I penned this about 3 years ago, when I was first getting into the whole structuralist/poststructuralist schtick. I was indeed drunk, and it appears in the first novel I wrote, rather shamelessly about a novelist. You can’t go back, and maybe that’s the point.
I am inarticulate,
Because I am drunk.
I cannot even remember the way home.
I am not even sure if I have a home.
If I do I am not sure this key will fit the lock because I am so drunk.
I am staggering aimlessly, swearing and mumbling at passers-by.
There is no inherent connection between my mumbles and what I mean.
My testimony tomorrow will be that I drank 13 pints but it was probably 8.
My surroundings do not seem real yet I cannot overcome them.
If I were a therapist I would say this was phallogocentrism.
But I am not.
So I won’t.
Now this is clever prose, siatd, each line is succint, apparent and unpretenious, this poem has several layers of meaning, a lovely little trifle…
1 - a clear prose explanation of an expereince of being drunk and drunkness!
2 - a critique of language (the limitations)
Specifically, the search for central-meaning ((phallo-centric meaning)) in language…being akin to - a drunkard trying to make sense, or, looking for a key in the dark
3 - this prose-poem is a short explanation of post-structural theory
itself
p.s.
i am beginning to see much more clearly the symbolic-importance of the “deformed male genitalia” in some of your writing! The "aftermath of Western Logocentrism and the impotence of the imaginative psyche to overcome deconstruction. (God, am I making sense?)
I actually think it is fatuous tosh, but I liked it when I wrote it
You are indeed making sense. Many people would identify the frequent references in my work with a sort of loss of masculinity or sexual prowess or existential power (like in that story by Hemingway) but I’m using it as a very different kind of metaphor.
‘logocentrism’ means, roughly, western metaphysics, so there is no ‘western logocentrism’. I’m more referring to phallogocentrism, the metaphysics of the phallus, than to logocentrism itself. It’s the deconstruction of a particular metaphysics, not of metaphysics itself, that concerns me in my novels and short stories.
Glad you enjoyed the poem. It’s not as good as the one about the penultimate day of hell, but I’ve lost that one.
Whenever I read anything I write I think ‘I could have done better’ but who can be arsed to rewrite a whole novel?
Work on the latest novel is taking some dark turns, really forcing my to write about stuff I know I should write about but I avoid like the plague. It’s so easy to avoid confronting the things you should confront by hiding behind intelligent irony. I’ve got bored, and I’m looking to write the literary equivalent of a Chris Morris show, so I’ve got to really try, no matter how uncomfortable it might be.
