Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

257Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, modern America’s obsession with the Real has always endedviolently. The obsession with the Real is also an obsession with the Imaginarythe Orient. Theexcessive obsession with the Other has yielded an excess that ricochets back on the “I”. TheAmerican subject is, as a result, embarrassed between excess and lack. This binary of excess andlack dissolves in the missed encounter.Contextualizing Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Melville’s Moby-Dick within theeconomy of Lacanian concepts, I argue that these narratives engage incessantly with the Real ofthe body. I venture to argue that Hawthorne and Melville are modern writers avant la lettre andthat their engagement with the excess and the manque of the Real offers a model of the career ofhuman subjectivity. Melville and Hawthorne argue in favor of multiplicity of the signifier. Theletter A, the doubloon, the hieroglyphics, and the White Whale are all functions in the Real. To bemore precise, they are signifiers that fail to meet the rigors of the Symbolic, and thus crack andslide toward the Real. As Hawthorne writes, “the scarlet letter had not done its office” (124). Thesame is true for all of these signifiers. A simplistic reading of these works would see them to beinvoking a coherence of the signifier. Upon deeper scrutiny, however, this reading losescredibility and pushes the reader into the abyss of the Real. Rather than tending towardcoherence, I suggest, Melville and Hawthorne regress toward the Lacanian Real, the third spacebetween the Imaginary and the Symbolic exchange. Like the Lacanian Real which is outside orrather beyond the analytic experience, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Melville’s Moby-Dickincessantly slide toward deathtoward the abyss of representation and hermeneutics. In fact, wehave a series of appointments, missed appointments, and disappointments.