Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

by David Foster Wallace

  “To show we’re Americans and we’re not going to bow down to nobody”;

  “It’s a classic pseudo-archetype, a reflexive semion designed to preempt and negate the critical function” (grad student);

  “For pride.”

  “What they do is symbolize unity and that we’re all together behind the victims in this war and they’ve fucked with the wrong people this time, amigo.” (back to text)

  145 * Pace some people’s impression, the native accent around here isn’t southern so much as just rural. The town’s corporate transplants, on the other hand, have no accent at all — in Mrs. Bracero’s phrase, State Farm people “sound like the folks on TV.” (back to text)

  146 † People here are deeply, deeply into lawn-care; my own neighbors mow about as often as they shave. (back to text)

  147 * Mrs. Thompson’s living room is prototypical working-class Bloomington, too: double-pane windows, white Sears curtains w/ valence, catalogue clock with a background of mallards, woodgrain magazine rack with CSM and Reader’s Digest, inset bookshelves used to display little collectible figurines and framed photos of relatives and their families. There are two knit samplers w/ the Desiderata and Prayer of St. Francis, antimacassars on every good chair, and wall-to-wall carpet so thick that you can’t see your feet (people take their shoes off at the door — it’s basic common courtesy). (back to text)

  148 * AP reporter Michael Mewshaw’s Short Circuit (Atheneum, 1983) is just one example of national-press stuff about drugs on the tour. (back to text)

  149 * Or listen again to her report of how winning her first US Open felt: “I immediately knew what I had done, which was to win the US Open, and I was thrilled.” This line haunts me; it’s like the whole letdown of the book boiled down into one dead bite. (back to text)

  150 * Here I should point out that this RS editor, whose name was Mr. Tonelli, delivered the length-and-space verdict with sympathy and good humor, and that he was pretty much a mensch through the whole radically ablative editorial process that followed, which process was itself unusually rushed and stressful because right in the middle of it (the process) came Super Tuesday’s bloodbath, and McCain really did drop out — Mr. Tonelli was actually watching McCain’s announcement on his office TV while we were doing the first round of cuts on the telephone — and apparently Rolling Stone’s top brass’s fear of looking stupid came roaring back into their limbic system and they told poor Mr. Tonelli that the article had to be all of a sudden crammed into the very next issue of RS, even though that issue was scheduled to “close” and go to the printer in less than 48 hours, which, if you know anything about magazines’ normally interminable editing and fact-checking and copyediting and typesetting and proofreading and retype-setting and layout and printing processes, you’ll understand why Mr. Tonelli’s good humor through the whole thing was noteworthy. (back to text)

  151 * In particular I never got to talk to Mr. Mike Murphy, who if you read the document you’ll understand why he’d be the one McCain staffer you’d just about give a nut to get three or four drinks into and then start probing. Despite sustained pestering and sleeve-tugging and pride-swallowing appeals to the Head Press Liaison for even just ten lousy minutes, though — and even after RS’s Mr. Tonelli himself called McCain2000 HQ in Virginia to bitch and wheedle — Mike Murphy avoided this reporter to the point of actually starting to duck around corners whenever he saw me coming. The unending pursuit of this one interview (what eventually in my notebook got called “MurphyQuest 2000”) actually turned into one of the great personal subdramas of the week, and there’s a whole very lengthy and sordid story to tell here, including some embarrassing but probably in retrospect kind of funny attempts to corner the poor man in all sorts of awkward personal venues where I figured he’d have a hard time escaping… nevertheless the crux here is that Murphy’s total inaccessibility to yrs. truly was not, I finally realized, anything personal, but rather a simple function of my being from Rolling Stone, a (let’s face it) politically featherweight organ whose readership was clearly not part of any GOP demographic that was going to help Mike Murphy’s candidate in SC or MI or any of the other upcoming sink-or-swim primaries. In fact, because the magazine was a biweekly with a long lead time — the Lebanese-Australian lady from the Boston Globe (see document) pointed all this out to yrs. truly after we’d just watched Murphy more or less fake an epileptic seizure to get out of riding in an elevator with me — even a droolingly pro-McCain Rolling Stone article wouldn’t actually appear until after 7 March’s Super Tuesday, by which time, she predicted (correctly), the nomination battle would effectively be over. (back to text)

  1 There’s a comprehensive native apothegm: “Camden by the sea, Rockland by the smell.” (back to text)

  2 N.B. All personally connected parties have made it clear from the start that they do not want to be talked about in this article. (back to text)

  3 Midcoasters’ native term for a lobster is, in fact, “bug,” as in “Come around on Sunday and we’ll cook up some bugs.” (back to text)

