"Putrefaction is my light": Consumption, Absorption and Excess in Martin Vaughn-James's The Projector

In his Preface to The Cage (1975), Martin Vaughn-James describes his work as “A book with no story, a book with no characters.” The surrealist distortion of space (as well as time) across the narratives could be deemed as a byproduct of its preceding work, The Projector (1971). Unlike The Cage, The Projector is a text that bustles with characters with human bodies having non-human heads - of electronic appliances, animals, or toilets. While the former two categories of entities occasionally make the corresponding motifs evident to describe the said character’s nature, it is those with toilets as their head (or “toilet-heads,” for ease of reference) who occupy a greater bandwidth of the overall plot. The theme of excess, depicted via the visual and verbal references of food and excrement, occupy a central position in The Projector. It seemingly throws light on a post-industrial world where the sustenance of an individual is compromised with the propagation of instruments and activities that encourage having “fat” in one’s brain, thus becoming entities with no agency and individuality. This paper attempts to explore how the narrative spaces in The Projector explore the idea of “excess” with regard to food and excrement.