Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

45absorbing. The outcome of the narrator’s fear of castration and loss is his submission to the filial(reality) principle. His entry into the Symbolic Order or the language system requires thesubmission to the rules of languagethe Law-of-the-Father, which is at the center of PuritanAmerica. To be recognized as a literary figure, Hawthorne’s narrator submits to the law of hisFatherSurveyor Pue, by giving a prosopoetic figure to the ‘bones’ of the ancestors which hehas figuratively disinterred earlier in “the Custom House.” By this logic, the narrator’s primalscene is also the Father’s. The narrator’s identification with the dead Father is erotic and literary.The latent content of the narrator’s scarlet letter suggests that the very image of phallic authority,the primal scene, is disrupted and challenged by the forbidden desire, which is a desire to returnto an origin identified with the absent or lost mother. This thwarted desire comessymptomatically and is often encrypted within the archive.The dead fathers summon up the narrator to the realm of history. The narrator’s difficultyin reading the residues of Pue’s dusty residues reflects his hermeneutic bewilderment in front ofHester Prynne’s scarlet letter and his obsession with recovering the past. Figuratively disinterringhis fathers, Hawthorne, although he gives them a voice and face, only supplements the “mustypapers” (27) and complicates the work of both the archivist and the reader. As Eric Savoy arguesin his “‘Filial Duty’: Reading the Patriarchal Body in the ‘Custom House’”:the novel itself produces an inconclusive history of interpretation; Hester Prynne’s letterremains, in scene after scene of reading, a silent and uncorroborative sign … it is, in fact,recovered rather than uncovered by every interpretive motion. While it symbolicallyextends the invitation to decipher and thus instigates the allegory of reading, Hawthorne’snarrative recurringly restores it to its simple materiality and robs it of allegoricalsignification: it remains … disfigured. (399; original emphasis)