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

offered for interpretation, the ‘thing’ in
Vereker’s text maintains its position central
to the text by being resistant to any such
readerly acquisition; the thing becomes the
impossible yet necessary object as lynchpin
of all critical machinations. In its elusive
manoeuvres, the text sets up a dynamic of
critical hide-and-seek. Through its very
effacement, it declares what it is ‘about’ in
an elaborate snare it sets for its reader,
alluding to its ‘thing’ at every turn, tempting
with an erotics of flirtation, inviting the
reader to linger on its threshold, catch hold
of it and “pull hard, pull it right out”: a
tantalising text-tease (24). We are “therefore
to be [ ] good boy[s]” - and girls - and “not
try to peep under the curtain before the
show [is] ready: [We] should enjoy it all the
more if [we sit] very still” (47). The story has
the power to hold us captive, we are ‘on a
promise’, “thoroughly to be tantalised” (40),
coerced into turning the page in a physical
encounter with the text as a material and
tangible thing which promises to ‘unveil its
idol’ in front of a “palpitating audience” (49)
but will eventually “lay [itself] bare” only in a
final revelation of negativity. In its black
markings on “every page and line and letter”
lies its engravement. Its continual acts of
deferral are connected with the deathliness
which is the impetus lying behind the
signifying act: it is as a compensation for
loss of ‘the object’ that it is signified. It is in
a quest to critically unravel the secretive
figure that a posited wholeness may be
obtained for subjects radically split through
the signifying act: the reader is held hostage
linguistically to the ‘the thing’ embedded in
the text. In his essay on ‘Differance’,
Derrida refers to the ‘a’ as a silent figure “like
a tomb”, a pyramid in which the letter rises
again through interpretative play (Derrida:
1968, 132). Just as a pyramid holds the
treasure of the dead, Vereker ‘the scribe’
refers to the ‘thing’ held within his text as
“buried treasure” for critical unearthing. He
takes his ‘secret’ beyond life’s limits, his
treasure goes with him beyond the limits of
life: “the sentence had virtually been written.
The writer might go down to his grave” [57].
The quest for to discover the secret of “the
figure” is referred to by the narrator as that
which acts as a “counterpoise to [ ] grief”
[51].
The ‘treasure’ of the text correlates with
Lacan’s objet a as projected phantasy, the
fixated fetish as centre over which ‘I’ may
oscillate endlessly in negotiation with critical
desire. “Ask the writer about the anxiety
that he experiences when faced by the
blank sheet of paper,” says Lacan, “and he
will tell you who is the turd of his phantasy”
(Lacan: 1977, 315 – emphasis as original).
In the retentive procedures of James’ text
and its mechanisms of withholding, it retains
that lodged foreign body; it keeps its filth
within as a stored up “buried treasure” to be
picked over in fantasised privacy. In
Freudian theory, the anal stage of ego
development sees the infant’s ‘treasure’ as
central to formation of subjectivity, the
faecal trajectory by which boundaries are
established. According to Mary Douglas,
“[a]ny structure of ideas is vulnerable at its
margins” (Douglas: 1991, 121). Like Divine
in the John Waters’ film Pink Flamingo, we
might sense “deep dark trouble”: a deep
dark trouble lying beneath the still waters of
aestheticism; a troubling presence existing
under the surface, its subterranean position
providing the guarantor for artistic
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