Seán McCorry, John Miller - Literature and Meat
Seán McCorry, John Miller - Literature and Meat
Seán McCorry, John Miller - Literature and Meat
Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing an
‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human
exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences that haunt
the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary stud-
ies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-disciplinary ques-
tions. How might we rethink and problematise the separation of the human
from other animals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our relation-
ships with other species? How might we locate and understand the agency of
animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of
as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may
have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a
wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and
to animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of
animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read
as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human
concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary
animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with the material
lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to
or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic
engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate nat-
ural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary
texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the disci-
pline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses
on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of
the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to
fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera)
with which English studies now engages.
Series Board
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
Literature and Meat
Since 1900
Editors
Seán McCorry John Miller
University of Sheffield School of English
Sheffield, UK University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
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on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
v
vi CONTENTS
Index 249
Notes on Contributors
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xi
CHAPTER 1
outside of the West and in earlier periods, but that work has not been
attempted here. The history of meat cultures leads us towards a survey of
some of the ethical and representational questions that emerge from tak-
ing meat seriously as both an index of socio-cultural change and a scene of
violence. In turn, this survey allows us to articulate the ways in which the
volume aims to contribute to work in animal studies and the more recent
and more sharply delineated field of vegan studies.
The history of meat production from 1900 to the present closely maps
on to broader processes of modernisation, with technological develop-
ments stimulating a twofold process of intensification: first of all an inten-
sification of speed, as farmers and slaughterhouse workers reared, killed,
and processed animals for the market at an ever-increasing pace; and sec-
ondly an astonishing scaling up of animal agribusiness, with more and more
corpses produced each year to satisfy the modern consumer market’s grow-
ing appetite for animal flesh. Already by 1900, the productive forces that
had been set in motion by the industrialisation of animal slaughter had
achieved such levels of efficiency and velocity as to become valued as aes-
thetic spectacles, as Dominic A. Pacyga points out:
At the turn of the twentieth century, a reported five hundred thousand people
visited [Chicago’s] Union Stock Yard annually. To modern sensibilities, to
take a tour of the stockyard and the packing plants—even to bring small chil-
dren to the hog kill—might seem repulsive, but through most of its history
the Union Stockyard and the adjacent plants were major tourist attractions.
Fascination with the new drew these visitors.6
This “fascination with the new” perfectly captures the surprising connec-
tions between the animal body and modernity. It is not that the meat indus-
try passively reflected modernity’s general impetus towards intensification
and acceleration; it is rather the case that the techniques that would allow
modern industrial production to increase its output were in fact devised
in the slaughter business. Carol J. Adams is one of many writers who have
noted the Chicago stockyard’s signal role in inspiring new methods of
industrial production, principally through its influence on Henry Ford,
who borrowed the stockyard’s strategies of spatial and temporal organisa-
tion for his own automobile factories: “Although Ford reversed the out-
come of the process of slaughtering in that a product is created rather than
fragmented on the assembly line, he contributed at the same time to the
4 S. MCCORRY AND J. MILLER
For Carson and others, the meat industry is a key indicator of the moral
health of modernity, which simultaneously encapsulates the progressive
dream of technological development and consumer abundance on the one
hand, and a kind of pagan reversion to gratuitous violence on the other.
Authors like Carson, Huxley, and Harrison create a framework for crit-
icising the perverse modernity of meat culture that would later in the cen-
tury be appropriated by more radical vegetarian and vegan critics of animal
agriculture. The novelist J. M. Coetzee bears the traces of this tradition
when he writes of his experiences as a vegetarian in Texas: “Trying to live
a life on Gandhian-Shavian lines [i.e. abstemious, non-violent, vegetarian]
in the United States today” is impossibly dated, since “it is a way of life
without a future”, wholly obsolete in “an economy based on the personal
automobile and on getting people to consume more each year than the year
before”.17 Several essays in this collection engage with the diverse tempo-
ral imaginaries of meat culture. Coetzee extrapolates from the twentieth-
century American experience in imagining that meat production will con-
tinue to expand as consumer affluence grows, the “chicken in every pot” of
the 1920s becoming the monstrous over-abundance of animal flesh of the
present and future. But this is not the only possible future for meat culture.
As Seán McCorry shows in his chapter on Soylent Green, environmentally-
attuned writers of speculative fiction worried that short-term abundance
could turn to longer-term scarcity, with the disappearance of “meat ani-
mals” a key indicator of ecological health. And John Miller’s chapter on
in vitro meat shows how mid-century science fiction was already anticipat-
ing twenty-first-century debates on the aesthetics and political economy of
artificial meat.
This is not to suggest that Coetzee is unreasonable in imagining our cur-
rent regime of intensive meat production as basically secure for the foresee-
able future. It is perfectly possible to imagine meat production continuing
despite any future scarcity crises; meat holds such a prominent place in the
imaginaries of patriarchy, individualism, and class power that it seems likely
to survive even at the cost of accelerated environmental decline. Indeed, it is
already surviving at the cost of accelerated environmental decline. Whether
or not “artificial meat” is accepted on the consumer market, it is probable
that animal flesh will continue to be sold as a pricy marker of authenticity
and luxury consumption. Despite the growth of ethical veganism in the
first decades of this century, the general tendency of meat production is
towards continued expansion. According to the FAO’s statistics, between
1 INTRODUCTION: MEAT CRITIQUE 7
1961 and 2016 the number of pigs slaughtered globally nearly quadru-
pled, from 376,366,821 pigs to 1,478,167,073. Over the same period, the
number of chickens slaughtered increased tenfold, from 6,577,869,000 in
1961 to an astonishing 65,847,411,000 killed in 2016.18 The scale of all
this killing is such that scientists expect that the waste generated (namely
the bones of the slaughtered chickens) will leave a defining signature in
the geological record of modernity, noting that “broiler chickens vividly
symbolize the transformation of the biosphere to fit evolving human con-
sumption patterns, and show clear potential to be a biostratigraphic marker
species of the Anthropocene”.19 Given the current vogue for renaming our
geological era (from Anthropocene to Capitolocene to Anthrobscene and
beyond), it is tempting to offer the Carnocene as another alternative: ours
is the epoch when the planet was profoundly and irrevocably damaged in
order to accommodate an appetite for the flesh of other creatures.
The immense scale of the violence attributable to our current meat cul-
ture creates substantial representational problems for novelists and other
creative artists who attempt to engage with the lives and deaths of so-called
“meat animals”. It is difficult to know how to even begin to represent 65
billion deaths within literary discourse, and this representational problem
seems in many ways to follow from the conventions of literary representa-
tion itself. Amitav Ghosh has recently shown how the novel form struggles
to respond adequately to climate change, arguing that the (bourgeois real-
ist) novel’s preoccupation with the regularities of experience, its commit-
ment to individualism, and its pervasive anthropocentrism all contribute
to a representational blind spot made apparent by its inability to repre-
sent encounters that are driven by extreme climate phenomena: “in these
encounters”, he writes, “we recognize something we had turned away from:
that is to say, the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors”.20
Similarly, the economic and institutional contours of meat culture resist
(at least in part) any attempts to capture them within literary form. The
association of the novel with individualism, and the centring of most novels
on the experience one or several individuated subjects (who moreover are
nearly always figured as human subjects, at least in so-called serious fiction),
creates significant difficulties with regard to the problem of scale. Since
literary discourse has so far been preoccupied with representing individual
experience, novelists lack the formal resources that would equip them to
represent the lives and deaths of the 65 billion broiler chickens who are
killed for meat each year.
8 S. MCCORRY AND J. MILLER
the ethical point of departure for more critical approaches.30 Wright draws
connections between meat culture and national security, tracing the ways
in which the post-9/11 security panic drew a clear line between (carnist,
and especially pork-eating) American cultural norms on the one hand, and
“foreign”, dissident, or otherwise suspicious dietary norms on the other.
This perhaps surprising linkage supports a contention made by Emelia
Quinn and Benjamin Westwood in their collection Thinking Veganism in
Literature and Culture: Vegan Theory, as they call it, might be conceived
as an exercise in “discovering what vegan ways of being in the world might
do to our practices of reading”.31 Although our collection is not conceived
directly as an example of an emergent vegan studies, several essays in the
collection engage with veganism and/or vegetarianism (most extensively
Tom Tyler’s chapter). More exactly, the kind of meat critiques the volume
foregrounds comprises a similarly far-reaching endeavour to vegan studies
and a form of critical practice that will, we hope, necessarily inform dissident
perspectives on meat culture.
The volume begins with Vicki Tromanhauser’s exploration of the testi-
mony of women serving as non-combatants (principally as nurses or ambu-
lance drivers) in the First World War. These women witnessed extraordi-
nary, harrowing scenes of the human body’s dissolution in the face of the
war’s industrial-scale slaughter; strikingly, they often described their expe-
rience in ways that foreground what Tromanhauser describes as the human
body’s ultimate “meatness”. For Vera Brittain writing in her 1933 memoir
Testament of Youth, wounded bodies gave the hospital in Camberwell a
“butcher’s-shop appearance”. More specifically, Mary Borden in The For-
bidden Zone (1929) sees a soldier’s extracted knee as a “ragoût of mouton”,
while Irene Rathbone’s 1932 novel We That Were Young identifies a swollen
arm as a “nightmare German sausage”. Tromanhauser draws on the work
of Georges Bataille, Julia Kristeva and Mel Y. Chen to examine how the
wounded human body’s formlessness produces a state of ontological con-
fusion in which distinctions between the human and non-human become
difficult to cling on to.
Chapter 2 sees Ted Geier turn to the work of Franz Kafka and to the
inescapable politics of the killing machines through which his characters
are rendered as “meat objects”. Kafka’s work is consistently drawn to pun-
ishment—most famously in “The Penal Colony” (1914) and The Trial
(1925)—and the elaborate attention to the mechanisms of slaughter sug-
gest comparisons to Sinclair’s great novel of the Chicago meatworks The
Jungle (1910). As animals are processed into meat in Sinclair’s visceral
1 INTRODUCTION: MEAT CRITIQUE 11
Chapter 7 takes the collection away from land as Dominic O’Key con-
siders W. G. Sebald’s depiction of herring fisheries and fish-eating in Rings
of Saturn (1995). To date Sebald has received little attention from animal
studies scholars with the dominant critical focus concerning the human-
ism of Sebald’s project in the face of the holocaust. Rings of Saturn does,
however, engage at some length with the North Sea fishing industry. Draw-
ing on Adorno’s formulation of “Natural-History”, O’Key explores how
Sebald presents nature and history as interlinked in two key scenes: the
comic description of the consumption of a particularly bleak plate of fish
and chips in Lowestoft and a historical narrative of herring fishery in which
he is sharply critical of its ecological harms. Ultimately, for O’Key, Sebald
can be seen as a figure who is significantly resistant to fish eating.
In Chapter 8, Rachael Allen turns her attention to some affinities
between the position of women and the position of “meat animals” in
contemporary poetry. Drawing on the work of Carol J. Adams and Nicole
Shukin, Allen provides a close reading of the poetry of Ariana Reines and
Selima Hill that explores the imaginative connections between women and
cows. The ambivalent relationship between matter and sign is revealed to be
a site of instability, with symbolic figurations impacting on our understand-
ing of the body of the animal/woman, and vice versa: “Both Reines and
Hill, through their varying poetics, ensure that the material consequences
of an animal-made-symbol are foregrounded, for the figure of both the
animal and the woman”. Writing against attempts to posit the body as a
symbolic and material resource for the use of others, Allen’s poets seek to
liberate the flesh from instrumentalisation and exploitation.
A crucial and under-examined aspect of contemporary meat culture is
the way in which it exemplifies and reproduces the dominant role of the
United States in world affairs, translating the “hard” violence of the animal
agricultural system into the “soft” power of American cultural hegemony.
In Chapter 9, Sarika Chandra explores the relationship between meat and
the prestige of American culture in the global capitalist marketplace. Chan-
dra focuses on Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998), a novel which follows
Japanese-American filmmaker Jane Takagi-Little as she directs My Amer-
ican Wife, a documentary and cooking show foregrounding a carefully
curated image of (white, heterosexual) American domesticity. The purpose
of My American Wife is to generate a market for American beef products
in Japan. Chandra’s chapter explores how meat figures in this intercul-
tural encounter, following Jane as she constructs the artifice that defines
the image of American meat culture on the global market, through her
14 S. MCCORRY AND J. MILLER
repudiation of meat culture and her eventual turn towards making exposé
films that take aim at the exploitative practices of large-scale agribusiness.
The chapter concludes with some important insights into the limits of the
exposé form as a mode of meat critique.
In Chapter 10, Sarah Bezan turns her attention to the materiality of
meat through a reading of British novelist Jim Crace’s The Devil’s Larder
(2001). Working along lines of thought established by the New Materialist
theorists of recent years, Bezan’s reading of the novel shows how food is
no passive matter, but instead possesses its own agency and wilfulness, a
fact reflected in Crace’s fabulist narrative by the magical effects that food
induces in the eater. With the key concept of “alimentary materialism”,
Bezan refuses to position humans as solitary actors and foods as simple sur-
faces upon which they act, a move which the novel imagines as a weakening
of the human’s (imagined) potency and uniqueness: “Crace deconstructs
the literary field of food, which has often historically privileged the human
as a superior entity in tasting others, rather than in being tasted”. The Devil’s
Larder contests the boundary work that partitions the edible world into
human/animal/vegetable, licit and taboo foods, such that these taxonomic
categories lose their coherence, with instructive effects.
Chapter 11 sees Ruth Lipschitz confront the politics of death across
species lines, reading the performance Dance With Nothing But Heart
(2001) in the light of Jacques Derrida’s zoontology. This performance—a
collaboration between South African artist Steven Cohen and his partner,
the dancer Elu—prominently features an ox’s heart, which is at once a prop
for Elu to dance with and a corporeal reminder of animal life and death.
Lipschitz’s chapter dwells on the question of mourning as it is variously
posed for humans and for animals, ultimately discovering in Cohen and
Elu’s performance a complex interaction of sex, gender, and species that
troubles any attempt to draw a clear, insuperable line between human and
animal, loosening the hold of species taxonomies over the ethical work of
mourning the other.
If it is not too early to speak of an emerging canon of meat texts, Michel
Faber’s Under the Skin (2000) would certainly figure prominently in any
such selection. In Chapter 12, Matthew Calarco builds on his previously
published typologies of animal-activist strategies to produce a new read-
ing of Faber’s novel. The novel imagines an ironic inversion of human
supremacy, with an alien race (who are named “human” in the text) arriv-
ing on earth to farm human (or “vodsel”) males for their flesh, which is
1 INTRODUCTION: MEAT CRITIQUE 15
Notes
1. UNFAO, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” 267.
2. Cowspiracy.com, “The Facts”.
3. Potts, Meat Culture.
4. Joy, Why We Love Dogs, 29.
5. Fiddes, Meat, 3.
6. Pacyga, Slaughterhouse, 1–2.
7. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, 80.
8. Armstrong, What Animals Mean, 138.
9. Bacon, in Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, 46.
10. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 9.
11. Heidegger, in de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political, 153.
12. Huxley, Brave New Victuals, 56.
13. Huxley, Brave New Victuals, 61.
14. Huxley, Brave New Victuals, 60–61.
15. Parry, “Oryx and Crake,” 242.
16. Carson, in Harrison, Animal Machines, vii.
17. Coetzee, “Meat Country,” 43.
16 S. MCCORRY AND J. MILLER
Works Cited
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory.
New York: Continuum, 2010.
Andersen, Kip, and Keegan Kuhn, dirs. Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret. 2014.
Appian Way Productions.
Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2008.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity, 1989.
Bennett, Carys E., Richard Thomas, Mark Williams, Jan Zalasiewicz, Matt Edge-
worth, Holly Miller, Ben Coles, Alison Foster, Emily J. Burton, and Upenyu
Marume. “The Broiler Chicken as a Signal of a Human Reconfigured Bio-
sphere.” Royal Society Open Science 5, no. 12 (2018). https://doi.org/10.
1098/rsos.180325. Accessed 10 May 2019.
Coetzee, J. M. “Meat Country.” Granta 52 (1995): 41–52.
Cowspiracy.com. “The Facts.” http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts. Accessed 5 May
2019.
De Beistegui, Miguel. Heidegger and the Political. Abingdon: Routledge, 1998.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet.
Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Faunalytics, “Global Animal Slaughter Statistics and Charts.” https://faunalytics.
org/global-animal-slaughter-statistics-and-charts/. Accessed 10 May 2019.
Fiddes, Nick. Meat: A Natural Symbol. London: Routledge, 1991.
Fudge, Erica. Animal. London: Reaktion, 2002.
———. “Why It’s Easy Being a Vegetarian.” Textual Practice 24, no. 1 (2010):
149–166.
1 INTRODUCTION: MEAT CRITIQUE 17
Geier, Ted. Meat Markets: A Cultural History of Bloody London. Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 2017.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Harrison, Ruth. Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry. London:
Vincent Stuart, 1964.
Huxley, Elspeth. Brave New Victuals: An Inquiry Into Modern Food Production.
London: Panther, 1967.
Joy, Melanie. Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows: An Introduction to
Carnism. San Francisco: Conari Press, 2010.
Masson, Jeffrey. The Secret World of Farm Animals. London: Vintage, 2019.
McHugh, Susan. Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines. Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Pacyga, Dominic A. Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It
Made. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Parry, Jovian. “Oryx and Crake and the New Nostalgia for Meat.” Society and
Animals 17, no. 3 (2009): 241–256.
Potts, Annie, ed. Meat Culture. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Quinn, Emelia, and Benjamin Westwood. “Introduction: Thinking Through Veg-
anism.” In Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan The-
ory, edited by Emilia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood, 1–24. London: Palgrave,
2018.
Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985.
Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Sylvester, David. The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1987.
United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. “Livestock’s Long Shadow:
Environmental Issues and Options.” http://www.fao.org/3/a0701e/a0701e.
pdf. Accessed 5 May 2019.
Wright, Laura. The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of
Terror. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015.
CHAPTER 2
Vicki Tromanhauser
V. Tromanhauser (B)
State University of New York, New Paltz, NY, USA
heaped upon the floor of the lorry or surgical theatre).1 Women’s writing
of the Great War presents us graphically and unsparingly with what I will
call the matter of our own meatness, of fleshy substance that will not yield
to spiritual transcendence or aesthetic transformation. Running through
their graphic accounts of life behind the lines is a figurative insistence upon
the status of the wounded body as meat. What calls for special attention
in these texts are the places where the emphatically inedible human body
proves unable to ward off its own potential edibility.
Such fleshy entanglements are disturbingly realized in the case histo-
ries of the British physician and psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers. Rivers served
for the duration of the war in the military hospital Craiglockhart in Scot-
land, where he was tasked with treating officers suffering from shell shock in
order to return them to active duty. In Instinct and the Unconscious (1920)
he describes the case of a young officer who lands in a shell explosion face
first upon the rotting abdomen of a German corpse, filling his mouth with
“the decomposed entrails of an enemy” and producing “the most horrible
sensations of taste and smell”.2 This young officer he deemed “so wholly
free from any redeeming feature” as to render the man irrecoverable for
the war effort. This gastronomical trauma ruptures all boundaries between
body and flesh, edible and inedible, and thus disrupts digestion on multi-
ple levels: inducing the retching horror of his surfacing memories that pre-
vent him from eating or psychologically working through the violence of
combat, and depriving the Army of additional cannon fodder in the form
of another fighting unit to send up the line. Left to guzzle the enemy’s
entrails, Rivers’ patient’s war neurosis makes a pulp of national differences
and territorial designs. What emerges, instead, is a different kind of blood
or flesh bond between soldiers at war, a carnal intimacy that crosses enemy
lines and registers in the troubling likeness of bodily interiors our own raw
animal matter.
The intensely detailed depictions of wounds featured in the narratives of
nurses generate a particular mode of traumatic testimony, one that resists
sentimentalizing its brutal subject and, according to Laurie Kaplan, even
“consciously de-feminize[s] language, form, and content” through its “im-
pressionistic realism”.3 Since, as Santanu Das argues, “[t]he ordeal of the
nurses was usually one of witnessing and helplessness rather than of sur-
vival or of any direct ‘threat to life’”, their memories appear less marked by
the repressive operations of silence and occlusion that characterize those of
combatants.4 London medical headquarters in the First World War tended
to recruit upper- and middle-class, educated women for ambulance work
2 INSIDE THE “BUTCHER’S SHOP”: WOMEN’S GREAT … 21
and V. A. D. nursing because a prevailing class ethos to “stick it” and suffer
in silence proved advantageous to the war effort, yet a staple feature of their
postwar memoirs and narratives is the candid and painfully vivid disclosure
of the physical hardships and material challenges they faced. Braided into
this narrative of women’s visceral contact with the mutilated male body
is their own physical deterioration under conditions of extreme depriva-
tion, including the challenges of protein scarcity met by new forms of meat
from unrationed offal to the beef extract Bovril, with which the ambulance
drivers sustain themselves in Evadne Price’s Not So Quiet …Stepdaughters
of War (1930), published under the pseudonym Helen Zenna Smith. An
Australian-British journalist who had worked as a munitioneer in England
but never served at the Front, Price was commissioned by a publisher to
produce a female response to Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the
Western Front (1929) which she based upon the war diaries of Winifred
Constance Young, an ambulance driver in France. One of Price’s heroines,
Georgina Toshington, nicknamed Tosh, is the niece of an earl and daugh-
ter of a sportsman who boasts the stomach of a horse and “the vocabulary
of a Smithfield butcher”, both of which prepare her for the horrors of the
convoys of wounded she faces as an ambulance driver in France and allow
her to anticipate that “in another month or so she should be able to eat
what the [canteen] food resembles without turning a hair”.5
The pressures of food scarcity and rationing introduced new and unrec-
ognizable meats to the wartime palate. This culinary ingenuity formed a
response to the Eat Less Meat campaign, which was devised paradoxically
to starve the enemy into submission by reigning in English carnivory, since
an estimated £500,000 spent daily by civilians on animal protein threat-
ened limited national stores.6 The course of the war’s end largely bears out
the argument of the food campaign. While the English disciplined their
consumption and conserved their stores, the growing food crisis within
Germany, despite its army’s territorial advances, helped to bring about the
negotiated Armistice. Diminished food supplies resulting from the Allied
naval blockade and the failure of the German government from the war’s
onset adequately to manage and distribute existing food stores among its
military forces and civilian workers contributed to Germany’s capitulation
to the Allies in November 1918.7 Patriotic appeals to noncombatants for
dietary restraint contrast with the carnal plenitude of the battlefield, where
soldiers lived on intimate terms with the prospect of being buried in a
mess-tin, as one soldier recalls of his mate in We That Were Young (1932),
an autobiographical novel by the British nurse and pacifist Irene Rathbone
22 V. TROMANHAUSER
that spans the war and post-war years from 1915–1928.8 As the epigraph
to Dorothy (Mrs. C. S.) Peel’s The-Eat-Less-Meat Book (1918) pithily puts
it, “Of our men we ask their lives, their limbs—/of ourselves a little less
food”.9 By the rather grim calculus of its proportional logic, eating less meat
might save the limbs and lives of Tommies, while indulging in it raises the
spectre of cannibalism by augmenting the casualties on the battlefield.
Peel’s cookbook introduces various strategies for reducing England’s
heavy reliance upon meat and challenges widespread popular distress about
the inadequacy of a meat-rationed diet, the upper and middle classes largely
unaware that women and children in working-class families routinely sur-
vived on a diet of meat no more than once or twice a week in order to
conserve the precious protein for the primary male wage-earner. With-
out proposing strict vegetarianism, the volume offers various mock-meat
options like the “Lentil Roast”, a mix of red lentils, potatoes, bread crumbs,
onions and spices, which the recipe directs the cook rather desperately
to “form into a shape as much like duck roast as possible” before cover-
ing in scraps of fat, baking, and serving with brown or tomato sauce.10
Peel’s “semi-meatless” dishes offer recommendations for augmenting the
scant meat with bean or grain-based stuffing and make do with kidney,
suet, a rasher of bacon, or the scrag end of neck of mutton. And offal,
the “elegant term” for an animal’s less desirable internal organs, was
mercifully never rationed and so as one civilian wife quipped, “We live
mostly on entrails”.11 The ever-versatile “Savoury Cassolettes”, for exam-
ple, calls for “any pieces of meat, almost anything of a savoury kind you
have”, thus availing themselves of the indiscriminate “porkhambeefveal-
fish” that M. F. K. Fisher wittily called the minced meat under rationing.12
In less competent hands than Peel’s such dishes could take ghastly forms.
The food of the grossly incompetent cook at the field hospital in Price’s
Not So Quiet… is not only poorly prepared, but literally filthy: “One is
liable to find hair-combings in the greasy gravy; bits of plate-leavings from
the day before and an odd hairpin”, and “The principle dinner is a sort
of disgusting soup-stew made of meat that hangs over a drain until it is
cut up…sinister-looking joints of some strange animal—what, we cannot
decide”.13 To consume it is to set into motion a process of bodily rot of
even the healthiest young women, bringing on food poisoning and dysen-
tery and causing small cuts to fester and turn septic. The cook’s pot proves
a kind of microcosm of the trenches, its ambiguous “soup-stew” reminis-
cent of the mud that comprised such a perilous feature of the landscape of
2 INSIDE THE “BUTCHER’S SHOP”: WOMEN’S GREAT … 23
the Western Front, combining rain and earth with biological and chemi-
cal waste, bits of iron and wire, the wreckage of industrial weaponry, and
decomposing corpses. Its contents interchangeable with the human meat
the drivers clean from the ambulances, the pot produces a confusion of
fleshes and fluids that assault the senses of the ambulance drivers no less
than W. H. R. Rivers’ patient. Responsible for swabbing the insides of the
ambulances, the canteen, and the WC, the drivers serve as what Jane Mar-
cus calls the “charwomen of the battlefield, the cleaners of the worst human
waste we produce”.14
Like the mud that swallowed so many soldiers, the cook’s indeterminate
“soup-stew” of hair-combings, the odd hairpin, and the sinister joints of
an unidentifiable animal—which the drivers agree is “certainly not beef or
mutton”15 —raises the prospect of the body’s deliquescence, its dissolution
into formless ooze or offal. Part of the horror of the stew’s ambiguous con-
tents derives from its implicit power to devour, sucking everything into the
pot’s iron gullet. Simmering in the cook’s pot is the fundamental confusion
of human and matter, and the frightening prospect of the former getting
absorbed into the latter as so much filth and waste, since as Price’s heroine
Helen Smith observes, “One shapeless lump of raw liver is like another
shapeless lump of raw liver” (95). In Helen’s repetitive phrasing, human
organs ripped from the body linger on the tongue and press against the
roof of the mouth inducing it to gag upon such a proliferation of waste.
Directing our attention to what must be expelled for subjectivity and
selfhood to flourish, Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva share a fascination
with the discarded and unassimilable waste that resists incorporation into
our structures of personhood and human being. For Bataille the open ori-
fice and for Kristeva the gaping wound makes visible the formless stuff of
our being in all its turgidity, humidity, and pungency. Indebted to Louis-
Ferdinand Céline’s narrative of traumatic experience in the Great War
trenches, Kristeva’s theorization of the abject in Powers of Horror draws
upon the injured body: “A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid
smell of sweat, of decay” and “refuses and corpses show me what I perma-
nently thrust aside in order to live. […] My body extricates itself, as being
alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from
loss to loss, nothing remains in me, and my entire body falls beyond the
limit—cadere, cadaver”.16 Like so many Great War nurses, Mary (May)
Borden, an untrained American nurse who volunteered with the French
Red Cross, stood at such a border gathering that waste drop by drop
in order to separate what might live from what passes beyond the limit.
24 V. TROMANHAUSER
distance in order to feel more palpably the changes in pulse and temper-
ature and read the spasms of jerking limbs as signs of life persisting or
ebbing away as the inanimate reclaims the animate. Such corporeal inti-
macy betrays clear boundaries, as Borden recalls in an active present tense
what she feels beneath the “frock coat”, or more aptly here trench coat,
of bodily form: “We dig into the yawning mouths of his wounds. Help-
less openings, they let us into the secret places of his body”.21 The body
appears in all its porous vulnerability here, mouth and wound collapsing
onto one another as fleshy portals into the body’s soft interior. But pas-
sive and “helpless”, these fleshy openings also acquire a strange vitality in
Borden’s syntax, which grants them more agency than the nurse’s healing
hands, themselves suggestively swallowed into the rounded vowels of the
wounds’ “yawning mouths”.
Where the active soldier’s domain is the battlefield—the theatre of the
vigorous, athletic body—the nurse’s domain comprises what John Caputo
calls the “anarchy of the flesh” in which the shapely body melts into a suf-
fering and susceptible mass, since, he explains, “The flesh is not the prin-
ciple of the body or of bodily life but the un-principle which exposes it to
ignominious undoing and the oblivion of disease, dismemberment, dimin-
ishment, and death”.22 By contrast with the “transitive” body in its supple
and intentional movement, the “intransitive” flesh is freighted, warm, and
messy, “the thick gum of carnality that clings to every transcendental oper-
ation and holds it stuck in place” (211). Flesh menacingly gums up the
metaphysics of human subject formation and jams the machinery of our
making and world-building.
Gumming up the pious operations of patriotism and dutiful sacrifice are
the convulsions of the body’s exposed flesh, the young English carnage that
for Vera Brittain comprises a wholesale “indictment of…inept humanity”.23
Her memoir Testament of Youth (1933) takes us inside the butcher’s shop
of the Great War hospital where the soldier’s heroic body is painfully disar-
ticulated. The loss of her fiancé Roland Leighton, her brother Edward, and
two close friends calls into question the trope of national sacrifice as the pro-
liferation of deaths turns individual tragedy into disposable carnage. While
serving in a hospital in Camberwell, Brittain recalls the squeamishness of
patients and male orderlies alike over “the butcher’s-shop appearance of
the uncovered wounds”, which causes one orderly to faint on top of his
patient (211). Brittain’s nursing testimony shuttles between the fantasized
memory of the ideal, intact body of her lover and the more prosaic bits of
26 V. TROMANHAUSER
broken flesh she encounters in the hospital ward. Her fantasy of the inter-
changeability of British Tommies—where in nursing another soldier, she
successfully ministers to Roland “by proxy” (166)—relies upon a Christian
ethos of service and sacrifice, with its attendant topoi of redemption and
resurrection, and embraces the image celebrated in recruiting posters of the
nurse as English Madonna to the ailing soldier as sacrificial son. Roland’s
death, however, represents the ruins of heroic sacrifice, and following this
traumatic loss Brittain’s testament suggests more extreme corporeal trans-
mutations. The mud-caked and blood-soaked clothes that are returned to
Roland’s family speak to the grueling agony of his inglorious death, “shot
like a rat in the dark” by a sniper while repairing a patch of barbed wire
(243). Betraying “the horror of war without its glory”, the shattered rags
of his uniform reek of “not ordinary mud” with the “usual clean pure
smell of earth”, but of mud “saturated with dead bodies…that had been
dead a long, long time” (251, 252). Here the idealized body gives way to
abject formlessness. His redolent remains, mingled with the matter of other
nameless dead, Tommy and Hun alike, perform a “declassification in the
double sense” of Bois and Krauss. What Brittain smells in the putrid odour
pervading the Leightons’ sitting-room is the ruins of patriotism that so
violently knock Roland from his esteemed place in the private and national
memory that Brittain “wondered, and I wonder still, why it was thought
necessary to return such relics” (251).
