Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

174Likewise, the White Whale is invested in the business of catachresis and chiasmus. TheWhite Whale was referred to indirectly in the first 132 chapters. This invisibility pertains todialectics of the double. Ahab’s statement:Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’vewilled; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me madStarbuck does; but I’mdemoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehenditself! The prophecy was that I would be dismembered; andAye! I lost this leg. I nowprophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and thefulfiller one. (171; emphasis mine)The amount of emphasis laid on the catachrestic reunion of opposites suggests, however,something else, something related to nature of the double itself: principally, that the double is thepsyche’s search for wholeness. The reunion of opposites is also chiastic: wherein the objectbecomes the subject who will return and repeat the act, or resend the letter, and thus make anobject of the prior subject (the Whale as the “original” agent of trauma, of dismemberment). Thereturn to and of the double remains perched on the abyss of the missed encounter between the egoand the non-ego, between the inadequacy of the shadow and the fullness of the ego, and betweenthe impossibility of the encounter and its inevitability. When Ahab is there death is not, and whenhe is not there death is in the circularity of chiasmus that repeats the letter of the doubloon.The circle is full when everything returns to the grave, to the unfathomable depths ofconsciousness. This absolute return is expressed at the conclusion of Moby-Dick: “Now smallfowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides;then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago”(535). As is always the case in literature and cinema, there remains a chance survivor, someone