Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

161not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splitswhat it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look atitself is not one; and the law of addition of the origin to its representation, or the thing toits image, is that one plus one makes at least three (36).There is a paranoid effect in a reflection, multiplying and decomposing identities. The tensionbetween the double and identities prompts us in the direction of studying the mise en abyme as(s’abimer) decomposition. This kind of mise en abyme is in fact a failed reflection. In this sense,the White Whale is but an alter ego created by the split in the psyche. The characters are ghosts,products of a mind divided by competing forces.This double-effect, or error-effect makes the encounter, that is already missed, betweenthe ego and its double(s) impossible. Transposed on the double apparatus of the narrative, thedouble-effect draws a structural matrix, a dialectics of signifier and signified exchanging placesunder the guise of the double. When the drama is done, there remains only Ishmael. LikeQueequeg’s coffin, Ishmael’s narrative is the rhetorical premise that constitutes the materialcontinuity of the past and of the various doubles that dwell in the narrative. As suggested byRobert K. Martin, “Ishmael’s return to the surface, and resumption of the narrative, is anindication, in one of the novel’s symbolic patterns, of the emergence of the circle out of thestraight line. It is also the restoration of the feminine and maternal” (70). At another level, thenovel is more about the melancholy in which the act of writing is situated rather than the mererepresentation of the hunting of the whale. The whalea signis clear and elusive at the sametime. It stems from an anomalous absence, an absence that finds its resolution in the figure of thedouble. If the missed encounter, seen as an absence, finds its resolution in the double, then the