Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

220recovering a romanticized idealized relation with the mother. Thus, the biographical Symboliccollapses at and unfolds in the traumatic Real.But there is another, hidden sense in which the Real illustrates the homosociality, not tosay the homoerotics of Melville’s relation with Hawthorne, under the aegis of filial duty andpatrilineage, under the influence of the Hawthorne letter. This illustration may in some wayaccount for Melville’s attempt to recover the idealized relation with the mother. Keeping in mindthe fact that Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter immediately upon the death of his mother; whatthe letter transmits has everything to do with the melancholic attachment to the mother.Hawthorne in a sense misread the letter from Surveyor Pue: he thought it was about filial duty,preserving the patriarchal project of regulating women, but in another sense, he read it exactlyright, hence his great ambivalence toward Hester Prynne, and toward the female body. Melville,too, both misreads and (unconsciously) reads the letter: the narrative thinks it is ‘about’ men onships, but it is ultimately ‘about’ (in the sense of circling ‘about’ or around) the absent mother.Marked by the traces of the double and the missed encounter with the original/primalexperience, Melville’s narrative brings various discourses into dialogue with the impossibility ofrepresentation, which is at the center of trauma theory. Trying to go beyond the limits of thedouble, trying to assimilate the original experience, the events and characters in Melville’snarrative double and become doubled by, envelop and become enveloped by an uncanny missedencounter and an unassimilable lost event. Seeking the lost object of desire and lost past,Melville’s narrative, suspended between the loss of origins and the supplementarity orcomplimentarity of signifiers, yearns for a wholeness, or what Fredric Jameson calls “themelancholy of disbelief, the nostalgia of the nineteenth century intellectual for the ‘wholeness’ of