Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

123voice of the dead, we can no longer trace the name. In his brilliant analysis of the trope ofprosopopeia in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, de Man argues: “to read is to understand, to know,to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeatthat is to say, the endless prosopopeia by which the deadare made to have a voice and a face which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us toapostrophize them in our turn” (122; emphasis mine). De Man’s argument is that to read is,performatively, a will to prosopopeia and a will to reading. Like reading, naming implies callingimplies apostrophizing. Since we can no longer trace the name because of the spiral nature of theact of apostrophizing and remembering, then, the primal concept is confusion. Lukacher positsthat “in assuming the voice of the deadthe masked actor performs an act of half-mourning,reminding the audience not only that the voice that speaks is already dead but also that it livesbehind the mask” (90).Hawthorne is unable to respond to the uncanny voice of Pue. In his quest to understandthe meaning of the letters of the fathers, Hawthorne visits literally the second storey of theCustom House, an archival space that validates his ghost story. The fluctuation between storeyand story, between spectrality and materiality, or between prosopopeia and the will toprosopopeia is in fact a fluctuation between corpus and corpse. Such continual slippage towardthe corpse links writing to the uncanny and the Gothic. Hawthorne’s discovery of the scarlet letteris the moment psychoanalysis intersects with the Gothic:Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner; unfolding one anotherdocument, and reading the names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rottedat the wharves, and those of merchants, never heard of now on ‘Change, nor very readerlydecipherable on their mossy tomb-stones; glancing at such matters with the saddened,weary, half-reluctant interest which we bestow on the corpse of dead activity,and