Word of Mouth: Food and Fiction After Freud 2002004172, 9780415938501

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One Repast: Mother, Identity, and Memory
Chapter Two Consuming Culture: The Linguistics of Location
Chapter Three Lesser Crimes: Anorexia's Plea
Chapter Four It Goes Without Saying: Oral Aggression and Its Mutterings
Afterword Last Suppers: Final Words
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS

edited by

William E. Cain Wellesley College

A

ROUTLEDGE SERIES

OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES: A COINCIDENCE OF WANTS

POSTCOLONIAL MASQUERADES

The Novel and Neoclassical Economics Charles Lewis

Culture and Politics in Literature, Film, Video, and Photography Niki Sampat Patel

MODERN PRIMITIVES

Race and Language in Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston Susanna Pavloska

Reading and Storytelling in Contemporary American Fiction Robert Durante

PLAIN AND UGLY JANES

ALLEGORIES OF VIOLENCE

The Rise of the Ugly Woman in COIltemporary American Fiction Charlotte M. Wright

Tracing the Writings of War in Late Ttventieth-Century Fiction Lidia Yuknavitch

DISSENTING FICTIONS

VOICE OF THE OPPRESSED IN THE LANGUAGE

Identity and Resistance in the Contemporary American Novel Cathy Moses PERFORMING LA MESTIZA

Textual References of Lesbians of Color and the Negotiation of Identities Ellen M. Gil-Gomez FROM GOOD MA TO WELFARE QUEEN

A Genealogy of the Poor Woman in American Literature, Photography and Culture Vivyan C. Adair

DIALECTIC OF SELF AND STORY

OF THE OPPRESSOR

A Discussion of Selected Postcolonial Literature from Ireland, Africa and America Patsy J. Daniels EUGENIC FANTASIES

Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920's Betsy L. Nies THE LIFE WRlTlNG OF OTHERNESS

Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston, and Winterson Lauren Rusk

ARTFUL ITINERARIES

FROM WITHIN THE FRAME

European Art and American Careers in High Culture, 1865-1920 Paul Fisher

Storytelling in African-American Fiction Bertram D. Ashe THE SELF WIRED

POSTMODERN TALES OF SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS

From Aleio Carpenter to Charles johnson Timothy J. Cox

Technology and Subiectivity in Contemporary Narrative Lisa Yaszek THE SPACE AND PLACE OF MODERNISM

EMBODYING BEAUTY

Twentieth-Century American Women Writers' Aesthetics Malin Pereira

The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York Adam McKible THE FIGURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

MAKING HOMES IN THE WEST/INDIES

Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and jamaica Kincaid Antonia Macdonald-Smythe

William james, Henry james, and Edith Wharton Jill M. Kress

WORD OF MOUTH Food and Fiction after Freud

Susanne Skubal

i~ ~~o~1~~n~~:up LONDON AND NEW YORK

First Published in 2002 by Routledge Published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 ThirdAvenue,NewYork, NY, 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2002 by Routledge All rights reserved, No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Skubal, Susanne, 1949Word of mouth: food and fiction after Freud I by Susanne Skubal. p. cm. - (Literary criticism and cultural theory : outstanding dissertations) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Food in literature. 2. Literature, Modern-History and criricism. I. Title: Food and fiction after Freud. II . Title. !II. Literary criticism and cultural theory. PN56.F59 S56 2002 809'.93355-dc21 2002004172

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-93850-1 (hbk)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

1

Chapter One Repast: Mother, Identity, and Memory

11

Chapter Two Consuming Culture: The Linguistics of Location

41

Chapter Three Lesser Crimes: Anorexia's Plea

67

Chapter Four It Goes Without Saying: Oral Aggression and Its Mutterings

101

Afterword Last Suppers: Final Words

137

Notes

145

Bibliography

1S3

Index

163

v

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Acknowledgments

S

ay what you will about convention, this one-of public acknowledgment-is an inspired idea. I am delighted for the opportunity this space avails me to give thanks and credit to many people for their indispensable support of me over the duration of this project. I have long and richly benefited from the University of WisconsinMilwaukee's Department of English, its diverse and strong faculty, capable and accommodating staff, and from both the camaraderie and contention of its graduate students, particularly Val Ross whose admonition on one occasion (" Agency, Susanne. Agency.") has served me well on many. I am also indebted to the Graduate School of UW-Milwaukee for a substantive and encouraging fellowship in 1995. The University of Wisconsin-Manitowoc is where I've made my living for many years now. This small freshman-sophomore outpost of the university is a place of enormous good will, admirable work ethic, and invigorating academic vitality. To my friends and colleagues there lowe thanks for the deep lessons of quality and equality, and for the sustaining laughter that daily echoes through the halls. I especially want to acknowledge the Office of Student Services and its director, Mike Herrity, for his patient and steadfast support. More than he would ever let on, I know, he often and long quietly carried the inconvenient or extra load so that I could do this work. I am so grateful for that, and for his contagious generosity of spirit and abiding optimism. Cathy Buchner, our program assistant, came to my rescue when my word-processing skills collapsed first under a series of program glitches, followed by a hard-drive failure, and finally a late-night lightning strike. Not only did she fix it, she managed to lift my spirit and restore my belief in the magic of getting the words on the page. Dear friends all, David and Deb Douglas kept watch for me, Gail and Jerome Fox gave kind encouragement and the use of a spare office, Marilyn Pfeffer opened her summer place early one year so that I could have a VI1

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Acknowledgments

week's cherished use of it, Connie Jo made me know there was always someone in my corner, Diane Martin walked me through the shadows, and, from a distance she so often took the trouble to transcend, my big sister, Mary Anne Ciavatta, lent the loyalty of her interest in my best interests. It was my great good fortune that Catherine Leone and Jeff Brown chose to spend a month in Italy, and graciously gave me the gift of uninterrupted freedom to spread out thoughts and books and papers in their lovely home. In this public space I especially want to acknowledge and thank my friend Paul Emmett for introducing me to psychoanalytic theory, its variations, vicissitudes, and virtues, and for sharing so unselfishly his habits of heart and mind, by which he reads the lines ever so discerningly, always allowing another truth between them. In a sense this project began some thirty years ago in an American literature survey course taught inimitably one summer by Dion Kempthorne, after which I was no longer a physics major. Since then I have had the good draw of many fine teachers. I am particularly indebted to Joseph Chang for insisting on my reading rather than merely revering Shakespeare, to James Sappenfield for an appreciation of the power of literary and critical temperance, to Gregory Jay for firmly taking the resistant reader, muttering and cussing, beyond New Criticism, and to Jane Gallop for allowing me an unofficial audit of her irreverent and insightful survey course on Freud. And most especially to Herbert Blau whose incomparable and uncompromising intellectual passion and rigor made a fervent warrior of a would-be reader. To Kathleen Woodward, whose gifts are so abundant and rich as to be enviable, I am most grateful. In directing my work in this project her fine sense of proportion, of purpose, and of process was unfailingly balanced by humor, grace, and humanity. In particular I have benefited from her great intellectual generosity and integrity and have been inspired by her passion for ideas of all kind, and especially those well said. I am also greatly indebted to those generous few who read earlier versions of the manuscript-Professors Woodward, Blau, Jay, and Sappenfield of UWM, and Professor William Veeder, who for this and on many occasions has kindly come the extra distance from the University of Chicago for me. During the hottest summer of my memory, they turned my pages and paid me the great compliments of attention and inquiry. I wish especially to thank the patient and professional folks at Routledge for their good work and great assistance in getting me to the finish line and the book into print. Early on Damon Zucca provided encouragement and candor, and for the past many months Damian Treffs has guided my efforts and contributed his own generous efforts and discerning editorial talents to this publication. Memories of my father and his quiet appetite for life have been a sustaining force for me in this undertaking. I recall one autumn day some

Acknowledgments

IX

years ago when I walked up his driveway to discover him puttering in the garage. In a small hibachi grill my brother had abandoned after college, my father was burning a handful of leaves. To my idle question of purpose ("What are you burning those leaves for?"), he replied with calm directness: "I like the smell." I am obliged to him for his lessons-too often unpracticed I confess-of savor and subtlety. And to my mother, who so often fed and fussed over my children, so that I could more freely take to the highway in pursuit of other texts and the wisdom of other voices, I am profoundly indebted. It is her voice in particular I must acknowledge hearing in my own, more than I might want to say. Throughout this project I have had the unwavering support and encouragement of Kerry Trask, whose love of language, history, and life's mystery so often lighted the way for me. For a long time as my husband and now as my cherished friend, he has given me honest and sage advice, and the supreme sustenance of respect. It is to our children, John-Peter and Emily, with love and wonder, that I dedicate this work.

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WORD OF MOUTH

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Introduction

E

ating is personal, whatever else it is. What we will and won't eat, when, where, how, how much, and why is our own business. So I begin briefly with a personal account. I once tried to make blue pears. I was young and all but illiterate in the kitchen, which was remarkable because I came from a large, aspiring-tomiddle-class family. But up to then my culinary assignments had been confined to buttering toast and seemingly endless clean-up. So when a new acquaintance with whom I was to double date suggested that we cook "for the guys" and volunteered to make lasagna, I was more than a little impressed, even intimidated. I'd never eaten lasagna much less prepared it, which might begin to explain my bravado reply. I offered to make a side dish-blue pears. I'd never eaten or prepared them either, had no recipe or recollection of them, had, in fact, never even heard of them. I had only a vision of what they might be. But what could be more impressively sophisticated? I started with fresh pears, nicely ripened with a blush of coral on their smooth yellow skin, and a couple of little bottles of blue food coloring. I tried gently squeezing a few drops of pigment onto half a pear. The dye was too concentrated to produce anything but nasty, bruised-looking blotches where the midnight drops had landed, and in one area it had seeped under the thin yellow skin, looking like an especially vicious hematoma. Undaunted, I got a mixing bowl and half-filled it with cool water, figuring a diluted soaking would do the trick. I carved away and discarded the skins of five pears, halved them, cut out the pithy cores, and eased them into the dye-laced water. How long to leave them in the solution? After a few impatient minutes, I took a straining spoon and coaxed one of the slippery things out of the blue depths, ready to admire the glorious transformation of the pale, dove white flesh into a smooth robin's egg blue. What I fished out instead was a pathetic, motley, water-logged thing. The dye had been 1

2

Word of Mouth

unevenly absorbed, exposing and highlighting the fine and coarse vein structure of the fruit. They looked like circulatory models gone amuck. We were thoroughly grossed out-screamed even, as I recall-as teenage girls are wont to be. In the meantime I had inflicted serious damage to my girlfriend's (mother's) kitchen counter, sink, and utensils, and my hands and face were besmirched in tenacious blue. Ajax cleanser, moistened baking soda, and Lava soap were brought to bear indiscriminately, but with passable effects. My friend, very kindly, had me shred some iceberg lettuce (which I must say I did with a flourish), toss in a few cherry tomatoes, and shake the bottle of 1000 island dressing for my humbled part of the offering. In the decades since then, I've had better times and results in the kitchen. Yet I can claim no real credentials as a cook, let alone gourmet. I make several decent, occasionally complimented, chicken things, a truly outstanding meatloaf, nice but fussy eggs Benedict, good Orange Roughy, and great Christmas frosted form cookies-both molasses and butter-based varieties. And using my father's recipe and approach, I can make the best buttermilk pancakes imaginable. But all in all, Emeril and the rest have nothing to fear from me. Then, too, I don't have a gastronome's credentials or palate. My taste and eating experience run from fairly pedestrian Midwestern fare to some very specific, sometimes expensive, and altogether uncommon and exquisite things, a few of which now come to mind: medium rare to rare Tuscan beef as it is served at a lovely, small restaurant in Siena, the crayfish and shrimp appetizer at Au Chien Qui Fume in Paris, and the balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil-laced cabrese (if the soft buffalo mozzarella is available and the tomatoes are truly in season) at Stephano's Trattoria in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. But at heart I am, and in my small circle reputed to be, a junk food diva. I really know my way around Hostess, cello-wrapped caramels, cheap chocolate, doughnuts, malted milk balls and shakes, circus peanuts, potato chips (Old Dutch gets my vote), jelly beans, caramel corn, and a vast assortment of various and sundry nutritionally valueless treats.1 More particularly, for a long time I've been one of an expanding number of grown-ups (I read in a New York Times article that there's a minor cult of devotees) who delights in marshmallow Peeps and Bunnies-the near-fluorescent yellow or pink, and recently blue, purple, or white marshmallow-based shapes that are coated in gaudy monochrome sugars, stamped with little dark bullets of sugar for eyes, and nestled in tidy rows under clear cellophane. Peep aficionados know that they are best when they've been aged by peeling back the packaging and resisted, depending on how dry the room air is, until they are firmer (I dare say al dente) than their newly-minted soft state.2 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the undisputed dean of alimentation, paused to define food in his seminal work, The Physiology of Taste (1825), offering two definitions-a "popular" one: "Food is everything that nour-

Introduction

3

ishes," and what he termed a "scientific" one: "Food is all those substances which, submitted to the action of the stomach, can be assimilated or changed into life by digestion, and can thus repair the losses which the human body suffers through the act of living. Thus the distinctive quality of food consists in its ability to submit to assimilation" (65). Given that my Peeps forego any nutritional content labeling (really, if you need to know, you should avoid them), they manage to make it as food only under BrillatSavarin's scientific rubric: they are assimilable, one at a cherished time or by the row. Evidently, human beings are omnivores as a species. Yet, except in times of famine or extreme privation, we tend individually to be rather choosy eaters when given a choice. Freud observes that this oldest instinctual domain-the oral--comprehends a fundamental judgment about ourselves and the world: this will be a part of me; this other won't. The distinctly personal nature of the eating we do and don't do is also made apparent by the fact that we can never know if what we taste is what another tastes, even if we're drinking from the same cup or eating off the same plate. Yet while the experience of any food has this imprint of exclusiveness, we aspire to commonality if not communion with others through shared "taste." In fact, for some of us it is really very difficult to acknowledge and accept that a loved one doesn't love, say, avocados as we do; or worse, absolutely abhors them. How can this be? Can't they taste how luscious these lovely things are? Perhaps, we console ourselves, it's an acquired taste; they'll come around eventually. Then, too, there is the reverse: how can anyone I truly know and love willingly eat anchovies? No doubt mothers have perennially faced this incontrovertible mark of estrangement that comes with the rejecting of the food they offer, as much as they are made to feel connected and at one with their children when they love and eat the food mother prepares and provides. The nature of eating, then, can be described as divided along this personal/communal axis. Few things are more intimate and ultimately solitary. Digestion is quintessentially so. What and how we taste is not reproducible to any degree of certainty. In some sense taste is inexpressible. The vexed question "what does an orange taste like?" is made even more unanswerable if raised to "what does that orange taste like in your mouth?" And underscoring our alimentary solitude, we note that we cannot eat for anyone else, cannot really eat with anyone else, even if our bites occlude on the same sandwich. Yet, from the beginning, eating is communal, requiring the society of at least two. In most cultures, the commonality of food is a linchpin of group identification. A companion is one with whom food is shared"with bread." And the communicant is in the fold by virtue of the shared Eucharistic meal. Eating is a powerfully social act even when we're eating alone because, through eating, we assimilate that which was other and reproduce and commemorate, however unconsciously, the initial and essential bond of being fed. This tension between eating as an isolated and iso-

4

Word of Mouth

lating act and as a shared cultural and interpersonal act is played out every time a waiter presents each of us with a menu. We eat together our single servings on separate plates. Eating at the same table, sharing food, touching glasses in a toast, approximates the impossible. Table manners and hygiene merely reiterate and legislate the physiological imperative: however polite and public, eating is a self-centered act. And more often these days the bread of life comes sliced; the host is stamped out and offered to us in discreet, perfectly round, white wafers. And yet, isolating or identifying, eating is fundamentally life-affirming. Our first and last eros is oral. It smacks of universality when psychoanalyst Karl Abraham reports: "Loving somebody was exactly the same idea as eating something good" (257). The reverse is even more manifestly true: eating something good is exactly like loving somebody, even if by that we only mean our own body. Abraham later flatly asserts that "phenomena connected with the genital zone cannot be as primary as those connected with the oral zone" (451). But my purpose here is not to argue against any of life's zones, only to say that the oral has its own incomparable and pervasive pleasures, desires, and dramas. Thus to have appetite is to have appetite for life. Curiously perhaps, Freud, Abraham and others convince us most of this through their examination of the obverse-mourning and melancholia, by name-the mark of which, they note, is always a guiltdriven rejection of food, a lack of appetite. A small scene in Alice Walker's The Color Purple, in which Celie manages to restore Shug Avery's physical and emotional vitality after loss, exemplifies the life-affirming force of food: She drank her coffee, puff on her cigarette. I bite into a big juicy piece of home cured ham .... I lavish butter on a hot biscuit, sort of wave it about. I sop up ham gravy and splosh my eggs in with my grits .... Mr. _ _ ast me how I get her to eat. I say, Nobody living can stand to smell home cured ham without tasting it. If they dead they got a chance. Maybe. (54)

So it is we delight in good food-glorious food. Few writers have done that with more grace and sagacity than M. F. K. Fisher.3 Her reputation as a food writer and philosopher is well established by her having translated and augmented Brillat-Savarin's expansive treatise on gastronomy and, no less, by having herself authored some two dozen books on the pleasure and life-affirming experience of delicious and deliberative eating. In the Forward to The Gastronomical Me (1976), Fisher intones the eros of eatmg: People ask me: why do you write about food and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and about love the way others do? The easiest answer is to say that our three basic needs, for food, security, and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot

Introduction

5

straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger ... and the love and warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied, it is all one. ("Forward")

This often-cited passage doesn't do justice to Fisher's lyrical celebration of the delicious, but I take heart and find a sustaining mantra in her explicitness here. The history of human alimentation has been observed to parallel if not propel human evolution. Everything, from migration and settlement patterns to warfare, religion, family size and structure, technological advances, and even the physical size and characteristics of the human form itself, has to a great extent been predicated on what there was or wasn't to eat. Enormous energy and ingenuity have been devoted to the capturing, killing, cleaning, gathering, raising, harvesting, transporting, storing, hoarding, sharing, preparing, and consuming of food. For if we don't eat, we die-alone, perhaps refusing life, or in great, pitiful, helpless numbers. In present-day western culture we are normally quite removed from our food sources. In just the past few decades we have largely stopped plucking our own chickens, gathering their eggs, or chopping off their heads. I venture that most of us would be put off by those early recipes that require us to "take the hen or cock and wring its neck." (I had occasion recently to be eating a delicious chicken cacciatore at a restaurant in Rome with a group of college students, most of whom were positively dismayed and disgusted by the dinner because, as one of them loudly deplored, "The chicken had bones in it!") Not only does our food more often now come packaged, frozen, and refined beyond all recognition, our cooking habits have undergone a similar quantum transformation from open fire to hearth to electric range to "minute plus" microwave. And with that has gone the need to assemble when the food is hot. The institutions of family dinner and the common board are less than commonplace, leaving longstanding cultural practices-from Levitical injunctions to Emily Post-style admonitions-widely unpracticed. We cling in varying degrees to some old prescriptions and habits: the daily fresh baguette in France, the turkey at Thanksgiving, the Seder meal of Passover, meatless Lenten Fridays for faithful Catholics, ceremonial tea in Japan, corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day, something on the grill for the 4 th of July, champagne to welcome the New Year. Nostalgia propels some of this. And in it we may be reminded that much of human hunger is memory. Of course there is a veritable mountain of cultural material that concerns itself with eating. Cookbooks outsell any other classification of bound publication. They range from focused guides with titles like "Bread Machine Magic" and "One Potato, Two Potato" to serious culinary scripture, led, I would venture, by The Joy of Cooking, which is in its 27 th printing. A proliferation of diet and nutritional tracts are sold in supermarket check-out lanes. Newspapers have full sections indexed as "Food" in which

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they commit scores of column inches to such things as "Making It with Miracle Whip" or "After School Super Snacks" or "The Proud Zucchini." Toney magazines are devoted to the gourmet's life and style and wine selection, while both network and cable television feature likely and unlikely personalities cooking up something "easy" or elaborate for our vicarious consumption and attempts at imitation. (I've caught everyone from Julia Child and the Galloping Gourmet to Big Bird and Jimmy Carter in studio kitchens.) Big food business contrives to have us take in and retain its jingled messages, even if we don't deserve a break that day. All of which-and so very much more-underscores that ours is still a food-driven species, however evolved our eating habits or technologically transformed our lives and kitchens. Sooner or later considerations of orality must confront not just the divided nature of eating (personal and social), but its doubled nature as well. Truly the mouth is a multifarious site, both a locus of need and a satisfier of desire. It is the site of recurring lack and loss as much as it is the place of pleasurable, sustaining recompense. Brillat-Savarin's definition announces the compensatory, reparative function of food, but it takes the open mouth to bring it in. Even more provocative, the double domain of the oral lies in its being the site of both human ingestion and utterance. Here we are all bilingual, speaking the language of mother and father. By the Bible, in the beginning there was the Word; according to Freud, in the beginning there was the deed. The body holds with Freud in this. But regardless, we have these mouths that can work miracles or commit mayhem-in word or deed. This book examines the business of human mouthwork, most particularly as it is presented in fiction. For in literature, as in life, food nourishes but it also means something. It is significant. Allowing that universality (even certainty) is a large and difficult order, I have chosen some textual moments, big and small, that contain and convey the oral nature of human experience, grouped them around a meaning, and added the heat if not light of theory, usually psychoanalytic. My methods are at times crude, like the old recipes that call for us to: "Hack it with a knife" or "Rip the belly open" or (my personal favorite) "Hew it in gobbets." But my hope is not to eviscerate the texts as much as to assimilate some of the rawness or refinement of their meaning. Yet there is always this risk behind the grin of any epistemology-the devouring mutilation of knowledge beyond repair. It may be that this is why, despite all that is written about human orality, despite the easy preponderance of food and eating in our nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and folklore (I once counted fifty-three food references in nursery rhymes I was familiar with), and despite the way "food stories" seem to roll off our tongues, there is a largely unspoken but nevertheless pervasive and profound discomfort with the actual oral. In The Hungry Self (1985), author and therapist Kim Chernin points to the referential

Introduction

7

nature of this site of discomfort, echoing Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva, as well as Freud and Abraham: "from the very deepest layers of meaning, the mother is always conjured up and made present by the presence of food" (99). Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976), and Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love (1988) variously confront and contend with this fact, advocating a new order, a comprehensive rethinking of the rules and roles of nurturance, and even a recourse to the displacement of perversion. But the body and the psyche know better, or worse. So we disguise more than display ourselves at dinner. We wash our hands. We set out a delicate floral centerpiece and see to it that the Waterford is spotless, the steel stainless. We dim the lights and don the pearls that grace the neckline that plunges. We lay the damask in our laps and try to keep our conversation cordial, exchanging light words first to the person on the left (if you're a lady) and then to the person on the right. How much is conceived and calculated to keep the focus anywhere but at the primitive, masticating mouth. This discomfort is not only physical, it is critical. Freud's difficulty with the oral and the maternal, so convincingly and compellingly examined by Madelon Sprengnether in The Spectral Mother (1990), is also manifestly and perhaps universally human. The oral, its losses and its sometimes livid, vicious return, veritably pleads for repression. I will look at it this way. In his enigmatic case history of the "Rat Man" (1909), Freud records one of Rat Man's dreams in which the naked body of Freud's mother appears, two swords sticking in her breast, "the lower part of her body and especially her genitals [having] been entirely eaten up by me and the children" (Standard Edition 10: 282). To this, Freud notes his strange and striking response: Source, easy.... The two swords were the Japanese ones in his dreams: marriage and copulation. The meaning is clear. He had allowed himself to be lead astray by a metaphor. Was not the content the idea that a women's beauty was consumed-eaten up-by sexual intercourse and child birth? This time he himself laughed. (SE 10: 283)

In locating the "easy source" and "clear meaning" of his patient's errant "metaphor" of the eaten body of the mother in child birth and intercourse, and thus presumably unmasking the metaphor, Freud, in fact, is insisting on reading the eaten body merely as metaphor for something else: the sexual body, the reproductive body, the used body, the euphemistic body, even the laughable body. This is often the case when eating is mentioned in fantasy or fiction: the significance is assumed to be elsewhere-anywhere, it would seem, but the oral. While images of eating and food have, indeed, taken us e1sewhere-certainly to sexuality and mortality, but also to consumerism and capitalism, opulence and decadence, incorporation and imperialism, and everywhere

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Word of Mouth

from love and hate to the fall from grace and the communion of saintsthere is something about images of eating which seem at once to convey meaning and yet to deflect consideration. I will try to hold the focus on the orality of the image and consider it in its own right, asserting a foundational and irreducible significance in the oral nature of such images, always mindful of the unmatched associative capacity of the oral moment. Certainly, it is difficult to confine any discussion of the oral to just thatinevitably the jaw bone is connected to the thigh bone-but I will resist where I can the easy elision from the oral to, let's say, the anal, or the genital, or for that matter the linguistic. Because oral images in literature are already double-they are word and deed-this late-comer, language, makes matters sticky. Where possible and productive I will try to pull them apart because orality-as-Ianguage is not the main course of my interest. Throughout I will assert, if not insist, that eating is ultimately only its own metaphor. Before turning to the content of the chapters that follow, I need to qualify my terms and give my theoretical bearings, both staking claims and offering disclaimers. This seems particularly necessary because I've yet to come upon what I consider to be an adequate term to describe my subject, "orality" being the best of an unsatisfactory bunch that includes terms like "eating," "feeding," "cooking," "alimentation," and "gastronomy." I use the term orality or "the oral," then, both in the physiological sense as denoting the mouth and its work of taking in nourishment, and in the psychoanalytic sense as the first libidinal zone and locus of desire. I find myself privileging the psychoanalytic lens, perhaps not so much for the answers it offers, but because I am most compelled by the questions it asks. Throughout the book I draw on several theorists-Freud, to be sure, but also prominently Melanie Klein, Karl Abraham, Julia Kristeva, and D. W. Winnicott-in some cases taking issue with aspects of their work, but most often taking strength and support from them. Likewise I rely heavily at times on anthropological, historical, and cultural theory for the insights and critical grounding it variously provides. The chapters that follow unavoidably involve choices I've made. Having to choose is especially emblematic of, if not problematic in, this area of inquiry. There are so many literary offerings from which to select. Risking the first of what will undoubtedly if abashedly be too many puns on the subject, I would compare the situation-of choosing among literary offerings-to that of a guest at an elaborate banquet or a hungry customer at one of those typically average restaurants with a menu the length of a small phone book. So many things look and sound tempting; many appeal because I've sampled them before and found them to be fine, while others appeal because they are exotic or rare, and in selecting them they promise to bestow a kind of badge of sophistication, a mark of the erudite palate and person. Among those offerings I most lament having to forego here are Kate Chopin's The Awakening, M.F.K. Fisher's Long Ago In France, Anne

Introduction

9

Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Carson McCullers' The Ballad of Sad Cafe, Carol Shield's Stone Diaries, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, James Joyce's The Dead (as well as his memorable kidney), Isak Dinesen's main course, "Babette's Feast," Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, several tempting Flannery O'Connor short stories, and more of Katherine Mansfield's wonderful entrees. 4 Others I can pass over more easily for now: Laura Esquival's Like Water for Chocolate, Daniel Akst's recent St. Burl's Obituary, Gertrude Stein's orts and crumbs, Dickens' "more" and less, Rabelaisian excesses, Spenserian wretched gluttonies, Huysmann's peculiar if nourishing peptone enemas, as well as all those tasteless post-modern, fat-free things. My plate is already quite full, thank you. In the first chapter J consider the unholy trinity that is human identity, memory, and mother, as they are ever inflected by the oral, especially the oral bond of infancy. Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, William Faulkner's Light in August, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Katherine Mansfield's "Bliss" are the literary texts taken up in those terms. In the next chapter I move from ego-identity to the cultural identity that comes, also at the oral site, with eating and speaking. The vicissitudes of assimilation and cultural identity, as they are marked by mouthwork, are examined in Louise Erdrich's Tracks, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Shakespeare's Caliban sets the tone and terms for these considerations. The third chapter takes up literary representations of disordered eating, specifically anorexia. Here I offer a response to two persistent questions about the disorder-why women and why now-by examining theoretical and clinical accounts, and then turning to Samual Richardson's Clarissa, Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock, Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman, and Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" to examine literary renderings of the deliberate self-erasure of non-eating. In the last chapter I inquire into the oral nature of our darkest imaginings, dreads, and desires. After reviewing anthropological, historical, and psychoanalytic accounts of cannibalism and the aggressive oral, I consider briefly several representative literary and cultural texts which depict, or displace, the voracious oral, and examine more closely the taboo that covers not only the deed, but also the enunciation of it, in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno," and William Shakespeare's Macbeth. All in all, I am pleased with my choices here. I find them provocative as well as productive, a fair sampling of the range and complexity and tenacity of the oral. Would you care to join me?

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CHAPTER ONE

Repast: Mother, Identity, and Memory Hunger is memory. -Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast

I

thought to begin with a poem I would devise that could at once usher us into the subject of this chapter and convey the ineffability of it-its special resistance to logos. The poem, simple but strong, would have recalled my experience as a nursing mother-first cautious and concerned, then confident, and finally downright cocky. I would have used that word "cocky" teasingly, remembering and offending Freud and his friends in a single word. The poem would have to be about my early maternal part in the mother-infant moment because the other perspective, the infant's, is beyond all conscious recall. In some sense it is literally beyond me, and that would be an essential point. I would no doubt project a bit, or attach, to the babe at my breast, some amount of pleasure and satisfaction in the nurturance, though I wouldn't call it that, and some amount of frustration and anxiety, maybe even anger, at my clumsiness or delay or haste. But this poem wouldn't linger there. It would move to a certainty I experienced as first my son and, two years later, my daughter fell asleep at my breast, their little mouths moist with the last pull of milk that never quite made it in, and so announced mutely they'd had enough of me and my warm offering for the time being. The poem would shift a decade, almost two, as I did then and must do now, to the thought of the thing. And I would remember thinking and sometimes saying to their soft little heads: It's okay. This is free. There is no bargain being struck here, except that you live and grow. It doesn't matter if someday you are nasty or unappreciative or an adolescent know-it-all sarcastic shit. This much is truly free and gladly given. This yes, this love, this much of me is yours. Go you will, in peace or passionate rending. It's okay. The poem might have been more allusive: my little pre-genital yes taking on Molly Bloom's, like some David standing up to joyce's literary Goliath. And there would be alliteration and surely assonance enough to go around. But mostly it would kick things off right. This oral business is 11

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beautiful and magical, a wellspring of mystery. The bond at the breast is immutable, and no amount of logic and language can quite get there. The poem would own up to that somehow, and then, with that much benediction, I could begin. Much of what we know about the human experience, about ourselves, our bodies, our quantities, capacities, inclinations, aversions, dreads and desires, we know from science, its mathematics and methods, and from language, its constructs and the culture it conveys and which contains us. While once we might have referenced the great repositories at an Alexandria or Oxford, or the laboratories and lecture halls of universities, ancient and new, or the metaphysical and literary canons of human thought, we now need only to mention the microchip and the Web to confirm how much it is that we know or might, by the double flexing of a finger, learn about human life. But before we can take the first step in this infinity of knowing, we already know and learn that which makes our human identity possible. It happens, has happened for millions of years, without a script and most often without a record. A baby is born and takes in the universe. Biblically "to know" is to know sexually, but psychically as Edenically "to know" is to know orally. During even the first moments and months of life the human infant has a sustaining pre-verbal wisdom of the body, starting at its mouth. There is the look, the smile, the smell, the sound, the touch and the taste of life. But from the first this is conditional. Human life happens only in the presence of an object/other-the breast or its surrogate. Before the eyes have opened or cleared, the rooting reflex tells the infant which way to turn to find the breast. Thus, the international sign in deaf for "mother" strokes the cheek, imitating the touch that turns the baby's head to seek the nipple of the nourishing other. From the very beginning, it would seem, biology dictates a bond. And in this paradigm, the place of connection is the breast and the mouth. Constitutionally, if the infant isn't fed, it dies. But more than a matter of nourishing survival, it is this same connection which creates humanness. Reflected in the art and icons of the centuries, we find whole epochs of valorization of this relational space-babe at breast. And it is by virtue of these first acts of taking nourishment that we begin to have knowledge of life. In this regard, British psychoanalyst John Bowlby asserts that body intimacy in the feeding embrace not only elicits a first, radical knowledge, but that it is essential for the entire psychological and physiological organization of the infant. Bowlby's research on human attachment, published in a three-volume work bearing the titles Attachment (1969), Separation (1973), and Loss (1969), describes a range of components, conditions, and implications of this initiating human bond. He identifies the most crucial component of

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successful human development to be the dyadic nature of the relationship. The mother (biological, adoptive, or surrogate) and child attachment, which Bowlby insists is distinct from dependence, provides the greatest promise of psychological health and resilience throughout childhood and into adulthood. This may not be surprising, or even remarkable, except that his research establishes that there are measurable differences in infant ego development as early as in the second month of life between infants who are being nurtured institutionally (and therefore, because of multiple caregivers, unable to experience attachment) and infants who are being nurtured in families with a predominant caregiver. These differences are manifested in such areas as response to stimuli, soothing response time, and the ability to track motion. Although these differences are apparent as early as two months, Bowlby establishes that the prime period for attachment formation extends through the first six months of the infant's life. What's more, his study allays the fear that this strong monotropic tendency or need in the human infant will result in a lessening of the ability to attach to other figures. In fact, Bowlby points out that a child with a strong attachment to a primary figure is more likely to direct social behavior and attach to subsidiary figures than the child who has had little or no primary attachment. The mother-infant bond, cemented in the feeding embrace, is not only a rehearsal for other love relationships, but constitutes the fertile ground for all psychic development. In some sense Bowlby's observations and research shed little new light on the subject of human development and the critically oral nature of infantile acquisition of character and culture. The incorporative oral nature of early development is common knowledge, refined even reified by psychoanalytic theory. Freud named the oral as the oldest instinct, the first libidinal stage. And following Freud other psychoanalysts have theorized the complex and crucial oral underpinnings to human character formation. Karl Abraham assembles a skeletal framework of the oral as having both an incorporative, sucking phase, followed by and overlapping a destructive, biting phase. Melanie Klein's work fleshes out the picture of infantile psychic development. Not only does she assert, as Bowlby will affirm, that human psychic development is dynamic from the start and that it is rooted in the oral experience, but she too insists on the relational quality of the oral. Setting the course for object-relations theory, Klein posits a picture of humanness that begins with the infant's phantasy of omnipotence and universality, but which is early and often shaken by the reality of the object that cannot conform to and confirm the phantasy. It is this relational space, of mouth and breast, that will be the domain of psychic negotiation and hence development. Klein's theory describes the infant as one who phantasizes an interior and exterior world that both responds to and refuses its desires. The breast

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and its milk-the quintessential first object or part-object-come to stand for love, goodness and security. Yet they can never be enough. In part this is, of course, because of the objective reality of di-fusion, of separation at birth, but also because the nurturing other cannot fulfill the phantasy of non-separation and totality. The baby isn't everything, no matter how loved or well-attended, and this is repeatedly demonstrated to the infant because its urges, manifested largely in the oral, are not simultaneously felt and met. Klein describes the ensuing infantile scene: "the infant's feelings seem to be that when the breast deprives him, it becomes bad because it keeps the milk, love and care associated with the good breast all to itself. He hates and envies what he feels to be the mean and grudging breast" (1963:42). The psychic and developmental process Klein describes has the infant not only taking nourishment and affirmation at the breast, but also phantastically enacting an aggressive devouring and "spoiling" of the breast. Her theory continues with the infant projecting this aggression onto the object/breast and then fearing retribution from the breast. The infant psyche will cope with these crucial conflicts of love and hate, nurturtive feeding and destructive devouring, by splitting the object imagos into the good and the bad, until such time as it can tolerate and reconcile this profound ambivalence toward the object without, as well as the object within. The common ground of Bowlby's attachment theory and Klein's objectrelations theory include not only their insistence on the relational, dyadic requisite of infantile development and their similar assertion that this dynamic is at work even in the neonate, but also that the bond or relation is, by necessity, covalent; aggression in whatever manifestation is complicit in attachment. This is supported by ethologist Konrad Lorenz in his investigation of the relationship between bonding behavior and aggression in various animal species. In his 1953 publication of On Aggression he writes: "Intra-specific aggression is millions of years older than personal friendship and love.... Thus intra-specific aggression can certainly exists without its counterpart, love, but conversely there is no love without aggression" (217). And to this we can add Freud's two-drive theory, all of which yields a portrait of humanness that consists, even before and outside of culture's considerable control, of a psychic interdependency, a pas de deux, that negotiates love and hate, desire and dread, incorporative identity and immemorial loss, nurturing presence and devouring destruction. The importance, then, of the attachment, achieved in large part through the feeding embrace of mother and child, can hardly be overestimated. But as is true of much of what we can know and say about the oral, this is not often mentioned critically, and rarely foregrounded.' Because early infant nurturance and attachment occur more or less routinely, pre-culturally and pre-linguistically, most accounts are casual or clinical. It is when something goes wrong that our attention is drawn there. Certainly, when babies starve, we know something is socially, politically, morally disturbed. When

