Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

60enables us to better grasp the déjà vu in The Scarlet Letter. We have the feeling that we havealready read The Scarlet Letter. This impression constructs the temporality of the act of readingitself.As I will explain in this chapter, prosopopeia, which is a hallucinatory Gothic trope ofhaunting, is the solution of the problem of how to meet the desire to make the dead speak, toreturn to presence the ultimately absent. In prosopopeia we have the illusion of the immediacy ofthe spoken word because absence and presence work as the matrix of desire to bring back thedead subject to life. However, this anasemic operation is invested in the prosopoetic Gothicmode. In “The Custom-House,” the picture of the dead father comes back to gaze at and toembarrass the narrator. In embarrassment we have an excess of knowledge and an inability tohave access to the secret of the narrative. This surplus is an uncanny element that elevates “TheCustom-House” to the field of the abject. 17 Like the triangular relationship between child, mother,and father, Hawthorne’s narrative constructs a triangular relationship among absence, the desirefor presence, and the absent desire (the Thing). The letter A becomes a target for the energy ofdesire which is ungraspable. At the level of the signifier, there is a slippage between thefigurative and the literal. The letter A is both metaphoric and material. At the same time there isan oscillation between desire and disgust. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristevarightly observes that “in the presence of signified deatha flat encephalograph, for instanceIwould understand, react, or accept” (Powers of Horror 3). The fluctuation between desire anddisgust, between attraction to and repulsion from the Thing is intensified by Dimmesdale’sstatement: “oh, Hester Prynne thou little, little, knowest all the horror of this thing! And theshame!the indelicacy!the horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the