  4 Factoid: Lobster traps are usually baited with dead herring. (back to text)

  5 Of course, the common practice of dipping the lobster meat in melted butter torpedoes all these happy fat-specs, which none of the council’s promotional stuff ever mentions, any more than potato industry PR talks about sour cream and bacon bits. (back to text)

  6 In truth, there’s a great deal to be said about the differences between working-class Rockland and the heavily populist flavor of its festival versus comfortable and elitist Camden with its expensive view and shops given entirely over to $200 sweaters and great rows of Victorian homes converted to upscale B&Bs. And about these differences as two sides of the great coin that is US tourism. Very little of which will be said here, except to amplify the above-mentioned paradox and to reveal your assigned correspondent’s own preferences. I confess that I have never understood why so many people’s idea of a fun vacation is to don flip-flops and sunglasses and crawl through maddening traffic to loud, hot, crowded tourist venues in order to sample a “local flavor” that is by definition ruined by the presence of tourists. This may (as my festival companions keep pointing out) all be a matter of personality and hardwired taste: the fact that I do not like tourist venues means that I’ll never understand their appeal and so am probably not the one to talk about it (the supposed appeal). But, since this FN will almost surely not survive magazine-editing anyway, here goes:

  As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way — hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing. (back to text)

  7 Datum: In a good year, the US industry produces around 80,000,000 pounds of lobster, and Maine accounts for more than half that total. (back to text)

  8 N.B. Similar reasoning underlies the practice of what’s termed “debeaking” broiler chickens and bro
od hens in modern factory farms. Maximum commercial efficiency requires that enormous poultry populations be confined in unnaturally close quarters, under which conditions many birds go crazy and peck one another to death. As a purely observational side-note, be apprised that debeaking is usually an automated process and that the chickens receive no anesthetic. It’s not clear to me whether most Gourmet readers know about debeaking, or about related practices like dehorning cattle in commercial feed lots, cropping swine’s tails in factory hog farms to keep psychotically bored neighbors from chewing them off, and so forth. It so happens that your assigned correspondent knew almost nothing about standard meat-industry operations before starting work on this article. (back to text)

  9 The terminal used to be somebody’s house, for example, and the lost-luggage-reporting room was clearly once a pantry. (back to text)

  10 It turned out that one Mr. William R. Rivas-Rivas, a high-ranking PETA official out of the group’s Virginia headquarters, was indeed there this year, albeit solo, working the festival’s main and side entrances on Saturday, 2 August, handing out pamphlets and adhesive stickers emblazoned with “Being Boiled Hurts,” which is the tagline in most of PETA’s published material about lobsters. I learned that he’d been there only later, when speaking with Mr. Rivas-Rivas on the phone. I’m not sure how we missed seeing him in situ at the festival, and I can’t see much to do except apologize for the oversight — although it’s also true that Saturday was the day of the big MLF parade through Rockland, which basic journalistic responsibility seemed to require going to (and which, with all due respect, meant that Saturday was maybe not the best day for PETA to work the Harbor Park grounds, especially if it was going to be just one person for one day, since a lot of diehard MLF partisans were off-site watching the parade (which, again with no offense intended, was in truth kind of cheesy and boring, consisting mostly of slow homemade floats and various midcoast people waving at one another, and with an extremely annoying man dressed as Blackbeard ranging up and down the length of the crowd saying “Arrr” over and over and brandishing a plastic sword at people, etc.; plus it rained)). (back to text)

  11 By profession, Dick is actually a car salesman; the midcoast region’s National Car Rental franchise operates out of a Chevy dealership in Thomaston. (back to text)

  12 The short version regarding why we were back at the airport after already arriving the previous night involves lost luggage and a miscommunication about where and what the midcoast’s National franchise was — Dick came out personally to the airport and got us, out of no evident motive but kindness. (He also talked nonstop the entire way, with a very distinctive speaking style that can be described only as manically laconic; the truth is that I now know more about this man than I do about some members of my own family.) (back to text)

  13 To elaborate by way of example: The common experience of accidentally touching a hot stove and yanking your hand back before you’re even aware that anything’s going on is explained by the fact that many of the processes by which we detect and avoid painful stimuli do not involve the cortex. In the case of the hand and stove, the brain is bypassed altogether; all the important neurochemical action takes place in the spine. (back to text)