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a single baby is starved, we might look to the pathology of the caregiver. But what of the baby whose basic nutritional needs are met but who experiences little or no attachment? The disorder may be asymptomatic or masked for months, years, even decades. But we encounter it nonethelessoften in prison populations, in mental institutions, or on the margins of society. Selma Fraiberg's account of the diseases of non-attachment in her 1958 publication, Every Child's Birthright, borrows from and synthesizes a large number of studies which have appeared since World War II dealing with the absence or rupture of human attachment in infancy. Several of these studies-including Bowlby's-were conducted in infant institutions, while others followed child subjects who had passed their infancy and early years in serial foster care. Among the grim findings of these studies, which consistently indicate the irreversibility of the results of deprivation of attachment during infancy, Fraiberg cites three areas of particular damage: permanent impairment in the ability to attach to any persons, long-term impairment in intellectual and language function, and chronic disorders of impulse control. The non-attached possess an impoverished, even absent, emotional range; humorless, griefless, guiltless, remorseless, profoundly joyless, these hollow figures are mostly anonymous strays. But periodically they confront us in their surge for an existential jolt. Characteristic of the brutal acts of the non-attached, these eruptions of violence seem indiscriminate, purposeless, and affectless. In the fictions of Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet or Celine we might come across them, and in the news stories and real-life accounts of incidental brutality or baseness we are sometimes forced to face the amoral, non-attached agent, who, as Fraiberg notes, is like the killer in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, saying of his victim: "He was a very nice gentleman .... I thought so right up to the minute I cut his throat" (302). Though the failure of adequate attachment to a nurturing other more often produces a less graphic condition-an attitude of indifference, an absence of human connection or affinity-it is the abnormality if not brutal aberrance of those hollow figures in our human landscape which elucidates, in the negative, the monumental significance of early attachment through nurturance. Of course human beings are subsequently subject to an amazing array of disorders and deviances, some little more than quirks or creaks, others lethal and loathsome. But my point here, early on in this discussion, is that the oral bond is first and foremost that without which what we recognize as humanness cannot fully occur. It's that basic. This chapter, then, takes as its subject the profound and permanent effects of the orally bonded nature and origin of human identity. This identity-producing past, that is with us in memory and in our hunger that is memory, is pursued, evaded, appeased, displaced, and repressed into the

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food we eat and the stories we tell. In this chapter I look at four such stories. First I consider Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, finding his ultimately evasive meditation on the past to nevertheless point to the trinity that is mouth, mother, and memory. Next I turn to William Faulkner's Light in August with its startling orality-benign and accursed-and trace the narrative's invocation and exploration of memory that should be maternal. Then I take up F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby for its glimpse at the mythic and mundane of incorporative eros and identity. And finally, I consider Katherine Mansfield's short piece, "Bliss," as it brings these matters to their manic state. Few moments in fiction have had the nearly universal nod of recognition that greets a short passage in the "Overture" to the seven volumes of Marcel Proust's opus, Remembrance of Things Past (A fa Recherche de Temps Perdu), published during the period from 1913 to 1927. I refer, of course, to the passage in which the narrator, Marcel, describes the transportive and evocative effect of incidentally eating a tea-soaked bit of a shell-shaped cake-the petite madeleine. Mysteriously, almost magically, he experiences, more than just a recollection or deja vu, a re-embodiment, as it were, of times past. These resurrected times were the boyhood summers he spent with his parents and beloved grandmother at the home of his Aunt Leonie in the village of Combray. This moment of remembrance-the oral nature of which should not be underestimated-becomes a veritable touchstone of validity, referred to scores of times in the volumes which follow. The experience of the madeleine-induced memory will serve as a register of the "real," authentic past as contrasted with the "superficial," constructed past that is the best that conscious effort at remembering can produce. Proust makes his valorization of the oral lyrically explicit: But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. (1: 36)2 The madeleine moment reveals the special power of nostalgic longing. But more than a catalytic conveyance of memory, the taste is itself an embodiment-a soul-ready to return to life. And as Proust will pursue it, it has about it much of what we've come to associate with the uncanny. There is another momentous recollection from Marcel's childhood at Combray that is recalled throughout the work but which, unlike the remembrances which are lost to us unless and until the madeleine equivalent experience unlocks them, was already available to Marcel in vivid

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detail. In fact it was this recalled scene that constituted Marcel's chief recollection of his childhood at Combray until the little tea-soaked cake brought back its expansive set of memories. In the "Overture" he describes an evening at Combray when Monsieur Swann, a family friend, has come to dinner, resulting in Marcel's being sent to bed early and without being able to give a talismanic goodnight kiss to his mother. Unable to endure this deprivation, Marcel desperately risks what he is sure will be his father's wrath and his mother's certain banishment of him and enlists the cook to slip a note to his mother asking that she visit him before she retires. When this strategy fails, the anxious boy resolves to risk all past and future pleasure by having the temerity to present himself to his mother when she ascends the stairs for bed. Sitting at his window, he hears the bell on the gate, signaling the departure of Monsieur Swann and the imminent encounter with Mamma. At first mother is angry and refusing, but unpredictably Marcel's father responds to the sobbing boy and sanctions not only the longed for goodnight kiss, but an entire night of comfort for the distraught child: "Go along with him, then; ... stay in his room for a little .... There's no question of making him accustomed .... You can see quite well that the child is unhappy" (I: 28). Mother does as father bids. After a fashion. She spends the night with her son, but rather than offering the boy a flood of maternal warmth, lullaby, and embrace, she offers instead to read one of the books that was to be a birthday gift from his grandmother, George Sands' Francois Ie Champi. Marcel will often refer to this night, his other touchstone, "the sweetest and saddest night in my life" (II: 1006), invoking it to add special significance to later events in his life. The contrast between the madeleine which serves to recapture the otherwise lost past, and the ever-present memory of the night of maternal presence, which serves to confer meaning on subsequent experiences, is intriguing. But what is perhaps more striking is that, despite the narrator's more than ample insistence on and pride in his central quest for the "meaning" and significance of these special memories, he never really arrives at any epiphany of knowledge, self or otherwise. Considering that the narrative is one of the longest ever penned, this may be remarkable indeed. But allowing for the integrity of the project (we can't insist on a Bildungsroman), we still have a text that is incredibly stunted in its refusal to connect even its own biggest dots. Proust's narrative persona accounts for the power of real memory because for him it undoes the "apprehensiveness of death" which vanishes "the moment 1 instinctively recognized the savour of the little madeleine" (II: 995). He goes further in his explication, saying that it is "because at that moment the person within me was a timeless person, consequently unconcerned about the vicissitudes of the future" (II: 995). Moreover, the madeleine moment "enabled me to escape out of the present" (II: 996).

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Having done away with the future and the present, he is free to be transported to the safety of a rather prophylactic past. This in fact becomes his life's project, and the subject of all his creative endeavors, though he never really probes his valorization of the past over present and future. He offers instead, again and again, the tautological self-evidence of the experience of remembering: "In the slightest sensation conveyed to us by the most ordinary food-the fragrance of a cup of coffee, for instance-we recapture that vague hope of fair weather which beguiled us so often in the uncertainty of the morning sky" (II: 1005). The experience of remembering and recapturing past hopes and beguilements does not serve to heighten the present or imbue it with any added impact or significance. Rather, the present cup of coffee and this morning's sky, the present moment, is valuable, if at all, only to the extent that it sends us back to other, earlier cups of coffee and morning skies. While the narrator urges upon himself the need "to extract the meaning" of "the past contained in the savour of a madeleine" (II: 1013), he balks at just that. Instead he revels and exalts in the effect of remembering itself, becoming "more and more exalted as I analyzed more and more deeply the sound of the spoon against the plate or the taste of the herb tea, with an ever increasing joy which had transported into my room the bedroom of my Aunt Leonie and, in its wake, all Combray and the two walks, Guermantes way and Megeglise way" (II: 998). Conspicuously, absent in this dizzying spin into the past is the one conscious memory he had carried from his childhood-that singular "saddest and sweetest night" spent with Mamma. He never, knowingly, puts the two together. It is curious too that he describes the process as an analyzing one, because it is precisely the intellectual, conscious, analytic effort to recall or think one's way into memory and meaning that he repeatedly disparages. He protests: How little satisfaction I found in my clean sterile thinking ... if occasionally I had some pleasures-not of the intellectual sort-I wasted these with one woman or another.... if given a hundred more years to live [it] would merely have added successive extensions to an existence that had no depth. (II: 991)

I suggest it is important to consider the "some pleasure" "wasted" with "one woman or another" that failed to secure a place in the present for this once and always unhappy child. It is in Marcel's approach-avoidance relationship to Albertine-a loving and pretty young woman, whom he manipulates into his life, even managing for a time, using the prospect of a forthcoming marriage proposal and a display of pathetic sadness, to get her to come to Paris and be a sort of live-in attendant/companion-that we can trace matters back to the one, first woman, on whom Marcel wasted his life. He describes kissing Albertine on one occasion "as purely as if I had been kissing my mother to charm away a childish grief which as a child

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I did not believe that I would ever be able to eradicate from my heart" (II: 678). It is significant that he is often able to invoke mother directly in relation to Albertine and the kisses they exchange. It is also important to note that it is mother's disapproval of Albertine as a marriage partner that Marcel will take refuge in when avoiding the blunt reality of his being incapable of having an adult-emotional, sexual, connected-attachment to Albertine or any other woman or man for that matter. In Marcel's reflections and ruminations on, doubts and jealousies of, attraction and aversion to Albertine, we can find his unresolved and otherwise unspoken obsession with a reluctant, distant, non-nurturing, and ultimately disappearing mother. 1 He recounts that when he was kissing Albertine, "as I used to kiss my mother, at Combray, to calm my anguish, I believed almost in Albertine's innocence" (II: 465). It is, of course, mother's innocence or lack thereof that is resolutely unexamined but powerfully at stake in Remembrance of Things Past. The most direct connection between Albertine's presence and maternal nurturance, given sparsely or painfully withheld, is made in a rather startling passage, again with Albertine serving as surrogate: She was installed in a bedroom ... in my father's tapestried study, and ... late every night before leaving me, she used to slide her tongue between my lips like a portion of daily bread, a nourishing food that had almost the sacred character of all flesh upon which the sufferings that we had endured on its account have come in time to confer a sort of spiritual grace, what I at once call to mind in comparison is ... the night my father sent Mamma to sleep in the little bed by the side of my own. (II: 384)

Completing the picture of sublimated and impotent suffering of the questionably nurtured child, Marcel describes a feeling "almost" of "brotherly intimacy" he had from the start for Albertine, concluding that "a feeling of this sort may be the cause of the keenest pain. For in order to really suffer at the hands of a woman one must have believed in her completely" (I: 753). This kind of belief is distinctly infantile; this kind of suffering (surely masochistic) must first come at the withheld hands, lips, and breast of mother. Although the narrator will not make the conscious connection to mother, it breaks through the text in the next line when he refers to this feeling of familial (brotherly) intimacy that was to remain at the heart of his limited love for Albertine as "that embryo of moral esteem" (I: 753), announcing unmistakably the maternal site. In the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past, The Past Recaptured, an enfeebled Marcel reflects again and again on the memory producing madeleine, the sound of spoon on plate, the small plate of petit fours and glass of orangeade given to him by the butler, and the evocative feel of the napkin brushed against his lips, as these things in turn call up the past, especially pausing this time to reflect on his first experience with the seashore at Balbec where he had first met Albertine. The "same starchy

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stiffness" of the napkin against his lips summons up "a fresh vision of azure blue ... but this time it was pure and saline and it rounded upward like bluish breasts" (II: 993). He makes no direct association between the maternal sea, his own mother's stiff and laundered tolerance of his good night kiss as he desperately longs to place it "just there" on her slightly salty cheek, nor to the blue-green dress she wore the memorable night of Swann's visit. But what else in the world could ever produce these astonishing "bluish breasts" but that very connection. We are given a final means of apprehending the lifelong effects of Marcel's meager mothering in his meditation on collecting books, most especially "first editions," the meaning of which he stipulates as "the edition in which I read it for the first time" (II: 1007). He continues speaking of "original editions" and "original impressions," disparaging later impressions which "are no longer original." He observes that first editions are "like the dress in which we saw a woman for the first time, they would help me recapture the love that filled me then, the first beauty, on which I have superimposed so many images, less and less dear, trying to recapture the first one ... " (II: 1007). He winds up, almost breathlessly, with a telling particular to his preference for originals saying that if he still possessed "the copy of Francois Ie Champi which Mamma one evening took out of the package of books my grandmother was to give me, I would never look at it; I would be afraid of inserting in it little by little my impressions of today" (II: 1008). In so doing he would lose the little he has of mothered childhood. It is most significant then that he sees his papers being ravaged by the present, in the form of a devouring destruction, "eaten away like wood an insect has gotten into." His life's work is "all moth-eaten; it's too bad" (II: 1114). The explicit pre-occupation with the oral in Remembrance of Things Past-the ubiquitous madeleine, the kisses managed and missed, the motheaten notebooks, the invalids thin fare, the dinner parties and luncheonsis bound to Proust's meditation on memory implicitly and to the maternal inevitably. Of memory Marcel says, "and once again, I discovered, first of all that memory has no power of invention, that it is powerless to desire anything else, even anything better than what we have already possessed" (II: 771). The correspondence between Proust's lyrical rendering of the limitation of our capacity to desire being cast by the limitation of what we already possessed and the clinical accounts of the life-long effect that the strength or weakness of the initiating mother-infant bond has on our capacity to experience desire and achieve healthy human attachment in adulthood is striking, is it not? Though Proust does not put mother explicitly in his account, it is difficult to deny the association between what was initially "possessed" and the infantile imprint of maternal presence. When Marcel compares the power and pleasure of the involuntary "real" memory produced by the madeleine in his mouth to consciously

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acquired recollection, he again points to and valorizes the first place of pleasure, saying that the real memory is said to be like a "breath of fresh air-refreshing just because we have breathed it once before ... it could not convey that profound sensation of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is always the paradise we have lost" (II: 994). Having had too little of paradise in childhood, Marcel's desire is finally too meager to propel him into real relationships, and his memory is finally so unfulfilling because it can produce only the site of what was not enough to really forget. Although Marcel is ostensibly commenting on the dilettante's approach to art and literature when he writes: "since they fail to assimilate the really nourishing part of art, they suffer from a continual need of artistic enjoyment, a gnawing hunger that nothing can satisfy" (II: 1011), he is plainly describing himself as he writes hour after hour his detailed volumes of malnourished memories. At moments he comes close to this obsessive but averted truth, as when he notes that in his adulthood, during a visit to Venice with his mother, she would smile at him; he contrasts that, in a sad mixture of admission and bravado, with a recollection that at Combray, "she was unwilling to let me see how much she loved me" (II: 822). As if replicating his mother's remoteness, he can only put a small morsel of "Ma-mma" in the madeleine he savors. His displacement of the nurturing oral into the verbal, manages to put that much of mamma to his mouth. A final confirmation of this radical link between mother, the petite madeleine and memory is to be found in the book, Francois Ie Champi, that Marcel remembers Mamma reading on that "sweetest and saddest" night of his life. The book tells the rural tale of a foundling who is unfailingly mothered-fed, kissed and loved-by a pure and simple woman, who also reads to the boy. Her name is Madeleine. That is never mentioned in Remembrance of Things Past. Perhaps, even without that bit of knowledge, we can taste the ma in the madeleine of Marcel's memory. "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing ever wonders." Faulkner's extraordinary language here from Light in August forces us back syntactically and psychoanalytically. We might ask again, what is it that comes before knowing. What might constitute the memory that believes before knowing remembers? Light in August offers two models of memory and identity, both emphatically and significantly oral. Published in 1927, Faulkner's novel tells of the overlapping odysseys of several figures whose lives intersect in post-reconstruction Jefferson, Mississippi. Lena Grove's journey to no place in particular begins and ends the cyclical narrative, suggesting through her the indefatigability of nature in even or especially human nature-"as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be." Whether Lena is read as replication of a latter day Mary

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in search of a manger, as clever barefoot country gal astute enough to manipulate the sympathies of strangers, or as guileless and gullible innocent, her being first and last a mother is central to her identity in the novel. But more than that, she is positioned and presented as the prototype of the maternal-socially and cultural exorbitant, essentially pre-verbal, and finally enduring: "My, my. A body does get around" (480). And in a manner that refuses to be read as co-incident, Faulkner makes most of Lena's identity as an eating and feeding figure. We are introduced to the unwed Lena, before she gives birth to her child, as she makes her ostensible way toward the father of her baby. She is offered a hearty breakfast and a gift of "egg money" from an otherwise unsentimental Mrs. Armstid. It is this money that Lena uses to purchase cheese and crackers and the special object of her fancy-a tin of sardines. She justifies her fifteen-cent extravagance by reassuring herself that at breakfast she had discreetly covered her appetite: "I et polite" (23). She offers to share her little larder with the next in line of strangers who give her rides in their wagons: "I'd take it kind for you to share." "I wouldn't care to. You go ahead and eat." She begins to eat. She eats slowly, steadily sucking the rich sardine oil from her fingers with slow and complete relish. Then she stops, not abruptly, yet with completeness, her jaw stilled in midchewing, a bitten cracker in her hand and her face lowered a little and her eyes blank, as if she were listening to something very far away or so near as to be inside her. Her face has drained of color, of its full, hearty blood, and she sits quite still, hearing and feeling the implacable and immemorial earth, but without fear or alarm. "It's twins at least," she says to herself, without lip movement, without sound. Then the spasm passes. She eats again. (25)

Though Lena's face is said to drain of blood, there is no fear or alarm. She remains inviolable, intact. There is no loss here. The nurturing mother replenishes herself: she eats again. Already, of course, there is the involuntary umbilical bond of mother and fetus. But Faulkner's language here, in this parable of sublime pre-natal communion, predicts and prefigures the deliberate bond that is to come. Without lip, without sound, without naming. At the end of the novel, weeks after the baby is born, Lena's "fatherless" child remains unnamed, but undamaged by that lack. We can rest easy on his account because we are given to know that "the baby ... hadn't stopped eating, that had been eating breakfast now for about ten miles like one of these dining cars on the train" (480). The easy nurturing and hearty appetite of this closing scene bode well for both mother and child. In dramatic contrast to Lena and her nameless child is the novel's other prototype-the motherless child-Joe Christmas. That his story consumes a far greater share of the novel may be simple testimony to our literary and psychological predilection for things that go graphically wrong. But it may also be indirect testimony to the cultural hierarchy of things worth telling.

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The pre-verbal is not only immutable, but, in some cultural and symbolic sense, inaccessible and ultimately unengaging as narrative. Maintaining a literary focus there, at the successful mother and infant feeding embrace, would seem to be a doubly doomed endeavor. For it tells its own simple story in irreducible tableau, forcing the reader to look elsewhere for the symbolic and its compelling stories of desire and loss. British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott describes and Iyricizes this pre-symbolic story of the body as "the delicacy of what is pre-verbal, unverbal, and unverbalizable except perhaps in poetry" (lOS). But in doing so he points to the incompatibility of a nurturing presence and narrative itself. If, as Faulkner's Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying puts it, "the word ... is just a shape to fill a lack" (52), then asking the real oral to do the work of the Symbolic is foreclosed. (I would only add my own observation that it is very rare to find a full, adult portrait in literature of a good mother.) So Faulkner can be seen framing his narrative of loss with the nurturing and natural sufficiency of Lena Grove's bodily presence, but he does not linger there where the pre-verbal nurturance is namelessly working just fine. Instead, in Light in August we are offered the patchwork story of Joe Christmas, the affectless man who begins and ends life as a motherless child. And, again, it is with a frequency and consistency that refuses being read as co-incident that Faulkner stages his story at the oral site. The text is copious with incidents of oral intensity. In fact, it is difficult to conjure up an image of Joe Christmas that does not begin or end at the mouth. To begin with there is the scene of his birth, superimposed on his mother's death scene, conjoining forever his life and his loss. Doc Hines is Joe's maniacal grandfather who months before Joe is born managed to track down and kill Joe's father and who sought, bitterly in vain, to find a doctor who would abort his daughter'S pregnancy. The grandmother recounts the scene: her pleading with Hines to get a doctor to attend the birth; his refusal to go; his determination to prevent her from getting help: And I tried to get out the back way and he heard me and run around the house with the gun and he hit me with the barrel of it and I went back to Milly and he stood outside the hall door where he could see Milly until she died. And then he come in to the bed and looked at the baby .... I heard him go out the front door and then I got up and built up the fire in the stove and heated some milk. (358)

In the presence of her daughter'S just then dead body, the grandmother's mute act of heating some milk for the infant, is predictive of the limited and lethal nurturance that will be Joe's identity. We next encounter the boy in an orphanage, where the five-year-old has sought some vestige of comfort by secreting himself in the dietitian's room and sneaking an occasional soft, "pink worm" of toothpaste from the tube on her nightstand. Hiding in her closet he overhears the dietitian and intern having sex. The passage which follows is long but the language is crucial:

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Word of Mouth He squatted among the soft womensmelling garments and the shoes. He saw by feel alone now the ruined, once cylindrical tube. By taste and not seeing he contemplated the cool invisible worm as it coiled onto his finger and smeared sharp, automatonlike and sweet, into his mouth . . . . He began to sweat .... for some time now he had been doing nothing else but sweating. He was not hearing anything at all now.... He seemed to be turned in upon himself, watching himself sweating, watching himself smear another worm of paste into his mouth which his stomach did not want. Sure enough, it refused to go down .... Then it happened. He said to himself with complete and passive surrender: "Well, here I am." When the curtain fled back he did not look up. When hands dragged him violently out of his vomit he did not resist. He hung from the hands, limp, looking with slack-jawed and glassy idiocy into a face no longer smooth pink-and-white, surrounded now by wild and disheveled hair whose smooth bands once made him think of candy. "You little rat!" the thin, furious voice hissed; "you little rat!" (113-14)

Joe's horrific "primal scene" reverberates with his brutal birth scene and will undergo a final staging when he again will not resist the furious figures that surround him. It is significant that his oral engagement here and elsewhere is largely passive, even appetiteless, bringing to mind Julia Kristeva's provocative description of abjection in Powers of Horror (1982), particularly when she writes of "The ImproperIDnclean." Her form and Faulkner's content coincide, tenaciously at the oral: Along with the sight clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at the milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire; "I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it, "I" expel it. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only in their desire, I expel myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which "I" claim to establish myself. . . . During that course in which "I" become, 1 give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. (3)

What will prove most significant in Joe Christmas's abortive attempt at self-recognition and identity is not so much the question of his racial makeup but the fact that there was no mother or father with and against whom he can identify. In Kristeva's figuration, the child establishes himself by virtue of volition, by rejecting and surpassing the profferings of others. Joe Christmas will eventually reject the offerings of others-"Keep your muck"-but he will never arrive at that degree of identity. And it is hard to miss that his dysfunction is rooted and rendered in the absence of the earliest identification-the oral. We can see this clearly demonstrated when the eight-year-old Joe, who has been coldly adopted by the harshly Protestant McEachern, enacts a distorted ritual with food and refusal. Unwilling to learn his catechism, Joe has been repeatedly beaten and denied food by his foster father. He takes these punishments without affect, yet he responds perversely to Mrs.

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McEachern's offer of food and comfort. She tries to get close to him: "Sit up and eat. It wasn't him that told me to bring it to you. He don't know it. I waited until he was gone and then fixed it myself" (145). But Joe cannot assimilate the offer of affection that comes with the food. He carries the tray of food to the corner and dumps it on the floor. He was just eight then. It was years later that memory knew what he was remembering; years after that night when, an hour later, he rose from the bed and went and knelt in the corner as he had not knelt on the rug, and above the outraged food kneeling, with his hands ate, like a savage, like a dog. (146)

There is in this passage an insistent reminder that without an initiating, nurturing bond the child cannot take in the culture that will define his brand of humanness. What's more, without this fundamental oral acquisition of love, the child/man cannot experience any brand of full human identity. Manifestations of Joe's emotional vacancy, which, I am more than suggesting, results from the absence of a crucial psychic "sealing effect" of early attachment, recur throughout the novel. And, again, they are consistently rendered in terms of eating, of what and how he puts things in his mouth, and of what he can never know there, having never learned that first language. One instance that illustrates this emotional illiteracy occurs in his late adolescence. Joe has had a waitress/prostitute for his first lover, but their marginal liaison is over, having been brought to a violent end by Joe's attempted murder of McEachern. In this passage Joe has been beaten bloody by two men who run the sleazy diner/whorehouse. We'll find out We'll see if his blood is black Lying peaceful and still Joe watched the stranger lean down and lift his head from the floor and strike him again in the mouth, this time with a short slashing blow. After a moment he licked his lip a little, somewhat as a child might lick a cooking spoon. (205)

That Joe licks his lip, not to clear the blood or soothe the wound, but as a child with a cooking spoon, is the very model of his underlying emotional illiteracy. He has no body lexicon for hate or love, no recourse but a primitive oral masochism. In Joe's destructive relationship with JoAnna Burden, a middle-aged spinster with too much money to be fully outcast and too much religious and social eccentricity to be included in the community of Jefferson, we are given another rendering of the oral nature of Joe's disorder. It is her kitchen and the lifeless and loveless food she leaves there for Joe to eat alone, in the dark, "set out for the nigger," that becomes the site of his schizophrenic rage: He did not see His hands saw; the dishes were still a little warm, ... He seemed to watch his hand as if from a distance. He watched it pick up a

26

Word of Mouth dish and swing it up and back and hold it there while he breathed deep and slow, intensely cognitant. He heard his voice say aloud, as if he were playing a game: "Ham," and he watched his hand swing and hurl the dish crashing into the wall, the invisible wall, ... He held this dish poised, sniffing.... "Beans or spinach? ... All right. Call it beans." He hurled it, hard .... "Something with onions," he said, thinking This is fun. Why didn't I think of this before? "Woman's muck." He hurled it, hard and slow, hearing the crash, waiting. (224-25)

Particularly telling is the strange affectless quality of his destructiveness. More brutish than childish, his enactment is too detached to be a tantrum. It is as if he has to elicit the participation of his senses and intellect, which otherwise are unengaged. The final vocabulary item in his cataloging of edibles-"woman's muck"-signals his having conflated the oral and the genital, yet in that it is clear that Joe has not advanced to a psychic maturity. Rather, everything collapses into the hollowness of his non-identity. The impossibility of the nutritive, if not nurturing, for Joe Christmas is well established, even before he lashes out with the straight razor at JoAnna Burden's throat. But a full sense of the pervertibility of the oral attends his trying to hide in the wild: He gathered and ate rotting and wormriddled fruit; now and then he crept into fields and dragged down and gnawed ripened ears of corn as hard as potato graters. He thought of eating all the time, imagining dishes, food. He would think of that meal set for him on the kitchen table three years ago . . . with a kind of writhing and excruciating agony of regret and remorse and rage. Then one day he was no longer hungry.... Yet he knew he had to eat. He would make himself eat the rotten fruit, the hard corn, chewing it slowly, tasting nothing. He would eat enormous quantities of it, with resultant crises of bleeding flux. Yet immediately afterward he would be obsessed anew with the need and the urge to eat. It was not with food that he was obsessed now, but with the necessity to eat. He would try to remember when he had eaten last of cooked, of decent food. (316)

That Joe Christmas eats until he bleeds, that he consumes indiscriminately rotten, spoiled, inedible food, is symptomatic of much more than his being on the run. This perverse relationship to eating-an intake that is destructive of body tissue, that is in effect a self-poisoning with the excessive, the decayed, the over-natural-has been the pattern from the beginning, the die cast from the first mouthful of heated milk his grandmother gives him, over his mother's dead body. Quite simply, Joe has never eaten "decent food." It is, then, most significant that Joe Christmas always eats alone. That he refuses the kind offers of food from even well-meaning others. That he dies hungry-empty of even the psychic latency that might give motive or meaning to his life. Faulknerian scholar Donald Kartiganer says of Joe Christmas that he "withholds some ultimate knowledge of himself, some glimpse into the recesses of being which we feel necessary to understand-

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ing" (91). But rather than seeing him as withholding ultimate knowledge of himself, we are obliged to recognize that it is precisely this pre-verbal self-knowledge that Joe Christmas lacks. There is nothing to withhold or offer. If we recall that even the thin human bond of his grandmother's heated milk, a meager trace of a birthright, comes to be quickly withdrawn when his grandfather takes him from the crib and turns him over to an orphanage, we can begin to plumb the depths of Joe's incapacity. His is a convincing portrait of social mutation-truly the motherless child. He neither loves nor hates; he does not attach. There is no question of separation, of weaning, of breakdown, of mourning or loss. In Joe's death scene, the parentless child must also punish himself. After having given himself up to the absent law-the sheriff, we're told is at home eating: "a man as big as him has to eat several times a day" (429)Joe reverses himself, unaccountably, and attempts an obviously doomed escape. By blurring the faces of Joe and his vigilante executioner and castrator, Percy Grimm, Faulkner forces us to read the scene as one of selfmutilation and suicide. Grimm uses a "butcher knife" on the man who again has "crouched" in a corner, this time behind a kitchen table, and who "was not dead yet" as Grimm hisses his pronouncement and slashes away at his groin: "Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell" (439). The black and the white and the pink, he'll certainly let mother alone. To Kristeva's litany of abjection Joe might add: I castrate myself. But here and throughout the novel, Joe says virtually nothing. That he is arrested in a Lacanian pre-symbolic universe, that he never cathects, never takes in the language of father, having never had the language of mother, is confirmed on the occasion of his refusal to be "fathered" by McEachern. He will withstand beatings and privations rather than learn the Name of the Father-McEachern's catechism. This refusal to assimilate or be assimilated is marked in his memory as "on this day I became a man" (137). Having been denied mother and the nurturing oral bond, Christmas refuses father and the symbolic, mutely letting the empty trajectory of his life run its course, only pausing now and then to suck and gnaw a bit on the muck of life that comes his way. In the end Faulkner has him "just lay there, with his eyes open and empty of everything save consciousness, and with something, a shadow, about his mouth" (439). The empty shadow at Joe's mouth stands in powerful contrast to the deep wellspring of memory that Lena Grove's nameless child takes in with every nurturing swallow.

If it can fairly be said that Proust recovers an identity in the madeleineevoked past, and Faulkner's Joe Christmas inhabits the non-identity that attends affectless, unattached eating, then it may be productive to consider F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby in those terms. First published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is roughly contemporary with Light in August and the last

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volumes of Remembrance of Things Past. What is immediately apparent and relevant here about Jay Gatsby is that his identity is a double fiction. Not only did he change his name at seventeen and set out to create and inhabit a new identity, leaving behind his "shiftless and unsuccessful" parents, even that replacement identity comes in half-truths, distortions, speculations, delusions, and denials. In fact the artifice and isolation of Gatsby's life and identity are central to the novel. What is also striking about The Great Gatsby in this context is that, despite its pre-occupation with consumption, almost no one eats. Yet the oral underpinning of desire-met and missed-is unmistakable. Gatsby himself describes his moment of decision and identity in terms of what he will draw to his mouth: Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees-he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God .... Then he kissed her. At his lips touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (112)

Gatsby's decision here is momentous not only because he recalls it as such, but because he becomes, for good or ill, consciously identified with the "perishable" object of his desire. In choosing the body, he also chooses and acknowledges the corpse. His persistent and obsessive quest will be both to win that object and re-write it to merit his self-surrender. The impossibility of success in this mythic and mortal quest is defined not so much by any social barrier or Daisy's marital status, but by the mistaken address of his desire. Despite his having re-established his liaison with Daisy, and even having regained her professions of love, he cannot be content with a conquest in the present. Behind Daisy is his desire to "return to a certain starting place" (112), which he imagines would be accomplished in large part by Daisy's complicit denial of her existence "in the meantime," including especially her ever having loved her husband. But also behind Daisy and behind any desire that Jay Gatsby can articulate is the ultimately failed desire of Jimmy Gatz: "Be better to parents" (174)-the last of his selfinscribed resolves. The originary "starting place," where omnipotence and the milk of wonder is to be found, is at the mother's breast. Though she is never mentioned in the text as a single figure or force, his mother's "spectral presence" and absence, to borrow Madelon Sprengnether's provocative phrase, haunts the narrative. It may be reductive, but it is nevertheless accurate, to observe that there is not a single functioning mother in The Great Gatsby. Daisy hardly qualifies. Her daughter-"You dream, you"-is presented in the flesh only

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briefly, "a freshly laundered nurse leading a little girl into the room" for "mother wanted to show you off." The "well-disciplined child" exits quickly, "pulled out the door," upstaged by a tray of "four gin rickeys that clinked full of ice" (117). The beverages are given more sound and substance. Earlier, during his initial re-acquainting visit with Daisy and Tom Buchanan, Nick Carraway makes one of his characteristically bizarre remarks. Inquiring after Daisy's daughter, he says: "I suppose she talks, and-eats, and everything" to which Daisy "absently" replies "Oh, yes" (17). We know there is a functional child present-she talks and eats. But we remain unconvinced of Daisy as a functional mother. Gatsby's, or rather Jim Gatz's mother, as I've already noted, never really appears in the text, and we can only presume she is dead by the end of the narrative, because Mr. Gatz arrives alone to attend his son's burial. He makes no mention of her. And we hear nothing of her passing in the course of reconstructing Gatsby history. Then too, we only hear of Nick Carraway's father'S admonitions and lineage. He makes no mention of his mother. And Jordan Baker, we are told, has no family save an aunt somewhere in the wings. No, there are no "working" mothers to be found here. All this maternal absence in The Great Gatsby may begin to account for another pronounced absence in the novel. Virtually no eating occurs, which is made even more conspicuous because food is so often promised, even presented. Everyone is invited to lunch and dinner, but nothing appears to be consumed. Even the descriptions of Gatsby's parties which feature "two suppers" fall short of detailing any actual ingestion of food. The opulent banquet Nick describes has about it a quality Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, terms "ornamental": the hors d'oeuvres glisten, the hams are glazed and spiced, the "salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold" (40). The food is more magical than edible, and it is made more to disappear like Prospero's banquet than to be eaten by humans with hardy appetites. In any case, we are not made privy to any lip-smacking delight or delicate savoring of foodstuffs, fancy or plain. Nick Carraway echoes the text's dissatisfaction if not discomfort with eating, remarking that he "took dinner usually at the Yale Club-for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day" (57). Then too, we have learned from Nick that the Finnish woman who comes to tidy up for him and cook his breakfast can provide only half of the sustenance associated with the oral in that her "wisdom" is "muttered" in Finnish "to herself over the electric stove" (3). There is one notable exception to the absence of actual eating in the text. Nick and Gatsby are lunching with Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby's shady business partner. A "succulent hash" is brought to the table, and Nick reports that Wolfsheim ate it with an oxymoronic "ferocious delicacy" (71). We should note that Nick doesn't report eating anything himself; there is no

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suggestion that anything tasted good, bad or indifferent, or was satisfying or filling. However, we are told that Gatsby leaves the table during lunch: "He has to telephone," reports Wolfsheim (72). That Gatsby substitutes the aural of the telephone (he's always on the phone) for the oral of lunch may in this instance be attributed to his discomfort with being seen eating, that being too much the mark of mere humanity. Earlier we learned that Gatsby doesn't drink, ostensibly because he witnessed the ill effects of alcohol visited on his patron Dan Cody. But, in this particular lunch scene, it is necessary to consider Gatsby's departure when the food arrives as a mark of his aversion to watching Wolfsheim eat ferociously. This becomes a more convincing take on the scene when later we learn that as a boy Gatsby once told his father that he "et like a hog," for which his father beat him (175). So it is telling that during the period of weeks when Gatsby is entertaining Daisy (carnally we assume), the erstwhile fastidious Gatsby dismisses his battery of proper, white-gloved servants, replacing them with an uncultivated but taciturn crew of "Wolfsheim's people" who, the delivery boy reports, leave Gatsby's kitchen looking" like a pigsty" (113). It is as if Gatsby can and must admit the orality and corporality of his life because of the now embodied relationship with Daisy. If he's in, he may as well be in whole hog. While little if any eating is staged in Fitzgerald's text, beverage consumption, especially alcoholic beverage, abounds: exquisite claret, whiskey by the bottle, wine overflowing, ale and beer, gin rickeys and tonics, and every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons are transformed to suitable mix by a machine in Gatsby's kitchen "which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb" (39). Pointedly, this otherwise Edenic item-the fruit-is divested of body by machine and man, the lifeless hulls heaped as waste. There is only one glass of milk in the novel. Nick offers it to Mr. Gatz with a simple plate of lunch, which we are told he doesn't touch. The milk is attempted, however, but spilled by the father's shaky hand, and goes uningested. If mothers and milk and nurturing foodstuffs are displaced throughout the text by fathers and booze and unconsumable signs and sites of eating, there is nonetheless an obsessive concern with the breast. We learn almost immediately that Jordan Baker is very small breasted, that Myrtle Wilson's sister is a flat, thin woman, and that the guest who tore her gown at one of Gatsby's parties was sent an expensive replacement by the host which was remarkably much too big in the bust. Consistent with her mythic function for Gatsby, however, no mention is made of Daisy's breasts or body size, only its hue-her skin is a "milky" whiteness. Nevertheless, we can follow her emblematic green dock light to an important connection with the "fresh, green breast of the New World" (182) that greeted the first sailors

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arriving there. Gatsby is, of course, self-conceived as a sailor. In his first incarnation as Jay Gatsby, he rows out to Dan Cody's yacht and sails off, attempting to escape the dirt-bound identification that is father and mother. And we can note that he takes Nick for a sail-dose to shore-the better to see the East and West Eggs of his rootless existence. The only full breast in the novel is assigned to Myrtle Wilson. Hers is a full-figured, sensual, and voluptuous body, described by Nick as bordering on the excessive. (Nick would be bothered by ample female flesh, one thinks.) The violence that is visited on the body of Myrtle Wilson is most telling. It conforms precisely to what Kaja Silverman describes in The Acoustic Mirror (1988) as the castration that underwrites all phallic aggression. Following Melanie Klein's assertion that the first castration is inevitable and occurs with weaning, Silverman suggests that this crucial first loss is dealt with by projecting castration to the entirety of the female body. In this sense we see that it is not enough for Tom Buchanan to break Myrtle's nose for her insistent verbal self-enunciation in defiantly speaking Daisy's name. The breast-and-mouth-possessed Myrtle is too phallic by far in this man's world. Castration must be writ large, enough to cover the case. And consistent with the figuration of weaning as "real" castration, it must be inscribed and inflicted at the mouth and breast of the only fullbreasted body around: They saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long. (138)

