Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

110specifics of Hawthorne’s spectral economy, his hauntology: all this originates in his meditationupon the grave, upon the decomposed body. Prosopopeia then may be said to “recompose thebodybut, of course, to produce “a body that is more abstract than ever.” The fleshing of theskeleton is a return to and a reincarnation of the original body. This uncanny return to thegraveyard is predicated upon memory. However, “The Custom-House” is the spectral archive ofthe national, historical, political, and religious past of Salem. As Eric Savoy argues, “Gothic textsreturn obsessively to the personal, the familial, and the national pasts to complicate rather than toclarify them, but mainly to implicate the individual in a deep morass of American desires anddeeds that allow no final escape from or transcendence of them” (169). The Historical aspect of“The Custom-House” and its fascination with the Realthe various archival residues of theAmerican history that haunt the narrativeinscribes the American subjectivity in the realm oftemporality. However, the Realthe American Realis an impossible Real. The impossibility ofrepresenting the Real suspends and links it to the Gothic. “The Custom-House” and The ScarletLetter strive to give the American Real a voice. This attempt reflects the nineteenth-centuryAmerican anxiety about the nation’s destiny and destination. This anxiety is explained by EricSavoy’s argument that the American Gothic is “symptomatic of cultural restlessness, the fear offacing America’s darkly pathological levels. It is also … what gives rise to the Gothic verbalfigures, their urgent straining toward meaning, and their consequent strains upon the limits oflanguage” (“The Rise of American Gothic” 169). Savoy’s argument that the American Gothic isthe domain of transhistorical and pathological levels alludes to the Real of the Gothic that issignaled by the linguistic ruptures that cause these psychological and cultural troubles toincessantly return, suggesting that “the gothic tendency in American culture is organized around