Amidst the gruesome tangle of shapeless flesh in the field hospital, Brit-
tain marvels at “how we were able to drink tea and eat cake in the [operat-
ing] theatre—as we did all day at frequent intervals—in that fetid stench,
with the thermometer at about 90 degrees in the shade, and the saturated
dressings and yet more gruesome human remnants heaped on the floor”
(374). The medical staff’s daily meals work the transubstantiation of the
Eucharist in reverse, where flowing blood and gobbets of flesh are baked
by the hot surgical theatre into the banality of tea and cake. When a Prus-
sian lieutenant reaches out an “emaciated hand” to thank Brittain for her
services, she instinctively takes his foreign, enemy fingers in hers, “thinking
how ridiculous it was that I should be holding this man’s hand in friend-
ship when perhaps, only a week or two earlier, [her brother] Edward up at
Ypres had been doing his best to kill him” (376). The war’s indiscriminate
violence reduces uniformed bodies to shattered flesh, but for the nurse
who dabbles her fingers in his entrails, Brittain intimates, such corporeal
transmutations might breed not clannish malice, but friendship.
2 INSIDE THE “BUTCHER’S SHOP”: WOMEN’S GREAT … 27
‘meat’ and being ‘flesh’”, Cheng suggests, “because to remain aware of this
ambivalence is to resist the complacency of humanness on the one hand
and the condescension of imagining we can relinquish our human privilege
on the other” (Cheng, n.p.).
Such ontological confusion surfaces in Borden’s operating room, the
bewildering proximity of dead and dying fleshes nowhere more palpable
than when one of the orderlies mistakes an extracted knee the surgeon has
left boiling in a saucepan for a “ragoût of mouton” and nearly serves it up
for the casse-croûte.26 The mess of flesh on the operating table turns flesh
for the mess as literal and figurative meat become queasily entangled: “Well,
it was lucky he didn’t eat it”, the surgeon remarks, “It was a knee I had
cut out, you know” (100). This harrowing scene raises the question of just
how flesh in the Great War will be cured, since, as the orderly’s confusion
intimates, body and meat cannot be cleanly sorted. The curing of the flesh
might tender either of two ostensibly opposed outcomes: inert dead meat
or active living body. What writhes on the operating table is the fragility and
malleability of our own vital substance as it quivers between animacy and
inanimacy, sentience and matter, being and object, formed and formless,
and, most nauseatingly, edible and inedible. The whole environment of the
medical building takes on the moisture of human tissue: “The air was thick
with steaming sweat, with the effluvia of mud, dirt, blood” (98). Steeped in
human bodily fluids, the surgical space comprises one great viscous interior
where body, flesh, and meat swirl in a vast effluvia that defies medical or
conceptual sorting.
In the patient’s spilling viscera the Great War nurse confronts the horror
of Bataille’s informe, the prospect of the becoming-flesh or becoming-meat
of the once shapely heroic body. Working in a London hospital during
the summer of the Somme offensive, Joan Seddon, the heroine of Irene
Rathbone’s We That Were Young , must become “word-perfect” in the
business of changing soiled dressings, holding mangled limbs, wringing
out saturated fomentations, peeling lint from the seared flesh of poison gas
or “liquid fire” patients, and probing among “lacerated muscles” for bits
of loose bone with a “little bodkin-shaped instrument”.27 Such stomach-
heaving sights and smells assail her senses and images of food gone off mark
some of the most brutal assaults the bodily wounds in the ward deliver: the
“sodden pancake” of a saturated poultice emits “a warm and sickly odour”
(197), the cheek of a jaw-case named McIvor is “swollen like a bloated
orange” (201), and a surgical incision discharging yellow pus from Joan’s
septic arm resembles “a melon when a single slice has been removed” (240).
2 INSIDE THE “BUTCHER’S SHOP”: WOMEN’S GREAT … 29
her arm, now swollen to the dimensions of a nightmare German sausage, was
causing her a lot of pain. She looked at it with stupid eyes as it lay crimson
and tight-skinned on the counterpane. She didn’t recognize it. She thought
at moments that it must be her leg, which had somehow got outside the
bedclothes. (239)
human” but can also entail “the more active making of an object” (48). In
mistaking her own arm for a dissevered leg that is oddly detached and out
of joint, Joan envisions in her nursing hand a flesh that is foreign at once
to her body and to her culture and that is even disturbingly edible.
While animal, female, disabled, and foreign bodies in Western cultures
have routinely been construed as consumable, it is also from such a pre-
carious place that women’s Great War writing suggests we might forge
new alliances across the conventional lines of battle and affiliation. Its
graphic rendering of human flesh drags us down into the formless matter
on the operating table and refuses us the security of ethical distance or the
aesthetic anesthesia of abstraction. In the greater abattoir of the battlefield,
the V. A. D. nurses and ambulance drivers newly apprehended a gradu-
ated scale of corporeal matter that extends from the shapely human body
to a loose, pulpy mass, and their feeling stories ask that we come to more
intimate terms with our flesh, animality, carnality, and even meatness.
Notes
1. Smith, Not So Quiet, 186; Marcus, “Corpus,” 245.
2. Rivers, Instinct, 121.
3. Kaplan, “Deformities,” 37, 39.
4. Das, Touch and Intimacy, 198.
5. Smith, Not So Quiet, 11, 10.
6. Peel, How We Lived Then, 91.
7. Spencer, British Food, 303.
8. Rathbone, We That Were Young, 103.
9. Peel, Eat-Less-Meat, 12. An appendix in How We Lived Then compares com-
pulsory food rations in Germany against British voluntary rations nearing
the war’s end in December 1917, showing the British allowance of bread,
meat, fat, and sugar exceeding the German allowance by between 30 and
40% (Peel 1929, 219).
10. Peel, Eat-Less-Meat, 97.
11. Peel, How We Lived Then, 92.
12. Peel, Eat-Less-Meat, 75; Fisher, How to Cook, 62.
13. Smith, Not So Quiet, 51.
14. Marcus, “Corpus,” 245.
15. Smith, Not So Quiet, 51.
16. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3.
17. Borden, Forbidden Zone, 95.
18. Bataille, Visions, 31.
19. Bois and Krauss, Formless, 18.
32 V. TROMANHAUSER
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Translated by
Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1993.
———. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Translated by Allan Stoekl.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2010.
Bois, Yve-Alain, and Rosalind E. Krauss. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone
Books, 1997.
Borden, Mary. The Forbidden Zone. 1929. London: Hesperus, 2008.
Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth. 1933. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Caputo, John D. Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Con-
stant Reference to Deconstruction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2012.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. “Sushi, Otters, Mermaids: Race at the Intersection of Food
and Animal; or David Wong’s ‘Louie’s Sushi Principle.’” Resilience: A Journal
of the Environmental Humanities 2, no. 1 (May 2015). http://www.jstor.org/
stable/10.5250/resilience.2.1.006.
2 INSIDE THE “BUTCHER’S SHOP”: WOMEN’S GREAT … 33
Das, Santanu. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2005.
Fisher, M. F. K. How to Cook a Wolf. 1942. New York: North Point Press, 1988.
Hallett, Christine E. “‘Emotional Nursing’: Involvement, Engagement, and
Detachment in the Writings of First World War Nurses and VADs.” In First
World War Nursing: New Perspectives, edited by Alison S. Fell and Christine E.
Hallett, 87–102. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Kaplan, Laurie. “Deformities of the Great War: The Narratives of Mary Borden
and Helen Zenna Smith.” Women and Language 27, no. 2 (2004): 35–43.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S.
Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
Marcus, Jane. “Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War.” Afterword:
Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War. 241–300.
———. “The Nurse’s Text: Acting Out an Anesthetic Aesthetic.” Afterword: We
That Were Young. 467–498.
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” In The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen,
edited by C. Day Lewis, 55. New York: New Directions, 1965.
Peel, C. S.. The-Eat-Less-Meat Book. Rev. ed. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head,
1918.
———. How We Lived Then, 1914–1918: A Sketch of Social and Domestic Life in
England During the War. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1929.
Rathbone, Irene. We That Were Young. 1932. Introduction by Lynn Knight, After-
word by Jane Marcus. New York: The Feminist Press, 1989.
Rivers, W. H. R. Instinct and the Unconscious: Contribution to a Biological Theory
of the Psycho-Neuroses. 1920. Kitchener: Batouche Books, 2001.
Smith, Helen Zenna. Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War. 1930. Afterword by Jane
Marcus. New York: The Feminist Press, 1989.
Spencer, Colin. British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
CHAPTER 3
Ted Geier
T. Geier (B)
Ashford University, San Diego, CA, USA
the very first human steps upon it, and the purposeful, personified teleo-
logical object—a way over troubled waters—“was torn and transpierced by
the sharp rocks which had always gazed up at me so peacefully from the
rushing water”.5 Even inanimate human constructions become rendered
flesh, in Kafka. Peaceful neighbours were always executioners.
The family itself is perhaps the most threatening cohort of all, if The
Metamorphosis is any indication. They await the absence of the hideous
nonhuman at the heart of the story, Gregor, who cannot even eat because of
his emergent nonhuman form, so that the young daughter with the dancer’s
body can stretch out and thrive. This sort of finish is repeated in “A Hunger
Artist,” in which a self-starving aesthete withers away and the crowds that
cannot even appreciate his art, anyway, flock to the young, natural panther
in the cage nearby. Such events compound the Kafkan fascinations with
a natural authenticity of the body, with the pointlessness of restrictive art
forms—of discipline itself—and with the competing types of life articulated
as human, animal, other. In the end, the forgettable subject is the object
designed by the social patterns in the stories.
Kafka’s labouring creature in “The Burrow”, and the always-already
arrested life in labours and anxieties in The Trial would rightly be taken
as emblematic of the central character in Kafka. The actual word, animal,
occurs only once in The Trial , and it is employed in a sexual simile when K.,
with Miss Bürstner, “moved forward, took hold of her, kissed her on the
mouth and then over her whole face like a thirsty animal lapping with its
tongue when it eventually finds water”.6 These moments in Kafka indicate
all the world: the condemned man in “In the Penal Colony” did not salute
his commanding officer. He was expected to do so every hour while the
commanding officer slept. This is a customary exercise in authority and
command, in Kafka, and the captain catches the condemned man asleep
at two in the morning, as he was intending to. He then whips the man.
The man shouts “throw that whip away or I’ll eat you alive”, written as
Ich fresse dich in the original. Fressen is animal eating, as opposed to the
more civilized, human essen. Thus, in rising up and rejecting the arbitrary
collar of animalized obedience, the man in fact claims the very animality
that pre-figures his station.
What reveals the meat animal status of those condemned in the colony is
the elaborate apparatus that doles out punishment. And another marker of
the restriction of bodies meted out by law and policy also haunts the story:
The act of meticulously reading legal documents—akin to Kafka’s daily
work in offices in Prague—recurs again and again, as does the nightmare of
40 T. GEIER
illegibility. “In the Penal Colony” is perhaps the singular example of Kafka’s
disciplined bodies being punished under the sign of the law, dictated by the
written word that turns out to be inscrutable to the outsider. The archaic
sentencing instructions for the machine’s operation can be read only by the
expert officer. When the explorer asks to review these documents, guarded
and protected by the faithful officer, “all he could see was a labyrinth of lines
crossing and recrossing each other, which covered the paper so thickly that
it was difficult to discern the blank spaces between them”.7 The descriptions
of the killing machine itself run far longer, in the story. It is a technical
marvel and the machinic, physical apparatus of governance and authority.
As I will address in relation to The Jungle, the wondrous beauty of the
processing machine seduces the very object of its control. The butcher and
the meat are all articulated by the overwhelming, harrowing force of meat
processing and by unfathomable design.
The burrowing creature in “The Burrow” also pursues a private dis-
cipline by unverifiable instructions, resulting in the physical labyrinth
of his “Castle Keep” designed to “provide a considerable degree of
security”.8 Like the crossing lines of the precious sentencing document
in “Penal Colony”, which ascribes the subject-specific horror of further
inscription (the machine scrawls declarations and etches punishment upon
the body of the condemned), the Keep raises the spectre of permanent
self-torture (“is one ever free from the anxieties inside it?”) according to
an anonymous, sovereign instruction by formal, legal, organizational doc-
ument. The letter of the law, famously impenetrable and perhaps even
unfathomably corrupt in The Trial, assures the constant burrower of dic-
tated labour and object-status. He is subjected as a labouring object that
also tries to assure itself of a future labour function in the world. The
fear of obsolescence ensures his industry, just as the men in the Chicago
meatworks achieve intense velocity through the perfection of their special-
ization—Jurgis will marvel at their single-cut precision, regardless of the
scale of that cut. The creature in “The Burrow” is working under the orders
he believes he has been issued, and he is also under the power of a society
that always scrapes along outside as “small fries” and the terrifying thought
of a “clearly audible” neighbour, “the beast”. All of this is summarized in
the structure—the built enclosure of a burrow:
all alike still and empty, ready by their various routes to conduct me to all the
other rooms, which are also still and empty—then all thought of mere safety
is far from my mind, then I know that here is my castle, which I have wrested
from the refractory soil with tooth and claw, with pounding and hammering
blows, my castle which can never belong to anyone else, and is so essentially
mine that I can calmly accept it even in my enemy’s mortal stroke at the final
hour, for my blood will ebb away here in my own soil and not be lost.9
Only when K. resisted being dragged off by him did Gerstäcker tell him not
to worry, he would have everything he needed at his own place, he could
give up the post of school janitor, and would he please now come? He’d been
waiting for him all day, Gerstäcker told him, his mother didn’t know where
he was. Slowly yielding to his demands, K. asked how he planned to provide
board and lodging for him. Gerstäcker just answered briefly, saying he needed
K. to help with the horses, he himself had other business now, and he wished
K. didn’t have to be dragged along like this, making unnecessary difficulties
for him. If K. wanted payment then he, Gerstäcker, would give him payment.
But for all his tugging K. stopped dead now. He didn’t know anything about
horses, he said. That didn’t matter, said Gerstäcker impatiently, and in his
irate state of mind he actually clasped his hands pleadingly to persuade K. to
go with him.10
Who was that? A friend? A good person? Somebody who was taking part?
Somebody who wanted to help? Was he alone? Was it everyone? Would any-
one help? Were there objections that had been forgotten? There must have
been some. The logic cannot be refuted, but someone who wants to live will
not resist it. Where was the judge he’d never seen? Where was the high court
he had never reached? He raised both hands and spread out all his fingers.11
These hazily present parties ignore the plight of the meat animal in Kafka,
rendering the human or otherwise object of unceremonious dispatch
44 T. GEIER
for punishment, even for suffering. In these ways, Kafka’s works activate a
demand for justice while probing the presumption of such a concept.
For example, the horrid disaster of the justice machine in “In the Penal
Colony” and the literal arbitrariness (arbiter is judge) of the law and its
guardians—in The Trial or elsewhere in Kafka—reject the law’s sturdiness
through demolition and absurdity. But none of this undoes the law’s force.
More importantly, the systems that process the Kafkan meat doubt the
potential to manage and organize society in what might be simply called
a “politics”. Kafkan politics are impossible subjections. The meat object is
not a voter or a plaintiff, obviously, and the idiocy of the system itself further
reveals that to approach its halls with plans of improvement, redemption, or
any sort of security was the first indication that one was already thoroughly
subdued. Fitting freedom and justice to a system and a process merely
reinforced the obeisance to the collar, of course.
At this point, it will be important to consider the reception and interro-
gation of Kafka’s works, and literature itself as a committed political form,
as addressed within critical theoretical traditions. One direct consideration
of modernism’s political potential, beyond simply its discovery that there
are no more politics possible in the fascism of the meat system (or biopoli-
tics, in a later diagnostic frame) is Neil Larsen’s Modernism and Hegemony.
Larsen’s book, as a whole, refuses any suggestion from modernist works
or elsewhere that the possibility for politics is ever closed off. And so if
Kafka’s wandering, withering protagonists indicate a sort of “pre-political”
or a-political frame up that renders individual lives incapable of resistance
and representation, such a notion is but a first step towards a more devel-
oped mediation of such conditions. A cursory sense of the “Kafkaesque”
might return with the charge that, as Adorno writes in Fragment 94 of
Minima Moralia, all politics and subjectivity is subsumed by “high” pol-
itics: “Where freedom occurs as a motif in political narratives today, as in
the praise of heroic resistance, it has the embarrassing quality of impotent
reassurance”.13 Larsen chooses the very same fragment from Adorno (but a
different quote) to pair with one of the two mentions of Kafka in the entire
book, despite Kafka being one of Adorno’s primary engagements on the
matter.14 Kafka’s sense of the bureaucratic parallels Adorno’s sense of the
“biopolitical” administrative life that subjects life and death to irresistible
procedure but no actual relief and freedom. This is precisely the wondrous
infatuation Jurgis has with the “irresistible” beauty of the slaughter works
on his tour of the Durham meat facilities. Those works then turn pig and
3 KAFKA’S MEAT: BEAUTIFUL PROCESSES AND PERFECT VICTIMS 47
man alike into meat for the grinder, working the gears of society as capital
material.
Rehearsing Adorno’s assessment of modernist aesthetics that resist rep-
resentation and realist banality, Larsen then objects to the way Adornian
aesthetics seem to exalt this curious style of representation. A work such
as Kafka’s “recognizes” the conditions under arrest in modernity, but in
its form refuses to “represent” them. Larsen quotes from Adorno’s Frag-
ment 94 of Minima Moralia: “Total unfreedom can be recognized, but
not represented”.15 In a, frankly, stunning admission of Larsen’s contempt
for a categorical Kafka (as modernism, apparently), there are but two ref-
erences to his work throughout the entirety of Modernism and Hegemony,
and both include the indefinite article, listing “a Kafka” alongside and/or
against “a Mann”, “a Schonberg”, and naturally, “a Beckett”. The point
here is not to condemn Larsen’s meticulous critique of “Critical Theory”,
reified as a mass object in his text. But Larsen does privilege a form of cri-
tique, demanding a potency and “material” address requiring a thorough
belief in reason and analysis. The modernist mistrust of fetishistic proce-
dure and system Kafka perhaps best represents—language and politics, for
example—refuses their opiation by refusing belief in the communicability
of that same refusal. Larsen’s analysis puts his hands all over the corpse of
humanity, poised and primed to save it. Kafka wouldn’t dare such hubris.
Larsen in fact does not deal at all with Kafka’s work, only with the spectre
of modernist aesthetics and a historical subject of critique that turns out to
be the business of critique, itself. Adorno, later in the very section Larsen
parses for a remark against the political potential of modernist aesthetics,
writes that
Adorno calls Kafka “objective”, after all, in the course of an essay entitled
“Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’ Realism in Our Time”.17
This he calls a “tendency”, rather than a “simply depict[ing] the world in
communicative form”.18 In a longer exegesis, one could mark the con-
stant interplay of Beckett and Kafka, in Adorno’s “Trying to Understand
48 T. GEIER
Revolutionary leaflets and kindred things: they look as though they have been
overtaken by catastrophes, even when they are no older than 1918. Looking
at them, one can see that what they wanted did not come to pass. Hence
their beauty, the same beauty the defendants in Kafka’s Trial take on, those
whose execution has been settled since the very first day.20
Adorno’s lament at politics in his time applies Kafkan meat logics, in effect.
Another way to approach Kafka’s works as practical political texts on
the processing of life-unto-death is through a sort of biographical nota-
tion that probes authorial intention on specific points such as the indus-
trial form. As it turns out, this way of testing the “reality” represented in
Kafka’s expression of suffering and control produces some further strong
sibilance with Sinclair and a tradition of meat industry critique. Sander
Gilman, for example, writes of Kafka’s biography in direct relation to Sin-
clair’s The Jungle. Kafka worked by day to “examine and explain industrial
accidents. He looked at how hands and fingers were caught in machinery”.
And further: “Machinery fascinated him”. Gilman then connects Kafka’s
occupation and fascination to the time of industry muckrakers, singling
out Sinclair’s work foremost, and “always with an eye toward the mean-
ings given the physical body for the shell for the suffering soul. There one
could have no magical restitution”.21 Kafka’s work routinely returns, as
previously discussed, to this question of the machine and the human body.
In “In the Penal Colony”, especially, there are scenes in which system,
machine, building become the object of fetish—the “great structure” of
torturous punishment is worshipped by its officer, mutely adored by others
basking in the light of its work, and rooted on in cruel revenge by the con-
demned man saved in the final scene. Sinclair’s famous Chapter 3, in which
pigs are declared individuals and Jurgis marvels at the smooth, highlights
3 KAFKA’S MEAT: BEAUTIFUL PROCESSES AND PERFECT VICTIMS 49
the very same, sublime functioning of the processing system. The Jungle
tracks the metric of human labour bodies in parallel to the processed and
rendered animal bodies—all are equivalent as material, all are unfree, but
the system’s perfection is beautiful. The system is worshipped as a source
of wonder, time and again. Jurgis notes the speed and the accuracy, preci-
sion, and production of its labourers. He wants to be incorporated by the
machine, in effect. Only once he truly has been, cast back out as refuse,
does he realize the cost of that precise process. The Jungle uses an obvious
parallel of animal bodies to humans processed by the machines of society,
though it also notes the poetry of it all—that is a word the narrator puts
in Jurgis’ mouth as the proper representation for such a beautiful process
that works so supremely beyond all calculation and mastery:
Jurgis, again, wants desperately to become the meat of this system, just
as so many of Kafka’s protagonists and narrators submit to the process of
discovery and progress only to arrive at the final dispatch, calm and prepared
for slaughter and fit for nothing more.
One natural interlocutor for this figure, “becoming-meat”, is the work
of Deleuze and Guattari. Therein, or especially perhaps in Deleuze’s Francis
Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, concepts such as “indiscernibility” between
human and animal and a quasi-utopian flattening of all into meat express
the sensorial community under the force by which “every man who suf-
fers is a piece of meat”.23 Deleuze notes Bacon’s hybrid creatures, or at
50 T. GEIER
least an animal spirit called by the human face upon the display of carnal-
ity, splayed and flayed, subjected to the cleaver, the eye, the painter. The
coherent claim of modernist form, across Bacon and Kafka, is this undoing
of “the human” under the force of life, its collars, its inscrutable organiza-
tion of individuals into masses and material. It is no accident that Deleuze
compares Bacon’s painting directly, and only, with Kafka at this point: “For
both Bacon and Kafka, the spinal column is nothing but a sword beneath
the skin, slipped into the body of an innocent sleeper by an executioner.
Sometimes a bone will even be added only as an afterthought in a random
spurt of paint”.24 The architecture of a human—the backbone—is likewise
indiscernible: classic biological form identifies only vertebrates, piercing the
veil of any more precise, hallowed status through an anonymously precise
dissection and observation.
Deleuze’s reading of Bacon with Kafka’s diary entry, “The Sword”, is
part of a series of such alignments Deleuze will make throughout the book.
Kafka with Beckett recurs again and again, and these three express not
modernity’s attack on the human—that could be resisted and vanquished—
but the laughable expectation of such contestation when the instruments of
horror are already merely instruments-at-all. To take up tools and trade in
objectification, including language, already asserts the subjection to analy-
sis, echoing Adorno’s “Trying to Understand Endgame” in suggesting that
these are the gifted communicators of incommunicable death. There is no
death in a sociation that homogenizes life as processes, systems, and forms.
Deleuze proclaims these artists, ultimately to not even believe in death, and
certainly not to take up an assumption that life judges death.25 That is to
say, “[a]lthough Bacon likens himself to a ‘pulverizer’ or a ‘grinder’, he is
really more like a detective”.26 Kafka’s theme, decidedly, is the detective’s
pursuit without revelation: an endless process. The endless processing. Cap-
ital’s fantasy, in simplest terms.
The meat of Kafkan expression can go on with or without the descriptive
horrors of Bacon’s displays, which readers may recall most vividly in the
case of the flowering wound in “A Country Doctor” or the final gruesome
punishment of the officer, who is the highest expert on the machine from
“In The Penal Colony”. This presents a weird, uncanny bridge from Kafka
back to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, of all things. Renfield’s species hoarding
and designs on a multispecies feast in the sanitarium reveal the “automatic”
animus that Kafka’s subjects are incapable of, and yet the Universal horror
film version cast an all-too-perfect facsimile of Kafka’s figure as a diminu-
tive, sickly imp taking in the potency—the bare competence—of every other,
3 KAFKA’S MEAT: BEAUTIFUL PROCESSES AND PERFECT VICTIMS 51
of any other. Dracula’s carnal incorporations are the whole opposite of the
hunger artist’s exquisite abstention, and yet the Universal version presents
a parallel aesthetics of consumption in the debonair, sexy bloodsucker. The
reason to include these cross-period traditions of machinic meat consump-
tion, including the banned cannibalistic, is to incorporate the simultaneous
terror at modernity and the slaughter house of world war globalism with
the politics of resistance at the heart of Kafka’s works. But this also high-
lights the seductive character of the incorporating processes. Becoming
meat means being eaten by the likes of Dracula or the bosses in The Jungle.
Kafka’s protagonist could never accept, willingly, the silver-screen suave
master each of those pathetic/egoist agonists seems to demand, though
Josef K. immediately “gives it up” to legal authorities who have no author-
ity throughout The Trial . He gives into every form of authority. But Kafka’s
meat always fantasizes about the great authority running the works, anx-
iously anticipating becoming the finest meal for that singular audience.
They are the most beautiful cuts. They do not—could not—matter at all.
Notes
1. Ryan Bell, “Temple Grandin: Killing Them Softly.”
2. For general coverage on the period and the market and animal care trends,
see the work of Richard Perren, the history of Smithfield by Robyn Metcalfe,
and this author’s Meat Markets: The Cultural History of Bloody London.
3. When Kafka’s short stories are referred to, they are taken from The Collected
Stories. References to the novels are taken from open access online sources
in English and, occasionally, in the original German.
4. Franz Kafka, “Before the Law,” 4.
5. Kafka, “The Bridge,” 411–412.
6. Kafka, The Trial , Ch. 1, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7849/
pg7849-images.html.
7. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 148.
8. Kafka, “The Burrow,” 339.
9. Kafka, “The Burrow,” 340.
10. Kafka, The Castle, 275.
11. Kafka, The Trial , Ch. 10, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7849/
pg7849.html.
12. For Thompson’s reading of “In the Penal Colony,” and especially these
instances of Kafka’s fear of meat eating and the sanitarium, see Chapter
Four of Kafka’s Blues, “Negro’s Machine”.
13. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 144.
14. Neil Larsen, Modernism and Hegemony, 7.
52 T. GEIER
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by
Edmund Jephcott. New York: Verso, 2005.
———. Notes to Literature, Volume I. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by
Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
———. Notes to Literature, Volume II. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by
Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Bell, Ryan. “Temple Grandin: Killing Them Softly at Slaughterhouses for 30 Years.”
National Geographic, 19 August 2015. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/
people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2015/08/19/temple-grandin-killing-
them-softly-at-slaughterhouses-for-30-years/.
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W.
Smith. London: Continuum, 2003.
Geier, Ted. Kafka’s Nonhuman Form: Troubling the Boundaries of the Kafkaesque.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
———. Meat Markets: The Cultural History of Bloody London. Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh Press, 2017.
Gilman, Sander. Franz Kafka. London: Reaktion, 2005.
Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. Edited by Nahum Glazer. Translated by Willa
and Edwin Muir, et al. New York: Schocken Books, 2011.
———. Der Prozess. http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/-9771/1.
———. The Trial. Translated by David Wyllie. http://www.kafka-online.info/the-
trial.html.
Larsen, Neil. Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agen-
cies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Edited by Clare Virginia Eby. New York: Norton, 2003.
Thompson, Mark Christian. Kafka’s Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the
Construction of an Aesthetic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016.
CHAPTER 4
Adrian Tait
A. Tait (B)
Bath, UK
accepts sacrifice and eats flesh” (281). That subject determines the shape
and nature of a “dominant schema of subjectivity” (281) which leaves a
place open “in its very structure […] for a noncriminal putting to death”
(278):
What is at stake, as Cary Wolfe points out, is the “systematized and mech-
anized” slaughter of animals.9 “Everybody knows what the production,
breeding, transport, and slaughter of […] animals has become”, wrote
Derrida; it is “a veritable war of the species”.10
Several points follow from Derrida’s summing up of a world in which
“it is not forbidden to make an attempt on life in general, but only on
human life”.11 Firstly, “the specific structure of eating animals becomes
simply one more version of the larger symbolic structure by which ‘man’
in the western philosophical tradition secures its transcendence through
mastery of nature”.12 Secondly, and at the same time, that structure is also
extraordinarily intimate, domestic. It operates in our daily lives. Thirdly, like
the class system that it emulates or extends, it operates through a process of
differentiation or othering, attributing “[a]uthority and autonomy […] to
the man (homo and vir) rather than to the woman, and to the woman rather
than to the animal”, and excluding those others “from the status of being
full subjects”.13 The fourth, notable aspect of Derrida’s “dominant schema
of subjectivity” is the way in which the legitimacy of the act of eating meat
is so rarely questioned.14 We have, in effect, internalized this “noncriminal
putting to death”.15 To draw on Derrida’s reference to the “executions
of ingestion, incorporation, or introjection of the corpse”, quoted above
(278), society has drawn the act of eating meat deep into the complex
discursive weave through which it constitutes itself.16
Given the intricacy of the discourse with which Derrida’s schema of
“carnivorous virility” is therefore entangled, the challenge of decoding it is
substantial. Nonetheless, Derrida’s concept of carnophallogocentrism pro-
vides a framework from within which to approach To the Lighthouse and At
56 A. TAIT
drink by the humans with whom they share such close living quarters”.27
The scene reflects Woolf’s own grave disquiet at their plight, Ryan argues
(162–163), a point which in turn coincides with Adams’ contention: that
Woolf recognized in the act of eating meat a patriarchal act. The question,
Adams asks, is “[h]ow do we overthrow patriarchal power while eating its
symbol?”28
Adams herself implies that Woolf has no adequate answer. Indeed, she
argues that, in Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room, “Woolf seems to suggest that it
is when thinking about women that we will forget the meat”.29 Yet To the
Lighthouse suggests a more complex, substantive response to the politics of
“patriarchal consumption”, rooted in its depiction of Mr. Ramsey.30 Mr.
Ramsey is every bit the stern and uncompromising Victorian paterfamilias.
To his youngest son, James, he is the “arid scimitar of the male”.31 The
phrase exactly captures Derrida’s own sense of carnophallogocentrism as
at once life-denying and death-dealing, martial and specifically masculine.
It also an apt description for Mr. Ramsey, who embodies the logocentric
thinking on which these structures of meaning are raised. A philosopher of
the utilitarian and empiricist British school, Mr. Ramsey places himself (as
animal rationale) at the centre of a universe whose orderly intelligibility
he takes for granted.32 Certain that language is itself a transparent medium
for capturing reality, and never doubting “his own accuracy of judgement”,
Mr. Ramsey “conceives of his own intellectual efforts in the form of a
rigidly alphabetical progression”.33 Yet he is “stuck at Q”, unaware that
the fault lies, not with the failings of his own “splendid mind”, but with the
logocentric basis of his thinking.34 “Never was anyone at once so ridiculous
and alarming”, thinks Mrs. Ramsey (18). Nevertheless, Mrs. Ramsey keeps
her thoughts to herself, as she feels she must, in a society that imposes
separate spheres on men and women. Men, as she understands it, take up
active roles in the public sphere; “they negotiated treaties, ruled India,
controlled finance” (9). Women marry, manage the home, and care for
family, a logic that Mrs. Ramsey has herself internalized. Having borne
eight children, she devotes herself to supporting her husband, caring for her
family’s needs, and, wherever possible, arranging other people’s marriages.