After Freud, to read fully this nightmare assault on the maternal source (Myrtle reported her husband was urging her to have a baby) demands attention to the smallest detail. The vehicle of aggression is not, as the secondary revision of Michaelis reports it to investigators of the accident, green or even yellow. The vehicle of this violent, castrating, death-drive is a rich "cream." What might finally be said about The Great Gatsby in the context of this study is that it is the story of bonds-severed, failed, and restored. In breaking from his parents and all connection with his originary identity, Gatsby becomes other to himself; isolated and essentially unmourned. Perhaps it is fitting that he dies, a result of mistaken identity, in the artificial pool of his own design and choosing, never making it back to the maternal sea. Opening the narrative, Nick tells us he's "in the bond business," but observes that "everybody is in the bond business" (3). The full play and force of the metaphor comes late in the novel after Gatsby's death. Nick answers Gatsby's phone, hoping to be hearing from someone connected enough to Gatsby to show up at his funeral. Instead the voice at the other end blurts out a bit of bad news involving Gatsby's dealings in bogus

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bonds. However dreary and uninspiring his childhood past had been, and however driven to self-improvement and self-conception had been his youthful resolves, Gatsby the man could not sustain an identity out of desire alone. Abandoning his past and the body that bore it condemned him to being a shimmering, at times even glorious, mirage of a man, incapable of taking in either life's sustenance or the time-bound love of a woman, worthy or not. In contrast, Daisy's bond with Tom is sealed in their access to a common if pathetic past. We last see Daisy through Nick's eyes, shortly after she's run down Myrtle Wilson. She and Tom are in the pantry, two bottles of ale and a plate of cold, fried chicken between of them. There is but scant possibility that the wealthy Buchanans had only wings and legs on their plate; surely the late night repast, even if left uneaten, included some tasty white breast meat. So, like Nick and Gatsby, we might want to look away in discomfort at what we are. The last thing Nick says to Gatsby contains a subtle but promising possibility, one that might be read as pursued if not fulfilled, in Nick's decision to return to his Midwest-to go home. "Good-by," Nick calls to him, and adds: "I enjoyed the breakfast, Gatsby" (155). The only narrative assertion of pleasure in the oral comes when Nick breaks his fast. Though he never mentions it, his return is likely to strengthen a floundering identity through re-connection to the past, bound as it is to be nurtured by some hearty, perhaps homemade, Midwestern meals. It is in that intersection of past and present through memory, whether conscious or tucked away in the neocortex, that identity exists. And it is first and last called into being by being given something good to eat. I want to take a final pass at the profound conjunction of memory, the mother-child bond, and individual identity, as well as the oral impetus and underwriting of that trinity, by looking at Katherine Mansfield's short but rich piece, "Bliss," first published in 1919. Unlike the three longer narratives discussed above, "Bliss" makes no direct mention of memory or the past-personal or racial. Instead it tells of a day in the life of a thirty-yearold woman, Bertha Young, who experiences and exposes a feeling of "unaccountable" elation. My reading of Mansfield's "Bliss" is close, but the story is short, and offers an important and revealing glimpse into the unremembered but original oral nature of the bliss that visits us from time to time. The psychoanalytic take on bliss or elation coincides and collapses very quickly into the treatment or consideration of mania, which Freud, even as late as Civilization and Its Discuntents (1930), refers to as a "pathological" state. He goes so far as to speculate that "there must be substances in the chemistry of our own bodies which have similar effects, for we know at least one pathological state, mania, in which a condition similar to intoxication arises, without the administration of any intoxicating drug" (SE 21:

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78). Katherine Mansfield's prescience in this regard, as it is exhibited in the opening paragraphs of "Bliss," not only anticipates the same somewhat facile comparison between intoxication and bliss, but prefigures in just a handful of words the central issue of Freud's capstone work. She writes: "Oh, is there no way you can express it without being 'drunk and disorderly'? How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?"4 The terms and stakes of mania's struggle are thus declared. In enunciating them, Mansfield also gives a whiff of the fear that surely attends the impending battle through the image of a body shut up in a case-the suffocating, confining coffin of being buried alive. But in the next breath, Mansfield's Bertha Young attempts a hasty if incomplete retraction: "No, that about the fiddle is not quite what I mean," she thought, running up the steps and feeling in her bag for the key-she'd forgotten it as usual-and rattling the letter box. "It's not what I mean, because-Thank you, Mary"-she went into the hall. "Is nurse back?" Before considering the form and substance of this manic denial, it may be useful to consider the three short paragraphs that precede it. They warrant a rather close look because they illustrate well the vexed nature of emotional verity: where is it located? Is it interior or exterior, manifest or latent, a thing of conscious subjectivity or something too amorphous and terminally unconscious to pin down? In this regard, Mansfield's use of ellipses, dashes, and inventive punctuation and syntax, characteristic of much of her writing, is especially apt, imitating as it does the flightiness and unstructured quality of bliss. This unfettered quality of bliss is especially evidenced in the seemingly gratuitous shifting of point of view that occurs in the first three paragraphs of the text. We find the opening paragraph of the story to be well marked as third person narrative. The character in question is the object of narrative interest. She is named-Bertha Young-and her state and habits of mind are similarly ascribed to her: "she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk." The second paragraph moves unaccountably to a generic and progressively more awkward second person address, bearing as it does the earmarks of an attempted projection: "What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss-absolute bliss-as through you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of the afternoon sun and it burned to your bosom ... " (emphasis added). Failing in this projection to second person (it is, after all, difficult to get that piece of the afternoon sun jammed into all of our readerly bosoms), the third paragraph begins, "Oh, is there no way you can express ... " and gestures to sustain the projection and exteriority of second person, but gives way, as it were, to the undeniably subjective and paranoid image of being locked in that fiddle case. It is

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this subjectivity, of the individual and embodied Bertha, that is at issue here. And it is met with immediate denial and flight. The first attempt at denial ("No, that about the fiddle is not quite what I mean") is swallowed by the tag "she thought." Uncertain of the efficacy of her denying thought, Bertha attempts to distract and further distance herself from the image of confinement of her body with a manic scrambling to and in the third person: "running up the steps and feeling in her bag for the key-she'd forgotten it as usual-rattling the letter box." Her second denial ("It's not what I mean, because") is unfinished, but linked with an elongated dash to the direct address of "Thank you, Mary." While it is punctuated, more or less, as one spoken utterance, we can't be sure of Bertha's voice until she is in the presence of Mary. Mary who? Mary what? All we are given to know is that Mary can, definitively, "answer" the door, with or without a key. In marked contrast, Bertha seems constituted by and grounded in question; her first complete, uncompromised moment of agency and utterance is unelatedly abrupt and asks for an other: "Is nurse back?" We will return to nurse and to the "rna" in Mary before matters are closed. But for now, it is worth noting that the instahility and undecidability of identity and center of consciousness that the text produces on the first page serves to alert us to the complexity and difficulty of saying just what one-I, you, or she-feels. Before pressing further with Mansfield's narrative rendering of Bertha Young's bliss, it may be useful to rehearse what clinicians have to say about her self-described emotional state, indexed as "mania." That, we find, is relatively little. Relative, certainly, to mania's linked partner, depression. 5 Superficially we can account for there being less clinical attention and case study involving mania because people would seem to be less inclined to seek treatment for elation per se than for depression per se. But it is also likely that the connotation of the term "manic" is, withal, too flighty or superficial or harmless to be taken seriously by theorists. A sort of "no pain, no problem, no profit" mentality seems to attend and limit both clinical and critical interest in mania. To the contrary, however, those theorists and practitioners who have investigated the workings and features of mania seem to agree that there is plenty of psychic pain and purpose, if not profit, in it. Kleinian theory as it pertains to manic states is particularly useful to an understanding of the subject. Klein's work in this area is especially fruitful because of her comfort with and even insistence on the affective life of the human psyche, starting in earliest infancy. So we might begin by imagining-as Klein did-an ego not yet fully equipped with the integrated defenses of maturity, but beyond the psychotic chaos of the neonate, having to negotiate a battery of threats and offers from menacing and nurturing objects, both internal and external, and having at its disposal a handful of phantastic recourses. Among those

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methods of psychic coping, Klein gives special credence to aggression in the form of phantasized attacks or counter-attacks on the dreaded bad objects, but also delineates other characteristic ego mechanisms, including introjection, projection and, especially, the strategy of splitting, in which the object or part-object is divided into good object and bad object, good breast and bad breast, good mother and bad mother. Splitting, in fact, might be said to be the staple of defense mechanisms of the Kleinian "manic-depressive" position. Two facets of this process are important to a full understanding of mania. One is that splitting is, in effect, a forestalling of the necessary reality of integrated individuation and ambivalence, and, moreover, a fending off of the conflict and threat that attends that reality. As such, splitting is a kind of prescient or precocious denial-a denial before the fact. The second aspect of splitting that is crucial here is the oral nature of the paradigmatic first judgment enacted· by splitting "good" from "bad." Freud outlines this first moment of judgment in his paper "Negation" (1925): Expressed in the language of the oldest, that is, oral instinctual impulses, the alternative runs thus: "I should like to eat that," or "I should like to spit it out"; and, put more generally: "It shall be inside me" or "it shall be outside me." (SE 19: 237) A related and parallel process of epistemophilia also occurs at this earliest site of decision, the mouth, and it too, would seem to involve an opposing "anti-epistemophilic" urge-a denial of (desire for) knowledge. In terms of judgment, then, the mouth might say: "I've tried that and I don't like it." But in terms of knowing, the mouth attempts its first refusal: "I don't know or want to know that." Then the more complicated denial: "I don't think that." And finally, in the words of Eliot's Prufrock: "That is not what I meant at all." It is important to remember that while the Kleinian model, as forwarded in "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States" (1935), recognizes a developmental process, a "normal working-through of the infantile positions" (133), Kleinian "positions" are not so rigid or discreet as Freud's libidinal "stages." In fact, as Klein sees it, while the ego may develop an array of more sophisticated maneuvers, among them repression, inhibition, displacement, sublimation, and the granddaddy of them all, symbolization, it never loses the use of its more primitive tools. Thus, these manic and depressive positions, even among healthy, "integrated" adults, are never fully surpassed. In times of trial or trouble the defenses and comforts of the manic-depressive position serve us well. The manic state, then, is essentially a childish one, characterized by omnipotent or magical delusions and repetitious attempts to control or master emotions. Idealization is a typical feature of the manic position as is the less typically recognized feature of contempt for the objects in question. But the central, operative defense in mania is denial. Bertram Lewin,

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in The Psychoanalysis of Elation (1950), calls attention to the important distinction that must be made between manic denial and other forms of denial. While other forms of denial deal with the intellectual or ideational content of the repressed, manic denial is directed at the emotional content, and prototypically at defending against the impact of the loss of the one irreplaceable object-mother-who from infancy on is still and always lost with weaning. Psychoanalyst Sandor Rado's often cited, concise formulation of the manic model is most useful: "In mania the ego fuses with its superego in an accurate intrapsychic reproduction of the fusion of baby and breast at nursing" (54). In mania the ego "feels" as if it has never lost its first object. It affectively denies separation by the manic measure of dedifferentiation (Freud's term). In the depressive state the ego mourns or pines for the object it has guiltily lost, and beneath that is the mourning of the first loss-the mother's breast. In the manic state, the emotional measure of that loss, its psychic toll, is denied. The manic mind gets too busy to take notice, too pre-occupied with "screen affects," and, ironically, too self-absorbed to feel the pain or count the loss. In mania the ego forgets its (separate) self. We left Bertha Young as she made her way in from the public space, trying to contain and control her unaccountable bliss. The story unfolds with a dinner party as the centerpiece, but the markedly oral domain of the story is evident throughout. Really, this short piece if a veritable motherload of orality. Within the bursting confines of a dozen or so pages, three separate eating scenes are elaborated, along with scores of more or less direct references to the business of the oral-to foodstuffs, eating habits, nurturance, digestion, indigestion, vomiting, suppers, stomachs, dinners, soups, the "shameless passion for the white flesh of lobster," "the green pistachio ices-green and cold like the eyelids of Egyptian dancers," simply "admirable soufflees," burning bosoms, and especially milk and "absolutely creamy" cream, cream. But before reflecting on Bertha's engagement with adult orality, we need to attend to her first inquiry ("Is nurse back?"). What an odd way of asking if your child and her caretaker are home. Something's amiss. We can hear another hint of Bertha's conflicted relationship to her only child, Little B, and to the "Little B" within, in this truncated exchange with Mary, whose reply to Bertha's first question is a simple "Yes, M'm." Bertha's retort is a seemingly harmless second question: "And has the fruit come?" Again the answer comes back: "Yes, M'm. Everything's come." There is no mention of baby, unless she's part of the un-itemized "everything." And if, as I would suggest, one of the realities that Bertha Young's elation is designed to deny is her ambivalence toward her Little B and, more profoundly perhaps, her fearful denial of being mother, then the apostrophe in Mary's "M'm" becomes more telling. Is she swallowing an "A" and with it the formality of "madame," or is Mansfield enunciating much more by

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twice on the first page of the story omitting the maternal "O"? I would submit that the "nothing-at nothing, simply" that ends the first paragraph (in contrast to the phallic "something up" in the air and the forgotten "as usual" phallic key) is then echoed at the bottom of the page by the missing "0" that is "Mom." Moving beyond this opening colophon of apostrophic denial, we can trace a pattern of manic measures which reveals the denial in Bertha's bliss. The most obvious of these occurs in the struggle over feeding Little B. But before she goes to do emotional battle in the nursery, Bertha first stops, as if to fortify herself with the self-assurance of having managed something, to arrange fruit on the dining room table. The text reads: "Mary brought in the fruit on a tray and with it a glass bowl, and a blue dish, very lovely, with a strange sheen on it as though it had been dipped in milk." Bertha arranges the fruit, brought to her by the one whose name, again, most announces mother, in "two pyramids of these bright round shapes," and stands to admire what "was so incredibly beautiful," but begins to laugh. She stops herself saying, "No, no. I'm getting hysterical." And in a desperately manic move away from these breasts of fruit, "she seized her bag and coat and ran upstairs to the nursery" where she tries to release some of the "radiance" she feels in "that bright glowing place ... in her bosom" by feeding the baby. The struggle with Nurse 6 over feeding rights to Little B can be read as an interesting illustration of the way the "need to feed" works as a screen for the fear/desire of being devoured or devouring. Lest we overlook the threat of the devouring figure, Nanny tells Bertha of Little B's encounter in the park with a big dog. Bertha wants to ask "if it wasn't rather dangerous to let her tug on a strange dog's ear." But the danger is further displaced by turning it into a desire to ask a question about danger, and that question, and displaced danger, is then suppressed with an otherwise overstated, "But I did not dare to." If we recall that the manic state is a defensive denial, then it must be involved in warding off a dangerous cognition. At base, that danger and the anxiety it produces, is the fear of being devoured by mother in retaliation for phantasized attacks and actualized feeding on her. In this regard, we must remember that for all her preoccupation with food, Bertha comes across as cold and unappetizing. She doesn't cook, which may pass as unremarkable. But she doesn't eat, and in this narrative that is remarkable. We don't see her pop so much as a single grape into her mouth. The only thing we are told she has swallowed is "a piece of the sun," the seeming source of her bliss. The pun on "son" is unavoidable in this context of the nursery, where her child is described as an edible item: "she's been a little sweet all afternoon." Bertha's identification with Little B is as ominous as it is extreme. This identification-her baby is her body-is sealed in the repetition of the image of the violin case. This time Bertha asks: "Why have a baby if it has

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to be kept-not in a case like a rare, rare fiddle-but in another woman's arms?" The ostensible referent for "another woman" is Nanny, Little B's surrogate mother. But what happens if we press her repetition of the violin case image, and especially the telling denials that follow both questions? If we substitute her original question's "body" for "baby" in the nursery question, we must reconsider the "another woman" referent. Then it is impossible not to hear the manically muffled lament at differentiation from mother in: "why have a [body] if it ends up in another's arms." If mania replicates the feeling of fusion of infant and mother at the nursing breast, then Bertha's bliss is her affective defense against the reality of separation. The feeding scene in the nursery concludes in a way that clearly reiterates the failure of fusion between this mother and child: When the soup was finished Bertha turned round to the fire. "You're nice-you're very nice!" she said, kissing her warm baby. "I'm fond of you. I like you." And, indeed, she loved Little B so much-her neck as she bent forward, her exquisite toes as they shone transparent in the firelight-that all her feeling of bliss came back again, and again she didn't know how to express it-what to do with it. "You're wanted on the telephone," said Nanny, coming back in triumph and seizing her Little B.

Even before Nanny triumphs and retakes Little B, the inadequacy of the mother-child bond is blatant. We read with a chill Bertha's measured "fondness" for the "nice" baby, signaling as it does that the baby remains, or has become, an unattached object or, more precisely, collection of part objects-toes, neck, (and earlier) hands, lips-to blissful Bertha. The telephone call not only propels Bertha's manic flight from any further confrontation with the failed maternal oral, but it specifically takes her to father: "Down she flew. It was Harry." Yet the futility of this move toward connection with the masculine is made clear when she can't give voice to her bliss in the face of phallogocentrism: "What had she to say? She'd nothing to say. She only wanted to get in touch with him for a moment." Mansfield flashes her leveling contempt for Harry and his impatience with Bertha's "nothing to say" by putting matters this way: "What is it?" rapped out [his] little voice. "Nothing. Entendu," said Bertha, and hung up the receiver, thinking how more than idiotic civilization was. They had people coming to dinner.

No, the Symbolic offers no comfort or recourse for Bertha's "no thing." This feeling, this bliss, this unconscionable loss, is inexpressible in terms of the Father. Yet while Bertha gives a hint of the disdain she has for "little" Harry and gamely attempts to disparage the paternal order as "idiotic,"

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she has already lost the maternal. Indeed, what is a body to do except get ready for dinner? The remainder of the story follows Bertha's attempt to enact another sort of "phantastic" bond, this one with Pearl Fulton, the latest of her "finds"-"beautiful women who had something strange about them." And, clearly, Pearl seems the prototype of the phallic female, figured as she is as the double of the tall, slender flowering pear tree, and possessed of "something." As such, she seems Bertha's last hope for fusion. The inevitable disillusionment comes in the form of an Oedipal betrayal. In the reconstituted primal scene, Bertha "sees" that, phallic or not, mother (of Pearl) is doing it with father. Bertha Young's "bliss," then, is both an enunciation of a series of desires-a declension of failed figures starting with the castrated or marred Ma in Mary and ending with the unresponsive phallic mother Pearl-and denials of the lack desire always speaks. But this isn't a matter of penis (or even phallus) envy. The missing part that is manically envied and denied, not even remembered, is the first missing part, mother's breast. The separation that occurs at weaning-implicated as the source of the pain that mania most wants to forget-is the necessary passage to psychic maturity. This separation from and consequent loss of oneness with the mother should eventuate in the relative autonomy of individuation and identity, that remembers at times the fear and the isolation, as well as the wonder of what we are. For Bertha, however, identity is sought not through individuation, but through manic denial of separation and through repeated and failed attempts at fusion. Bertha does not want to be one of two: she wants to be one with mother. In one of those textual mimicries of meaning, Mansfield puts a highly improbable, then curious, and finally conspicuous repetition of "an incredibly beautiful line"-"Why Must it Always be Tomato Soup?"-just before and after the revelation of Pearl's (Harry's too, but who cares) betrayal. And for good measure, the sissified dinner guest Eddie repeats the questioning phrase for a third time, adding: "It's so deeply true, don't you feel? Tomato soup is so dreadfully eternal." I suggest that if there is not conscious method in mentioning tomato soup three times in the final paragraphs of this short text, then there is at least the trace of manic madness. If "tomato" is invoked by a British mind, the resulting to-ma-to reveals both the ma in tomato and the real lamentation in "why must it always be ... two, Ma, two," or the eternal urge backward "to Ma, too." For Bertha, this knowledge of separation from mother is dreadful and eternal. The only hope for that fusion this side of eternity is manic bliss. The maternal past that is both remembered and concealed in the orality of life eventually calls in its markers. Death-driven, in a flash, or refusing, sucking desperately onto the last breath of life, to go gentle into that good

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night, we all return to the maternal. The separate space of our humanness between birth and death is made possible by the maternally urged and inflected oral. Eat your vegetables. Drink your milk. Chew slowly. Here's your lunch. Share. Wash your hands. Brush your teeth. Come for dinner. Eat. In the eating of existence the mouth remembers mother. The patriarch's prayer praises His bounty and ask Him for daily bread, but we know where it comes from. And we love and hate, consume and preserve, warmly remember and desperately forget her. In language we take in Father, but our first mouthful is mother, and our first word, and often our last, is mamma. So Hamlet's father has to come back from the dead to say to his son "Remember me" and Christ has to ask in the language of mother: Take. Eat.This is my body. Do this in memory of me. Without being asked, without a word from her, we take her in and remember her, in our hunger, in our food, and in our meager or magnificent fictional accountings of our humanity.

CHAPTER TWO

Consuming Culture: The Linguistics of Location a cook a pure artist who moves everyman at a deeper level than Mozart, for the subject of the verb to-hunger is never a name; dear Adam and Even had different bottoms but the neotene who marches upright and can subtract reveals a belly like a serpent's with the same vulnerable look. Jew, Gentile or pigmy he must get his calories before he can consider her profile or his own, attack you or play chess, and take what there is however hard to get down: then surely those in whose creed God is edible may call a fine omelette a Christian deed. -W.H. Auden, "First Grub, Then Ethics (Brecht)"

I

n this chapter I violate an unspoken tenet of literary criticism that has its counterpart in Western cuisine: savory and sweet should not on the same plate meet. Social science and poetry should be kept similarly apart. Yet to take up the issues of cultural identity and alterity it is most necessary to study the place where the domains of nature and culture, biology and mythology, art and science, all quietly or smackingly occlude-the mouth. Here I will make a case for reconsidering D.W. Winnicott's "potential space" in terms of eating as well as, if not rather than, playing. I will offer the anthropologist's fare, both exotic and familiar, as backdrop to reading "mouthwork" moments from literary texts which straddle a cultural borderline: Louise Erdrich's Tracks, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Who better to serve as a guide, or better to say maitre de, than Shakespeare's Caliban? Julia Kristeva and Gayatri Spivak will attend. Before addressing directly the role the oral plays in the questions of cultural identity and otherness, I want to relate an incident that for me captures the embodiedness of cultural identity. Several years ago I had 41

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occasion to be visiting London on what proved to be the hottest stretch of summer in London's recorded history. Having taken whatever relief there was to be had in drinking lots of liquids-most of them not nearly cold enough for my American palate-I found myself needing to use the public toilet at Paddington Station. I noted only a slight drop in temperature as I made my way down the terrazzo stairwell leading to the women's restroom located two flights of stairs down from street level. I entered to find a set of four or five stalls against the far wall of the room. A couple of stall doors were closed securely and the others rested ajar. I approached one of these open stalls and pushed the door in to discover a woman dressed in black Muslim garb seated on the toilet. In that instant I saw that her skirts were pulled up and draped on her lap, her legs were somewhat apart, her crotch and pubis quite exposed. In that same instant I took in a look of terror and rage as she attempted to re-cover her face with the veil she had apparently removed to gain some relief from the smothering heat. She started immediately to screech, fumbling for the veil and trying with the other hand to hide her face, especially her mouth. The encounter lasted just a few seconds as I hurriedly reacted by pulling the door closed and apologizing, unthinkingly in English: "I'm sorry. I didn't know anyone was there. Excuse me." All this while she continued to shriek at me in a language I did not recognize but with a meaning I could not miss: I had violated something sacred to her. I turned round and, childlike, ran out and up the stairs, stubbing my sandled bare toes on a step near the top, her voice still echoing two flights up. As I recollect this scene I find myself fast up against a cultural barrier that will not yield to reason or language. The space and place of violation will not be translated. She-this other-ached for my having seen her exposed, but to me unremarkable, face. But in my mind's eye I can only remark at seeing her uncovered, dark and glistening cunt, which she made no attempt to cover or hide, not even to so much as draw her legs togethera reflex I had not imagined to be other than universal. I offer this brief cross-cultural text as an acknowledgment of limitation, of location, of my own embodiedness in culture, and of the embodiedness of culture. In a collection of her essays entitled Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986), Adrienne Rich writes of the "politics of location," stating that it is possible to abstract "the body" but not "my body." On first glance the specificity of Rich's embodiedness seems candid and striking: scars, disfigurements, discolorations, damages, losses, . . . Bones well nourished from the placenta; the teeth of a middle class person seen by a dentist twice a year from childhood. White skin, marked and scarred by three pregnancies, an elected sterilization, progressive arthritis . . . no rapes, no abortions, long hours at a typewriter-my own, not in a typing pool-and so forth. (215)

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But even in this her body-accounting paragraph, there is a sense of the statistical, the descriptors following one upon the other and in effect leaving the body behind, or preserving it at best as a place of intersecting vectors: female, white, middle class, Jewish, living in the 1940's, 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, in North America, English speaking, heterosexual then lesbian, and smart enough to be able to avoid the deadly sameness of abstraction. In this disclosure and use of the body and the mind of the poet there is nonetheless an inevitable invitation to conflate, then extrapolate: white-North American-middle-aged-middle-class-Iesbian-Jewish woman are like that. Or think this way. So that identity has lost integrity, integrity itself being a Western, especially North American, notion, co-dependent with individualism. For my purposes here, however, I want to set aside Rich's politics and that worthy struggle, and take up instead the poetry of her text. Perhaps she would not mind my hearing a Whitmanesque echo in a passage that comes a bit later in the essay: Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap, the coffee, the rice, ... to pull the day's water up from the well, to boil water for tea, ... to pull the vegetables and start the walk to market .... In Peru: 'Women invest hours in cleaning tiny stones and chaff out of beans, wheat and rice; they shell peas and clean fish and grind spices in small mortars. They buy bones or tripe at the market and cook cheap, nutritious soups.' (229)

It might be said that all culture passes through the mouth. Food-its production and preparation, its distribution, its consumption-still comprises the central economy of life. I There are no more elaborate social rituals than those associated with eating. Even a cursory look at the works of structural anthropologists reveals food codes of enormous complexity and rigor, which seem nevertheless to be passed on from generation to generation without fanfare or diploma. Of all life's voluntary actions none is more basic than eating. As Gayl Jones puts it from mother to daughter in Corregidora, stating the most obvious of life's laws: "You die if you don't eat." You die even if you do. The human combustion engine, like Shakespeare's fire of life, is indeed "consumed by that which it was nourished by" (Sonnet 73). In their compendium of eating habits, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating (1980), Peter Farb and George Armelagos assert that "eating is the primary way of initiating and maintaining human relationships" (4). Moreover, they claim that anthropologists can readily extrapolate an entire society from its eating behavior. Although their study is not exhaustive, it ranges from the Bemba of Zambia whose lives revolve

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around food and beer, and who all day long shout from hut to hut about what is to be eaten at the next meal and what was eaten at the previous meal, to the Trobrianders for whom hunger is shameful. They are a sort of society of St. Anthony's, who was said to blush whenever he had to eat. For them the having, giving, and displaying of food is crucially and conspicuously public, but eating is always done alone with backs turned toward others. (Watching my teenage son and his friends as they scarf down cheeseburgers makes me think the practice has some real merit.) Farb and Armelagos theorize that, more basic than the impact on cultural development, "the entire adaptation of the human body has been molded by the need to acquire, prepare and consume food" (14). And conversely, human beings, along with some varieties of rodents, are distinctive in their food adaptability. Scanning the globe it is possible to find human beings consuming anything and everything that is digestible, even of course some substances that are toxic, tobacco and alcohol leading that list. Food codes and classifications vary from culture to culture, bearing and conveying as they do essential elements of the operating cultural paradigm. The Chinese classify foods along the ying/yang axis. Some Western cultures use a somewhat flexible gender axis (real men don't eat quiche), or first time/leftover distinction, or a meal/snack basis of classification. In The Raw and the Cooked (1969), anthrotheorist Claude Levi-Strauss demonstrates, in my reading at least, the futility of trying to trace systematically food codes of a given culture, in this case the Indians of the Amazon. What promises to be a simple and clarifying system of classification-raw or cooked-quickly becomes a labyrinth of permutations: raw/handled by women, raw/handled by men, cooked by boiling, cooked by roasting or broiling, rotten by unhastened decay, ad infinitum, pointing to the resistance of food codes to be totally apprehended. Rather, they are like any sophisticated language; they exist in their application and usage and are, as noted earlier, in the process of evolving even when they appear intractably set. 2 A growing bibliography of anthropological and cultural texts addresses the tenacity and culture-generating power of food. Along with Farb and Armelagos' Consuming Passions, a representative sample should include Mary Douglas' Food and the Social Order (1984) and Implicit Meanings (1975), Jessica Kuper's The Anthropologists Cookbook (1977), Foster and Ranum's anthology Food and Drink in History (1979), Margaret Visser's The Rituals of Dinner (1991), Mary Anne Schofield's anthology Cooking by the Book (1989), and Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (1992), edited by Deane Curtin and Lisa Heldke. Among the many and diverse properties of food, its prevailing tendency to become an occasion, to take on a temporal dimension, to transform itself into a situation, is amply noted. The coffee break, the business lunch, the Sunday family dinner, the dinner date, the having of a drink, the wedding

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feast, are some of the most obvious. Roland Barthes' essay "A Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption," in Foster and Ranum's anthology, admonishes against the common assumption that food is "obvious" and, in that, "insignificant." Barthes notes that "especially to the scholar it connotes triviality or guilt" (167). He asserts to the contrary that when a person "buys an item of food, consumes it, or serves it, modern man does not manipulate a simple object in a purely transitive fashion; this item of food sums up and transmits a situation; it constitutes an information; it signifies" (168).1 So food is a language that we speak, for the most part, unwittingly. This is not so much the case when food and eating codes encompass or overlap religious doctrine, ritual, or feast-the Thanksgiving pumpkin pie, the lamb of Passover, the Christmas cookie, the wedding cake, the sacrificial bread and wine--con- or trans-substantiated. It is perhaps worth noting that we do not normally suffer social or self alienation so much from declining to partake of the food of the feast as we do if we violate those food codes involving dietary restrictions. It would seem better to not eat the "right/good" food than to eat the "wrong/bad" food. If we partake of the forbidden food we run the risk of irreparably disrupting our cultural identity. In this sense, the language of the body is given over to the language of the soul-orthodox-unorthodox, kosher-unclean, blessed and unblessed. The Levitical code is a case in point. While Levitical restrictions revolve around an ideology of wholeness, completion, and perfection, underneath we can see that matters of hygiene and social management are shaping the ideological surface. From my own experience in another "food language," I can recall as a child feeling destined for hell for having eaten a hamburger on a Friday, my North American Catholicism prohibiting "under penalty of mortal sin" the eating of meat on Friday. In 1963, a Papal encyclicalVatican II-rescinded this identifying linchpin of my youth, retaining it merely as a flimsy recommendation, one that my mother and her kind still, over thirty years later, are anxious that their children observe. While identification with the community of believers is the modern mainstay of communion rites, the more powerful and primitive underpinning of communion rites is an identification with the deity, made possible by and constituting a reparation, a healing-"Say but the word and I shall be healed" is the communicant's prayer. But before any New Testament act of reparation transpires through sacramental eating, there is the Fall of Genesis. In the beginning, and markedly so, the site of identification-as sinner-is oral. The Lord said: "Don't eat." But we did. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge meant that a distinction between man and God was destroyed. The Lord said: "Man is become as one of us, to know good and evil." It is in order to defend the remaining difference, the Otherness of the immortal God, that we are banished from the Garden and denied the food of divinity: "lest he put forth his hand, and take also from the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever."

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Our desire to eat still re-enacts our desire to know, to taste, to partake of the stuff of the gods. We eat to live and life is all we know of immortality. So it is that all eating bears the mark of transgression, of sin. Even more, it betrays our mortality with every mouthful. Hence, the blessing of food, the consecration of the bread and wine, the subjection to dietary restrictions, the significance of fast and abstinence. Of course, it is not only the Judeo-Christian cultures that treat eating this way. Muslim, Shinto, Buddhist, and Native American belief systems all attempt to restrict or "purify" or atone for eating as part of the identifying creed. Thoreau's might begin: "I believe in homegrown green beans." One thinks of Gandhi's monumental fasting, and of sacred cows here, there, and everywhere. The pursuit of the modern gods of Western culture likewise take the faithful to task at the oral. In seeking the image of God's likeness as defined in recent Body-by-Solo Flex ads, we are implicitly admonished to restrict the caloric intake. And with the zeal and piety of religious conviction, diet and lifestyle preachers like Richard Simmons and Susan Powter and their disciples seem to proclaim and profess: We shall eat no fat for surely God is not a fat lady. With a number of significant ideological registers in mind, I would suggest, not so very facetiously, that a concise and telling way to locate and define your cultural identity is to examine your reaction to the smell of bacon frying. In his essay "The Location of Cultural Experience" in Playing and Reality (1967), the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott asserts and examines a place in the topography of the mind for the experience of things cultural. According to Winnicott, that place or "potential space" where cultural experience occurs is located between the individual and the environment. He theorizes that this third area-one that is neither the domain of inner psychic reality nor the vast territory of external reality-is constituted by "the child's first use of symbol and the first experience of play" (96). He asserts that playing with these first symbols or "transitional objects" "expands into creative living and into the whole cultural life of man" (102). Things, to put matters simply, can go well or ill in this "potential space," as it is: that which initially both joins and separates the baby and the mother when the mother's love, displayed or made manifest as human reliability, does in fact give the baby a sense of trust or of confidence in the environmental factor.... It can be looked upon as sacred to the individual. ... By contrast, exploitation of this area leads to a pathological condition in which the individual is cluttered up with persecutory elements of which he has no means of ridding himself. (103)

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In one of only two endnotes to this paper, Winnicott discusses Merrill Middlemore's 1941 observations on the "infinite richness in the intertwined techniques of the nursing couple" (98). Winnicott attests that Middlemore "was near what I am attempting to state here" and suggests that this area of interest-the embodied relationship of the nursing child and mother--contains "rich material" "for us to observe and enjoy" provided "we are not simply thinking in terms of oral eroticism with satisfaction or frustration, etc." (98). Following up on Winnicott's hint and heeding his admonition to set aside issues of drive theory-libidinal or physiological-I find myself stating what surely must be the obvious: the body's first play is oral. Whether the infant creates its own fleeting objects in the form of tiny spit bubbles, or is playing at and with the mother's breast or bottle, or shoving a little fist or thumb in its mouth, the first forms of playing involve the mouth. In fact, I would suggest that the mouth figures as the prototypic "potential space," even in Winnicott's model of play. But beyond, or perhaps beneath, his model, the eating experience itself would seem to be a more universal bedrock of cultural initiation and experience than the experience of play. Repetition of and variations on the eating experience, on the manipulations of food in the mouth or hand and feelings of possession and power as well as dependence and attachment, especially given that we know most eating is not driven by biological hunger per se, would as readily produce "culture" as would permutations on infantile play. The case I wish to make here is not to contend with what Winnicott describes and theorizes from the point at which he takes up the question of cultural experience, but rather to assert that the first (and perhaps last) experience of culture is eating, and that even the model of playing is derivative of the model of eating. What's more, the relational space between mouth and food, and the attendant dynamic, conform to Winnicott's assertion that this space can be considered "sacred" and certainly can be made profane and poisoned "with persecutory elements of which he has no means of ridding himself" (10). The stern administering of castor oil or the witch's nasty brew are images that come easily to mind, as do the more commonplace images of children resisting the eating experience, wanting nothing to do with this or that particular spoonful of culture. Following again Freud's delineation of the instinctual judgment implicit in swallowing or not swallowing, it could fairly be said that our first aesthetic response to a cultural offering is either "I should like to eat this" or "I should like to spit it out." Julia Kristeva's meditation on abjection in Powers of Horror revisits this oral site of resistance to culture's offerings, beginning with the child's gagging response to the film of cream on proffered milk. Then too, having had enough of even something "good" to eat, the child is wont to use her food as a precocious creative medium long before she has access to tempera and easel.

