The sense of absence, of an abyss of a kind within a human being, has always

been a good starting engine for creating art of any kind, whether that art comes in visual,
musical or literary form. However, it is in the period of poststructuralism that this feeling
establishes itself in its most prominent form. In this essay the latter subject will be ripped
out of and foregrounded from the poem by American writer and poet Charles ukowski.
ut before getting into a more detailed discussion on this problem, the term
poststrucuturalism should be firstly be defined. As opposed to structuralism, which
advocated the idea that human life may be understood through signs as symbols !one of
them being language", poststructuralism could be understood as sign# system as
incomplete, unfinished, unknowable. $atter movement is closely connected with
postmodernism, which tries to, as %ean &rancois $yotard said it' () present the fact
that unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived
and which can neither be seen nor made visible.
All of these previously mentioned notions are manifested in poem Beast by
Charles ukowski. The beast in the poem is a metaphor for something which cannot be
e(pressed via words or phrases, the beast is strongly present throughout the entire poem,
but still remains incomprehensible. In the poem even ukowski himself says' esus!
how will " ever explain #ou to them$ %ust this single line shows the indefiniteness of the
subject in the poem.
%&'# beast comes in the afternoon
while other people are taking pictures
while other people are at picnics
m# beast comes in the afternoon
across a dirt# kitchen floor
leering at me&&
Here, we see Bukowski describing everyday situations (people being at
picnics, people taking pictures of themselves, him being in the kitchen), but what is
so peculiar about it is that he puts them in a sort of unfamiliar, strange context
which creates a feeling of anxiety, feeling of him being in a dark place (dirty kitchen
floor), an abyss, and he continues to defamiliarize them, in a way, as the poem goes
on. If this is being looked at from acan!s theory of the levels via which people
connect and understand the world, these ordinary people are people who are
interacting with the world through the symbolic level (through norms accepted by
the society), unlike Bukowski who seems to be stuck in real phase, a dark place
which we try to avoid by all means.
%()while other people are employed at jobs
that stop their thinking
my beast allow me to think
about him
about graveyards and dementia and fear
and stale flowers and decay
and the stink of ruined thunder
ut what is more interesting this beast doesn!t have to take shape of a hole, of
losing something but forgetting what it was or missing someone you never met, this
beast has all kinds of various forms, forms which depend on the individual himself.
In ". Barnes! Flauberts Parrot, #laubert!s beast comes in a form of boredom$
(eep within me there is a radical! intimate! bitter and incessant boredom which
prevents me from en)o#ing an#thing and which smothers m# soul.
This boredom makes him paraly)ed, unable to do anything but to relish in it, just
like ukowski!s beast prevents him even from being able to breath, to keep his head
up.
%()my beast will not let me be
he comes to me in the afternoons
and gnaws and claws
hands gripping my gut
*irginia +olf in To the lighthouse described, intentionally or not, the beast of
%rs &amsay .'hat beast has a shape of the people who surround her, not only in the
shape of her husband but, what is more important, in the form of herself, and she
only manages to escape it when she completely loses herself, when she distances
herself from her own everyday life.
%*or now she need not think about an#bod#. +he could be herself! b# herself. ,nd that
was what now she often felt the need of - to think. well! not even to think. To be silent.
to be alone ()/osing personalit#! one lost the fret! the hurr#! the stir. and there rose to
her lips alwa#s some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this
peace! this rest! this eternit#()&
ut, she is afraid of letting herself go to that feeling so she runs away again,
almost feeling ashamed for allowing herself to even think in such way,&& But instantl#
she was anno#ed with herself for sa#ing that. 0ho had said it$ 1ot she. she had been
trapped into sa#ing something she did not mean.&&ut almost everyone is doing the same,
as ukowski described it in the poem'
%&()the# think " am a coward
but the# are the cowards because the# refuse to
feel! their braver# is the braver# of snails&&
ut if you think about it, who can blame them( )on!t we all want to run
away from the things which we fear the most( )on!t we all, as %orton says in
cology without !ature, wish to see a beautiful lake and a deer while avoiding the
sight an airplane which passes above them( )on!t we all try to smooth out all of the
inconsistencies, all of the smudges which don!t fit into our picture of life so that we
could, stimulate our own reality, get a copy of what isn!t real(
% ()my beast is not interested in my unhappy
theory " he rips# chews# spits out
another piece of
me
Here, even ukowski tries to develop some sort of theory of life, which
will help him in his battle with it, but the problem is that this thinking, this theori)ing has
led him into being able to think only of it(him), and which allowed the beast to *feed!
on him even more. +is theory of life thus became the theory of the beast. +is life is
now the life of the beast itself.
%() " walk out the door and he follows me
down the street$
we pass the lovely laughing schoolgirls
the bakery trucks
and the sun opens and closes like an oyster
swallowing my beast for a moment
as % cross at a green light
pretending that % have escaped#
pretending that % need a loaf of bread or
a newspaper#
pretending that the beast is gone forever
and that the torn parts of me are
still there
under a blue shirt and green pants
as all the faces become walls
and all the walls become impossible$
In the last verse we see a rather tormenting struggle, as if we are
watching a fish being pulled out of the water. ukowski is trying to escape from the beast
and in these few short moments in which he manages to do so, to feel as an average
human being outside this dark place of his created in his head, he still is not living.
+e is like that fish. Because during that few minutes he is living a sort of half life, or
to be more specific he is pretending to live it. +e is now an actor, or even a viewer
watching a film called life being played on a big cinematic screen. ,nd no matter
how real the scenery might seem, it will never be real to him. 'he void within him
will never allow him to grasp it, to feel it, to make it his own. ,nd since this reason
of him being such miserable is nowhere to be found in the poem, one can either see a
it as a bunch of unrelated words, an illegible pile of sentences and phrases written
by a crazy person, or can truly find himself in the lines written. -ven .vid knew
that there is no such thing a pure pleasure/ some anxiety always goes with it.
0hatever the case is, perhaps the best conclusion is given in -. Catton.s The
$uminaires'
%&"f " have learned one thing from m# experience it is this2 never
underestimate how extraordinaril# difficult it is to understand a situation from another3s
person point of view.&& !/evlin Cowell"