Thomas Holcroft seems proud of himself as he confides to his journal the gist of his dinner conversation with a vegetarian:
June 24th, 1798
—Dined, Godwin and Reece present. . . . Spoke to Mr. Reece on the morality of eating animal food: he said we had no right to kill animals, and diminish the quantity of sensation. I answered that the quantity of sensation was greatly increased; for that the number of living animals was increased, perhaps ten, perhaps a hundred fold, by the care which man bestowed on them; and that as I saw no reason to suppose they meditated on, or had any fore-knowledge of death, the pain of dying to them is scarcely worth mentioning. . . . Ritson joined our party in the evening.19
In a situation where flesh is consumed, vegetarians inevitably call attention to themselves. They have made something absent on their plates; perhaps a verbal demurral has been required as well. They then are drawn into a discussion regarding their vegetarianism. Frequently, someone is present who actually feels hostile to vegetarianism and regards it as a personal challenge. If this is the case, all sorts of outrageous issues are thrown out to see how the vegetarian will handle them. The vegetarian, enthusiastic reformer, sees the opportunity as one of education; but it is not. Instead it is a teasing game of manipulation. At times, ludicrous questions are raised; they imply that the entire discussion is ludicrous.
George Borrow, reporting on a dinnertime conversation with Sir Richard Phillips, Romantic radical and publisher, demonstrates this phenomenon:
“You eat no animal food, sir?” said I.
“I do not, sir,” said he; “I have forsworn it upwards of twenty years. In one respect, sir, I am a Brahmin. I abhor taking away life—the brutes have as much right to live as ourselves”
“But,” said I, “if the brutes were not killed, there would be such a superabundance of them, that the land would be overrun with them.”
“I do not think so, sir; few are killed in India, and yet there is plenty of room.”
“But,” said I, “Nature intended that they should be destroyed, and the brutes themselves prey upon one another, and it is well for themselves and the world that they do so. What would be the state of things if every insect, bird and worm were left to perish of old age?”
“We will change the subject,” said the publisher; “I have never been a friend to unprofitable discussions.”20
The situation is established not only to provoke defensiveness but to sidetrack the reformer into answering the wrong questions, as Phillips implies by changing the conversation. In this, the pattern of discourse resembles that of dinnertime conversations about feminism in the early 1970s. Questions of definition often predominate. Whereas feminists were parlaying questions which trivialized feminism such as “Are you one of those bra burners?” vegetarians must define themselves against the trivializations of “Are you one of those health nuts?” or “Are you one of those animal lovers?” While feminists encountered the response that “men need liberation too,” vegetarians are greeted by the postulate that “plants have life too.” Or to make the issue appear more ridiculous, the position is forwarded this way: “But what of the lettuce and tomato you are eating; they have feelings too!”
The attempt to create defensiveness through trivialization is the first conversational gambit which greets threatening reforms. This pre-establishes the perimeters of discourse. One must explain that no bras were burned at the Miss America pageant, or the symbolic nature of the action of that time, or that this question fails to regard with seriousness questions such as equal pay for equal work. Similarly, a vegetarian, thinking that answering these questions will provide enlightenment, may patiently explain that if plants have life, then why not be responsible solely for the plants one eats at the table rather than for the larger quantities of plants consumed by the herbivorous animals before they become meat? In each case a more radical answer could be forwarded: “Men need first to acknowledge how they benefit from male dominance,” “Can anyone really argue that the suffering of this lettuce equals that of a sentient cow who must be bled out before being butchered?” But if the feminist or vegetarian responds this way they will be put back on the defensive by the accusation that they are being aggressive. What to a vegetarian or a feminist is of political, personal, existential, and ethical importance, becomes for others only an entertainment during dinnertime.
After trivialization, the discourse challenges the legitimacy of the issues. A feminist would encounter an earnest couple, with either the man or the woman asserting that they are a very happy couple: “Does my wife (Do I) look oppressed?” There really was no interest in a complex feminist analysis of oppression. Similarly, vegetarians encounter this: “Would you make carnivorous animals become vegetarian too? What about your (our) dog, cat?” In each case, the reformer is made to appear that she or he would take analysis or reform too far, disrupting the sacred nature of established relationships (a marriage, a carnivorous animal).
The rules regarding politeness at dinnertime favor the status quo and limit the range of the conversation. By the mid-seventies when the issues of rape, domestic violence, and pornography were quickly gaining prominence as feminist issues, were feminists to anatomize the problem of violence against women during pleasant hours of conversing and eating? Correspondingly, vegetarians who are asked why they are vegetarians while everyone else eats meat must consider: do they really want to know that I object to the way animals are butchered, and how much detail can I supply when everyone else is eating meat? What are my duties to the hostess?