  14 Morality-wise, let’s concede that this cuts both ways. Lobster-eating is at least not abetted by the system of corporate factory farms that produces most beef, pork, and chicken. Because, if nothing else, of the way they’re marketed and packaged for sale, we eat these latter meats without having to consider that they were once conscious, sentient creatures to whom horrible things were done. (N.B. “Horrible” here meaning really, really horrible. Write off to PETA or peta.org for their free “Meet Your Meat” video, narrated by Mr. Alec Baldwin, if you want to see just about everything meat-related you don’t want to see or think about. (N.B. Not that PETA’s any sort of font of unspun truth. Like many partisans in complex moral disputes, the PETA people are fanatics, and a lot of their rhetoric seems simplistic and self-righteous. But this particular video, replete with actual factory-farm and corporate-slaughterhouse footage, is both credible and traumatizing.)) (back to text)

  15 Is it significant that “lobster,” “fish,” and “chicken” are our culture’s words for both the animal and the meat, whereas most mammals seem to require euphemisms like “beef” and “pork” that help us separate the meat we eat from the living creature the meat once was? Is this evidence that some kind of deep unease about eating higher animals is endemic enough to show up in English usage, but that the unease diminishes as we move out of the mammalian order? (And is “lamb”/“lamb” the counterexample that sinks the whole theory, or are there special, biblico-historical reasons for that equivalence?) (back to text)

  16 There’s a relevant populist myth about the high-pitched whistling sound that sometimes issues from a pot of boiling lobster. The sound is really vented steam from the layer of seawater between the lobster’s flesh and its carapace (this is why shedders whistle more than hard-shells), but the pop version has it that the sound is the lobster’s rabbit-like death-scream. Lobsters communicate via pheromones in their urine and don’t have anything close to the vocal equipment for screaming, but the myth’s very persistent — which might, once again, point to a low-level cultural unease about the boiling thing. (back to text)

  17 “Interests” basically means strong and legitimate preferences, which obviously require some degree of consciousness, responsiveness to stimuli, etc. See, for instance, the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1974 Animal Liberation is more or less the bible of the modern animal-rights movement:

  It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being kicked along the road, because it will suffer if it is. (back to text)

  18 This is the neurological term for special pain-receptors that are “sensitive to potentially damaging extremes of temperature, to mechanical forces, and to chemical substances which are released when body tissues are damaged.” (back to text)

  19 “Preference” is maybe roughly synonymous with “interests,” but it is a better term for our purposes because it’s less abstractly philosophical — “preference” seems more personal, and it’s the whole idea of a living creature’s personal experience that’s at issue. (back to text)

  20 Of course, the most common sort of counterargument here would begin by objecting that “like best” is really just a metaphor, and a misleadingly anthropomorphic one at that. The counterarguer would posit that the lobster seeks to maintain a certain optimal ambient temperature out of nothing but unconscious instinct (with a similar explanation for the low-light affinities upcoming in the main text). The thrust of such a counterargument will be that the lobster’s thrashings and clankings in the kettle express not unpreferred pain but involuntary reflexes, like your leg shooting out when the doctor hits your knee. Be advised that there are professional scientists, including many researchers who use animals in experiments, who hold to the view that nonhuman creatures have no real feelings at all, merely “behaviors.” Be further advised that this view has a long history that goes all the way back to Descartes, although its modern support comes mostly from behaviorist psychology.

  To these what-looks-like-pain-is-really-just-reflexes counterarguments, however, there happen to be all sorts of scientific and pro–animal rights counter-counterarguments. And then further attempted rebuttals and redirects, and so on. Suffice it to say that both the scientific and the philosophical arguments on either side of the animal-suffering issue are involved, abstruse, technical, often informed by self-interest or ideology, and in the end so totally inconclusive that as a practical matter, in the kitchen or restaurant, it all still seems to come down to individual conscience, going with (no pun) your gut. (back to text)

  21 Meaning
a lot less important, apparently, since the moral comparison here is not the value of one human’s life vs. the value of one animal’s life, but rather the value of one animal’s life vs. the value of one human’s taste for a particular kind of protein. Even the most diehard carniphile will acknowledge that it’s possible to live and eat well without consuming animals. (back to text)

  1 From “Can These Bones Live?” in The Edward Dahlberg Reader, New Directions, 1957. (back to text)

  2 Of course, contemporary literary theory is all about showing that there’s no real distinction between these two ways to read — or rather it’s about showing that aesthetics can pretty much always be reduced to ideology. For me, one reason Frank’s overall project is so worthwhile is that it shows a whole different way to marry formal and ideological readings, an approach that isn’t nearly as abstruse and (sometimes) reductive and (all too often) joy-killing as literary theory. (back to text)

  3 The amount of library time he must have put in would take the stuffing out of anybody, I’d imagine. (back to text)