Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption

Eating the Avant-Garde

Michel Delville

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415958318
• eBook ISBN: 9781135904692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From Plato's dismissal of food as a distraction from thought to Kant's relegation of the palate to the bottom of the hierarchy of the senses, the sense of taste has consistently been devalued by Western aesthetics. Kant is often invoked as evidence that philosophers consider taste as an inferior sense because it belongs to the realm of the private and subjective and does not seem to be required in the development of higher types of knowledge. From a gastrosophical perspective, however, what Kant perceives as a limitation becomes a new field of enquiry that investigates the dialectics of diet and discourse, self and matter, inside and outside.

The essays in this book examine the importance of food as a pivotal element – both materially and conceptually – in the history of the Western avant-garde. From Gertrude Stein to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Samuel Beckett, from F.T. Marinetti to Andy Warhol, from Marcel Duchamp to Eleanor Antin, the examples chosen explore the conjunction of art and foodstuff in ways that interrogate contemporary notions of the body, language, and subjectivity.

1 Tasting Is Believing

A Few Thoughts on Still Life Poetics

GREENAWAY’S COOK

The main subject of Peter Greenaway’s film, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, is the relationship between political power¹ and the imperatives of physical and sexual hunger. For Greenaway’s dictator-thief, food is a way of asserting his authority over his wife and partners by stuffing them with delicacies in order to prevent them from mouthing the unpalatable truth. “A good cook puts unlikely things together,” says the thief—like duck meat and orange or ham and pineapples. The oxymoronic potency of bittersweet food is equated with the apex of good taste. But it also signifies the ultimate form of violence, which lurks beneath the varnish of cultural refinement in a world in which every civilized gesture becomes an act of barbarism. The multiplication of foodstuff, the seemingly endless banquets, and the infinite refinement of the French chef’s cuisine only build the aestheticized background against which the most atrocious crimes are perpetrated.

If we agree with Norman O. Brown that “eating is in the form of the Fall” (Brown 97),² then the original separation between nature and culture can be seen to result from the primal scene of illicit eating. More often than not, the lives of Greenaway’s characters are reduced to the mechanical transit between the dining room and the bathroom, which, incidentally, is where most of the illicit sex takes place in the film. The association of food, sex and scatology in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover reaches an intensity unparalleled since Rimbaud’s “Young Glutton” (1871), a little-known gem from the Album zutique. Like the greedy child of Erik Satie’s “Almond Chocolate Waltz,”³ Rimbaud’s young glutton, who is seen sticking out his tongue at a pear like a chameleon trying to catch a fly, sums up the mysterious process which takes human beings into a dimension where the use-value of food is divorced from the act of eating and transposed onto another, more abstract level:

Cap of silk,

ivory prick,

very black attire,

Paul stalks

the cupboard,

sticks out small tongue at pear,

prepares

wand,

and havoc.⁴

(Rimbaud 16)

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is full of such poetic displacements that convert food into an intellectual or emotional fetish. About halfway through the movie, we learn, for example, that one of the reasons why the French cook’s cuisine is so popular is because it includes all kinds of black ingredients. For Richard’s clients, these “insatiable consumers of matter” (Feher 395), eating black food is like defying death by consuming the color of death (“I charge a lot for anything black—grapes, olives, blackcurrants. People like to remind themselves of death—eating black food is like consuming death—like saying—ha, ha, Death!—I’m eating you.”). Greenaway’s film culminates in a failed cannibalistic ceremony that attempts to combine the forces of Eros and Thanatos through the catalytic virtues of French cuisine. The ritual is interrupted by the execution of the thief, who is shot by his wife after trying to force her to eat her dead lover’s roasted genitals. The eater and the eaten are caught in a vicious circle: a perverted narrative equivalent of Arcimboldo’s “Cook” (ca. 1570), a visual palindrome which can be seen alternately as the cook’s head and a plate full of roasted meat.⁵

The cinematic still lifes of Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover seem an ideal introduction to the object poems I will examine in this chapter. All the examples I have chosen deal with the representation of foodstuff in contemporary poetry. Like Greenaway’s film, they address the issue of the ontological instability of the ego by focusing on the avatars of a lyric self caught in a process which brings about a continuous alteration of the distinction between mind and matter, diet and discourse, inside and outside, between what is I and what is not (or no-longer or not-yet) I. The central paradox in Greenaway’s still lifes is that they cannot be completely still because the camera not only moves around the object but also registers the slightest changes produced by the play of light and shade as they happen. The cinematic still life cannot thus engage in the “illusion of timelessness” which characterizes the traditional still life; it cannot contain the message that “nothing changes,” that “the instant described will remain as it is in the eyes of the beholder, the individual perceiving subject” (Stewart 29). Rather, it returns us to Cézanne’s shrivelled lemons that for D. H. Lawrence proved the validity of our “intuitive feeling that nothing is really statically at rest” (Anderson 1).

