by Lawrence Lenhart
The first time David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster”
was dropped in my lap, I wasn’t impressed. The timing was all wrong anyway. It arrived
the same semester as Peter Singer’s Animal
Liberation (subtitled A New Ethics
for Our Treatment of Animals), and I was unusually primed to read Wallace
as sanctimonious, not to mention showy. At the time, I was into brevity. My
favorite album for many years in a row was Short
Music for Short People, a compilation of 101 thirty-second songs, each by a
different punk band. The album was released by Fat Wreck Chords, a label
founded by Michael Burkett (aka Fat Mike) of NOFX. Unlike Singer, NOFX preached
through farce. Their debut album, for example, was Liberal Animation. Not only is it a spoonerism of the Singer
text, but the cover art features cows wining and dining over plates of human
corpse. The first words to any NOFX album ever feature Fat Mike railing against
PETA slogans: “‘Affection not dissection’ / ‘Meat is murder’ / ‘Animals are for
petting’ / Oh shut the fuck up already.” So, upon encountering Wallace, you can
understand why I chaffed with his ceaseless nuance.
One of the most excellent NOFX songs is “Clams Have Feelings
Too (Actually They Don’t).” Released a few years before “Consider the Lobster,”
I was always excited by the research-y parenthetical in the middle of the chorus:
No chowder for you, ‘cause
clams have feelings too
(Actually they don’t
have central nervousness)
No Manhattan style,
clams have the right to smile
Come to think about
it, they don’t have a face
Compare this with Wallace’s treatment of the subject of
sentience during his reportage at the Maine Lobster Festival:
Before
we go any further, let’s acknowledge that the questions of whether and how
different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be
justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be
extremely complex and difficult. Since pain is a totally subjective mental
experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our
own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience
pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core
philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. The fact that even
the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate with
us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of
additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and
morality to animals. And everything gets progressively more abstract and
convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into
cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and
finally invertebrates like lobsters.
It’s not the most entertaining stretch of the essay, but it
is entirely characteristic of Wallace’s cerebral style. In preparing to write his
article for Gourmet, Wallace
requested editors send him anything they’d ever published relating to lobsters.
And it may have been in these back issues that Wallace first encountered the
work of M.F.K. Fisher.
--
To this day, Jeff Oaks is still the only writer to have ever
uttered her name to me. In his Writer’s Journal class, we read How to Cook a Wolf, a cookbook—sort
of—published while America rationed its way through WWII. In his New York Times review of the book in
1942, Orville Prescott writes:
Cook
books are indisputably indispensable for the welfare of the human race, and
they sell very nicely… Few indeed have any claims to literary merit. At least,
few did until a knowing lady who signs herself austerely M.F.K. Fisher began
conducting her one-woman revolution in the field of literary cookery. Mrs.
Fisher writes about food with such relish and enthusiasm that the mere reading
of her book creates a clamorous appetite. She also writes with a robust sense
of humor and a nice capacity for a neatly turned phrase.
Towards the end of the review, Prescott cannot disambiguate
Fisher’s humor from her mysticism:
She
insists that boiling water too long before using it is a great mistake and
deleterious to whatever is being cooked. Again, as a mere man, I am bewildered.
Is she joking, or is water that has boiled for several minutes any different
from water that has just come to a boil?
He seems to be genuinely soliciting his reader for
clarification. Fisher’s playfulness paired with her reader’s uncertainty is a
fair indication that she is as much a prose stylist as she is a food writer. Fisher
herself wouldn’t appreciate the designation. Towards the ends of the 800-page
tome, From the Journals of M.F.K. Fisher,
she admits astonishment, even embarrassment, when critics dub her a stylist. She
denies the charms of stylized writing: “the so-called style of such writers
bores me, turns me off, makes me feel tricked.” As far as I can tell, she’s
really talking about what we now call the lyric essay: “preoccupation with the
rhythmic use of words, [shining] with the same strange luster of an acquired
tongue.” And yet if you read her work, it’s unmistakable. Consider these
excerpts from Gastronomical Me, a decadent preparation for tangerine consumption.
Separate each plump little pregnant crescent…
Tear delicately from the soft pile
of sections each velvet string…
Take
yesterday’s paper (when we were in Strasbourg L’Ami du Peuple was best, because when it got hot the ink
stayed on it) and spread it on top of the radiator…
After
you have put the pieces of tangerine on the paper on the hot radiator, it is
best to forget about them. Al comes home, you go to a long noon dinner in the
brown dining-room, afterwards maybe you have a little nip of quetsch from the bottle on the armoire. Finally he goes…
On
the radiator the sections of tangerines have grown even plumper, hot and full.
You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on
the packed snow of the sill. They are ready.