“What was this mania of hers for marriage?” asks one of her house-guests
(144), Lily.
Within her own sphere, Mrs. Ramsey is herself “tyrannical, domineer-
ing, masterful” (50), as Lily’s feelings testify (144–145). Yet the values on
which Mrs. Ramsey insists are in effect those that have been imposed upon
her, and with which she has become complicit. Her daughters might “sport
58 A. TAIT
with infidel ideas […] of a life different from hers” (9); Mrs. Ramsey has
taken her husband’s name, and ingested his values. The process is now so
complete that she has, in turn, become an agent of the same cultural con-
figuration that otherwise disempowers her. Unconsciously, it is the values
of a patriarchal society that Mrs. Ramsey endorses and, within the home,
imposes, and it is through the act of eating that those values are brought
together in the sacrificial structure to which Derrida refers.
The dinner party is the centrepiece of the novel, and a scene of which
Woolf was herself proud; she called it “the best thing I ever wrote”.35
It brings together all the novel’s main characters, and puts them into a
conversation that explores but also extends the “dominant schema”, even
as that schema is enacted through their eating of meat. The dish that forms
the focus of the meal itself is, of course, Boeuf en Daube, a dish which to Mrs.
Ramsey “partook […] of eternity” (85): “an exquisite scent of olives and
oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish,
took the cover off” (81–82). Yet the dish signifies much more than itself.
“Of course it was French”, thinks Mrs. Ramsey (82). The dish reflects the
family’s cultural aspirations and its cosmopolitanism. It also embodies the
practical realities of a life of leisure, here made possible by a cook who has
spent “three days” (82) preparing it. Save for a few comments, however,
little is said about the dish. “The Boeuf en Daube was a perfect triumph”
(86), observes Mrs. Ramsey, yet the observation is placed in parenthesis.
The fact that meat is being eaten has similarly been set to one side. The
“ethical frontier” to which Derrida refers is thus quietly subsumed within
a schema that “accepts sacrifice and eats flesh” yet does so without making
manifest the contradiction that is at the centre of it: that “it is not forbidden
to make an attempt on life in general, but only on human life”.36
This schema, it quickly becomes apparent, is expressed primarily through
the men, rarely the women, and almost never the children. Mrs. Ramsey
herself is more or less silent, dominated by Mr. Ramsey. She may have orga-
nized the dinner, but it is Mr. Ramsey who sits at the head of the table, and
it is his feelings that she is constantly monitoring, ready to intervene and
make good any disturbance of the status quo. But is she entirely complicit
with the values that this dinner embodies? She does not pretend to under-
stand a conversation that ranges over literature and philosophy and maths.
“What did it all mean”? she asks herself (86). “To this day she had no
notion” (86). Yet Mrs. Ramsey is sufficiently acute to identify and distin-
guish what is otherwise unmarked and unremarked: “this admirable fabric
of masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and
4 CARNOPHALLOGOCENTRISM AND THE ACT OF EATING MEAT … 59
that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so
that she could trust herself to it utterly” (86). She clearly identifies its gen-
dered dimension, its centrality, and the way in which she is herself caught
in its net, a net that she nevertheless trusts to support and provide for her.
“Then she woke up. It was still being fabricated. William Bankes was prais-
ing the Waverley novels” (86). In that moment, Mrs. Ramsey recognizes
that this mesh of overlapping meanings is neither permanent nor “natural”,
but constructed, and in the process of being constructed all around her;
constructed, and imposed on to (or insinuated into) the lives of all those
who have been brought to the table, from relative outsiders like Lily to her
own children.
Significantly, that moment of waking is echoed later in the novel, when
the determinedly independent Lily returns to the Ramsey’s home on Skye.
“Her eyes opened wide. Here she was again, she thought, sitting bolt
upright in bed. Awake” (117). It is Lily who will have the last word in
the novel. Her painting, completed at last, signals the possibility that the
apparent permanencies of Mrs. Ramsey’s life—from its ideology of sepa-
rate spheres to the ritual act of eating meat—might be remade.37 But just
as Lily’s own art negotiates and finally transcends the stolid, sentimental
commemorations of well-do-do life that were a commonplace of Victorian
painting, so Woolf’s narrative constitutes a new form of discourse, which
itself enacts a radical shift away from the patriarchal carnophallogocentric
centre.
That shift is radical (as the word itself suggests) all the way down to
the roots of the phallogocentric structure that is Woolf’s real subject. As
Deborah Parsons points out, Woolf was one of the “pioneers of a new sub-
jective realism” that sought to substitute “internal revelation” for “external
description” and “the flux of momentary thoughts” for “chronological nar-
rative and dramatic plot”: the impressionistic, as Alt suggests, is opposed
to the categorizing and categorical way of thinking embodied in Mr. Ram-
sey.38 Only through this new approach, Woolf argued in A Room of One’s
Own, was it possible to capture reality, “erratic [and] undependable”.39
Yet this innovative approach was itself, Parsons notes, an act of resistance
to a “dominant ‘masculine’ ideology (of which materialist literary realism
was a part)” (96).
The consequence of this radical break is apparent in Woolf’s presentation
of Mrs. Ramsey, a figure who is excluded from any meaningful engagement
with the “dominant schema”, and who, in a predictable act of introjection,
excludes herself from it. In Woolf’s reformulation of the novel as a sequence
60 A. TAIT
that day as if they were laying the foundations of something”, Julia thinks,
“[b]ut it was only something which perished very quickly” (10).
In At Mrs. Lippincote’s, Taylor therefore creates a counterpoint to the
world of plenty enjoyed by the Ramsey family, a world whose differences
have been thrown into sharp relief by war and wartime rationing. There is
to be no more Boeuf en Daube, as Julia realises.
“I see it now and smell it—the great earthenware dish and its” (she closed her
eyes and breathed slowly) “‘confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats,
and its bay-leaves and its wine’.”
They laughed at her and she took up a spoon and was surprised that the
taste was of fruit, not meat. (155)
As this passage indicates, Julia is not remembering the dish so much as its
representation inTo the Lighthouse. “‘I like to get my recipes from good
literature’, Julia explained” (155). That reference makes explicit an impor-
tant difference between Mrs. Ramsey and the dissenting Julia. Mrs. Ramsey
has little time for books; Julia reads whenever and wherever she can, even
whilst eating lunch (68), and constantly invokes books, to the consternation
of her husband, who frequently mistakes her references to characters like
Catherine Morland for real people (“‘I never knew her’, said Roddy”) (79).
For Julia, the novels which she reads are not simply a distraction from the
unwelcome realities of a straitened existence, but a means of understanding
them. She takes her lessons from literature as she does from life, perceiv-
ing no difference between them: both partake of the same structures of
meaning. For Julia, therefore, the discursive dimension of her existence is
pivotal to her appreciation of it, and of others. For example, her husband’s
boss, the wing commander, is “Rochester to the life” (48), an allusion that
the wing commander understands but happily for his peace of mind Roddy
does not (48–51), since it positions Julia as Jane Eyre. Julia’s own pref-
erence for the Brontë sisters and the work of Woolf herself (“a little too
modern” for the wing commander’s taste) (155) signals something of her
own dissenting role within that discourse.
These intertextual allusions also underline the extent to which Taylor is
herself emulating Woolf, even if it is sometimes to poke fun: Mrs. Ramsey’s
complaint that “[a] whole French family could live on what an English cook
throws away” is repeated almost verbatim in At Mrs. Lippincote’s simply
so Julia can tartly reply “[p]ersonally, I think they’re welcome”.55 Clearly,
Woolf was a formative influence on Taylor’s own writing.56 “I write in
4 CARNOPHALLOGOCENTRISM AND THE ACT OF EATING MEAT … 63
scenes, rather than in narrative”, Taylor observed; like Woolf, she moves
the narrative point of view from one character to another.57 Whilst Julia
dominates the first few chapters, the narrative then shifts to Eleanor, and
again to Sarge, a factory worker and political radical (83–84), whilst simul-
taneously interleaving the thoughts and feelings of several other characters,
including Oliver and the wing commander. Like Woolf, Taylor uses these
shifts to transgress the constructed boundaries of class and gender, in so
doing, mapping a society which has itself become more fluid, and, in time
of war, more uncertain of itself.
Significantly, and by contrast with Woolf’s well-to-do characters, a lack of
servants means that Julia is brought much closer to the domestic realities
that underpin her way of life. She may day-dream of “warmth, leisure,
delight, relaxation” (42), but she does so during “many an hour washing
up, ironing or shelling peas” (99). Roddy, meanwhile, is still cocooned in a
phallogocentric world, a “leader of men, who did not know how the world
lived” (5), and who, as “a leader of men”, can and does disregard “the
intricacies of his own body” (69). Caught up in what he mistakes for a
world of action, Roddy has no need to ask where the next meal is coming
from. “[H]aving no life of her own” (20), it is Julia’s job to provide; but
“what with the war” (96), food is a prominent concern. Finding, preparing,
and cooking it also forms part of a reality that Julia resents. Exciting as
she might find it to exercise her creativity over vol-au-vents (42) and flaky
pastry (67), the necessity of cooking every day (and always for the menfolk)
infuriates her. “‘Why? Why? How did this notion get around that women
cook only for men?’” Julia demands (58). Moreover, cooking invariably
entails meat. Entire conversations revolve around mutton, pig’s liver, “a
piece of skirt” or “the way the gristle ran” (80). Menus feature “faggots,
tripe and onions, pig’s trotters, black pudding” (62–63). In shop windows,
flies circle “plum-coloured meat, the orange fat, and pallid sausages” (3).
“‘A darling little boiling fowl’” is delivered to the back door, along “with
its windpipe and giblets” (19). “[D]rops of thick blood” (40) run from a
shopping bag, thereby demonstrating that a copy of the Communist Party’s
Daily Worker is “entirely inadequate” for wrapping up liver (41). But the
culmination of this fascination with meat comes when Julia encounters
“‘the very king of butcher’s shops’” (180).
It was a welter of reds—the brown-red of the blood, the deep red of beef and
the paler red of mutton, the bluish red of a bunch of carnations in a jam-jar,
a rosette of scarlet between a pig’s ears. She looked at the pallid, lecherous
64 A. TAIT
dead face, posed there with its rosette, the folds of flesh drawn into a sneer,
the suggestion that it caricatured humanity. But behind it and all around, the
shop flashed and swam with garnet, with ruby and amber. (180)
Conclusion
“Dietary habits proclaim class distinctions”, notes Adams, “but they pro-
claim patriarchal distinctions as well”.65 In To the Lighthouse and At Mrs.
Lippincote’s , dietary habits underline the dominance of a masculine dis-
course which simultaneously promotes and conceals the consumption of
“dead animals”.66 As Derrida puts it, “men do all they can in order to
dissimulate this cruelty or hide it from themselves”.67 According to Der-
rida, this sacrificial structure reflects a carnophallogocentric schema that
installs the “virile” male—as at once carnivorous, masculine, rational, encul-
tured—to a position of dominant centrality.68 Yet that dominance depends
on dualisms which both Taylor and Woolf reject. In Taylor’s work, the
exacting way in which relationships are rendered underlines the impossi-
bility of sustaining the kind of rigidly bounded identities on which dualism
depends. As Taylor emphasizes, lived reality is a complex dynamic, insepa-
rable from an embodied existence, and from the matter that influences it.
66 A. TAIT
Notes
1. Qtd, Birnbaum and Olsson, “An Interview.”
2. Derrida, Points, 280.
3. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 85.
4. Taylor, At Mrs. Lippincote’s , 155.
5. Fiddes, Meat, 2.
6. Rohman, Stalking the Subject, 10.
7. Rohman, Stalking the Subject, 13, 14.
8. Derrida, Points, 280.
9. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 69.
10. Derrida, The Animal, 6, 31.
11. Derrida, Points, 279.
12. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 95.
13. Derrida, Points, 281; Calarco, Zoographies, 131.
4 CARNOPHALLOGOCENTRISM AND THE ACT OF EATING MEAT … 67
Works Cited
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Alt, Christina. Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010.
Beauman, Nicola. The Other Elizabeth Taylor. London: Persephone, 2009.
Birnbaum, Daniel, and Anders Olsson. “An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the
Limits of Digestion,” 1990. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/02/68495/an-
interview-with-jacques-derrida-on-the-limits-of-digestion/. Accessed 8 Febru-
ary 2018.
Bradshaw, David. Introduction to Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, xi– xlvi. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008.
Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Der-
rida. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Dekoven, Marianne. “Modernism and Gender.” In Modernism, edited by Michael
Levenson, 212– 231. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Derrida, Jacques. Points: Interviews, 1974–1994. Edited by Elisabeth Weber. Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
———. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2000.
4 CARNOPHALLOGOCENTRISM AND THE ACT OF EATING MEAT … 69
———. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans-
lated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Fiddes, Nick. Meat: A Natural Symbol. London: Routledge, 1991.
Glendinning, Simon. Derrida: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2011.
Humble, Nicola. The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity,
and Bohemianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Martin, Valerie. Introduction to Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs. Lippincote’s, vii– xii. Lon-
don: Virago, 2013.
McQuillan, Martin. “Does Deconstruction Imply Vegetarianism?” In Derrida Now:
Current Perspectives in Derrida Studies, edited by John W. P. Phillips, 111– 131.
Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
Parsons, Deborah. Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson,
Virginia Woolf. London: Routledge, 2007.
Reeve, N. H. Elizabeth Taylor. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2008.
Rohman, Carrie. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. Chichester:
Columbia University Press, 2009.
Ryan, Derek. Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2013.
Taylor, Elizabeth. At Mrs. Lippincote’s. London: Virago, 2013.
Westling, Louise. “Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World.” New Literary History
30, no. 4 (Autumn 1999): 855– 875.
Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Edited by Anna Snaith.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
———. Congenial Spirits: Selected Letters. Edited by Joanne Trautmann Banks.
London: Pimlico, 2003.
———. To the Lighthouse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
CHAPTER 5
Stewart Cole
George Orwell and W. H. Auden are most readily connected through the
former’s castigation of the latter’s poem “Spain”, specifically its twenty-
first stanza, the original version of which begins: “To-day the deliberate
increase in the chances of death, / The conscious acceptance of guilt in
the necessary murder”.1 Orwell—whose experience fighting fascists in the
Spanish Civil War had been cut short when he was shot through the throat
by a sniper—took particular umbrage at Auden’s characterization of mur-
der as “necessary”, opining that “Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only
possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when
the trigger is pulled”.2 In framing Auden as one “kind of person”, Orwell
sets himself off against the most acclaimed British poet of their shared gen-
eration, implicitly casting himself as a man of action in contrast to Auden’s
political theatrics.3 To a certain extent, history bears this out: both went
to Spain to serve the anti-fascist cause, but while Orwell returned home
S. Cole (B)
University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI, USA
having narrowly escaped death, Auden spent his time in idleness and bore-
dom before returning to London well ahead of schedule. As a result of
such disparities, the two writers have been cast almost as nemeses despite
both being among the most insistently cautionary anti-fascist voices of the
1930s.
That Orwell’s animosity towards Auden and “Spain” arose not simply
out of a perhaps justifiable sense of the poet’s engagement with the Span-
ish conflict as dilettantish and comparatively immaterial, but also out of a
reprehensible homophobia, has often been noted.4 But it is worth return-
ing to the original contexts of Orwell’s bigoted disparagements of Auden
to illuminate just how bound up his brand of anti-fascism is with a cer-
tain physicalized conception of masculinity—an imago of manliness that
seems to extend as if naturally not only into anti-homosexual bigotry, but
into his no less marked contempt for vegetarians, a group he repeatedly
derides in specifically emasculating terms. Indeed, in combining a by-now
proverbial linguistic directness and self-possession with a commitment to
a normative model of masculinity and an assured disdain of the choice not
to eat animal flesh as a deviancy verging on perversion, Orwell serves more
than any other writer of comparable cultural stature to positionally embody
Jacques Derrida’s conception of “carnophallogocentrism”—a term deftly
elucidated by Matthew Calarco as “emphasiz[ing] that the notion of the
subject that is being critiqued in post-humanist thought should be under-
stood not simply as a fully self-present, speaking, masculine subject [i.e., a
phallogocentric subject] but also as a quintessentially human, animal-flesh-
eating subject”.5 As Carol J. Adams puts it (in direct conversation with
Calarco), the concept of carnophallogocentrism is thus useful in highlight-
ing “the linking of carnivorous virility with the speaking subject, and the
linking of the Western subject with meat eating”.6 In examining Orwell’s
denunciations of Auden over the latter half of the 1930s in The Road to
Wigan Pier (1935) and elsewhere, one finds them woven into a discursive
context in which virile masculinity, homophobia, and anti-vegetarianism
seem inextricable. Such a context allows Orwell’s strident authorial voice to
pivot seamlessly between lamenting that “the mere words ‘Socialism’ and
‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice
drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack,
pacifist, and feminist in England” and deriding the typical socialist as “a
prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often
with vegetarian leanings”, one moment bemoaning the lack of a “vigorous
5 “NECESSARY MURDER”: EATING MEAT AGAINST FASCISM … 73
seem harmless enough, as so often with Orwell’s belittlements, one can see
in Auden’s twin denigration of abstinence from animal flesh and women’s
artistic endeavours an embodiment of Adams’s pioneering concept of “the
sexual politics of meat”.10 Rooted in the insight “that women and animals
are similarly positioned in a patriarchal world, as objects rather than sub-
jects”, Adams’s theorization casts the consumption of meat as not only an
expression of bodily virility but, by extension, a continual re-consolidation
of patriarchal supremacy.11 Whether female or not, vegetarians are thus
feminized as a means of denigrating their refusal to exercise a key form of
dominance upon which the carnophallogocentric social order is founded.
As we will see, despite their evident differences as regards sexuality more
generally, Orwell and Auden perpetrate this feminization relatively equally.
One of my key contentions in this chapter is that in the case of the 1930s
context under examination, the exercise of carnophallogocentric domi-
nance takes on a particular urgency in light of the threat posed by fascism to
the integrity of the humanist subject. Especially with the rise of Hitler and
the Nazi party—which would culminate in a Holocaust that effected what
Mark S. Roberts characterizes as “the sheer reduction of humans to sub-
animal abjection”—fascism comes to be seen not just as a political menace
but as a biopolitical one, the insidious guiding ethos of which threatens
not just to install oppressive hierarchies within the human species but to
pseudospeciate within humanity itself, consigning certain marked groups
to an animal or sub-animal status, often as a justificatory prelude to exter-
mination.12 In light of this threat, the oppositional rhetoric of anti-fascist
writers, Orwell and Auden among them, understandably becomes more
forcefully humanist as the 30s proceed—thus Orwell’s repeated paeans
throughout the latter half of the decade to the “ordinary man” and, else-
where, “the mass of the people” and “their innate decency”13 and Auden’s
claim, in the Introduction to a 1938 Left Book Club anthology entitled
Poems of Freedom, about the function of poetry (an assertion typical of his
aspirational conception of art in the pre-war years): “I think it [poetry]
makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to
deceive, which is why, perhaps, all totalitarian theories of the State, from
Plato downwards, have deeply mistrusted the arts”.14 Crucially, however,
“more human” in this context does not mean “more humane,” nor need
decency extend beyond the species line—and in fact if it does (at least to the
extent of vegetarianism), it becomes not just fodder for ridicule but, in its
deviance from the ordinary, an affront to the common humanity that must
be garrisoned as a communal bulwark against fascism. In such a context,
5 “NECESSARY MURDER”: EATING MEAT AGAINST FASCISM … 75
both the murder of animals and the strict human–animal hierarchy that
authorizes it are ostensibly necessary in order to prevent the fascist perpe-
tration of analogous acts of violent hierarchizing within the human species.
This brand of zero-sum logic in regards to animal advocacy is still very much
in evidence today; as Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson point out in their
analysis of contemporary left politics and animal movements, according to
such a logic, “[s]haring in human supremacy over animals—in species nar-
cissism—provides the most effective tool for disadvantaged humans, even if
it cannot be defended philosophically”.15 Consequently, animal advocacy
movements face accusations of trivializing human suffering through their
efforts to call that protective supremacy into question. As I will discuss, this
dynamic strongly informs a prevailing negativity towards vegetarianism in
an England fraught by the growing prominence of European fascism in the
years leading up to the Second World War, and this negativity is exemplified
in Orwell’s and Auden’s writings of the era. In what follows, I will further
delineate how the outbursts of anti-vegetarian rhetoric in the latter 1930s
work of Orwell and Auden all occur within contexts that render them vir-
tually inextricable from the two writers’ opposition to fascism, and further,
how despite their significant differences in aesthetic and even ethical out-
look, both assert the requisite status of the carnophallogocentric subject
not only in their shared negative portrayals of vegetarianism but also, albeit
more implicitly, in casting meat-eating as a necessary form of specifically
human empowerment, solidarity, and resistance.
Viewed as contemporaries who rose to political consciousness in the
years after the First World War and to fame in the ideologically charged
1930s, Orwell and Auden share some crucial common ground. Born into
an assured and ostensibly harmonious Edwardian England, both future
writers observed the war from the halcyon vantage of middle-class public
schoolboys, imbibing jingoistic platitudes and reveling in a pastoral vision
of their homeland as an island of idyllic countrysides, only incidentally
the world’s principal imperial oppressor. As the postwar era bled into the
1920s, however, both young men confronted the dissolution of this mirage.
In 1922, a 19 year-old Orwell set out for Burma to join the Indian Impe-
rial Police, a five-year experience that exposed him to “the dirty work of
Empire at close quarters” and thus became the wellspring of his lifelong
political convictions.16 Auden, though living a much more sheltered exis-
tence and experiencing a far less jolting awakening, also had a first brush
with politics at 19, when during the General Strike of 1926 he volunteered
to drive a transport bus—not as a strike-breaker (as was the case with most
76 S. COLE
of his fellow Oxford undergraduates involved at the time), but rather for
the Trades Union Congress. These marked differences in material expe-
rience amid an apparent similarity in general political orientation would
define the two writers’ public relationships as both emerged into promi-
nence in the 1930s. The publication of Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933) announced Orwell as a formidable verbal documentarian willing to
immerse himself in conditions of poverty and hostility in order to bring
such conditions more forcefully to light. Auden, meanwhile, won instant
fame with the 1930 publication of his first trade collection, the clinical,
gnomic Poems —a book often credited with uniquely capturing the por-
tentous zeitgeist of the burgeoning thirties and inaugurating the young
poet’s circle of friends and contemporaries as “the Auden generation”. As
Samuel Hynes puts it in his landmark book of that title: “Poems invented
a new state of mind, for a new decade. Its world had to be invented, you
might say, in order that the ’thirties could be experienced imaginatively.
The creation of Auden country is the most original literary achievement of
the decade”.17
However original, Auden country nonetheless gains much of its allure
from its frequent air of phantasmagoric irreality. In comparison to the
stark real-world situatedness of Orwell’s work through the first half of the
1930s—especially in immersive nonfictional works like Down and Out and
the essays “The Spike”, “A Hanging”, and “Hop Picking”—the poet’s
work of the same period bears the cultivated air of the fashionably engagé
rather than conveying concrete engagement. Even an overtly political mid-
decade poem like “Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head” (later titled
“A Bride in the Thirties”), which directly references the era’s ideological
turmoil, does so within a theatrical and even campy framework that, in
seeking to draw parallels between the personal and political, amorous and
electoral realms, risks trivializing the human lives at stake amid the dem-
agoguery it pantomimes: “Hitler and Mussolini in their wooing poses /
Churchill acknowledging the voters’ greeting / Roosevelt at the micro-
phone, Van der Lubbe laughing / And our first meeting”.18 Like much of
Auden’s work at this time, the poem’s thematics are strongly informed by
an idiosyncratic mixture of, on the one hand, a political outlook broadly
if nebulously opposed to the status quo, and on the other, a commitment
to the artistic utility of certain primordialist explanatory models drawn
from contemporary literature within and adjacent to psychoanalysis—most
prominently Freud’s late metapsychology, but also the works of Gerald
Heard, Homer Lane, and D. H. Lawrence. In the case of “Easily, my dear,
5 “NECESSARY MURDER”: EATING MEAT AGAINST FASCISM … 77
You and I and the editor of the Times Literary Supp., and the Nancy Poets
and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for
Infants —all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor
drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal
dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.
(5:30–31)
78 S. COLE
That the so-called “Nancy Poets” are included among a paragon of the
literary establishment, the head of the Anglican Church, and a caricature
of a boutique Marxist illustrates the extent to which Auden and his cohort
epitomize for Orwell not just cultural aloofness but a reprehensible—and,
crucially, unmasculine—divorcedness from the world of labour upon which
their prosperity is founded.
This contrastive rhetoric—with the middle classes depicted as woe-
fully out of touch with the ordinary humanity embodied in working-class
habits—also extends to the realm of food, as Orwell repeatedly takes diet
as a sort of litmus test not just for ordinariness, but for humanity itself.
In Chapter VI, he presents two contrasting food expenditure budgets, one
provided to him by an unemployed miner and his wife and the other drawn
from a letter written to the New Statesman as part of what he calls “a dis-
gusting public wrangle about the minimum weekly sum on which a human
being could keep alive”—a debate occasioned by the Means Test used to
determine applicants’ eligibility for unemployment benefits (5:87). The
mining family’s food budget includes ostensible luxuries like sugar and
jam, plus two separate entries for “meat” and “bacon”, while the more
spartan one from the New Statesman (which Orwell acknowledges “repre-
sents about as wise an expenditure as could be contrived”) lists only brown
bread, margarine, dripping, cheese, onions, carrots, broken biscuits, dates,
evaporated milk, and oranges—all eaten raw so as to save on fuel (5:87).
In comparing the two diets thus represented, Orwell notes the scarcity
of vegetables and lack of fruit consumed by the miner’s family, remarking
that “The basis of their diet … is white bread and margarine, corned beef,
sugared tea, and potatoes—an appalling diet” (5:88). This does not pre-
vent him, however, from pronouncing against what he sees as the essential
deviancy of the healthier alternative:
Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like
oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to
the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but
the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing.
The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread
and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have,
the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may
enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man
doesn’t. … When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are under-
fed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome
food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. (5:88)
5 “NECESSARY MURDER”: EATING MEAT AGAINST FASCISM … 79
Not eating meat is thus equated to not pursuing money, with both conceal-
ing behind apparent purity an insidious craving for “less innocent forms of
power”—presumably, given the context, the sorts of sociopathic drives to
domination that fuel the play’s roll call of farcical autocrats. Granted, the
first two lines of the above-quoted passage would seem to highlight a hypo-
critical tension between men’s stated ideals and their essential competitive
suspicion of one another, and so the anaphoric injunction to “Beware”
can ring somewhat ironically, as the inner voice of the afflicted xenophobe.
Viewed in this way, the warning against vegetarians can be read as implic-
itly critiquing the withering of tolerance—even among those who profess
devotion “to God, to Humanity, to Truth, to Beauty”—in the face of
deviance from accepted normality. In other words, the apparent suspicion
expressed here towards “the chaste, the non-smoker and drinker, the veg-
etarian” might actually be read as a rebuke to the mocking stance adopted
by Orwell in Wigan Pier against “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-
wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in
England”, whereby in appointing himself the guardian of ordinary decency,
his humanism becomes an alibi for bigotry.26
Nonetheless, the very presence in Dogskin of vegetarians as emblematic
of puritanical vanity, whether ironic or not (and given the play’s mongrel
status as a picaresque anti-fascist musical revue, it is most profitably read
as both ironic and not), serves to link those who abstain from meat to
the range of other, more insidious purity- and power-seekers who pop-
ulate Alan’s quest. The play’s final scene immediately follows the chorus
discussed above, and in it, Alan and Francis return to Pressan Ambo to
find it newly transfixed upon a jingoistic youth cult, the Lads of Pressan, at
whose inaugural rally the founding Vicar delivers a histrionic sermon that
exhorts: “Only those whose decisions are swift as the sirocco, senses keen
as the finest mirror galvanometer, will constant as the standard inch and of
a chemical purity need apply”.27 The Vicar’s exaltation of “chemical puri-
ty” cannot help but invoke the preceding chorus’s warning against “those
with no obvious vices”, and so within the framework of the play, vege-
tarians serve as minor-key examples of the puritanical egotism at the root
of the various autocracies encountered throughout—including the nascent
fascism of the Lads of Pressan, which Alan and Francis repudiate at the
play’s end by leaving the village to join (in the play’s original version, later
deleted by Auden) “the army of the other side” (555).
This linkage of vegetarians to fascists by way of a shared urge to purity
is forged even more explicitly (though still comedically) in Letters from
82 S. COLE
Meat’s recognizable message includes association with the male role; its
meaning recurs within a fixed gender system; the coherence it achieves as
a meaningful item of food arises from patriarchal attitudes including the idea
that the end justifies the means, that the objectification of other beings is a
necessary part of life, and that violence can and should be masked.35
Notes
1. Auden, “Spain 1937,” lines 81–82.
2. Orwell, Complete Works, 12:104.
3. Orwell, Complete Works, 5:170.
4. See, for example, Bozorth, 156; Goldensohn, 88; and Hitchens, 206.
5. Adams and Calarco, “Derrida,” 33.
6. Adams and Calarco, “Derrida,” 52.
7. Orwell, Complete Works, 5:161, 170.
8. Orwell, Complete Works, 5:159–160.
9. Auden, “Letter to Lord Byron,” Part IV, lines 148–149.
5 “NECESSARY MURDER”: EATING MEAT AGAINST FASCISM … 87
Works Cited
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory.
New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Adams, Carol J., and Matthew Calarco. “Derrida and the Sexual Politics of Meat.”
In Meat Culture, edited by Annie Potts, 31–53. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Auden, W. H. “Easily, My Dear, You Move, Easily Your Head.” In The English
Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927 –1939, edited by Edward
Mendelson, 152–154. London: Faber & Faber, 1977.
———. “Letter to Lord Byron.” In Letters from Iceland, by W. H. Auden and Louis
MacNeice, 15–21, 47–57, 97–105, 198–207. London: Faber & Faber, 1965.
———. Plays and Other Dramatic Writings, 1928–1939. Edited by Edward
Mendelson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
———. Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, Volume 1. Edited by Edward
Mendelson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
———. “Spain 1937.” In The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings,
1927 –1939, edited by Edward Mendelson, 210–212, 424–425. London: Faber
& Faber, 1977.
Auden, W. H., and Louis MacNeice. Letters from Iceland. London: Faber & Faber,
1965.
Bozorth, Richard. Auden’s Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homo-
sexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
Campbell, Timothy. Translator’s Introduction to Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, by
Roberto Esposito, vii–xlii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1981.
Cole, Stewart. “‘The True Struggle’: Orwell and the Specter of the Animal.” LIT:
Literature Interpretation Theory 20, no. 4 (2017): 335–353.
Fleuron, Svend. The Wild Horses of Iceland. Translated by E. Gee Nash. London:
Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1933.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New
York: W. W. Norton, 1965.
Goldensohn, Lorrie. Dismantling Glory: Twentieth-Century Soldier Poetry. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the
1930s. New York: Viking, 1977.
Kim, Claire Jean. “Moral Extensionism or Racist Exploitation? The Use of Holo-
caust and Slavery Analogies in the Animal Liberation Movement.” New Political
Science 33, no. 3 (2011): 311–333.
Kymlicka, Will, and Sue Donaldson. “Animal Rights, Multiculturalism, and the
Left.” Journal of Social Philosophy 45, no. 1 (2014): 116–135.
Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2000.
5 “NECESSARY MURDER”: EATING MEAT AGAINST FASCISM … 89
Orwell, George. The Complete Works of George Orwell. Edited by Peter Davison. 20
vols. London: Secker & Warburg, 1997.
Roberts, Mark S. The Mark of the Beast: Animality and Human Oppression. West
Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2008.
Rossi, John, and John Rodden. “A Political Writer.” In The Cambridge Compan-
ion to George Orwell, edited by John Rodden, 1–11. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Spencer, Colin. The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. Hanover: University
Press of New England, 1995.
CHAPTER 6
John Miller
J. Miller (B)
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Pointedly, the Mizoran diet renders famine, scarcity and poverty unthink-
able while liberating women from patriarchal servitude. IVM in Lane’s
world is a key part of a radical worldview that addresses a network of injus-
tices.
The German sci-fi pioneer Kurd Lasswitz’s 1897 Two Planets (which
includes possibly the second literary depiction of cultured flesh) echoes the
utopian elements of Lane’s fiction. A Martian invasion brings humans into
contact with the “automat sausage” as a sign of the alien race’s superior
technological and cultural achievement.20 There is rather more complex-
ity and ambivalence in Lasswitz’s novel than Lane’s; the benefits of Mar-
tian civilisation in Two Planets seem dubious at times as the depiction of
the interplanetary culture clash includes elements of anti-colonial polemic.
Still, Lasswitz illustrates simulated meat’s role in a cornucopian strand of
thought that contrasts with downbeat Malthusian views of food futures
with their presumption of impending ecological exhaustion.21 Simulated
meat guarantees future abundance and in this regard Lasswitz’s depiction
tallies with Lane’s. As the British statesman Frederick Edward Smith, Earl
of Birkenhead would comment in his 1930 prophecy The World in 2030,
“Synthetic foods and the production of animal tissues in vitro will finally set
at rest those timid minds which prophecy a day when the earth’s resources
will not feed her children”.22 In this context, technology, in the form of
cultured flesh, represents the transcendence of ecological and ideological
limits, not as part of a corporate commodification of animal life, but as an
expression of a progressive politics that was a prominent part of the utopian
imagination from the late nineteenth-century into the first decades of the
twentieth.23
As science fiction developed as a form of mass entertainment from the
1940s onwards, a significant number of literary allusions to cultured flesh
appear. There are, for example, brief references to butcher plants in Clif-
ford D. Simak’s Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), carniculture vats in H.
Beam Piper’s Space Viking (1961) and Four-Day Planet (1963), and beef
trees in John Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977). Stories such as Arthur
C. Clarke’s “Food of the Gods” (1964) and Larry Niven’s “Assimilating
Our Culture, That’s What They’re Doing!” (1978) address IVM in a more
extended fashion and foreground one of its most recurrent and disturbing
possibilities: the in vitro cultivation of human flesh for consumption by
other humans in Clarke’s story and by the alien race the Glig in Niven’s. In
contrast to IVM’s first appearances in Lane’s and Lasswitz’s fiction, what
96 J. MILLER
these texts have in common is a far more despondent sense of the future dur-
ing a “New Dark Age” of dystopian thought marked, as Belasco explains,
by “radical critique of consumer capitalism, technocratic efficiency, and cor-
porate globalization [… and] a strongly Malthusian fear of overpopulation,
congestion and crowding”.24 As far as IVM is concerned, this bleak liter-
ary agenda reaches something like its culmination in 2003 (by which time
cultured flesh was more than a literary fantasy) in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx
and Crake with the disturbing image of ChickieNobs: “bulblike objects”
with “a mouth opening at the top” but no “eyes or beak” which are rather
paradoxically “liberated” by the environmentalist God’s Gardeners.25
This thumbnail sketch illustrates how the literary history of IVM devel-
ops from a sanguine faith in technology in which innovations in food pro-
duction will help, like Lasswitz’s Martians, to “fulfil the idea of humanity”
(130), towards a bleak view of the catastrophic ecological consequences of
techno-capitalism which, by contrast, provides evidence of something like
the failure of humanity.
Appearing after the cornucopian enthusiasm of the inter-war years had
been successively soured by the great depression and the Second World
War and before the outbreak of 1950s’ baby-boomer optimism, The Space
Merchants occupies a significant historical juncture. Set in a future in which
an ecologically-devastated world is largely controlled by rival advertising
corporations and consumerism is elevated to the status of a religion, the nar-
rative follows the tribulations of the “copysmith” Mitch Courteney, whose
career initially seems destined for the stars when he is given responsibility
for marketing an attempt to colonise Venus by Fowler Schocken Associates
(one of the world’s largest ad agencies). Apparent commercial intrigue sees
Mitch kidnapped; his death is announced in the media, while he is sent to
Costa Rica on a significantly-named vessel, the Thomas Malthus, to work
as an indentured labourer with the new identity of George Groby. His
new role is “scum-skimmer” on a Chlorella Proteins plantation, harvest-
ing algae from a series of tanks in a “towering eighty-storey structure”.26
Mitch becomes involved—initially half-heartedly, later more sincerely—
with the World Conservationist Association, or the Consies as they are
known (evidently an echo of America’s post-war bête noir, the commies).
He joins a widely demonised organisation committed to fighting “the reck-
less exploitation of natural resources” and the “needless poverty and […]
human misery it has created” (81). Working undercover, Mitch returns
to America and is reunited with his estranged wife Kathy (also, it turns
6 THE LITERARY INVENTION OF IN VITRO MEAT … 97
After ten years with Chlorella he had worked his way up […] to Master Slicer.
He worked in the great, cool vault underground where Chicken Little grew
and was cropped by him and other artisans. He swung a sort of two-handed
sword that carved off great slabs of the tissue, leaving it to the lesser packers
and trimmers and their faceless helpers to weight it, shape it, freeze it, cook
it, flavour, it, package it, and ship it off to the area on quota for the day.
He had more than a production job. He was a safety valve. Chicken Little
grew and grew, as she had been growing for decades. Since she had started as
a lump of heart tissue, she didn’t know any better than to grow up against a
foreign body and surround it. She didn’t know any better than to grow and
fill the concrete vault and keep growing, compressing her cells and rupturing
6 THE LITERARY INVENTION OF IN VITRO MEAT … 99
them. As long as she got nutrient, she grew. Herrera saw to it that she grew
round and plump, that no tissue got old and tough before it was sliced.
(78–79)
designed to protect Chicken Little from the cancers she is prone to, Her-
rera proudly announces “This is her nest” (86) as her biotechnological
body figuratively assumes an animal nature. Presently, Herrera professes a
certain fondness for her, “whack[ing] the rubbery thing affectionately with
the flat of his slicer” (86). The curious whack recalls a kind of workplace
sexual harassment that features elsewhere in Pohl’s fiction. The Merchants’
War, for example, the sequel to The Space Merchants , published in 1984
(some time after Kornbluth’s death), sees its hero Tennison Tarb deliver
a “friendly pat” to the “bottom” of a female co-worker (52). The con-
nection between these incidents is distant in time, but the echo is notable.
Chicken Little is integrated into a human community of labour in a way that
forges intimacy, even implicitly sexual intimacy; note Hererra’s mission to
see that Chicken Little remains enticingly “round and plump” rather than
“old and tough”, as if part of his job is to keep her available to the stereo-
typical terms of heterosexual desire. As such, Herrera’s apparent affection
suggests a progression from the theriomorphic to the anthropomorphic,
bringing her into the pale of human social interactions, albeit only in order
to objectify her as the butt of his lubricious attentions. It is not sufficient
to think of Chicken Little simply as inert protein for human consumption;
she is both affectively and ideologically more dynamic than that.
There are a number of distinct elements to Pohl and Kornbluth’s con-
struction of Chicken Little’s ontological status, therefore. Chicken Little
is animalised, humanised and victimised. Such complexity is enhanced by
Pohl and Kornbluth’s evocative use of the term “protoplasm” (87) which
insists on Chicken Little’s Semi-Living flesh as an embodiment of a fun-
damental, cross-species biological materiality. Protoplasm is a term with a
long history, coined in 1839 but formalised by T. H. Huxley in 1869 in
an essay “On the Physical Basis of Life” as the idea that there might be a
“kind of matter which is common to all living beings, and that […] endless
diversities are bound together by a physical, as well as an ideal, unity”.36
Huxley concedes that this notion is “shocking to common sense” (7) and
asks, poetically, “what community of form, or structure, is there between
the animalcule and the whale, or between the fungus and the fig tree and,
a fortiori, between all four?” (8). In Huxley’s work protoplasm is a term
that expresses a general edibility through the idea that there is a “single
physical basis of life underlying all the diversities of vital existence” (9).
Specifically, the “identity of that substance in all living beings” underlies
and is evidenced by “a catholicity of assimilation” (that is, the absorption
of one body into another) shared by humans “with other animals, all of
6 THE LITERARY INVENTION OF IN VITRO MEAT … 101
plush offices is clinched when Mitch observes that “every piece of furni-
ture is constructed from top to bottom of authentic, expertised, genuine
tree-grown wood” (8). In trying to win back Kathy (before his Consie con-
version) Mitch makes an extravagant romantic gesture: “I’m going to buy
you a real flower!” (44). High-end jewellery is now made from wood (50).
For all that Consie ideology is seen as a radical challenge to consumerist
hegemony, consumerist hegemony contains a similar privileging of the nat-
ural over the simulated to that which underpins Consie thought. For sure,
in the early stages of the novel Mitch is scathing of environmentalism.
“Consie sentiment”, he reflects, comes “down to one thing: Nature’s way
of living was the right way of living” (19, original emphasis). The world
may be in a parlous state but, for Mitch, “[s]cience is always a step ahead
of the failure of natural resources” (19, original emphasis). Notwithstand-
ing such disavowals of nature and the widespread hegemonic attachment
to commodity culture, there remains a strong affective link to the natu-
ral environment that the novel’s narrative structure endorses by charting
Mitch’s capitalist apostasy. Importantly, meat is part of this picture. Pohl
and Kornbluth’s creation of Chicken Little is offset by numerous references
to high-end real meat. Fowler Schocken, for instance, has not “tasted any
protein but new protein for years” (8). Mitch himself “can’t stand anything
but new protein” and complains at the taste of “regenerated-protein mer-
chandise” (29). After he starts turning his copysmith skills to the Consie
cause, Mitch’s first idea is to stimulate desire for roast beef to make con-
sumers “think about the old days favourably” (89). Cultured flesh in The
Space Merchants is very much a secondary product that serves to evoke
the supposed satisfactions of the authentic, and now luxurious, product it
imitates.
A resonant moment in The Merchants’ War illustrates this interrelation
between real and cultured meats. The Merchants’ War is the story of the
fall and rise of Tennison Tarb, a star-class adman who gets addicted to
mokie-koke (a mixture of coffee and cocaine), but eventually gets his life
back under control and masterminds what seems to be the beginning of
the end of consumer capitalism. Chicken Little does not feature in the
follow-up text but there are numerous references to the ironically named
product ReelMeat, made from cell cultures (138). While serving with the
military in the Gobi Desert, one of the few enclaves yet to be incorporated
into consumer capitalism, Tarb witnesses a disturbing scene in a vineyard
outbuilding during which he discovers his friend Gert Martels has “one
bad habit”:
104 J. MILLER
I smelled the shed yards before I reached it. It was used for drying grapes into
raisins, and it was heavy with a winy stink. But over and above that sickening
fruit stench there was something stronger—not just stronger. Almost fright-
ening. It was a little like food—ReelMeat, maybe, or TurrKee—but there was
something wrong with the smell. Not spoilage. Worse than spoilage […]
They had built a fire—to see by while they ate stolen rations, I assumed.
Wrong assumption. There were half a dozen troopers gathered round the
fire in the shed, and what they were doing with the fire was desiccating an
animal over it. Worse than that, they were eating the dead animal. Gert
Martels stared up at me open-mouthed, and in her hand was part of its limb.
She was holding it by its skeleton. (125, original emphasis)
utopians sought to critique. Yet it is hard to reduce the novel’s animal pol-
itics simply to a reactionary meat craving. An effect of Mitch’s conversion
from ad-man to Consie is that as the novel progresses it becomes increas-
ingly difficult to tell one side from the other. Just as Mitch is at times a capi-
talist and at times an environmentalist, so Runstead is a notably ambivalent
figure. As Pohl and Kornbluth endeavour to tie the threads of the plot
together at the end, Runstead is discovered to have been (in Mitch’s eyes
at any rate) “posing as a Consie who was posing as a copysmith” (165).
Nothing like an authentic ideological position is ever revealed. Rather than
a stereotypical good-guys-against-bad-guys narrative, The Space Merchants
is, satisfyingly, a good deal more complex. The novel in this way refuses the
assumption of a naïve position outside capitalist ideology. Just as the Con-
sies meet inside Chicken Little, so Mitch uses his copysmith skills to reen-
ergise the largely incompetent Consie movement so that environmentalism
is integrated, problematically, into the forms of consumer capitalism. If the
novel voices a reactionary appetite for old-fashioned animal flesh, it also
emphasises that such a perspective emerges from within capitalist frame-
work that is always working to produce desire—and desire is, necessarily in
a world structured around advertising, the least stable of experiences. The
novel encourages us to take its nostalgic valorisation of conventional meat
with a pinch of salt.
This ambivalence leads us to think about the novel’s critique of biotech-
nology as something subtler than a reactionary fetishisation of natural meat
and something that intersects strikingly with current concerns. Melinda
Cooper argues that the development of neoliberalism from the 1970s
onwards was intimately connected with the rise of biotechnology in that
same period. Central to the operation of a neoliberal order is the availability
of debt. As Cooper puts it, in the early 1970s:
the United States transformed itself into the focal point of an effective debt
imperialism—a world empire that is curiously devoid of tangible reserves or
collateral, an empire that sustains itself rather as the evanescent focal point of
a perpetually renewed debt and whose interests lie in the continuous repro-
duction of promise.42
Debt, in financial terms, is what makes the world go around. On the one
hand, this observation locates a profound abyss at the centre of the capitalist
world system; as Cooper continues, “the debt form is no longer referenced
to any known terrestrial reserves”; neoliberalism is structurally divorced
106 J. MILLER
from ecological reality. On the other hand, this abyss is also “deeply mate-
rialist: that is, it seeks to materialize its promise in the production of matter,
forces and things”.43 The result is a situation in which capitalism works
towards, in Richard Twine’s phrase, “the biotechnological trumping of
ecological and material limits”.44 Cultured flesh promises to achieve pre-
cisely this explosion of the terrestrial bounds to capital’s expansion in the
service of the redemption of neoliberalism’s promise. When global finance
functions in a political imaginary “devoid of tangible reserves or collateral”,
IVM becomes the necessary form of protein: food that is dreamt up from
(close to) nothing.
Significantly, debt is central to experience in The Space Merchants on
both an individual and ecological level. The conditions of Mitch’s employ-
ment on the Chlorella Proteins plantation are based on the necessity of the
worker’s debt as a means of social control. It does not take Mitch long to
realise that “You never got out of debt. Easy credit was part of the system
and so were the irritants that forced you to use it” (79). The result is that
it is nearly impossible to leave Chlorella Plantations. At the same time as
Mitch lives beyond his means, so does the planet: drawing down resources
to support an unsupportable population as the biosphere appears locked
into entropy. The planned Consie way-out by starting a colony on Venus
abandons Earth as a lost cause and, anyway, when the colony is depicted
in The Merchants’ War, it is discovered to be anything but a utopia: arid,
bleak and inhospitable.
Faced with such ruin, capital only accelerates, promising a future the
earth is not equipped to provide. Chicken Little is the abject, pulsating
form of this promise: the neoliberal beast par excellence that incarnates the
novel’s insistence on a ubiquitous ideological formation built on mate-
rial impossibility. As Richard Dienst writes in a trenchant study of the
neoliberal politics of debt, indebtedness produces “a kind of reverse ecolo-
gy” through which “all-encompassing economic institutions set the terms
whereby nature and humankind will pay for their own survival”.45 As we
find ourselves on the brink (perhaps) of an in-vitrotarian revolution, cul-
tured flesh indicates not so much the triumph of the biotechnological imag-
ination as the failure of political wisdom and the ever-deepening operation
of sustainability as a signature promise, albeit an always-already broken one,
of neoliberalism.
6 THE LITERARY INVENTION OF IN VITRO MEAT … 107
Notes
1. New Harvest, “Mission & Vision.”
2. New Harvest, “Mission & Vision.”
3. New Harvest, “Mission & Vision.”
4. Despite the optimism that has surrounded the development of in vitro meat,
a recent report from researchers at the University of Oxford has offered a
less rosy view. IVM may even be worse for the climate than conventional
meat, depending on the source of the energy used in its production. See
McGrath, “Cultured Lab Meat.”
5. Hopkins and Dacey, “Vegetarian Meat,” 93.
6. New Harvest, “Mission and Vision.” There has recently been a backlash
against IVM’s claim to be real meat with farmers in the U.S. looking to
legislators to ban the use of the word meat for products cultivated in vitro.
In the words of Jim Dinklage, president of the Independent Cattlemen of
Nebraska, “The word meat, to me, should mean a product from a live ani-
mal”. See Popper, “You Call That Meat?”
7. Pearce, “Give Up Eating Meat.”
8. Friedrich, “Clean Meat”; Shapiro, Clean Meat.
9. Shapiro describes New Harvest founder Jason Matheny running focus
groups to come up with a customer friendly name for IVM. Apparently,
“test-tube meat” and “synthesised meat” were seen to lack glamour; “in
meatro”, “green meat” and “meat without feet” were seen as more promis-
ing. Matheny’s personal favourite is “hydroponic meat” (Shapiro, Clean
Meat, 46).
10. Stephens, “In Vitro Meat,” 400.
11. Liem, “Memphis Meat Scientist.”
12. O’Riordan, Unreal Objects, 101.
13. Adams, “Frankenmeat.”
14. Catts and Zurr, “The Tissue Culture and Art Project,” 154.
15. Catts and Zurr, “Disembodied Livestock,” 106.
16. Catts and Zurr, “Disembodied Livestock,” 106. Part of the problem with
IVM currently is that, as Shapiro notes, “one cow fetus can provide enough
serum for just a single kilogram of meat” (Clean Meat, 62), although
progress is being made in producing non-animal based serums.
17. Miller, “In Vitro Meat.”
18. Lane, Mizora, 18, 113.
19. Belasco, Meals to Come, 206, 101.
20. Lasswitz, Two Planets, 49.
21. See Belasco, Meals to Come, 86 on the historical tension between the cor-
nucopian and the Malthusians views of food futures.
22. Smith, The World in 2030, 20.
23. For a detailed account of utopian food thinking (see Belasco, Food to Come,
95–118).
108 J. MILLER
Works Cited
Adams, Cody. “Frankenmeat: Growing a Burger in a Petri Dish.” http://
bigthink.com/floating-university/frankenmeat-growing-a-burger-in-a-petri-
dish. Accessed 9 March 2018.
Amis, Martin. New Maps of Hell. London: Penguin, 2012 (1960).
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. London: Virago, 2004.
Belasco, Warren. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food. Oakland, CA:
University of California Press, 2006.
Brennan, John P. “The Mechanical Chicken: Psyche and Society in The Space Mer-
chants.” Extrapolation 25, no. 2 (1984): 101–114.
Calarco, Matthew. Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Catts, Oron, and Ionat Zurr. “Growing Semi-Living Sculptures: The Tissue Culture
& Art Project.” Leonardo 35, no. 4 (2002): 365–370.
6 THE LITERARY INVENTION OF IN VITRO MEAT … 109
———. “The Tissue Culture and Art Project: The Semi-Living as Agents of Irony.”
In Performance and Technology, edited by S Broadhurst and J Machon, 153–168.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
———. “Disembodied Livestock: The Promise of a Semi-Living Utopia.” Parallax
19, no. 1 (2013): 101–113.
Clarke, Arthur C. “Food of the Gods.” In The Wind from the Sun, 3–7. London:
Victor Gollancz, 1964.
Cooper, Melinda. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal
Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.
Dienst, Richard. The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good. London:
Verso, 2011.
Friedrich, Bruce. “‘Clean Meat’: The ‘Clean Energy of Food’.” http://www.gfi.
org/clean-meat-the-clean-energy-of-food. Accessed 7 March 2018.
Hopkins, Patrick D., and Austen Lacey. “Vegetarian Meat: Could Technology Save
Animals and Satisfy Meat Eaters?” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental
Ethics 21, no. 6 (2008): 579–596.
Huxley, T. H. On the Physical Basis of Life. New Haven, CT: Charles C. Chatfield,
1870.
Lane, Mary Bradley. Mizora: A Prophecy. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2007
(1881).
Lasswitz, Kurd. Two Planets. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
1971 (1895).
Lestel, Dominique. Eat This Book: A Carnivore’s Manifesto. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2016.
Liem, Emma. “Memphis Meat Scientist: The World Is Ready for Clean Meat.”
https://www.fooddive.com/news/memphis-meats-scientist-the-world-is-
ready-for-clean-meat/445892/. Accessed 9 March 2018.
McGrath, Matt. “Cultured Lab Meat May Make Climate Change Worse.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47283162. Accessed 23
April 2019.
McHugh, Susan. “Real Artificial: Tissue-Cultured Meat, Genetically Modified
Farm Animals, and Fictions.” Configurations 18, no. 1 (2010): 181–197.
Miller, John. “In Vitro Meat: Power, Authenticity and Vegetarianism.” Journal for
Critical Animal Studies 10, no. 4 (2012): 41–63.
Milner, Andrew John, and Robert Ian Savage. “Pulped Dreams: Utopia and Amer-
ican Pulp Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 35, no. 1 (2008): 31–47.
The National Chicken of Tomorrow Committee. The Chicken of Tomorrow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPYYwdI0tIc. Accessed 7 March 2018.
New Harvest. “Mission & Vision.” http://www.new-harvest.org/about. Accessed
23 April 2019.
Niven, Larry. “Assimilating Our Culture, That’s What They’re Doing!” In The
Draco Tavern, 17–24. New York: Tor, 1978.
110 J. MILLER
Seán McCorry
The cannibal is the perfect demon for a culture based on geographic and
scientific expansion and progress, which yet fears its own consuming appetites
and displaces them onto others.
—Maggie Kilgour, “Cannibals and Critics”1
S. McCorry (B)
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
was figured as an indicator that the imagined victory of human over non-
human was thoroughly precarious, and particularly endangered in our time
by the new pressures of post-war demographics. What was finally at stake in
these texts’ representations of cannibalism was an evaluation of the project
of modernity itself. Does scientific and technological development elevate
the human, as its proponents claim, or does it rather tend to dissolve human
exceptionalism through its deployment of fundamentally inhuman strate-
gies of calculation and instrumentalisation? How does meat (human or
nonhuman) map on to this story of modernity, and with what costs for
nonhuman animal lives?
Soylent Green represents an early attempt by Hollywood to explicitly
thematise anxieties around population pressure, resource scarcity, and the
survival (or not) of humanism in the face of capitalism’s vicious commit-
ment to efficiency at any cost. While accounts of early capitalism emphasised
frugality and thrift as dispositions that were well-suited to capitalist accumu-
lation,5 Soylent shows how these attitudes map neatly on to postwar fears
of impending demographic crisis. Released in the period when Fox would
have been undertaking her ecological research on notonectids, the film fol-
lows her analysis by imagining cannibalism as a radical solution to resource
scarcity. We follow Charlton Heston’s Detective Frank Thorn, an officer
in a corrupt police department, as he investigates the murder of William
Simonson, a senior executive at the Soylent Corporation. As characterised
by Thorn’s roommate and mentor Sol Roth, Soylent is a monopoly which
“controls the food supply for half the world”. Roth works for Thorn as a
police “book”, a researcher whose access to archives helps Thorn to build
his cases. Roth and his fellow police books are portrayed by older actors,
intimating that literacy and humanistic learning will face an uncertain future
in late industrial capitalism.6 Roth and Thorn share a dingy, claustrophobi-
cally small apartment, an arrangement made necessary by the rapid growth
of the United States’ population. These same population pressures have
made food a scarce resource, the production and rationing of which is
carried out by capitalist monopolies like Soylent in collaboration with an
enthusiastically repressive state apparatus.
Adapted from Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!,
Soylent Green is one of a number of seventies’ films that responded to a wave
of institutional and activist environmental interventions in that decade,
notably the first Earth Day and the establishment of the United States’
Environmental Protection Agency.7 These interventions were responding
in turn to a developing awareness of the extraordinary growth rate of the
114 S. MCCORRY
refuge in nature have been made obsolete by the dual pressure of popu-
lation growth and the securitisation of the remaining natural resources, as
Thorn’s lover Shirley discovers when she expresses a desire to leave New
York:
must be brought into balance with the death rate or mankind will breed
itself into oblivion. We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms
of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out” (xii).
Ehrlich’s attention to reproductivity and his deployment of metaphors of
physical illness place him firmly within a tradition of biopolitical thinking
which takes as its point of departure the recognition that human life must
be understood precisely as life; that is, as a set of biological dispositions
and requirements (for reproduction, food, and health, say) that it is the
task of power to manage and intervene in. As Michel Foucault puts it,
excavating these strategies of “bio-power” means tracing “how, starting
from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the
fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species”.13 Foucault
identifies biopolitics as a political strategy which emerges with the devel-
opment of discourses of public health and demographics in the eighteenth
century, but his descriptions of the biopolitical mode of governance are
especially resonant with the ecologically-inflected turn towards population
in the twentieth century. As he puts it, “instead of affecting individuals as
a set of legal subjects capable of voluntary actions, […] one tries to affect,
precisely, a population, […] a multiplicity of individuals who are and fun-
damentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality
in which they live” (21).
In the second half of the twentieth century, the question of global
population became a key site for biopolitical intervention from intellec-
tuals, governments, and non-governmental organisations. The biopolitics
of population stand in an ambivalent relation to humanism, understood
as that mode of politics which centres human agency, capacities, and dig-
nity. While Ehrlich wants to guarantee not only human existence but also
a certain quality of life which is compatible with human dignity, in his dis-
course on population he engages for the most part with those aspects of
human life—bodies, food, pathology, dependency—which are convention-
ally absent from humanist analyses. Humanism figures the human subject
through a conceptual schema that privileges cognition and autonomous
self-sufficiency over embodiment and dependence on environmental exter-
nalities, yet the biopolitics of population is necessarily more concerned with
the latter, however much it ultimately aims at safeguarding the “higher”
human capacities.
Moreover, in delimiting its sphere of concern and intervention, biopol-
itics finds itself operating in contexts which are never exclusively human,
least of all when questions of food production and security are centred.
118 S. MCCORRY
As the political theorist Dinesh Wadiwel puts it, “The modern sovereign
[…] not only manages the life of its human subjects, but turns its attention
to the management of all animal and plant life within its domain”.14 Impor-
tantly, however much the biopolitical sovereign may aim at safeguarding
human prestige and well-being, it does so by shortening the ontological
distance between the human and the nonhuman, treating both as instances
of biological matter to be managed, fostered, or (if necessary) destroyed.
Within this frame, humans are ethically and politically privileged (in the
sense that the world system is managed for their benefit and security) even
as they are ontologically decentred by a biopolitical method which is far
more interested in them as living animals than as political subjects.
Soylent Green testifies to this ambivalent position of the human in the
biopolitics of population management. On the one hand, the human is
absolutely privileged within the terms of this discourse, so that sustainability
becomes sustainability for the human. In this vein, a major strand of the
scientific-technical debate on “overpopulation” involved calculating and
securing an optimum level of animal-agricultural production to provide
humans with a sustainable supply of animal protein.15 At the same time,
population biopolitics tends to flatten the differences between human and
nonhuman by treating humans not as sovereign subjects but as living bodies
alongside other living bodies. Soylent Green leverages this displacement of
human sovereignty by dislocating cannibalism from its imaginative role as
an exemplary signifier for “uncivilized” pre-modern values and practices.
Instead, the rediscovery of the edibility of the human body is presented
as the necessary corollary of a thoroughly modern discourse of population
management, shorn of its vestigial commitment to human exceptionalism.
In spite of their methodological focus on humans as biological actors
rather than as humanist subjects, ecologists’ accounts of global population
crisis emphasised the humanistic value of their work. In the best-selling
Limits to Growth (1972) report, for instance, the authors insist that “the
crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but
even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless
existence” (197). This, then, is a biopolitics in which power acts on the
biological life of the species in order to securitise something more valu-
able: human dignity, in the orthodox humanist sense. Mere survival here is
associated with (and deprecated as) the simple fact of humanity’s existence
as an animal species among others. The horror of reversion to a “worthless
existence” stalks the work of both population ecologists and Soylent Green.
7 “THEY’LL BE BREEDING US LIKE CATTLE!” … 119
But what counts as “worthless existence” here? And, thinking with Soy-
lent Green, how does meat figure in an economy of value which confers
worthlessness on certain modes of living and dying? In Fleischer’s film,
humans are figured in ways that bypass the usual markers of humanist sub-
jectivity. The characters are flat—narrative functions rather than biograph-
ical persons—and they are frequently referred to in ways that emphasise
their corporeality as living (or dead) bodies: Simonson, the murder victim
at the centre of the narrative, is “butchered” with a meat-hook; corpses
are neither buried nor mourned, but taken to a “waste disposal plant” (in
fact, the Soylent production line); “scoops”, or waste disposal trucks fit-
ted with bulldozer blades, deal with food rioters, positioning human life
as biological matter to be managed by industrial machinery; corporeality is
again centred in the representation of the extraordinarily dense crowds that
Thorn must navigate in order to go about his business as a police detective,
the masses living in a proximity which is reminiscent of contemporaneous
developments in intensive animal agriculture.16
The implication of all of this is that over-populated modern life is close to
a state of “worthless existence”, understood as human life without human-
ist propriety. Meat enters here as an index of scarcity, a marker of pres-
tige, and an icon of a past which is diminishing in memory. The poor are
fed by handouts from the Soylent Corporation which consist of “high-
energy vegetable concentrates” made from soybeans and phytoplankton
(and, of course, human bodies). No longer “Man the Hunter”, the car-
nivorous origin myths which had captivated twentieth-century anthropol-
ogists like Raymond Dart (1953) and Richard B. Lee and Irven Devore
(2009 [1968]) have been swept away by a scarcity-enforced reliance on a
vegetarian diet founded on phytoplankton, the “lowest” trophic level—a
development that the film clearly registers as a loss of species prestige, and
a kind of inversion of evolutionary teleology.17
The ruling classes can buy their way out of this injury to human pride
by purchasing meat on the black market. These establishments, which are
referred to as “meat-leggers” in Harry Harrison’s novel (43), are protected
by caged enclosures in the style of a nineteenth-century bank, and they sell
meat at a price which makes it unavailable to all but the richest customers.
In the novel, we learn that dog-meat is standard fare, while beefsteak is their
rarest and most prestigious product (42–43). In a lingering shot, the film
shows us a single joint of beef, destined for Soylent executive Simonson’s
plate.
120 S. MCCORRY
the acute horror of becoming meat for another is the culmination of the
waning of anthropocentrism which has been produced by the population
crisis in late capitalist modernity. In Matthew Calarco’s words, “part of
inhabiting the subject position of the human is to situate oneself and other
human beings on the side of being fundamentally inedible: human beings
eat others but are not eaten by others, especially not other animals”.20
Soylent Green invites us to imagine that access to meat is a key marker of
a human sovereignty which it never seriously puts into question, however
much it regrets some of the more injurious effects of this sovereignty on
the biosphere. It registers the end of meat (and the eventual becoming
meat of the human) as a symptom of sovereignty on the wane. I wonder
instead whether we can think the disappearance of meat not as something to
be mourned, but as a productive position from which to rethink relations
between human and nonhuman beyond the presumption of sovereignty
and the instrumental calculations of anthropocentric biopolitics.
