Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

255of subjectivity and the figurative recuperation. We see this missed encounter at work in both textswhere bodies engage in associations with uncanny and ghostly voices and remnants.Significantly, the missed encounter is produced as missed because the overarching narrativeframe is one of autobiography inflected through a Gothic figurative economy: graves bones,exhumation, and finally, the gravitation of all these toward prosopopeia, i.e., toward hauntingwhich is the return of the Real. Working within the Gothic economy, Hawthorne generatesfigures that he cannot properly read as figures: he literalized them as the body of the ghost. Infact, the uncanny nature of the pharmakon or what we might call the pharmakon of the Real isbest summed up by Melville’s hypothesis about the nature of the spout: “You have seen himspout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world itis not so easy to settle these plain things. The oxymoronic nature of the spout as pharmakon (bythe way, very relevant to the study of the Real) 73 reveals that we are dealing with the impossible.We may want to recall, in this regard, the disfiguration of Ahab by the White Whale.As an objet a supplementing the Real of the body, Ahab’s prosthesis may stand at thesame time for excess and for lack of jouissancethe excessive jouissance linked to the Real ofthe body and the hole that is at the center of the Real. This incorporation of the prosthesis intoAhab’s body reflects the horror of the sinking of the Pequod. We have a movement fromdisassembly to assemblage and again to disassembly. The uncanny nature of this movement isprobably best summed up in chapter “The Fossil Whale”: “I am horror-struck at this antemosaic,unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time,must need exist after all humane ages are over” (434). The absent legthe ivory substituteisindeed a reminder and a remainder of a traumatic past which, in this quotation, assumes a