Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

146narrative, is beyond the scope of this chapter. Surely, the homosocial is the matrix in which acertain order of the missed encounter takes place.Unassimilated, like the traumatic experience, the shadow becomes dangerous and canonly be represented through rhetoric and trope. In fact, there is a parallel between thepsychoanalytic model of the shadow and the poetic construct of the double. Read in light ofRank’s theory of the double, Jung’s and Freud’s theories of the shadow, Moby-Dick engages thecharacters and events in many missed encounters and concentrates on the effects/affects of thework of doubling. What happens when the shadow is unassimilated and inaccessible? Likepsychoanalysis, which dwells on the inassimilable and the inarticulate, the failed encounter withthe shadow functions as a mere iteration of the impossibility of assimilation and therefore asrepresentation, as a mere repetition of an encounter that is unavoidably impossible and missed.Based on a repetition of the subject’s traumatic primal experience, psychoanalysis focuses on themateriality and inadequacy of the signifier and of trauma writ large. Yet, what exactly is thebusiness of the double in the narrative? Does the shadow originate in the subject’s primal trauma?To make headway into these challenging questions, let us first study Ahab’s missedencounter with the shadow and the effects/affects this failed encounter yields. Unlike Ishmaelwho sails on “the ungraspable phantom of life” looking for a cure to his malaise, Ahab knows theThing that haunts him and he is possessed by and obsessed with the Thingthe White Whale. Infact, “the firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, andvictorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab” (401). Here we have a Whitmanesque hero whocontains multiplicity within himself. Containing multiplicity does not mean that Ahab succeeds inincorporating all these different elements. Ahab struggles with anything that is inscrutable: