Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

116ambivalence and doubt. Derrida argues that archiving the other 41 within one’s narrative unfoldsalways in the realm of violence (78-79). This encounter between the archivist and the other ismade violent and, ultimately, impossible due to the investment of the archive in the Freudianpsychoanalytic retrospective model in which there is a chiastic logic between cause and effect. Inthe archive, the axes of time are reversed: the past becomes future and the future becomes past.This temporality of the archive or what Dominick LaCapra calls the “repetitive temporality” (9)sees history as transference. Transference, however, is activated by the dialectics of psychologicaltrauma. The archive is traumatic because it is governed by what Paul de Man calls in his“Literary History and Literary Modernity” the “desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in thehope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks anew departure” (148; emphasis mine). It is a testimony to and a manifestation of an unresolved ormissed encounter with the past. The missed encounter, however, might be conceptualized as akind of paradox or irony. The desire “to wipe out the past” is paralleled by an obsession with andan investment in the past (archive), in a kind of national psychology. Bringing the past to thepresent through the tropological disinterment of the corpses of the fathers invests Hawthorne’snarrative in the national literary project of nineteenth-century American literature. The effect oftrauma is always belated, and trauma does not yield itself to simple narrative. The effects oftrauma, as I shall demonstrate, are going to show up as symptoms or traces of trauma. TheFreudian Oedipal economy shapes Hawthorne’s archive. He receives the authority to write orinscribe his narrative from his Oedipally inflected relationship of attraction and repulsion with hispatriarchal figures. Hawthorne’s chiastic relationship with his lost love-objectthe