Journal of Research & Scholarly Output 2006 - Grimsby Institute of ...

which is central to the story. The figure
thereby becomes figurative. In the figuring
of ‘the thing’ lies seduction as the subject
engages with rhetorical structure and the
structure acts as a trap into which the
reading body is lured and held captive: sent
to ground by “the chase for which I myself
had sounded the horn” (29). By entering the
virtual dimension of criticism, the critic
becomes engaged in a phantasy in which he
may hold the illusion of full presence. ‘The
thing’ is a sleeper in the flesh of the story, a
lodged foreign body lodged in the ample
Jamesian surrounds. In their ‘Preliminary
Communication’ of 1893 to Studies on
Hysteria, Breuer and Freud refer to the
symptomatic base of hysteria being due to
memory acting as a lodged “foreign body”
which remains active in the working present
(Breuer and Freud: 1991, 57). The present
of the narrative is here wound around with a
superfluity activated from within by the
reading body which, in its critical endeavour,
occupies the unnamed position of
secondary narrator-writer. The reading body
in this text is, of course, split by being both
represented (narrator) and implied (reader).
This split scene of readership, inhabiting a
place in and out of the text, positions the
interpretative act itself as hysterical. If, in
reading, the one and other intrude upon one
another in an imposition of boundary so that
the threshold of the subject is transgressed
in the reading process, the depiction of this
process within the story space itself must
render James’ text doubly split. Iser
theorises the reading process in
phenomenological terms:
If reading removes the subject-object
division that constitutes all perception, it
follows that the reader will be ‘occupied’ by
the thoughts of the author, and these in their
turn will cause the drawing of new
‘boundaries’ . . . ‘division’ takes place within
the reader himself. (Iser: 1988, 226).
In textual exegesis is a radical estrangement
then. We become, to use Kristevan
terminology, ‘strangers to ourselves’. The
subject is ‘subject’ to power, subjected and
subjectified in relation to constructivity
which is not to say that it reaches a stable
point of ‘subject’ or indeed that that state of
being subject is ever identical to itself but is
indeed constantly under threat of eruption.
Butler refers to this in The Psychic Life of
Power as “a reiterated ambivalence at the
heart of agency” (Butler: 1997, 18). In a
reading of power mechanics which is built
upon Freud’s ‘compulsion to repeat’, Butler
states that:
Power is never merely a condition external
or prior to the subject, nor can it be
exclusively identified with the subject. If
conditions of power are to persist, they must
be reiterated; the subject is precisely the site
of such reiteration. . . (Butler: 1997, 16)
In its perpetual performance, a projected
unity is encountered again and again for as
long as a central point of power is
maintained. Such a reading would posit the
existence of a transcendental referent
without which there would be no sense in
signing analytically and in thrall of which the
“critical laurels” are withheld. This links with
Lacan’s concept of the phallus as
transcendental signified and Foucault’s
formulation of resistance as non-anterior to
power (Foucault: 1990, 95). Far from being
Page 52
FOCUS