Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

70the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith,beheld there the appearance of an immense letterthe letter Amarked out in lines ofdull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point, burning duskilythrough a veil of cloud; but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it, or, atleast, with so little definiteness, that another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in it.(116)Dimmesdale’s guilt is repeated, remarked this time in the sky, giving him the possibility torestore his subjectivity by means of suicide. Meeting his own demise, Dimmesdale’s fate bringsus to the encounter with the Real. The end (direction and destruction) of Dimmesdale’s letter’strajectory equals its expenditure. Standing on the scaffold where Hester first faced hercommunity, Dimmesdale exposes his breast and provides a discourse to supplement and toexplain his gesture of revelation. Bearing his ghastly A, Dimmesdale confuses his communityand the reader and bids farewell to Hester. Does the letter really appear when Dimmesdaleexposes his breast? What does it mean? The answer is that Dimmesdale, in his re-enactment ofthe scaffold scene and taking the letter on himself, stages the confusion that has ab initio been thematrix of hermeneutics. Even the narrator is confused: “The reader may choose among thesetheories. We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the portent, and would gladly, nowthat it has done its office, erase its deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation hasfixed it in very undesirable distinctness ” (187). Through a careful study of these theories, this reenactmentcalls reflectively and symptomatically to the reader for an encryptive rapport, andidentificatory transference. Similar to the way the inassimilable past events can be staged throughand in language, like the looming of the shadow, Dimmesdale’s death scene reflects in part the