Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

111the imperative to repetition, the return of what is unsuccessfully repressed, and, moreover, thatthis return is realized in a syntax, a grammar, a tropic field” (4). There is a double-voiceddiscourse in “The Custom-House”: a fascination with unveiling the truth about the past and a fearof the return of the represseda fear that defines the uncanny circuits of trauma in Hawthorne’snarrative.This double-voiced discourse is further complicated by the tension between animpossibleor rather, missedencounter with the Real, at one level, and the linguisticrepresentation of the Real, at another level; this doubleness marks the investment of Hawthorne’snarrativeitself a reading about the impossibility of readingin cryptonymy and ghost writing.Hawthorne is suffering from le trouble d’archive which stems from le mal d’archive. For bothDerrida and Hawthorne this mal d’archive is produced by the burden of the question of identity inthe field of the national, of the tradition. What this suggests is that Hawthorne is troubled by whatDerrida calls the “visor” (84) effect of his haunting fathers. To have this trouble, Derridaexplains, “is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, andirrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the mostarchaic place of absolute commencement” (90). This nostalgia 37 explains the subject’s obsessionwith the past, with the lost love-objects. Like the Freudian model of melancholia, nostalgiainitiates a mania of desiring and a propensity for suicide if the affective closure of re-uniting withthe love object is not achieved. This spectral effect suspends the act of writing between thepresent, the past, and the future. This suspension links the domain of the archive to the domain ofpossibility and promise. In the beginning there was “The Custom-House.” This introductorynarrative is the object of nostalgia on the part of the narrator who takes it as the origin of the