Van Helsing launches the chase against the vampire precisely with a rallying call against memory: «remember my friends that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker» ( D 146). In Dracula ( D) the question of transgenerational communication is all the more pregnant as the text offers itself as a powerful denial of haunting and unconscious inheritance. The Gothic offers its texts as exemplary case studies on the question of inherited memory and the transmission of «the sins of the fathers» to their children «to the third or fourth generation,» to quote Walpole’s canonical definition of the genre in the preface to The Castle of Otranto (Walpole 5). Nothing is ever abolished which does not resurface in one guise or another, like an enigma, a sign or a phantomatic presence in a later generation.ĢThe subject of gothic fiction represents the most extreme drift of the hypothesis of an intersubjective production of the psyche. The research of Laplanche and in particular his theory of seduction and that of Abraham and Torok concentrate precisely on the shift from the communicated to the uncommunicable and the ghostly in transgenerational transmission. Haunting betrays a defect in the transmission, the foreclosure and encrypting of the message inherent in its very conveyance. But transgenerational transmission also involves a dimension of haunting as one inherits the unsaid and the desire that are part of the unconscious of another, usually the parent. Shaped by the desires and the unconscious of those who, like the parents, dream, speak or name him, the subject becomes a self through cultural inheritance. The subject is an «intersubject», a mere link in the chain of generations and a subject in a group as well as an independent entity. In addition to listening for the telephone, you are being asked to tune your ears to noise frequencies, to anticoding, to the inflated reserves of random indeterminateness - in other words, you are expected to stay open to the static and interference that will occupy these lines.ġAt the origin of the individual psyche there is always, in part, another or others. Paradoxalement, le vampire est donc produit par cette technicité même qui vise à l’éliminer. Mais la sténographie s’offre en fait comme le lieu de la résurgence inattendue du spectral. Autour du phonographe et de la machine à écrire, un réseau d’informations se tisse, qui relie neurologues, phrénologues, avocats, sténodactylographes et hommes d’affaires, unis dans la certitude que le savoir, aidé de la technique, ne peut que triompher du monde de la mémoire. Dracula est un produit emblématique de l’âge de la communication, tel qu’il émerge à la fin du XIX e siècle. Une à une, les victimes de Dracula apparaissent comme cryptophores d’un secret dont l’émergence est d’autant plus inévitable qu’elle est fonction du mode de communication mis en place par le texte. Une lecture de trois scènes cruciales de Dracula, reliées par une logique autre que celle de l’intrigue, découvre l’inscription cryptique d’un non-dit familial : le secret de la bâtardise qui choisit la hantise vampirique pour s’incarner. Partant de l’idée d’une hantise transgénérationnelle, cet article fait du vampire la figure du retour d’une mémoire refoulée sur plusieurs générations.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |