Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

178hieroglyphic marks, inscrutable as they are, structure the whole work of Melville and give life toIshmael’s story. The point I want to raise here is that the figure of the double, though illusive andinscrutable in most cases, is at the core of literature and life in general. Without a doublebe itharmonious or competingthere is no life. I will talk in the next chapter about the necessity ofthe cultural Other or double. Queequeg is resurrected as a carved hieroglyphic mark. EvenIshmael, who was astounded by Queequeg’s tribal tattoos, has become illustrated himself:The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from myright arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there wasno other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded forspace, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I wasthen composing — at least, what untattooed parts might remain — I did not troublemyself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenialadmeasurement of the whale. (429)My reading attains to “the skeleton dimensions” of Moby-Dick and the specters of prosopopeia.This epitaphic resurrection explains Melville’s interest in inscriptions, monuments, hieroglyphics,and tombs in his later work. This interest leads us to talk about the relationship between death andwriting, between the Gothic and psychoanalysis. I want to argue that the Gothic is essential to theunderstanding of psychoanalysis as is psychoanalysis to the Gothic. The investment of thenarrative in the Gothic tropology of the double, hieroglyphics, shadows, ghosts, and corpsesposits a crisis in the constitution of the subjecta crisis that is described in narrative terms. Thetropes of the double and its derivatives, and prosopopeia evoke such narrative trauma, which is infact the trauma of the subject. Prosopopeia, the trope of the dead and the double, allows us to