Abstract

Feast is a story about consumption in the new world - primarily from the perspective of a second-generation Canadian for whom the new world means the exciting, and sometimes debaucherous, world of early adulthood, but also from the perspective of his father for whom it means the new country. This project is the culmination of three years of work. Feast began as a novel, turned into a series of short-stories, a long poem, a book of short-poems, a play, and finally into a combination of these things. The work is meant to be both formally and tonally vibrant. Though the different voices are mediated and arranged by a single narrator, there is no clearly discernible authorial presence and, as a result, no easy judgment of the characters and events in the story. Jake's sensual lifestyle is both overindulgent and a source of exuberance and poetic energy; Stanislav's ascetic choices are both desperate and the source of genuine self-recovery. In their various affirmations and denials, the characters in Feast all seek intimacy and happiness while acting within (or against) a culture built on the promise of consumable bliss. This cultural promise is, like everything else in the work, an object of critique, humour, and celebration.