Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

176Castaway” is Pip’s obituary and Ishmael’s journey into the abyss of death. Read as an existentialepitaph, Moby-Dick could be said to have a chain of encounters and missed encounters betweenthe survivor and the dead, encounters that complicated further by the suspension of narrationbetween prolepsis and analepsis. Pip’s plunge into the “endless end” (451) would leave a blankspace in Ishmael’s narration. Ishmael is the only character to survive at the end of the novel,allowing for the story to be told. Sharon Cameron states that “Ishmael is the lone character whodoes not lose his body to death. But he does become pure voice, relinquishing his life as acharacter … So the novel seems culpable of enacting the very wishes for which it kills itscharacters” (66). This means that Ishmael survives in the form of a voice, a voice thatprosopoetically gives a head to the dead bodies and mixes literary genresdramatic, epic,Gothicthus, much like a postmodern narrative, blurring the boundaries between discourses. Thecharacters of Pip and Ahab embody perfectly these fusions. Ishmael writes, “thy wretchedlaugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange mummeries not unmeaningly blendedwith the black tragedy of the melancholy ship, and mocked it! (462) Like Hawthorne’sliterary corpus which is authorized by the paternal corpse, Melville’s narrative refers to anoverdetermining absent paternal figure. This Gothic affiliation resonates with the Freudianpsychoanalytic project. The argument I want to raise here is that the narrative, like psychoanalytictheory, is situated within a chain of relationsindeed, inherited and (over)determined by thepaternal figure and then by the heir who becomes the legatee. This reversal of roles, alwaysalready determined via analepsis and prolepsis, is what I would like to call reversed prosopopeia.In Moby-Dick we have a reversed prosopopeia that conceptually accounts for the narrativebusiness of bearing witness to trauma: it is the dead who give a voice to the living. Queequeg’s