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Substituting "eating" for "playing" in Winnicott's formulations may seem to contribute little to an understanding of, in Winnicott's words, "what life itself is about" (98). In fact, it would seem to suggest a reductive lowering of the human experience to the level of animal drive. After all, other predatory creatures are known to "play" with their food. But it is precisely because of the enormous complexity and creative ingenuity of human food systems that we rightly claim our distinction and superiority to other animals. Here I am referring not only to six-hundred-page cookbooks or the specific gustatory delights of everything from haute cuisine to Kentucky Fried Chicken, but to the very defining anthropology of the species-the ever-evolving technologies of agriculture, of food preservation and distribution, of food preparation and consumption. Samuel johnson's companion and biographer, James Boswell, offers an apt and insightful definition of a human being as "a cooking animal"-"No beast is a cook" (517). We might first be inclined to discount this distinction (as Barthes predicts scholars would) as trivial if clever, but there is a dull thud of acknowledgment and recognition that what separates us from other animals, indeed, what constitutes our cultural humanness, is fundamentally linked to this transformational power we exercise over what we ingest. Of course, this is not to say that everything is cooking and eating, anymore than to say that everything is playing. But to push the parallel just a bit further, I would suggest that Winnicott's definition of culture as "inherited tradition ... the common pool of humanity, into which individuals and groups of people may contribute, and from which we may draw if we have somewhere to put what we find" (99) (emphasis added) could be accessed more immediately and universally through eating than through playing. Male or female, infant or octogenarian, filthy rich or dirt poor, Parisian or Pakistani, fundamentally speaking, we have "somewhere to put what we find." Open wide. It is not so large a leap to move from these considerations of culture and the nature of human experience to the L words: language, lack, loss, and Lacan. And surely Lacan seems never at a loss for words about language: "Language is a subtle body, but body it is. Words are trapped in all the corporeal images that captivate the subject" (87). But, again, Kristeva may be even more to the point: When the object that I incorporate is the speech of the other, precisely a non-object, a pattern, a model, I bind myself to him in a primary fusion, communion, unification .... In being able to receive the other's words, to assimilate, repeat and reproduce, I become like him: ONE: a subject of enunciation. (1985:244)

Without belaboring the aural/oral shift of the site of incorporation, it is nevertheless important to note that language is something less (certainly other) than language if it doesn't end up in the mouth. Lingua means

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"tongue" before it means language. In Kristeva's depiction of language as the transforming "non-object" and means to subjective cultural identity, the subject "I" is acting as his or her own agent: incorporating, binding, receiving, assimilating, repeating, reproducing, becoming-"a subject of enunciation." Significantly, in her model the speech of the other is gendered masculine, suggesting in concert with Lacan that, indeed, it is the Law of the Father that initiates us (or through which we initiate ourselves) into culture. But before agency and subjectivity, before words are formed to fill the mouth of the child, we must remember that there is already the language of the body-the look, the touch, the warmth, the milk. First the mouth fills with milk-the maternal word-leaving a taste, beyond and before memory, that lasts a lifetime, and setting in motion the doomed if delightful repetition compulsion that is language. It isn't so much that speech is acquired at the mother's breast by the incorporation of the speech of the mother (or father); it is rather blackmailed or tricked into being: "If you name it, you won't lose it." The sad and sane truth of the matter is that even if you name it-however lyrical the ballad, whatever the litany of incantation, and no matter how exquisite the masochistic transformation enacted in the "Fort! da" of Beyond the Pleasure Principle-it is forever lost. Language is the first booby prize. Even when set to music and sung in whispered love, at its core, it is a lie-the first and grandest lie. Freud names the site and terms of the mortal struggle explicitly: "it is a battle of the giants that our nursemaids try to appease with their lullaby about heaven" (SE 21: 122). We may be placated, soothed by the poet's "endlessly rocking," but we are never filled. I am reminded again, here, of Faulkner's Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying as she similarly prefigures a Lacanian rendition of these things: "the word ... is just a shape to fill a lack ... words are invented by people who didn't have whatever the word named" (57). "Mama." "Cookie." It strikes me that there is a little noted coincidence in child development between the acquisition of vocabulary and the increase in the variation of the child's "edibles." The correspondence between the two expanding categories is certainly not direct, except insofar as the child will, as a matter of course, learn the names of what he or she is eating. But if we examine these two registers of cultural sophistication, linguistic sophistication-a standard cultural register, and dietary sophistication-a less common marker of cultural sophistication, it is at least likely that we'll find that a subject who puts a great variety of food in his or her mouth will be more linguistically mature and probably a more "cultured" subject than the person whose diet is undeveloped for reasons beyond the individual's control or choice. A collateral observation should also be noted: cultural or ethnic integrity necessitates integrity, or at the very least fidelity, in both registers-the Mother tongue is spoken and the menu is likewise mother's.

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In Food and the Social Order (1984), Mary Douglas addresses culture as produced and defined by eating habits by observing that "people choose what to eat, when and how often, in what order, and with whom .... It is disingenuous to pretend that food is not one of the media of social exclusion" (18). The obverse is, of course, also true. The breaking of the bread, the common board, the communal meal, the tastes and aromas of home, all create and enunciate an identifying cultural bond. I thought at this point to locate myself, to identify myself, not so much as a speaking subject, but as a North American middle-class eater. But that gives me pause. It is obvious, perhaps reductive, to observe that the cultural chaos and widespread technological and material plenitude of America have introduced a tremendous variety of food options for even suburban and rural eaters. Although it may not be "good" ethnic fare in all cases, it is now possible, even likely, to find little towns in Northern Michigan having drive-thru taco places, or to find German bratwurst (made in Wisconsin) available in Tampa, Florida, or to discover a wonderful Thai restaurant in Weaverville, North Carolina. In fact, restaurant "tourism" is popular entertainment and serious business. 4 What is more to the point, however, is the limited and peculiar menu that might be legitimately termed American. What is characteristic, identity-securing, American food? These things come to mind: hot dogs, corn on the cob, watermelon, hamburgers, fries, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, potato chips, jello, steak, malts, coca cola, chocolate chip cookies, ketchup, and popcorn. As I produced this brief (certainly incomplete and perhaps idiosyncratic) list, it struck me that these foods are almost all "cook out" foods, or, and what's more, are all eaten, with the exception of steak, without cutlery. (Jello is now made in a "finger jello" fashion, cut into simple or "cute" shapes "that children love.") Generally, these foods could be said to be undomesticated foods, not wild or raw things exactly, but not the least dependent on mother's recipe or a homey culinary touch. In fact, American food is mostly masculine: McDonald was a farmer before he put on a clown-face and costume to hawk a cheap alternative to homecooking; Hardees relies on the masculine pun; and Burger King with the Whopper (it takes two hands to handle 'em) out sells the dessert-linked Dairy Queen, the spokesperson for which is not a queen or even a girl, but Dennis the Menace. Risking further reductiveness, I would also suggest that what we most readily identify as "American" foods are those things we'd expect to find on a children's menu. American food comes compartmentalized, is eaten with fingers, off of unbreakable, disposable paper or cardboard or styrofoam, and is nutritionally suspect and gustatorily unchallenging. What's more American than the "Happy Meal," complete with the friendly plastic figure? The name promises a meaning. Language subsumes sustenance. What things we admit into our mouths and what we emit from them, then, are essential to our individual and cultural identities. What we will

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eat and what we won't-again the poet speaks, this time e. e. cummings sings for Olaf: "There is some shit I will not eat." And yet, what we will put in our mouths: BLT's, PCB's, DDT, MSG, gumballs called "sputniks," hohos, tostitos, burritos, moshu pork, egg foo yung, feta, fritos, boeuf tournedos, peppermint patties, hamburger patties, Danish pastries, Welsh pasties, edible panties, and, if push comes to shove, "kind of hard-tocatch" Bosnian black ants. For several years running, Billy Brandl, a redheaded boy in my grammar school class, now years later dead by his own hand, used to eat all the green crayons from out of his chunky box of fortyeight. I don't know if he ate them because he especially liked the green ones or especially disliked them. I didn't speak that language. In turning to the literary text to see how these matters might be manifested there, I find myself taking up the question of identity by framing it, out of conditioned reflex: Who's there? Who speaks? Whatever correlation there is between speaking and eating seems to recede dramatically, with eating and its images rendered "other" or trivial or impertinent in the face of the great and powerful Oz of the Symbolic. It would seem frankly absurd to take up a literary text by asking: Who eats? Yet it is precisely in the oppositional force and domain of these two giants that we exist as cultural beings, trying to appease both. Hence, the prayer before meals, the dinner conversation, the after-dinner speech, the menu itself that names what we eat-attempts to circumscribe, to civilize the pre-historic, preOedipal act of eating. But the primitive, infantile subtext that is whispered by every eating occasion contends with culture for supremacy. So that however multi-lingual and sophisticated the subject and no matter how refined or stylized the recipe, the saliva remembers and enunciates an undeniable identity: devourer, biter, lip-smacker, meat-grinder, Pavlovian drooler, mother-sucker, eater of things dead and dying. Enter Caliban. More and less than the subaltern, Shakespeare's embodied "other" stands "deformedly" at the border of nature and culture. Born of the "wicked dam" Sycorax, Caliban has possession of his island until Prospero-himself dispossessed of a kingdom-arrives and takes it from him. The method of conquest in The Tempest is not the mysterious silver bullet or the flash of ornate armor, but rather the lethal weapon of language. Cali ban understands the means of his fall: When thou cam'st first, Thou strok'st me and made much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries in't; and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night. (I, ii, 332-336)

What is more, Cali ban also knows that what he bartered with was his knowledge of the island, and more especially, his knowledge of what was edible and how to get it.

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By the beginning of the play Caliban already laments the deal, issuing in Act I his self-accusation: "Cursed be I that did so"(I, ii, 339)-that traded the knowledge and language of Nature for the name of the Father. His curse then moves from self to teacher. And it is significant that, although many readings of The Tempest assign the role of teacher to Prospero, it is his daughter Miranda who says: I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thous didst not, savage, Know thy own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes With words that made them known. (I, ii, 353-360)

It is in direct reply to Miranda that Caliban delivers his, as Houston Baker calls it, "meta-curse," and enunciates as he does the hallmark of the colonized: "You taught me language, and my profit on 't/ Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid youl For learning me your language" (I, ii, 363365). Prospero's side of the story describes the orphaned Cali ban being taken into Prospero's "own cell" until he seeks to violate Prospero's only woman, his girl-child Miranda. The Oedipal waters are only mildly murky here. But what is more to the point is that the exchange of knowledge, the cursed deal, is accomplished through the nurturing feminine and in the dual oral register: food for language, naming the bigger light (sun/son) for fetching food stuffs. 5 In a later scene between Caliban and Stepha no, a "drunken butler" is mistaken by Caliban for a great magician, and the exchange is temporarily reversed and thereby made even more explicit. Stephano plies Cali ban with liquor for knowledge, trying to get him to "talk," saying: "Come on your ways: open your mouth: here is that which will give language to you, cat. Open your mouth" (II, ii, 81-83). Possessed by Stephano's liquor, as he is already possessed by Prospero's language, Caliban offers up his only bounty-food knowledge: I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow; And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts, Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmoset; I'll bring thee To clustering filberts, and sometimes I'll get thee Young scamels from the rock. (II, ii, 163-168)

This follows his earlier offer to "show thee every fertile inch 0' th' island" and to "pluck thee berries" and "fish for thee, and get thee wood enough" (II, ii, 154-157). Upon reflection it strikes me that there is little in this list of offerings that sounds immediately mouth-watering, even to the English palate of the early seventeenth century. Fish and berries, surely, would not be unfamiliar dietary items, but a list that includes "nimble marmosets" and bitter

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"pignuts" or, worse yet, "scamels"-so exotic as to not make meaning even in the OED-seems designed to announce the alterity of matters as nothing quite like the suggestion of eating "unknowns" and "unmentionables" can. Marmosets are little gray monkeys. That matter aside, the extent of Cali ban's enslavement in the paradigm of the master's language is even more evident in his anthem of liberation: "Ban, Ban, Ca-Caliban / Has a new master: get a new man, / Freedom, highday!" (II, ii, 179-181). His drunken song of "freedom" is bitterly ironic with its yippee for a new master, the rum-soaked buffoon Stephano. It conveys the intractability of language's imprint, undercutting Prospero's assertion to the contrary when he says of Caliban: "A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick: on whom my pains, / Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost!" (IV, i, 189-191). It is perhaps a little curious that this play which is nearly all language and little action, except in the recounting of past or displaced action, is also very directly concerned with what constitutes human cultural identity. Clearly Cali ban and Ariel are cast as borderline figures to raise this very question. But it is Prospero's response to Miranda's question about the nature and genus of the "brave form" of Ferdinand, whom she has just encountered for the first time, which points the way. Miranda assumes that Ferdinand is radically "other"-"But 'tis a spirit" (I, ii, 413). To which Prospero replies categorically: "No, wench: it eats, and sleeps, and hath such senses / As we have, such" (I, ii, 414-415). First mortal identifier: it eats. And while Ferdinand's concern graduates quickly to another libidinal zone-"My prime request, which I do last pronounce, is (0 you wonder!) / If you be maid or no?"(I, ii, 426-428)-her answer, that she is certainly untainted, a maid, elicits from an amazed and delighted Ferdinand the other cultural identifier: "My language?" (I, ii, 431). Like her, he eats; like him, she speaks. Both oral markers are in place. It is also remarkable in a play which names eating and food stuffs so purposively that, except for reality-altering liquor, nothing is actually consumed. There is, however, Ariel's feast in which "strange shapes" are directed to bring in a banquet for the shipwrecked wayfarers. Alonso speaks the don't-Iook-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth lines: I cannot too much muse

Such shapes, such gestures, and such sound, expressing (Although they want the use of tongue) a kind Of excellent dumb discourse. (III, iii, 36-40, my italics)

The viands that Ariel produces for them prove to be, in fact, mere discourse; the banquet vanishes without nourishing, not unlike the banquet of steam and stones Shakespeare's other outcast Timon offers the fickle men of Athens. This discourse of disappearance and inedibility sets the limits of language. Some things, it would seem, can't be taken in, comprehended, or constituted by word. The figure of speech won't do. Nowhere is that more

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somatically the case than the mouth. While we can note that sexual fantasy, phone or even cyber sex will "do the trick," phantasmic food will not nourish. The word is never further from the thing, though irony may find them in the same orifice. The metaphor may produce meaning, but it won't put food in the mouth nor can it tell how a tomato tastes but by weak proxy. Doctor O'Connor of Djuna Barnes' Nightwood illustrates the absurdity of trying to make the metaphor literal: "Haven't I eaten a book too? Like the Angels and the prophets. And wasn't it a bitter book to eat.... And didn't I eat a page ... flay some and toss some into the toilet for relief sake-then think of Jenny without a comma to eat" (127). Think of poor Jenny with plenty of commas, but only commas, to eat. Before leaving Caliban and his identifying curses, we should consider the identity of the master, Prospero. At first glance, we might take him at his word. He is a man of language. His books are his power and his magic. But even Pro spero can't live on language, or his daughter's love. He needs to feed the flesh, and that requires Caliban's code. Prospero, too, undergoes a transformation or re-cognition in the exchange of language for food. While Cali ban, as well noted, curses the very deal that constitutes him as a speaking subject, Prospero instead confesses himself. With Caliban as the ostensible referent for "thing," Prospero ends by introducing Caliban to the others by saying: "this thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine" (V, I, 275). To be possessed of Caliban and eat his food is to be identified with him regardless of the distance attempted through the language of disdain for deformity, barbarity, or alterity. This thing, this craw, this hunger, this desire, this maw, this flesh, this mouth . . . I acknowledge mine. I am Caliban. Few examples in fiction resonate so profoundly of cultural identity being doubly if ambivalently located at the oral as a scene in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1947). I'm referring to the moment in mid-novel when the narrator confronts himself-his origin, his ethnicity, his very identity-in the manic eating of the street vendor's butter and brown sugar-soaked yams: I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom .... I no longer had to worry about who saw me or what was proper. To hell with all that .... What a group of people we were, I thought. Why you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked. (200)

His recollection of himself gives way to a rush of long suppressed aggression toward his social rival and psychic double, Willard Bledsoe. He fantasizes an obliterating attack on Bledsoe by publicly confronting him with what he knows to be Bledsoe's private, identifying desire: "a foot or two of chitterlings, raw, uncleaned and dripping sticky circles on the floor" (201). He spins out a full drama of accusation:

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Bledsoe, you're a shameless chitterling eater! I accuse you of relishing hog bowels! Ha! And not only do you eat them, you sneak and eat them in private when you think you're unobserved! You're a sneaking chitterling lover! (201)

He remarks further that this leveling accusation would be more devastating than accusing him of raping a ninety-nine year old, ninety pound, blind and lame woman. The comparison is significant in that it makes clear the distinction between the Oedipal action, however culpable, and the preOedipal oral identification. The operative word throughout is shame. At base he is not accusing Bledsoe, or himself in his reflection, of committing any guilty act, but of being something. Like Mansfield's Bertha Young, the narrator attempts a manic denial: "This is all very wild and childish." Yet however briefly, he does allow himself an uncensored pleasure in oral identification: "But to hell with being ashamed of what you liked .... I am what I am! ... 'Give me two more,' ... 'They're my birthmark,' ... 'I yam what 1 am' " (201). Even beyond the dismissible corniness of the pun, there is something here that announces manic hysteria, that resists or retreats from serious thought, and that would make of this epiphany of identity something trite, almost silly. Like Freud's laughing response to Rat Man's dream of the mother's "eaten body," the narrator's self-consciousness becomes giddy and the reader gladly follows suit. It is as if this much self recognition won't be confined to the logos of culture and consciousness-black or white. Yet identity has announced itself, despite the denials of mania and giddiness, in the ethos of appetite that won't be denied. 6 Leaving behind the poetics and economics of Shakespeare's island and the mania of Ellison's yam, I would like now to pursue the matter of the doubly-oral inflection of cultural identity by considering three roughly contemporary literary texts by women who might reductively be called metis, or culturally-crossed. If as Gayatri Spivak suggests in her essay "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985), we should not ignore the role of literature in the production and representation of culture, then it may be especially useful to examine texts that locate themselves in the interstices of cultures, in the cultural borderlands. Spivak also poses what many take to be cultural criticism's first question: "Can the subaltern speak?" These three texts-Erdrich's Tracks, Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea-go a long way toward addressing, and significantly complicating, the scholar's astute half-question, revealing at the same time as they do a pervasive concern for the other half of the oral: "What do they eat?" Or, more basic still: "Do they eat?" In Tracks (1988), Louise Erdrich, herself part Ojibwa, tells the story of a handful of reservation Indians living an uneasy and factional life at the margins, where a desperate blend of food needs and language, both spoken

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and on the legal page, constitute identity and life itself. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) was authored by a woman born in Dominica, whose father was Welsh and whose mother was a white West Indian. Rhys' culturally divided identity gives voice and substance to the "mad" Bertha of Jane Eyre. Maxine Hong Kingston has a similarly hyphenated culture identityChinese-American. Her book, The Woman Warrior (1976), depicts a battle with both her cultural past and present. The site of that struggle is persistently and convincingly the mouth. Of the many assertions that might be made by juxtaposing these works, perhaps the most remarkable has to do with the way these texts reveal a powerful ambivalence toward the business of the oral-both eating and speaking. By tracing what happens when these border figures speak or do not speak, and when and what they eat or refuse to eat, we may begin to plot a poetics of location that identifies these various cultural figures more certainly and intractably than all the politics that might be brought to bear on them. In Erdrich's Tracks, two storytellers compete to voice the truth. Nanabush, the old male narrator, loves the very words and foodstuffs that make their way into his mouth. More than a tale of meager subsistence and government-assisted and compromised life, Nanabush tells of the sustenance and pride that comes with eating good food taken from a clean hunt, and of the magic and potency that attends the spoken word. The connection with sexual potency is made explicit when his Margaret allays his doubts of virility after famine and illness: "as long as your mouth works, the other will" (129). Pauline is the other narrative voice of the text. Like a Cassandra in negative, we believe Pauline even though we realize she is mad. Hers is a destructive-greedy and ever unsatiated-mouth. This is not just a matter of her gossip going nasty and becoming a means through which she might take some pitiful measure of revenge for her meager spirit and limited body. More than that, Pauline's speech corrupts the very paradigm of knowing. The violence she does-in breaking the silence and secrets of the deathbed utterings she, in carrion fashion, harvests, or in revealing the secret of the child's paternity, or of the real or imagined secrets of woman's love medicine-is unmistakable. In a final scene, Pauline enunciates the lucid madness of conflating the two oral realms: "I shall not live by bread alone .... There's meat.... I want words from God's mouth" (199). Instead, Sister Saint Anne has offered the novitiate Pauline "broth strained from the boiled fins, tails, and mashed bones of a carp" (193) to which Pauline abjects: " 'You stink, ... you smell worse than this hell soup does. Take this slop away.' I clenched my jaw, and won a form of triumph" (194). Though she is forcibly fed the life-sustaining slop, she is forever denied her identifying desire.

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While Pauline violates language with language, Nanabush reveres it as sacred, and he trades in the Name of the Father with caution and concern. To Lulu, the child he rescues from non-identity by claiming paternity of her, he says: My girl, listen well. Nanabush is a name that loses power every time that it is written and stored in a government file. That is why I only gave it out once in all these years. No name, I told Father Damien when he came to take the church census. No name, I told the Agent when he made up the tribal role. (32-33) The sparseness of Nanabush's "lawful" language finds its parallel in the meagerness, to the point of incredibility, of his diet; at times he boils bits of his clothing for broth. He seems often to have nothing to put in his mouth, so little that he and his companions must attempt to live on word alone. It is that very lack, the lack of the bread of togetherness, that undoes the Indian cause and finds them, in their hungry divisiveness, selling the very source of their food for the white man's words: whiskey, chainsaws, pick-ups. In stark contrast to Pauline's and Nanabush's narrative voices, the most compelling voice in the story is almost never heard from. Fleur Pillager is the powerful and beautiful possessor of Indian life and magic. Unlike the others she avoids Cali ban's cursed way of collaboration, as attested to by her relative silence. One of the few times we hear of Fleur speaking is when she is being raped by the settlement men in the smokehouse. She had asked to be "dealt in," to be allowed to play cards and gamble with the men at work. It is her silence and self-possession when winning that is intolerable to them. Their cocky miscomprehension-"the Squaw can't bluff" (20)fuels their violent attack. Despite Fleur's formidable resistance, the three men assault her, with Pauline and the young boy Russell listening in the shadows. Pauline remembers: I closed my eyes and put my hands on my ears, so there is nothing more to describe but what I couldn't block out: the yells from Russell, Fleur's

hoarse breath, so loud it filled me, her cry in the old language and our names repeated over and over among the words. (26)

Years later, it is Fleur's magnificent final act of defiance-felling the forest that had been swindled from her-which brings the narrative to a close. But it is her self-nurturing and preserving silence that is most signifying. Her decision not to drink the white man's whiskey and not speak his words, not even to plead for mercy in his language, marks her strength and integrity and, above all, her self-possession. In a very different cultural context, though just a few states to the southwest and in strikingly similar terms, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior presents us with a wide range of speaking and non-speaking, of eating and non-eating. In fact, these two oral functions seem to serve as the

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very axes of a cultural identity grid in the text, with speech being the more expected gauge, though not necessarily the more compelling. The two conspicuous voices of the text are the "nameless" narrator and her mother, Brave Orchid, who is said to "talk-story" in response to all the real and phantasmic struggles of life, first in pre-revolutionary China and then in San Francisco's Chinatown. Like Nanabush in Tracks, Brave Orchid is the consummate trickster. She deploys speech tactically and strategically, to fool the slave seller, to exorcise "ghosts," to trick the jealous gods into thinking her children aren't worth stealing by remarking how ugly they are or giving them pejorative "pet names": "Good night, Little Dog." The impact of Brave Orchid's language, whether speaking true or false, is remarkable, as her daughter/narrator recognizes: "At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of a great power, my mother talking-story.... She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fu Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman!" (19-20).

The less lyrical end of the spectrum of speech is likewise given its formative and powerful due: "There is a word for the female 'I'-which is 'slave.' Break the women with their own tongues!" (47). Certainly the potency of language as subject-maker is not to be underestimated. But what I find especially engaging in this text, the underpinning movement of which is the construction or recognition of identity-individual, cultural, even mythical-are the many moments when both kinds of mouthwork coincide. These include what might be dismissed as just thatco-incidental-as when Fourth Aunt recounts the failed attempt by Fourth Uncle to sell faggots and yams because he would not "shout" his wares: "Starving to death, his wife and children starving to death, and he's too damned shy to raise his voice" (51). In the narrator's own childhood, too, there were such double valence co-incidences; learning language and earning even the best bits of language ("I got straight Ns, Mama") was measured against the other oral value: "You can't eat straight Ns" (46). In another way there is a curious concurrence of issues of eating and speaking in the encounter staged by Brave Orchid between her newly emigrated sister, Moon Orchid, and Moon Orchid's Americanized physician husband. He categorically disavows his old-world wife and repudiates his former self, saying: "It's as if I had turned into a different person" (152). Yet it is his initial, nearly hysterical, response to the return of the repressed, embodied as it is in the form of the abandoned Moon Orchid, which puts both mouthwork issues together. He answers the accusation, "How could you ruin her old age?" with revealing if impeccable logic: "She has had food . ... Look at her. She'd never fit into an American household. I have important American guests who come inside my house

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to eat." He turned to Moon Orchid, "You can't talk to them. You can barely talk to me." (153) (emphasis added)

Moon Orchid's response is to cover her mouth, hiding her face and rejected identity in her hands. But Brave Orchid, turning to a convention of American culture, insists, of all things, that he invite them to lunch! "Don't you owe us a lunch? At a good restaurant?" (154). That they then proceed to "do lunch" together is reported without description or dialogue. Moon Orchid's subsequent descent into institutionalized madness is likewise given in terms of the oral: "Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over" (159). Yet it is also registered that with the commonality of mental asylum food, the other cultural barrier comes do,,\,n: "We understand one another here. We speak the same language, the very same" (160). And while they eat the same food, we are given to understand that a distance persists for Moon Orchid; she is able to assimilate too little of even this community of madness. She "grows" very thin. This side of whatever universalizing of cultural identity comes with madness, Kingston also pays profound attention to the identity-producing power of mouthwork. At every turn, telling or not telling is at issue: "Don't tell." Don't put certain words or names in your mouth. And at every turn, eating and edibles are at issue: " 'Eat! Eat!' my mother would shout at our heads bent over the bowls, the blood pudding awobble in the middle of the table" (92). With the litany of foodstuffs in this text-the raccoons, hawks, snakes, snails, black-skinned bantams, "four- and five-day leftovers" with "brown masses" that "sometimes sat on every dish" (92), ducks' tongues and monkeys' lips-and in the context of descriptions of legendary Chinese eaters, the narrator "tells" with alienating and graphic detail of "bird screams and the thud, thud of the turtles swimming in the boiling water, their shells hitting the sides of the pot" (91), and of the glass jar in which her mother "kept a big brown hand with pointed claws stewing in alcohol and herbs" (91), and of the Old World delight in eating the live brains of a collared monkey. (Perhaps a Caliban-caught marmoset.) All of this and more give special credence to the revelation that Brave Orchid's power was dual-faceted. Not only was there great power in her ability to talk-story, but her strength was attributed to her ability to "eat anything." In this culture "all heroes are bold toward food" (88). "My mother could contend against hairy beasts whether flesh or ghost because she could eat them, and she could not-eat them on the days when good people fast" (92). However powerful Brave Orchid is, hers is the power of acceptance, of incorporation, of possession. And while we must acknowledge the imperatives of eating and the desire for and in language, we find in this text as well a compelling case for the power of refusal at the oral site, the other side of the story of oral judgment. The two figures who best enact this oral "otherness" are the immutably silent Chinese-American classmate-who, though she is able to speak and reads aloud, does not otherwise speak, even

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under the narrator's torturous assault-and the "unmentionable" aunt who dies rather than speak the name of the father of her child. Both these figures-with their lips forever sealed-speak forcefully. It is perhaps not coincidental that the "quiet one" who does not speak so much as her own name under the mashing duress and desperate pleadings of the narrator, also refuses the offer of candy. She admits neither of these culturally corrupt bits into her mouth. And it is likewise not merely coincidental that the silent aunt's "spite" suicide signifies itself as such by her having drowned herself in the village's drinking water, letting her body curse them by contaminating what they need to put in their mouths. The battles that are waged in The Woman Warrior seem indeed to visit and revisit the oral domain, so that it seems like some contested Holy Land, forever disputed. The cultural identity that emerges for the narrator from this struggle is cast in negation and defiance, and fittingly, in terms of eating and speaking. "I stopped checking bilingual on job applications" (205) is not so much a matter of the limitations of dialect, but of the more profound and inherent denial of the implicit identity of language. Her parallel refusal to cook or to feed people, or to burn the food when she cooks, is likewise identity-girl, slave, daughter, cowbird-denying. But it is her desire to "live on plastic" (92), to refuse the food of her mother's kitchen and culture, that makes her alien. She muses instead on a mythic identity: "If I could not-eat, perhaps I could make myself a warrior like the swordswoman who drives me" (106). Failing such mythic not-eating, she selects a logos and a diet that makes her most other to the live monkeybrain eaters: I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, t.V. dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. (204)

Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea invites further consideration of the way matters of the mouth both generate and destroy identity. Before turning to the text itself, I want to take up briefly a related issue raised by Gayatri Spivak. In her reading of Rhys' novel in "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," Spivak casts the narrative denouement-mad Bertha's plunging to a flaming death from Rochester's attic-as "an allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism, the construction of a self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer" (270). I want to suggest instead that to read Antoinette/Bertha as a prototypical "self-immolating colonial subject" denies her agency and identity even more categorically than Bronte did by leaving mad Bertha the "unknowable" mystery of identity in Rochester's attic, perhaps even more than by his re-naming her. I propose reading

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Antoinette, even in her madness and defeat, as no more allegorical a figure than the others in the text, and, in fact, as a formidable agent despite, or because of, her convoluted individual and cultural identity. The story, told by two narrative voices which alternate without announcement, is set in nineteenth-century Jamaica and involves an extended and finally lethal encounter through a calculated marriage between a "second son" Englishman (who goes unnamed throughout the narrative) and Antoinette Cosway, a beautiful, culturally-crossed West Indian Creole heiress. Resented by the recently freed slaves of her Coulibri environs, with whose culture she is profoundly identified-she speaks their language, eats their food, and believes in the same magic-Antoinette comes to terrible terms with the loss of that identity and the unassimilability of another, even though she is renamed by its representative. Antoinette resists to the bitter end the violence of being colonized and re-Christened: "'Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know that's obeah too" (147). Like the strategically silent figures in Tracks and The Woman Warrior, Antoinette will resort to silence. While it may be possible to read her abdication of speech as evidence of impending madness, or as impotent and sullen resignation in the face of her marital or material defeat, it is important to note that her narrative voice persists as fully reliable and that, in fact, she has the final "say" in terms of the narrative. That her suspension of speech is an act of volition, even revolution, rather than a lapse into psychosis, is demonstrated in the last speaking encounter between her and her Englishman husband, in which she speaks for a "nameless" island boy who cries to be taken along to England. The husband is the narrator in this scene of multiple ironies: She had followed me and she answered. I scarcely recognized her voice. No warmth. No sweetness .... "He knows English," she said, still indifferently. "He has tried very hard to learn English." "He hasn't learned any English that I can understand," I said. And looking at her stiff white face my fury grew. "What right have you to make promises in my name? Or to speak for me at all?" "No. I had no right, I am sorry. I don't understand you. I know nothing about you, and I cannot speak for you." (171) In this way Antoinette not only disavows any skimpy marital rights she may have felt as this Englishman's wife, but in denying knowledge of her husband and forfeiting any claim on speech, she essentially and ostensibly abdicates her subjectivity. But like the drinking water spite suicide, Antoinette's verbal self-annihilation signals a defiance, a refusal to be any longer possessed by her husband-his desire or his language. "She was silence itself" (172).

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Although there is surprisingly little mention of menu in this "exotic" text, the instances when it is mentioned, or conspicuously absent, seem all the more significant. The first reference to eating is lethal. We hear of death resulting from eating the wrong thing: Antoinette's mother's horse is poisoned. We also learn within the first few pages that Antoinette spends most of her time in the kitchen, which is not attached to the main house, and that her family's cook/attendant and Antoinette's surrogate parent, Christophine, sleeps near the kitchen. The full reality of Antoinette's isolated, nearly orphaned state, is conveyed in a double-edged, perhaps easily overlooked, line: "As it was late I ate with them instead of by myself as usual" (75). How usual is it for an eight-year-old, in any culture, to routinely eat alone? It is also with reference to what she eats that Antoinette conveys her ambivalence to her social identity which was originally that of a (white) Creole but was recast by the more recent association with her mother's new English husband: "We ate English food now, beef and mutton, pies and puddings. I was glad to be like an English girl but I missed the taste of Christophine's cooking" (51). It is curious that while we are told of specific English foods, and later of specific convent food ("hot coffee and rolls and melting butter"), we are never told what it is that Christophine cooks. In fact, there is only a tangential reference to "fruits and vegetables" presented to Christophine by the island girls who were afraid of her obeah magic. The one specific mentioning of native fare is the "boiled green bananas" prepared by Antoinette and her sole childhood playmate, a black girl named Tia. "We boiled green bananas in an old iron pot and ate them with our fingers, out of a calabash and after we had eaten she slept at once" (23). Except for this, unlike the case and curse of Cali ban, the language of the island-its patois and its edibles-remains powerfully undisclosed. That the knowledge of what is eaten is knowledge of the eater comes across unmistakably in the paranoid concerns voiced by Antoinette's mother to her new hyper-rational husband. In an effort to convince him to take them away from the Coulibri estate, she concludes a listing of arguments against staying in Jamaica with: "They invent stories about you, and lies about me. They try to find out what we eat every day" (32). Both businesses of the oral, what is spoken and what is eaten, are at issue here. And so I read the kept secret of what Antoinette natively eats as a significant mark of her impenetrable, unbartered identity as much as her otherness. I also think it worth noting that after the first section of the book, narrated from Antoinette's point of view, virtually all reference to alimentation is liquid: cool drinks are offered, accepted and declined; unable to put into words what happened to her at the hands of taunting children, Antoinette tries to drink the milk proffered by the convent nun, but chokes; both Antoinette and her husband attack their deadlocked fears with rum. They only reference to an admixture is the white powder potion/poison that Antoinette begs from Christophine to use to try to rekindle her husband's

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passion, if not love. Food solids are refused or invisible, contributing to the mounting unnaturalness and alienation of the narrative. Two oral moments do, however, penetrate the text and in both instances the mouth is Antoinette's. The first occurs after her husband acknowledges that he doesn't love her and then refuses to allow her to drink more of the reality-numbing rum. He narrates: "I managed to hold her wrist with one hand and the rum with the other, but when 1 felt her teeth in my arm 1 dropped the bottle .... My arm was bleeding and painful and 1 wrapped my handkerchief round it, but it seemed to me that everything around me was hostile.... There was nothing 1 knew, nothing to comfort me" (148149). The second time Antoinette-now Bertha, locked away under Grace Poole's gin-laced guardianship-bites, is in reaction to her step-brother's words: "I cannot interfere legally between yourself and your husband." Grace Poole tells her that "it was when he said 'legally' that you flew at him and ... you bit him" (184). Her primitive, pre-Symbolic response to the law of brother-father-husband must be read not so much as regression to the psychotic infantile but as assertion of something primal and irreducible. Although, or because, she has lost all control and identification with culture-"What am 1 doing in this place and who am I?" (180)-she does manage to articulate herself with her teeth. Her final word seems to both lament and forgive; she invokes the word "Tia," naming the girlfriend of her childhood, who later threw the jagged stone of alterity, betraying and breaking their identifying bond: "We had eaten the same food" (45). The Englishman, too, confronts the uncanny power of the oral, though, as we might expect, he does so only through the prophylactic of the Symbolic. No boiled bananas licked from fingers for him. No sir. He encounters the "idea" of eating, of consuming and being consumed by something, when looking at the few books resting on a crude bookshelf in what was the (step) father's room: "Byron's poems, novels by Sir Walter Scott, Confessions of an Opium Eater, some shabby brown volumes, and on the last shelf, Life and Letters of . .. The rest was eaten away" (75, emphasis added). His very next words are a letter: "Dear Father" (We might imagine: "who art back in England with your beloved first-born son, my brother, while my life and my very identity are at mortal risk in this place with this other, a mysterious woman-wife, and her black magician cook; I am in danger of being engulfed by this green menace from out the maternal sea . . . ) Although I've referred to Antoinette's husband as Rochester, taking the name from Bronte's text, it is of no small significance that his name, like the name of the life that is eaten away on the shelf, is never mentioned in Rhys' novel. Like names, identity in this place is lost, or irretrievably altered, or, at least symbolically, eaten away. And the green parrot Coco, with its wings clipped for domestication sake, sings out in a language less foreign than French: Qui est Ia? Qui est Ia? Any reply of substance must more than name the subject. However unwillingly or unwittingly, the articulation of "who" encounters at least the aftertaste of

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mother's language as much as the bland morphemes of father's. The breath of identity must make its way through the mouth-a territory already claimed by the maternal, no matter what name is inserted there. Before setting aside these issues of identity and culture, I would be remiss not to mention another text which, like the three works I've discussed here, is situated self-consciously "at the margins" of cultural identities, and, as in the case of Kingston's book, trespasses wantonly across the tidy lines of genre. I'm referring to Audre Lourd's Zami (1986), which she herself designates a "biomythography" and which catalogers file under "feminist studies." Anyone familiar with this vital and resonant text will not be surprised at finding it cited here. There is hardly a page of this tale of search and arrival at identity-Zami: A New Spelling of My Namethat is not imbued with the tastes, aromas, images, or concerns of food. More than a pre-occupation, food preparation, sharing, and savoring fuel and guide its affective and material progression. There are everyday foods like the buttered English muffins purchased for a dime at the Second Avenue Griddle; there are the succulent vegetables and peculiar fragrant pieces of dried meat discovered in Chinatown; there are expensive but tasteless party snacks served by uptown lesbians; and loving meals of "extra thin spaghetti, some fresh parsley, half a pound of chicken hearts, and a packet of powder milk" (205) to be had for seventy-five cents. She writes of the "delicious and magical and precious" (67) tastes of her father's food, eaten from off his plate in the back room of his office, and of how these tastes formed the fondest and closest moments shared with her father. And without exception, food shared by lovers becomes essential to the loving and finally to the lovemaking. One passage in particular stands out as conveying the identity-producing power of intimate connection with food. The scene is the narrator's mother's kitchen on the occasion of the girl's first menses. She is using for the first time her mother's prized West Indian mortar and pestle to pound the spices for her cherished souse-garlic, raw onion, salt, black pepper, a bit of celery top. As she performs this archaic and simple task-"Thud push rub rotate up ... Thud push rub rotate up"-she undergoes the epiphany of self-recognition: as her mother's woman child, as a sensuous and desiring body, and as a source of something "warm, shameful, but secretly utterly delicious" (77). This sense of herself as something "delicious" intones the ultimate in culturally and maternally inflected selfknowledge: self-love. I am good enough to eat. Finally, I suppose little is gained by a simplistic revision of Spivak's seminal question "Can the subaltern speak" to "Can the subaltern eat," or even by a logical declension that asks what the subaltern should eat or what words she should put in her mouth. To and from whom? And at what

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peril? Recalling Caliban raises the inevitable peril of collaboration with culture-colonizing or native. But, however these questions are addressed, it must be noted that the question of eating needs to be answered, at least minimally, before questions of language can be anything but academic. Hunger, real hunger, must be a profound identifier. So it may be: Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, they shall be filled. More blessed, at least for the full-bellied moment, by kind rather than degree, than those who just plain hunger and thirst. I have had few encounters with real adult hunger, but one such experience underwrites much of this chapter. I was visiting another of the world's great cities, Chicago, and was treating my provincial self to the delights of Michigan Avenue. From Bloomingdales and Henri Bendel's I walked south past the Watertower and Saks and the new multi-story Victoria's Secret, and I stopped in at Stuart Brent's and bought a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing (I have not yet read it), all the while knowing that I was most intent on entering the little shop next to the bookstore to buy a supply of the most wonderful, fresh caramel corn imaginable. There was no queue trailing out the door and down a stretch of the block, as is often the case, so I was able to make my purchase without delay-a big, but not obscene, bag of the caramel corn for $7.00 or $8.00 and a decent size bag of the mighty good cheese popcorn as well. I quickly dismissed any thought of waiting to indulge until I was back in my hotel room, and with some attempt at civility, discretely reached into first one bag and then the other, slipping small handfuls at a time into my liplicking mouth. I was nearing the Wrigley Building and river when I noticed a man approaching me. He was a black man of slight build, wearing the clothes and look of the dispossessed. I thought too late to avoid eye contact, yet I kept walking, feeling somewhat uneasy about what was to happen. His request was simple and disarming: "Excuse me, Ma'am. I hate to bother you. But could I have some of what you're eating?" He continued talking, explaining himself and his predicament-he had just three days earlier arrived in Chicago from New Orleans and the guy he was to connect with for a place and a job was not to be found and he didn't have a place to stay and hadn't had anything to eat in a day and a half. I had stopped walking and half-turned toward him as he spoke. Then, in what was a deft and really classy manner, he managed to handle my unspoken concern for hygiene and my wariness of his otherness, by gesturing with cupped hands and head feints, and patiently guided my dumb hands to scoop up and serve him first one handful and then another of the still warm caramel corn. We started walking again, side by side, me digging into the caramel corn and dishing it up, one fistful for him and one mouthful for me, and I offered at one point for him to try the cheese popcorn as well. He declined. Somewhere near the middle of the walkway of the Michigan Avenue bridge he stopped and reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a dollar bill

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and some small change. "Another lady gave me this a little while ago. It's all I have. Would you sell me what's left in that bag for this?" I'm still somewhat dumbfounded by my response. With what I can only describe as a sibling's gentle bickering, I argued to keep some for myself. I said we could share. So together we stood there on the bridge, divvying up the caramel corn. He asked and gestured to me to sprinkle some of the cheese kind in as well, and I recall thinking that was "good" and feeling the sort of satisfaction that comes from introducing a friend to a new recipe or restaurant find. I think (hope) he got the bigger bag. We parted company then; he told me his plan was to go and sit "down there" along the river embankment and eat the corn; I crossed the bridge and continued down Michigan Avenue, deciding to pay a visit to the Art Institute and Cezanne's tulips before heading back to the hotel. When I began to think about the oral link of culture and identity, I tried to conjure up some cooking images of my father's mother, who was a local legend for her Bohemian round rye bread and soft molasses cookies. Although I have those recipes and memories of her warm kitchen on Wollmer Street, this is a troubled tie. There is always in my mind the story of how each fall on the farm north of town she would slit the necks of geese to make the blood soup that was another of her specialties. When I recall this image, I feel more kinship with the Hmong boy who is struggling to learn the first bits of my language, having spent ten of his eleven years in a camp in Thailand, but who snacks with me on Peanut M and M's, than with my grandmother. Each year I plant a modest kitchen garden between the neighbor's fence and the garage. Half dozen tomato plants, a couple rows of green bean and peas that the rabbits (this year they've nested in the woodpile inside the useless garden fence) reduce to slim pickings, a zucchini plant or two, lately some broccoli, and some of the pretty herbs-dill, parsley, sweet basil. Then, too, there are a few hardy raspberry bushes that survive my unschooled autumn pruning, a big and showy rhubarb, a small but mightily overgrown asparagus plot, and chives to supply, as my father would say, "Coxie's army," whoever that is. This is no show piece, no victory garden, this plot of twenty by thirty feet. It is just a way I imagine myself connected to a race of bean and berry pickers. So that in this we speak the same language, the very same.

