Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

181prosopopeia, moves the economy of subject and object relations toward the Gothicthe realm ofexcess par excellence. Like the analysand who fears the loss of his kernel of jouissance, thesubject, after the psychoanalytic cure, does not relinquish his symptom. The narrative movesfrom representing the ghost to addressing itthat is, when it re-turns to the dead (past) thoughthe use of prosopopeia. Melville’s ghostly narrative is explored within a theoretical frameworkarticulated at the intersection of psychoanalysis and the Gothicindeed, the threshold of deathand desire.Unlike many Romantic authors, Melville, like Hawthorne, argues that writing comes fromdeath and that the dead, in the form of ghosts, hieroglyphics, or just memories, continue to exerttheir authorial power from beyond the grave. Like Queequeg’s coffin that rises from the vortex toserve as a lifebuoy (a literal and literary) record for Ishmael, the dead authors rise from graveyardand change the direction of the mirror by refracting its vector. Queequeg’s sepulchral monumentis, in fact, a memorizing of the dead. These epitaphic monuments allow the author to write.Instead of being given a voice, this senseless monument gives Ishmael the possibility of writingand literally saves him from the circling waves of death that absorbed the coffin. In fact, thenarrative structure of Moby-Dick and the chiastic relationship between the three “I’s” is anallegory of the business of the missed encounter. What Melville’s play with allegory and thetheory of the double entails is an anxiety about writing.Let us consider the White Whale to understand the career of an allegory of reading. Thewhiteness of the whalean allegory of indefiniteness, blankness, and différancerefers to themultivocality of this image. Following de Man’s analysis: