Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

213Derrida, referring to the obscuring and supplementary effects of writing). In “The Fountain”chapter, which describes the phenomenon of the whale’s sprout, we learn that the whale lives inintervals and that “he carries a surplus stock of vitality in him, just as the camel crossing thewaterless desert carries a surplus supply of drink for future use in its four supplementarystomachs” (356). The indefinite nature of the whale’s mysterious mist defines the whole nature ofthe narrative and the whale. In Plato’s The Republic, we see a clear definition of the pharmakon. 63As Derrida argues in his Dissemination, “contrary to life, writingor, if you will, thepharmakoncan only displace or even aggravate the ill. Such will be, in its logical outlines, theobjection the king raises to writing: under pretext of supplementing memory, writing makes oneeven more forgetful; far from increasing knowledge, it disseminates it” (102). The indecision andinscrutability that characterize the pharmakon are clearly present in Moby-Dick: “Speak out! Youhave seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell water from air? My dear sir,in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. And as for this whale spout, you mightalmost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely” (358). We first learn the sproutcould be beneficial and in this chapter the narrator tells us that “the spout is poisonous”. Irwinargues: “Melville … link[s] the uncertainty of human verification and the indefiniteness of theveil of mist to the indeterminacy of self-reflective thought as it attempts to deal with the notion ofeternity, with the survival of the self as a linguistic (that is, repetitive) entity in a condition ofatemporality” (291-2). The inability to define the nature of the spout reflects the inscrutability andundecidability that structure the narrativecharacteristics that shape the dialectics of thepharmakon. The pharmakon is also referred to as the perfume that conceals “the dead under theappearance of the living” (Dissemination 142). We see that the pharmakon, like Moby-Dick, is