What one faces at this time are efforts at disempowerment. That which is threatening, such as feminism and vegetarianism, must be redefined, delimited, disempowered. Often one individual holds the position of redefining, delimiting, disempowering the vegetarian. A feminist’s emphasis on sexual violence is judged as hysterical; a vegetarian’s emphasis on the death of animals as emotional. Both feminists and vegetarians are accused of negativity because they appear to require that something be given up (the most obvious trappings of femininity; the meat on the plate) as opposed to their own perspective in which they are emphasizing the positive choice (aspiring to emancipation and liberation; choosing vegetables, grains, and fruits). Who is a feminist or a vegetarian becomes a vexed question and the principles behind feminism and vegetarianism are transformed into “being moralistic.”21
As though a text of meat must be recapitulated on the level of discourse—the flesh made word—you become the rabbit, the other person the hunter who must vindicate the sport. You will be teased, you will be baited. You are the quarry, not your beliefs. The other attacks, backs off. This activity may be neither as blatant nor aggressive as the following anecdote reveals, but the issue of control over the conversation is similar:
Well knowing Ritson’s holy horror of all animal food, Leyden complained that the joint on the table was overdone. “Indeed, for that matter,” cried he, “meat can never be too little done, and raw is best of all.” He sent to the kitchen accordingly for a plate of literally raw beef, and manfully ate it up, with no sauce but the exquisite ruefulness of the Pythagoreans glances.22 [Notice the manfully]
Though you are kept under control by this control of conversation, you appear to be the manipulator, the one who is redefining, delimiting, dis-empowering meat eating, and the other is the protector of the meaning of meat eating:
On their return to the cottage, [Sir Walter] Scott inquired for the learned cabbage-eater, meaning Ritson, who had been expected to dinner. “Indeed,” answered his wife, “you may be happy he is not here, he is so very disagreeable. Mr. Leyden, I believe, frightened him away” It turned out that it was even so. When Ritson appeared, a round of cold beef was on the luncheon-table, and Mrs. Scott, forgetting his peculiar creed, offered him a slice. The antiquary, in his indignation, expressed himself in such outrageous terms to the lady, that Leyden first tried to correct him by ridicule.
At a dinner where meat is eaten, the vegetarian must lose control of th
e conversation. The function of the absent referent must be kept absent especially when incarnated on the platter at the table. The flesh and words about it must be kept separate. Meat eaters cannot capitulate to vegetarianism at this point; they would have to re-vision their menus while in the midst of adhering to the texts of meat.
The meaning of meat is reproduced each time it is served and eaten. Food in general and meat in specific, like the female body, is a “site of visual pleasure, or lure of the gaze.”23 Vegetarianism announces that it will destroy the pleasure of meals as they are now experienced. Thus it is a given that vegetarians will be unable to determine the shape of the discourse when eating with meat eaters. But, it is inevitable that vegetarians will eat with meat eaters; and it is also inevitable that the absence of meat on their table will touch off a discussion. In this situation, the issue of vegetarianism is a form of meat to meat eaters: it is something to be trapped and dismembered, it is a “dead issue.” Vegetarian words are treated like animal flesh.
While the codes of the texts of meat must be broken down, they cannot be broken down when meat is present because it reifies the old codes. And while the vegetarian is faulted for a failure to maintain objectivity, none at the dinner table is actually objective. Complicating the lack of objectivity is the fact that vegetarianism as it is experienced by meat eaters is ambiguous: just what does one replace meat with? The final complication is the existence of the “story of meat,” which influences the perspective of meat eaters. When I say the story of meat I refer to the worldview that determines that meat is acceptable food. This viewpoint consists of various parts similar to the sequence a story follows.
The story of meat
These pheasants of course, if one wanted to be legalistic about it, wouldn’t be here at all if we hadn’t put them here, got the eggs, hatched them out, reared the chicks—you might say we gave them life and then after a bit we take it away again—arrogating to ourselves somewhat God-like powers I must admit. But let’s not bother with all that.
—The host of a shooting party in Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party24
The story of meat follows the narrative structure of story telling. Alice B. Toklas implies this in her cookbook when, in a chapter entitled “Murder in the Kitchen,” she uses the style of a detective story to describe killing and cooking animals.25 Through recipes she provides the appropriate conclusion to the animals’ death according to the texts of meat; the animal becomes delectable, edible.
There are some incontrovertible assumptions that determine our approach to life: Stories have endings, meals have meat. Let us explore whether these statements are interchangeable—stories have meat, that is, meaning, and meals have endings. When vegetarians take meat out of the meal, they take the ending out of the story of meat. Vegetarians become caught within a structure they attempt to eliminate. Our experience of meat eating cannot be separated from our feelings about stories.
We are a species who tell stories. Through narrative we confer meaning upon life. Our histories are structured as stories that postulate beginnings, crises, resolutions; dramas and fictions animate our imagination with stories that obviously have a beginning and an end. Narrative, by definition, moves forward toward resolution. By the time the story is concluded we have achieved some resolution, whether comic or tragic, and we are given access to the meaning of the story as a whole. Often meaning can only be apprehended once the story is complete. Detective stories demonstrate the closure of narrative, because the act of discovering at the end of the story who really “done it” often causes a reordering of all that transpired before the end of the story. Closure accomplishes the revelation of meaning and reinscribes the idea that meaning is achieved through closure.