For Christian Metz, one of most important problems addressed by film theory is that of the “impression of reality” experienced by the viewer. Film gives us the impression that we are “witnessing an almost real spectacle” to a much greater extent than does a poem or a painting. Film “speak[s] to us with the accent of true evidence” (Metz 4). When poetry strives to give an impression of reality, it has to rely on other means of actualization of the image, means that are necessarily more complex than in film, where “the image is always actualized” (67). As Paul Hoover writes:

In poetry, actualization occurs on many levels at the same time, including the sound of the words and phrases, the timing of the sentences, the formal relations of the parts, the intellectual demand placed by the poem as thought, and the obvious underlying fact that poems are in words, while films rely primarily on images. Because imagist poems are so constrained by phanopoesis,⁶ Pound’s term, they are in the long run foreign to what poetry does best, which is to display the complex privacy of thinking, and the emotional announcement that is poetic rhetoric. Any movement which seeks to abolish rhetoric in poetry will ultimately fail, as it is central to the poem’s emotional “push” even when that intention is ironic or muted. (Delville and Pagnoulle 12)

STEIN’S APPLES AND POTATOES

As we will see in the next chapter, nowhere is this complex process of actualization of the poetic image more evident than in the work of Gertrude Stein, whose celebrated “repetition with variation” technique sought to emulate the dynamics of the moving image. Commenting on the literary portraits of The Making of Americans, Stein writes: “I was doing what the cinema was doing, I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what the person was until I had not many things but one thing” (Stein 1967: 106). Whereas in film the main technical concern is how to link one image to the next, actualization in Stein’s cinematic prose poetry occurs at the level of the verbal elements of the poem which, read sequentially, are gradually perceived as a “continuously moving picture” (105). One of the main goals Stein set herself while writing Tender Buttons was indeed to write “portraits of things” without reducing them to static objects. The idea was, she claimed, to “include color and movement” in her prose miniatures (113). In a piece such as “Apple,” the illusion of “movement” conveyed by Stein’s prose, results, to a large extent, from the use of wordplay, multiple negations, and alliterations, all of which take the reader away from semantics and subordinate referentiality to the imperatives of rhythm (as we know, many of Stein’s poems were inspired by the syncopated cadences of casual conversation and “kitchen talk”). Stein’s use of repetition and reiteration produces more ambiguity as the repeated words grab different meanings from the neighboring words and sentences, refusing to become “useful” by becoming attached to the things they are supposed to designate:

APPLE

Apple plum, carpet steak, seed calm, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please.

A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use. (187)

But the overall effect of the still lifes of Tender Buttons is ultimately less verbal than “verbi-voco-visual,” to use James Joyce’s phrase. Perhaps more than any other poetic form, the object poem written in prose appears to hesitate between ekphrastic⁷ description and the creation of visual effects directed towards the presentation of the poem as object. Because of its justified margins, the object prose poem (especially when it consists of a single block of writing placed in the middle of the page) necessarily aspires to the condition of concrete poetry and the visual arts as the “framing” of the described object by the white margins almost inevitably evokes the concrete framing of the canvas. Typographically speaking, the objectification of the thing described is further underlined by the already reified en bloc composition of the paragraphs, which emphasizes the materiality of text.

As David Antin posits, Stein’s prose poetry “is a kind of concrete poetry with justified margins” (qtd. in Perloff 2004: 14). And, indeed, the ability to see words and paragraphs, rather than read them, is not the privilege of concrete poetry as such. Even if one concurs with Marjorie Perloff that the conventional prose poem is “usually a block of print whose words, syllables, and letters have no optical significance” (177) and exhibits a continuity which “encourages an inattention to the right-hand margin as a terminal point,” the object poem in prose seems a somewhat different entity in which the ekphrastic element is so marked that it invites, at least to some extent, a visual reading of its textual components. In Tender Buttons, the painterly impulse is immediately apparent in Stein’s decision to write several sketches devoted to the same object, as in the “Potatoes” series, for example, where she allows herself to depict her subject from a variety of angles thereby emphasizing the affinities between her writing techniques and Cubist painting. As Rosmarie Waldrop explains, “[the] most obvious feature [of the concrete poem] is reduction…. both conventions and sentence are replaced by spatial arrangement” (qtd. in Perloff 2004: 175). In “Potatoes,” the reduction of the poem to a short series of words undergoing various repetitions and variations precludes any attempt at a “normal,” sequential reading of the piece. Such poetic prose is typical of a kind of writing that develops an aesthetics of permutation, substitution, and indeterminacy and enacts what Waldrop calls the “revolt against this transparency of the word” (175–76), the rallying cry of many poets associated with Language Poetry:

POTATOES

Real potatoes cut in between.

POTATOES

In the preparation of cheese, in the preparation of crackers, in the preparation of butter, in it.

ROAST POTATOES

Roast potatoes for.

