Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

133Dick inscribes through the protagonist Ahab a missed encounter with the primal experience oftrauma that is beyond the narrative. Likewise, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacanpsychoanalytically articulate the impossibility of having access to the traumatic event andemphasize the importance of language and the unconscious in the articulation of suchimpossibility.This chapter considers certain psychoanalytic theories of trauma and deconstructiveapproaches to language and writing to help explicate the parallels between the literary and poeticmanifestations of the missed encounter, and the psychoanalytic exposition of the vicissitudes ofthe missed encounter: its impossibility, materiality, and supplementarity. Not only will thepsychoanalytic models of Rank, Freud, Jung, Lacan, and Kristeva enable us to better grasp thevarious contours and detours of the missed encounter in general, but will also help to unpuzzleAhab’s and Melville’s mysteries. My approach to the missed encounter is not a matter ofconjecturing what that encounter should have been, or could have been, or would have been, ifsuch an encounter had been possible. To do so would be indeed to write a fictional supplement, tohypothesize. This is to say, by implication, that the missed encounter is by its very naturetraumatic, and indeed trauma can be and ought to be understood precisely as a missed encounter,the residues of which are harbored in the unconscious, and which manifest through suchsymptomatic expressions as repetition (which indeed is part of the economy of doubling). Asargued by Cathy Caruth, trauma emerges as “the unwitting reenactment of an event that onecannot simply leave behind” (Unclaimed Experience 2).If we consider Lacan’s theorization of the missed encounter in the context (in The FourFundamental Concepts) of trauma and repetitionthat tuché appears in the temporality of