Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

66attempt to have access to the past, focuses on the excess of cryptsan excess that enablesHawthorne, through the business of prosopopeia, to encrypt the Father as phantomatically andphantasmatically present as a ghost or a remainder, and to be subject to his interpellativeinjunctions, which is the origin of writing and reading. In other words, Hawthorne, the impliedauthor of “The Custom House” and of the novel, lives under the shadow of the dead Puritanfathers, who may be said to be incorporated (via melancholy) and introjected (via Surveyor Pueand the event of the archive), and takes on the functions of the fathers (i.e., the functions ofdiscipline and punishment) through reinscribing the story of the scarlet letter. This turn towardthe debris of the letter and restes of the dead fathers starts when Hawthorne encrypts “their blood[which] may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him” (14): such affective traces left by theencryption suggest the crypt’s logic of order, blame, guilt, and necessity.Although Hawthorne seems to hide the unspeakable encryption, the encrypted objectenfolds and becomes enfolded by the writer, and so their traumatic missed encounters (and theirshared incorporation and introjections) appear through the anasemic ruminations of the subject’sbusiness. With the support of prosopopeia, Hawthorne turns the narrative to the Gothic and pavesthe way for the collapse of the crypt and the symptomatic re-enactment of the encrypting trauma.Not surprisingly, what returns in the series of re-enactments is reducible, as a kind of zero degreeof the signifier, to the color red or to the word “scarlet”: the blood of the ancestors’ victims thathave figuratively stained their buried bones returns in the piece of scarlet cloth that is also a signand a (failed) symbol. At a second degree, the reiterated question “what does the scarlet lettermean ?” repeats the primal question: “what is the law and the will of the Father?” And at a thirddegree, what is encrypted, I argue, is the violence that sustains the relation between the two: i.e.,