Abstract

The Festive Wound is a pair of thematically related short novellas. Their theoretical underpinning is concerned with the interstices, or liminal moments, where polarities dissolve in inversions and admixtures of pat understandings. The Festive Wound can be construed as the paradoxical product of its twin constituent parts, contradictory as they are complementary, alike as they are dissimilar. The novellas discuss the psychic trauma we experience in our contemporary urban lives and the problem of healing the resulting wounds. Emotional dependency is figured as resulting from our confusing the physical, intellectual and psychical properties of our lives. These considerations are both exaggerated and undercut by a narrator whose experiences are as picaresque as his meditations would be profound. Alternating levels of diction, double-entendres, false endings, dreams and hallucination are all employed to heighten the subjective character of the narrator's experience