Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

177coffin is Ishmael’s lifebuoy. What I am talking about here is not an actual prosopopeiathat is,the actual trope occurring in an actual sentence. The condition I am describing is an effect or aregister rather than a trope per se. In fact, “Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle tounfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read,though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in theend to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolvedto the last” (455; emphasis mine). The living Ishmael receives the letter of Queequeg’s “properperson” twice, once during his lifetime, and again, retrospectively, after his death and during thenarrative which stages the (missed) encounter. These mysteries will remain unsolved because,like the narrative structure itself, they are always deferred. Quite oxymoronically, the trope ofprosopopeia, which phantsmagorically gives face to the defaced, suspends the promise of endingit originally promises. In fact, Melville’s play with prosopopeia is registered in his theory of thedouble. The double complicates the work of prosopopeia and makes it unfold in paradoxthevery essence of the double itself. The marriage between prosopopeia and the double is soonbrought to the court of différance. Yet, the relation between the double and prosopopeia iscomplex and contingent. Sometimes the double is generated by prosopopeia, as in the case ofHenry James’s Gothic stories. In Moby-Dick, I would say that doubling and prosopopeia are in arelation of narrative economy to assujettissement, which is to say, the unfolding of prosopopeiawithin the economy of doubling, both subjective (i.e., characters) and narrative temporality (i.e.,prolepsis and analepsis).Let us consider Queequeg who carves copies of some of the tattoos of his body on hiscoffin. Creating the double of his hieroglyphic marks, he carves a whole theory of writing. His