Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

180Considered a prosopoetic surplus, the White Whale has to do with both scale (the figures of vastexpanses) and emptiness. This image creates a barrier and at the same time refers to somethingbeyond the text. The subject gets closer to the point where he wants the image to emerge as abarrier. Is the reader another image or rather shadow that traverses the text?Ishmael is haunted by the ghostly shadows of a past we do not have access to. Right fromthe beginning of the text, he invites the reader to enter his world of shadows. This invitation (re)turns to the Gothic when the reader becomes a character in the novel and when extra-textualelements such as the painting in Chapter 57 participate prosopoetically in the production ofmeaning. This generates a Gothic scene of writing in which the reader becomes the property ofthe narrator. The reader becomes the fish and reverses the law of prosopopeia: “And what areyou, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too” (381). The reader is thus subject to the tropeof prosopopeia because he is called to language, to the economy of language, by the dead, by theobligation to bear witness, comprised as it may be by a certain melancholia (though this is moretypical of Hawthorne than of Melville). The obligation to bear witness is the very basis of traumatheory, that is, the ways in which this obligation is countered by the missed encounter, which isthe very core of the traumatic primal scene. What interests me is the doubling of event and nonrepresentation:the trauma is a missed encounter; in the wake of trauma is the obligation to bearwitness to the dead, to represent what happened and what it meant, which leads of course to therepetition or doubling of the missed encounter, which perseverates the trauma. Hence thecircularity of inscription, literalized both in the circularity of the novel (ending where it begins,beginning where it ends) and the voyage of the Pequod (another doubling). This links the trope ofprosopopeia to the psychoanalytic project. The narrator, through the use of the trope of