By Isaac Butler
The trap springs! The second lobster section begins with a little more light science about lobsters and how they are trapped and what the difference is between a soft shell and a hard shell lobster. This segues into discussing how to cook them. It’s all very normal Gourmet Magazine (albeit filtered through Wallace’s voice). You expect, perhaps, that a side bar is on its way with winning recipes from the year’s festival.
But no.
Instead, in the fourth paragraph of this section we get this: “A detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even other to mention it is that lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle.” Again, this connects to the idea of what our interest in considering the lobster is. We don’t mention that the animal is alive because (a) it’s obvious but also (b) we don’t really want to think about it. And now, whether you realize it or not, he’s going to make you start thinking about it.
So yes, its aliveness is part of its appeal. Lobster is fresh and lobster is convenient and lobster is easy to prepare. At no point is Wallace going to dispute any of the positives surrounding the eating of lobster. He’s just going to complicate them. Witness, for example, in discussing their freshness, he mentions the bands around their claws, which leads him to footnote eight, probably the most important of the essay’s footnotes, where he compares banding lobster claws to debeaking broiler chickens, dehorning cattle, cropping swine tails etc, all of which are performed (he informs us) sans anesthetic.
This is the first glimpse of discussion of animal suffering and cruelty to animals in the entire essay, and within it he notes that he is unsure whether or not Gourmet’s readers know about any of it. Here, the “we” is beginning to split into “you” and “I,” with the I being your humble correspondent who is puzzling these things out and the “you” becoming an increasingly alien other. The gourmand whose moral sensibility Wallace finds unfathomable.
Anyway, here we get to the main subject of the article:
So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in the kitchens across the US: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does “all right” even mean in this context? Is the whole thing just a matter of personal choice?
The reader doesn’t realize this at this moment, but the rest of the essay is going to be about these questions. One of the constant complaints of the negative letters the piece received is that Wallace never segues away from these questions again. Some readers were expecting that these questions would be briefly pondered in a way that exonerates the reader and then returns us in scene to the festival itself.
This is one of many ways the trap works. Wallace has baited it with his digressive sensibility and prose panache. Indeed, he immediately segues back into scene, but just as a way of introducing PETA. Now, he makes fun of PETA over the course of the article, but he does this as a way of disarming us to the introduction of their perspective—that lobsters obviously die in horrendous amounts of pain.
Note again the stream of consciousness segues. We pivot from the last question “personal choice” talking about people who don’t want it to be a “personal choice,” namely PETA, but before we can talk about that, we have to talk about this cab ride Wallace took, and then a second cab ride, which gets us to the de rigeur defense of lobster eating, which he quotes someone else saying: “`There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains don’t have that part’”
So now we’re off on another digression, into The Pain Problem. Namely, do animals feel pain? And do they suffer from it? And how can we tell. As in Authority and English Usage, Wallace wants to make sure we understand that he is a fair (and democratically) minded arbiter of these questions. After all, he wants to make sure that we pause to “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.”
Again note that we’ve gone from talking about actual pain to talking about how we think about pain. Because once again, thought is Wallace’s real subject. The title isn’t just called Consider the Lobster as a fun play on MFK Fisher’s Consider the Oyster. It’s because he really wants to figure out how we should be thinking about it, where our “interest” lies.
So, having run through the scientific classifications of the lobster, the culinary delicacy of the lobster, the marketing of the lobster etc. now we get how to philosophically, ethically, and neoroscientifically consider it. And these questions are, of course, “uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling.”
Here, Wallace once again brings up the venue and assignment. He’s pretty sure that we don’t want him asking these questions but “the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF… and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.” In other words… “Hey, reader, we’re on the same side here. My hands are tied! Honesty compels me to write about this!”
The side effect of this appeal to honesty is that it subtextually goads the reader into continue to read it. It is essentially saying “if you want to continue to cook and eat lobster, you must read the rest of this essay and puzzle through this stuff with me.”
(I focus on this because one curious thing about the negative letters to the editor is that people hated the essay, but read the whole thing. That’s odd. When I hate a lengthy essay, I don’t generally finish it, particularly when it appears in a magazine. Why (I kept wondering) did people read the essay to completion? This is why I think the essay is a trap. By the time you get to the actual issue at the heart of it, you can’t stop reading it.)
