Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

121Torok, and Kristeva, I shall demonstrate how prosopopeia makes the traumatic experience ofdeath “homely.” Prosopopeiaa trope of the Gothic par excellenceinscribes the narrative inthe space of différance. Freud asserts that the uncanny is something which is originally homelikeand familiar, which has been repressed and then comes back to haunt. The working of theuncanny impedes the effort to understand it and thus refers us back to the impossibility ofunderstanding which at the center of the uncanny. “Das Unheimlich”the uncannyinhabits“The Custom-House” which produces a tropological substitution for the absence of the body.Like the dead fathers, the buried text is given a voice. However, in prosopopeiaas ametamorphosisthe dead are not completely dead and forgotten; they remain suspended, waitingto be archived in the work of mourning that may never be done. Lukacher perspicaciously depictsthe prosopoetic nature of the voice of the dead. He argues that “the voice of the text, like thevoice of the patient, is a verbal mask that conceals forgotten words and the forgotten scenes theycompose” (68). The presence of a voice necessitates a listener or an addresseethe ear of theother. Freud claims that it is through listening that the analyst could unpuzzle the mystery of theprimal scene.What is, therefore, the role of the voice and the act of listening? In the Barthesiannarrative model, which is derived from Freud’s psychoanalytic model, the fear of castration andthe death of the father are mingled in the voice. Like Freud, Barthes argues that the voice includesother parasitical voices. In S/Z, he states that the voice is “the direct product of castration, thecomplete, connected evidence of deficiency” (110). However, the voice of the father is bothreadable and unreadable, present and absent, heard and unheard, the emblem of subjectivity andthe very symptom of the erasure of that subjectivity. The narrator of “The Custom House” states,