Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

219psychoanalytic regressions to the womb, and by desiring an exchange of letters, Melville’sprotagonist treads the road that leads to the tomb. This (auto)biography in which Ishmaelor callhim Melvilleexposes the malleable contours of psychoanalytic regression, allows the anxiety ofthe re-turn to the womb, the fear/desire of death, and the (missed) encounter with the Real tofuse. Such fusion of trauma and its temporality does little to account for Melville’s choices.Structured through a failed reading of the inscrutable Thing, unable to step outside the repetitivestructure of this impossible encounter, Melville’s narrative can never free itself from the confinesof the double.This catachresis forces the reader to go beyond the “mimetic” reading to “poetic” readingof Moby-Dick and of Melville’s work in general. This reading refers to Barthes’ statement that“writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, where all identityis lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (142). Melville anticipated HaroldBloom’s theory of the psychology of “misreading.” According to Bloom, the history of Westernpoetry has been a “history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willfulrevisionism" (30). Poets and critics “misread” their own precursors to confirm their originality.Because traumatic experience, as a primal experienceand experience writ largeis tied to aprocess of representation, to language, it is indispensable to come to an understanding of the rolethat the material signifier plays in trauma. Because traumatic experience is grounded in therepetition of impossibility, it is indelibly tied to the Real beyond the signifier. In this sense,trauma opens up an ethical space beyond the symbolic which is, nevertheless, intimately tied tothe materiality of the signifier and, therefore, to our social and linguistic destiny. Thus, Melville’sperverse scenarios may restage the primal scene with the aim of eliminating the father and