A stands for Agalma. The mystic symbol of unatterableness in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

In “The Custom-House,” the introductory sketch to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the narrator inexplicably places on his breast “a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded,” casually found in a bundle of old documents. He immediately feels “a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat,” and lets the object, the letter A, fall to the floor. This “ornamental article of dress” is the “mystic symbol” The Scarlet Letter revolves around in the attempt to extract some “deep meaning,” but always failing to do so – or better, substituting this hidden, ineffable truth, which subtly communicates to Hawthorne’s and (by proxy) the reader’s “sensibilities” “evading the analysis” of their minds, with the proliferation of a virtually endless series of possible external, “surface” meanings. What is missing, in this process of semantic dissemination, is not only the obvious “mystery” the symbol covers instead of revealing it (the name of Hester Prynne’s accomplice, Arthur Dimmesdale, in the crime of Adultery, a word totally absent in the romance), but also its very origin, desire, a concept which according to Jacques Lacan may have some kind of expression only indirectly, by way of the objet (petit) a. In his 1960-61 seminar Lacan articulates the objet (petit) a with the Greek term agalma – a precious ornament hidden in a worthless vessel which alludes to, but cannot fully manifest, the ineffable dimension of desire. In my paper I will try to show how, throughout Hawthorne’s romance, the mystic token on Hester’s breast operates as the mobile signifier both for the impossibility of giving utterance to this desire and for the surplus of meaning Hester creates with her artistic re-writing of the letter. The mystic potential of the scarlet letter might then be found in its capacity of telling without telling, or better of telling precisely by way of the ethical choice of refusing to tell, of staging the ineffable in the most visible way.