CHAPTER THREE

Lesser Crimes: Anorexia's Plea One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small And the one that mother gives you Won't do anything at all -Grace Slick, "White Rabbit"

I

n 1970 I was arrested for disorderly conduct. I had, rather half-heartedly to tell the truth, gone with my socially conscious roommate to protest Sentry Foods for selling California grapes. Although war protests were more the rage at the time, I had never participated in them, mostly, I think, because my younger brother was serving in Vietnam. My personal and social consciousness could more comfortably converge in objecting to the exploitation of migrant workers by money-grubbing fruit growers and their profiteering collaborators on Milwaukee's Oakland Avenue. So, on this my maiden protest voyage, I carried a hand-stenciled sign that read: SAY NO TO GRAPES. There were other placards bearing similarly brief messages, but their precise wording escapes me. I do recall, however, that there were no expansive messages, no leaflets or mini-tracts of middle-class socialism. Only those sparse imperatives. We were to walk in a circle of sorts, not really blocking the entrance to the supermarket, but strolling across the entrance way and circling out into the driveway and parking lot. The first twenty minutes were just awkward. I found myself feeling rather silly, unconvinced and unconvincing. But my roommate's conviction was sustaining if not contagious. I didn't see the assistant manager come out of the store, but as he accosted us I caught a glimpse of his Sentry name badge peeking out from under his half-zipped nylon jacket. I'm sure he was directing his remarks to all seven or eight of us when he said, "You'll have to leave the property. There's no loitering allowed." But it was my sign that he happened to try to confiscate. As he grabbed hold of it, I yanked back. My tugging at the bottom, with his grip acting as a fulcrum, caused the top half of the sign to flap out at his face, scraping his cheek and nose and sending his glasses to the pavement. My apologies were sincere and profuse, but finally insufficient. The police arrived almost instantly, as I was handing him back the glasses I had hastily scrambled to retrieve. 67

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There, in the parking lot, the investigating officer interviewed the sheepish pack of us, hinting that other, more serious, charges---conspiracy, criminal damage, assault-were possibilities. Then he asked if I would stipulate "no contest" to a lesser "disorderly conduct" charge and pay the $35 citation. "Yes. But will my parents find out about this?" was my quick reply. "Not unless you tell 'em." I never did. I recount this brief episode of my undergraduate days, not because of the ironic "no" to food that the placard pronounced, and not even because telling a long-kept secret might free some little space in my soul, but because I think it suggests how fine the line between order and disorder really is-especially in the great range and complexity of oral matters. A little tug here, a little disorder there. Sixty minutes a day of aerobic exercise is healthy, sixty-five is excessive for some. Fasting one day a week is fashionable discipline, fasting three days a week is obsessive. Choosing "fat free" is smart, cringing at the thought of butter is borderline. Whenever I come across the now commonplace term for problems with eating-eating disorders-there is this faint echo from my misdemeanor past. What does it mean to have an eating dis-order? Is this, too, on some other level, copping to a lesser charge? Most often, of course, disordered eating refers to eating too much, too often as to become obese, or eating too little and too seldom as to become too thin. But it could mean idiosyncratic eating habits-eating only green things, let's say-that do not directly affect body size or integrity. Medical and social science has responded to the variety of these and other eating disorders with an array of categorical and sub-categorical labels: bulimia, bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa, anorexia mirabilis, binge-eating, gorging, purging, overeating. Underwriting the entire category of disordered eating is the assumption that eating, like other culturally controlled acts, ought to be "ordered." But unlike the bulk of culturally and psychically ordered things, eating is in some fundamental way outside the Symbolic order to begin with, primitively and irrepressibly the mark and measure of the pre-genital, of the maternal. If we note generally that the very range of "order" is subject to the vicissitudes of culture, we might also note that nowhere is this more evident than in matters of the ideal body, especially the female body. It is well documented and much rehearsed that over the past three decades insurance companies' "ideal weight" charts have lowered the norm for men, by 15 pounds to 162 for a 5'10" adult male, and for women by a disproportionate 12 pounds to 121 for a 5'5" adult female. More telling than this by its commercial and cultural impact is the explosion of the diet industry, complete with an avalanche of diet guides, exercise tapes and tools, fitness clubs, slimming products, fat-free and nutra-sweetened everything. The latest item to hit the market place and stomachs of the western world is a fake fat product, promising slimming hope to fried food lovers everywhere. To

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add immediacy, if not urgency, to the quest for lean-bodiedness, it is possible to cruise the network and cable channels anytime of day or night to find half a dozen or more stations pitching thinness in the guise or form of health, exercise, beauty and, of course, happiness. Yet all this is anything but advocating dis-order. In fact it preaches a hyper-order, a control of appetite, of unsightly bulges, of the body itself. As historians Carolyn Walker Bynum (Holy Feast, Holy Fast [1987]) and Joan Brumberg (Fasting Girls [1989]) make abundantly clear, disordered eating isn't new. And, clearly, long before medical or social science tracked individual alimentary pathologies or medieval religious fasting, the poets and recorders of even our distant past tell of eating and non-eating that was aberrant-nay, sinful: gluttony is the first of the seven deadliest. On the other hand, Romans were the noblest of bulimics, publicly bingeing and purging in marble vomitoriums. But that was okay-the order of the day. All this is to say that to write about eating disorders in this late twentieth-century culture must, by definition, be other than writing about our cult of thinness-the Kate Moss ideal, the trials of Oprah and Liz and Roseanne, or even the amazing increase in the popularity of medical interventions such as liposuction, stomach-stapling, and tummy-tucking. Ironically, it is harder today than ever before, at least by inches and pounds, to be considered an eating disordered person. In a place of abundance, but in a normalizing climate of a universal drive to leanness, the "ordered" dieting, even fasting, girl merely impersonates the pathological. In this chapter I intend to narrow my focus to dangerously disordered anorexia, as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as manifesting most if not all of the following symptomatology: a refusal to maintain normal body weight; loss of more than 25% of original body weight; disturbance of body image; phobia of becoming fat; no known medical illness leading to weight loss; hyperactivity; and amenorrhea. I will forego discussion here of the dangerously uncontrolled eater, who produces a body so big as to be life-threatening if not finally lethal, except to note that many studies point to surprising similarities in these opposing disorders. I hope to explore two questions that have been, to my mind at least, unsatisfactorily addressed even by the considerable volume of work that has been done on anorexia: why women and why now? Some quite creditable accounts of the former-Kim Chernin's The Hungry Self (1985), Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight (1993), and Mara Selvini Palazzoli's Self-Starvation (1972) among the bestl-point to the inevitability of women being more easily "infected" by pathological eating disorders because of their historical and cultural closeness to matters of food, its preparation, and its consumption. It is the quintessential female metier. These accounts, to varying degrees, trace the important and undeniable effects of patriarchal, scopophilic, objectifying culture that has long

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shaped and shocked and shamed the female body into girdles and fat farms and frailty. The female consciousness has not only been co-opted in this regard, it has often anticipated and cultivated the context. Most women, I would venture, find fat as unappealing as men. In fact, women seem to outdo men in disliking the fat that is equated with the feminine. But these accounts, even the most psychological of them, seem to remain and stall at consciousness. And we might still be somewhat surprised and unsatisfied to find such full-bodied studies as Bordo's Unbearable Weight conclude with generic appeals to a change in cultural values, insisting that as the body is a cultural construct, the cure is in breaking down the dualistic thinking of the culture. Or we might be perplexed, even vexed, to read in Joan Brumberg's Fasting Girls (1988) that the pathogenic force or agent of this devastating illness is flatly given as "shame." The question remains. What is the basis of the affect? Ashamed of what? This is more than faintly tautological-a clinical and critical cui de sac. In exploring the subject of anorexia, I will consider theoretical worktexts that directly address disordered eating as well as pertinent psychoanalytic texts-and I will take up a handful of literary representations of disordered eating, including Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747), Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock (1927), Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman (1969), and Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853). Together they are somewhat of a transhistorical sampling, but I must also note that there is a surprising paucity of "good" representations of anorexia in fiction, even contemporary fiction. I will not digress to speculate on this fact other than to suggest that it is perhaps in the very nature of fullfledged anorexia that there is little or nothing to depict. The page, like the anorexid body, shrinks, fades, and erases itself. Having suggested that the realm of the unconscious is virtually overlooked by cultural, medical, and behaviorist accounts of anorexia, it would seem appropriate to turn to the field of psychoanalysis to address the matter. And, as I noted in earlier chapters, Freud, Karl Abraham, and especially Melanie Klein, focus considerable theoretical attention and clinical work on the oral stage. But, in part because anorexia-at least as an emblematic and widespread disorder-post-dates these theorists, and in part, I conjecture, because anorexia has been taken up territorially by behaviorists and clinical specialists, and because the American medical community gives little credence to psychoanalytic theory, relatively little psychoanalytic focus has been brought to bear on the subject. What might a psychoanalytic take on anorexia suggest? Can it push our understanding of the phenomenon beyond the limits of cultural criticism and medical intervention? In a speculative, but I hope responsible and productive fashion, I will consider anorexia both against and with some basic psychoanalytic tenets, namely Freud's description and notion of "Fort!-da"

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and masochism, his discussion of negation, Abraham's understanding of the oral experience in human development, and Klein's delineations of early childhood mechanisms of introjection/incorporation, aggression, guilt, and reparation. I hope to suggest an answer to the pivotal question: what at base is the anorexic saying "no" to when she says "no" to food. First, it is necessary to bear in mind that the anorexic is consciously doing what she wants to do-even though that desire is cast in the negative. Her refusal to eat is on some level at least pleasurable-fulfilling a desire. On the conscious level we have the rejection of food and with it a string of food side effects: body fat, mature femaleness-including breasts, hips, tummy, menstruation, fertility-and, withal, the lack of control that is threatened by appetite. What is said to begin as a culturally conditioned desire to be physically, even sexually, appealing, produces for some a form, a body, that has grossly missed that aim. A quick scan of pornography bears out the point: the anorexic body is not in any "normal" sense erotic. The opposite, it should be observed, is not true of the corpulent female body. Whole sections of the pornographic library are devoted to fat women, but nary an anorexic is to be found. The alleged aim of "attractiveness" must be questioned. The opposing and somewhat facile observation, that anorexia is most commonly found among adolescent and newly post-pubescent women, and that an ambivalent desire for and dread of sexual maturity is at the heart of the disorder, fails to fully explain the anorexic's path of choice. Why not, as did medieval women, resort to other forms of disfigurement? Why not say "no" to sex? Why is the refusal characteristically oral? And what accounts for the pleasure of this particular choice? Karl Abraham asserts that some infants experience feeding as an assault, an oral penetration, by the breast or bottle. Yet this must be true for male infants as well as female infants and thus counters any suggestion that anorexia is at base a simple restaging and reversal of this early scene of inability to refuse, now with the adult-child in control. Still, this offers a useful set of terms, especially when juxtaposed with Melanie Klein's groundwork on the infant's "perception," through experience, that the breast is never precisely enough, not only because it is ultimately withdrawn or withheld, but because the delay between desire for oral attention and the nurturing response is the earliest of human experiences to shake infantile omnipotence. The breast is the first (part) object, and must be experienced as such-as something other-when it does not correspond perfectly to the erstwhile omnipotent child. The bad, grudging, or refusing breast is the earliest disturbance of the infant's world, wounding the infant's perfect, omnipotent, then narcissistic universe. Klein marks the endpoint of this losing psychic battle, putting it succinctly: "Weaning is the first great tragedy of life" (Love, Guilt, and Reparation 110). Nursing, eating, hunger, is the first knowledge of unfilled-even momentarily-desire

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and lack. We know the infant is virtually helpless-a needy little thing. The infant learns this by attrition and disillusionment, experiencing the oral as the site of its first great defeat. 3 Anorexia offers a phantasy of omnipotence at this primary, oral site. The anorexic reclaims control. She not only asserts control over her weight, her body (shape), her (a)sexuality, her excretory function, her menstrual, ovulation, and reproductive system, and, in sum, her very identity, but she exerts tremendous control over her family and loved ones and against a culture that demands a level of order and conformity. Given all this, the wonder may be that we are not all-men and women-anorexic. Another, perhaps crucial, loop in the anorexic knot can be unraveled by considering further Klein's account of early psychic life. She stresses the existence, during the ego-identity formation phase, of infantile phantasies of devouring aggression directed toward the "bad" breast. Significantly, the infant also projects this devouring design onto what it then imagines to be a retaliatory, devouring maternal object. It would seem that the accompanying profound dread of being devoured haunts the psyche, possibly forever. Hansel and Gretl fool the dim-sighted witch-who we remember is fattening them for her oven-by substituting bony twigs for their plump fingers when she demands to inspect their progress toward more succulent edibility. The anorexic makes her body unappealing not only sexually, but gustatorily. If, as I will suggest, unconscious fears fuel anorexia, then one of these-the fear of being devoured-is countered by the strategy of starvation: I will be too little and unappetizing to eat. But again, we have an ungendered set-up and solution in that boys (it is both Hansel and Gred who fear the witch's appetite) would have this same psychic experience, yet do not typically resort to self-starvation. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud recounts observing his one-and-a-half-year-old grandson play with a wooden spool, making it disappear behind the curtain of his cot, saying with marked delight "0-0-0-0," which Freud hears as the child's attempt to say "fort," the German word for "gone." He notes that when the boy makes it, markedly less often, reappear, he says "da" ("there" in English). In this child's game Freud sees a desire for and successful enactment of mastery or control-one that compensates for the apparent loss of the object. He speculates further, interpreting that: "Throwing away an object so that it was 'gone' might satisfy an impulse of the child's, which was suppressed in actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him" (SE 18: 16). Freud goes on to suggest that the child may "only have been able to repeat the unpleasant experience in play because the repetition carried along with it a yield of pleasure of another sort but none the less a direct one" (SE 18: 16). Two features of this specific "Fort!-da" scene call for examination. The first, as Freud notes, but without remarking that it is not typical of child's play, is that the only use the child made of any of his toys was to play

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"gone" with them and that "as a rule, one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act" (SE 18: 15, italics mine)-the "there." The other curious feature of the scene is Freud's description (rather sad I think) of his grandson as "not at all precocious" yet on "good terms with his parents ... and tributes were paid to his being a 'good boy.' He did not disturb his parents at night, he conscientiously obeyed orders not to touch certain things or go into certain rooms, and above all he never cried when his mother left him for a few hours" (SE 18: 14, italics mine). This is followed immediately by Freud's assurance that "he was greatly attached to his mother, who had not only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any outside help" (SE 18: 14). It is, of course, not usual for a child to only play "Gone" with his objects any more than it is usual for an eighteen-month-old to never cry when his mother leaves him for several hours. John Bowlby's accounts of childhood enactments of attachment, separation, and loss (and any babysitter) will support what I'm saying here. Freud may not have had occasion to know this, though he clearly appears defensive as to the mother/child attachment, revealing in the bravado of "no doubt" a concern for the nature of the child's manifest pleasure in loss, by asserting that "no doubt" the greater pleasure was attached to "da." Nowhere in this passage does Freud use the psychoanalytic term for turning displeasure into pleasure, though earlier in the same work (on the same page!), when puzzling over the nightmares of trauma victims, he offers that "we may be driven to reflect on the mysterious masochistic trends of the ego" (SE 18: 14). It is telling that, although Freud later discusses masochism as (sexual) perversion or an "abnormal" or "feminine" resolution to psychic conflict, he declines to use the very word that would solve the puzzle of this extraordinary "Fort!-da." It is crucial here to note that while most children play fort-da, or peek-a-boo, or disappear/appear in some form or other, most do not resort to a masochistic solution to what must be an unresolved, and hence unendingly repeated, aggressive conflict. But for some of us, the aggression, humiliation, or guilt associated with having one's object(s) disappear beyond control, is covered by a psychically "lesser crime"-a desire or wish for it to be that way. Anorexia seems quintessentially such a masochistic solution. The pleasure-which I have been assured is quite powerful-that accompanies selfstarvation is predicated on refusal, not only of food, but of appetite itself. Yet there is still the psychoanalytically unaccounted for genderedness of anorexia, given that men seek masochistic solutions in other arenas. Once more, Freud provides a point of departure. In his relatively late, short paper, "Negation" (1925), he asserts in unambiguous fashion that "we never discover a 'no' in the unconscious" (SE 19: 239). But what if, we might ask, in the case of the anorexic, the "no" or the profound nature

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of the "no" is precisely what is repressed, screened by a more comfortable and conscious "no" to food and fat and the feminine, let's say, but at the same time burying the repressed "no"-a guilty or aggressive or unconscionable "no." It is perhaps not coincidental that Freud's short piece on negation contains his already cited enunciation of identity defining judgment implicit in and constituted by the early pleasure-ego's desire to introject good objects and eject or refuse bad ones: I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out. It is curious that Freud imagines the ego's "no" to be attached, without exception, to an object, idea, or wish that must, by definition, be there, even if only to be repressed, denied, repudiated, lost, or castrated. The negative, for Freud, seems to carry the mathematical quality of absolute value. Is it possible to imagine another principle at work in the special case of a "no" that is attached to "nothing"? So that it yields an absolute value of nothing, the absolute value of zero being zero. Shakespeare's Lear casts it in the generative: "Nothing will come of nothing" (I, i, 90). And if we need to put anything or anyone in the place of nothing, it must be originary, primal; it must be mother who is me who is everything who is nothing. The woman, usually young but always of childbearing age, who pathologically and masochistically refuses food and body fat and femaleness, obviates the need to refuse motherhood. The anorexic can't be mother. It is crucial to note here that today it is culturally, ethically, and biologically acceptable, even healthy, to decline motherhood, and women do so consciously and deliberately without apparent or latent misgiving. But there is this irrefutable difference at least: physiologically, men lack wombs, and with that the possibility of reproducing, in the flesh, mother. This difference, this male lack, constitutes the missing "no." To expand on this, it may be useful to rehearse our understanding of the processes by which the "bisexual," pre-genital and pre-gendered infant psyche becomes male or female. Whether following or contending with Freud, most theorists of human development recognize that engendering involves the Oedipal drama and castration threat for the boy and a less plausible and more "challenging" female Oedipal drama, presumably fueled by a defining "penis envy," for the girl. In Sarah Kofman's The Enigma of Woman (1985) and Madelon Sprengnether's The Spectral Mother (1990), considerable light is shed on Freud's and phallocentricism's blind spots regarding the engendering of women. But all limitations withstanding-though they are considerable-Freud's account of a process through which the little girl becomes a woman is useful here. To review: the girl must perform the divisive, "feminine" task of rejecting or de-identifying with her first object (mother), because, as castrated, it is woefully inadequate. She must then advance to an attraction to, though not an identification with, a "better" object-the phallus of the father. But

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she must displace that desire onto a desire for a baby from the father, and finally onto a desire for a thrice-removed, compensatory baby (a boy baby, to be sure) from a father surrogate. Now, she is a woman. But now, too, she is at risk of becoming the very (maternal) object she had to reject in order to accomplish her individuation. In some certain if unfathomable measure, reproducing mother, rejoining (with) her, atones for having abandoned her in the first place-a debt not owed by the boy-now-man who never had to surrender mother as his ideal object. Boys, on the contrary, are to embrace, marry, and impregnate a once-removed model of their first love. And though the annals of history and analysis attest to the difficulty and even disastrous outcomes of the male's mission, the collective history of women (whenever it was investigated or recorded) reveals a series of situations and symptoms that say, at the least, it's not so easy a thing to pull off, this being female and all. Early psychoanalysis dealt with such a set of largely female symptoms, collectively called hysteria, which Freud and most followers associated directly with repressed and/or otherwise disturbed sexuality. And thanks in no small measure to psychoanalysis, the stranglehold of Victorianism on sexuality, even female sexuality, was loosened so that men and women could more easily recognize and tolerate themselves and function as sexual beings. I would suggest here that a crucial factor in the "success" the culture has realized in all but eliminating hysteria and hysterical neurosis is that science and culture were able to collaborate with human instinct-in this instance, sexual instinct. In the case of anorexia, the would-be collaborative instinct remains unidentified, perhaps non-existent. 4 In the face of the self-starved body, it is certainly unconvincing to point to a primary instinct to eat. It is similarly unconvincing to identify a primary instinct to be a mother, in that given the choice many women prefer not to get pregnant, or abort pregnancies that are unwanted, or give babies away, or resort to infanticide. If we add to (or is it subtract from) this missing "instinct" an understanding that the developmental task of women is a much prolonged process and finally a doubling-back and rescinding of maternal rejection, first at pubescence with the acceptance of the body (of the mother) she is becoming, and eventually, through pregnancy, of the identity of herself as mother, then we might begin to apprehend the tenacity of this female disorder. Julia Kristeva adds another twist to the tale of the mother-daughter drama when she considers that, with the birth of a child, the newly created mother re-establishes contact with her mother, replaying "in reverse the encounter with mother" ("Place Names," 279). As Kathleen Woodward points out in "Tribute to the Older Woman" (1994), Kristeva's figuration of re-identification with mother is ambivalent, if not problematic, for the once consciously individuated daughter-become-mother who is now ensnared in this double-bound identity. It is likewise significant that this critical female developmental task

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prescribes that a more fully formed, and therefore fully-defended, ego is charged with handling the process. The "bogy man" of castration-that lets the little boy move quite willingly to a copycat object-is available at the crucial point of identification with the father, and at a time when he can believe and use such tales, which in turn fulfill their generously compensatory promise in the phallocentric culture he encounters in manhood. The pubescent girl has stories, too, but what can they promise and what can she be threatened with other than that she will lose the approval and love of (mostly) her mother-feeder, the very person she must be most committed to rejecting; or, alternatively, should she reproduce (mother), that she will be re-fused into maternal self-obliteration? What is more, in the sterile ground (or is it fertile?-that would depend on what you're growing) of a misogynist culture that conflates pejorative fat with the feminine and alternatively loves the lean and muscular look of androgyny if not masculinity, and that relegates motherhood to the economic category of "unemployed," the young woman must suspend more than a little disbelief when she looks in the mirror at a full-breasted, generous-hipped, softstomached body, or when she buys "New Freedom" panty liners with shields to prevent leakage. If we assume what is almost always the case, that this would-be anorexic is an intelligent, well-educated, and "promising" young person, we have further reduced the naturalness of her task. Anorexia is virtually non-existent in third world or primitive cultures. There, one might assume, there is not the tremendous discrepancy between the model and the myth, between the personal and cultural aspirations and the reality of the woman's role. It is incumbent on us to remember that most western women make their way to and through female adulthood without turning to hysteria, psychosis, suicide, homicide, reclusion, martyrdom, or anorexia. And this is not to suggest that women who are comfortable in their womanhood or maternity have somehow been duped and deluded. On the contrary, they have made their way, at least in terms of their psychological maturation, more or less admirably, even courageously, and to some degree by the dumb luck of genetics and geography, to a place that is neither right or wrong, but, let us say, stable and, to borrow Winnicott's phrase, "good enough." For them the conscious decision-yes or no-to motherhood or its possibility is consistent at some minimum level with the unconscious repository of identity. But for the anorexic, the erasing of the (female) body, the signature amenorrhea, and the impossibility of motherhood-all accomplished and signified by refusal at the primary, oral site-points to an una toned, unrecovered, and irrepressible unconscious "no." A lesson learned too well "before memory knows and knowing forgets." Having offered this account for why it is women and not men who assault and destroy their bodies through oral refusal, I want to suggest an

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explanation, one I have not seen forwarded elsewhere, for why it is "now" that anorexia has infected what must have always been this fertile psychic ground. For millions of years women have had little or no control over life instincts-theirs or their sexual partners. Drastic measures, "unnatural" means, had to be enlisted in order to avoid maternity. Significantly such refusals carried with them severe physical risks and cultural punishments or atonements. But since the 1960's and in remarkable concurrence with the rise of the anorexic "solution," women have had a readily available way of saying "no" to maternity and, with it, the reparative act of reproducing mother-oral contraception. I suggest that the coincidental epidemic of anorexia and the widespread availability of oral contraception go hand in glove. Using the pill-something their mothers didn't have access to-women could exercise conscious control over their biological destinies. Many young women did so and do so without conscious or unconscious selfreproach. But others, "good girls," are compelled to seek the powerful, repetitive, masochistic punishment of self-starvation in an attempt to pay an unconscious debt that comes insistently overdue with sexual, reproductive, and psychic maturity. More than merely "surpassing" mother, this buried refusal to expiate and atone through reproducing mother is felt to be destroying her. This is a place of phantastic shame and guilt. With a masochistic means at the ready and a cultural context reinforcing her ostensible intentions, the anorexic is free to deny herself to death. A brief passage in an article by Tillman Habermas that appeared in the 1989 International Journal of Eating Disorders encapsulates this configuration. In noting that Charcot was the first to recognize concerns about body image in relation to disordered eating, he records that "during his [Charcot's] examination of an anoretic patient, he discovered a pink ribbon around her waist that she explained as a warning against weight gain, stating: 'I prefer dying of hunger to becoming as fat as mama' " (263). If we consider that the ribbon was girlishly pink and that it is tied around the waist-not the thigh or hips-and then remove "the fat" from her refusal, there is the anorexic's credo: "I prefer dying of hunger to becoming mama." Samuel Richardson's extremely influential mid-eighteenth-century epistolary novel Clarissa offers its heroine as "an Exemplar to her sex." In prefatory remarks Richardson declares his intentions: To warn the Inconsiderate and Thoughtless of the one sex, against the base arts and designs of specious Contrivers of the other-To caution parents against the undue exercise of their natural authority over their Children in the great article of Marriage-... But above all, to investigate the highest and most important Doctrines ... while the unworthy ... are condignly, and, as may be said, consequently punished. (xxi)

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On the broad surface of this seven-volume work Richardson tells the story of the seventeen-year-old Clarissa Harlowe whose father, after being spurred on by Clarissa's greedy brother and her "rejected" sister, resolves that his daughter must marry the wealthy but odious Mr. Solmes. Robert Lovelace, a dashing rake, hopes to turn Clarissa's misfortune to his own lustful designs. With the leverage of Clarissa's renowned intellectual independence and moral certitude, Lovelace deceives Clarissa into fleeing her father's garden with him. He perpetrates a series of deceptions that succeed in conveying her to a brothel, the residents of which sham respectability to facilitate a seduction, which initially fails. Not to be refused, Lovelace drugs Clarissa to the point of stupor and rapes her. Having left her parental home against the backdrop of her refusal to consent to the unwanted marriage to Solmes, Clarissa is cursed and disowned by father, brother, uncles, sister, and mother. Unable to return home, and with only the emotional support of correspondence with the stable Anna Howe and later the limited help of Lovelace's now-enlightened friend John Hickman, Clarissa manages to escape to tentative haven in lodgings above a smith's shop. Here she remains for a few months, settling her earthly matters as best she can and wasting away to death, despairing of a reconciliation with her family and steadfastly refusing offers of marriage or assistance from Lovelace or his family. For his part Lovelace is consumed by guilt, countered with aggressive resolve to not be triumphed over by Clarissa. In a delusional state he insists that Clarissa must be pregnant by him, delineating his profound desire by writing to Hickman: Had I an imperial diadem ... I would give it up, even to my enemy, to have one charming boy by this lady. And should she escape me, and no such effect follow, my revenge on her family, and, in such case, on herself would be incomplete, and I should reproach myself as long as I lived. (319)

With Clarissa's death, Lovelace leaves England for the Continent where he throws himself in the path of Clarissa's valiant-too-late cousin Morden. In the inevitable duel Lovelace is mortally wounded. His last words are: "LET THIS EXPIATE" (516). In offering Clarissa as an exemplar of her sex, Richardson presciently and ironically constructs a veritable paradigm of the anorexic drama. If we consider what it was to be "Clarissa," several salient characteristics emerge. She was a good, obedient, and attractive daughter, though, curiously, she seems to have identified with, and to have been established as a financially independent person by, her grandfather, with whom she seems to have spent much of her girlhood. We are further given to understand that Clarissa's relationship to her family and their authority is unusual, "perverse." While she professes a desire to please father, mother, brother and sister, she avers the very role the patriarchal culture and her femaleness

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would prescribe. She is "too clever" and too good with words. It is important to note that her refusal of Solmes comes after refusing several other suitors. Her repeated request is to live "a single life"-"a single life (which had always been my choice)" (55). In Clarissa's struggle to decline the task assigned to her by patriarchy, she willingly resigns all material rewards of social position, even those bequeathed to her by her grandfather. Suicide is not a viable solution for Clarissa, and to the letter of (Canon) law she consumes just enough to not "hasten" death. What Clarissa most clings to and eventually experiences as her greatest conscious loss is the approbation of and connection to mother. To her she pleads: Do not you renounce me totally! If you must separate yourself from your child, let it not be with absolute reprobation on your own part. My uncles may be hard-hearted-my father may be unmovable. I may suffer from my brother's ambition, and from my sister's envy! But let me not lose my mamma's love; at least her pity. (37)

The pity that Clarissa seeks from her mother, though most obviously associated with the dilemma of an impending forced marriage, can be understood to have greater scope if we consider the "unhappy" state of Clarissa's mother and the remediation Clarissa once represented to her. After repeatedly noting the effect on her of Clarissa's non-compliance ("add[ing] to the uneasiness between your father and me") (45), Clarissa's mother laments: "you were once all my comfort, Clarissa: you made all my hardship tolerable: but now! However, nothing, it is plain, can move you. .. . Write not another letter to me. I can do nothing for you. But you can do everything for yourself" (45). Mother's words prove ironically prophetic. In this case, the maternal "nothing" from her mother condemns Clarissa to self-consuming guilt, starvation, and despair. Yet on some level one can scarcely wonder at, let alone fault, Clarissa's refusal to reproduce this mother. That Clarissa's mother abandons her to a fate that would replicate the life of upper class "hardship" she herself has known passes, perhaps, as convention. But that she utterly abandons her, even before her ill-fated flight with Lovelace, refusing to talk with her, to correspond with her, even pointedly refusing to eat with her, while we are repeatedly reminded of mother's dining needs, exceeds convention. Yet the episode that most reveals the depth of maternal rejection occurs after Clarissa has wasted away to death. Too late, of course, the family-mother, father, brother, sister, uncles all-laments Clarissa's fate and their part in it. Her coffin is received and displayed in the parlor. While other assembled mourners viewed the body, "The unhappy parents proposed to take one last view and farewell of their once darling daughter.... But they both agreed to refer their melancholy curiosity till the next day" (490). Not only does the next day not hold such a "last farewell," but Colonel Morden reports without judgmental remarks that the funeral and burial itself were unattended by

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Clarissa's parents: "The father and mother would have joined in these last honours, had they been able: but they were both very much indisposed, and continue to be so" (492). The short paragraph which follows immediately leaves no doubt as to the source of the intractable indisposition and to the absoluteness of the separation: "The inconsolable mother told Mrs. Norton that the two mothers of the sweetest child in the world ought not, on this occasion, to be separated. She therefore desired her to stay with her" (492). Clarissa's refusal to reproduce her mother is punished by the mother's refusal to rejoin her even in death. With maternal identification irretrievably severed, Clarissa is finally denied reconciliation with the actual hreast of infancy, that of her nursemaid, Nanny Norton. Instead she returns not to the maternal womb/tomb, but to the place of surrogate nurturance, grandfather's Dairy House garden, where she is buried, as she willed, at the feet of her benign and benevolent and thrice-removed grandfather. Readers of Clarissa may find this maternal drama non-central to Clarissa's history, despite the oral nature of her anorexic end. But few can help remarking, especially in contrast to Richardson's earlier heroine, Pamela, that Clarissa's refusal of Lovelace ("a man I once might have loved"), despite his repentance and in the face of her desperate situation, attests to a powerful resolve to escape the patriarchal order that would "rightfully" expect her obedience to a husband. Attachment to Lovelace, especially in marriage, would mean compliance with his profoundest patriarchal wish, which we recall he terms a "triumph" over her-fathering a baby by her. Or, in terms the anorexic understands-making her a mother. At one point, in pressing his seduction of her, Lovelace offers Clarissa to be "father, uncle, brother to you, and in your good time, a husband" (365). Conspicuously absent from the offered list is "mother." That was to be Clarissa's fate-a fate she refuses unto death. Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock, written in 1931, is similarly set in the eighteenth century, although the place is colonial Quebec, the city on the rock, topped by its imposing cathedral and its hierarchal allegiance to none less than the epitome of patriarchal figures-Louis XlV. This is the conflicted context for the primary tale of a widowed apothecary Euclide Auclair and his young daughter Cecile. Their story is one of acclimation to a new world, of modest struggle and modest triumph, on a formidable, now sheltering, now foreboding, ledge of granite. The measure of Cecile's transformation from a motherless and transported child of a thoroughly decent, Parisian-born medicine maker to a whole and healthy woman is to be found, almost epigraphically, in her happy union with a manly voyageur and particularly in her four sons. The narrative is richer by far than this plot summary suggests, but essentially it is a quiet story of a kind of literal and figurative domestication, marked by the conjoining of Old World and New.

