Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

189The invocation of this common “pool” repudiates the possibility of doubling in this place.Although there is doubling and re-doubling before getting to this atemporal place, where there isonly unity and uniqueness. This inescapable “pool,” death, is achieved through representingprosopoetically the White Whale. Like Ahab who tries to hunt the White whale, Ishmael assays todetermine the meaning of the Real. Both arrive at the unavoidable illusion of getting at what theywant. Ahab’s illusion is metaphysical 60 and ontological and Ishmael’s is poetic. In fact, the novelis more about the unsurpassable melancholy in which the act of writing is situated.I wish to take up Kristeva’s “narcissistic melancholia” “in which the dying out of alllibidinal bonds appears to be not a simple matter of turning aggressiveness toward the object backinto animosity against the self but is asserted as previous to any possibility of object positioning”(Black Sun 16) as explanatory of the tropics of the double. It follows, then, that Ahab is adepressed narcissist, 61 to use Kristeva’s words. As she argues “the depressed narcissist mournsnot an Object but the Thing … The ‘thing’ [is] the real that does not lend itself to signification,the center of attraction and repulsion, seat of the sexuality from which the object of desire willbecome separated” (13). Here Kristeva’s explanation is entirely resonant with Freud’s model ofmelancholia in “Mourning and Melancholia.” Freud’s model demonstrates how the melancholicknows what object he has lost, but not what that object means. The Thing that haunts is theshadow (double) cast upon the split subject. 62 Holding on to the phantasmic re-turn to and of thelost object of desire, the depressed melancholic starts to fluctuate between the desire of recoveryand the anxiety of disappearance. According to Freud, in melancholia there is a regression to anidentificatory state. The relationship between Ahab and the White Whale is characterized by the