Notes
1. Kilgour, “Cannibals and Critics,” 22.
2. Fox, “Factors Influencing Cannibalism,” 940.
3. Most recently, Bill Schutt’s Eat Me: A Natural and Unnatural History of
Cannibalism. I am indebted to Schutt’s book for alerting me to Laurel
R. Fox’s research.
4. See also Fox, “Cannibalism in Natural Populations.”
5. See, most famously, Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the “Spirit” of
Capitalism.
6. Indeed, writing materials are unavailable to all but the richest citizens, and
Roth is astonished when Thorn pilfers pens and papers from the home of
the wealthy murder victim Simonson. Roth’s characterisation borrows from
Ray Bradbury’s Faber in Fahrenheit 451: both are former professors who
have been made redundant by the devaluation of intellectual work in late
capitalism, and both are the humanistic voice of conscience in their respective
texts, articulating anxieties about the direction of the new mass society.
7. Murray and Heumann, Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge, 93.
8. Other contemporaneous texts engaging with population pressure and
resource scarcity include John Brunner’s expansive and formally experimen-
tal novel Stand On Zanzibar (1968), Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 film Silent
Running, and especially Michael Anderson’s 1976 adaptation of William
F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s Logan’s Run (1967), which imag-
ines a similar anthropophagic end to technological development. More
recently, The Matrix (1999) and Cloud Atlas (2004) have revisited Soylent
122 S. MCCORRY
Green’s imaginative conceit that late capitalism will eventually turn towards
the human body as a source of cannibalistic sustenance.
9. For a compelling account of Heston’s filmic articulation of racialised human-
ism, see McHugh, “Horses in Blackface.”
10. Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1953) does
similar work to reimagine red politics as green, figuring conservations (or
“Consies”) as a clandestine revolutionary organisation.
11. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold
War, 118–156.
12. Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth, 268.
13. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 1.
14. Wadiwel, “Cows and Sovereignty,” n.d.
15. The authors of The Limits to Growth note that “food from animal sources is
of greater value in sustaining human life” (106) and produce charts tracing
the varying quantities of animal protein consumed in the developed and
developing world. In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich similarly asserts that
“Protein is the key to the world food problem” (21), noting again that
animal flesh is the source of the “highest quality” protein. He is particularly
disturbed by the fact that, in the West, ‘we feed a great deal of the protein
we import to our pets’ (23), positioning this as a failure of species solidarity
with other humans.
16. On corporeality and proximity in overpopulation narratives, see Ursula
K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination
of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 74.
17. Dart, “The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man” and Lee and Devore,
Man the Hunter.
18. Parry, “Oryx and Crake and the New Nostalgia for Meat,” 254.
19. Hughes, “The Ends of the Earth: Narrative and Identity in Dystopian
Film,” 28.
20. Calarco, Thinking Through Animals, 60.
Works Cited
Anderson, Michael, dir. Logan’s Run. 1976. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Bashford, Alison. Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine, 1953.
Brunner, John. Stand on Zanzibar. London: Doubleday, 1968.
Calarco, Matthew. Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Dart, Raymond A. “The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man.” International
Anthropological and Linguistic Review 1 (1953): 201–219.
7 “THEY’LL BE BREEDING US LIKE CATTLE!” … 123
Dominic O’Key
Introduction
In this essay, I want to approach the question of literature and meat by
considering a writer whose works are only rarely thought of outside a tra-
ditionally humanist framework, let alone inside a framework that is crit-
ical of industrial meat production. This writer is the late German author
W. G. Sebald (1944–2001), whose hybrid1 prose fictions such as The Emi-
grants (1992) and Austerlitz (2001)—written in German and met with
international acclaim when translated into English—have been canonized
as exemplars of a late twentieth-century world literature that asks “what it
means to be human after the Holocaust”.2 The prevailing scholarship on
Sebald tends to connect his texts’ “oblique and tentative […] approach to
the Holocaust”3 to a wider thematic preoccupation with the violence of
modernity.4 Viewed in this light, Sebald’s texts are said to perform a kind
of “memory work”5 that wants to re-present and salvage the forgotten
victims of modernity. Sebald himself frames his literary project in this way:
D. O’Key (B)
Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
narrator orders a plate of fish and chips at a hotel; the second is a historical
narration of North Sea herring fishing. Taken together, these passages’ dif-
ferent narrative strategies—humour, historical analysis, and the placing of
in-text images—develop a latent critique of flesh-eating and aquaculture.
Finally, I end this chapter by bringing Sebald’s natural history of the herring
into conversation with the recent “oceanic turn” in popular and critical dis-
courses.11 Sebald’s natural history of the herring not only anticipates this
critical understanding of oceanic degradation. It can also be claimed as a
text which enlists innovative representational strategies in order to call into
question the politics of eating. Sebald, who lived as a vegetarian for ethico-
political reasons, uses important moments of his literary project in order
to contest fish-eating.12
That evening I was the sole guest in the huge dining room, and it was the
same startled person who took my order and shortly afterwards brought me
a fish that had doubtless lain entombed [vergrabenen] in the deep-freeze for
years. The breadcrumb armor-plating had been partly singed by the grill,
and the prongs of my fork bent on it. Indeed it was so difficult to penetrate
what eventually proved to be nothing but an empty shell that my plate was
a hideous mess once the operation was over. The tartare sauce was turned
grey by the sooty breadcrumbs, and the fish itself, or what feigned to be fish
[was ihn vorstellen sollte], lay a sorry wreck [Hälfte zerstört ] among the grass-
green peas and the remains of soggy chips that gleamed with fat. (Rings 43;
Ringe 58)
Pivoting on this “but”, Sebald’s narrator negates the earlier tradition of nat-
ural history. Rather than perceiving nature as a timeless abundance, Sebald’s
narrator highlights the co-implication of the human and the nonhuman,
and even draws the reader’s attention to the limits of human knowledge:
“But the truth is that we do not know what the herring feels” (56). This
formulation does not imply that, because we do not know what the herring
feels, we can therefore do as we please. Rather than abdicating responsi-
bility, this appeal to non-knowledge is an ethically attuned corrective that
cuts across the Enlightenment’s “thirst for knowledge”. Against the notion
that only the “higher animals” feel pain and fear, Sebald’s narrator articu-
lates how such ideologies authorize intensive over-fishing and its attendant
threats to the species. For Sebald’s narrator, not knowing is not enough to
inflict pain.
Sebald’s Natural-History also highlights the toxicity, mutation and death
among North Sea species affected by deposited pollutants. “Every year”,
Sebald writes, “the rivers bear thousands of tons of mercury, cadmium and
lead, and mountains of fertilizer and pesticides, out into the North Sea”.
8 HERRING FISHERIES, FISH-EATING AND NATURAL HISTORY … 135
Owing to this industrial pollution, “toxic substances sink into the waters
of the Dogger Bank, where a third of the fish are now born with strange
deformities and excrescences”:
Time and again, off the coast, rafts of poisonous algae are sighted covering
many square miles and reaching thirty feet into the deep, in which the crea-
tures of the sea die in shoals. In some of the rarer varieties of plaice, crucian or
bream, the females, in a bizarre mutation, are increasingly developing male
sexual organs and the ritual patterns of courtship are now no more than a
dance of death, the exact opposite of the notion of the wondrous increase
and perpetuation of life with which we grew up. (53)
Conclusion
Recently, there has been a critical turn towards the sea.45 Whether respond-
ing directly or indirectly to what Callum Roberts calls our “collective amne-
sia” over ocean health,46 a number of critics, scientists and activists—such as
Sylvia Earle, Stefan Helmreich and Stacy Alaimo, to name just a few—have
published important interventions into the fact that, since the “middle of
the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of tons of ocean wildlife have
been removed from the sea, while hundreds of millions of tons of waste
have been poured into it”.47 Thus “[h]uman biocultural practices flow into
the putatively natural zone of the ocean, scrambling nature and culture, life
forms and forms of life”, Helmreich writes.48 Tying this to the politics and
ethics of industrial aquaculture and food consumption, Jonathan Safran
Foer’s much-discussed book Eating Animals (2009) calls on humans to
imagine the scale of bycatch each and every time they consume fish: “this
plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving […]
The plate might have to be five feet across”.49 Even those of us who do
not eat fish are inextricably implicated. As Elspeth Probyn puts it in Eating
the Ocean (2016), “there is no innocent place in which to escape the food
politics of human-fish entanglement”.50
“In 1955”, Roberts writes, “the first of the great herring fisheries col-
lapsed off the East Anglia coast of England. This herring population had
sustained a highly productive fishery for over a thousand years, but it
could not survive the onslaught of twentieth-century industrial fishing”.51
The European Commission called its first moratorium on herring fishing
in 1977. It is this context which both clarifies and heightens the stakes
of Sebald’s Natural-History, in which the North Sea is constantly rep-
resented as a space of ecological exhaustion. Throughout Rings, Sebald
invokes deforestation, storms, coastal erosion and the spectre of extinction,
among other phenomena, in order to reveal the imbrication of humanity
and nature. For Sebald, natural phenomena such as these are not merely
reducible to their natural character, but in fact become agential forces that
react to and in turn reshape human life, just as human life inevitably reshapes
the natural world. Natural-History is therefore a meaningful concept for
exploring Sebald’s work because it reminds us that such “nature” is not
just marked by human history, but that its history is human history.
In this essay, I have suggested that Sebald’s meditation on industrial
fishing practices cannot be easily disassociated from his narrator’s (non-
)consumption of fish and chips in the Albion Hotel. I have also argued
8 HERRING FISHERIES, FISH-EATING AND NATURAL HISTORY … 137
that Sebald’s natural history of the herring achieves two crucial interven-
tions: first, it disrupts anthropocentrism; secondly, it demonstrates how the
world of the human has a unique power over nature, but is at the same time
fundamentally exposed to nature. To conclude, I would like to note that
Adorno’s concept of Natural-History was not meant to be a mere diagno-
sis of humanity’s shared fate with nature. Adorno also saw Natural-History
as part of wider materialist project that would “open up an alternative
form of re-enchantment that remains socially critical”.52 Understood in
this way, Sebald’s meditation on the North Sea herring might ultimately
be described as an attempt to find a non-violent way to representationally
“capture” herring. Sebald’s Natural-History uses language rather than nets
to bring herring from obscurity to the surface. By situating herring at the
centre of this passage, Sebald’s text registers and speaks back to the often
uncontested logics of human meat consumption. Simultaneously, Sebald’s
writing asks the reader to think through the implications of the ambiguity
rather than the certainty of animal pain: “the truth is that we do not know
what the herring feels”. If, as Nicole Shukin theorizes, “animal capital” is
that process which relies on a double “rendering” of nonhuman animals,
into figurations or abstractions of themselves on the one hand and thus into
commodities for consumption on the other,53 then Sebald’s Rings produc-
tively re-figures these abstractions and re-enchants the human-nonhuman
relationship. Literature cannot avoid the practice of rendering animal signs,
or indeed of rendering “meat” in its abstracted signification. But as Sebald’s
natural history of the herring makes clear, literature also has the capacity
to variously navigate, trouble, expose and hence “render” the damage of
meat consumption on a localized and global scale.
Notes
1. Wolff, W. G. Sebald’s Hybrid Poetics.
2. Cosgrove, “W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” 200.
3. Jaggi, “The Last Word.”
4. See Long, W. G. Sebald; Santner, On Creaturely Life. This essay does not
have the space to explore the ways in which Sebald provocatively connects
together the Holocaust to practices of industrial animal agriculture. I do
138 D. O’KEY
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York:
Continuum, 1973.
———. “The Idea of Natural-History.” In Things Beyond Resemblance: Essays on
Theodor W. Adorno, edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor, 252–269. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006.
Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Bond, Greg. “On the Misery of Nature and the Nature of Misery: W. G. Sebald’s
Landscapes.” In W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, edited by J. J. Long and
Anne Whitehead, 31–44. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics. London: Macmillan, 1977.
Cosgrove, Mary. “W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” In The Novel in German Since 1990,
edited by Stuart Taberner, 195–211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011.
140 D. O’KEY
Couper, Alastair, Hance D. Smith, and Bruno Ciceri. Fishers and Plunderers: Theft,
Slavery and Violence at Sea. London: Pluto, 2015.
Crownshaw, Richard. The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature
and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene.” Comparative
Literature 69 (2017): 32–44.
Earle, Sylvia A. The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Oceans Are One. Wash-
ington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2009.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Lon-
don: Routledge, 2002.
Fuchs, Anne. “W. G. Sebald’s Painters: The Function of Fine Art in His Prose
Works.” Modern Language Review 101 (2006): 167–183.
———. “Ein Hauptkapital der Geschichte der Unterwerfung.” In W. G. Sebald
and the Writing of History, edited by Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long, 121–138.
Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2007.
Groves, Jason. “Writing After Nature: A Sebaldian Ecopoetics.” In German Eco-
criticism in the Anthropocene, edited by Caroline Schaumann and Heather I.
Sullivan, 267–292. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005.
Helmreich, Stefan. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2009.
Hullot-Kentor, Robert. Things Beyond Resemblance: Essays on Theodor W. Adorno.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Hutchinson, Ben. “The Shadow of Resistance: W. G. Sebald and the Frankfurt
School.” Journal of European Studies 41 (2011): 267–284.
Jaggi, Maya. “The Last Word.” The Guardian, 21 December 2001, https://
www.theguardian.com/education/2001/dec/21/artsandhumanities.
highereducation.
Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic. London:
Verso, 2007.
Kennedy, Roseanne. “Humanity’s Footprint: Reading Rings of Saturn and Pales-
tinian Walks in an Anthropocene Era.” Biography 35 (2012): 170–189.
Lepenies, Wolf. Das Ende der Naturgeschichte: Wandel kultureller Selbstver-
ständlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Munich:
Hanser, 1976.
Long, J. J. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-
versity Press, 2007.
Longo, Stefano B., Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark. The Tragedy of the Commod-
ity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2015.
8 HERRING FISHERIES, FISH-EATING AND NATURAL HISTORY … 141
Lorimer, Jamie. “The Anthropo-Scene: A Guide for the Perplexed.” Social Studies
of Science 47 (2017): 117–142.
Öhlschläger, Claudia. “Medialität und Poetik des trompe-l’œil: W. G. Sebald and
Jan Peter Tripp.” GegenwartsLiteratur 6 (2007): 21–43.
O’Key, Dominic. “W. G. Sebald’s Zoopoetics Writing After Nature.” In Texts,
Rachael Allen
R. Allen (B)
University of Hull, Hull, UK
meat” (6–7), and thinks of herself “alternately chewing and drooling, like
the cow” (6). In Reines’ The Cow, this is written explicitly, as in “ITEM”:
A cow is a name for a heavy woman or a woman with sloe eyes. Cow is a
common epithet for a slow woman or clumsy woman; a woman with a foul
smell. A thick-lipped woman, an unintelligent woman.5 (5–7)
Elsewhere, and with an assumption that the reader will recognize the
woman-as-cow trope, Reines balances the bodies of cow and woman
around lines that blur the material specifics of who is being referred to.
In “BLOWHOLE”, sexual violence against women is connoted alongside
the bolt-gun violence exerted on a cow before she is killed for slaughter:
“Liquid shoot into her skull and leak out her eye hole. […] Moistest mouth
is cow’s mouth sorrow face normal” (9–11), and again, in “ITEM”, where
she asks “What do you call the meat around a cunt” (12), dehumanizing
the body of a woman while dismembering the body of a cow.
Human and animal body are merged not only to complicate the poetic
intentions outlined—to make visible otherwise invisible violences by under-
scoring the material implications and assumptions of metaphor—but also
to complicate who is being subjected to violence, and who should take
precedence as a “victim”. By aligning the body of the female human and
the body of the animal for these reasons, a level of identification is enacted
between them and their treatment. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol
J. Adams critiques the metaphoric stand-in of animals for female human
bodies (specifically, female human bodies subjected to violence) with her
theory of the absent referent. The theory of the absent referent is primarily
used in critiques of societal consumption of animal products, where the
absent referent names “the literal being who disappears in the eating of
dead bodies”.6 However, the concept is also relevant in critiques of the
use of metaphor, specifically metaphors of women subjected to domestic
violence wherein a woman is described as an animal, and this animal then
becomes “the absent referent in images of women butchered, fragmented,
or consumable”.7 The trope could be detrimental to both writers’ poetic
intention if seen as a reinforcement of a linguistic structure that subju-
gates both the animal—by her being used as a metaphor for a figure who
exists above her in society’s speciesist hierarchy—and the human, by erasing
instances of violence specific to women.
Yet against the agricultural landscape of these poems, the coupling of
woman and cow becomes integral to their poetic project. I argue that by
146 R. ALLEN
actively inhabiting this problematic trope they are then able to critique it.
Chelsea Grimmer notes that Reines “borrows the metaphor of woman-
as-cow”,8 yet Reines’s intention is to effectively prove how the successful
function of the animal as a symbolic referent has overtaken its material,
worldly body, so that we might see the problems inherent in its very mate-
riality, as Shukin does when she unpeels layers to reveal the violence writ-
ten into a word like film. By evidencing the worth of this trope, both poets
prove the speciesist violence inherent in the common stand-in of animal for
woman, so that they may undermine and critique both this language and
the poetic structures that easily house this language. In effect, this reverses
Adams’s critique by reinstating the animal’s presence within the language
structure; it is presented as reflexive evidence of itself, the trope’s material
origins emphasized in the somatic consequences that both Hill and Reines
insist upon: these poems bulge with shit, guts, blood, glands, semen, tal-
low, carcasses, worms, piss, and milk. This merging of material reality with
linguistic function then enacts a critique and exploration of the aforemen-
tioned “disjunctive discourse”.9 Readers are forced then to confront the
existence of bodies in poetry who, because of metaphoric relegation, are
now formed in and emerging out of the “spectral state”.10
The Cow has been noted for its linguistic innovations, relying on, in Chelsea
Grimmer’s words, “decentered grammar’s rhetorical power to construct a
female human experience resistant to dominant modes of more linear and
hierarchical ideologies”.11 Reines’s incorporation of “found” texts and the
appropriation of pre-existing material feeds into this, a practice that Mar-
jorie Perloff says “works precisely to deconstruct the possibility of the for-
mation of a coherent or consistent lyrical voice, a transcendental ego”12 —a
philosophical concept historically implicated in the marginalization of ani-
mals. Taking the definition of the lyric poem as outlined in The Princeton
Encyclopaedia of Poetics, that, “in modernity, the term is used for a kind
of poetry that expresses personal feeling (G.W.F. Hegel) […] indirectly
addressed to a private reader”,13 then it is not that Reines rejects this private
address, more that she works to just deconstruct a singular and consistent
lyric voice to create a poetry that is multifaceted. It is in the latter part of
the The Cow where Reines frames text from the report Carcass Disposal: A
9 “A GRAIN OF BRAIN”: WOMEN AND FARM ANIMALS … 147
The experimentations with voice within these more intuitive, “poetic” parts
gesture aesthetically to the sound and feel of the sections of collaged text
via their syntactic disruption. Reines’s intention, perhaps, is to disrupt the
locus of subjective experience, to oppose a normative linearity and create
an alternative experience outside logical modes of representation that feed
into the animal-consuming status quo. The fourth poem, “BLOWHOLE”,
is an early example:
Because of remembering where or what you ovum gasp and burst. First he
spit on my asshole and then start in middle finger and then the cock slid in
no sound come out, only gaping, grind hard into ground. (1–3)
engages in more typical poetic devices that gesture to their own materi-
ality—like rhyme—complicating her experimentations with representation
further. “Grain” and “brain” are words that signify actual substances, and
by their being aligned in visual and aural rhyme, create an aural and tex-
tual substance external to representational meaning; here, the ain sounds
become tangible, deepening the bodily-ness of the text. Reines choice of the
measurement “grain” also holds material histories within it. Gesturing to
the industrialisation of food stuffs and human-made measurements, Reines
offers us a gory repurposing of the Blakean invocation “To see a World in
a Grain of Sand” (1) in ‘Auguries of Innocence’, urging the reader to see
how the infinitesimal is compounded in larger systems, yet lacking the plea
for Christian enlightenment that would have been Blake’s impetus.15
Reines’s textual slippages mean that semantics become corrupted, sepa-
rating the word from what it may otherwise attempt to signify. Her refusal
of representational denotation means that the text often feels as though it
is undergoing a linguistic dissection, emphasizing the many sections that
thematically anatomize bodies, as in “BILLET”, where a cow’s stomach
appears independently from any mention of a body: “Cannot have a ‘the
world’ but can have millions of guts through which the / maize and antibi-
otics of ‘a world’ are forced to pass” (6–7). Revisiting “BLOWHOLE”,
body parts are unhoused from both their signified body, and the logic of
the textual body that is signifying them: the singular ovum; “the” cock,
not his or her cock; finger; asshole; millions of guts, all become disembod-
ied objects, gender, and species side-lined. This assembly of dismembered
body parts is a key aspect in Reines’s building of a new creature purpose-
fully formed in the spectral state: the consequence of a corrupted symbolic
and material being. In this she calls to mind Carol J. Adams’s theory of
the absent referent. The animal is the invisible but underlying component
to contemporary flesh eating, and Reines lays the textual groundwork for
one of the primary symbolic manifestations of the animal in contempo-
rary culture—as meat—to be attached to its material reality—which is also
meat—in order that she might begin to create a new referent. Meat in
the supermarket is as untethered to a symbol of the animal as much as the
body parts floating around in Reines’s poem: “Through butchering, ani-
mals become absent referents. Animals in name and body are made absent
as animals for meat to exist”.16 Reines shows the process of how the absent
referent is made; sliding from a symbolic being to dismembered, consum-
able parts. Meat within her poems figures both as a symbolic representation
of the animal that separates us from the real animal, and a material aspect of
9 “A GRAIN OF BRAIN”: WOMEN AND FARM ANIMALS … 149
Mad cow disease was discovered in the United States for the first time in a
Holstein cow that was too sick to walk but was nonetheless slaughtered and
sold for meat. The mad Holstein’s brain and spinal column were sent to a
rendering plant somewhere, possibly to be turned into dog or chicken food;
possibly to have its blood rendered before being fed to young calves as a milk
supplement. (146–151)
The corrupted and cannibalized carcass of a cow forming the basis for
the body of another cow is perhaps the most disturbing and plainly writ-
ten manifestation of the animal as material for its own existence. Here
lies the focal point of Reines’s hybrid figure, bringing with it the material
implications of being made invisible, via symbolic relegation: a now visi-
ble, interspecies sickness. I return to her generative phrase “grain of brain”
as an early indicator of these cannibalisms. An industrially raised cow eats
grain; she also eats brains, bodily matter which is then digested and uti-
lized to help the cow function—fueling and becoming their own, living,
eating brains, which are in turn, then eaten again, becoming brains, etc.
This Möbius strip of an image creates a micro-cosmos of reality for both
cows and human—eat brains, become brains, eat brains. Not just another
way that Reines indicates bodily poetics (though here a self is literally eaten
so that it may become matter, both poetic and material), this line indicates
9 “A GRAIN OF BRAIN”: WOMEN AND FARM ANIMALS … 151
My nipples tick
like little bombs of blood
someone is walking
in the yard outside
As opposed to Reines, who breaks sense via grammatical and narrative rup-
tures, Hill shifts complete, “logically”-sound sentences across the surface
of almost random images as though scanning a landscape through a peep-
hole. This engenders a manipulation of representational sense as she resists
the inbuilt “logic” that may be delivered via a complete sentence. Instead,
154 R. ALLEN
that someone like me’s quite wrong for someone like you;
that I owe my energy to the squashed pituitary glands
The difference between the speaker and the stranger is marked clearly by
a comparison between those who have an intimate relationship with the
animals they consume (in that they rear it, harvest it, slaughter it them-
selves)—no cooks—and those who don’t—with cooks. In what we can see
as an inversion, or perhaps a reclamation, of masculine associations with
meat and being “a full subject”27 in A Little Book of Meat , peace comes
from the existence of a shared communion between female humans and
animals with an acceptance that the animals will be eaten, something that
9 “A GRAIN OF BRAIN”: WOMEN AND FARM ANIMALS … 155
directly correlates to what Berger believes has been lost through the “exis-
tential dualism” of our relationship to animals. Once, they were “subjected
and worshipped, bred and sacrificed”, and now
the vestiges of this dualism remain among those who live intimately with, and
depend upon, animals. A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is so glad to
salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger
to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by
an and and not by a but.28
We can directly align the “Little Sisters” of Hill’s poem with the “peas-
ant” in Berger. And as with Berger’s conclusion, that “every tradition
which has previously mediated between man and nature” is now broken,
by “twentieth-century corporate capitalism”,29 so the “fall” or separation
we experience in Hill’s poetry is introduced alongside an example of this
influence: brand named pharmaceuticals. We are told that the speaker owes
her energy to pigs squashed in the Armour Packing Plant, historically, one
of the most successful meat packing plants in America.30 We can assume
that she is referring to the brand name supplement Armour Thyroid, a sup-
plement derived from the thyroid gland of a pig used in the treatment of
hyperthyroidism. Armour Thyroid’s name derives from its origins as a by-
product of early intensive meat production at the Armour Packing plant.31
For the speaker, and for Hill, the masculine figure has introduced aspects
of industrialization and automation, away from the communal matriarchal
living of the previous structure, and this omission implicates the speaker in
an industrialized meat industry. The line between animal and female, from
this point forward, is blurred. She oscillates between aligning her experi-
ence with the cows: “I live in a world of cows insane with longing. / Mother
has made us a pond we can lie down in” (21–22), and merging bodily with
them: “I think of me / alternately chewing and drooling, like the cow”
(5–6). Hill evidences a speciesist chain of agency (a reinforcement of the
Derridean concept of the speaker wherein authority is ascribed to the man
over the woman, and the woman over the animal), to reflexively prove it.
Her primary Edenic and matriarchal environment was perhaps only ever
there so she could critique an inevitable industrialization.
We then see in A Little Book of Meat the impact of patriarchal capi-
talism—and all that engenders; corporate influence, intensive animal agri-
culture and violence, and finally, as in The Cow, sickness—in real time,
156 R. ALLEN
processes that have been used to exclude them. These figures in both The
Cow and A Little Book of Meat, if not empowered, are at least existing on
their own terms, through the lens of their own broken gaze.
Notes
1. Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” 16.
2. Shukin, Animal Capital, 111.
3. Pick, Creaturely Poetics, 108.
4. Hill, A Little Book of Meat .
5. Reines, The Cow.
6. Interview with Carol J. Adams.
7. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, xxv.
8. Grimmer, “Reading Against the Absent Referent,” 67.
9. Shukin, Animal Capital, 111.
10. Pick, Creaturely Poetics, 108.
11. Grimmer, “Reading Against the Absent Referent,” 67.
12. Perloff, “Can(n)on to the Right of Us,” 463.
13. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition, 826.
14. Grimmer, “Reading Against the Absent Referent,” 75–76.
15. Blake, Auguries of Innocence, 506.
16. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, 20–21.
17. Grimmer, “Reading Against the Absent Referent,” 79.
18. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, 79.
19. Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People (Lon-
don: Verso, 2017), 43.
20. Pick, Creaturely Poetics, 108.
21. Perloff, “Can(n)on to the Right of Us,” 463.
22. Hill, “Acknowledgements,” 5.
23. Morton, Humankind, 37.
24. Derrida, “Eating Well,” 280–281.
25. Calarco quoted in Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, 6.
26. This surrealism is noted extensively in criticism on Hill, and on her Poetry
Archive page, “Selima Hill is perhaps best known for her surrealism,”
https://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/selima-hill, accessed 22 April 2019.
27. Adams talks at length about the associations between patriarchal societies
and meat eating in The Sexual Politics of Meat: “Meat eating societies gain
male identification by their choice of food […] vegetables and other nonmeat
foods are viewed as women’s food,” 4–5.
28. Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” 16.
158 R. ALLEN
Works Cited
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory.
London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? London: Penguin, 2009.
Blake, William. The Complete Poems. London: Penguin, 2004.
Bessie Louise, Pierce. A History of Chicago, Volume III: The Rise of a Modern City
1871–1893, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Cruedele, John. “Rorer Buys Drugs Unit of Revlon.” New York Times,
30 November 1985. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/30/business/rorer-
buys-drug-unit-of-revlon.html. Accessed 2 April 2019.
Derrida, Jacques. “‘Eating Well’, or the Calculation of the Subject.” In Points …
Interviews, 1974–1994, Jacques Derrida, edited by Elisabeth Weber, translated
by Peggy Kamuf et al. California: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Earthling Liberation Kollective. “Carol J. Adams—‘Politics and the absent referent
in 2014’—Neither Man Nor Beast.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_
continue=155&v=sjkhmJ5FQaA. Accessed 2 April 2019.
Grimmer, Chelsea Rebekah. “Reading Against the Absent Referent: Bare Life, Gen-
der and The Cow.” Pacific Coast Philology 51, no. 1 (2016).
Hill, Selima. A Little Book of Meat. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 1993.
9 “A GRAIN OF BRAIN”: WOMEN AND FARM ANIMALS … 159
Sarika Chandra
The question of how, why, and with what consequences meat is produced
and consumed, has moved into the mainstream of popular culture. In this
trend, especially notable since the 1990s in the form of television talk shows
that offer cooking lessons to news reports, meat has become central to con-
versations about weight loss, the ills of the beef industry, environmental
crisis, and general concerns about health and longevity. To understand this
phenomenon and to address the urgent political questions at stake in meat
production and consumption, we must also think, about the current narra-
tive possibilities of meat as such. Meat narratives, it appears, have become
a way to narrate and convey the urgency of the crisis of global capitalism
itself. Many of the “meat narratives” since the 1990s have taken the form of
documentary and journalistic exposés.1 These tend to focus on the ills that
plague the agribusiness factory-farm system and especially those of the beef
industry, whether it is the use of antibiotics in beef production, the U.S.
government’s trade disputes with other nations over hormonally treated
S. Chandra (B)
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA
of U.S. culture with the rise of Asian economies and the tenuous incor-
poration of Asian Americans within national narratives of inclusion across
axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality”.3 The novel attempts to map
notions of race, gender, and sexuality in relationship to not only the crisis
of industrial production—as measured by their impact on labour—but also
to the planetary crisis of the environment unfolding as part of the capital-
ist world trade system in which meat producers/packers/consumers, and
meat itself—in its living and non-living form—takes centre stage. Emerg-
ing from and conversant with the structures of the reproduction of late
twentieth-century capital, My Year of Meats attempts to direct our atten-
tion to the contemporary conditions that continually reproduce meat as a
commodity.4
My argument focuses, more specifically, on the questions the novel raises
about the narrative form that the crisis of meat assumes. What makes My
Year of Meats particularly illuminating for a discussion of the narrative pos-
sibilities of meat is that it itself, in effect, functions as an exposé in the form
of a novel. My Year of Meats gives narrative form to the contradictions at
the heart of the capitalist organization of society via a story woven through
the processes of beef production and consumption. However, the book
eventually retreats into imagining alternative ways of living within existing
structures, and at the same time, reducing the questions it raises about
gender, sexuality, and race to one of better consumer choices premised on
multicultural politics centring non-normative subjects and practices. The
novel’s plot envisions and dramatizes solutions to the problems related to
beef production by developing characters that adopt alternative lifestyles to
industrial meat consumption based on their “diverse” backgrounds. And
significantly, it champions the idea that the broader knowledge about the
meat crisis is best produced and disseminated via a documentary exposé
about its ill effects.
