Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

193eventually “cannot endure Eros, [he] prefer[s] to be with the Thing up to the limit of negativenarcissism leading [him] to Thanatos” (20). Ahab desires death. Does death kill desire, or doesthis mean the paralysis and death of writing? Does the dissolution of desire mean the hermeneuticimpasse, or does it signal the beginning of ghost writing. The dissolution of melancholia is, infact, followed by asymbolization. Such failure of symbolization is one materialization of themissed encounter between the reader and the text, between the author and the reader, and betweenthe ego and the object of desire.Unlike Ahab whose death drive is directed toward the exterior world, the othercharacters like Pip, Fedallah, and Queequeg choose to yield to the Thing. Ahab’s masochisticprojections suspend melancholia which can find its resolution only in the re-turn to theGothicto cadere. This re-turn, itself ghostly, moves the narrative toward the Gothic. Such shiftis impossible without the tropics of the Gothic. Apostrophizing the lightning in the “Candles,”Ahab shouts, “Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fieryfather; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies mypuzzle; but thine is greater” (477; emphasis mine). This prosopoetic invocation of the universeties Ahab’s existential quest for answers to the quest for the lost mother. As argued by Robert K.Martin, “It is through the opposition of the two elements that Melville establishes hisfundamental structure of the encounter between the two great myths of Western culture, theromance of the Golden Land, or the search for a lost Eden, and the quest for knowledge andpower, or the legend of Faust (69-70). In fact, the narrative raises many existential questions: theambiguity of the world, the reason of existence, the origin of life, the ambivalence ofrepresentation, and so on.