Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

115archive … can only illuminate, read, interpret, establish its object, namely a giveninheritance, by inscribing itself into it, that is to say by opening it and enriching it enoughto have a rightful place in it. (67)This “performative repetition” inscribes the archivist and his futurea synecdoche of theAmerican futureinto death and memory of the dead fathers. Are we talking about the future ofthe archive or the archive of the future or the future qua archive? Following Derrida’s argumentthat the archive is the domain of the past conditional“would have been”I want to link thisanalysis to the nineteenth-century American project of nationhood and national literature. In thissense, subjectivity becomes the archive and the archival narrative becomes caught up indifférance. Invested in deferral, “The Custom-House” yearns to coincide with a consciousnessthat is no longer there. The experience of reading of “The Custom-House” allows one to accountfor the attempt to assimilate the future and the past into the present. The non-linearity and multidirectionalityof time in Hawthorne’s narrative experiments with time and offers a new horizon ofexpectationor what Sacvan Bercovitch calls in The Rites of Assent the idea of progress, whichis central to the American national project. This idea of progress structures the narrative oftemporal evolution and condensation of experience and spatial expansionism and makes sense ofwhy Hester comes back to America at the end. Such progress is possible only through the re-turnto the past.The impossible dialectics of the desire to return to the origin and to understand the truenature of the ghosts or revenants (and understanding their messages) structures the work ofHawthorne as an impossible haunted archive. We meet the ghosts of Hawthorne’s fathers in theexperience of excavating his archive. They return, as such, as the spectral manifestation of