An engrossing and highly informed account of the global beef industry,
My Year of Meats weaves a complex tale that connects multiple locations
as far apart as New York and Tokyo. Living in New York, the protago-
nist, Jane finds herself out of work as a documentarian and takes a job
as a production coordinator with a Japanese television show called “My
American Wife” (“MAW”). The show is sponsored by the U.S. BEEF-EX
company, represented by Joichi “John” Ueno in Japan,5 and is designed as a
venue for marketing American beef—with its own domestic market already
saturated—in beef-wary Japan. Jane helps to conceptualize and film the
episodes in the U.S. before they are sent over to the Japanese editing team.
164 S. CHANDRA
family values symbolized by the red meat in rural America” (8). Here, as
previously noted, meat, in itself, serves a narrative function, with the wife
now reduced to playing a supporting role: it is the meat that is narrating the
wife, “America” and its “family values”. From Jane’s (and, to a large extent,
the reader’s) point of view, this narrative is pure kitsch, transparent for its
lack of imagination and un-reality, serving up a beef-eating, rural America
as the repository of what is itself a seemingly edible menu of wholesome
family values.
The second camera frame (2B), made up of the episodes of “My Ameri-
can Wife” directed by Jane, appears to shift its standpoint into closer prox-
imity to that of the off-camera frame (at this point presumably congruent
with Jane’s and the reader’s standpoint as well). These new episodes of “My
American Wife”, shot by Jane, are presented as if self-evidently opposed
to and more progressive than the original BEEF-EX showcases. Jane pur-
posely chooses to film the meat-eating stories of families that are apparently
antithetical to the BEEF-EX image in order to expose the farcical, if not
toxic nature of the beef industry’s idea of American family wholesomeness.
Among them is a family of Mexican immigrants, a family with a daughter in
a wheelchair, and even a mixed-race, vegetarian, same-sex couple with two
children—material that Jane, already embarked on a course that will lead
her to subvert the reality TV meat narrative, considers to be an “amazing
opportunity for a documentarian” (27). I will return to these episodes in
more detail below.
However, it is the third camera-narrative (2C) that of Jane’s documen-
tary exposé itself, towards which her guerrilla-TV tactics will ultimately
lead her. For, according to the novel, this is the medium that will purport-
edly allow for framing the “reality” that remains hidden in the BEEF-EX,
reality-TV-as-infomercial format. Jane gets her opportunity to make such
an exposé when, under pressure from her BEEF-EX higher-ups to focus
on a “normal” family after her foray into the (non) meat-eating habits of
“diversity”, she seeks out the Dunn family, owners of a cattle farm in Col-
orado. The family consists of father John, his wife Bunny, and their five
year-old daughter, Rose. Gale, John’s son from a previous marriage, takes
care of their farm. While Jane is there to shoot the footage of wife Bunny
preparing a standard menu of American beef, she comes to learn about the
ills plaguing the farm. In this last shoot that Jane will direct as an employee
of BEEF-EX, her gradually amassing knowledge of the far-reaching U.S.
beef tragedy culminates as she discovers that Gale feeds his cattle every-
thing from “recycled cardboard, newspaper” as well as “by-products from
10 NARRATIVE POSSIBILITIES IN RUTH OZEKI’S MY YEAR OF MEATS 167
till the animal was sick or needed it before you pumped ’um full of drugs.
Them scientist of yers, they git their paychecks from the pharmacooticals
and they’re all in cahoots with the government” (263). But while John
seems to have a better understanding than his son does of the politics of
meat production, the consequences of eating meat produced in this way
never occur to him.
None of these interactions are filmed, either for the BEEF-EX episode or
for the subsequent documentary exposé. But the novel shows that the total
separation between consumption and production is not simply a matter of
the physical separation of consumers and producers but of the theoretical
and critical connections that need to be made between the various practices
engaged in and the choices made by even just a single individual. Poignant
in this regard is the fact that Gale, while being portrayed as an unscrupu-
lous zealot when it comes to turning a profit, is also shown to be unaware
of the consequences of administering drugs like DES on his own body: he
has developed “enlarged breasts” and DES has “elevated his vocal [cords]”
(278). Meanwhile it is appropriate that during her work on the Dunn fam-
ily ranch Jane makes the connection between her own struggle to conceive
and carry a child to term (ending in a miscarriage) and the fact that she has
a “deformed uterus” resulting from DES given as a miscarriage prevention
drug to her mother when she was pregnant with Jane (274). An already
sinister image of the American heartland is further accentuated by the nar-
rative of Jane’s increasing knowledge both about her own vulnerability
to factory farming and its environmental degradations, including severe
topsoil erosion and other, extreme forms of pollution caused by the meat
industry. Formally speaking, the novel shifts the question of meat from the
merely fact-gathering, journalistic plane of the exposé to a broader, and at
the same time a more concrete plane of social reality, a plane on which the
social connection between relations of production and consumption can,
in principle at least, be made. In My Year of Meats not only are its ill effects
on animals themselves shown but also the realities of how meat-farming is
feeding into our very inability to reproduce ourselves. As such the novel is,
at the very least, able to raise the question of what should be done about
the widespread problems it uncovers. However, it shifts the focus onto a
version of popular American multiculturalist, alternative life-stylism. In the
process, the outer, off-camera frame, within which My Year of Meats as a
meat narrative promises to transcend the limits of the meat exposé genre,
recedes back onto and finally merges with one of its inner, camera frames,
the frame of the exposé itself.
10 NARRATIVE POSSIBILITIES IN RUTH OZEKI’S MY YEAR OF MEATS 169
How is it that this reversal comes about? The answer, I propose, lies
in the novel’s ironic faith that the line between off and on-camera reality
is a temporary, provisional one. Despite her growing distrust of BEEF-
EX and commercialized reality TV—a process dramatized and conveyed
to the reader via the double-frame device—Jane nevertheless considers the
camera lens itself to be, in principle, ideologically neutral. Nothing in My
Year of Meats questions or ironizes that belief, and the novel comes close
to suggesting that the camera itself has truth-telling abilities. Here again,
the climactic episode unfolding on the Dunn family cattle ranch requires
analysis. Consider for example the way that Jane and her crew are alerted
to Rose’s premature sexual development. One day, after filming at various
locations around the farm, Jane and her crew are reviewing the day’s footage
when they notice something sinister in the scene showing Gale playing with
his half-sister. “Gale had wrapped his thick arm around her. His forearm
supported her back and his hand held her in place tight around the stomach,
partially hidden in the folds of her dress…” (269). Zooming in on this
frame, the crew realizes that “resting on the callused edge of her half-
brother’s hand was a pronounced swelling which had looked like bunched
fabric at first but now, up close, had the weight and heft of a woman’s
breast” (270). In horror, Jane and her crew realize for the first time how
the hormones Gale feeds his cattle are affecting life on the ranch itself,
including Rose. Production has become consumption. But, although the
setting for this moment of recognition is, in a scene allusively recalling
the film Blow-Up, the photographic darkroom, the novel does not exhibit
Antonioni’s caution towards the belief in the literality of representation.
Not just for the inner but for the outer-frame of MYM as well, the camera
lens here acts as a neutral probe used to discover the real rather than to
shape a particular reality in the very process of its detection. The novel takes
this as a moment of unadulterated truth before the latter has a chance to
be manipulated by BEEF-EX and reality TV. The exposé, in this way, is
re-positioned as the best possible medium for imagining and executing
change. And this is precisely, as I have noted above, how critics have read
this aspect of the novel. But, ironically, it is precisely the re-framing of
Jane’s exposé that then leads the novel to retreat from its critical standpoint
towards structural problems into notions of alternatives within the existing
system.
This too is disclosed by the Rose/“blow up” episode. The exposé Jane
decides to make after her discoveries at the Dunn ranch does not focus
so much on connecting Rose’s story to the meat industrial practices, but,
170 S. CHANDRA
episodes such as the above-cited conflict between Gale and John over pol-
itics, the pharmaceutical industry, research, etc., make it into the frame of
the fictionalized exposé—and that this glaring contradiction is not subject
to the least bit of ironization in the novel. And though the novel’s initial
dramatic framing of Jane’s documentary gestures towards the systemic con-
nection between production for profit and consumption for the sake of that
production, it undercuts this because some of these explanations are voiced
through the character of Gale himself. This limitation of Jane’s documen-
tary only addressing the symptoms is exacerbated by the fact that the novel,
in its authorial, outer, off-camera frame, considers the documentary exposé
to be immune to the kinds of doctoring and manipulation caricatured in
the “My American Wife” shows. The novel’s end with Jane’s documentary
being leaked to the news media, resulting in both the cancellation of “My
American Wife” and Gale’s confession, serves as closure to not only the
novel but also to the broader social questions raised throughout the novel.
The episodes of “My American Wife” directed by Jane before her doc-
umentary transformation already suggest as much. As mentioned earlier,
back in Tokyo, Akiko reproduces the meat dishes from “My American
Wife” episodes for her husband “John” Ueno, and it is through the eyes
of her character, off-camera, that the novel conveys the actions within the
on-camera frames of “My American Wife” programs. But, as we shall see,
notwithstanding the increasingly critical and exposé-like content of “My
American Wife” as Jane uncovers the real pathologies of “Beefland” USA,
Akiko interprets the “human-interest” pathos of Jane’s TV narrative as one
more reason to embrace the American culture of meat. That is, for Akiko,
along with Jane, the novel’s on- and off-camera frames effectively merge.
The first of “My American Wife” episodes that Jane directs features
Mexican migrant workers Alberto and Catalina Martinez. Seven years ear-
lier, they had immigrated to Texas, where their son Bobby is later born
and where, through farm and factory labour, they scrape enough money
together to buy a small farmhouse. This is a poignant choice of family here
since it is, after all, largely migrant workers from Mexico like the Martínezes
who work the “disassembly lines” in the slaughterhouses that put the beef
on the dinner tables. But for Akiko, the story of the Martínezes is evoca-
tive of the same “freedom and opportunity” narrative that, when it is not
brute necessity itself, lures migrant labour into the slaughterhouses. This
narrative, eventually, in its liberal version, lures her to the U.S. too. The
172 S. CHANDRA
Wife” theme song swells, confirming the couple’s domestic joy with tele-
vised closure. Cut to a BEEF-EX commercial showing sizzling steaks, the
“vast American landscape” and declaring it all to be another inspiring story
of “Beefland!” But the ironic juxtaposing of the meat commercial with
the Lara and Dyann episode is more ironic than the novel itself seems to
realize, as it is this episode that clinches Akiko’s desire for an America that
is “Beefland” for her as well. Finding herself crying and rocking back and
forth after watching the censored episode, she assumes it is out of fear of
her husband’s mood when he returns from work, sensing that “it might be
wise to throw away the recipe for Pasta Primavera right away and perhaps
serve a Beefy Burrito instead” (ibid.). However, “it was not just fear of his
[John’s] anger or even of getting hit. As she watched the sun set on the
vast American landscape—‘Beefland!’ the logo proclaimed—she realized
that her tears had nothing whatsoever to do with John. These were tears
of admiration for the strong women so determined to have their family
against all odds” (ibid.). Formally, the novel associates Akiko’s thoughts
about her abusive husband with “Beefland”. However, the episode itself is
associated with almost mythic qualities of freedom for Akiko.
Because of its critical, alternative and exposé-like edge, Jane’s TV meat
narrative has convinced Akiko that her future lies in the less repressive
atmosphere of the U.S. She flies to New York to meet Jane, who, along
with Lara and Dyann, promises to help her cope with her imminent single-
motherhood. The Lara and Dyann episode, bringing to a close Akiko’s life
of abuse, implies that a multicultural alternative lifestyle is the only real
weapon in the battle against “Beefland”. As Akiko travels around the U.S.
by train to visit some of the families featured on My American Wife, we get
the following narrative:
Leaving Louisiana, the train headed back up north, into Mississippi, Alabama,
Georgia, the Carolinas. As she stared out the window, she whispered the
names of the Deep South to herself, matching their syllables to the rhythms
of the train. No wonder people sang songs about these places: deep-blue
swamplands, cloaked in tattered mists; enormous fields of tobacco and cotton
and wheat, forming horizons, bigger and more American than anything.
(335)
But isn’t this just a “Beefland” commercial without the cut to the raw, red
steak sizzling as it hits the frying-pan? The “Beefland” once associated with
John has now, it seems, been converted into an ideal. It reiterates the image
174 S. CHANDRA
of America as a place of hope that immigrants carry to the US. The “family
values” image of rural America that BEEF-EX exploits to sell meat now
becomes a place in which to escape from these very same values. However,
people working tobacco, cotton and wheat fields also suffer under extreme
exploitative conditions. Embedded in this contradiction is the irony that
a novel whose action spans a global network positions a domestic version
of multicultural values to sell the “real” values of “Beefland” to a Japan
embodied in the figure of Akiko. In a roundabout way, seemingly unsus-
pected by the novel itself, meat, in the end, narrates not only the wife, but
her liberation and self-discovery as well. “America” doubles as “Beefland”
and as the shimmering land of “opportunity” and “freedom” to Akiko.
For My Year of Meats meat truly is the message, that is, even when its
“alternatives” are extolled, since the “alternatives” themselves are America,
and America is…meat. Akiko cannot read the pathologies except as pathos
and sees no contradiction here. This is the irony that eludes My Year of
Meats, despite its own relative ironic distance from such narratives. By this
point in the unravelling of the official, corporate scripting of “My Ameri-
can Wife”, Jane attempts to incorporate the “human interest” realities she
uncovers directly into the televised narrative itself, of turning “reality TV”
into exposé. What the reader of the off-camera frame in My Year of Meats
sees is more than what the (fictional) spectator who tunes in the show sees:
namely, Jane’s and her crew’s horrified discovery of Rose’s DES-spawned
catastrophe when they stumble across it in the editing room. The clear
sense of the novel here is that, even when it is looking for a reality “behind
the scenes”, the documentary/exposé as a genre of critique misses some-
thing. The exceptional character of the exposé leaves it, and My Year of
Meats , unprepared to discover that, were the cameras rolling all the time
and everywhere, they would reveal a world in which such exceptions had
become the norm. The flipside of this breach in the ideology of the exposé is
the previously mentioned irony, also thrown into brilliant relief by Ozeki’s
novel, of the elder Dunn’s uneasiness about farming with pharmaceuti-
cal toxins even as he continues to consume them at his own dinner table.
My Year of Meats , however, is not, finally, the narrative immanent in that
contradiction and appears to have found its way into these breaches in the
exposé form inadvertently, and, in the end, cannot help but fall back into
the alternative vision of “Beefland” that seduces Akiko.
But the narrative of meat comes back to spoil its own show. What remains
is a question of how a mode of production, that makes consumption a mere
appendage of a production carried on for the sole purpose of valorizing
10 NARRATIVE POSSIBILITIES IN RUTH OZEKI’S MY YEAR OF MEATS 175
capital, makes us eat and what it makes us eat. That is a question difficult
to answer, but a question to which My Year of Meats significantly charts
a path. But it answers it, finally, with a new recipe combining the same
social ingredients, and with a kind of nervous look over its shoulder at the
slaughterhouses.
Notes
1. See, for example, Jennifer Abbott, A Cow at My Table (Flying Eye Produc-
tions, 1998), Shaun Monson Earthlings (Nation Earth, 2005), and Graham
Meriwether American Meat (Leave It Better, 2013).
2. Cheng, “Meat and the Millennium,” 191.
3. Cheng, “Meat and the Millennium,” 191.
4. Consider, as perhaps the classic example of meat crisis, the appearance, begin-
ning in the late 1980s, of mad-cow disease, or BSE. The outbreak of BSE
was traced to the practice of feeding the otherwise unmarketable remains
of slaughtered cows, pigs and chickens to cattle being raised for their own
eventual slaughter. The European, and particularly British beef industry had
turned to offal as the protein source for its cattle feed because of Europe’s rel-
ative inability to produce soybeans, the main source of protein in cattle feed
in the world, in quantities sufficient to make the price of European beef com-
petitive on the world market. That same world market became, in turn, the
destination of the infected commodities, making BSE, virtually overnight,
a world phenomenon. These reified conditions of meat production take
shape in a broader crisis of commodity relations. Over-production and the
subsequent sharpening of capitalist competition drive the global system of
production to ever increasing degrees of rationalization and globalization,
reaching a point at which the spheres of production and consumption them-
selves appear to exist on entirely separate planes. The deadly implications of
a globalized crisis of over-production that, in its drive to capture world mar-
kets, creates not only a glut of all kinds of commodities themselves but also
a glut of their waste products, makes it only a matter of time before a way is
sought to market that waste as well, or to recycle it according to the dictates
of capitalist rationalization.
5. This is an obvious reference to John Wayne and the kind of frontier cowboy
version of Americanism depicted in his films.
6. Emily Cheng argues that the construction of American womanhood in My
Year of Meats, presented as a model for Japanese women, firms up Amer-
ican notions of family against the historical backdrop of narratives of U.S.
economic decline and the rise of Asian economies in the 1990s.
7. In addition to critical work by Cheng and Palumbo-Liu, see writings by
Leah Milne, Shameem Black, and Winona Landis.
176 S. CHANDRA
Works Cited
A Cow at My Table. 1998. Directed by Jennifer Abbott. USA: Flying Eye Produc-
tions. DVD.
American Meat. 2013. Directed by Graham Meriwether. USA: Leave It Better,
2013. DVD.
Black, Shameem. “Fertile Cosmofeminism: Ruth L. Ozeki and Transnational
Reproduction.” Meridians 5, no. 1 (January, 2004): 226–256.
Cheng, Emily. “Meat and the Millennium: Transnational Politics of Race and Gen-
der in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats.” Journal of Asian American Studies 12,
no. 2 (2009): 191–220.
Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.
———. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Vintage Books, 2003.
Cornyetz, Nina. “The Meat Manifesto: Ruth Ozeki’s Performative Poetics.”
Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 12, no. 1 (January, 2001):
207–224.
Earthlings. 2005. Directed by Monson, Shaun. USA: Nation Earth, DVD.
10 NARRATIVE POSSIBILITIES IN RUTH OZEKI’S MY YEAR OF MEATS 177
Foley, Barbara. Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Kilborn, Richard, and John Izod. Confronting Reality: An Introduction to Television
Documentary. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997.
Landis, Winona. “Feeling Good and Eating Well: Race, Gender, and Affect in Ruth
Ozeki’s My Year of Meats.” In Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics, edited by Melissa A.
Goldthwaite, Chapter 10. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017.
Miller, Toby. Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Milne, Leah. “‘Hybrid vigor’: The Pillow Book and Collaborative Authorship in
Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats.” College Literature 42, no 3 (Summer, 2015):
464–487.
Ozeki, Ruth L. My Year of Meats. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
———. My Year of Meats. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
Palumbo-Liu, David. The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global
Age. Duke University Press, 2012.
Pellow, David Naguib. Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights
and the Radical Earth Movement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2014.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Penguin. 1906. Reissue edition, 1985.
Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph. The War Against Animals. Leiden and Boston:
Brill/Rodopi, 2015.
CHAPTER 11
Sarah Bezan
Food, as portrayed in Jim Crace’s fiction and in the annals of his memoirs, is
endowed with its own material agency. In “Have You Seen Our Chicken?”,
a quasi-Dickensian parable of a missing chicken dinner for a 2007 issue of
the Independent on Sunday, Crace recounts the disappearance of “North
London’s quietest cockerel” during Christmas Lunch, 1952.1 The anec-
dote begins with a tribute by Crace: “I knew that chicken personally. It was
Ferdinand…He had been pecking around the wire cold-frame in our shared
garden for two years, growing fat and complacent on our leftovers”. Due
in part to his neighbourly disposition and reputation as an “uncomplaining
bird”, Ferdinand had been granted a stay of execution at Christmas 1951,
and had spent another year “living it up on mom’s best food”, a menu that
included kitchen scraps and experimental offerings of sliced tongue and
rations of corned beef.
S. Bezan (B)
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
of cremated cat (story 62), these food fabulations are consigned to the
service of Crace’s teasing humour, which works to continuously keep his
readers guessing. “Trust nothing I say”, Crace advises his readers in an
interview, “but place yourself in an imaginary and testing environment
where unusual events are likely to occur and then be responsible to any
idea that offers itself”.5 Crace’s prescription for reading his fiction extends
fully to The Devil’s Larder, which, much like the novel’s opening tableau
(a short meditation on a canned good that has lost its label), evades easy
categorization.
In addition to its formal innovations, The Devil’s Larder uniquely por-
trays food objects as materially agential forces. As a magical-realist manual
for interpreting the interventions and agencies of food and flesh (described
throughout the chapter as “edible matter”), the novel is guided by a prin-
ciple of digestive upset: in each of its courses, the appearance of strange
meals produces effects (illness, death, transfers of energy and biomass) and
affects (empathy, curiosity and especially disgust) that lead to the collapse
of the natural order of things—particularly of the hierarchical relationship
between predator and prey, eater and eaten. I offer a posthumanist critique
of these unusual effects and affects, arguing that Crace’s alimentary materi-
alism endows edible matter with characteristics of mutability and agentiality
that further become the basis for challenging the narrative of homo culi-
naris (the idea, held by cultural anthropologists, that “to cook is to be
human”). In crossing the barriers of taste, Crace’s sensuous book utilizes
disgust as an affective mode to rethink nonhuman and edible objects and
environments.
For instance, readers of The Devil’s Larder will note from the outset
that Crace’s gustatory tableaus convey an abject set of aesthetic values. We
must be prepared for outlandish accounts of eating, including stories of an
omelette that becomes pregnant after being mixed with ejaculate; a soup
stone that is imbued with the vegetable and animal broths of bygone meals,
becoming a molecular archive of taste; woody polyps that grow in a patient’s
bowel and become food for his doctor; and a trio of aromatic melons that
sprout from seeds deposited in a septic tank. Tracing the material forces
of these abject foods, I organize the sixty-four short stories of the novel
into categories that showcase three particular foods and elements: eggs,
salt/stone, and plants. It is through his surrealist tableaus with these peculiar
elements that Crace deconstructs the literary field of food, which has often
historically privileged the human as a superior entity in tasting others, rather
than in being tasted.
182 S. BEZAN
recent novel, The Melody (2018), the widower Alfred Busi has his larder
raided by a homeless child and is drawn into a world of food waste and
freeganism, thereby illustrating how the practice of scavenging dehuman-
izes homeless populations. The Melody furthermore describes a Palaeolithic
humanity “that must scavenge on its naked haunches for roots and berries,
nuts and leaves, roaches, maggots, frogs and carrion, stolen eggs and hon-
ey” (262), and concludes with a strange and solacing scene in which Busi
inters his wife’s ashes into the soil, along with a luxury picnic of pâté, caviar,
olives, foie-gras, pastries, cakes, and dainty sandwiches.
In these novels, food and flesh intersect with expressions of desire, grief,
and survival, and explore ideas of biological sex and reproduction, capi-
talist consumption (and its attending economic precarities/prosperities),
counter-cultural or resistant political practices, and evolutionary concep-
tions of human civilization based on the striations of gender, race, ethnic-
ity, and class. Crace’s past journalistic work likely shapes his consideration
of these subjects,9 and The Devil’s Larder certainly aligns with the wider
thematic concerns of his oeuvre, yet its unique shift in scope (towards the
aesthetics of disgust) means that the conception of taste becomes a literary
strategy to probe into the entanglements of eating customs and conceptions
of the human.
the cooking of animal flesh. We learn from Nick Fiddes’s book, Meat, that
anthropological studies of homo culinaris avoid this key aspect of consump-
tion in the evolution of cooking. In Fiddes’s review of the work of Lévi-
Strauss, he argues that this ethnological work “purports to demonstrate,
among other things, how fire universally transforms food from a natural
state to a cultural state demarcating, he argues, the emergence of humani-
ty…[But] the point missed is that Lévi-Strauss largely fails to acknowledge
that in most cases he is not discussing the cooking just of food, but partic-
ularly the cooking of animals” (15). Understanding Fiddes’s argument as a
rejoinder to the anthropocentrism of the majority of anthropological work
in the past century, it is clear that homo culinaris is interminably inscribed
into the meaning of food and the epistemologies of taste.
In this history of cultural anthropology, the term “meat” is instrumen-
tal to the evolutionary narrative of homo culinaris : it can be regarded as
a rhetorical remnant of the anthropological machine that relies on these
significations (that is, of the early hominid becoming human in the act of
killing animals and cooking meat) as evidence of human exceptionalism.
Understood this way, the application of the word “meat” to nonhuman
animals has only served the purpose of reinforcing the human’s supposed
mastery over nature as food, and furthermore distances the human from
any associations with edibility, animality, and mortality. If it is the case, as
I have argued elsewhere, that eating meat poses an abject threat to human
self-subjectivity by crossing bodily borders (from outside to inside),11 then
it is worth considering how animal flesh, which Fiddes argues is one of
“the likeliest potential foods to nauseate us…the gristle, the blood ves-
sels, the organs, the eyes” (17–18), can be classified as “meat” and thereby
transformed from that which is “disgusting” into that which is “edible”.
Obfuscating the mortal finitude of the human (who is similarly composed
of guts and gristle), the apparatus of taste is one that attributes privilege
into the evolutionary history of homo sapiens, often at the expense of mainly
nonhuman animal bodies that have been relegated to the lower echelons
of the appetitive order of nature.
The rhetorical repurposing of animal flesh as “meat” in the evolution-
ary narrative of homo sapiens finds its foundation in the human’s mastery
of nature; a mastery wielded by a relationship between humans and food
that is moderated by the operations of taste. This relationship is tethered
to digestive practices of eating others (i.e. those marked as “meat”) that
are thought to be the distinguishing characteristic of homo sapiens, but
are a part of a larger philosophical project of consuming animals, as Kelly
11 CROSSING THE BARRIERS OF TASTE … 187
throwing his corpse overboard into the sea (story 39). But despite the
disparate and shifting index of foods that appear in each story, the novel’s
postmodernist and magical-realist elements result in effects and affects that
station edible matter as an actant capable of upsetting the appetitive order.
Story 3 of The Devil’s Larder sets the scene for Crace’s alimentary mate-
rialism, illustrating how ideas of flesh and edibility can be attributed unex-
pectedly to seemingly in/edible and nonhuman food objects, and to the
human itself. In this story, readers are confronted with a strange scenario:
“united by a single appetite” for bush meats (5), five men are presented
with hors d’oeuvres of “soft-bodied spiders, swag beetles, forest roaches”,
and the “curried cuissardes of frog” (6), yet insist that “we are seeking
something more extreme than frog, something prehistoric, hard-core, dan-
gerous, something disallowed where we come from. We mean, at last, to
cross the barriers of taste” (7, my emphasis). After their dinner, the men
stumble back to the forest pathway from whence they came, aware that it is
now they who have become “fair game” for predators that lurk in the dark,
including dogs, snakes, flies, wasps and even cadavers that they imagine will
“rise up from the undergrowth and seize us by the legs” (8). Portraying
the slippage between the eater and the eaten, story 3 acclimates readers
to the possibility that ostensibly impassive food objects or animals deemed
“prey” will challenge the constitution of the human. As the novel unfolds,
Crace’s alimentary materialism invites us to consider the creative transfers
of biomass and energy that do not issue from the human as the pinnacle of a
quaternary structure of predation but as one of the many edible organisms
that are enfolded in the web of life.
Pointedly conveying this notion of life is the egg: a slimy, pregnable,
and muculent substance (a tripartite form of hardened shell, firm yolk and
slippery albumen) that serves as a binding agent for baked goods and as a
foodstuff for both highbrow and lowbrow eaters. Story 12 describes eggs as
the central backdrop of a meal that is scraped together “in these hard times,
in these slow months between the winter and the rain” (34), imparting an
embodied empathy into its human diners. The poverty of the eaters runs
in parallel with the egg-laying hens. While the diners “dream of work and
cash and ranging free”, they also buy sanctioned eggs from free-range hens,
with labels printed on their cartons guaranteeing that:
The playful and poetic label that is adhered to the carton demonstrates an
odd parallel between the affective temperament of the hens and the eaters
of eggs who, by close of the short story, “stay at home and contemplate
the life of hens” (35). Seemingly moved by the effect of eating eggs, the
eaters of story 12 are affectively transformed into a mode of contemplation.
Operating at the periphery of this short story is the gendered labour of the
hens themselves (or what Susan Squire calls the products of “liminal live-
stock” in our “gendered agricultural imaginary”),14 which, true to Crace’s
oblique political standing, never fully come to the fore. But as an ovum of
new life, the egg figuratively germinates seeds of insight into other forms
of fleshy being, conveying a sense in which the effect of eating eggs creates
the affect of empathy in the eaters themselves.
The affective register of eggs is heightened later in the novel (in story
41), this time invoking surprise and disgust in its readers. In a brief story of
five lines, we read that “spitting in the omelette is a fine revenge…But take
care not to masturbate into the mix” (126). As the mixture is heated, it
becomes “quick and lumpy, until they could outwit [the man]…by leaping
from the pan with their half-wings and running down the lane like boys”
(126). Like the last story, part of the sub-text of this story is gendered,
relating (at least in magical-realist terms) how a mixture of eggs with a
man’s ejaculate results in a kind of half-human, half-hen hybrid in Crace’s
perturbing tale. Yet this story serves once again as an admonition to his
readers of the similitude of these material substances: as a binding agent,
the egg has the absurd effect of creating a disgusting conglomerate of male
ejaculate and the fertile product of hens, begging the question: What kinds
of outcomes, besides being eaten, is edible matter capable of creating?
Similarly multifaceted in a form (between liquid and solid), salt and
stone appears in Crace’s novel in order to represent the edibility of the
human and the embodied memory of stone. Stories 17, 27, 56, and 59
toys with the idea of salt and waste, along with the memory and aftertaste
of stone as a mineral agent that ascends from the sea to become edible
matter. Story 17, for instance, offers an aperitif in the form of dinner party
icebreaker: “Imagine it. You’re on a raft, the two of you, three days from
190 S. BEZAN
any land…What do you drink to save your lives? Sea water, or your own
urine? Will you take pass or brine? Decide. You’re caught between the devil
and the salt blue sea” (52). While the wife will choose her own urine, the
husband will drink sea water. Lips white with salt, he will fill a can with
urine for his wife, but “so long as he drinks sea, preferring universe to self,
she will survive unscathed” (53). The story reveals the affinity that bod-
ies share with one another and their environments: as salt is passed from
one element to another, imbibed from one body to another, the human
becomes edible. Likewise, story 27 represents salt as both a tool of the
kitchen and a constitutive component of the human body. This story fea-
tures a team of girls who utilize salt, spices and eventually their own urine,
for “prick-teasing” razor clams. At the end of the story, the girls’s teacher
demonstrates the process, as observed (through binoculars) by their boss:
“I’d caught her squatting on the flats, her skirts held up, her underpants
pulled clear, the urine sinking at her feet. The clams for that night’s cus-
tomers were springing up between her legs” (85). In tasting the bounty of
clams, the teacher claims that she could taste the spices and other kitchen
spoils used to collect them, such as jam, cinnamon, pop, curry powder and
pickles (85). Sexual euphemisms aside, the razor clams serve as an archive of
taste, collecting and retaining flavours that are “smuggled…into the flesh”
(84). This idea extends to the soup stone of story 56 and the flour stone
of story 59, which produce magical effects by storing “memory and after-
taste” (170) that are transferred to other bodies. The narrator of story 59
declares that the flour stone has seeped into the forest itself: “I fancy I can
smell a bakery…There’s yeast in rotting fruit. There’s dough in mulching
leaves. Tree bark and fungi stink of bread” (182). Similarly, another scene
featuring salt and stones outlines the nutritive qualities of those elements
for a couple buried under a collapsed roof. In this precarious position,
the man and woman lay beneath the boulder clay, sucking on stones and
becoming enfleshed with their histories. We read that “the old man and
his wife stayed strong with stones. Their bodies grew as gelid as the earth
and they could feel their stomachs filling, the slow transfusion into them
of rain and sun and harvest crops” (146). What will at one time be their
final resting place, the cold clay is for the couple a protective capsule that
fills them with heat and nutrients, emphasizing the relationship between
human and humus; dirt and flesh. In these stories, the intersection of the
“fleshiness” of environments and of elements establishes a cross-elemental
and inter-species paradigm of eating through the embodied memory of salt
and stone.
