Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

77possible for disembodied voices and signs to communicate with the reader. The relationshipbetween the Thing and the abstract idea that are signified by the same words reflects therelationship between the author and the reader, between fiction and reality, and between the textand its (sub)texts. Although the New Critics’ claim that a close reading of a texta reading thatjoins meaning to experiencecan trace how its different parts relate and achieve order andharmony, I want to focus on the ways in which the text defamiliarizes reality. The reader,however, is drifting away. What he sees is the glowing Aan image that resembles the light ofthe psychologist who hypnotizes his patient. By the end of the narrative, the reader meets his ownletter and faces his own primal scene of the encounter with this narrative. Hawthorne’s symboliceconomy in which the narrator extends his hand to the reader transgresses the rule of fiction andtime diexis. In fact, Hawthorne wants simultaneously to pretend that he is offering a literalhistoriography and to concoct allegory at the same time. He surreally makes the reader participatein the production of meaning and at the same time in the exhumation of the dead paternal figures.The reader, then, is a witness who will testify to the re-creation of the past.Although the primal scene in The Scarlet Letter is a historical event (i.e., both theencounter with Surveyor Pue, where Hawthorne assumes his “filial duty” and the plethora ofencryptions), it is very important to the narrative. The Freudian scenic model is a model oftemporality of the subject that functions through the belated impression of trauma that isreconstructed in analysis and/or narrative. This is done on the level of the unconscious. Since theunconscious does not measure time, we are left with the traumatic imprint, mark, or symptommemory of loss and castration. Hester represses the father’s order. Her egoan agency ofdefenseattaches the desire to the buried memory of the primal scene to protect the ego from the