Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

124exerting my fancy, sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image ofthe town’s brightest aspect. (28)Hawthorne’s stressing the materiality of the “dry bones” figures forth the Gothic subject. I shallstudy the business of prosopopeia to elucidate the career of the Gothic story as it moves from onegrave to another. The figurative and literal disinterment of the restes of the fathers and theirsermon suggests an obvious connection between prosopopeia and the uncanny, between theghosts and the splintered subject, and between the voice and the corpse.The uncanny dimension of the voice is elucidated by Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse:Fragments:what constitutes the voice is what, within it, lacerates me by dint of having to die, as if itwere at once and never could be anything but a memory. This phantom being of the voiceof what is dying out, it is that sonorous texture which disintegrates and disappears. I neverknow the loved being’s voice except when it is dead, remembered, recalled inside myhead, way past the ear; a tenuous yet monumental voice, since it is one of those objectswhich exist only once they have disappeared. (114)The play of repression and return or what Freud calls the play of “disappearance and return”refers to the tone change in his grandson’s Fort/Da (gone/there) game which is a mise-en-scèneof the absence and return of the mother. In The Scarlet Letter, we have a fading of the fatherfigure and his petrifying return. Writing “from beyond the grave,” Surveyor Pue validates thenarrator’s writing, which “may be considered as the posthumous papers of a decapitatedsurveyor” (39). Much like Freud’s Fort/Da game, Hawthorne drifts into the structure ofdisappearance and return. Inspired by the game “even-odd” and Freud’s Fort/Da, Lacan links the