Adjective Narcissism

By J.W. Carey

Within Adjective Narcissism, Carey pushes the boundaries of typically held beliefs, abusing the nature of his broken protagonist to question himself, the obligatory narcissim his profession demands and the world around him. A complex portrayal of life through a young man's eyes, Carey rejects the literary advice given to him in favour of exposing his own individuality; an individuality he laments as a falsehood.

An author's exercise in self-obsession matching self-loathing, a single night of a young man's life turns into a blatant exposition of a damaged character, rejoicing in the damage and loathing that same joy.

'Where Carey excels is in his ability to deliver such a novel without overdoing anything.
The book is simple, eloquent, and memorable.' - onlinebookclub.org

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.W. Carey
• Release date: Nov 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310157455

J.W. Carey

I've lived in the North-West of England my entire life, and in 23 years I haven't managed to achieve a single thing. I write these things because it lets me feel like I've achieved something, and it lets me tell myself that I am something beyond that which I am in my daily life.

Book preview

Adjective Narcissism

John Carey

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 John Carey

Cover by John Carey

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Adjective Narcissism

A Broken Polemic

By John Carey

Contents:

Adjective Narcissism

- Me

- T.S. Elliot

- Bob Dylan

- Frank Turner

- Plato

- Leo Tolstoy

- F. Scott. Fitzgerald

- Alan Wilson Watts

- Robert Frost

Honesty

Contact

Adjective Narcissism

A Broken Polemic

By John Carey

Though I would desire to deny it, that I may be able to maintain any sense of humility, however false said humility may be, there is something undeniably satisfying in seeing those eight words finally positioned above this parody of prose. To know that I have struggled and, despite the fact that I have done so in adversity of nothing, have created something. I, me, have drawn something from some quasi-intellectual dimension, something towards which I cannot explain my compulsion, something which I cannot justify before my peers or my superiors, (for surely there are no inferiors to a creature such as I?), but can grasp at the trailing skirts of Understanding as she passes me by in smokeless bars occupied by hazy lights and wiser characters than I.

I can pretend to an intellect that I know I lack and, though I refuse the act in of itself, the very acknowledgement that such an option exists should, if you carry a similar stain of sensitivity as I am not ashamed to admit I possess, offer you some internal view into the text you are about to suffer through and then abandon to the empty corners of your memory; its temporary position on some ignoble coffee table, long-forgotten, or some street corner occupied by second-hand cigarettes and the occasional temptation of copper, before it ends.

But examples of literature, such as they are, which can be said to bear that execrable adjective of ‘Experimental’ carry with them a certain stylised stimulation, a noxious scent which can be said to possess more than a hint of failure’s own particular brand of cheap eau de toilette.

Though I am not yet confident that this fragmented piece of prose possesses either the authority or the self-awareness to slot itself neatly amongst such other examples, in that virtually unattended festival of interesting folly, one headlined by such crowd-pleasing acts as Shields and Danielewski, I would position a warning here and now, penned directly for your benefit and not for mine.

This is not a ‘work’, ignorant of all those negative connotations which that vile word carries with it, which needs to be read. Offering little more than myself and my optimistic mediocrity an excuse for our intertwined existence, I would state now, in what meagre sense of honesty which remains within this shell of imagined authority, that this is something which needs to be written, not necessarily for, but rather by, myself.

This ostensibly linked series of typographical errors; each one refusing to be tied to a solitary failure, but, instead, a collective mistake of such lofty proportions that neither these lexical decisions, nor the lack of any encompassing theme, possess any redeeming features. It cannot be said to offer you innovative narrative discourse, it cannot claim to offer you dramatised monologue. Across these severely limited pages you will find no evidence of a literary upbringing, no clever imagery referential to a modern life and few shared experiences, ones designed to make you feel as though you are not alone, ones tasked with interjecting my personality into your solitude.

Within my words, or these words which once I possessed the audacity to call my own, you will not find wit, nor love of life or death or the grey existence caught in between the two, and nor will you find a purpose, an answer, or any fragmentation which could, through the wasteful use of a monarch’s legions and the produce of dead horses, be metamorphosed into either. This is a text bare of emotion and fact, one empty of meaning and absent in it desire.

This is objective narcissism described in uncomfortably fitting, and deliberately ill-fitting, adjectives, given physicality solely for the purpose of the unnamed figure, for that Authorial characterisation, for that Worthless God hidden amongst the obvious truths, and yet, hidden all the same.

‘It is easy to ‘appear’ intelligent when involved in the creation of any text, of any work, no matter the form it may decide to take. All you need to do is ask yourself ‘why’, ‘why’ you have involved yourself in such a thing. You take the absent question mark and, in your self-proclaimed genius, you hang it above yourself, like an empty noose awaiting a heretic.’

Me

Firstly, before what little impact the following text, this randomly-extracted honest account of self-abasement and composed, for the most part, of the theft of words penned by better personifications than I, can be allowed to launch its attack on those few senses of yours that you actually care to spare for it, as though it were a pauper slouching in the shadow of a doorway, I would pose to you a series of questions. I know you didn’t come to me, if you actually believe that is what you are doing, to be judged and in a wholly physical reality I would have no right to do so.

But in this world, I am the author. You are a visitor into this, the subconscious of a man I have locked away, chained to a prose absent of narrative, in a maelstrom of deceit, alcohol, music and the cages of those humanitarian deities I have worshipped since I hid a refusal to utter the words of a Lord’s Prayer behind the laughter of my peers.

Am I really the voice of the author, or the character dreaming of a man he could be, or some omnipotent narrator, one possessing a voyeur’s perversion taken to the very limit of its ability? Is this, am I, the logical conclusion of an obsessive society? By what mythical authority do I, a man of such complex simplicity and simplified complexity that I cannot even begin to make sense of myself, possess the right to tell you any narrative, whether it is my own or not? Why would you let someone with just such a sickness of the mind as mine into your own consciousness, if only for these next few pages, tortured beyond all recognition?

Why are you reading this, this non-sensical series of queries, when you could be doing so much more? You could write as simplistically as I am wont to do, at the pace of a spavined snail and understandable even by the child. You could create a narrative with meaning, one containing purpose, something to set the world alight or to quench the collective thirst of a generation a hundred years hence. You could sit