Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

81Gothic. The supplementarity of language which is advocated by both Derrida and Lacan is clearlymanifested in Hawthorne’s narrative.Derrida locates the referent of his theory in the human body. His materialization of theletter sees writing as an investment in the act of survival. According to him, language is aperformative act of signifying. Performative as it is, materiality is permanent and does not decay.In the Derridean epistemological paradigm, the letter does not perish or stop at a destination,although, unstable as it is, it plays with impossibility and the danger of non-signification. In thisdeconstructive model, history is seen as intertextual. Intertextuality is highly pertinent to myanalysis of Hawthorne’s narrative economy. The archive, as I shall explain in this chapter, isintertextual. Its textuality provides Hawthorne with a missed paternity, making the materialincarnation in or as a letter. Here I take up Eric Savoy’s argument that “Pue’s text and his ghostlyexhortations render legible, become a tropic substitute for, and supplement the limited legibilityof the ancestral body, just as Hawthorne’s own Scarlet Letter is a supplement to Pue’s text (401)and extend it to the missed encounter. Savoy’s argument that the slippage between the signifier ofthe blood-stained bones of the ancestors and the “scarlet” letter of Pue’s archive sheds light onthe paternal project: to material and tropic exhumation of the fathers’ bodies. This slippage isprecisely what allows Pue to be the official ancestor or legatee in the economy of writing. Pue, inshort, is the nexus of archival transmission (i.e., its agent). My point is that the economy of TheScarlet Letter is post-material in which filiation is married to affiliationa contract passed onthrough the word, through textuality. As in translation, which causes a certain frustration on thepart of the translator, reading yields frustration which is necessary to keep a text alive. ForDerrida, the materiality of the letter (writing) is the unremitting activity of (inter)textual