DFW puzzles through it pretty much any way he can. First he looks at language, noting that the animals whose brains resemble ours get called by different names like “pork” and “beef” while we call chicken “chicken,” lobster “lobster,” etc. Then he notes that his own “semiconscious” substitution of the word “prepared” for “killed.” He also looks at it psychologically: eating a lobster is an intimate experience. We see it alive, we see it (and abet its) dying, we eat it. And here he again performs a kind of conflicted thinking—because the thought process in something this carefully written is nothing if not performative—noting that perhaps this is morally preferable to eating factory farmed steak.
And there are other ways to consider the problem of considering the lobster. Most importantly (and emphatically) there’s how the lobster actually behaves, which is to say it tries to cling to the container to avoid being put in boiling water and it clatters the lid in such a way that DFW cops to needing “to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven-timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.”
This little moment of self-deprecating joke (author as a neurotic wimp) is again a set-up. While he ends this section before the line-break as being about him, really what he’s doing is painting an image he’ll return to twice in quick succession. First, as fairly obvious pain-behavior, and second as the expression of a preference not to be boiled alive on the lobster’s part. This image, in other words, is used to check off two of the three criteria for whether or not the creature is suffering (the three he discusses are whether it has the “neurological hardware” required for feeling pain, whether it demonstrates pain-behavior, and whether or not it exhibits a preference for not experience the pain, thus obligating us to consider its “interests” and note again the use of that word).
Throughout he salts the piece with a lot of scientific information and jargon. Clearly, he’s well read on the subject. While it’s all filtered through the same voice, this has the subtle effect of establishing Wallace’s authority on the subject of animal suffering. Also, a kind of meta-plotline for the essay emerges: Wallace goes to the festival, starts thinking about all those poor lobsters, begins doing research which leads him to certain awful revelations about how the meat industry works and what a lobsters’ neuro make-up is like and in horror he ends up crafting this essay. This meta-plot helps make the essay more seductive. No one is really interested in someone reporting what they already know and getting self-righteous about it—and indeed, there’s a pointed lack of the kind of self-righteousness that essays and books about animal cruelty and factory farming are frequently rife with-- instead, Wallace really assays his topic. It’s a kind of quest narrative (the quest here for the answers to some thorny moral questions) folded into the digressive structure.
So, he ponders the abstract questions of whether or not a lobster feels pain, what it’s neurological hardware is, what pain is, how a lobster experience the world. He cites experts in philosophy and in lobsters. He walks us through alternative ways of killing/cooking lobsters and problematizes them. He ends what we think will be the disquisition on this subject with a discussion of lobster preferences (lobsters prefer certain temperatures of water to others, they prefer being alone, and it’s hard not to shake they prefer to not be boiled alive).
And then we return to scene. The scene we’ve been hungry for. But now the scene is poisoned. Gone are the brilliant-and-hilarious riffs on democracy, on the smells, on food, on marketing. Gone, in other words, is the normal DFW schtick. Instead we get this:
In any event, at the MLF, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings…
Here the word choice is kind of mind-bogglingly precise. The claws are “hobbled” (not banded) and are waved “impotently,” the lobsters “huddle,” (they don’t gather) and “scrabble frantically.” (rather than scurrying away). And just when you thought we were done with all the examining and the uncomfortable questions, and were going to return to scene to exit, comfortably from the considering DFW’s doing, he instead hits in with a litany of questions paired with a whole host of problems with even beginning to answer them.
This then segues to the most pointed part of the piece, the part where DFW fully and deliberately separates himself from the reader in order to interrogate us. After wrestling through these questions with us, he then states that he is not one of us readers of Gourmet. In fact, he lacks “culinary sophistication” and has never thought through these questions until now. But he assumes we have, or actually really wants to make it clear that we should have:
Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)?
Which leads him to the point that the essay is pretty clearly constructed to make. “I am not trying to bait anyone here- I’m genuinely curious,” Wallace writes, “After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet?”