11 CROSSING THE BARRIERS OF TASTE … 191
Notes
1. The full story can be found in the Independent on Sunday archives.
2. Crace has authored 11 novels in total, spanning from 1986 to 2018 (when
he officially retired).
3. See “Synopsis” under The Devil’s Larder on the author’s website, http://
www.jim-crace.com.
4. Ian Sansom, “Interview with Jim Crace.”
5. See Penguin, “Author of the Month,” Interview.
11 CROSSING THE BARRIERS OF TASTE … 193
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford
University Press, 2002.
———. Taste. Trans. Cooper Francis. London: Seagull Books, 2017.
Bennett, Jane. “Edible Matter.” New Left Review 45 (2007): 133–145, https://
newleftreview.org/ll/45/jane-bennett-edible-matter.
Bezan, Sarah. “From the Mortician’s Scalpel to the Butcher’s Knife: Towards an
Animal Thanatology.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 10, no. 1 (2012),
119–137.
194 S. BEZAN
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis, MN: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Crace, Jim. Continent. London: Picador, 1986.
———. Arcadia. London: Picador, 1992.
———. Signals of Distress. London: Picador, 1994.
———. The Devil’s Larder. London: Picador, 2001.
———. All That Follows. London: Picador, 2001.
———. “Have You Seen Our Chicken?” Independent on Sunday, Sunday
23 December 2007. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/
books/features/have-you-seen-our-chicken-by-jim-crace-766274.html.
Accessed 9 May 2018.
———. The Melody. London: Picador, 2018.
Diamond, Cora. The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Fiddes, Nick. Meat: A Natural Symbol. London: Routledge, 1991.
Kass, Leon. The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Making Sense of Taste. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1999.
———. “Introduction.” In The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink,
edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Oxford: Berg, 2005.
———. Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/
acprof:oso/9780199756940.001.0001/acprof-9780199756940.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York, NY: Columbia
University Press, 1982.
Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2013.
Masurel, Pauline. “The Devil’s Larder by Jim Crace.” The Short Review, 2002.
http://www.theshortreview.com/reviews/JimCraceDevilsLarder.htm.
“meat, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2018. http://www.oed.
com/view/Entry/115517. Accessed 9 May 2018.
Mott, Nicholas. “What Makes Us Human? Cooking, Study Says.” National
Geographic News, 26 October 2012. https://news.nationalgeographic.
com/news/2012/10/121026-human-cooking-evolution-raw-food-health-
science/. Accessed 9 May 2018.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Dawsonera Online. https://www.dawsonera.com/abstract/9780674041523.
Accessed 9 May 2018.
Oliver, Kelly. Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2009.
11 CROSSING THE BARRIERS OF TASTE … 195
Sansom, Ian. “The Devil’s Larder.” London Review of Books 23, no. 22
(15 November 2011): 13–14. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n22/ian-sansom/
smorgasbits. Accessed 9 May 2018.
Squier, Susan. “Liminal Livestock.” Signs 35, no. 2 (2010): 477–502.
Tigner, Amy L., and Allison Carruth. “Introduction.” In Literature and Food Stud-
ies. London: Routledge, 2018, 1–16.
Wrangham, Richard. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. London: Pro-
file Books, 2009.
CHAPTER 12
Matthew Calarco
Introduction
Michel Faber’s novel Under the Skin might appear at first glance to follow
the familiar contours of a Bildungsroman, in this instance tracking the trans-
formation of a young woman as she undergoes a crisis in her self-identity
and drifts slowly but in a determined manner towards another way of life.
The young woman here would be the novel’s protagonist, Isserley, whose
job involves participating in the capture and production of flesh for human
consumption. As the novel unfolds, Isserley eventually comes to reject this
M. Calarco (B)
California State University, Fullerton, CA, USA
practice and the industry and market imperatives that render it operative.
Where the novel takes an unanticipated and disturbing twist, however, is
in regard to the precise source and nature of the flesh being captured, pro-
duced, and consumed. The product at the heart of Isserley’s occupation
is what, in her language, is called “vodsel” meat or “voddissin”, a delicacy
that is produced for wealthy human consumers by workers like Isserley
who themselves cannot afford it. For readers of the novel, it gradually
becomes evident that vodsels are in fact what we would call human beings
and, conversely, that the beings who call themselves human are, from our
perspective, aliens. Furthermore, even though Isserley eventually comes to
question her role in the capture and production of vodsel flesh, none of
the capacities for which we vodsels often pride ourselves (for example, our
refined capacity for language, self-consciousness, culture, and so on) appear
to play any role in this conversion. Attending to these rather unusual and
disconcerting aspects of Isserley’s disposition and eventual transformation
allows us to think about our own participation in and rejection of meat
production in a very different light. I shall suggest in what follows that
Isserley’s drift away from the voddissin industry and towards a reconsider-
ation of her place in the world provide us with important elements of an
ethics of belonging , and that such an ethics can help us recast the work that
is currently being done in nonanthropocentric theory and politics.
remaining back home, where beings of her low economic class are all but
destined to live and work in the “New Estates” under unthinkable condi-
tions. The most essential surgical augment that Isserley receives are large
breast implants, a bodily modification that the human executives at Vess
Incorporated have rightly divined to be of high value in contemporary vod-
sel culture, especially among many of its male members. It is exceedingly
important, the reader learns, for Isserley to be able to command and sustain
a male vodsel’s attention, as her job is to pick up male hitchhikers—mus-
cular, beefy men, since “puny specimens” are of “no use to her” (1)—and
keep them occupied in conversation during the course of a brief car ride
in order to determine whether they would be suitable vodsels to be turned
into voddissin.
As daunting as it might seem for an alien being to assume this role and
become a competent actor in something as complex as vodsel society, Isser-
ley notes that she is in fact able to pick up vodsel language, gestures, and
habits with relative rapidity and ease—primarily through watching tele-
vision. From Isserley’s perspective, vodsels (male vodsels, in particular)
are hopelessly simple and unsophisticated creatures who, despite gener-
ally favorable conditions on earth, appear unable to attain happiness or
awaken to their own condition. Thus, although Isserley has to undergo a
kind of cultural training to do her job, for a human being like herself the
cognitive and social aspects of the work are fairly straightforward. As just
noted, her task is to converse with male hitchhikers for long enough to
figure out if they fit the desired description for becoming voddissin. It is
not enough that her specimens simply be “beefy”; they must also be the
kind of individuals who can be “disappeared” from vodsel society without
alerting friends, family, or the authorities. Thus, Isserley is targeting indi-
viduals who occupy a rather unique subject position: male vodsels, who
hold a certain privilege within their culture, but who have come partially
to lose their hold on that privilege in a fundamental way. In other words,
Isserley is on the lookout for male vodsels who no longer matter, whose
lives are of little value to other vodsels. Such mattering (or lack thereof) can
only be determined, it seems, through Isserley conversing with the vodsels
and inquiring about their relations. Once she is able to determine with
sufficient certainty that a given vodsel is a low-risk specimen, she stuns him
with a drug (“icpathua”) and then brings him back to her base at Ablach
Farm, where Esswis and other human male co-workers begin the process
of preparing the body for fattening and eventual slaughter.2
200 M. CALARCO
differences between Amlis and Isserley but also Amlis’s complete rejection
of Isserley’s vocation and her attitude towards vodsels. Amlis staunchly
resists the institutionalized killing of vodsels and maintains that they are,
for all intents and purposes, the same as him and his fellow human beings.
He tells Isserley that the vodsels who are being transformed into meat once
“lived and breathed” just like human beings, and that human beings and
vodsels are fundamentally the same “under the skin” (175–176).
Amlis’s perspective on the mistreatment of vodsels is uncannily similar
to the approach taken by mainstream animal rights activists towards animal
suffering and killing in our own context.4 Animals are to be given rights
and full legal standing, it is argued by such activists, because they are fun-
damentally the same as human beings—that is, human beings and animals,
despite superficial differences at the level of species membership, are all the
same “under the skin”. Although it is tempting to read Faber’s novel as an
extended allegory demonstrating the force of this argument, it is not at all
clear that Isserley is actually moved by Amlis’s arguments about human-
vodsel identity. Rather, Isserley seems more inclined to be influenced by
Amlis based on their shared passion for the miracles of earthly existence.
In some of the most moving scenes of the novel, Isserley takes Amlis out
(at his insistence) to see the countryside and ocean near the factory and
to get a feel for life on earth. Like Isserley, Amlis appears to have a deeply
spiritual disposition, a taste and desire for the miraculous nature of earthly
existence. Amlis is utterly astonished by the simplest things: the rain, the
air, the land, the sheep, and other living creatures that populate the planet.
Life on earth contrasts sharply with life back home, which is dark, desolate,
and apparently lacking in clean air, water, and the like. In fact, upon seeing
the earth’s abundance, Amlis wonders why Isserley doesn’t just quit her
work altogether and try to carve out an existence within her earthly envi-
rons. After all, as Amlis notes, Isserley lives extraordinarily simply, and it
seems that the earth could more than support most of her minimal needs.
Isserley, though, has difficulty imagining a life beyond utility. In response
to Amlis’s suggestion that she should quit work and find a new place on
earth to call home, Isserley responds defiantly: “Are you suggesting I live
like an animal?” (255). Isserley’s language here is worth pausing over. For
the (vodsel) reader, it is almost impossible to read this sentence and avoid
thinking that Isserley is referring to what we might call nonhuman animals.
To live a life beyond work, beyond utility, outside the economic coordinates
of the dominant order would, for us (vodsels), amount to living “like an
animal”, in an abject space among those who are permanently cast out of
202 M. CALARCO
the social order. For Isserley, though, living like an animal means living like
vodsels, like us—which is to say (and from her perspective), in a subhuman
world deprived of genuine meaning, purpose, or aim. It is ultimately this
shift towards living like an animal that she finds most distressing. Isserley
is able largely to dismiss Amlis’s strained claims to human-vodsel (animal)
identity because the differences in language, cognition, and sociality are so
stark between the two groups. What Isserley fears most, however, is that
the human-vodsel boundary is being broached along other registers—not
in the mode of vodsels becoming like humans but in she herself becoming-
vodsel.5 Her surgical modifications have already placed her in a liminal
state in this regard, and her daily interactions with vodsels have brought
her ever closer to their world. Indeed, when Amlis visits the factory, this
possibility of being (mis)recognized as a vodsel lurks as Isserley’s deepest
fear. What she is most anxious about is that moment when the “sickening
opposite of recognition” would occur, that moment when Amlis would
be “expecting to see a human being, and he would see a hideous animal
instead” (79). Thus, when Amlis suggests she ought to leave work and find
another home in the world, Isserley fears she is sliding permanently into a
zone of abjection. In short, Isserley cannot initially affirm that she belongs
entirely to the earth—to do so would be to confirm that she is, in some
deeper sense, “like an animal”. She insists on seeing herself as being tied
to another world within the world, to the meaningful world within which
she and her fellow human beings properly belong.
Back to Earth
Amlis’s visit initiates something akin to a conversion for Isserley, though
not (as we have noted) for reasons having to do with the purported iden-
tity of human beings and vodsels. Rather, Amlis’s concern for the vodsels
seems to get under Isserley’s skin in an indirect way, leading her to want
to learn more about the various steps of the process that transforms vod-
sels into voddissin. In the scenes where Isserley is initially introduced to
the workings of the underground factory, she doesn’t seem to discern any
common traits with the caged vodsels who have been fattened and pre-
pared for slaughter; instead, she sees only a number of indistinct bodies.
The “monthling” vodsels are described as “a mound of fast-panting flesh.
… Their fat little heads … [were] identical, swaying in a cluster like polyps
of an anemone, blinking stupidly in the sudden light” (181). At this point,
when Isserley and Amlis are looking at the monthlings in one of their
12 BELONGING TO THIS WORLD … 203
cramped and dirty holding pens, one of the vodsels scrawls “MERCY” on
the ground.6 Amlis is keen to decode the writing, and asks Isserley for help
in interpreting the marks. Isserley, however, refuses to accord the vodsel
writing any significance. Even though she is not entirely competent with
the semantic range of the word (which implies that one can, like Isserley,
become a competent member of contemporary vodsel culture with almost
no exposure to the word or the correlative action), Isserley would prefer
that the vodsel world remain entirely separate from her, and that her limi-
nal subject position, training, and surgical transformation not be taken to
imply that she has any deep link with vodsel nature or communicative prac-
tices. When Amlis presses her repeatedly for a translation of the scrawling,
assuming that she has some special insight into vodsel language and psy-
chology, Isserley breaks down in tears: “I don’t know what you expect of
me. … I’m a human being, not a vodsel” (185).
Despite her disavowal of understanding the vodsel’s scrawling, what
Isserley does seem to recognize here—and what brings her closer to the
vodsels than she is prepared to acknowledge at this point—is the vodsels’
utter vulnerability. Deprived of articulate speech (vodsels are limited to
expressing “Ng! Ng! Ng!” because of their severed tongues) and mobility
(the fattening process makes for limited and lumbering movement), the
vodsels she sees in the holding pens are completely exposed and entirely
defenseless. Indeed, when the vodsels try to escape (with the assistance
of Amlis), they are easily recaptured or gunned down by human workers.
Isserley has throughout the course of the novel already shown how sensi-
tive she is to the fragility and vulnerability of embodied life, both in the
recurrent bodily pain she suffers after her surgical operations as well as in
the close calls she has with high-speed automobile accidents. However,
it is not until Isserley experiences an attempted rape by a hitchhiker that
she seems fully to grasp the deeper, more profound identity and condition
she shares with vodsels: she, too, like vodsels can potentially be reduced to
total defenselessness and vulnerability. In her efforts to stop the rapist, who
wields a knife and threatens her life if she fails to comply with his sexual
demands, Isserley begs him for “murky”, mispronouncing the word but
demonstrating that she grasps at least its basic significance both for herself
and for the tongue-less vodsel who scrawled it in the dirt in front of her
and Amlis. Thus, it is not simply that Isserley and the vodsels are more or
less alike based on having shared traits and capacities like language or con-
sciousness. The identity runs much deeper, and is much more threatening:
there is some fundamental aspect of Isserley’s existence that ties her to that
204 M. CALARCO
“mound” of flesh, to those identical “fat little heads” that “blink stupidly”
in the light. Ultimately, Isserley is discovering that she belongs to and with
the vodsels—that she is, in fact, “like an animal” and belongs entirely to
the earth.
In a defiant response to this possible disruption of her human identity
and vocation, Isserley makes a determined effort to reestablish her habits
and routine. In Chapter 10, the opening scene of the novel is restaged
(in part) but with Isserley more resolute than ever not to be distracted by
the wonders of the natural world and to remain squarely focused on her
work. She picks up another hitcher, a male vodsel who is unable to find
the right point of entry to start up a conversation with her. Internally, the
hitcher finds himself marvelling over the world in the same way that Isserley
often does, but Isserley has no sense of the hitcher’s attunement, nor he
of hers. With this hitcher pickup, Isserley finds herself even less at home
in her role and comes increasingly to feel the weight of her work as work.
She knows that a decision must now be made about how to live her life
and whether the path she has chosen is ultimately a worthwhile one. The
nausea concomitant with this realization brings the uncommunicative and
utterly alien qualities of the hitcher squarely into Isserley’s consciousness.
A deep hatred rises up in her for this particular vodsel—and perhaps for the
vodsel condition more generally. She stuns him with icpathua and readies
him to be taken back to the farm for processing and fattening.
However, during these preparations in the car, tears unexpectedly fall
from Isserley’s eyes, giving her further pause about her work and her rela-
tion to vodsels. It is this moment of rupture in her world that leads Isserley
finally to confront her claustrophobia and fear of underground spaces—
reminders of a life she avoided in the Estates—and to learn the full details
of what happens to the stunned vodsels after she deposits them with the
workers on the farm. Although Isserley is manifestly disturbed by what
she sees and learns (the workers have to remove her forcibly from the
underground factory during her tour), she still believes she has little choice
concerning her life direction but to return to work.
Back at work on the road, she picks up a final hitcher, a male vodsel who
reeks of dog and essentially lives in his van. This hitcher’s sole task is to ruin
drivers’ days by making them confront head-on the horrors of existence.
He wants them to feel as deeply as he does that existence isn’t worth it, and
he tries to find just the right timing and manner of delivering this message
so that drivers will be devastated by it. Sensing he has found this moment
with Isserley during his drive with her, the hitcher turns and says to her:
12 BELONGING TO THIS WORLD … 205
After this exchange, the hitcher requests to be let out of the car; Isserley
instead flips her icpathua toggle and stuns him. Staring at his unconscious
face and body, Isserley whispers “I’m sorry” and begins her trip back to
the farm.
These moments of compassion in her final two vodsel stunnings indicate
that Isserley’s life is already beginning to be redirected onto another path.
Following the encounters, her conscience is disrupted in surprising ways
and her compassion is extended further to non-vodsel animals who, while
perhaps visually similar to her, have rudimentary cognitive abilities.7 After
the final hitcher is deposited at the farm for processing, Isserley finds her-
self unexpectedly concerned about the fate of the last hitcher’s dog, who
is trapped in the hitcher’s van and will starve to death unless released. It
has not escaped Isserley’s notice up to this point how little these and other
non-vodsel animals matter in vodsel culture. Throughout the novel, we
are told of the roads she drives on being littered with roadkill; further, the
land near the roads is populated with agricultural animals undergoing feed-
ing/fattening processes prior to slaughter similar to those that she and her
fellow human beings make vodsels undergo. Why should these sacrifice-
able animals get under her skin, affect her dreams, disturb her conscience?
Despite the dual reinforcement of such beings not mattering much either
to human beings or vodsels, Isserley returns to the van and risks being
caught in order to release the trapped dog. Upon arriving at the van, she
lets the dog go, telling the spaniel: “You’re on your own now, doggy”
(295). In essence, though, these words could just as well apply to Isserley
herself (and Isserley does, in fact, note that the language she uses is not
shared by the dog), for at this point she has decided to leave her job and
has already passed up a hitcher on her way to release the dog. In leaving
behind the farm and her occupation, Isserley is effectively on her own, just
like the dog—though, she is not truly on her own any more than the dog
is. Indeed, both she and the dog now belong to the world in a profound
sense.8 In leaving behind the limited worlds of utility (Isserley) and pet-
hood and domestication (the dog), Isserley and the spaniel enter into a new
set of possibilities and potentials with countless other beings and relations.
206 M. CALARCO
The question that faces Isserley and the released dog is: What else might
we become now?
We learn nothing more about the dog’s fate and decision, but the novel
does allow us to track Isserley’s continued transformation towards another
way of life. With £375 in her pocket (taken from the wallet of the last
hitcher she stunned), Isserley leaves Ablach Farm for good. Underscoring
her deep belonging and fundamental indiscernibility from the world around
her, she considers places to hide in the surroundings, wondering whether
she might “disappear into the trees like a pheasant” (299). Ultimately,
Isserley decides on taking shelter in a bower in the forest, which effectively
allows her in the short term to live undetected (especially by the police, who
are looking for her after the disappearance of one of her hitchers is being
investigated). What finally brings Isserley back into vodsel society is her
hunger. In anticipation of re-entering society, she must once again undergo
her shower and shaving ritual to return her body to a form that passes
for a vodsel, this time wondering compassionately whether the chemicals
in the shampoo she uses are negatively affecting the wildlife in the loch
where she bathes. Although able to procure vodsel food upon her return,
Isserley has generally poor luck with digesting it; she is confident, however,
that between the food available in the fields and trees as well as other
foods available on earth, she will be able to sustain herself. Her faith in the
abundance and fecundity of the earth remains unwavering: “It was all out
there somewhere, she was sure” (303).
Isserley’s attempt to carve out a life on the outskirts of vodsel society
is interrupted by a desperate vodsel hitchhiker who forces Isserley to stop
her car and give him a ride to the hospital, where his wife is having a baby.
Paralleling Isserley’s marginal social status back home, the hitcher’s baby
is not considered a full member of vodsel society. The hitcher tells Isserley:
“The Wee Free Church says mah bebby’s gonny be a bastard … because me
and mah girril’s nae married. Whit’s that all aboot? Fuckin’ prehistoaric,
y’ken?” (305). Isserley is unsure how to decode the hitcher’s accent when
he says these words to her; sensing this, the hitcher asks her more straight-
forwardly which religion she observes. Isserley replies carefully: “Where I
come from … religion is … dead” (306). Here we are confronted with what
is perhaps the most difficult question of the novel. If traditional religion
devalues existence (as it does with the hitcher’s “illegitimate” baby, and in
a way that is similar to the previous hitcher’s attitude of life in this world
being “shit”), and the mere death of such religion does nothing to revalue
existence (as seems to be the case for most of Isserley’s post-religious fellow
12 BELONGING TO THIS WORLD … 207
human beings), with what resources might one re-build a meaningful and
worthwhile life?
At one point in the novel, Isserley notes that her coworkers on the
farm lack a “spiritual side” (63), hence her fundamental discontent with
life there and with the human “world” she inhabits in Scotland. Indeed,
the only interhuman interactions that seem to provide Isserley with any
genuine joy are the moments she spends with Amlis marveling over the
earth’s multitude of wonders. Is it not this shared spiritual passion, this
syn-theoria, that ultimately gives Isserley the push she needs to leave her
unfulfilling life on the farm and to experiment with a more meaningful way
of life? And is it not this same spiritual disposition that helps Isserley see the
horrors she is involved in with her work and that encourages her to twist free
of those particular entanglements? Ultimately, Isserley’s spiritual sensitivity
functions throughout the novel to allow her to see that if she hopes to do
justice to her own life and to the miracle of earthy life, she will have to be
a participant in the construction of a new way of life beyond Ablach Farm.
Perhaps it is this alternative spirituality, this more-than-human fidelity to
the earth and its other (possible) meanings, that points the way towards a
worthwhile life beyond traditional religion and its death.
Isserley never gets the opportunity to build another way of life, however,
because she and the new father she has picked up end up sliding off the
road, slamming into a tree, and getting badly injured. Passersby stop to
help Isserley and the hitcher (who has been thrown from the car); they
let her know that “The Mercy Hospital” is close by and that help will be
arriving soon. Isserley, of course, cannot risk being detected by vodsels and
knows that she will have to use the special detonation device that has been
installed in her Toyota “to blow her car, herself, and a generous scoop of
earth into the smallest conceivable particles” (310). The novel closes with
a profoundly touching narrative of what Isserley tells herself will happen
once she presses the button and her body is dispersed:
The atoms that had been herself would mingle with the oxygen and nitrogen
in the air. Instead of ending up buried in the ground, she would become
part of the sky: that was the way to look at it. Her invisible remains would
combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed,
she would be part of it, falling softly to earth, rising up again with the snow’s
evaporation. When it rained, she would be there in the spectral arch that
spanned from firth to ground. She would help to wreathe the fields in mists,
and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever. All it
208 M. CALARCO
took was the courage to press one button, and the faith that the connection
had not been broken.
She reached forward a trembling hand.
“Here I come”, she said. (310–311)
Here Isserley has attained what is perhaps the most important perspective
one can attain while on earth: recognition that one belongs entirely to the
earth and its wondrous systems and processes, that “all things are from
earth, and all things end in earth”. Such recognition amounts, to borrow
Faber’s dedicatory words at the beginning of the novel, to being brought
“back to earth”, where a worthwhile life can be sought anew.9
Belonging
Isserley’s life and death provide us with the beginnings of what we might
call an ethics of belonging. I have suggested here that her conversion towards
another way of life stems less from seeing vodsels as being essentially like
her—sharing her basic capacities and abilities, her dignity and distinction—
and more from a gradual and deepening recognition of her own belonging
to this world with and alongside vodsels and other planetary creatures and
elements. Such belonging refuses all gestures of transcendence and efforts
to establish a fundamental distinction or break from this world; it con-
stitutes, instead, a full and lucid acknowledgement that one belongs to a
realm that has hitherto been considered abject. An ethics of belonging thus
names a way of entering into a thought and life of radical immanence.
Isserley catches glimpses of the beatitude inherent in this ethic through-
out the novel: in her drives in the “prehistoric stillness” of the very early
morning (2); in eating the “heavenly” snow that accumulates on her wind-
shield (140); in the beauty she sees in the bushes and trees that grow entirely
on their own and serve “no agricultural purpose” (250). But she is not able
to gain a fuller sense of belonging to the world until she leaves behind her
work and enters into a mode of existence beyond utility. Much as capital-
ism and its emphasis on utility narrows our vision, rendering us stupid (to
borrow Karl Marx’s term) and one-dimensional (to borrow Herbert Mar-
cuse’s), Isserley’s occupation has formed her to view vodsels and much of
her existence on earth through constricted, market-based, economic lenses.
Moreover, given the economic precariousness of her life back home, she
has little choice but to find another (economic) way of life on earth—if, in
fact, she wants to live any semblance of a life worth living (by dominant
12 BELONGING TO THIS WORLD … 209
human standards). It is not until she experiments with living “like an ani-
mal”—that is, with leaving behind her work and its concomitant economic
“world”—that those scales start to fall from her eyes, thereby allowing her
to enter more fully into another register of life and relations.
With her growing recognition of the richness of life beyond work, Isser-
ley begins to see everything —vodsels, the earth, her own life and death—
differently. To be sure, that which is within her purview remains precisely
the same “stuff” it was before, but Isserley’s post-work existence offers a
hint of what the world and life might become if it were engaged beyond
utility. It would be an existence very much like the one Georges Bataille
describes under the rubric of sovereignty. Once work and utility are set
aside, it becomes possible, Bataille suggests, to enter into a relation with the
miraculous. Just as Isserley and Amlis marvel over the miracle of earthly life
outside of the constraints of voddissin production, so does Bataille remind
us of how the worker who drinks her wine towards no end, towards no
utility, entirely outside of work “enters a miraculous element of savour,
which is precisely the essence of sovereignty”.10 Such moments arise unex-
pectedly, by grace, when we look up from our work or are released from its
demands—for example, when we catch sight of “the brilliance of the sun,
which on a spring morning transfigures a desolate street. (Something that
the poorest individual, hardened by necessity, sometimes feels.)”11
An ethic of belonging, then, goes beyond extending mercy or pity to
all sentient beings—although one is no doubt awakened in some part to
the violence and murderousness of everyday existence through such ethi-
cal acts. Belonging speaks, more profoundly, to an animating desire, to a
passion for re-constitution and re-subjectification, to a taste for the miracle
of existence and the joy that derives from recognizing one’s embeddedness
within and alongside others in that miracle. This perspective and disposi-
tion—which Isserley, despite her post-religious mindset, does not hesitate
to call “spiritual”—is perhaps what is needed if we are to accomplish a
genuine transformation in our relations with beings we (who call ourselves
“human”) have traditionally characterized as sub- and non-human. In line
with this approach, those who struggle with and on behalf of animals might
come to see themselves as engaged not simply in a struggle for recognition
of formal legal rights for animals, but more basically and more importantly,
for recognition of the miraculous lives of animals and for a sense of the
larger wonder of planetary kinship. To fight with and on behalf of animals
would, from this perspective, be better understood as a way of affirming
210 M. CALARCO
Notes
1. This fragment has been transmitted via Theodeoretus. See Scholten,
Theodoret, IV.5, 316; translation mine.
2. In comments on a draft of this essay, Seán McCorry helpfully notes that
“ablach” is Scots for “an insignificant person” and that it derives from Scot-
tish Gaelic for “a mangled carcass”—a fitting name for the manner in which
the vodsels are seen and handled by the human workers.
3. For further reflection on the theme of alienation in both Faber’s novel and
Jonathan Glazer’s film adaptation of Under the Skin, see Sherryl Vint’s help-
ful essay, “Skin Deep”.
4. See Kristy Dunn’s excellent article, “‘Do You Know Where the Light Is?’”
for more on this topic.
5. Sarah Dillon offers a thorough analysis of this thread within Faber’s novel
in her essay “‘It Is a Question of Words, Therefore’”.
6. As we shall see, the notion of mercy returns later in the novel. For teasing
out the full implications of this concept of mercy, I have benefitted greatly
from Robert McKay’s forthcoming piece, “The Murkiness of Mercy: Michel
Faber’s Under the Skin”.
7. Isserley has a special passion for sheep, which seem almost human to her. In
observing a specific individual sheep, she notes: “It was so hard to believe
the creature couldn’t speak. It looked so much as if it should be able to.
Despite its bizarre features, there was something deceptively human about
it, which tempted her, not for the first time, to reach across the species divide
and communicate” (66). Later in the novel, when Amlis wonders whether
they have tried to use sheep for meat on the farm, Isserley is horrified at the
prospect, employing a logic of identity in response: “They’re … they’re on
all fours, Amlis, can’t you see that? They’ve got fur–tails–facial features not
that different from ours” (253).
8. It will not have escaped the reader’s notice that Cynic motifs loom large
in Faber’s novel. In exiting the meaningful life attached to human nomos,
Isserley enters into the realm of physis, into a world shared with dogs (to recall
12 BELONGING TO THIS WORLD … 211
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 3
(Sovereignty). Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Desmond, William. Cynics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Dillon, Sarah. “‘It Is a Question of Words, Therefore’: Becoming-Animal in Michel
Faber’s Under the Skin.” Science Fiction Studies 38, no. 1 (2011): 134–154.
Dunn, Kristy. “‘Do You Know Where the Light Is?’ Factory Farming and Industrial
Slaughter in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin.” In Meat Culture, edited by Annie
Potts, 149–162. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Faber, Michel. Under the Skin. New York: Harcourt, 2000.
Laertius, Diogenes. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols. Translated by R. D. Hicks.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.
Scholten, Clemens. Theodoret: De Graecarum affectionum curatione. Leiden: Brill,
2015.
Vint, Sherryl. “Skin Deep: Alienation in Under the Skin.” Extrapolation 56, no. 1
(2015): 1–14.