Meat eating is story applied to animals, it gives meaning to animals’ existence. To say this is to take Roland Barthes’s statement literally: “Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances—as though any material were fit to receive human’s stories.”26 Animals’ lives and bodies become material fit to receive human’s stories: the word becomes flesh.
We can isolate determining points in which the creation of meat recalls the movement of narration. There is a beginning, a postulating of origins that positions the beginning of the story: we give animals life. There is the drama of conflict, in this case of death. And there is the closure, the final summing up, which provides resolution to the drama: the consumption of the animal.
The story of meat follows a sacred typology: the birth of a god, the dismemberment of the god’s body, and the god’s resurrection. This sacred story paves the way for a mundane enaction of the meaning of dismemberment and resurrection—achieved through consumption of meat.
The story begins with the birth of the animal, who would not have existed if meat eating did not require the animal’s body. As we saw, Holcroft confides to his journal that his argument against vegetarianism is that meat eating has given innumerable animals life and thus increased “the quantity of sensation.” His is one of the most frequently reiterated defenses of meat eating in which benignity is conferred with the beginning of the story because life has been conferred upon an animal. Here we have the reassurance that accompanies the doubling of origins: the birth of an animal and the beginning of the story lock the story in a traditional movement of narrativity and a cultural one of reciprocity. We give them life and later we can take it, precisely because in the beginning we gave it. Based on our knowledge of how the story is going to end we interpret its beginning. The way in which the story of meat is conceptualized is with constant references to humans’ will; we allow animals their existence and we begin to believe that animals cannot exist without us.
The subterfuge in the story of meat occurs in the absence of agency and the emphasis on personal choice. The phrase humane slaughter and the eliding of fragmentation contribute to an elaborate artifice in which the person consuming meat is not implicated, because no agency, that is, no responsibility, no complicity, is inscribed in the story. A person can proudly proclaim his or her meat-eating habits. Though inculcated through social processes, meat eating is unambiguously experienced as personal.
Meat eaters must assume the role of literary critic, attempting to impose a positive interpretation on what they know to be a tragedy (the tragedy of killing animals), but which they see as a necessary tragedy. They do so by manipulating language and meaning creating a story that subjugates animals’ lives to human needs. The story of meat involves renaming, repositioning the object, and re-birth. As we saw in chapter 3, re-naming occurs continuously. We re-position the animal from subject to object by making ourselves the subjects in meat eating. The story ends not with death but re-birth and assimilation into our lives. Thus meat gives life. We accept meat eating as consumers because this role is continuous with our role of consumers of completed stories. Only through closure is the story resolved; only through meat eating does meat achieve its meaning and provide the justification for the entire meat production process. The meat herself represents the closure that occurs at the end of any story.
The threat to this story arises from two sources: vegetarianism and feminism. The vegetarian perspective seeks to establish agency and implicate the consumer. It challenges the notion that animals’ deaths can be redeemed by applying human meaning to it; thus it stops the story of meat. The feminist theorist has concluded that traditional narrative is determined by patriarchal culture. According to feminist theory, patriarchal narrative depicts male quests and female passivity. Teresa de Lauretis comments, “For there would be no myth without a princess to be wedded.”27 It suggests that it is in the gaps and silences of traditional narrative that feminist meaning can be found. Thus it questions the structure of stories. With the lens of feminist interpretation we can see that the animal’s position in the story of meat is that of the woman’s in traditional patriarchal narrative; she is the object to be possessed. The story ends when the Prince finds
his Princess. Our story ends when the male-defined consumer eats the female-defined body. The animals’ role in meat eating is parallel to the women’s role in narrative: we would have neither meat nor story without them. They are objects to others who act as subjects.
Vegetarians see themselves as providing an alternative ending, veggie burgers instead of hamburgers, but they are actually eviscerating the entire narrative. From the dominant perspective, vegetarianism is not only about something that is inconsequential, which lacks “meat,” and which fails to find closure through meat, but it is a story about the acceptance of passivity, of that which has no meaning, of endorsing a “vegetable” way of living. In this it appears to be a feminist story that goes nowhere and accepts nothingness.
If, through the story of meat, the word and the flesh are united, we might further argue that the body equals a text, a text is a body. From this perspective, changing an animal from her original state into food parallels changing a text from its original state into something more palatable. The result is dismembered texts and dismembered animals. Freeing Metis’s voice from the sexual politics of meat involves remembering both.
PART II
FROM THE BELLY OF ZEUS
Zeus lusted after Metis the Titaness, who turned into many shapes to escape him until she was caught at last and got with child. An oracle of Mother Earth then declared that this would be a girl-child and that if Metis conceived again, she would bear a son who was fated to depose Zeus, just as Zeus had deposed Cronus, and Cronus had deposed Uranus. Therefore, having coaxed Metis to a couch with honeyed words, Zeus suddenly opened his mouth and swallowed her, and that was the end of Metis, though he claimed afterward that she gave him counsel from inside his belly.
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) Page 14
