Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

254material elements of the body 72 (lips, eyes, ears, and other erotogenic zones) are linked to theReal and that they occur where there is a cut or a hole. The notions that interest us here are thegaze, the voice, and the nothing. In other words, the encounter with the Real of the body issudden, erratic, and obscene. The traumatic events are often accompanied by a shock whenthought is achieved on the material body. Passages like the following account for the sensoryeffect of the Real: “the ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, evenmore loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect” (Moby-Dick 190). In fact,there is a glissement, a process of association, between the hole and blankness: both are relatedmaterial manifestations of nothingness. In another passage, “Ahab, without speaking, was slowlyrubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to tighten its luster, and without usingany words was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffledand inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him”(Moby-Dick 165).In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the narrator eloquently states:With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to methe scarlet symbol and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostlyvoice he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverencetowards himwho might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestorto bring hismouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. (31)Fundamentally, the narrative trajectory of “The Custom House” stages the turn towardexhumation, toward the ancestral grave, culminating in a figurative exhumation of the ancestors.This figurative recuperation or what Eric Savoy calls “the materiality of figuration” (“Necro-filia,or Hawthorne’s Melancholia” 465) posits a missed encounter between the narrative construction