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In subtle contrast to Cecile is the spectral figure of Jeanne LeBer, the only daughter of a well-to-do Montreal merchant. Her story is told second and third hand, in small bits and pieces. As it is reconstructed, it begins with a "joyful childhood." At the age of twelve she is brought by her parents, as is the aristocratic custom, from Montreal to Quebec City to be educated in the Ursuline convent where she remains for three years. The sisters of the convent noted that though she was gracious and outgoing and seemed anything but melancholic, she managed to give away everything that was sent to her-"boxes of sweets and dainties, etc."-from home. Upon her return at fifteen to Montreal society, her eventual betrothal to the then young and spirited playmate of her youth, Pierre Charron, is a source of pride and promise for her family and the entire community. But though she wears the lovely, rich apparel her father selects for her, underneath she wears "a little haircloth next to her tender skin" (106). Soon she begs to be allowed to take religious vows, but, this request denied, she obtains her parents' nominal consent to imitate the domestic retreat of Catherine of Siena, and at age seventeen takes a five-year vow of chastity and immures herself in her room, refusing speech and contact with everyone, including her father and mother. During this first period of reclusion she muffles herself and steals out each morning to attend mass and take communion. But in renewing her vow for a second five years, she arranges to spend her substantial dowry to build a chapel to the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin and recludes herself in a cell she has constructed behind the altar of the chapel. There she remains, eating "meager food," declining "any dish of rich or delicate nature" (108), and often fasting for days. The people find her holy, a gentle exemplar of sainthood to contrast with the grisly path to martyrdom afforded the Jesuit saints by the menacing wilderness. They attribute minor miracles and divine visitations to the recluse, loving "miracles for so many hundred years, not as proof or evidence, but because they are the actual flowering of desire" (111). For purposes of thematic and ironic comparison, Cather contrasts the "flowering of desire" of the two young women, and, doubtless, sides with the life-affirming secular choice of Cecile. In striking contrast, Cather offers a glimpse of Jeanne LeBer's saintly "bliss" in her midnight vigil before the altar, her once soothing and lovely voice now "hoarse, hollow, with the sound of despair in it ... and when she prayed in silence, such sighs broke from her" (147). Yet there is no facile praise or condemnation of her choice. A final silence and mystery surrounds her death from starvation. What we are told, however, in addition to the early symptom of refusal of food from "home," is that Jeanne has stipulated that whatever limited service would be required to maintain her reclusive existence is to be provided by "an old woman." She steadfastly refuses any other material or maternal support.

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There are two textual moments, only a few words really, that suggest what I take to be the signature of the anorexic's struggle. Both are reported to Cecile's father by Pierre Charron, well before Cecile captures his romantic attention. In describing the extent of Jeanne LeBer's first period of reclusion, Pierre tells that during that time Jeanne's mother became gravely ill and on her deathbed begged to see her daughter and "give her the kiss of farewell" (108). The anorexic's only response is a refusal of this last communion: "Tell her I'm praying for her, night and day" (108). The refusal is so absolute and final as to be telling, and stands in mirror image to the refusal of Clarissa's mother to see her daughter even in death. What I read as the recluse's refusal of the maternal (reunion) is confirmed in a second instance, again reported by Charron. Speaking of his own mother's death and good care given her by the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin, Charron starts out, uncharacteristically, to begrudge the dowry that would have come to him had Jeanne become his wife. But in a more revealing fashion he points to the crux of the matter: If the venerable Bourgeoys had not got hold of that girl in her childhood and overstrained her with fasts and penances, she would be a happy mother today, not sleeping in a stone cell like a prisoner. There are plenty of girls, ugly, poor, stupid, awkward, who are made for such a life .... [N]ow she is no better than dead." (143, italics mine)

Never mind that his assessment smacks of chauvinism; it is exactly that reclusion and cold starvation are preferable to the anorexic than "happy motherhood." That is what goes ironically unapprehended here. He goes on to recall "the days when she first came home from Quebec" and "used to be at her mother's side, at the head of a long table full of glad company, always looking out for everyone, saying the right thing to everyone" (144). This, of course, is just when her hermitage and fasting begin. The last exchange between Charron and the recluse likewise carries the mark of the anorexic's refusal: "She told me it would be better if I left her father, and that I must marry. I will always pray for you, she said, and, when you have children, I will pray for them" (145, italics mine). The specificity of her concern and focus-when you have children-reveals the latent content of her refusal. This man, this body, this life, is about becoming mother. Her dowry, her "birthright," is given gladly to the Blessed Virgin, refusing the nurturance and corporality of Mother at all costs. Some two hundred years since the fate of Clarissa was first imagined, and thirty years after Cather's recluse was given scant form, a parodic novel by Margaret Atwood presents a modern day embodiment of anorexia nervosa. However, it should be noted at the outset that, according to Elspeth Cameron, Atwood "knew nothing about the disease" (45) during the writing of The Edible Woman in the mid 1960's, anorexia not receiving much public notoriety until the mid 70's. Despite the considerable contextual dif-

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ferences in the lives of Clarissa Harlowe, Jeanne LeBer, and Atwood's Marian McAlpin, the culturally prescribed project for these women is the same: marry and make a family. And as with Clarissa and Jeanne LeBer, the prospect propels Marian into a psychological flight and refusal that is signed, most emphatically, at the oral site. Marian's tale spans roughly the same period of time as Clarissa's-nine or ten months (!). The novel is divided into three sections, the first and last in Marian's first person, the middle section, when her eating and identity disturbances are at their pathological height, in third-person narration. Marian's story is rather unremarkable on the surface. A recent college graduate, she has a new, uninspiring, perhaps vaguely disturbing job working for "Seymour Surveys," testing market response to a variety of products ranging from Moosehead beer to women's sanitary napkins. Almost by default she has become involved (enmeshed) with a good-looking, markedly chauvinistic, and thoroughly pragmatic Peter, to whom, during the course of the relationship, Marian relinquishes more and more of her autonomous identity. He likes her in the "tiny red dress"-the tiny red dress it is. He wants sex in the uncomfortable (for her) bathtub; she accommodates his wishes. He orders for her at restaurants; she is glad to avoid the nuisance and embarrassment of indecision with the menu. He decides on a March wedding; she fills a lull in lunch conversation with the "office virgins" by announcing the engagement. Flanking Marian are two contrasting female figures-Ainsley, her messy, free-spirited, unencumbered roommate who decides to have a baby and goes about blithely selecting and seducing a father for the child, and Clara, Marian's high school beauty queen friend who is presented as a much encumbered and resigned wife, pregnant with her third child in four years. Duncan, a pallid, emaciated boy-man, whom Marian meets when conducting a door-to-door beer survey and with whom Marian has a passionless and ultimately unengaging affair, serves as a third, inadequate model of corporality. We know precious little of Marian's family or childhood. For all purposes she is making her way, in mock Bildungsroman, on her own. It is the novel's resolution that distinguishes this text from Richardson's and Cather's; Marian survives, escaping both the impending marriage and the anorexic grip. In "Famininity, a Parody of Autonomy" (1985), Elspeth Cameron rehearses the distinction Atwood herself makes between this novel and the eighteenth-century comedic narrative formula, as it was outlined by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (1957): "What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually parental, and that near the end of the play some twist of the plot enables the hero to have his will ... [which] causes a new society to crystallize around the hero" (163). Atwood points out that in The Edible Woman, "the person who embodies the restrictive forces of

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society is in fact the person Marian gets engaged to. In a standard comedy, he would be the defiant hero. As it is he and the restrictive society are blended into one, and the comedy solution would be a tragic solution for Marian" (Cameron 48). Citing this material from Frye and Atwood, Cameron expands on the particularity of Peter's anti-heroic position, as an enmeshing or "blocking figure." Yet it strikes me that the very agency or anti-agency that is attributed to him goes to the core of Frye's theory. It is the young man who wants, who desires, who manages to have his will and "causes a new society to crystallize" around him-or who fails in the quest. This crystallization stands in euphemistically and tellingly for impregnation and reproduction, without any of the messy body fluid stuff and certainly regardless of the body, let alone agency, of the erased young woman. Frye, indeed, is accurate in his description of normal comedic narrative. And it appears that it is precisely this comedic narrative that is refused, not unlike the refusals of Clarissa and Cather's recluse. Yet with The Edible Woman we are forced to recognize not only a difference in resolution, but a veritable shift in paradigms. This is a woman's narrative throughout, however problematic or pathological. And it may well be that this alone accounts for the non-tragic (and non-comedic) denouement. With that as a point of departure it is especially valuable to consider Marian's narrative of negation. Her "no" to a blah marriage prospect and marginal man is in some way incidental. It is her confrontation with and rejection of a handful of model figures, as mirrored by her steady elimination of variety and quantity of edibles, that constitutes her tale. Atwood's text in this regard could hardly be more overdetermined. We read of Marian's progression from preferring her meat medium rare to her aversion to eating anything that had been alive, envisioning and identifying along the way with the cookbook illustrations of cows with dotted diagrams of cuts of meat. Her specific delusion is that something might end up alive in her. In Marian's case, as in cases of actual clinical anorexia, there is an evident distortion of body perception, figured at one point by Marian seeing her reflection in the overturned teaspoon in which her head is pin-sized and her body is a bulge of flesh. Early in the novel, Marian and Ainsley visit the decadently pregnant Clara and her family, an encounter that launches Marian into her anorexic trajectory. For starters there is the singularly unappetizing dinner they share, prepared by Clara's domestically attentive husband Joe, a dinner which the three-year-old Arthur "evaded with spastic contortions of his body" as Clara "poked [it] in the direction of his mouth": "wizened meatballs and noodles from a noodle mix, with lettuce" (28). And for dessert, "something I recognized ... 'new canned rice pudding; it saves a lot of time,' Clara said defensively, 'and Arthur loves it' ... Clara deftly intercepted a long drool of pudding and returned it to Arthur's mouth" (29).

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Punctuating the visit and already limited conversation is a series of dirty diapers, references to gastrointestinal distresses, and especially a preoccupation with Arthur's failed toilet training: "Husband, your son has shat again. I don't know where but it's not in his diaper.... He's a real naturechild, he just loves to shit in the garden .... He thinks he's a fertility-god" (28). The parting shot again features a grim domestic tableau: Clara's "own body seemed somehow beyond her.... the maternity smock she was wearing; the stylized petals and tendrils moved with her breathing, as though they were coming alive" (27); Arthur with another accident: "He just loves peeing behind doors" (29); the baby (not breastfed we are pointedly told) in a laundry basket chewing on clothespins; and Joe, seeing their guests to the door, "a pile of dirty laundry in his arms," saying, "You must come and see us again soon .... Clara has so few people she can really talk to" (31). It is small wonder that Marian would resist replicating this denigrated domestic model. Yet her aversion seems especially focused on Clara's body: "so thin that her pregnancies are always bulgingly obvious, and now in her seventh month she looked like a boa-constrictor that had swallowed a watermelon. Her head, with its aureole of pale hair, was made to seem even smaller and even more fragile by the contrast" (25). And then, after calling her toddler "a little leech ... covered with suckers," Clara appears to Marian "like a strange vegetable growth, a bulbous tuber that had sent out four thin white roots and a tiny pale-yellow flower" (25). In studied contrast to Clara's laissez-faire, botanic approach to maternity is Ainsley's strategic design. Most significantly, however, we find Marian's disapproval of her plan to be based not so much on its impracticality, or unconventionality, or even on the unethical, manipulative and deceptive nature of the plan, but rather on Ainsley's desire to have a baby at all. The language reveals Marian's conflation of cooking, killing, and having a baby: "So what it boils down to ... is that you've decided to have an illegitimate child in cold blood and bring it up yourself" (36). In case we missed the connection, Marian again refers to Ainsley's maternity plans 'as "cold blooded," as if speaking of a murder, rather than a life-producing act. A paradigmatic moment occurs mid-point in the novel, bringing together these central concerns of aggression and maternity at the oral nexus. Marian and Peter are at dinner, both having declared themselves ravenously hungry. The topic has turned to juvenile delinquency and the disciplining of children, with Peter advocating kicking "the hell out of them" (but, "of course no one should ever strike a child in anger") and Marian suggesting, with a faint mark of the autobiographical, that "perhaps somebody kicked the hell out of them when they didn't deserve it" (150). As Marian begins to "attack" her steak, she recalls that "once on a streetcar she had seen a mother bite a small child because it had bitten her. She gnawed thoughtfully through a tough piece, and swallowed" (151). The

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pronouns slip markedly here, reinforcing the fused and confused identifications. But one thing is clear: Marian is no longer hungry. And we can recall the otherwise cryptic warning issued earlier by Duncan: "But be careful. You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal, you know" (98). Some weeks later at an office Christmas party Marian's reverie conveys the full scope of her difficulty with the corporal, and especially the feminine. First she conflates "mature" and "fat," and then reflects on her coworkers-all women-as being in various stages of ripeness and decay, "some rapidly becoming overripe, some already beginning to shrivel" and others with their "dune like contours of breast and waist and hip" or a "ham-like bulge of thigh" (171). She concludes with a phobic litany of human, specifically female, constitution: What peculiar creatures they were; and the continual flux between the outside and the inside, taking things in, giving them out, chewing, words, potato chips, burps, grease, hair, babies, milk, excrement, cookies, vomit, coffee, tomato-juice, blood, tea, sweat, liquor, tears and garbage. (171) In an attempt to save herself from drowning in this phantastic "thick sargasso sea of femininity," Marian reflexively determines to seek the phallic solution: "She wanted something solid, clear: a man; she wanted Peter in the room so that she could put her hand out and hold on to him to keep from being sucked down" (172). The blatant, phallic pun on "Peter" makes her eventual rejection of him all the more generic and resolute for having tried this handy solution and finding it finally untenable. The novel proceeds, then, producing again and again a juxtaposition and conflation of aggression, death and maternal images, of devouring and decadent figures. Of all the motifs of the troubled oral-maternal nexus in The Edible Woman, none is more deployed than the egg. Early on Marian is said to crack open her breakfast egg and, dubiously, get her thumb stuck in it. She is repeatedly described, or self-described, as "addled." There are dozens of ovals, as well as halos and rings-vaginal, oral, and anal in reference. But the most insistent of the egg moments occurs when Len, the unwilling and unwitting and now hysterical father of Ainsley's "coldblooded" plan, reacts to the knowledge of the pregnancy: "It's obscene, that horrible oozy ... Nauseating!" (163). Marian tries to calm him, but he peels back a layer of his own revulsion, linking it as he does to the oral and the maternal: She made me do it ... My own mother. We were having eggs for breakfast and I opened mine and there was I swear there was a little chicken inside it, it wasn't born yet, I didn't want to touch it but she didn't see ... she said Don't be silly, it looks like an ordinary egg to me, but it wasn't, it wasn't and she made me eat it. And I know I know there was a little beak and little claws and everything.... Horrible. Horrible, I can't stand it. (163)

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In comparison, Marian's ovarian repulsion is equally powerful if more latent and displaced. "She was coldly revolted. They were acting like a couple of infants. Ainsley was getting a layer of blubber on her soul already, she thought .... Soon she would be fat all over" (164). Len's writhing makes Marian think by indirection not of her own repulsion but of a parlor trick in which an egg that resists great force when held endwise, breaks with only a slight shift of the grip "and skoosh, there you were with your shoes full of albumin" (164). Predictably, the next morning, eggs-the last of the proteins on her list of palatables-are scratched off. Marian confronts directly what for her is the profoundly dreadful and deadly maternal in the prototypic fusion of mother and child, womb and tomb, in her visit with Duncan to the Egyptian room at the museum. Duncan loves the mummy displays and directs Marian's attention to three cases. The first is a closed sarcophagus, lavishly decorated with a painted golden face and stylized eyes lined in dark blue. (Later Marian will see herself as replicating this face as Ainsley does her make-up for Peter's party.) Significantly, Marian remarks, "She's beautiful," not knowing if she means it. Duncan replies: "I think it's supposed to be a man" (193). The attention called to gender distracts us from the verb tense. "She is beautiful" and "it is supposed to be a man" convey an effective presence. The next display is an open sarcophagus, revealing "a shrivelled figure" and calling to mind the remark that Clara made about Marian not needing to bother looking at her newborn baby because they all "look like red shrivelled prunes" (133). Duncan notes how well preserved it is, but Marian knows it is quite dead. The last mummy clobbers us with the connection between womb and tomb, with Duncan announcing that he is going to show her his favorite "womb symbol." "It looked like a heap of rubble. Then she saw that it was a skeleton, still covered in places with skin, lying on its side with its knees drawn up .... The body was so small ... a child" (194). The scene shifts quickly-after a guard interrupts an uneasy embrace by saying "politely though firmly" that "kissing in the Mummy Room is not permitted" (195)-to a coffee shop conversation in which Duncan's comments take us to the oral link between womb and tomb. After dispassionately suggesting that they should have sex, something he's only "taken a number of stabs at," he says: "I've always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me .... I'd prefer to be fed through the main artery. If I only knew the right people I'm sure it could be arranged.... " (198). The chapter ends on this ellipsis, giving us (and Marian) pause to wonder who the "right people" might be. Duncan's overdetermined death drive mirrors and reverses Marian's drive away from the womb within. The main artery is unmistakably the umbilicus. This passage is followed directly by a pivotal scene in which Marian is fake-dining with Duncan and his roommates, one of whom, Fish, holds

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forth on his thesis topic, "Malthus and the Creative Metaphor," linking art, poetry, and birth, and finding crucial fault with the modern world for its reliance on birth control as a method of population control. What we need is ... another Black Death .... Millions wiped from the face of the earth.... Then Birth would be essential again, then we could return to the tribe, the old gods ... the earth goddess ... the goddess of birth and growth and death. We need a new Venus, a lush Venus of warmth and vegetation and generation, a new Venus, big-bellied, teeming with life, potential, about to give birth to a new world in all its plentitude, a new Venus rising from the sea .... (207)

As Fish stands up to give rhetorical punch to his sermon, he jackknifes the card table, spewing the dinner about the room and jettisoning the food which Marian had been surreptitiously passing off to Duncan, into his face and hair. Fish's mock hysteria faintly echoes Len's hysterical egg trauma and easily recalls an earlier scene in which Peter describes his hunting and killing a rabbit: So I let her off and wham. One shot, right through the heart .... So I whipped out my knife, good knife, German steel, and slit the belly and took her by the hind legs and gave her one hell of a crack, like a whip you see, and the next thing you know there was blood and guts all over the place. All over me, god the trees were red for yards. (67)

But though these scenes reverberate significantly, it is Marian's own fearful reverie of sargasso-sea femininity that stands in direct opposition to Fish's vision. It is Fish's Venus that is the final image that propels Marian into breaking off her engagement and resolving instead to make and offer a surrogate "cake lady" to satisfy the identity-consuming and reproductivelydriven men in her life. The confectionary solution is just borderline enough to send Peter fleeing. With admirable integrity, Atwood resists at this concluding point any sort of fairy tale or comedic resolution. Neither we nor Marian are offered a model of healthy, viable, modern womanhood. However, we are given a Marian who, having finally rejected all the models available to her, is able to eat again with relish. Perhaps the very blatancy of her rejection of the reproductive role-the big-bellied Venus, Ainsley, Clara, as well as Duncan and the Egyptian mummy-saves her from the unconscious, tenacious, and self-destructive destiny of many seriously disordered eaters. Suggesting as I have that the anorexic struggle is embedded in a largely unconscious struggle against the reproductive maternal mission and the guilt that attends that refusal, it would seem foolhardy on the one hand and irresponsible on the other to pass over arguably the most famous food refuser of all fiction-Melville's pale, emaciated scrivener-Bartleby. So much has been written about this "all male" text as to make it somewhat

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daunting on that score alone. But this less than half-told story of a sullen, silent copyist who stops copying, won't account for himself and dies of apparent self-starvation seems to demand attention if only because his siren signature, cast in negation, is emblematic of anorexia itself: "I would prefer not to." 1 suggest a reading of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" that identifies what is most repressed yet most at stake in this narrative, as it is both told and analyzed, to be reproduction and particularly the maternal reproductive body. Readings of this narrative of conflicted desire and refusal often recognize it to be as much the nameless narrator's story as Bartleby's; but beyond that, 1 propose a speculative, but 1 think textually supported, understanding of the psychic subtext of this "fraternal" drama. To do that 1 must first imagine a boy, perhaps two or three years old, who has moved beyond the dominance of the oral to the retentive (or sadist) anal stage. Under mother's attentive care, toilet training and language acquisition are well underway, and Oedipus awaits but hasn't made much of a scene so far. Life is really pretty good and promises to be so for a lifetime. But then, without explanation, unaccountably, a baby brother appears. Mother seems nowhere to be found. Perhaps she's indisposed after a difficult delivery. Perhaps she died in childbirth. But, undeniably, in the next room, in a little cot or crib, is the helpless baby who has changed the boy's psychic world forever, displacing him and in some way arresting his maturation. There is bitter resentment of the new rival, to be sure, but not without guilt. And there is affection for the speechless baby; after all he is a brother to the boy. The ambivalence toward the innocent one (perhaps he is weak or sickly from birth) will persist, but the abandoning mother is another matter. She and her ilk will be banished from this boy's life. The big brother will grow up to be a tidy, safe man and make money. The little brother will be regressively forlorn. He will be Bartleby. 1 confess that my reading of Melville's story has become haunted, as it were, by this other speculative story. The question is whether Melville's story is similarly haunted by fraternal presence, maternal absence, and reproduction of another kind, and whether we can trace in Bartleby's final refusal to eat a boy's refusal to produce (a psychically separate) mother. It is commonly remarked that Bartleby and the narrator mirror each other, and this may be a good place to begin looking at the text. When we think about the meagerness of Bartleby's existence-at least as it is presented to us-about his reticence and apparent emptiness, we eventually come to recognize these same characteristics in the lawyer's more conventionally disguised but equally blank existence. This echoing is, of course, in keeping with the foundational pun of the story: Bartleby is his copy-ist. That he is a law copyist establishes the masculine locus and logos of the text. In this same fundamentally double meaning, Bartleby's is the lawyer's story. The reflexiveness of the narrative is similarly re-enforced by the way the entire "body" of the story is framed by its first and last words: "I."

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The narrator's identity, particularly given his namelessness, is as much at issue as is Bartleby's. But before turning to such matters, it may be relevant to consider the digital quality of the "I." The narrator opens with "I am a rather elderly man," and we can read the emphasis almost any way, though likely accenting age or gender. He then repeats in the second ("safe man") paragraph: "Imprimis. I am a man ... " (3). That would seem to disqualify age as the inflection, leaving the subject's maleness to receive the discursive emphasis. And no doubt "the man problem" propels the narrative. But to look at the first two paragraphs of the text is also to be struck by the excessiveness of the first person pronoun. "I" appears no fewer than ten times in the first paragraph and eleven in the second paragraph. The repetition gives the word a decidedly cypher-like quality. "I" is a pronoun, but "I" also looks like and is 1 (one). The mathematical sense of identity as being one (1) is foregrounded. Furthermore, the narrator tells us up front that he has been in "more than ordinary contact with" a "singular" set of men, and refers to Bartleby as "one of those beings" about whom there is "one vague report." In this context, we must hear in Bartleby's repeated "I would prefer not to" its homonym: "I would prefer not two." More explicitly, his final fusion-his return to primal oneness-lends support to this understanding of his insistent "not to" as "not two." The pattern of apparent doubling or mirroring followed by a reduction (seemingly by virtue of that very coupling or pairing) to oneness seems, then, likewise central to this text. With a light hand, Melville traces the Turkey and Nippers pair, describing their one-up, one-down routine, giving us to understand that taken together the two are one functional unit. When Bartleby is taken on he is similarly situated in terms of two in one: one premise in two parts, a folding door, a folding screen, and the matched opposites of "privacy and society were conjoined" (10). It is no accident that the business of copying-that is, re-producing originals-is at the crux of the story. The genetic models of the mitosis-meiosis process come to mind. But even and especially within the biology of the text, we might consider what kind of re-production occurs among men. The overwhelming evidence of this text and its subtext-" A Story of Wall Street" -is, of course, that men make money. By nature, women make babies. Yet our manifestly male narrator is trapped in the desire and engaged in the process of writing or "making" a life of Bartleby. Before he is through, the narrator certainly seems to be nurturing to Bartleby, to care for him, to protect him, to make a little nest for him. And it is, to begin with, the narrator's solicitation that brings about Bartleby's appearance. When we first encounter Bartleby, however, he is a scrivener, not a baby. But following the course of the narrative, we can easily trace a series of regressions and refusals, beginning with his declining to verify someone else's copy and ending with a refusal, at the oral site, to take sustenance or to speak or in any way produce even himself. Yet initially it is reasonable to read Bartleby's functioning pen as evidence of his occupying, however

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briefly, a phallic (adult) position; he is capable of operating in the Symbolic realm. That he performs his business out of the lawyer's sight, behind the privacy screen, and that mention is made of "subsequent erections" in the same passage, similarly suggests a sexual, if onanistic, functioning. What may be more important than reading Bartleby's initial position as phallic is noting the narrator's insistent denial through displacement of this possibility. The narrator describes Bartleby's prodigiousness with the reproducing pen this way: "At first, Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famished for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion .... he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically" (12). Not only does the voracious oral displace the phallic possibility, but the lawyer's alimentary metaphor is conspicuously inadequate. It is both faulty and truncated. "Gorging on" documents suggests taking them in, whereas copying is metaphorically closer to preparing them for someone else's ingestion. We might just let this all pass, but there is the colophonic alert to there being "no pause for digestion," which further undermines or unmasks the metaphor, begging the question of what is being produced with or without digestion. The metaphor takes in but does not put out; the excretory function is missing. What's more, the narrator's description pointedly denies the scrivener any associated pleasure. What is puzzling at first about the lawyer's omission of the excretory half of the process is that he seems quite taken with the anal in other contexts. We might speculate that this matter, like most, is too blatant-not latent enough-for the narrator, or, perhaps, that this is in some sense premature. Freud's explication of the "anal character" is worth quoting here: "They are especially orderly, parsimonious and obstinate" (SE 9: 69). He goes on to say that the anal character traits "are to be regarded as the first and most constant results of the sublimation of anal eroticism" (238), and notes the importance of money in an unholy trinity of money, excrement, and libidinal pleasure. Freud even remarks that "according to ancient Babylonian doctrine gold is 'the faeces of Hell' " (SE 9: 71). It is in this light we might consider the "prudent," "methodical," and "inveterate" narrator, the "safe man," who, he says of himself, in the "tranquillity of a snug retreat, [does] a snug business among rich men's bonds," and who loves to repeat the name of John Jacob Astor "for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion" (4). It is hard, I would suggest, to avoid hearing the "ass" in the repetitions of Astor, and later in the narrator's flight to Astoria. Even before Bartleby is on the scene we are given evidence of the lawyer's interest in things anal. He tells of his "inspection" of Ginger Nuts' "little desk," and, not coincidentally, immediately after mentioning the dollar a week he is paid. More insistent, of course, is the passage which describes the lawyer's exploration of Bartleby's "closed desk."

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There are several issues at stake here. First, we should note that it is the narrator rather than Bartleby who is anally-driven. Second, it is apparent that despite the pleasure of the exploration the narrator is unable in the end to say what it is he finds. After opening the handkerchief he reports finding "a savings bank," rather than "money" or "coins." Even, and especially, in retrospection he represses the thing itself. This scene of homoerotic curiosity is followed by the narrator's guiltridden attempt at distancing himself from Bartleby, beginning with a litany of ways Bartleby is bad. He doesn't read. He never visits an eating house. He doesn't even drink "like other men." He doesn't walk about, scarcely talks, and "more than all" there is about him "a certain unconscious air of pallid-how shall I call it?-of pallid haughtiness" (24). The homosocial gives way to the homophobic. His initial "fraternal melancholy" turns to fear and "repulsion" (24). He then pronounces the hopelessness of "special cases," due to their being a kind of "excessive and organic ill" (25). Though ostensibly referring to Bartleby, the description would seem to apply to his own relentless guilt. The self-reflexivity and doubled address of his summary remarks is also striking: "What 1 saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of an innate and incurable disorder" (25). Whose disorder? Who is the victimizer? The paragraph concludes: "I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul 1 could not reach" (26). The doubling of his body/his body and his soul/his soul forces the referent back to the narrator as much as onto Bartleby. The narrator's obsessive guilt, commensurate with nothing he does in the story he tells, is evidenced in the next paragraph which begins: "I did not accomplish the purpose of going to Trinity Church that morning. Somehow, the things 1 had seen disqualified me for a time from churchgoing" (25). What is it, really, that the lawyer saw or imagined seeing, but which he struggles desperately not to say? The scene is pivotal, occurring at dead center of the story. We can recall that he very casually explains going to his "chambers" that Sunday morning and that "luckily" he had his key with him, "but upon applying it to the lock, 1 found it resisted by something inserted from the inside" (21). The description continues with the lawyer both recounting and repudiating what he saw and felt. The language used here is particularly telling: the "something inserted" to his "consternation" is, of course, a key; Bartleby "thrust[s] his lean visage" at the narrator; he

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is in "a strangely tattered deshabille" and "was sorry, but he was deeply engaged just then, and preferred not admitting me at present" (21). Bartleby suggests that he walk around the block "two or three times," saying "by that time he would probably have concluded his affairs" (21). Before moving to the narrator's tellingly elaborate and sublimated response, we may well wonder: what are the possibilities of the "affairs" Bartleby will be concluding? He could be dressing or at his toilette or engaged in some sort of business affair, but "he was deeply engaged." Masturbation is unlikely in that Bartleby makes an appearance "holding the door ajar." Similarly, because he comes to the door, his being "on the commode" is a less plausible explanation. To understand the narrator's reaction to the encounter it is necessary to give critical attention first to the short paragraph that immediately precedes it: Here it must be said, that according to the custom of most legal gentlemen occupying chambers in densely-populated law buildings, there were several keys to my door. One was kept by a woman residing in the attic, which person weekly scrubbed and daily swept and dusted my apartments. Another was kept by Turkey for convenience sake. The third I sometimes carried in my own pocket. The fourth I knew not who had. (21)

For starters, it is hard to believe that the "safe man" of Wall Street didn't know or remember who has his fourth key, unless this knowledge is already repressed. The paragraph itself begins with a curiously compulsory "must" and introduces the extremely charged sign of the key, the quintessential non-aggressive phallic marker. His accounting for the other keys, especially for the first key, is most telling. In the full and ironic Derridean sense, the navel of the text is located here. The one woman, who exists in the unconscious mind becomes, in the mere mention of her, a "which [witch] person" who deals with the dirt and therefore is debased by class as well as gender, but who it is established, because she sweeps daily, has the mother's phallic broom as well as the son's phallic key. No other mention is made of her in the text, but primacy is unmistakably given to her: "One was kept by a woman," substantiating her importance in the (sur)text and making it reasonable to read the narrator's reaction to his encounter with Bartleby as a response to a dreadful primal scene or, what might be worse for the "fraternal" narrator, an identity-destroying scene of sibling and mother (oral) intimacy. The language throughout is openly sexual. Bartleby is so "withal trim and self-possessed" (of the phallic mother?), "that incontinently I slunk away from my own door, and did as desired" (21). Bartleby is figured in the position of authority here, and the narrator is left with childlike "twinges of impotent rebellion" against the "effrontery of this unaccountable scrivener" (21). The copy(ist) has taken the place of the original. (All the more fitting, then, is the lawyer's act of re-appropriation in reclaiming territorial rights to the copyist's desk

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when he later returns to the scene.} The narrator seems to have in mind both impotency and castration when he says that it "not only disarmed me, but unmanned me as it were" (21). Is it not possible to discern, behind the sexual screen, the lost arms to be those of mother, and the unmanning castration to be the tragedy of weaning and its maternal loss? He tries to "recover" himself by saying this is just temporary ("for a time") and only "a sort of unmanned" that has to do with being dictated to by an underling. What immediately follows is the lawyer's more elaborate attempt at recovery of himself, cast in rationalization, repudiation, and sublimation, all intended to deal with a bigger fear than simple emasculation. "Was anything amiss going on?" is followed by an immediate: "Nay, that was out of the question" (22). The lawyer seems to be palpably repressing the thought as he reiterates: "It was not to be thought of that Bartleby was an immoral person" (22). The preposition "of" is poignant here. Without it, the sense more readily is that Bartleby ought not be considered an immoral person. The syntactically superfluous "of" points instead toward what it is that the narrator shouldn't do--think about such things. But he can't leave such matters alone. "But what could he be doing there?-copying?" The lawyer can neither fully repress nor quite bring himself to speak of any kind of sex or "copulating." But more crucial, he can't permit himself to think of Bartleby making contact with a woman, especially the woman in his (psychic) attic. The passage is, of course, over-determined, but not as egregiously so as the two paragraphs that follow, in which the narrator finds a domesticated and rather flimsy screen of an explanation. "Yes, thought I, it is evident enough that Bartleby has been making his home here, keeping bachelor's hall all by himself" (22). There are at least three signifiers of solitary, male exclusivity: his "home" is the all-male workplace; he is a bachelor; he is all by himself. This is followed by an outpouring of compassion, the sublimation punctuated by exclamation points. Immediately then the thought came sweeping across me, what miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall Street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building, too, which of weekdays hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous-a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage! (22-23)

But for all the misdirection and sublimation-we must note that these thoughts "came sweeping" -, there is still the woman, both material and figurative, who abides there, too, and who daily sweeps and dusts and once a week-perhaps on Sunday-scrubs. No mention of, not a peep, of pity for her.

