Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

46This suspension between disfiguration and figuration, materiality and abstraction, absence andpresence structure The Scarlet Letter. In fact, the scarlet letter is the material debris (restes) ofhistory.I would like to build upon Eric Savoy’s argument by suggesting that “The Custom House”functions as a ghostly crypt that encrypts the father’s corpse/corpus. Such encryption is donethrough anasemia, prosopopeia, and disinterment. Returning to and re-reading the historicalevents of Puritan America, Hawthorne makes use of tropology to reconstruct the dead fathers’narrative. In doing so, he participates in the hauntological 13 work of the letter. In “The Burden ofHistory,” Hayden White writes:We should no longer naively expect that statements about a given epoch or complex ofevents in the past 'correspond' to some preexistent body of 'raw facts.' For we shouldrecognize that what constitutes the facts themselves is the problem that the historian, likethe artist, has tried to solve in the choice of metaphor by which he orders his world, past,present, and future. (47)Like art and history, psychotherapy is an attempt to access and represent the repressed andforgotten events. However, none of them yields an accurate recall. The circularity of crypts isresonant with the hermeneutic circle that the mise en scène of the novel stages: the repeatedencounter of the reading subject with the letter, the drama of différance. All arises from the cryptof Pue’s document, and all is referred by the narrator back to the document. It is this circle inwhich the missed encounter is repeatedly staged throughout the novel: where the Thingevaporates and slips away toward death and the grave.