Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

259Since it is impossible to have access to the Real of the dead father(s), Hawthorne seeks to relivethe experience through the gaze that is metonymically present in the document Hawthornehappens to find. In the Lacanian psychoanalytic model, the gaze is associated with the Real andin particular with the objet a. No wonder, then, that Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a theoryabout the fascination with the letter, objet a. Hawthorne’s fascination with the letter is not withthe letter qua letter because, as I have mentioned before, the letter does not have content; rather, itis with the effect or the excess of the letterthe gaze or the stain of the Puritan fathers.Hawthorne’s re-turn is to the remainders of his fathers, who “may fairly be said to have left astain upon him” (14). In fact, we are talking about the blood of a victim staining the perpetrator ofviolence so deeply that it penetrates to his very bones, which bear the stain later upon ahypothetical exhumation. Analyzing Hitchcock’s The Birds and Psycho in Everything YouAlways Wanted to Know about Lacan, Žižek argues:the intrusion of the stain in the scenes from Birds and Psycho is of a psychotic nature:here, the non-symbolized returns in the guise of a traumatic object-stain. Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz; designates a signifier which fills out the void of the excludedrepresentation, whereas a psychotic stain is a representation which fills out a hole in theSymbolic, giving body to the ‘unspeakable’its inert presence testifies that we are in adomain where ‘words fail’. The surplus-signifier ‘hystericizes’ the subject, whereas theeffect of the non-signifying stain is psychoticwe are thus again at the oppositionhysteria-psychosis, the elementary axis of Psycho's universe. (238-39)This stain is in reality the stain of the Real that troubles the symbolic stain of language, the stainthat appears in the guise of lack (i.e., objet a). The surplus traumatic stain of the Real intrudes theSymbolic and escapes the grip of the Symbolic and persists as asymbolization.