CHAPTER 13
Ruth Lipschitz
R. Lipschitz (B)
Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture,
University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
heart. He dances with the heart he cradles and carries, caresses and kisses,
and eventually rips open, and leaves the stage to move through the theatre
aisles, and among the audience. Returning to the stage, he hangs the heart
on a hook that is suspended by a wire and resumes dancing. His improvised
choreography includes what Cohen describes as a mixture of yoga poses,
bare-toe en-pointe ballet, and “Martha Graham movements” that combine
a sense of emotional intensity and tense physicality. He falls and rises from
the floor, extends his body into poses that are seemingly held to the point
of discomfort and punctures these with balletic leaps. His body’s halting,
agonised tension finds relief in movement in a way that recalls Graham’s
“contraction and release”, purportedly a stylised representation of breath-
ing.3 The dance ends when Elu, after the last of these falls, sits on the floor
cross-legged, takes his foot in hand and begins to suck it, at first gently and
then with increased urgency until, Cohen writes, “he is fucking himself in
the face with his foot”.4
I attended the second performance of Dance with Nothing but Heart.5
It was accompanied by Dance Umbrella’s warnings of the works “offensive
content”, which presumably meant Elu’s nakedness and the seemingly sex-
ualised ending. Cohen’s programme notes, however, describe the naked-
ness of Dance with Nothing but Heart as “full frontal poverty” rather than
as erotic.6 In a now-archived webpage on Q-online, Cohen writes that he
suggested Elu perform a dance to “show them your lack and your love”.7
This statement is typically understood, as a catalogue entry for this work
states, that “Dance With Nothing But Heart is a commentary on Cohen
and Elu’s personal lack of funds as well as on the general lack of funding
for contemporary dance in South Africa”.8
However, while creativity in the face of “lack of funds” might be the
acknowledged meaning of Dance with Nothing but Heart, it seems to
impoverish the work’s affect. To think the “With” in such restricted terms,
or to think of the heart simply as the work’s “only prop”,9 as Cohen calls
it, does not consider the way in which the performance’s intrinsic violence
is both heightened and disturbed by the tenderness with which Elu cradles
the heart. Rather, in this impoverished sense, the ox’s heart functions as a
modifier to the “with nothing” of the title: the heart is simply no-thing,
and the intersection of sex/gender and species in relation to Elu’s living
body, the absented ox, and the meaty materiality of the disembodied heart
is rendered meaningless. So too, are the registers of ingestion that link the
edible body of the animal to Elu’s sexualised foot-in-mouth action, as well
13 DANCE WITH NOTHING BUT HEART (2001) … 215
Precarious Life extends the question of the human into the frames of live-
able life and “grievable death”, for as she notes, who mourns and who is
“mournable” imbricates the ethical in the political. Yet, as authors such
as James Stanescu and Richard Iveson note, her formation of ethics as
recognition, rooted as it is in the Levinasian tradition, paradoxically cannot
recognise the vulnerability of the nonhuman animal, and her analysis of the
politics of grievability is caught within a definition of the ‘who’ who counts
as human.18
It is precisely this calculability of the subject that Derrida deconstructs
in his interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation
of the subject”. Metonymically expanding ingestion to the psychoanalytic
and ethico-political ways in which we ‘consume’ the other, he co-implicates
literal and figurative eating.19 In this expanded sense of “taking in the
other” as “eat-speak-interiorize”, he argues, the question of what he calls
the “conception-appropriation-assimilation” of the other is not ‘who’ or
‘what’ do I eat, but ‘how’.20 Since ‘I’ must ‘eat’, and since I can neither
regulate who nor what I ‘eat’, nor how much of the other I internalise,
Derrida asserts, what is at stake is determining the most generous and
hospitable way “to eat and let oneself be eaten”.21 In this “metonymy
of ‘eating well’”, there is no longer a single and absolute line between
edible and inedible bodies, between the living and the dead, nor can there
be an “indissociable limit” between the human and nonhuman. In other
words, the calculability of the subject can no longer rely on animal alterity
as its abjected determining foundation, and thus, the ethico-political and
psychoanalytic regulation of “bodies that matter” is profoundly opened to
a corporeal excess it cannot contain.
In the sections that follow, I track this corporeal excess along two interre-
lated lines of thought. I first set out the normative death-bearing structure
of animalisation that not only produces the Western humanist subject as
phallic and meat-eating, or to use Derrida’s neologism, “carnophallogo-
centric”, but finds its narrativised justification in the formation of the Law,
or in Lacan’s terms, the Name of the Father.22 Since, this fantasy of self-
creation is built on the sacrifice of animality and the negation of animal
life, I analyse the ways in which Dance with Nothing but Heart appears
to instal this carnophallogocentric scene and play to the iterative power
of its violence. However, precisely because this formation of the subject
requires the sacrifice of the animal other, I argue that the trope of phallic
mastery is performatively cited not to secure its politics of animalisation
and disavowal, but rather, to interrupt and disarticulate its co-ordinates.
13 DANCE WITH NOTHING BUT HEART (2001) … 217
Carnophallogocetric Calculations
Dance with Nothing but Heart is not only a work about violence, it is a
work born of violence. The sundered heart in question once belonged to
a living being whose edible body overwrote its corporeal vulnerability to
produce its death as legalised killing. Cohen bought two ox hearts from a
local butcher in preparation for the performance. The hearts were cut open,
drained of blood and then re-sewn. One was frozen for intended use in the
performance, and the other set aside for use in the technical rehearsal.
218 R. LIPSCHITZ
Sacrificing Animality
Briefly, Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) presents human civilisation as a
product of a transition from “primitive” maternal-led society to a patriarchy
defined by its oedipal resolution. For Freud, this transition begins at the
“primal feast” during which a band of brothers, driven by lust and jealous
of their (primal) father’s sexual access to their mother and sisters, kill and
eat him.35 Consumed by regret and guilt, the brother’s internalise the
prohibitions the primal father represented (as Jacques Lacan, puts it the
“Law of the Father”) and resolve the Oedipal family saga through the
establishment of the taboos of incest and patricide. And if one cannot have
sex with one’s kin, nor eat one’s kind, then the taboos of cannibalism and
bestiality also hold.36 At the onset of patriarchy, Freud sets the ‘animal’
outside the Law and prior to the prohibitions that shape the institution of
the human itself. Animality, Freud suggests, is humanity’s “pre-condition”
such that in the institution of the Law, the ‘animal’, as Kalpana Seshadri-
Crooks notes, is both hyper-visible and erased.37 In the substitutional logic
of the Symbolic, the animal body, Seshadri-Crooks writes, functions as “an
iterative device deployed by the law for self-authorization”.38
Consigned to human pre-history, to be animal in the carnophallogo-
centric schema is to be both pre- and sub-human. As the racist and sexist
iterations of an animalised ‘primitive’ show, to be positioned as pre- and
sub-human is to be unable to transcend an atavistic and deviant corpore-
ality—the stain of animality itself. Hence, Kristeva writes, the necessity of
abjection for the creation and maintenance of the “clean and proper body”
of both the ‘human’ and his ‘civilisation’.39 But as Kristeva argues, abjection
is an ambiguous process and its threshold, an unfinished site of struggle.
Thus, as the iterative foundation of the human, the animal (a site of both
“lack” and “excess”) produces the subject of the Symbolic as a negotiation
220 R. LIPSCHITZ
with an animality that both institutes and threatens the Law.40 In the lan-
guage of exclusion, abjection defends the subject against the return of an
originary animality, as well as against the drive-ridden chaos of cannibalism,
bestiality and non-heterosexual ‘deviance’. It anxiously separates “man”
from what is not “proper” to his self. However, since the animal abject is,
in the language of Kristevan abjection and Butler’s “constitutive outside”,
both a part of the self and on the inside edge of the “outside”, it cannot
ever be finally expelled. Since this separation between self and other is never
complete, the abjection of the animal must be re-enacted and re-performed
at both a psychic and social level. As Kelly Oliver points out in her analysis
of the animal question in Kristevan abjection, to preserve the oedipality of
the Symbolic, the always tenuous distinction between human and animal
is stabilised across the dead bodies of animals. And so the humanist subject
who cannot “sacrifice sacrifice” gives up ‘eating’ the mother in order to
eat the other, and thus, Oliver writes, turns cannibalism into carnivorism,
breast milk into animal meat.41 With animal death appropriated solely to
nourish the carnivorous virility of the human, the subject not only “eats
selfishly”, as Derrida might put it, but in expelling animality, devours death
without relation, and refuses animal kinship.42
one heart had not defrosted in time and Elu, Cohen recounts, refused to
dance with a frozen heart.50 The heart that was used for the performances
was the same one that had been used for rehearsal. Retrieved from the bin,
the heart was sewn together again and reblooded with blood that Cohen
saved in case of “oxheart emergencies”.51 Marked initially as waste, and
malodorous by the second performance, the heart is less a spoil of human
privilege over the death of the animal other than a transgressive return of
an animality that stalks the ‘origin’ of the human, and corrupts the regula-
tive purity of its heteronormative humanist subject. Rather than secure the
speciesist narrative of the Law through which Man calls himself Human,
Dance with Nothing but Heart ’s queer reiteration of ‘eating the animal
other’ produces an ‘outlaw’ subject that refuses the carnophallogocentric
transformation of animal life into consumable death, and thus, cannibal-
ism into carnivorism. Instead, Elu’s “foot-sucking/foot-fucking” next to
a dead heart suspended from a hook exposes the viewer to an excess that
phallic mastery’s compulsory heterosexuality cannot shore up. In this queer
eating lies not the confirmation of sovereign presence, but its othering. In
“taking in” the self as other, the oral and edible boundaries between ‘self’
and ‘other’ are limitrophically crossed to produce an orificial relational-
ity that is both porous and ambiguous. “Eating” metonymically, in other
words, not only puts the carnophallogocentric division between human
and animal, and edible and inedible bodies, at risk, it confounds, rather
than affirms, the easily digestible limit between carnivorous and cannibalis-
tic eating, and therefore, between ‘eating’ the living and the dead.52 To eat
the death of the animal other queerly is thus also to recognise the disavowed
animal body as ‘mournable’.
Grievable Corporeographies
If the animal in the sacrificial economy of the subject is without life, so too
is it without death. As Butler’s work on violence, vulnerability, and mourn-
ing demonstrates, the ethico-politics of “liveable” and “grievable’ lives are
negotiated across the threshold of “who counts as human”.53 Human(ist)
“liveability”, in other words, depends not on the dreamed “desubstan-
tialisation” of the abject human animal body,54 but on its recognition as
vulnerable to the threat of corporeal violence. As Stanescu shows, drawing
on Butler but writing against her avowed anthropocentrism, the “who”
who calls himself “human” and calls the other “animal”, produces animal
life as unliveable, and thus, ungrievable.55 Spread across an axis of species
13 DANCE WITH NOTHING BUT HEART (2001) … 223
is also about the unknowability of death, and the ontological, ethical, and
political disorientations of grief. In Butler’s terms, “grief posits the ‘I’ in
the mode of unknowingness”,61 precisely because it remains, as Derrida
writes, “non-subjectivable in the experience of mourning”.62 The death
of the other, in other words, contra the carnophallogocentric subject of
sacrifice, can never be ‘for’ me. Despite appearances, the performance of
the abject in this piece acts not to consolidate the sacrifice of animality
in the name of the human subject who tastes himself through the death
of the other and ‘eats’ only to nourish himself. Instead, Elu’s kissing and
caressing and tearing of the heart can be thought of as a kind of politico-
poetic reminder that “taking in” the other, and the other within the self,
occurs across a threshold infinitely open to an alterity that is in me “outside
of me”.63 Without this opening and its exposure to both tenderness and
violence, there can be no address to the other as other, nor indeed, to the
other as mortal.64
If the logic of carnophallogocentrism erects the subject through the
death of the animal, and if animal death is unmournable, Elu’s relation
to the dead animal heart he carries articulates a commitment to an alter-
ity he cannot, must not, appropriate. As Derrida observes, since “eating”
involves the metonymic digestion of the other, the question of how to “eat
well” recognises not only a non-speciesist mutuality in the finitude of the
living, but a queered non-anthropocentric subjectivity that sticks in the
throat of the self that “eats selfishly”, only for himself, and only through
the death of the animal other. To “take in” the other who one “eats” is
to carry them, to bear their weight as part of the thickened relationality
unconditionally open to “learning and giving to eat, learning-to-give-the-
other-to-eat” that characterises “eating well”.65 The ethical obligation that
ties Dance with Nothing but Heart to mourning, to an orificial “metonymy
of ‘eating well’”, resides, however, in more than the visual act of carrying.
If ‘I’ must carry ‘you’, then the word ‘carry’ must give up its egological
sense of to “include in oneself” and bear the incalculable alterity of the
other that announces and inscribes itself there, any other, even the abject
animal other who is the self.66 If eating metonymically means, for Der-
rida, “carrying the other in me”, then the limitrophic deconstruction of
the who/what I “eat” means that liveable lives and grievable deaths are
no longer secured by species difference but are open to the “infinite inap-
propriability of the other”.67 Rather than self-authorise in the death of the
animal other, the ‘taste’ of the ‘I’, in other words, can only start from the
13 DANCE WITH NOTHING BUT HEART (2001) … 225
queer, dislocated and dislocating position of the other in me: thus, as Der-
rida suggests,“[b]efore I am, I carry”.68 It is a carrying, moreover, that is
without end or condition. Tarrying in the resistance of grief, it carries itself
outside of the Law and queers a death-bearing, meat-eating sovereignty
into question, “not only for the dead, but for the living, too”.69 Herein
lies Dance with Nothing but Heart ’s naked transgression, and, its “heart”.
Coda
Elu Kieser died in July 2016 and is mourned and memorialised by Cohen
in a performance titled put your heart under your feet …and walk!/à Elu
(2017).70 While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, this performance is
in many ways a companion piece to Dance with Nothing but Heart. The
work combines live performance with a video edit that makes all too real
the performativity of violence in the distribution of animal death. Cohen
references traditional Jewish rituals of sanctioned and sanctified death as
he plays the bloody corporeality of assembly-line kosher animal slaughter
(Kashrut) against saying Kaddish (prayers for the dead) over Elu’s dema-
terialised body. Filmed in a kosher slaughterhouse, Cohen dances under
the dripping carcasses of freshly-killed cattle and immerses himself in the
blood that pools as they drain. Blood, soil, and Elu’s ashes place the ques-
tion of how one ‘eats’ and carries the dead centre stage, all the more so
since Cohen, after lighting the Sabbath candles and saying the Hebrew
prayers for light, bread, and wine, confounds literal and figurative eating,
carnivorism and cannibalism, heresy and sacrament, by taking a spoon of
Elu’s ashes and swallowing it with kosher wine. Outlaw mourning indeed.71
Notes
1. Cohen, “Dance with Nothing but Heart”.
2. The director is unnamed in Cohen’s account of this work.
3. Bannerman, “An Overview,” 9–46.
4. Cohen, “Dance with Nothing but Heart”.
5. Dance Umbrella 2001 ran over two nights at the Wits Theatre, Johannes-
burg. I found the critical response to this performance deeply disturbing
because of its apparent disavowal of the animals whose deaths occasion this
performance. There seems to be a similar silence surrounding animal death
in Cohen’s recent performance mourning and memorialising Elu, which I
discuss in this chapter’s Coda.
6. Cohen, “Dance with Nothing but Heart”.
226 R. LIPSCHITZ
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15–36. New York: State University of New York Press, 1999.
CHAPTER 14
Tom Tyler
T. Tyler (B)
School of Media and Communication,
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
No, it’s just a bunch of words strung together to form a name, much like the
Butthole Surfers. What does that mean? Does that mean they surf on butt
holes? After a while, the name doesn’t really say anything. It’s a moniker.
Throbbing Gristle. It’s good to have a memorable name. Tortoise, what
does that mean? Where did you get your name from? “Well, I have a pet
tortoise”. Who knows?4
move in as trappers, hunters, miners, and in other roles. The simple text-
button combat system allows you simultaneously to “stab”, “swing” and
“slash” at opponents with different weapons, and to scoff provisions to
restore lost hit points. In fact, cured meat, prepared by your charcutiers
or scavenged on your excursions outside the village, is the only source of
food in the game, and thus indispensable to your survival. The original
browser version of A Dark Room permitted players simply to “eat meat”
during combat, whereas the ports to mobile devices changed the button to
indicate instead, alongside the number of hit points that would be restored,
the quantity of “food” remaining, implicitly marking the synonymity of
meat and food within the game.
Beyond restoration, food is used in a number of games as a means
of enhancement. Rather than simply replenish points that have been lost,
“power ups” and “stat buffs” can temporarily increase maximum values
for health and other attributes, improve proficiency with skills and abili-
ties, and otherwise heighten a character’s capabilities. Using a mushroom
in the Mario Kart series (Nintendo et al., 1992–), for instance, provides a
speed boost, whilst quaffing Colovian Brandy in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
(Bethesda Game Studios, 2011) makes bartering more successful. In this
context, the role-playing game Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (Capcom Pro-
duction Studio 1, 2011) might appropriately be described, after Pope, as
carnivoracious.18 Your first task in the game is to kill an Aptonoth, a placid
herbivore described as a “vegan brute”, and cut chunks of raw meat from
the carcass. These, you soon learn, can be spit-roasted in a mini-game to
create steaks, which, when eaten, raise your maximum stamina for a time.
A little later in the game you can visit a Canteen, where meals are pre-
pared to order. Each category of food provides a different enhancement:
any kind of meat will make your attacks more successful; grains help with
defence; fish extend the time you can swim underwater; and so on. Meat is
here the most potent of the available foods, enhancing prowess in combat
and always bestowing its benefits first, overriding those that might have
been gained from lesser ingredients in the meal. Meat in Monster Hunter
3 Ultimate, then, embodies strength and vigour, and tops the hierarchy of
foods.
Finally, most lasting of all the advantages that food affords, it functions
in certain games as a resource. When expended, food here provides not just
a temporary enhancement, but permanent improvements and upgrades.
In the real-time strategy series Age of Empires (Ensemble Studios, 1997–),
food is used to produce citizens and soldiers, and to research the new
236 T. TYLER
“Meat”, he claims, “is undoubtedly the chief object of Bacon’s pity”, man-
ifesting “such convulsive pain and vulnerability”. It is, he says, the common
zone of man and beast, a state where the painter identifies with the objects
of his horror and his compassion (23). Thus, Bacon’s paintings, and par-
ticularly Deleuze’s examination of them, underscore a further meaning of
meat beside the usual connotations of strength and vitality, which is to say
the profound weakness and vulnerability of exposed flesh.21
The philosopher Matthew Calarco suggests that Deleuze’s account of
Bacon’s work constitutes an attempt to consider a radical indistinction, in
which the traditional, supposedly insuperable differences between human
and animal are levelled.22 Thought and practice which operates within such
a space of indistinction, Calarco argues, sets out to displace humanity from
its customary, exalted position far above the nonhuman world by reducing
it downward to an essentially inhuman zone. Confronting Bacon’s uncom-
promising paintings, the viewer is required to appreciate their own exposed,
fragile, vulnerable embodiment, the brute fact of their existence as flesh,
and hence their potential existence as no more than a carcass. The paintings
allow us a glimpse of the reality that human bodies, too, in common with
those of other animals, are “fundamentally and essentially meat”.23 “By
placing viewers within a zone of indistinction”, Calarco argues, “Bacon
encourages us to learn to see human bodies as edible”, and, simultane-
ously, “to catch a glimpse of the existence of those animal…bodies that
have been relegated by the established order to the status of being noth-
ing more than edible, nothing more than mere meat”.24 But, at the same
time, recognition of this indistinction between human and animal prompts
an awareness, Calarco suggests, that although we are all mere meat, we are
also more than mere meat: flesh is or was part of an entire body caught
up in passions, desires and relations that far exceed its existence as food for
another.25 Starting from a consideration of indistinction thus opens up new
possibilities for thought and action,26 and reorients us to alternative modes
of living, relating and being with others.27 Managing to acknowledge and
accept this displacement of humanity from its time-honoured exceptional
status is, however, “no doubt one of the most difficult facts for thought to
bear and sustain”.28
Meat, then, can connote not just power and vitality, but also expo-
sure and vulnerability. This latter meaning of meat is exemplified by the
game Super Meat Boy (Team Meat, 2010), in which the avatar does not
consume meat, but is made of meat. Players control the blood-red, cube-
shaped Meat Boy (Fig. 14.1), whose love, Bandage Girl, has been kid-
238 T. TYLER
Fig. 14.1 Super Meat Boy (Team Meat, 2010) (Copyright Nycrama LLC DBA
Team Meat, 2008–2017)
napped by the nefarious Dr Foetus. Meat Boy must run and jump his way
through dozens of levels, navigating past buzz saws, crumbling blocks,
homing missiles, rotating razor blades, spinning fans, roaming adversaries,
bosses, lava, lasers, syringes, spikes, salt and other hazards, to reach Ban-
dage Girl. The game, described by its developers, Edmund McMillen and
Tommy Refenes, as “tough as nails”,29 is notoriously difficult, requiring
split-second timing and the patience to keep replaying complex sequences
of jumps. There are no hit points here to be whittled down by successive
injuries and restored with conveniently-placed food items: a single mis-
take results in instant death and a return to the beginning of the level. As
Meat Boy, you are unprotected and completely exposed to the dangers and
threats you encounter. Even as you run and slide across floors and walls,
you leave a bloody residue on every surface you touch. As McMillen has
said:
So Meat Boy is a boy made of meat. But when designing him it wasn’t a
thought of “he’s made of steak or whatever else”. It was more: “He doesn’t
have skin”. He’s a boy without skin. So that’s why they call him Meat Boy.
So he’s exposed to the elements. Maybe he’s always in pain, but he just deals
with it. But he has to be very careful with everything because anything could
kill him. Like the smallest little thing, like salt, or whatever could totally
destroy him.30
14 MEANINGS OF MEAT IN VIDEOGAMES 239
The meat of Super Meat Boy, then, in the form of this boy without skin,
signifies not vitality but profound vulnerability. As such, Meat Boy is the
embodiment Calarco’s notion of indistinction. McMillen is keen to empha-
size that Meat Boy is not made of animal flesh, “steak or whatever else”,
but that nonetheless, as a boy who does not have skin, he is made of meat.
Meat Boy’s exposed, fragile, vulnerable flesh is of a kind with the exposed,
fragile, vulnerable flesh of other animals. Furthermore, the game’s unremit-
ting dangers, its brutal difficulty, and the repeated, gory deaths that result,
bring home to players the ease with which one’s fleshy body can quickly
become a carcass. This remains the case despite the fact that the game’s
protagonist is caught up in diverse passions, desires and relations, which
is to say that Meat Boy is, of course, far more than mere meat. Calarco
suggested, however, that thinking in terms of indistinction and an equa-
tion of human and animal at the level of embodied flesh, and in particular
accepting the displacement of humanity from its customary, exalted posi-
tion above the nonhuman world, is one of the most difficult thoughts to
sustain. Such proved to be the case regarding the radical challenge to con-
ventional understandings of meat that Super Meat Boy represents.
The provocative animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treat-
ment of Animals (PETA) responded within months of the release of Super
Meat Boy by producing a game of their own. Always keen to capitalize on
trends in contemporary culture, and to court publicity-rich controversy,
PETA have produced many games over the years, including the parodies
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals (This Is Pop, 2008), in which you
enact the gruesome preparation of a “thanksgiving feast”; Super Tanooki
Skin 2D (This Is Pop, 2011) in which, as a flayed raccoon dog, you must
“save your skin” which has been stolen by Mario; and Pokemon Black &
Blue (This Is Pop, 2012) in which you help Pikachu and friends escape their
abusive trainers.31 In Super Tofu Boy (MCM Net, 2010), having realized
that animal flesh was not for her, Bandage Girl has forsaken Meat Boy for
sexy, badass Tofu Boy. Now you must steer Tofu Boy through a series of
levels set in a slaughter house, the Golden Arches, and a bacon factory, to
rescue Bandage Girl from a jealous, vengeful Meat Boy. Like the macho
backstory, the gameplay is similar to Super Meat Boy, with hazards includ-
ing more spinning blades, as well as gas burners and meat pounders. The
levels are interspersed with helpful “tips” such as “cows are pumped full
of drugs to make them grow abnormally large” and “red meat can lead to
impotence, obesity, and loss of girlfriend”. At game’s end, Meat Boy meets
240 T. TYLER
a final, bloody death, and Tofu Boy and Bandage Girl are reunited once
and for all (Fig. 14.2).
Team Meat provided in turn a two-pronged rejoinder. In a post on
the developers’ site, McMillen claimed that PETA had played right into
his hands. “I actually repeatedly made fake user names in PETA’s forum
pushing the game at them in hopes something like this would happen”, he
wrote. Describing Super Tofu Boy as a major personal high point, he thanked
PETA for the flattering, helpful parody, and for making themselves look
foolish in the process: “see (as mentioned in countless interviews) Meat
Boy isn’t made of animal meat, he’s simply a boy without skin whose name
is Meat Boy”.32 At the same time, Team Meat added Tofu Boy as a playable
character to the Steam release of Super Meat Boy. (A Tofu Boy had, in fact,
already featured in a promotional comic, before the game’s release).33 This
14 MEANINGS OF MEAT IN VIDEOGAMES 241
Fig. 14.3 First Super Meat Boy advertisement (McMillen, “New Meat Boy Ad!”;
Copyright Nycrama LLC DBA Team Meat, 2008–2017)
meat related”,40 stated in the comic that you play as “an animated cube
of meat”,41 and explained in an interview that Meat Boy is “made of raw
meat”.42 In the comic, Meat Boy appears alongside Bacon Boy, Burger
Boy, Pork Chop Boy, KFC Boy, Veal Boy and several other boys made out
of animal meat.43 In the game’s first advertisement, the iconic silhouette
of a cow is broken up with dotted lines indicating traditional cuts of beef:
brisket, rib, sirloin, rump, et al. Close to the rear, outlined in red, we see
a more-or-less square cut labelled “Meat Boy” (Fig. 14.3).44 And simi-
larly, in a doctored version of a vintage advertisement from the American
Meat Institute, which proclaims emphatically “Nourishing Meat …a com-
plete protein food”, Meat Boy can be seen, bounded by lines of fat, as an
integral part of a huge slab of meat.45
So what is Meat Boy made of? Is this squat oddity simply a human boy
with his skin removed? Or is he a compressed cube of raw ground beef, a
select cut of steak, or some other kind of animal flesh? Is Meat Boy made
14 MEANINGS OF MEAT IN VIDEOGAMES 243
of the kind of meat we could eat? Is Meat Boy edible? Are his strength and
vigour, his vitality, something we could consume? Were we to partake of
him, might we assimilate Meat Boy’s bull-like iron reserves? (Tofu, in fact,
contains at least as much iron as steak and often more,46 though, were we
to eat Tofu Boy, a glass of vitamin C-rich orange juice would help with
its absorption.47 ) Ultimately, it remains unclear what kind of meat Meat
Boy is made of: human or another kind of animal. But, as Calarco argues,
we need to concede that, either way, Meat Boy is edible. Recognizing the
indistinction between human and animal is, in part, a matter of learning to
appreciate that the flesh of a human youth, with or without skin, or that of
a Calarco or a Deleuze or a Bacon, just like that of a cow, a pig, a rabbit,
a sheep, a turkey, a boar, a deer, a dog, a raccoon dog, a fox, a bear, a
black bird, a tortoise or even a vegan brute like an Aptonoth, is, as a matter
of fact, edible.48 But it is also a matter of learning to see that, although
we are all mere meat, a nourishing, complete protein food for others, we
are also more than mere meat. Meat Boy, like the other creatures with
whom he shares a carnate, embodied existence, is caught up in all manner
of passions, desires and relations which go far beyond his bare existence as
meat and throbbing gristle. Meat Boy, as the ambiguous embodiment of
indistinction, helps to remind us that the vital body and the vulnerable body
are one and the same, opens up new possibilities for thought and action,
and, with his companion Tofu Boy, reorients us to alternative modes of
living, relating and being with others.
Notes
1. “Meat, N.,” II.4.a.
2. “Meat, N.,” I.1.a.
3. “Meat, N.,” III.11; “Meaty, Adj.,” 2.
4. Dangers, Interview.
5. Fiddes, Meat, 5.
6. Twigg, “Vegetarianism,” 22.
7. Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat, 56; Fiddes, Meat, 67.
8. Barthes, “Steak and Chips,” 62.
9. Fiddes, Meat, 15–16, 45.
10. Twigg, “The Vegetarian Movement,” ch. 3; Twigg, “Vegetarianism,” 21.
11. Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat, 55–57.
244 T. TYLER
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Index
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 249
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
S. McCorry and J. Miller (eds.), Literature and Meat Since 1900,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26917-3
250 INDEX
192, 193, 198, 201, 210, 214, Oliver, Kelly, 61, 63, 64, 187, 220,
223, 231–239, 241, 243 226, 227
American Meat Institute, 242 The Omega Man, 115
common to human and animal, 49, omnivore, omnivory, 27
145, 170, 237, 239, 241, 243 ontology, 27, 98, 101
cured, 28, 235 O’Riordan, Kate, 92, 101
definition of, 192, 232 Orwell, George, 11, 12, 71–82, 84–87
human body as meat, 10, 19, 20, 31 “British Cookery”, 85
as luxury commodity, 15, 120 The Road to Wigan Pier, 11, 72, 73
and nostalgia, 5, 108, 120, 122 Owen, Wilfred, 32
signifying vulnerability, 15, 27, Ozeki, Ruth, 13, 162, 164, 165, 172,
101, 237, 239, 241. See also 174, 176
cannibalism My Year of Meats , 13, 162, 164, 165,
Meat Beat Manifesto (band), 232 174
Meat Boy. See Super Meat Boy
(videogame)
Memphis Meat, 92, 107 P
milk, 78, 146, 150, 183, 220 Pacyga, Dominic A., 3, 15
Milner, Andrew, 97, 108 Palumbo-Liu, David, 162, 164, 175,
Minecraft (videogame), 234 176
modernism, 46, 47, 51, 61, 67 Parry, Jovian, 5, 15, 108, 120, 122
modernity, 3–7, 47, 48, 50, 51, Parsons, Deborah, 59, 67
111–114, 121, 125, 127–129, Pearce, David, 92, 107
146 Peel, Dorothy (Mrs, C.S.), 22, 31
Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate
People for the Ethical Treatment of
(videogame), 235
Animals (PETA), 239–241, 244
Morton, Timothy, 150, 152, 157
performativity, 215, 225
mourning, 14, 120, 217, 222, 223,
Perloff, Marjorie, 146, 151, 157
224–227
Pick, Anat, 101, 108, 144, 157, 244
multicultural politics, 163, 164
pig, 7, 46, 48, 63, 64, 66, 84, 152,
155, 156, 175, 243
N Piper, H. Beam, 95
Natural history, 126–129, 131–135, Planet of the Apes, 115
137, 138, 185 Plato, 74, 185
Nazism, 82, 83 Pohl, Frederik, 12, 93, 94, 97–105,
New Harvest, 91–93, 107 108, 122
Niven, Larry, 95, 101 The Merchants’ War, 100
North Sea, the, 13, 126, 127, 130–137 Pohl, Frederik and Kornbluth, Cyril
The Space Merchants , 12, 91, 93, 94,
97, 100–106, 108, 122
O Pokemon Black & Blue (videogame),
Öhlschläger, Claudia, 135, 139 239
INDEX 255
work, 2–4, 8–10, 13, 14, 19, 20, 24, 204, 207–209, 213–215, 217,
26, 30, 35–39, 41–49, 51, 56, 61, 221, 222, 225, 234, 237
62, 65, 66, 73, 75–77, 80, 85, 87, Wrangham, Richard, 185
96, 97, 99, 100, 106, 108, 112, Wright, Laura, 9, 10, 16
113, 118, 120–122, 125–127,
129, 135, 136, 146, 148–150,
162–165, 168, 171, 173, 175, Z
181, 184–186, 188, 198–202, zone of indiscernibility, 236
Zurr, Ionat, 93, 99, 107, 108