Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

218genital symbol” (235), literature, another ghostly narrative, comes as a manifestation of the fearof loss and extinction. To save the dead from forgetfulness and loss, the double, an image ofproliferation and multiplicity, covers over the fear of death and is opened up to catachresticmanipulation. Likewise, Melville’s Thing remains outside the narrative. This reminds us of thatcertain something which can never be present to the scene of analysis if analysis is to keep itsdevotion to the “tuché”, to the impossible or missed encounter with the Real. Thus, it wouldseem, in order for the reader to offer a genuine analysis of Melville’s life, he must recognize thesignificance of certain limits, he must hold back something from the experience. That is, thereader is suspended in a desiring, quite often regressive, relation to the real/Real (i.e., the ways inwhich the sheer materiality and embodiment of the traumatic wound intersects with, but does notwholly account for, the Lacanian Real) while the scene of disclosure remains concealed asanother scene. Read as an (auto)biography, Moby-Dick stages Melville’s various encounters withother literary figures, most immediately Hawthorne, and keeps these encounters concealed inorder to structure the entire action of the biography and as an impossible event. Melville’srecognition of an impossible gratification in his relationship with Hawthorne, his literary double,exposes the structure of the missed encounter. It is interesting, if ultimately impossible, tohypothesize what that gratification might entail. Surely, it is in part a matter of filial duty: in thecycle of repetition and re-inscriptions, Melville wants to be the destinee of Hawthorne’s letter, toread it, and to send it along to the reader. He wants to read and to write in seamless continuity. Itis precisely this relation to the missed encounter that both (auto)biography and psychoanalysisexpose as the traumatic origin of subjectivity. By performing the impossibility of a totalknowledge of the origin through a narrative matrix that conceals recognition of the impossible