Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

104over to a new authorthe ghost. The point I want to raise here is that in both Barthes’ paradigmand that of the Gothic death is a metaphor and at the same time literal. In fact, death is necessaryfor tradition itself, tradition being that which needs ghosts and orders and injunctions.In Hawthorne’s narrative, person deixis is displaced since the distinction between the “I”of the living narrator/author and the “not I” of the absent-present ghost is blurred. Thedisplacement of referents and the spectrality of the narrative is in fact a manifestation of ahaunted writing, a writing that talks about itself only in relation to and in terms of other precedingwritings. This fascination with absence and death suspends Hawthorne’s narrative between theGothic and romance. In “Custom House,” we have mixed modes of narrative: on the one hand,there is an autobiographical story; on the other, there is a gradual solidification of ghostlypresences, culminating in the (dis)appearance of Pue in the archive. The ghost, instead of beingexorcized, turns out to be the exorcist and forces Hawthorne to write down his story, and speakthe unspeakable. Being an exorcist, the ghost inscribes fear and loss. His emphatic injunction, “Icharge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's memory the creditwhich will be rightfully due” (32) refers to the power of the invisible to disrupt and delegitimizethe order. The answer of the narrator is “I will.”The buried narrative of Surveyor Pue comes back in a new form. Figuratively disinterringthe remainders of the dead fathers and reading the archival text of Pue, Hawthorne realizes thatthe scarlet letter remains “frayed and defaced” (29).The text that comes back to haunt, Derridaargues, “is always distorted” (“Roundtable on translation” 158). This distortion is always alreadythere in the act of the exhumation of the dead and the transference of their discourse. To recallPue is to recall a dead Father’s name. Derrida argues that the exercise of naming is closely linked