For someone not trying to bait anyone, that question sure is baiting. One point that The Omnivore’s Dilemma makes over and over again is our alienation from our food. Here, Wallace is pointing that out in a way that calls into question the reader’s opinion of themself, and then segues into questioning the magazine’s opinion of itself, asking “what the adjective in a phrase like “The Magazine of Good Living” is really supposed to mean.”
Here, “good” is given multiple meanings, with different valences. And this gives a double meaning to the earlier sentence that lobsters are “good eating. Or so we think now.” While that sentence originally means “good” as in delicious, high-quality food and “think now” means in opposition to 18th century thinking on the subject, now the sentence could be taken to read that we think of it as “good” as in morally acceptable food, and now as in at this point in this essay.
Similarly, the word “gourmet” is made more complex, and given new meanings by the above quote. Wallace was nothing if not hyper-conscious of words and their meanings. There is no way he doesn’t know that gourmet actually comes from combining the 19th century French word gromet-- meaning something like wine-tasters or wine-merchant’s servants— with the modern French meaning of gourmant, which is glutton. DFW is inventing a new way to think about the word, and to think about what it means to have a “discriminating palate” and to be an expert in the preparation and eating of food (its two main dictionary definitions). Or rather, he’s complicating what we mean by “discriminating” and “expert” to include moral and ethical questions.
The final step of this essay is the deliberate denial of catharsis. He raises these thorny (or perhaps sentimental or cloyingly PC or whatever) questions, and instead of revising them, writes that the questions he’s asking “lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right here. There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other.”
(Note, again, the word “interest.” And how was it originally used again? “For practical purposes, everyone knows what a lobster is. As usual, though, there’s much more to know than most of us care about—it’s all a matter of what your interests are.” The entire essay is (in a way) contained in that sentence, which occurs on its second page. The sentence’s meaning relies on our apprehension of the words “care” and “interest,” and throughout the essay, Wallace has deepened and complicated those words, overturning them like rocks so we can observe the ants to-and-froing beneath. In the first instance, “care” is defined simply as “desire” and “interest” is defined as, essentially, field or discipline of knowledge.
By the end of the essay, however, “care” means empathy and “interest” means, essentially, perspective or point of view on the issue. There is much more than we will want to see if we are, in fact, empathic beings with moral compasses, depending on our point of view. And it’s worth repeating that this evolution of this word makes it very clear exactly how carefully written and revised this essay is, and thus the kind of meandering stream-of-consciousness form that it takes is a rhetorical device.)
This denial of catharsis is a move that DFW employs regularly in his fiction, but almost never in his non. The obvious effect is to leave all these troubling questions hanging, to deny you the pleasure of working through them so that you don’t have to think about them any more. It is a haunting move, and for some a deeply frustrating one. Witness this letter to the editor:
I kept waiting and hoping for some witty ending that would say something along the lines of “Forget the aforementioned babble—pass the butter!” Alas, that ending neer came, and I was left so annoyed that I chose to write this letter to express my severe boredom and lack of interest in future articles like this one.
The reader was bored? Really? Than why did they read the whole the thing? And why were they annoyed? Boredom is frequently the pose we take when we don’t want to admit that we found something troubling, or moving, or affecting, particularly if it is political (or moralistic) in nature. And note, again, the use of the word “interest.” The reader does not have an “interest” in seeing articles like this one again. But why? Because it refused to make her feel good about their eating choices, or reassuring them that they don’t need to think about them.
Wallace takes the reader on a remarkably far (and swift) journey over the course of this essay. He covers the same ground that Eating Animals does in one tenth the page count, and because he does not reveal his own answers to the questions he wrestles with, he manages to stay in the readers’ head the whole the time. He employs the cues and tricks of the standard-issue piece of literary journalism to entrap the reader into going on a journey for which they did not originally sign up. In terms of structure, the piece appears meandering, but is actually air-tight, filled with specific word choice and a relentlessly questioning forward momentum.
The essay is ultimately a masterpiece of formal design, but it’s no surprise that it also angered a great number of Gourmet’s readers. Beyond the questions it raises (which are, as Wallace describes them, uncomfortable and difficult), there’s simply the feeling one gets upon first reading it that you’ve been set up. One does not enjoy being outsmarted. Or does one or does one or does one.
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