Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

295We have seen Melville’s and Hawthorne’s narratives announce and denounce the powerand violence of language to interpellate and manipulate the reader’s expectations and even hisjouissance. The complicity of literature in imposing the economy of obscene and Symbolicviolence is deconstructed only through the reader’s severing the rope of libidinal identificationand the temptation of the Symbolic. The violence of the corpoReal sustains and is sustained bythe archive of both narratives: Hawthorne participates, however ambivalently, in a transhistoricalproject that is similar to Melville’s (ab)use of the disnarrated archive of trauma. Language in bothnarratives welcomes the readers to the “desert of the Real,” but the Realas has been establishedby Lacan and further explored by Žižekis the realm of violence par excellence. Grasping theessential violence of the Symbolic enables us to read truthfully our quotidian reality with all itsperverse versions of fundamentalism. The same logic of violence and perversion is readilyapparent in mediated images of war, catastrophes, scandals, disasters, and obscenitythepornography of the geopolitical, on screen and in print. However, all these images that weconsider to be generated by our historical moment have, without exception, a permanence in theobscene fantasies which circulate in our Symbolic. I think for example of H. G. Wells’ novel, TheWorld Set Free, which was written in 1914, as a proleptic fantasy announcing the violentirruption of the Real of the nuclear war into our reality. The fantasy of The World Set Free burstin the reality of WWII (i.e., the atomic bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inJapan). The bombings of 1945 would be, in Baudrillardian terminology, a simulation of theliterary anticipation of the events. By saying that literature is complicit in the fantasies of disaster,I mean that, as in all other discourses, a thing before becoming something, before acquiring itsmeaning, it has a prior textual/symbolic being. Before becoming material, before becoming real,