Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

203My critical study thus far has been to locate, in the supplementarity of Melville’snarrative, the affective detours of the origin and the supplement. It is worth noting that thenarrative opens with two paratextual references: “Etymology” and “Extracts”paratexts thatcould be read as archaeological and temporal references, and perhaps, more acutely, as archival inDerrida’s sense of “commencement and commandment.” In this sense, Melville writes ensillagein the wake of. It is no accident that “wake” has two meanings in English: the “wake”which attends the dead, and the wake that is left by a ship as it moves through the water. The firstparatextual reference is composed of dictionary entries and the second, much like Hawthorne’s“The Custom-House,” alludes to extracts “supplied by a sub-sub-librarian.” These paratexts, touse Genette’s word, are the parasitical sites that call for a reading of the question of the origin.Here, Melville yearns for an encounter with the two surveyors of the letter, a “late consumptiveusher to a grammar school” (ix) and “a sub-sub-librarian” (x), by recording his contribution to thetranshistorical project of writing. However, we learn that the two surveyors are cloaked inoblivion and defacementthe first “loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly remindedhim of his mortality” (ix) and the second “appears to have gone through the long Vaticans andstreet-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways findin any book whatsoever, sacred or profane” (x). This defacement marks the narratological placeof Ishmael who, like these two surveyors, will be cloaked in the veneer of absence and whose“Call me Ishmael” alludes to indefiniteness and origin at the same time. What the narrator callsfor is, in other words, an archival origin in the Old Testament that is, however, performativelymarked as contingent.