Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

251that in both Melville and Hawthorne the corporeal functions as the foundation that permeates thepoetic and the linguistic. Could not these residues be proof that something in excess of theSymbolic always permeates languagea process reflected by the encounter of language with theReal?No wonder, then, that words and symbols, in both Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter, areinvested in the economy of materiality. Is not Hester’s letter A a letter that signals a sexualrapport? Is not Ahab’s discourse self-reflexive, referring to his trauma beyond the narrative? Onthe level of narration, discourses of archivizationas a material actpermeate the narratives.These different discourses refer to or, perhaps, parody the Real of these narratives. It is true thatthe materiality of the signifier saturates both Melville’s and Hawthorne’s narratives, but thismateriality refers in fact to the residue beyond the narrative, the residue that can be apprehendedonly through and in language. This residue is the objet a.Melville’s and Hawthorne’s obsessive repetition of the objet a (Hester’s scarlet letter andAhab’s severed limb) is the most explicit evidence of the authors’ obsession with the Real of thebody in its most material manifestation. A parallel can be drawn, in fact, between Ahab andHester, between Hawthorne’s narrator and Ishmael, and between Hawthorne and Melville. In allthese cases, our gaze oscillates between the darkness of the body’s interior and the exteriorenvironment. In fact, there is an endless circulation of the narrative of and as a drive around theobjet aa circulation that signals an obsession with the Real. There is no longer a gap betweenthe inside and outside. We have seen that Hester’s and Ahab’s traumas, although located in thepre-history of the narrative (and thus constitute the disnarrated), are rewritten as pulsations of theReal of the body. In both cases, the exterior of the body is displayed as an extension of the