Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

57The letter always arrives at its destination because it is closely linked to death. A form ofwriting, it is the subject’s or the receiver’s relation with his own death. This ghostly aspect of theletter, as the loss of the letter, is a Derridean pun on loss and mourningconcepts which areexplained in “Fors.” The letter’s arrival at its final destination equals the meeting of death andwriting. Each one carries his/her own letter. Although the final destinationdeathis inevitable,the course of the letter is contingent upon the chaotic and unpredicted flow of events. In EnjoyYour Symptom, Žižek states that “the only letter that nobody can evade, that sooner or laterreaches us, i.e., the letter which has each of us as its infallible addressee, is death. We can say thatwe live only in so far as a certain letter (the letter containing our death warrant) still wandersaround, looking for us” (21). The letter, however, is identified with its unfolded exteriority. Itexplains and represents the interplay of signs arranged according to the addressee. In The ScarletLetter, the letter functions not only as a container of a death warrant but also as a perpetrator oflife, which is why the letter has a specific function (différance), but not a content, because thatcontent remainsas it is clear in the final explanation offered by Dimmesdale before hisdeathungraspable, inexpressible. It can only be expressed obliquely in the circuitous discourseof catachrestic tropes. It forestalls and defers death by giving the narrator the ability to tell storiesand by giving voice to the dead. Hawthorne’s narrative is, then, an endeavor, renewed in everychapter, to keep death outside The Scarlet Letter. The desire to ward off death is not perpetual asdeath conquers the living at the end of The Scarlet Letter. At the beginning of the narrative, deathis present through ghostly injunctions. This relationship between the letter (writing) and death isalso manifested in the subjugation of authorial voice in The Scarlet Letter. The real author of TheScarlet Letter is the archival dead father and the real narrative is the letter.