Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

107Hawthorne has internalized his dead fatherhis lost love objectinside his psyche as a way ofnot giving up the one who is lost. In this model, Hawthorne would be a successful mournerbecause although he goes into the graveyard and the archive of the Custom House to reclaim hisfather from death, he finds him, or his restes, again in the archive; he lives on while his fatherrests in the archive waiting for someone else to claim him. What we have is a fluctuation betweenmourning and melancholiaa process that is fueled by repression. The mise en scène of theCustom House archive fulfills Derrida’s model of the filiation event of the archive, as well as itstoxic burden, its eternal mal.Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House” charts an undoing of primary repression(Verdrängung) that is initiated by the narrator’s remembering the ghostwho, in Lacanian termsrepresents the objet a, that is a substitute for the dead paternal bodyand writing him out ofdeath into the narrative of survival. The desire for a lost, prohibited father-child relation 35 isperhaps most surprisingly evoked in the fictional and factual presence of male figures in most ofHawthorne’s narratives. He removes any trace of this forbidden desire to go back to an earlystage where he can put it in check. Disguised and displaced, this desire plays out in The ScarletLetter as, in anticipation of Derrida’s deconstructive model, the text exposes the instability of theprocess of identity construction. The father’s prohibition imaged in the primal scene marks anobstacle, but, as Derrida directs us to think, obstacles are inherently aporetic and leaky; whilethey assign new paradigms, they are also the site where hierarchical binary oppositions meet,where identity crashes. Hawthorne’s mourning of his ancestors brings back the ghost/father andfuels its uncanny request or rather command: that the sonhere Hawthornelegitimize the