Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

59woman, since the trauma of Hester and that of the Puritan community cannot be inscribed. Whatis pretermitted from the American Puritan tradition re-appears as signifying traces.Traditiontraditiomeans both handing over (tradere) and betrayal (traditore). However, thetrace is a material one. Hawthorne’s recuperative disinterment of Surveyor Pue’s text and hisadvocation of the politics of his Puritan fathers reveal Hawthorne’s investment in a genderedwritinga writing that blurs all boundaries. A signifying trace, the letter A, inscribed as it is onHester’s breast, implies the materiality of the sign and trauma. It is both recorded on and in thebody of Hester and in Hawthorne’s narrative. The letter A is the material reminder of thesignifying nature of discourse at the moment of trauma. It is also revelatory of the effect of theviolent linguistic inscriptions on the psyche. Such violence creates an illusion of comprehension.Hawthorne’s narrative gives body to the unspeakable. Such prosopoetic operation testifies to theviolence of the moment of trauma. The letter A appears on the page, on Hester’s chest, on thesky, and in the reader’s imagination. The letter gives a temporality and location to the discursivetrauma Hester and the Puritan community go through. The Scarlet Letter stages the nonrepresentationalityof trauma through the materialization of the letter. The non-representationalityof the traumatic is experience is tied to the materiality (inadequacy) of the signifier. We aretaught by psychoanalysis that this inadequacy is the determining characteristic of the signifier.This mise en scène stresses the fact that the language of The Scarlet Letter is always directedbackward, to the moment of the origin of history and consciousnessto the ana- or the arche-.This originary moment originates another indexed momenttextuality. The retrospectivetemporality of the archive, of anasemia allows us to talk about what can be recovered onlyindirectly in looking at the past. A close look at the tropological representation of the origin