There are notes of self-parody. While most readers look to
the cook-book author for help with dishes like veal and grated parmigiano, few expect a
lesson on how to consume citrus. It’s the kind of impracticality one finds in Julio
Cortázar’s “Instructional Manual”
(Cronopios and Famas) where he
explains “How to Cry” and “How to Climb a Staircase” and other mundane
maneuvers. It seems that part of Fisher’s stylism denialism originates in her identification
with her father’s newspaper writing. She wants to prove that she hasn’t fallen
far from that tree. And yet one senses their styles couldn’t be more different:
apples and tangerines.
More famously than
tangerines, though, M.F.K. Fisher is the ultimate perceiver of the oyster. Consider the Oyster (yes, Wallace's piece is homage to Fisher) is easily one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books. Okay, so it helps that I’m always aching for a next dozen oysters.
(There’s even a pearled oyster ornament dangling on the tree, inches from my
face as I write this.) Still, though, Fisher’s approach to the evergreen theme
of sentience strikes the all-important balance: It’s NOFX with a dash of reverence,
D.F.W. with a helping of pith. Voila!
Danger
is everywhere for her [“our oyster”], and extermination lurks. (How do we know
with what pains? How can we tell or not tell the sufferings of an oyster? There
is a brain…) She is the prey of many enemies, and must lie immobile as a fungus
while the starfish sucks her and the worm bores. She has eight enemies, not
counting man who is the greatest, since he protects her from the others only to
eat her himself.
She goes on to delineate the oyster’s eight predators along
with their particular cruelties. Just look at some of these
observations about the enigmatic oyster, beginning with the first sentence of the
book:
An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting
life.
It
is to be hoped, sentimentally at least, that the spat—our spat—enjoys
himself. Those two weeks are his one taste of vagabondage, of devil-may-care
free roaming. And even they are not quite free, for during all his youth he is
busy growing a strong foot and a large supply of sticky cementlike stuff. If he
thought, he might wonder why.
He is by now about one-seventy-fifth of an
inch long, whatever that may be… and he is an oyster.
For
about a year this oyster—our oyster—is
a male, fertilizing a few hundred thousand eggs as best he can… Then one day,
maternal longings surge between his two valves in his cold guts and gills and
all his crinkly fringes. Necessity, that well-known mother, makes him one. He
is a she.
She
has grown into a gray-white oval shape, with shades of green or ocher or black
in her gills and a rudimentary brain in the forepart of her blind deaf body.
She can feel shadows as well as the urgency of milt, and her delicate muscles
know danger and pull shut her shells with firmness.
Life
is hard, we say. An oyster’s life is worse. She lives motionless, soundless,
her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation, and if she escapes the menace of
duck-slipper-mussel-Black-Drum-leech-sponge-borer-starfish, it is for man to
eat, because of man’s own hunger.
And that's all in the first three pages! The language is Doyle's ("Joyas Voladoras"), the register Deming's ("Hood River Oyster"), the research Neely's ("Chiton"), and the form (we shall call these micro essays) akin to Nicole Walker's (Micrograms, Egg, Where the Tiny Things Are). Consider the Oyster will call to mind Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series, except it's brimful with annotated recipes. I recommend reading only if you have some ingredients on hand; inevitably, you'll want to try one of these: oyster stew, butter crackers, tartar sauce, oyster gumbo, oysters a la foch, oysters a la bazeine, dressing for turkey or other fowl with oysters, oyster stuffing, oyster catsup, dried oyster with vegetables, oysters Rockefeller, oysters with cream sauce, roast oysters, grilled oysters, pain d'huitres, oyster loaf, cream of oyster soup, oyster soup, oyster bisque, Hang Town fry, oysters and onions. And then there's this recipe, to be found within the essay "Pearls Are Not Good to Eat."
To Make a Pearl
To Make a Pearl
1 healthy spat
1 mature oyster
1 bead
1 wire cage
ligatures
scrubbing brushes, etc.
unnamable wound-astringent
provided by Japanese government
1 diving-girl
Introduce
the spat, which should be at least 1/75 of an inch long, to the smooth surface
of the cage. Submerge him in quiet clean water, where the cage will protect him
from starfish, and frequent inspections and scrubbings will keep his rapidly
growing shell free from boring-worms and such pests.
In
three years prepare him for the major operation of putting the bead on his
mantle (epithelium). Once the bead is in place, draw the mantle over it and
ligature the tissues to form a wee sac. Put the sac into the second oyster,
remove the ligature, treat the wound with the unnamable astringent, and after
the oyster has been caged, put him into the sea.
Supervise
things closely for seven years, with the help of your diving-girl. Any time
after that you may open your oyster, and you have about one chance in twenty of owning a marketable pearl, and a small but equally exciting chance of having
cooked up something really valuable.