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Instead, the narrator speaks of "a feeling of over-powering, stinging melancholy" and "the bond of a common humanity" which drew him "irresistibly to gloom" (23). Again, he insists on the exclusive maleness of the bond: "A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam" (22). There are four separate mentionings of Adam in "Bartieby, the Scrivener," but nary an Eve to be found. The closest the narrator can come in this passage to remembering the mother is the heavily veiled reference which immediately follows: "I remember the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway.... but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none" (23). If we read "is hidden" for "hides" and "a loft" (in the attic) for "aloof" and "mother" for "misery," this becomes at once an acknowledgment and a denial that the woman in question is also mother. That his "sad fancyings" are a stifled enunciation of the threateningdevouring, reproducing, abandoning-mother is finally labeled for us by his use of the word "chimeras." The monster in the attic of his mind is without doubt a she monster. Freud describes melancholy as "a hole in the psyche" (SE 14: 245) linked forever to the first loss, the loss of the mother's breast. Bartleby's narrator seems incapable of facing this loss. Any positive image of the mother is so profoundly introjected and protected that it is inaccessible, if not utterly missing. And even the negative half of a Kleinian-described splitting is so profoundly repressed that he can scarcely dare to say the word. Julia Kristeva's discussion of the body of the mother as the site of primal fear and figuration of the improper and unclean, the unspeakable abomination, can serve to substantiate the link between the narrator's overwrought response and the spectre of the (bad) mother's return. Very much in the language of Melville's story, and most resonant with the very imago of anorexia, Kristeva writes of the psychic "stray" or forlorn figure: I imagine a child who has swallowed up his parents too soon, who frightens himself on that account, "all by himself," and, to save himself, rejects and throws up everything that is given to him-all gifts, all objects ... and constitutes his own territory, edged by the abject .... Out of the daze that has petrified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother, a daze that has cut off his impulses from their objects, that is from their representations, out of such daze he causes, along with loathing, one word to crop up-fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject. (6)

It is important to recall that while Bartleby-and Clarissa, Cather's recluse, Atwood's Marian and case after case of self-starving women-surely fits Kristeva's sad figuration, it is the narrator who directs and misdirects our attention, and who sees his own fearful half-reflection in Bartleby. We might speculate that the narrator survives his abjection because he manages to engage, if not arrest, in "manly" anal production; Bartleby starves

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because he regresses to the maternal oral, and, because he cannot reproduce (like) mother, he can only achieve identity-oneness-with her in death. The last line of the "sons of Adam" paragraph closes the psychoanalytic circle. "The scrivener's pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet" (23). The corpse in this image is most ostensibly Bartleby's. But we might wonder as well about the other body, the missing body of the mother. If we allow that to the narrator his scrivener could be another kind of reproducer and reproduction-the epilogue encourages the substitution of "letters" for "men"-then it is possible to catch a glimpse of the faint form of the mother, the "original" corpse, into which the infant-like Bartleby has returned. The "shivering winding sheet" joins birth to death, swaddling clothes to burial garment. And in the "uncaring strangers" of the narrator's account, we can hear the echo of guilt that comes with "fraternal" neglect. While mother is so markedly overlooked in the text, there is a preoccupation with her oral realm. One of the most delightful moments in the story describes Turkey "once moistening a ginger-cake between his lips, and clapping it on to a mortgage, for a seal" (11). On the darker side, one of the grimmest moments is arguably the call to dinner of the "wasted Bartleby" by the round-faced grub-man. Between those extremes there is a plentitude of oral references: to meals, especially dinners, to "delicious selfapproval" and "sweet morsels" of conscience, to "brandy-like" dispositions, and to indigestion and grinding teeth and nuts and cakes and apples. However, Melville's narrator, we should recall, is never "seen" eating, and certainly not communally. Even, or especially, in this we can see Bartleby as the narrator's (developmentally younger) surrogate-this time as selfstarver. Like many anorexics, the narrator seems to take vicarious pleasure in reporting the eating habits of others, especially the food guys-Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut. As was noted in the tellingly faulty metaphor of Bartleby gorging himself on his copying, the narrator specifically conflates the oral site with the copyist's pen, and often puts money (as fetish?) in the same scene, as when he says: "Turkey would gobble up scores of these cakes, as if they were mere wafers-indeed, they sell them at the rate of six or eight for a penny-the scrape of his pen blending with the crunching of the crisp particles in his mouth" (10-11). Food and money and (re)productivity intersect here; all libidinal zones are accounted for. In the narrative world of Wall Street, an absence of nurturing would be, perhaps, less remarkable than its presence. And if it is true that the female, especially the mother, is both materially and psychically banned from this place, it is also true that the narrator attempts to provide necessary sustenance. As the tolerant and would-be nurturing parent, he tries in a fatherly way to reason with his man-child who is becoming regressively more infantile. Such a parent-to-child scolding takes place when Bartleby won't

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"act his age": "I am seriously displeased. I am pained, Bartleby. I had thought better of you .... You have not even touched that money yet" (33). Besides having a decidedly maternal ("shame on you") quality, the tone positively smacks of the dinner table talk, the child not having "even touched" the leafy greens. This nurturing struggles and finally fails. That may be at least in part because the narrator is no more comfortable or capable with the nurturing phallus than the sexual or linguistic one. Emblematic of this failure, on all counts, is his having "turned into a pillar of salt" (14). That the original was Lot's wife suggests a desire to be maternal, but in this phallic form there is no sustaining nourishment. The narrator cannot-will not-produce the nurturing maternal in himself. Instead he hires Ginger Nut-a boy-to do mother's work of feeding his "corps of copyists." And in the end he pays the grub-man to feed Bartleby, "slipping some silver into the grub-man's hands" (43) rather than, say, bringing him something from home. This, too, gives credence to the suggestion that in the mutual mirroring of lawyer and copyist, the lawyer's larder is as empty as Bartleby's. Perhaps even emptier, in that Bartleby's private space of the desk held the trace of mother's milk in the otherwise unaccountable "bit of cheese" the narrator found there. In undoing his body, Bartleby becomes the very image of the narrator's conflicted desire. Bartleby's regression to his final position "at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and lying on his side" (45)-fetus in the womb-has been the narrator's long-standing fantasy. He wanted to "know" where Bartleby came from, where he was born, and he explicitly offers to return him to "his native place." Then too, in a guilt-laden reversed birth trauma, he must tear himself from the helpless creature, having witnessed the child's return to the uterine walls of the mother. The "soft imprisoned turf" will prove a vile place after all. The promise of primal nurturance in a return to the womb is crossed by the insistent sign of decadence, the grub in man. Re-fusion with mother will render Bartleby refuse-less than an integral viable one, but at least preferable to an intolerable "two." In the epilogue the lawyer speculates as to the genesis of Bartleby's disorder, revealing as he does the failed mission of his own manhood. Before considering his language in the epilogue, I want to recall the language he uses to describe his own situation in the world: The good old office, now extinct ... of Master in Chancery, had been conferred upon me. It was not an arduous office, but very pleasantly remunerative. I seldom lose my temper; much more seldom indulge in dangerous indignation at wrongs and outrages; but I must be permitted to be rash here and declare, that I consider the sudden and violent abrogation of the office of Master of Chancery, by the new Constitution, as apremature act inasmuch as I had counted upon a life-long lease of the

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Without much of a stretch we can hear a child's bitter disappointment at a loss, a real or imagined falling out of a favored place, perhaps because of the "violent" arrival of a newly constituted sibling who usurps his life-lease as Master of Chance. He now lives, he tells us in the next line, at "No.Wall Street." (Perhaps he, too, in his younger years played a game or two of Fort!-da.) In the epilogue, then, when the narrator speaks ostensibly of his copyist, we might hear a stifled echo of his own reproductive lament: "Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to pallid hopelessness ... " (45). Conceive a man. By nature. And Miss Fortune. And finally, it is only fitting that this profoundly repressed narrator's telling of the actual sight and site of the first and last loss, the womb/tomb is abdicated: "Imagination will readily supply the meagre recital of poor Bartleby's internment" (45). The Realm of the Symbolic, the Man of Law and unconscionable loss, cannot. We need an Antigone to bury the fraternal dead. But for this, we remember, she will be denied, buried alive-perhaps now in the attic. Appropriate it is, then, that the scholarship surrounding Melville's enigmatic text has become known as the "Bartleby Industry,"S and that, in the blind spot of all that industrious, logocentric reading, nothing is made of the woman in the attic. Biography provides a final irony: Melville's own copyists were, of course, all women-wife, sister, and mother. Freud tells us that the desire to know is the desire to have knowledge of the body of the mother, and Genesis names Eve, as much as Adam, in the play of the first desire which is oral knowledge. Bartleby answers the narrator when he comes to him in the Tombs saying, with devastating force: "I know you ... and I want nothing to say to you" (43). Here again is the nothing, the no thing, the "0" of the mother's body, the site of first and final loss. Missing the womb, the male anorexic expiates for having let mother go by refusing the food that would keep him away from identifying oneness with her. What light these literary figures might shed on the real and complex pathology of anorexia may be faint and artificial indeed. But it is remarkable that reproduction and its refusal emerge as central to each of these narratives of self-starvation. Carolyn Walker Bynum's carefully documented and compelling study of self-starving medieval saints-Holy Feast, Holy Fast (1987)-employs a very different (and admittedly less speculative) methodology in her investigation of the phenomenon of oral refusal. What I want to acknowledge and borrow from her important research is the considerable biographical detail she provides of the life of Catherine of Siena.

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In Bynum's text we read of Catherine's pursuit of holiness through the phantastic ingesting of Christ's body and blood even to the exclusion of, rather than in the transubstantiated form of, communion bread and wine. Her acts of mortification of the flesh give pause, and we might see in them portentous shadows of contemporary images of generic masochism and especially images in documentary footage of desperately anorexic girls, struggling against restraints to yank out feeding tubes, or exercising beyond the point of collapse in front of mirrors that reflect emaciated, skeletal forms which are nevertheless driven to a fever pitch to purge away the calories and guilt contained in the smallest ort of a cracker eaten earlier that day. At one point we are told that while religiously refusing food, Catherine of Siena drinks the pus from the wounds of the sick: "Never in my life have I tasted any food and drink sweeter or more exquisite," she writes (172). And Bynum reports that while Catherine long professed a desire to "suck the wounds of Christ," in reality she "thrusts her mouth into the putrefying breast of a dying woman" (173). Her pathology-for so it must be thought (for me) despite all efforts to keep an open mind-attests, if nothing else, to the extremity of some overpowering force or fear. The cultural context that Bynum delineates seems finally to be an insufficient account. While Bynum's creditable analysis of food refusal-"the issue of control is ... basic .... Food related behavior was central to women socially and religiously not only because food was a resource they controlled but also because by means of food women controlled themselves and their world" (191)-illuminates the cultural setting, it passes over the particular. Her analysis goes on to bring into crucial alignment the many-faceted symbolic nature of food in medieval spirituality: "Food most basically meant flesh; flesh meant suffering (sometimes ecstatic, delicious suffering); and suffering meant redemption. Fasting, feeding, and feasting were thus not so much opposites as synonyms. Fasting was flight not from but into physicality" (250). But again, the path to self-starvation and pus consumption is too infrequently taken as to be charted by this cultural compass alone. The specificity of biography offers another instrument of analysis. Catherine of Siena was the twenty-third of her mother's children and the only one her mother nursed at her own breast, and later known to be "her favorite." Catherine's twin sister was sent out to a wet nurse and died in early childhood. The next, twenty-fifth, child born to her mother when Catherine was weaned was given the dead twin's name. Catherine's older sister, who starved herself for a period of time after her marriage because of a dissolute husband, was the person who managed to get Catherine to display herself, however briefly, as feminine, by persuading her to wear an elegant dress in public. But this sister was to die a short time later in childbirth. Catherine was present at her death. At the same time, Catherine's youngest sister died, most likely from a ruptured bowel (185-186).

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It is perhaps no surprise that Catherine retreats from the suggestion that she marry her sister's husband, that she refused, even before that, to consider marriage at all, or that she "made herself ugly" so as to be undesirable, and finally found her haven in the self-erasure of fasting. In the very specificity of Catherine of Siena-a sainted exemplar of her sex-we can find a figure of her times, in her somewhat convincing pursuit of sainthood through chastity and sacrifice. But we can't help but sense a psyche in desperate and unmitigated flight from motherhood, eagerly visiting and feeding the sick, ecstatically denying herself any physical comfort or consolation, and masochistically if miraculously refusing her own body, the body that might be mother.

In researching the subject of this chapter I sought the occasion to talk with an acquaintance of mine about her mid-life battle with anorexia. We met at a little coffee shop downtown. Her recovery has been steady if slow, tentative by her own description. Toward the end of the conversation I introduced my thoughts on the coincidence, if not contributing connection, of the effective "no" to mother(hood) in the "no" to food. Her response was calm, perhaps foredrawn: "That may be true for some anorexics," she ventured, "but it doesn't relate to me. I knew from little on that I didn't want to have kids. I never even wanted to play with dolls." We stopped talking to get another cup of coffee. Mine was a nice Latte, with added cream and sugar. Hers was a rich Columbian-black.

CHAPTER FOUR

It Goes Without Saying: Oral Aggression and Its Mutterings Ah, Grandmere, que vous avez des grands dents.

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alking home from school, later than usual for having had to stay after to put up a "punishment" bulletin board (I don't recall the crime though it likely had to do with talking out of turn), 1 thought to cut through the yards of several houses and save myself the distance and time of the long sidewalks that invariably met at perfect right angles in the Germanic Wisconsin community I was growing up in. 1 made may way up one driveway, sidled along the side of a garage, passed through a space between two fences, avoiding the tulips and crocuses that were breaking through ground here and there, and was angling across the backyard of another house, when I felt a dull ache and tug at my leg. A good-sized white dog was fixed to me, there, just above the right knee, its mouth lost in my green corduroy skirt. I was more astonished than afraid. Where had it come from? Why hadn't 1 heard it? I swatted at the dog with my crumpled lunch bag, containing nothing weightier that a half-eaten, too ripe banana. The dog released its grip and, soundless as it had appeared, jogged off through some cedars and out of sight. Coming from a family of seven children, I had not grown up with pets. But neighbors had dogs, big and little, gruff and yippy. I knew, of course, even in that May of fourth grade, that dogs could bite, but I had somehow thought they had to be provoked. Perhaps that accounts in part for my overriding response to the realization-not really bloody, but already swollen and punctured in deep purple-that 1 had been bitten: 1 was ashamed. 1 checked to see if anyone could have witnessed what had happened. 1 didn't see anyone seeing me. 1 had been spared. 1 got to the sidewalk and stuck to it, not even crossing the grass of my own front yard, and slipped in the back door. It wasn't until the next night-bath night-that my sister spotted the dog's mark. Tears and denials were of no avail. My parents were told, and a whole series of scenes ensued, most of which are mercifully dim to memory: the unanswered 101

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radio pleas to the owner of a dog of that description; the policeman (I was told he was so but couldn't be sure because he wore only a gray suit) at the front door; the trips (six I've been reminded) to Dr. Sobush for shots in the tummy. I do recall vividly, however, that to my vague puzzlement and genuine delight, my father took me across the street after the last of the rabies shots to Hutchausen's Toy Store where I was allowed to choose something: I selected a red cowgirl's outfit-a skirt with vinyl white pockets attached with silver studs, a vest fringed in white vinyl and with similar pockets but with the magnificent addition of ruby jewels in the center of each, white vinyl cuffs (also bejeweled) that snapped onto each wrist, and a red felt hat with a white cord and brown bead that pushed up to tighten under my chin. I had been very brave, I was told. I had been too ashamed not to be, I never said. Two years later I was old enough to shepherd the neighbor kids on summer mornings, not really babysitting so that they'd have to pay, but providing a good enough service to get included in the treat money Mrs. Harmann routinely doled out for trips to the corner store. Of the three children under my sway that morning, the eldest was a pleasant dull blonde girl, the youngest was an energetic, wouldn't-stay-in-the-rickety-stroller, curly-headed sprite of a girl, and the other was an always unwashedlooking, intense five-year-old crew cut kid named Billy. We picked out our candy, thirty cents buying quite a loot, and left the store. Billy started clamoring for a gumball even before I had plunked little Peggy into the stroller. Now, as it happened, I had a well-tested theory about penny candy consumption. Gumballs were the last thing you ate for the obvious reason that you either had to dispose of them prematurely (well before they went pitifully stale) in order to have at, say, the caramel bull's-eyes, the red licorice two-for-a-penny coins, the gaudy orange circus peanuts, the miniature banana, strawberry, chocolate or vanilla B-B-Bat suckers, or the overrated strips of paper covered with tiny rows of pastel drops we called "Spots"; or you had to risk losing part of the stash to someone whose mouth wasn't dumb enough to be occupied by gum. Billy didn't bother to hear me out. Instead he brought his teeth to bear on my hand. He clamped down so hard that my eyes instantly filled with tears. And he wouldn't let go. I stood there trying to pull my hand free, half-pleading, half-ordering through clenched teeth of my own, for him to stop. He wouldn't. I lifted my hand up thinking it would be out of his reach, but he came with it, up, amazingly, off his feet, his wiry body bumping into mine as he dangled there like a big carp. I slapped the sack of candy into his chest; "Here, take it," I shouted. But it wasn't until my knees buckled and I fell to the ground with him still clamped fast to the meat of my hand, that he loosened his jaws. I should have kicked him or slugged him or some damn thing. Instead, I found myself, again, deeply embarrassed. We made our way home slowly, lingering longer than usual in the playground of the schoolyard across the

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way. And when, despite the delay, Cheryl, the dull blonde, tattled to her preoccupied mom, I played down the panic and throbbing, agreeing with her that "Yes, Billy is a biter." No big deal. More than enough said. Bye. Over the years, I have always taken my shame response to these incidents to be, frankly, strange. Whatever people imagine they would feel if they were bitten by something or someone with real teeth-surprise, alarm, terror, irritation, anger, betrayal, panic-they are unlikely to put shame on the list. Yet there is something in the oral assault that goes beyond or beneath the surface of the aggression itself, that quickens the human soul, like little if anything else. And it may not be so surprising that it is as primitive as shame and laced therein. The iconography of human horrors, especially since the advent of such things as gun powder, napalm, plastic explosives, germ warfare, broad swords, musket balls, pick axes, chain saws, and gas chambers, is prodigious. But the images of horror that visit the minds of children may be more telling in their single-minded explicitness: the monster has teeth. Hansel and Gretl's witch wants to fatten them for her oven, the Troll under the bridge will eat the Billy Goats Gruff, and the wolf-everybody's wolfis licking his lips and baring his teeth. Whatever it is that is in the closet or under the bed or in the bushes of bad dreams menaces most with its mouth. In a graduate seminar several years ago, Kathleen Woodward put to us a question, I loosely recall, about what we each would most fear having happen to our bodies. Maiming of some sort was the mumbled consensus. But what was remarkable about this otherwise loquacious and selfdisclosing group, was the brevity of the discussion. Woodward was more than quick and kind enough to let us off the hook and onto the more comfortable ground of lack or loss or decadence. But the question comes back to me now as I consider here the dark side of the oral nexus: its flesh-tearing, blood-lapping, marrow-sucking, devouring business. The voracious beast-without and within. My inquiry into the nasty maw of the matter begins then with the anthropological, and cannibalism as cannibalism. The psychoanalytic lens, as shaped by Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, and Freud in Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents, comes next. And finally I will look at an array of literary and cultural texts which to my mind bear witness to the sometimes blatant, often displaced, largely latent, but always arresting and mostly unmentionable, human oral aggression. Fictional and phantastical accounts of cannibalism-arguably the most unsettling of human narratives-have over the years steadily made their way into the canon of human mythopoesis. Tales of Great Lakes Windigo Psychosis, of New Guinea savages, of missionaries boiled in great Zulu cauldrons, of Jesuits devoured piecemeal around New World campfires, of

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Aztec sacrifice and blood lust-removed by time, distance and cultural identity from their schoolyard rehearsals-as well as the culturally less removed tales of the Donner Party, the Andean plane crash victims, the Raft of the Medusa, Candide's poor Cunegond with one buttocks eaten, and the particulars of Swift's modest solution, are surely if obscurely woven into a common cultural awareness that some where, some time, human beings really ate each other. For the most part this is taken into our individual and collective conscience in an admixture of horror, disbelief, embarrassed discomfort, and bad jokes. (What did the cannibal give his wife for Valentine's Day? A box of farmers' fannies.) And then, most curiously and tellingly, it disappears from cultural consciousness. Witness that of all of the many books on primitive societies, few if any take cannibalism itself as their subject. Of the few that do, Reay Tannahill's Flesh and Blood: A History of Cannibalism (1975), Eli Sagan's Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (1974), and Peggy Reeves Sanday's Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (1986) provide the most comprehensive accounts and analyses of the subject. More recently, but also more obliquely, Dudley Young's brilliant and bothersome Origins of the Sacred: The Ecstasies of Love and War (1991) confronts the subject of mythic and actual cannibalism, as does Richard Slotkin, in his look at the cultural collision between Europeans and native North Americans in Regeneration Through Violence (1973). (On-going research by anthropologist Christy Turner [Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest, 1999] and archeologist Brian Billman has brought modern forensic science to bear on verifying the cannibalism practiced by the Anasazi ancestors of the Hopi and Pueblo Indians. Their findings, though very narrow in terms of the entire human landscape, have effectively countered the central claim of William Arens's The Man-Eating Myth [1979] that cannibalism is purely western civilization's fabrication, its alibi for conquest and cultural genocide.) Other anthropologists, mythologists, and historians-Mary Douglas, Alfred Metraux, Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Mircia Eliade, Rene Girard, Peter Farb and George Armelagos among the most reputable--cover, more or less, the cannibalistic component. Yet, with remarkable consistency, they do not linger on the subject, or submit it to any serious analytic scrutiny. What does emerge, however, from a perusal of these studies is that the "some where" and "some time" of our common knowledge of cannibalism was, in fact, every where and in some cases for a very long time of the human experience. Tannahill's compilation of accounts of anthrophagy spans the globe and the centuries from Egypt and Islamic societies where even in times of relative plenty meat in the market was often and preferably human to India in the last two or three centuries B.C. where, alongside strict vegetarian cultures, rural peoples such as the Birhors routinely

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killed and ate their sick and elderly family members and neighbors lest "their meat would be spoilt" (71). And then to China and Brazil and Hungary, Moravia, Poland, Ireland, the Pyrenees, and Charlemagne's Saxony where the old Salic Law of the Franks, which decreed a fine of 200 solidi for anyone found guilty of eating someone, was updated to read: "If anyone, deceived by the devil, believes after the manner of pagans that any man or woman is a witch and eats men, and if on this account he burns or gives her flesh to be eaten, or eats it, he will be punished by capital sentence" (167). Sagan's study, though not as comprehensive in its catalogue of cannibalism, offers a categorization and traces an evolution of cannibalistic practices. He asserts that as a cultural form cannibalism persisted for countless generations in two discrete categories: exophagy or aggressive cannibalism and endophagy or affectionate cannibalism. Rarely did the two forms occur within the same tribe. In fact, endophagists typically expressed horror at the thought of eating anyone who was not familial, and to that end would frequently capture and adopt a neighboring tribe's child, caring for and abiding with him for years, before ritually killing and eating the now-familial one. In the case of aggressive cannibalism, Sagan and others point foremost to the pragmatic. Eating the outsider-the enemyengendered fear in neighboring tribes, met varying nutritive needs, and offered the practitioner the ultimate triumph of eating one's victim. The more noble the victim, the more gratifying and socially efficacious the meal. In some societies it was common for the victorious cannibal to take the name of the victim, completing the full incorporation/identification process, a practice which will call to mind the communicant who takes the name of Christ-ian. In most societies that practiced exophagy, aggressive cannibalism gave way to one of two sublimations suggesting an emergent ambivalence to the practice. Either cannibalistic behavior became restricted to some designated members of the group and a totemic/taboo system developed, or the practice of head-hunting emerged as an institutionalized sublimation of cannibalism. Whenever head-hunting replaced cannibalism, it still served aggressive ends through the killing of the hated victim. But the practice of head-hunting, in a literal sense, preserved the beneficial sign and worth of the deed. It is at this point in the evolution of aggressive cannibalism that the instinct/desire to consume the victim is controlled in favor of a symbol, the currency of which yields social standing and, especially, sexual reward. It is significant that there is little if any association of sexual prowess with cannibalism itself, but that sexual potency is unmistakably linked to headhunting. So it is that the repression of oral aggression appears in these many instances to give way to a "less primitive" form of sexual competition and aggression. The implications of the direction of this evolution will be taken up a bit later when I turn to Freud's account of the foundation of

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human culture as he describes it in Totem and Taboo (1913). But for now, I want to follow Sagan in stressing that aggressive cannibalism as a cultural form has about it a distinctly ephemeral quality. Because the proof of triumph is utterly destroyed through devouring, there is no cumulative social effect. The cannibal needs to repeat the oral act without accrued benefit. Cannibals stop eating each other in part because there is more profit in the corpse as trophy than as consumable good, in the shrunken head on the doorframe than the devoured and therefore erased corpse in the belly, not simply because the instinct and pleasure of the oral act was outgrown. The headhunters' trophies serve as graphic transitional objects as the society moves from an oral/cannibalistic organizing principle to a sadistic anal or genital one. All of which is to say that in the case of both totemic and headhunting developments, symbolization seems uniquely capable of supplanting or redirecting instinctual oral aggression. The other type of cannibalism, endophagy or affectionate cannibalism, has seen a similar evolution away from actual incorporation of the dead body. Although some affectionate cannibals select and kill the person to be devoured while others only cannibalize the naturally selected dead, we can note that both approaches to affectionate cannibalism appear to be a response to separation anxiety, a way of perpetuating presence and undoing loss. Affection for the dead is reported as the conscious motivation for eating the corpse of the beloved, but Sagan, for one, suggests convincingly that endophagic rituals also reveal a display of anger at the loss, directed toward the dead person for having abandoned the living. Thus oral incorporation addresses both conscious affectionate and unconscious aggressive needs. As is the case with hostile cannibalism, the act of endophagy is presymbolic. The cannibal of either ilk knows no metaphor. It may be observed that primitive cannibalistic cultures are fundamentally pre-Oedipal, in many cases not knowing what or who was responsible for conception-was it something that was touched, or seen, or eaten? And a corollary observation or assumption posits that, by definition, guilt is not likely to be discovered in such cultures, obviating the need for repressive mechanisms. I Yet anthropological analysis of cannibalistic societies does not account for or, for that matter, even observe that in virtually all cannibalistic cultures-aggressive or affectionate-mothers are almost never eaten. In aggressive societies older women and female children were sometimes cannibalized, but women of child-bearing age were passed over. And in endocannibalistic cultures, the first deviation from the practice of eating the familial corpse occurs when the most distant members of the tribe are enlisted to disguise themselves as immediate family and then steal and do away with the mother's body, presumably so that mother's body will not be (consciously) eaten. If such endocannibalistic cultures might be said to have institutionalized the desires and drives appropriate to an infant at the oral stage of development, we can find in the refusal to eat mother

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very early evidence of ambivalence, denial and repression. Whether the force toward sublimation or symbolization of the oral incorporative desire is fueled by an a priori ambivalence and guilt, or whether a retroactive guilt is a by-product of the sublimation that was fueled by other needs, remains unclear. But what is clear is that the substitutions and symbolic sanctions enlisted to overcome the cannibalistic instinct begin with a denial of the desire to devour-aggressively or affectionately-mother. Then, too, our way of dealing with the corpse of the other reveals everywhere a trace of this original, incorporative, oral urge, as easily observed in such symbolic substitutions as saving or wearing the bones of the dead, eating animals that have been placed with the bodies, drinking the "wine of the corpse," keeping a lock of hair or saintly relic, preserving ashes in ornate (or tasteful) urns, drinking Old Bushmills and singing "Danny Boy" while gathered round the casket, taking gifts of food to the families of the deceased, and, almost universally where famine doesn't surround the death, partaking in some sort of funeral meal. What anthropology won't offer in the way of analysis or explication of the text of the cannibalistic oral, psychoanalysis well may. But before taking up what it is that Freud and other theorists say and do not say about cannibalism and the sadist oral, it may be useful to rehearse what they say about the oral in general. Freud first. While having acknowledged rather discretely the existence of a murky, not very meaningful (or manly?) oral stage of human development, Freud returns now and again to the oral to account for foundational human psychic enterprise. In his short paper "Negation" (1925), he examines the nature and form of repressed material, and the efficacy of negation in freeing the psyche to think the unthinkable, speak the unmentionable. Tellingly he situates, albeit fleetingly, this first place of repression/negation at the mouth: Expressed in the language of the oldest-the oral-instinctual impulses, the judgment is: 'I should like to eat this,' or 'I should like to spit it out'; or, put more generally, 'I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out.' That is to say, 'It shall be inside me' or 'it shall be outside me.' (SE 19: 237)

In this brief iteration of the structure of oral instinctual impulses, Freud not only moves from active to passive, culpability to innocence, but from the mouth itself as implicated in eating and spitting, to a more polymorphous "taking in" and "keeping out," and finally a non-alimentary or even physiological condition of being "inside" or "outside." He goes on in the same paragraph to distance his theory even further from the physicality of eating by stating: "As I have shown elsewhere, the original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself every-

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thing that is bad. What is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical" (SE 19: 237). There are several problems with this final formulation if held to the reality test of most patterns of ingestion-even infants once past symbiosis with mother and breast are forever taking in external things, which by Freud's reduction are therefore all bad, putting himself in direct contradiction to his original assertion that we want categorically to take in good and spit out bad. But what is most germane here, along with Freud's flight from the actual oral, is his gross omission: if it is external/bad, might we not refuse it, or, more importantly, if it is bad might we not destroy it in the only way we can imagine-by devouring it? It would seem that good or bad, we manage it with our mouths, though Freud seems incapable here and elsewhere of accounting for the destructive, aggressive component of orality. Karl Abraham, in contrast, takes up the sadist-oral with seeming ease. He puts it there, as a matter of course, between (sometimes overlapping) the non-destructive sucking oral and the now passive/preservative, now sadist/destructive anal. As discussed in earlier chapters, Abraham gives the oral its foundational place in regard to both personality development and erotic/libidinal pleasure. But he also situates aggression primarily at the oral. In examining the psychological machinations of melancholia he asserts: "In melancholic states of depression the unconscious of the person directs upon his sexual object the wish to incorporate it. In the depth of his unconscious there is a tendency to devour and demolish his object" (274). In this same essay, "The First Pregenital Stage of the Libido" (1916), Abraham links not only sadist/destructive desire to the oral but to primary repression: "the deepest repressed wishes of the melancholic are of a cannibalistic nature, that his 'sins' in their essence refer to a forbidden, even detested, act of eating, then we understand the great frequency with which he refuses to take food" (277). Beyond or beneath his understanding of the role of the cannibalistic oral in the melancholic, Abraham further asserts: "The unconscious cannibalistic impulses which appear to me to underlie definite symptoms of depressive mental disturbances also exist in normal adult people" (278). If Abraham suggests the existence "in normal adult people" of an unconscious cannibalistic impulse, Melanie Klein insists on its universality. In her configuration of the human psyche as a product of object-relations, Klein gives more than equal time to the aggressive, destructive impulses of the human bond and situates these sadist urges very early in a pre-genital (pre-oedipal) infancy. Kleinian theory posits and reposits a picture of human infancy that is very busy with the business of relating to the objects or part-objects of the infant's real and phantastic universe. Not only does Klein make the case for the maternal breast being the original desired good object of object relations, she also contends that the development of impulses, phantasies, and anxieties originate in the hostile feelings toward

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the mother's bad and dreaded breast. It is in response to and through this relational interplay that the human child creates its mental life: "external and internal situations are always interdependent, since introjection and projection operate side by side from the beginning of life" (52). Like Abraham and Freud, Klein initially connects oral sadist impulses with adult pathology-psychosis and schizophrenia. But she quickly goes on to contend that "normal" human development involves an initial paranoid-schizoid position in which fear of retaliation derives from the individual's own aggressiveness as it is manifested in the form of phantasized oral attacks on the mother and on the internalization of a devoured, and therefore devouring, breast, the prototype of all internal persecutors. For her purposes, Klein uses her observations and figurations to theorize both an Oedipus conflict that begins in the first years of life and a superego formation that results from the internalization of an injured and therefore dreaded breast as well as a satisfying and helpful breast. This early superego is of particular interest because of its severity on the one hand and its overindulgence on the other. Klein anticipates her critics when she agrees that: It does not seem clear why a child of, say, four years old should set up in his mind an unreal, phantastic image of parents who devour, cut and bite. But it is clear why in a child of about one year old the anxiety caused by the beginning of the Oedipus conflict takes the form of a dread of being devoured and destroyed. The child himself desires to destroy the libidinal object by biting, devouring and cutting it, which leads to anxiety since awakening of the Oedipus is followed by introjection of the object, which becomes one from which punishment is to be expected.... The super-ego becomes something which bites, devours and cuts. (71)

I would observe, though Klein does not emphasize it here, that this internalization through introjection acts on both bad and good objects, and that the introjected soothing, satisfying, and nurturing object will also have its psychic sway as the child advances. In later essays Klein foregoes the Oedipal reference, seemingly because she can no longer hope to stay in tune or favor with Freud. Regardless, Klein's elaboration of the impact of oral-sadist impulses on the psychogenesis of mania and depression, on conditions of mourning and melancholia, and on the development of intense human emotions is convincing and considerable. But for my purposes here, her analysis of the relationship between oral sadist desire and symbol formation is most compelling and germane. In brief, she asserts that sadism reaches its zenith in the earliest stages of life, specifically in "the oral-sadist desire to devour the mother's breast (or the mother herself)" (177). The subject's dominant aim is to possess the contents of the mother's body and to destroy her by means of every weapon which sadism can command. The child expects to find within the mother everything it desires and all of which is thought to be edible-

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excrement, babies, father's penis, father himself. The enormity of the phantasized oral attack on mother is matched by a profound and overwhelming fear of retaliation by the united parents and by the internalized objects. A series of defense mechanisms are deployed to cope with this enormous anxiety, but the first of these are violent and as such exacerbate matters by producing similarly violent retaliatory phantasies. Other mechanisms will prove to be more effective in defending against this primary fear: splitting, idealization, and denial among the best. But alongside these defense standards, Klein suggests that symbol formation, as it is foundational of all sublimation and displacement, and which is born out of the need to defend against devoured/dreaded/desired objects, is the mechanism of choice for the developing ego, by which it stays one step ahead of its fears. And with each new fear and step the child advances in maturity and culture. In this sense we frighten ourselves out of infancy and into language. We put the words in our mouth instead of mother. Klein's picture of infantile and foundational paranoia and its generative power squares with Julia Kristeva's darkly lyrical vision of the human psyche and the dangerous oral. Though Kristeva imagines the incorporated mother as menacing by means of its abjection, she, like Klein, sees us propelled to language by fear. Her exploration of phobia takes her more explicitly into cultural territory than does Klein's investigation of the child's psychic development, but no where in Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1982) do we find Kleinian principles refuted, even really disputed. Rather Kristeva reinforces the connection between the incorporative urge, primal repression, and the compensatory defense that is language, at its allusive and illusive best. She writes: "The fantasy of incorporation by means of which I attempt to escape fear (I incorporate a portion of my mother's body, her breast, and thus hold on to her), threatens me none the less, for a symbolic, paternal prohibition already dwells in me on account of my learning to speak at the same time" (39). We can note that unlike Klein, but aligned with Lacanian theory, she assigns to the father the power of prohibition. Kristeva's child is prohibited into language as much as it frightens itself into it. She tracks the syntactical and tactical defensive maneuver that alleviates, however briefly, the guilt and fear of devouring by substituting the phantasy of being devoured. In the face of these threats from the incorporated body of the mother and the violated paternal prohibition, Kristeva imagines, "I attempt another procedure: I am not the one that devours, I am being devoured by him; a third person therefore (he, a third person) is devouring me" (39). In configuring language as a universal fetish, a screen and a defense, Kristeva reinforces Lacan's notion of language as lack, but she also points the way back to Freud's totem-the first of all fetishes-the mother of all metaphors. Indeed it is in Freud's Totem and Taboo where we might expect to find the most explicit delineation of the relationship of primitive, instinctual

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drives and their management through cultural forms and norms. But whether it is Freud's averted eye when it comes to the menacing maternal and the sadistic oral or his tenacious grip on the phallic as foundational to any and all human culture, we find only two mentionings of cannibalism in his moderately lengthy study of primitive culture. In the first instance Freud refers unceremoniously to "the higher motives for cannibalism" having a similar origin as the phenomenon he has described concerning the power and restrictions of the use of names, saying: "By incorporating parts of a person's body through the act of eating, one at the same time acquires the qualities possessed by him" (SE 8:82). The only other reference to cannibalism occurs in the passage in which he imagines the crucial day in which: the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end to the patriarchal horde .... Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him ... and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. (SE 8: 141, italics mine)

Freud follows this description of the earth-shattering event with a brief pass at the development of the totem meal, as repetition and commemoration of "this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things-of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion" (SE 8: 142). That's it. In a two hundred page study of primitive cultural practices, no more than a half dozen lines of reference to cannibalism, to the act that has, more than any other, continued through the decades and centuries to define "us" and "them." The paradigmatic act of devouring "goes without saying," and without any serious analysis, as does the emphatically oral nature of the meal which, I'm suggesting, reveals the criminal deed to be of a definitively oral nature. As stunning as the meagerness of Freud's account of cannibalism is, it is perhaps not so puzzling in light of the enormity of his assertion in Totem and Taboo about the nature of the oldest and most powerful of human desires, which he puts succinctly: "The most ancient and important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totem clan of the opposite sex. These then must be the oldest and most powerful of human desires" (SE 8: 31-32). These come through to us as the most basic and foundational of human desires-patricide and incest-the prohibitions of which launch civilization. The desire to devour-anything or anyone-gets no press. However, in support and explication of the related tenets of totems and taboos, Freud compares the obsessions of neurotics with taboos, finding them to be very alike, and accounts for the tenacity of both taboo and

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obsession by explaining that both the prohibition, which is conscious, and the instinct, which is repressed, are at work, thus leading to a profound ambivalence toward the single object/action. But because the two conflicting forces operate in separate spheres--conscious prohibition and unconscious repressed desire or instinct-they won't be neutralized or compromised (SE 8: 27-29). What I find especially telling about Freud's meditation here is his description of a parallel practice-a "liability" that both obsessives and tabooists exhibit-of displacement forward and outward, which "contaminates" other objects or actions that come in contact with the prohibited object or action. Having identified the mechanism of displacement at work in these comparable situations, Freud seems determined to block his own path. He seemingly refuses to consider the implications of this same principle of displacement as having occurred originally, though he does suggest that: an unconscious impulse need not to have arisen at the point where it makes its appearance; it may arise from some quite other region and have applied originally to quite other persons and connections; it may have reached the place at which it attracts our attention through the mechanism of "displacement." Owing, moreover, to the indestructibility and insusceptibility to corrections which are attributes of unconscious processes, it may have survived from very early times to which it was appropriate into later times and circumstances in which its manifestations are bound to seem strange. (SE 8: 70-71)

Uncharacteristically for the father of psychoanalysis, the author of Interpretation of Dreams, the plumber of the unconscious, Freud does not speculate as to the nature of the "other region," "other persons," or "very early times" that might constitute the original, horrifically ambivalent instinctive and indestructible desire, now making its appearance after being doubly displaced onto patricide and incest. Instead he reiterates: "Where there is prohibition there must be an underlying desire" (SE 8: 70), and he proceeds to look past the mark of the oral on the very signs and symbols he delineates. If we consider a sampling of these-that an extensive system of taboos prohibit contact with the corpse, that son-in-Iaws are prohibited from looking at mother-in-Iaws (in particular their breasts), that the hunter is prohibited from putting food into his own mouth, that the name of the dead person must not be spoken (put in the mouth), that the totem animal must not be eaten except in highly restricted and ritualized circumstances, that some circumcision rites require knocking out teeth, that food is sometimes put in the mouths of the heads of dead, that fasting and elaborate food restrictions are commonplace, and that sacrifice and feast are integral to most totemic systems-it is impossible to overlook the oral intersection. Yet Freud offers faint or circular observations such as: "the sacramental killing and communal eating of the totem animal, whose consumption was forbidden on all other occasions, was an important feature of totemic reli-

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gion" (SE 8: 52). Or he offers a parenthetical note in a summary-like passage: "Totems were inherited only through the female line. There was a prohibition against killing the totem (or-which, under primitive conditions, is the same thing-against eating it.) Members of a totem clan were forbidden to practise [sic] sexual intercourse with one another" (SE 8: 107). Against the grain of his own assertion that incest and patricide are our "oldest and most powerful desires," Freud reports on the Arunta, an especially primitive tribe that practiced totemism that was unrelated to exogamy, but based on the production and regulation of edible totems. Here the full force of the cultural and psychological mechanism of totemism is in place before (and aside from) sexual or incestual questions exist. But Freud doesn't flinch. He merely notes that originally the clan had eaten its own totem without restriction, but, citing Frazer, he reports that restrictions had arisen from the observance that animals never fed upon their own kind. While the precise relationship between totemism and exogamy remains obscure and subject to debate (Frazer, for one, believes totemism and exogamy are two distinct institutions), everybody seems to agree that totemism predates exogamy. To this we should add the obvious though generally unnoted observation that totemic systems invariahly involved restrictions of an oral nature. The first restriction/repression, then, is oral. And because it is repressed, it is likely to be the destructive/sadist oral instinctive desire which is most deeply buried. The first ambivalence, the first civilizing denial or repression or sacrifice, is oral because the first aggressive desire is oral. And it is addressed to mother, in "very early times," well before it is displaced onto father and transformed into or augmented by genital, incestuous desire. If as Freud has argued, psychoanalytically and primitively, the desire to kill is the same as the desire to devour, then surely it is directed at mother before and more profoundly than at father. Moreover, the intensification of "the horror of incest" which Freud says underpins totemism and exogamy must occur psychically and developmentally later. Long before we struggle with Oedipal desire, we encounter a terrifying, aggressive desire to devour mother. It may well be that it is this primary oral desire to have mother, to incorporate her, to devour her entirely, that is displaced onto and fuels Oedipal desire. Freud concludes Totem and Taboo with homage paid to the power of psychic rather than factual reality, especially for primitive men. (Are we not all originally primitive beings?) He writes: "Accordingly the mere hostile impulse against father, the mere existence of a wishful phantasy of killing and devouring him, would have been enough to produce the moral reaction that created totemism and taboo" (SE 8: 159). To this we might readily concur: 'Tis enough. But also in this we find the opening that Freud himself would not take, the path of phantastic desire that Klein and others follow, that leads to a different place of primary desire and primary prohi-

