Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

147with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bedthat was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms ofsome latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of itsintensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter ofthe White Whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that socaused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle orsoul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind,which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously soughtescape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was nolonger an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore itmust have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his onesupreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself againstgods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own … God helpthee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinkingthus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture thevery creature he creates. (202)The “scorching contiguity of the thing” enacts the inscrutability of trauma, hence the projectiononto the other (the very embodiment of trauma). In fact, Ahab’s fascination with and fear of theinscrutability of White Whale connects his tendency toward mania and the unity with thewhalethe empty signifier that he fills with his unconscious desires and anxieties. Aconsequence of his compulsive and excessive obsession with the White Whale is that he loses anysense of reasoning. Obsessive as he is, he takes his double as his past, present, and future.Ishmael tells that, “in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness hadbeen left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished.That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his