While David Foster Wallace demonstrates an enormous capacity
for inhabiting subcultures, only M.F.K. Fisher, through her living, can be said
to have created one.[1]
In Two Towns in Provence, she writes
about an encounter with her hostile hostess in France: “Tell me, dear lady…
tell me… explain to all of us, how
one can dare to call herself a writer on gastronomy in the United States,
where, from everything we hear, gastronomy does not yet exist? Explain to us,
dear self-styled Gastronomer, to us poor people of this older world…” Fisher,
along with “everyone who was anyone in the American food world,” migrated to
southern France in 1970. Herein lies the paradox of M.F.K. Fisher. As Bee
Wilson puts it in The New Yorker, “Our
need to revere [her] as [a model] of impeccable French taste after all these
years is a little odd, considering that [she] sought to puncture the spirit of
snobbish reverence which infected the food writing of previous generations.”[2]
Indeed, if it wasn’t for the occasional French diacritical mark, I’d probably give her some stupid
label like: uniquely American. In many passages throughout her journals, Fisher
seems to be, as Wilson puts it, "translating these French
memories to an American public who had not experienced them firsthand. [She]
wrote for those who had never tasted croissants, never mind jambon persillé.” In “Poor Food,” for
example, Fisher aims to convince her reader the best sauce she ever ate was “not
at Foyot’s, in the old days in Paris,” but “in a cabin with tar-paper walls on
a rain-swept hillside in southern California.” (Likewise, the best stew was “not
a bouillabaisse at Isnard’s in Marseille,” but by “a very old small woman for a
great lusty batch of relatives.”) It seems like she is equally interested in
renouncing her own elitism as she is in empowering all those who have “honest
flour, pure water, and good fire.”
Fisher
seems to follow an unwritten rule in which every essay must make a turn for the sentimental.
Those moments are always so hard-won, though; having gotten through the calamities
of empty cupboards, divorce, the death of a sister, war, air pollution, each
flecked with memoir, it just feels kind for Fisher to recommend (as she
does in How to Cook a Wolf): “One way
to look your prettiest in the kitchen… is to put up a little mirror… Usually I
look into it… and I can see either that things are under control beautifically
or that a certain amount of smoothing, poking, and composing will do some good.”
(Nevermind that Orville Prescott concludes his book review with flirtatious
overture: “But judging from her picture, Mrs. Fisher is one cook who has
grounds to be very confident indeed without a kitchen mirror.”)
Not
long before she died in 1992, M.F.K. Fisher had settled finally on an ideal
metaphor for her life’s work, which by then consisted of 27 books: “There is
one word that I love… It is, as far as I know, completely American, and I feel
that I am one and that I write and talk as one.” That word is glory hole.
First, she conjures her mother’s usage: those cupboard or closets where cast-off
odds and ends are stored. “One mysterious thing about a real glory hole,” she
writes, “is that there is always the knowledge, the belief, the feeling that
sometimes whatever is in it will turn up, and be infinitely useful and
valuable.” The original glory holes, of course, were caches where California
gold rushers hid valuable-looking ores. I like that idea—the essay as a glory
hole in which a bunch of dusty, forgotten baubles vie for relevance until one,
suddenly, shimmers: a flake, no a nugget, or in the case of Fisher’s oeuvre, a
whole goldfield.
Since these past paragraphs have been chock-full
of scraps of Fisher’s writing, it seems appropriate to leave you with “Leftovers,”
one of the shortest essays in Journals.
Please, though, once you’ve gobbled the leftovers, go seek out a full meal. Consider
the oyster stew.
--
Lawrence
Lenhart is the author of The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage. His
prose has been published in Conjunctions, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre,
Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University
of Arizona, teaches genres at Northern Arizona University, and is reviews
editor of DIAGRAM. He writes about islands and black-footed
ferrets. [Web] [Twitter]
[1] Please
don’t mistake me as anything less than enchanted by David Foster Wallace. It
seems important, in this moment of D.F.W. disavowal (see Jessa Crispin’s “Enough
David Foster Wallace, already!” & Deirdre Coyle’s “Men Recommend David
Foster Wallace to Me”), to set the record straight: Not long after my initial
revulsion, I became an admirer of his work like so many others. Still, though, as
Crispin suggests, let’s not pretend literary criticism is objective. It’s
important to be wary of any gatekeeper who would claim: “These are the books that are important. No really, just these ones.
Those other writers are ‘minor.’” It’s this kind of practice that necessitates an
Advent Calendar of “recoveries” in the first place. Still, though, rather than
banish Wallace, I’d rather burnish Fisher.
[2]
Fisher is all-too-happy to puncture the reverence that accompanies Christmas as
well. If the Advent Calendar commissioner will allow it, behold Fisher’s
inner-humbug: “Sometimes the spirit of Christmas seems nothing more than a
conditioned reflex, and it is hard to make it work successfully when the
calendar calls it up.”
No comments:
Post a Comment