Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

100primal scene poses an answer to the critical question—what makes a father? In Freud’s reading,the father’s role is defined by castration: the father appears to be castrating the mother and holdsthe son thrall by the threat of castration. This interpretation seems to inscribe the argument thatone is empowered by removing the sign of power.Although “The Custom-House” seems less interested in autobiographical coherence thanin historical revenants, it tends toward coherent subjectivity. In fact, the case history ofHawthorne narrates the incoherence and temporality of the subject. Invested in différance, “TheCustom-House”a historical autobiographyis implicated in the chain of supplements, traces,and residues of a haunting past. These chains are overarching trajectories or frameworks: theybind “The Custom-House” to the narrative it prefaces, just as they bind figuration in the CustomHouse to the genres of both autobiography and historiography. Everything is haunted by theThing that remains unnamable and therefore requires the supplement. The supplement inscribesthe narrative in the Gothic. The Gothic dimension of “The Custom-House” is produced by thesemantic indirection which resides in the narrative, which appears as a series of spectersghostsof the dead ancestors and the forgotten history. This obsession with the past is central to theAmerican Gothic tradition. In fact, Hawthorne is following the injunctions of the father toremember him: “do this, and the profit shall be all your own. You will shortly need it; for it is notin your days as it was in mine, when a man’s office was a life-lease, and often times an heirloom”(31). Ghostwritinginvested in the economy of cryptonymyis associated with incarnation andexorcism of the dead fathers’ ghosts. However, these ghosts do not disclose any secret like theDerridean ghost, which is “le re-venant, the survivor [that] appears only as a means of figure orfiction, but its appearance is not nothing, nor is it a mere semblance (“Memoires” 85). The dead