John Barnet and the Materiality of Desire in James Hogg’s Justified Sinner

Abstract

This chapter examines a neglected scene in James Hogg’s novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in which the church groundskeeper John Barnet is fired for insubordination. Barnet, like an earlier version of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” makes innuendoes about his employer’s sexual history and refuses to deny spreading rumors about the paternity of the boss’s son. The ensuing confrontation becomes an allegory of labour relations and a parable about the materiality of desire. The chapter analyzes Barnet’s innuendo through the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, who similarly saw desire as having a certain materiality.