Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

122“with his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me thescarlet symbol and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice he hadexhorted me on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence toward him (31).Performative as it is, the voice of the father is necessary to build and authorize the historical andauthorial bridge between the letters of the past and the interpretive text of the presentwhich isto say, the validating voice of the ghost is required to document or write down the reading of thedebris of the letters. What is lost is the originan origin the ghostly voice tries to restore. Barthespoints out that:It is impossible to attribute an origin, a point of view to the statement. Now, thisimpossibility is one of the ways in which the plural nature of a text can be appreciated.The more indeterminate the origin of the statement, the more plural the text … it mayhappen that in the classic text, haunted by the appropriation of speech, the voice gets lost,as though it had leaked out through a hole in the discourse. The best way to conceive theclassical plural is to listen to the text as an iridescent exchange carried on by multiplevoices, on different wavelengths and subject from time to time to a sudden “fading,”leaving a gap which enables the utterance to shift from one point to another, withoutwarning. (S/Z 41-42; original italics)Barthes’ understanding of the primal scene is made clear through his claim that the primal sceneis initiated by the “fading” of the voicesa “fading” that refers to an unrepresentable past ororigin. Applying Barthes’ model to Hawthorne’s narrative, I contend that “The Custom-House”places the reader in an ambivalent position in his connection with the voice of the deada voicethat becomes, much like “The Minister’s Black Veil”, an obstacle that hides deficiency or lack.The voice is no longer a presence; it drifts into the realm of the dead. Since the voice is only the