Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

144Whale as “a broad white shadow [that] rose from the sea” (307), his description of Ahab who“leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, themore and the more he strove to pierce the profundity” (506), or when the Parsee and Ahab are“fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab theParsee his abandoned substance” (502)all these references reveal to us the investment ofMelville’s narrative in the theory of the shadow and the collective unconscious. Rather thandwelling on the maneuvers of the shadow, I ask in this chapter whether the shadow, for example,in its desiring of difference and change, can meet the Real by revealing its absences, its unseen,and its unconscious. Taking into account the fact that the Real is the site of emptiness, the voidthat is the annihilation of both the Symbolic Order and the Subject, we can argue that the shadowmoves toward a recessive space, toward asymbolization and death. Symbolizing a desire to bereunited with the lost origin, the shadow shows in poetic forms a tension between the laws of thecollective unconscious and the laws of the personal unconsciousa tension that indexes anothertension between the immateriality of the shadow and the inadequacy of the original. Such tension,as in the Freudian and Lacanian models of psychoanalysis, stages the impossibility ofrepresenting the subject’s lost origin of trauma.The point I want to raise is that the characters, going on journeys of the mind, encounterand fail to encounter their doubles. The outcome of this journey into “ungraspable phantom oflife” (23) is either the incorporation of or the obliteration by the shadow. Ishmael’s journey isinitiated by “a damp, and drizzly November in [his] soul” (21); Ahab’s journey is activated by arevengeful desire to chase the While Whale. Between the necessity of encountering and thereforeincorporating the shadow and the failed attempt to kill the shadow, the characters of Moby-Dick