Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

76remnants of an unknown past that transcends the coherence of the present and the written storyyet they do not arrive at presence in the presentonly as residue, trace, or debris.Faced with debris of stories, critics have long preferred to work on texts that seek torepresent to the reader the experience of traumatic juncture. However, Hawthorne’s statementthat the reader “must not doubt” (30) is in fact an invitation to participate in the making ofmeaning. However, it is also a ghostly invitation to enter the realm of the archive. The setting ofthe novel keeps the reader suspended in the world of literality, symbol, union, pluralism, andfiction. “This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history” (42). This statementclaims that the novel is set in the real world. More exactly, the rose is part of a larger symbolic(or allegorical) economy of figuration in which it is in dialectical opposition to “the blackflower”the figure of prison, punishment, and human frailty. In The Scarlet Letter we have amovement from the fictional to the real. The rose traverses the fictional and enters the factualonly to decorate The Scarlet Letter as real. Hawthorne understands the rose as literal, and hisgesture of offering the plucked rose to the reader is performative. By “Pluck[ing] one of itsflowers and present [ing] it to the reader,” (42) Hawthorne invites the reader to this Gothic worldand violates the art of writing fiction. This image of reaching out to the hand of the reader mixesthe figurative and the literal and brings the narrative a step closer to the Gothic. What we havehere is an author who is haunted by the ghosts of his dead father and who haunts his readers.Such hauntology offers the narrator the possibility to extend the work of the Gothic to the readerwho finds himself already in the realm transferential hauntology. This chiastic relationshipinvokes the timelessness of the unconscious itself. The narrator can touch the rose, pluck it fromits fictional setting, and offer it to the reader. This transgression of the law of narration makes it