Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

56evil eye is enigmatically visible in the narrative. Even the custom house turns out to be gazing atcharacters and the reader much like Hitchcock’s films in which houses look back in hunger todevour their victims. What the Custom House may be said to “want” is articulated in thediscourse of Surveyor Pue as ghostly revenant: it “wants” the event of the archive, thecontinuation of the chain of assujettissement, and thus the prolongation of the law of the puritanfathers. Inscribing the cradle of the scarlet letter in the custom house allows Hawthorne, in anattempt to control female sexuality, to project and to extend the Puritan patriarchal gaze.However, as Žižek contends, this gaze is the missing gaze“an impossibility that gives rise tothe fetish object” (202). The impossibility of the subject to see and to fix the object allows thelatter to give substance to that missed gaze and ultimately become the gaze itself. This anasemicabysmal encounter with the self is at the center of Western thinking. Nietzsche states that” whenyou look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you” (89). Like a mirror, the abyss createsthe sensation of vertigo. This vertigo and unease is the fracturing of the gaze of the abyss. Thetrajectory of the gaze that runs between the viewer and the abyss, much like the viewer and thepainting, redirects the gaze back to the viewer. If the abyss is bottomless, then, there is no fallingand if there is no falling, there must be a return. Accordingly, the letter must and will eventuallyeither find a destination or return to the sender. What happens if the letter fails to reach theintended receiver and if it does not return? The answer is that it either reaches a random receiveror it is destroyed. In both cases it fulfills its ontological function of conveying a message and thesender’s evaluative and deontic modalities which are strictly conditioned by generic andcontextual parameters.