Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

97analysis of Hawthorne’s life and primal scenes, he must hold back “something” from theexperience. In this way, the reader must be suspended, traumatically, in a desiring relation toreality insofar as the scene of (dis)closure remains deferred. Hawthorne’s own primal scenesremain concealed in order to structure the entire archival reading as a successful event. In fact,the event of the archive succeeds, in terms of Derrida’s “archive fever,” in that there is a scene offiliation and affiliation. Hawthorne’s recognition of an impossible gratification in his (missed)relationship with the ghosts of his ancestors exposes the structure of the missed encounter.Structured through a failed symbolization and an insufficient exercise of reading the tuché,unable to step outside the repetitive structure of the impossible encounter, “The Custom-House”can never elevate itself to the level of authenticity. The visibility of the invisibility of the ghoststhat inhabit “The Custom-House” is smuggled in both The Scarlet Letter and in the memory ofthe narrator/author. The ghost of Surveyor Pue emerges from a cadaver and his wig and clothingare described at length. The encounter with the material remains, the corpse, of Pue is, like thatwith the bones of the dead fathers, imagined any yearned for in a necro-filiac fashion, but they aremissed in the narrative. The ghost, then, is that which makes up for that impossible encounter,that impossible task of bringing the will of the Father, or the voice of the Father, to lifesavethrough the figure of prosopopeia. The ominous invisibility of the ghosts in the narrative as aghost story suggests Hawthorne’s desire to conceal it. What is at issue in terms of thepsychoanalysis of the Gothic is the way in which Pue supplements the ghosts that are felt but donot coalesce into prosopopeia or speak ( i.e., the fathers).Hawthorne removes any trace of this forbidden desire to return to an early, identificatoryencounter with the maternal Thing. Disguised and displaced, this desire plays out in his narrative,