Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

240perhaps reflective of Melville’s erotic fantasy about the recessive Hawthorne, which echoes thecolonial fantasy that incorporates and consumes the Other.The assimilation of the Others is part of what Fernando Ortiz calls “acculturation” bywhich these Others acquire a new culture. Ortiz argues thatthe word transculturation expresses better the different phases of the transientprocess from a culture to another one, because it does not only consist ofacquiring a different culture, [that is the acculturation], but also impliesnecessarily the loss of a preceding culture, which could be said of a partialdeculturation, and, in addition, it means the consequent creation of new culturalphenomena that could be denominated neoculturation. (103)Ortiz’s term and what Homi Bhabha calls “hybridity” reflect a rejection of the colonialistdichotomous discourse. Homi Bhabha argues in The Location of Culture that, “the representationof difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set inthe fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, isa complex on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities” (2). Hybridity isproduced in the liminal space between national communities. By this logic, the question ofidentity is closely linked to representation and cannot go outside the paradigm of language.Moby-Dick, however, is an elaboration of Bakhtin’s concept of novelistic hybridity which allowsfor a contestatory setting of cultural differences.Said’s Orientalism studies the logocentric basis of the Occident’s hierarchical andbinarized (mis)representation of the Orient. My aim, however, is not to validate Said’s theory, norto critique it. Staging the missed encounter as the impossible assimilation of the Real, extendingit to include the missed encounter between the East and the West, I shall demonstrate in the