(Stein 1967: 189)

STEVENS’S OBJECT LESSON

For Wallace Stevens, another poet influenced by post-impressionist art, the main focus also seems to be on color and form rather than content or symbolism. After a mock-didactic opening (“Opusculum paedagogum” [Stevens 196]), Stevens’s “Study of Two Pears” immediately proceeds to discuss what the pears are not, thereby emphasizing the unique, irreducible singularity of the object in a way that is reminiscent of Rilke’s Dinggedichte. In many ways, Rilke’s “thing poems” inaugurated the modern tradition of the object poem while marking the poet’s turn from his early Neo-Romantic lyricism to a more objective mode inspired by Cézanne, one which sought to describe objects and animals with the detached eye of the painter. Like Rilke, Manet, and Cézanne before him, Stevens enjoys the physicality of composition. His “Study of Two Pears” is only the ekphrastic depiction of an imaginary painting representing an absent object (the poem does not describe a specific painting although its implied referent is clearly the post-impressionist painterly tradition). Still, the third stanza of the poem nonetheless insists on presenting real fruits to the reader, three-dimensional forms which seem to exceed the canvas of the printed page.

Whereas Rilke’s poetics of “objective expression” (“sachliches Sagen”)⁸—for all its apparent factuality and descriptive exactitude—still endeavors to reveal the essential nature of things and inevitably lends itself to metaphorical interpretations (e.g., the theme of death and rebirth in the “Blue Hortensia”), Stevens’s “Study of Two Pears” insists on the object’s resistance to the observer’s gaze (the pears “are not seen as the observer wills”) and precludes any attempt to read symbolic meanings into the text (“The pears are not viols, / Nudes or bottles. / They resemble nothing else”). The colors that dominate Stevens’s still life (“yellow,” “red,” “blue,” “citron,” “orange,” and “green”) are abstracted from the fruit and turned into nouns (they are both substantivized and substantiated). As for the pears themselves, their shape may resemble that of a woman’s body or a bottle but they are above all “Yellow forms / Composed of curves / Bulging towards the base … They are not flat surfaces / Having curved outlines. / They are round / Tapering toward the top”). Impersonalized by Stevens’s literal imagination, they recede to the background as the poet’s attention becomes increasingly attracted by the play of light and shadow that blurs the outlines of the fruits. Because nothing seems to distinguish them from one another, they also acquire a generic quality. To paraphrase Georges Braque, “a pear beside a pear is no longer a pear … it has become fruit.”⁹

The compositional principles of Stein’s Tender Buttons and Stevens’s “Study of Two Pears” address questions of representation which exceed the limits of ekphrastic description. One of these questions once again has to do with the existence of the poem as a poetic object. Jack Spicer once wrote to Federico García Lorca: “I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste … live moons, live lemons, live boys in bathing suits” (Spicer 34). And according to Archibald MacLeish, “A poem should be palpable and mute, / As a globed fruit” (Charters 874). Reading and enjoying a mute poem means relying above all on the materiality of writing and the look of the poem on the page. It also involves a double form of transmutation: the transformation of the object into the written word followed by the latter’s further integration into the poem or book as object. As Susan Stewart has argued, literary descriptions of material objects inevitably tend to be perceived according to a visual mode of apprehension of the page as canvas:

just as the still life is a configuration of consumable objects, so the book’s minute description of the material world is a device which tends to draw attention to the book as object. The configurations of print and the configurations of context-as-décor bear an intimate relation which oral genres, pointing to the time and space of the body, do not partake of. Description of the material world seems self-motivated, seems to be directed toward a presentation without direction. (27)

The work of Bob Grenier, an American poet influenced by Stein and associated with Language Poetry in the 1970s and 1980s, oscillates between visual and textual representation in a way that returns us to Stewart’s “self-motivating” description. His Sentences, published in 1978, is a boxed collection of 500 short poems printed on note cards that be shuffled and reshuffled into any order. By specifying the paper quality and typeface (“This work was composed on an IBM Selectric Typewriter, using a Courier 72 (10 point) ball. Card stock is 110 lb index white” [Grenier unpag.]), Grenier inevitably draws the reader’s attention to the words on the page, which become the main object of investigation. To quote Beth Anderson, the poetic still life here “extend[s] the category of objects to include words themselves” (Anderson 2). This aspect of Grenier’s work was confirmed by his more recent works, which include handwritten and holographic poems that seek to preserve the “gestural” (in the Benjaminian sense) aspects of literary production.¹⁰ While Grenier’s elliptical style distinguishes it from the blocks of prose of Tender Buttons, some of his “sentences” seem to hark back to Stein’s culinary anti-descriptions:

arriving in potato

TWELVE VOWELS

breakfast

the sky flurries

ROBERT BLY’S THING POEMS

At the other end of the spectrum which opposes the Language poets’ poetics of abstraction and “radical artifice”¹¹ to the more traditional strategies deployed by poets committed to a poetry of direct statement which does not challenge the seeming “transparency” of the written word, we find the poetry of Robert Bly, one of the best-known practitioners of the American object or “thing” poem. Far from foregrounding the materiality and opacity of writing, Bly insists on the sense of transparency and immediacy one experiences when reading a poem ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Tasting Is Believing: A Few Thoughts on Still Life Poetics
• 2 On Tender Buttons and Brussels Sprouts: Modernism and the Aesthetics of Consumption
• 3 Pop Serialism: Soup Cans, Pie Counters, and Things that Look like Meat
• 4 Minimalists and Anorexics
• 5 Uncontrollable Materialities: Food and the Body in Performance
• Epilogue: The Food and Hunger Poet at the Turn of the Century: Anorexia, Anthropoemia, and Abjection
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index