Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

106other within oneself in a safe crypt within the ego. The crypt is a symbol in which the egopreserves the corpse of the dead other. It is worth signaling that the psychic crypt is also related tothe encrypted word as message. The lost Pue is incorporated within Hawthorne’s split ego and hisletter is encrypted as the transhistorical message. As Derrida elaborates in his discussion ofAbraham and Torok:the incorporated dead, which one has not really managed to take upon oneself, continuesto lodge there, like something other and to ventrilocate through the “living.” The livingdead … is the one who is enclosed in the crypt. For instance, I lose a loved one, I fail todo what Freud calls the normal work of mourning, with the result that the dead personcontinues to inhabit me, but as a stranger (The Ear of the Other 57-58).The psychoanalytic exegesis of Hawthorne’s attachment to the lost objectits important functionin identity-constructionis articulated by the act of owning Pue. In this context, any narrative is,like the photographic negative, a shadow of a work that stands in the shadow of different textsand contexts. Any narrative would be, like the photographic narrative, “very like a ghost; it reifiesthe concept of an absent presence, existing positively as a negative image. In a negative we seelight as dark and dark as light; we see, in effect, what is not there” (Garber 17). Hawthorne, infact, is writing out of the crypt, out of the remainder without presence; it is through this residue ofthe other, a ghostly outside secretly placed inside, that the author is able to write and to fulfill thefilial duty imposed by his dead fathers. I want to argue that the super-ego is not a derivative ofmelancholia; it is the cultural imperative. At issue is the shared function of the encrypted fatherwith the super ego as “voice” of obligation, of “filial duty.” Hawthorne’s narrative leaks thedesire to engage with death and forgetfulnessprimal scenes that foreground any narrative.