Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

162narrative investment in the Gothic is fueled by the maneuvers of the Thingmaneuvers activatedby prosopopeia.In reading Moby-Dick, we find, following the logic of the double and prosopopeia, thatboth the narrator and the reader end where they beganonshore. Melville’s first person narratorcreates a connection with the reader. However, this connection is disrupted by the appearance ofthe doublean appearance that reiterates an economics of libidinal identifications. While itremains plausible that Ishmael wants to shore up a narrative in the hinge between death anddesire, between the double and the lost origin, between the libidinal regression and libidinalincorporation, he ends up being the epitome of all these gaps. The gap between the doubles in thenarrative that doubles between the reader and the narrator activates the reader’s libidinalidentificatory and indemnificatory desires. The narrator’s poetics of libidinal direction teases thereader into the journey and unfolds on the threshold of death. Hence, there is more to theiridentifications. These identifications, as I will explain in due course, emerge from and return tothe figure of Narcissus. Exposed to the trap of the double, the narrator and the reader are leftonshore, suspended between the inside and outside, between truth and distortionwhich is tosay, at the level of poetics and narrative strategy, the boundary is external and metaphorical; atthe level of psychoanalysis, the boundary is obviously internal and metonymic. Irwin’s analysisof the double suggests:It is this simultaneous internal splitting/external doubling that renders the notion of a limitproblematic in a mutually constitutive opposition. For example, in the opposition betweenbody and shadow, there is an essential (that is, original) uncertainty as to whether thedividing line between the two should be interpreted as an internal or an external limit,