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bition-devouring mother. Before we experience and surrender desire for sexual union with her (or father), and in the lifelong delay of fusion with her in death, we must first phantastically forego, as did both aggressive and affectionate cannibal societies,-by repression, displacement, denial, and substitute symbol formation-mother as meat. And we must forever atone for the thought of it that still haunts us like the deed-our psychic original sin. Freud revisits this territory of totems and taboos, of aggressive and libidinal instincts and their regulation or repression, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Again he manages for the most part to keep mother, and our guilty, primitive, devouring designs on her, out of it. In making the case that aggression is "an original, self-subsisting, instinctual disposition in man . . . [and] constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization," he places aggression and eros categorically at odds, with aggression being "the derivative and main representative of the death instinct" (SE 21: 122). Men, he says, "are not gentle creatures who want to be loved" (SE 21: 111). They have "a powerful share of aggressiveness," the renunciation of which is not enough to satisfy the super-ego "for the wish persists and cannot be concealed from the super-ego" (SE 21: 126) and results in the eternally ensuing bargain that sees that "a threatened external unhappinessloss of love and punishment on the part of external authority-has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt" (SE 21: 126). No doubt Freud has correctly identified the source of the force of guilt to be aggression turned inward on the subject, and he seems similarly on the mark when he asserts that "the sense of guilt is an expression of the conflict due to ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction or death" (SE 21: 132). Here, again, one might expect to hear some mention of the original site of that ambivalence, some allusion to the original object of love and hate, the thing we want most to preserve and destroy-mother. But here too, the mother as object and oral aggression as means both remain unspoken. Instead we find a constitutional "remorse" for having killed (here not specifically devoured) the "primal father" that hinges on a "primordial ambivalence of feeling towards the father" (SE 21: 132). And "after their hatred had been satisfied by their act of aggression, their love came to the fore in their remorse for the deed" (SE 21: 132). Some quotient of this remorse and guilt must surely come from having killed and eaten the wrong one. Which is not to say that we should devour the right one, but only that because we, like Freud, have enormous difficulty acknowledging that foundational human aggression-our oral-sadist instinct-is aimed first and foremost at mother, we seem doomed, or freed, to displace and then enact phantastically or actually that aggression. In noting that women have been kept out of the civilization dub, something which has made them understandably hostile and jealous, Freud care-

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fully (or carelessly) excepts and exonerates mother, giving as he does a directional marker in negation to the nub of things: aggressiveness "forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single possible exception, perhaps, of the mother's relation to her male child)" (SE 21: 113). In that parenthetical, possible, perhaps, exception there is more than a whiff of smoldering paranoia. What's at stake here? Is the exception important to sons? To mothers? What is being defended or denied? It should be observed that Freud seeks to preserve or rescue the mother from the taint of aggression, at least toward her son(s). Freud's "mother" is no retaliating, devouring thing. And in the passage which follows we can find a hint of his corollary denial, through primary displacement, of the son's otherwise overwhelmingly guilty aggression: "It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness" (SE 21: 114). The infantile "third term," the person "left over," onto whom the aggression can be psychically less dangerously displaced, is father. But like the mention of cannibalistic urges in Totem and Taboo, even disguised and displaced oral aggression, emanating from or directed at the mother, goes-almost-without saying. I want to step back from psychoanalytical and cultural theory to state the obvious about eros, aggression, and the oral. Civilization does not require the elimination of eros or aggression. It has found wonderful, labyrinthine, and horrific ways of channeling, condoning, even beatifying sexuality and aggression as much as it has condemned or commanded the restriction of them. One need only place the tablet bearing "Thou shalt not kill" alongside the tablets in Washington, D.C. that honor those killed in southeast Asia three decades ago, or the tablet that reads "Thou shalt not commit adultery" alongside the countless frescoes and renderings of the unwed Madonna and child, to see civilization's double talk regarding both aggression and eros. But one thing civilization is unequivocal about is its foundational oral repression. No sane or sound human being eats other human beings these days. While human beings continue-much as they have from the time they came down from the trees or out of the swamp or sea-to maim, mutilate, and kill any and every sort of living thing, including and especially one another, and to fondle, penetrate, and fuck every orifice that promises any amount of pleasure or sense of power, human beings have stopped actually eating each other. The violation of this taboo disqualifies us as no other from the family of civilized man. So if we were to imagine, as Freud did, some pivotal dawn or dusk in human prehistory when we rocked our universe through the commission of a real or phantasized communal sin, we would have to trace the evidence back further than killing father or fucking mother. We might fairly imagine that the first repression and renuncia-

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tion came after a real or imagined devouring attack on mother. But this was a sin so great and dangerous that we fled first, for generations and centuries, to killing and devouring father or the merely familial, or to eating the "other," and then, finally, to eating anything but human flesh. That this first repression and flight from instinct occurs before there is father, in a pre-oedipal, pre-gendered, and pre-verbal psychic world, may account in no small measure for our cultural and linguistic blackout. Euripedes in The Bacchae puts it poetically: "There is a grief so great it knows no size. I cannot look" (87). And because it is symbol-language-that substitutes and rescues us, we cannot speak the thing we replace with words. Kristeva renders it this way: "Through the mouth that fills with words instead of my mother whom I miss from now on more than ever, I will elaborate that want, and the aggressivity that accompanies it, by saying" (41). But this special saying, of cannibalistic desire and dread, is in itself tabooed. When it occurs it is relegated to the errant, dim, and dangerous borderlands of culture, to the transgressive texts of a Celine, Hawkes, de Sade, or Plath, to fairy tales, to Gothic fictions of vampires and werewolves, to the mythos of long ago and far from the logos of civilization, to the incredible, to the sacred, to bad jokes, and, when all else fails, to dreams, of the sort that Melville's Pierre wonders: "how it was, that so excellent a gentleman, and so thoroughly good a man, should wander so ambiguously in his mind; and trembled to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which in spite of the individual's own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts" (96). Western literature that mentions actual oral attack remains in the canon, slipping past the watch guards of civilization's censorship, in only a handful of tolerable forms. The anthropologists make it because they announce as their subject something other than us. The ancients make it because they deal in deeds so long ago as to also be admissible in their otherness. Myths, scriptures, and holy books speak of things beyond reason. The gods can do and speak and eat as they please: "Take. Eat. This is my body." And in this realm of the gods, we don a white dress, take communion, and feel no shame. Science fiction and the Gothic get by because the devourers are alien, monstrous, categorically not fully human. Captivity narratives and survival accounts can tell of cannibalism because the deed was constrained, enforced. But here the telling itself is often tentative, "strangely affectless," as Herbert Blau puts it in "Making History: The Donner Party, Its Crossing" (1980). He remarks that the record of the events lacks the "ghastliness" or the "horrific"-"the diaries were discreet as if the nature of the person couldn't bear to bring the horror down to the page" (149), though he describes the powerful effect of the unexpressed emotion on his troupe of actors, saying "we dwelt on them incessantly, however, and they nurtured the manner of our telling" (145). Twice-, thrice-removed, we can speak of such things.

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So we have ways, indirect and displaced, that make it possible to say without saying that we are driven by the desire and dread of devouring and being devoured. The most graphic descriptions substitute the beast without for the beast within. Grendel and Grendel's really voracious mother can been seen tearing Boewulf's clan to bits because Beowulf is not depicted devouring his human enemy. Nature and the zoom lens provides the footage of the jackals as they tear at the zebra's flesh, or the anaconda as it defies the principle of pi and swallows the goat whole, or the elegant leopard as it brings down and dispatches the even more elegant eland. It is removed enough from our humanity to be admissible, but close enough to haunt and hint at something within, particularly if the rendering is accompanied as it sometimes indiscreetly is by a faint, unaccountable taste of blood in the mouth. In Willa Cather's wheat fields of My Antonia (1918) there is such a moment when the voracious oral erupts into consciousness and language, and can do so because the voracity is displaced. The confession is Pavel's, the silent Russian emigre, who we learn shamefully saved himself one frozen night in the Ukraine as he and his brother groomsman traveled with a wedding party. The sledges were attacked by wolves, hundreds of them. One by one the sledges fell and "the screams of the horses were more terrible to hear than the cries of the men and women" (39). Finally there is only Pavel's sledge which carries Pavel, his brother Peter, and the bride and groom. Pavel's middle horse is failing. He gives Peter the reins. "He called to the groom that they must lighten-and pointed to the bride" (40). A struggle followed and Pavel knocked the groom over the side of the sledge and threw the girl after him. The wolves of Pavel's memory emerge in a guilt-ridden death bed confession, but Cather constructs the telling carefully, making it clear that her youthful narrator is both fascinated and chastened by the story. "For Antonia and me, the story of the wedding party was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel's secret to anyone, but guarded it jealously-as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure" (41). A remarkably similar scene of wolf attack occurs at the end of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and illustrates precisely the approach-avoidance we have to the voracious oral. Ironically, of course, Defoe's fictional Englishman is renowned for having confronted cannibalism itself, and in Crusoe's solitude and reverie he considers "The worst kind of destruction, viz. that of falling into the hands of cannibals, and savages, who would have seized on me with the same view as I did of a goat or a turtle, and have thought it no more a crime to kill and devour me, then I did of a pidgeon or a curliew" (159). While the narrative obsesses on cannibalism and savage unregeneracy and proceeds to "naturalize" cannibalism as a Providential bungle or curse, remediable by Protestant patriarchy (Friday will learn to stifle his

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dietary preference for human flesh out of deference to the good and clever and well-armed Englishman), Defoe refrains from describing the cannibalistic act itself. He does describe in gruesome detail the remains of the human feast from which he had rescued Friday, enumerating body parts, "great pieces of flesh left here and there, half-eaten, mangl'd and scorched ... three skulls, five hands, and the bones of three or four legs and feet" (167) all of which he has Friday gather and burn to ashes. The culturally critical moment occurs then: I found Friday had still a hankering stomach after some of the flesh, and was still a cannibal in his nature; but I discovered so much abhorrence at the very thoughts of it, and at the least appearance of it, that he durst not discover it; for I had by some means let him know that I would kill him if he offer'd it. (167)

Aside from this passage's amusing chauvinism, evidenced in the first place by the inveterate Englishman finding it surprising that "still," after one day with him, Friday "still" was a cannibal in his nature, the passage points presciently at the psychological mechanism that must be deployed in confronting this manifestation of human, even if primitive, nature: our abhorrence goes beyond the deed and to "the very thoughts of it" and to "the least appearance of it." True to western civilized consciousness and creed, founded on an identity-producing primary repression of oral sadism, Crusoe makes it clear that he will kill the living man rather than tolerate the eating of a dead one. The power of Crusoe's abhorrence is literary testimony to the enormity of what is repressed; the genocide of native Central Americans by the conquistadors is historical testimony to our horror at what we still dread to allow as human. But what is more telling is that Crusoe's abhorrence and attendant moral threat is addressed not only to the act but to the "discovery" or disclosure of it. Risking the horrible pun, this is the quintessential cannibalistic "gag order." Not only "thou shalt not eat another," but "thou shalt not let on that you want to." Yet Defoe himself will yield up a final graphic rendering of the devouring of human flesh. Perhaps it is more than merely odd that Crusoe, the anxiously civilized Englishman, after surviving thirty years on an island haunted by cannibalism, is given to encounter the voracious oral on his journey home to England as he travels through the forests of northern Spain. It is as if Defoe is compelled to depict the devouring act, which he situates at the very end of his lengthy tale, and which has no real bearing on the central narrative. Again it is wolves, hundreds of them, which descend upon a traveling group. They attack and tear the flesh from men and horses alike, leaving carcasses in their wake: "the man, his head and the upper part of his body was eaten up" (240). It takes all the ingenuity of the civilized man to ward off the wolves-guns, of course, and an explosion of gunpowder. But Defoe

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makes much of two other defenses against the devouring attack. The first is the use of the voice: "remembering that I had been told that the fiercest creatures were terrify'd at the voice of a man; and I caus'd all our company to hollow as loud as we could; and I found the notion not altogether mistaken, for upon our shout they began to retire and turn about" (239). The other defense might pass unnoticed except that Defoe veritably underscores it. He describes their having taken a defensive position behind a fallen tree which he identifies, three times, as a "breast work." The first time he calls attention to the term by, uncharacteristically in this text, capitalizing the expression-"Breast Work." At the very least the expression and its repetition announce the presence of the maternal in the struggle with the devouring other; the phallic defenses will not suffice. But what is especially curious about this detail is its disappearance a page later. When reviewing what had happened and how they had managed to escape being devoured, Crusoe narrates: "For my part, I was never so sensible of danger in my life; for seeing three hundred Devils come roaring and open mouth'd to devour us, and having nothing to shelter us or retreat to, I gave myself over for lost" (242, italics mine). The breast work that had contributed so manifestly to their defense has faded to a "nothing." However we might account for this incongruous episode of the wolf attack-a final bit of narrative flourish, a masked attack at Spain and its Catholic, Inquisitional excesses, a final trial and triumph for the indomitable Englishman-it is permitted, I would argue, to the point of being critically unremarkable, because it isn't Friday's unreformed brethren-lips smacking, teeth bared-who launch the devouring attack. The devils in question are admitted to consciousness and enter the human narrative in the displaced form of the beast. Psychically, the devourer must come to our consciousness in wolves' c1othing. 2 Enter the werewolf and the vampire. These Gothic icons make their way into the cultural imagination and canon largely because their devouring predilection has been safely rendered non-human: Dracula's a bat, a wolf, at least a dark foreigner. Yet Bram Stoker's tale continues to be compelling in no small part because it depicts the susceptibility of otherwise pointedly innocent or stalwart humans of becoming bloodsuckers themselves. Stoker goes to great descriptive length to establish Dracula's having enforced Mina to drink his blood: With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker's hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down on the man's bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink. (298)

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Stoker has Mina recount in precise detail this same scene. The comparison is worth examining. With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the--Oh my God! My God! What have I done? (304)

Aside from the fact that the scene most readily resembles an enforced fellatio (is this more, or less, acceptable to the Western psyche?), it is especially telling in two ways. First, it establishes that the greater horror in this tale, and in Western consciousness, is to be the devourer rather than the devoured. Mina has already related, unabashedly, the vampire's having consumed at her neck vein his "little refreshment to reward [his] exertions" (303). But it is her having drunk the vampire's blood that makes her shamefully "unclean." Now she is truly dangerous. Taboo. Her husband must not kiss her. The other remarkable point in the passage is the elongated ellipses, the blank, that exists where the substance of the deed is called for. Even with the taste of blood still in her mouth, Mina cannot say the word. Her recourse is to culture's sacred-"Oh my God." In this she echoes the defenses used by Von Helsing and the others to ward off the vampire and his bloodsucking power-the Holy Water, the crucifix, and the Sacred Wafer, ironically the symbolic (or transubstantiated if you prefer) Corpus Christi of another victim. Leaving behind the devouring, aggressive oral that is admitted to the culture's literary psyche in the shape and guise of the manifestly monstrous or non-human, we can point to any number of canonical texts which admit an amount of explicit human oral aggression-a little scene, a momentary snarl and snap of the jaws, or a prolonged pre-occupation with nasty mouthwork. A handful of examples may suffice here to illustrate how the human-however bridled-capacity to sink teeth into human flesh manages to make its way into the tales we tell about ourselves, though rarely without the saving mitigation of mental disease. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a fair case in point. While the narrative makes much of the evocative, bonding power of commensality-the pans of rich, sweet, molasses-laced beans, the mulatto rice that solicits Janie's tale, the lovemaking through feeding of Janie and Teacake, and Teacake himself as a figure of emotional nurturance-the dark side of the oral has its moment. In rescuing Janie from a flood plain, Teacake is bitten by a rabid dog. In his delirium he misrecognizes Janie and cannot be controlled by her words of reassurance. Teacakes's gun is "leveled at Janie's breast," but Janie's aim proves more on the mark. Yet in his dying urge "he closed his teeth on the flesh of her forearm ... Janie struggled to a sitting position and pried the dead Teacake's teeth from her arm. It was the meanest moment of eternity" (175).

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Teacake's rabid madness is pre-requisite for this inhuman act. Janie will testify that it was the mad dog in him that had to die. Doris Lessing's short novel, The Fifth Child, offers a more extended look at oral aggression in its portrait of Ben, a voraciously, insatiably hungry, demanding, brutal, non-verbal child. His upper-middle class parents, Harriet and David Lovatt, face a nightmare not of their choosing, but of having to choose between rescuing the comfortable, communal life they had once enjoyed by institutionalizing their "monstrous" fifth child or sacrificing their former life of familial integrity by keeping the child with them. The narrative depicts Ben as most menacing at the mouth: "and then he turned his head and closed his jaws over her thumb. Not as an ordinary baby will, in the sucking bite that relieves the pain of teething, or explores the possibilities of a mouth, tongue: she felt her bone bend, and saw his cold triumphant grin" (56). Later Harriet discovers him "squatting on the big table, with an uncooked chicken he had taken from the refrigerator. Grunting with satisfaction, he tore the raw chicken apart with teeth and hands, pulsing with barbaric strength" (97). Lessing's novel depicts the vicious oral more directly than most, but does so on a generic tightrope. Either it is read as a contemporary Gothic horror story, to be shelved with Stephen King and such, or it risks a judgment of flawed fiction, somehow too blatant for most serious literary tastes. Yet the text lays out the question at hand-how can we be related to our human flesh-eating forebears? "Ben makes you think ... all those different people who lived on the earth once-they must be in us somewhere" (114). The narrative's resolution suspends the question. But the more salient point is that the question is raised only through the repeated defense of difference, of otherness. Ben is rendered psychically safe by virtue of his being a monster, a troll, a goblin, as much as he is human. A similar instance of the madness alibi can be recognized as the requisite permission and defense Charlotte Bronte employs to give us Bertha, the shadow figure who viciously bites her brother when he finds her confined in Rochester's attic. As I discussed earlier, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Seawhich purports to tell Bertha's tale before she is made mad-offers another moment of oral attack when Antoinette (Bertha) bites her derelict husband. The bite can be seen as signaling her descent into madness. And it is at this point that she begins her refusal to speak. True to Bronte's novel, Rhys reconstructs the other scene of oral attack in the Englishman'S attic, sealing her insanity in that moment like little else can do. Another mode of both admitting and suppressing images of the sadist oral is employed in the narratives of colonial America. While historians like Francis Parkman and Jonathan Carver render in graphic detail scenes of massacre, scalping, blood-drinking, and heart-eating by frenzied Indians, and William Bradford's papers detail widespread cannibalistic practice, the literature of the period deals with the orality of the matter mostly by not

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saying. Two texts-James Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782)-will serve to illustrate both the fascination with and avoidance of the subject. Both authors take as their setting the pre-Revolutionary North American borderlands where European nations contend for empire, enlisting and enticing Native American tribes to do battle with and for them. Historical accounts of the siege and massacre at Fort William Henry in 1757 tally well with much of Cooper's fictional account of the event in The Last of the Mohicans, suggesting he was well acquainted with the full extent of the blood-gorging that took place there and elsewhere in the woodlands. Crevecoeur, for his part, was himself in the service of Montcalm at Fort William Henry, and witnessed first hand the voracious massacre there. This is noteworthy in both cases because it precludes the possibility of ignorance of the oral-sadist actions that took place there. Yet, while Crevecoeur's purportedly non-fictional account of life in the clearing and Cooper's fictional saga of the Deerslayer and his noble Mohican companions both profit from the Europeans' fascination with the uninhibited rawness of the new land, and in particular their fascination with and dread of the blood-thirsty savage, neither narrative holds the focus there. In Cooper's novel there is a brief, coordinating clause of an account: "The flow of blood might be likened to the outbreaking of a torrent; and the natives became heated and maddened by the sight, many among them even kneeled to the earth, and drank freely, exultingly, hellishly, of the crimson tide" (176). Even in this brief treatment, Cooper makes clear that the Indian is doubly removed from his humanity-the Indian is, by definition and identity, not civilized, and he is further distanced and degenerated by his having been "maddened." In contrast with this example of fictional telling, Richard Slatkin in Regeneration Through Violence (1973) cites numerous first hand accounts of cannibalistic practice in the colonial north woods. By those accounts, cannibalism was commonplace. The captives or sojourners tell of human hands floating in broths, of hunks of raw or roasted human flesh, and of customary feasts on human body parts. Slotkin writes: "The Tarrantine Indians of New England would (by one Puritan account) tie captives to a tree and gnaw their flesh piecemeal from the bones" (90). Slotkin's useful study of the mythic history of the American frontier makes the case, salient to this inquiry, that the European mind struggled more with the dread of degeneracy into savagery than with the fear of falling victim to the tomahawk or even the cooking fire. Sexual intermingling with the Indian was threatening, but as Mary Rowlandson, a seventeenth century colonial American woman who recorded her three-month-Iong captivity makes clear, it was the "Black Eucharist" that was identity-destroying. Thus, when William Bradford decries the merry making of Thomas Morton and

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his lot, the hierarchy of offenses should not be lost: "They also set up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies rather; and worse practices. As if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of the Roman goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians" (in Slotkin 64). Confronted as he was with the reality of Indian cannibalism, Bradford here resorts to allusion, making it the "mad Bacchanalians." This underscores and illuminates what must have been most menacing to the European psyche in the New World: what the Indians are, civilized men once were, and could become again. Here is an excerpt from another of Bradford's accounts: not being content only to take away life, but delight to torment men in the most bloody manner that may be; flaying some alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off the members and joints of others by piecemeal and broiling them on the coals, eat the collops of their flesh in their sight whilst they live, with other cruelties horrible to be related. ( in Slotkin 26) To reports such as this, the Puritans responded with Scripture, the sermon, the word. With the right words in our mouths we might guard against the evil oral. Upon centuries of repression, denial, and displacement was heaped new generations of repression, denial and displacement. Crevecoeur's writing in this regard is paradigmatic. His Letters from an American Farmer portrays a bucolic scene of home and hearth and neatly furrowed fields. The Indians are noble and respectable, if uncultured. Crevecoeur goes so far as to attribute a portion of the Lord's Prayer to the Algonquins, noting first that "The Supreme Being does not reside in peculiar churches or communities; He is equally the great Manitou of the woods and of the Plains" (224). Nowhere is there mentioned the blood gorging that he witnessed at Fort William Henry. Yet throughout Crevecoeur's text, violence erupts, often sadistically oral. Snakes fight to the death engorging each other, wasps swarm on animals killing them where they stand, lovely hummingbirds periodically and unaccountably turn on each other ripping one another to death, and rosy cheeked farmers keep a wild pigeon "made blind and fastened to a long string; his short flights and his repeated calls never fail to bring them down ... you must not think they are ordinary food; on the contrary I think they are excellent" (61). Arguably the most memorable passage in Letters is the scene of the slave, suspended in a cage, his eyes eaten out by birds of prey, his body a mass of wounds; he is being eaten alive. Crevecoeur has his narrator limply lament being out of ammunition, making it impossible for him to put the Negro out of his misery. Instead, he gives him water (which will prolong his suffering), and responds to the sufferer's plea for poison by asking: "How long have you been hanging there?" (178). Then he reports: "Oppressed with the reflections which this shocking spectacle afforded me,

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I mustered strength enough to walk away and soon reached the house at which I intended to dine" (178-79). The aggressive oral positively screams out of the text, but only through the muffler of displacement. The narrator is not only "oppressed with the reflections," he executes (on our behalf?) a tremendous if incomplete repression of the sadist oral that surrounds him;~ Leaving colonial America behind, I want to take up the aggressive oral and its unmentionability by examining more closely three other canonical texts which to my mind exemplify our all but muteness when the matter is human oral sadism. Together they may seem an unlikely threesome: Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), Melville's Benito Cereno (1855), and Shakespeare's Macbeth (1628). But together they also bring into consideration a wider cultural context than a more homogeneous selection might offer. The most blatant of these in its ostensible confrontation with cannibalism is, of course, Heart of Darkness. And, indeed, Conrad's narrator, Marlowe, pauses to reflect on the cannibals who make the journey up the river with him to retrieve Kurtz. Curiously, Marlowe's account is a naturalizing, if not normalizing, description. When, for example, there is a skirmish with natives, the cannibal spokesman suggests a strategy: "Catch 'im .... Give 'im to us." To which Marlowe queries, "What would you do with them?" The answer is unequivocal: " 'Eat'im,' he said curtly" (67). Marlowe reflects on this exchange with cool rationalism: "I would no doubt have been properly horrified had it not occurred to me that he and his chaps must be very hungry ... They still belonged to the beginning of time" (67). In this last phrase he places them outside the rules and rubric of civilized humanity. It's okay. It's more of a curiosity than a horror: "Fine fellows-cannibals-in their place ... And, after ail, they did not eat each other before my face" (57). And then he ruminates: "Why in the name of all the gnawing devils of hunger they didn't go for us-they were thirty to five-and have a good tuck-in for once, amazes me now when I think of it ... how unwholesome the pilgrims looked, and I hoped, yes, I positively hoped, that my aspect was not so-what shall I say-so-unappetizing" (67).4 More or less than survivor's swagger, Marlowe's acceptance of the cannibals is predicated on categorical distinctions: they belong psychically and culturally to another time and place, and as such do not threaten him where his psyche lives. He remarks about their restraint, which becomes one of several key words in the text, saying: "It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. Restraint-I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield" (70). Except for these reflections and a brief passage in which Marlowe disposes of the body of his helmsman, tipping it overboard, rather than risk its becoming a "first-class temptation," there are no other

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direct references to cannibalism in Heart of Darkness. Yet the subject manages to dominate the text, perhaps more powerfully for it going unsaid. Kurtz himself becomes the embodiment of what must be repressed, denied, or, at the very least, defined as extraordinary. Even before encountering Kurtz, his picket fence crowned with human heads leads Marlowe to conclude "that Mr Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him-some small matter which, when the passing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence" (98). The staked heads-"these-say, symbols"-are given to be less menacing to Marlowe than the mere verbalization of rituals practiced by the natives of Kurtz's camp. 'I don't want to know anything of the ceremonies used when approaching Mr Kurtz,' 1 shouted. Curious, this feeling that came over me that such details would be more intolerable than those heads drying on the stakes under Mr. Kurtz's windows. After all, that was only a savage sight ... pure uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief. (98)

The distinction is a critical one. Pure savagery, like Marlowe's cannibal crew, is admissible because it is psychically safe. But Kurtz's cultural collapse cannot yield a safe purity and distinction. It is for this reason that it is only elliptically said that Kurtz presides "at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rights" (84), that Marlowe "remembers" but will not define "the colossal scale of his vile desires" (125), and that the "things" the wilderness "had whispered to him ... about himself which he did not know ... echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core" (98) go unnamed. And perhaps it is for the same reason that Kurtz finally encrypts himself in the inscrutability of his last words-"The horror! The horror!" (118). I suppose it would be reductive and facile to assert flatly: Mistah Kurtz-he a cannibal. Perhaps that explains why the mounds of criticism offered over the decades on Heart of Darkness don't bother to go there. But what is telling is that Conrad and his Marlowe let it go without saying. And, again, it may be that the saying is more indiscreet than the doing because language is categorically restrained from taking us to the Real, and can only skirt the Imaginary. Kurtz's mouth, his voice, his eloquence is horrific and fascinating because it is the site of culturally inadmissible transgression-indiscretion in its most mathematically categorical sense. Cannibals are fine in their place. Eloquence is admirable, even enviable. But the eloquent cannibal, the civilized devourer of human flesh, is a psychic oxymoron. It best goes without saying. Instead the text will only gesture. So while we are told (twice) that Kurtz's mouth was "weirdly voracious ... as though he had swallowed all men before him" (101), it is the half dozen reminders of our residing in our civilized cities "next door to the butcher," the reminder of our presence in the "sepulchral city" where we "devour infamous cookery," the reminder

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of what England was to the Romans when they made their way up the Thames-"one of the dark places of the earth ... [with] precious little to eat fit for a civilized man" (8), it is these reminders which enunciate the psychic danger: It was unearthly, and the men were-No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it-this suspicion of their not being inhuman ... what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity-like yours-the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. (59)

Marlowe acknowledges the appeal in the "fiendish row," and he asserts: "but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced" (60). Not silenced, perhaps, yet clearly it can be made to deny, to equivocate, to lie, even if that is like "biting into something rotten" (44). Ironically, his lie at the end to Kurtz's (nameless) Intended literally puts her in Kurtz's (voracious) mouth. One final passage from Conrad's text is compelling to me in its discretion. After we learn, inimitably, that "Mistah Kurtz-he dead," there is a monumental lapse on Marlowe's part: All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and went on with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much ... outside it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man ... The voice was gone. What else had been there? But I am of course aware that the next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole. (118)

We should remember that Marlowe had already managed by his own hand to dispose of the corpse of his huge helmsman lest it be a "first-class" temptation to the cannibals. What class of temptation would Kurtz's body be? Beyond that, Marlowe's defensiveness here is unmistakable. What else had been there, indeed? He remains with his dinner because he cannot confront the brute, the dark beast that menaces inside as well as outside. Before he escapes to a convenient unconsciousness, he offers a resoundingly hollow reassurance, a "but, of course," in the compulsory if vague "awareness" that "something" was buried in a muddy hole. But because the text has repeatedly detailed the burial of ivory-while the carcasses are left to scavengers-we might well imagine that the "something" buried the next morning was that which is certainly inedible-Kurtz's ivory, his bare bones. Of all things, Marlowe can't confront the disposition of the corpus delicti of Kurtz. He averts his psyche and remains at dinner, his mouth, if not mind, safely engaged elsewhere. In recalling Conrad's narrative it is worth noting that the "telling" of the tale is itself thrice-removed. Conrad employs an almost featureless narrator to hear and relate Marlowe's recitation of the "nightmare of [his] own choosing," which at crucial times is really constituted by the recounted frag-

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ments of the errant Russian's tale. The effect is that the reader's questions remain suspended in part by suspicion of the narrator's unreliability on the one hand and on the other by the distancing effect of a voice within a voice within a voice. If the indiscreet question should occur to us-what exactly were the unmentionable deeds? What rites are unspeakable? What happened to Kurtz's edible parts?-we have no one to whom the questions ought properly to be addressed. Figuratively, literally, linguistically, no one can bear witness. The issue of witness and testimony is very much at the center of Melville's "Benito Cereno." Unlike Melville's magnum opus Moby Dick, in which the voracious oral is foregrounded if critically overlookedQueeque is a bona fide cannibal, Fedallah's teeth have been ominously filed to sharp points, and the white whale itself, having already devoured Ahab's leg, draws the narrative and the Pequod to its huge maw-Melville's "Benito Cereno" seems quite unengaged with the sadistic oral. It is the story of Captain Amassa Delano's encounter, off the coast of Chile, with Don Benito and his slave ship the San Dominick. Noted for its treatment of epistemological concerns, it centers on the unveiling of appearances. The slaves have overthrown the Spanish rule aboard the ship, but feign submission to Don Benito and his crew in order to safely negotiate and take advantage of the encounter with Delano's New England ship. The deception is uncovered when the besieged and desperate Don Benito leaps into Captain Delano's departing oar boat and survives a last gasp attempt by the black leader Babo to kill him. After the ensuing fight in which the slaves on the San Dominick are defeated and again taken captive, Don Benito and Captain Delano revisit the events and misapprehensions that brought them to this place. This constitutes, in effect, a second, "truthful," telling of the tale. However, Melville gives yet another rendering of the events on board the Spanish ship through the vehicle of the trial that follows, in which we are given lengthy portions of a detailed deposition given by an emotionally shattered Don Benito. The affective and narrative crux of this third telling seems to be the execution of Benito Cereno's friend, the slave owner Don Alexandro Aranda, by the revolting slaves. In the first accounting of Aranda's death, Benito Cere no is forced to deceive Captain Delano, telling him that his dear friend had "died of the fever." Operating under this deception, Delano sympathizes with the Spanish captain, explicitly because he imagines the special grief that comes with Cereno's having had to cast the body of his friend overboard. He offers what he thinks would be a consoling bit of commiseration about a similar loss he had suffered: "Assured of the welfare of his spirit, its departure I could have borne like a man; but that honest eye, that honest handboth of which had so often met mine-and that warm heart; all, all-like

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scraps to the dogs-to throw all to the sharks!" (181). Though in one sense Delano's remarks are off the mark, they prove crucial to the narrative, not only because it is revealed that Aranda had been executed and that his skeleton had been fixed to the prow of the ship as a figurehead of warning to the surviving Spanish crew, but also, and arguably even more significantly, in light of Cereno's testimony concerning the event. We recall that his deposition is a painstakingly detailed account of everything that took place during and subsequent to the slave revolt, as well as a rehearsal of the encounter with the American ship and the deceptions and events associated with it. The deposition is remarkable (even tedious) in the excess of its particularity, made even more remarkable given the fragility attributed to the deponent Don Benito. It is as if to insist that nothing, not the smallest detail, will go unreported. In this manner, in legal transcript form, we learn that "Babo came to the place where the deponent was, and told him that he had determined to kill his master, Don Alexandro Aranda" and that: the Negro Babo commanded the Ashantee Martinqui and the Ashantee Lecbe to go and commit the murder; that those two went down with hatchets to the berth of Don Alexandro; that, yet half alive and mangled, they dragged him on deck; that they were going to throw him overboard in that state, but the negro Babo stopped them, bidding the murder be completed on the deck before him, which was done, when, by his orders, the body was carried below, forward; that nothing more was seen of it by the deponent for three days. (244)

At this point, the deposition breaks off into a cataloguing of the other killings (mostly men were thrown overboard to drown), and then takes up the question of Aranda's body saying "that, during the three days which followed, the deponent, uncertain what fate had befallen the remains of Don Alexandro, frequently asked the negro Babo where they were, and, if still on board, whether they were to be preserved for interment ashore, entreating him so to order it" (246). His testimony then details how Aranda's skeleton had been substituted for the ship's figurehead and the message "Follow your leader" had been scrawled beneath it. But again at this point, Don Benito's testimony turns away from Don Alexandro's skeleton, this time to detail in belabored fashion the encounter with the American ship. Despite all the specificity of the testimony, a question emerges, precipitated in part by Cereno's nearly clinical accounting of events and in part by what he pointedly refuses to say. Without any break in the text of his deposition, lodged in the middle of a sentence that spans three pages in length, we read "that Yan was the man who, by Babo's command, willingly prepared the skeleton of Don Alexandro, in a way the negroes afterward told the deponent, but which he, so long as reason is left him, can never divulge ... " (249, italics mine). This refusal to say from the witness who has tes-

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tified to everything! With such elaborate insistence on telling all, what is it that will not be told? The text has already dispensed with the idea of throwing the flesh to the sharks, rendering that possibility categorically mentionable. The horribly unmentionable for Cereno would seem to be that they ate his beloved friend. And this may well be enough to account for Cereno's refusal to speak of the matter. \ But there is one other incongruous detail which points to even darker recesses of the psyche. The deposition concerning the display of Aranda's skeleton and the threat it is intended to convey, gives way to this odd bit of testimony: "that, before the events last mentioned, they had tied the cook to throw him overboard, for it is not known what thing they heard him speak, but finally the negro Babo spared his life" (246). What is it that a cook might speak of that would endanger him so? What food did he prepare during the three days after Aranda was killed and before his bare bones appear as figurehead? My speculation here may be far-fetched, but it accounts for Benito Cereno's irredeemable grief and vague but haunting shameful guilt, something of which he hints at when talking to Captain Delano about his having mistaken the situation aboard the San Dominick: You were with me all day; stood with me, sat with me, talked with me, looked at me, ate with me, drank with me; and yet, your last act was to clutch for a monster, not only an innocent man, but the most pitiable of all men .... So far may even the best man err, in judging the conduct of the one with the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted. But you were forced to it; and you were in time undeceived. Would that, in both respects, it was so ever, and with all men." (256)

By calling attention to the intimacy of their having eaten together, by labeling himself a "monster" and then protesting his "most pitiable innocence," and by alluding to the "recesses" of the situation that possess him utterly, Cereno's acquittal of Captain Delano seems equally self-directed. The "but you were forced to it" line seems to beg for universal absolution for anyone who was forced to anything. Yet his last remark, in its evocative conditional mode, has about it a quality of confused lament and ultimate immutability: "Would that, in both respects, it was so ever, and with all men." Contextually, "both respects" seems to refer in the one half to being "undeceived." But the other half of the "both" seems an odd wish-that all men, always, had been or would "be forced to it." We are told that the inconsolable Cereno dies shortly after the trial and this final exchange with Delano, that he is buried with the recovered skeleton of his friend, and that Babo, remaining mute throughout his trial and execution, meets a "voiceless end," his body burned to ashes, but his head fixed on a pole in the Plaza. From beginning to end of the narrative, the whereabouts and disposal of the human body haunt the text, behind which is the almost unspoken, heavily veiled horrific fear of having eaten "that honest eye, that honest hand ... that warm heart; all, all."

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I want finally to consider another moment in a canonical text where the cannibalistic oral is raised and then pointedly suppressed by the refusal to put it into language. But before focusing on this moment in Macbeth, I'd like to look briefly at Shakespeare's blatant treatment of cannibalistic vengeance in Titus Andronicus (1594). The play by any standards is excessive-familial bodies pile up in pits; innocent Lavinia is raped, her tongue cut out, her hands cut off, and finally is killed by her father to end her "shame"; the heads of Titus's sons are returned to him in a bag along with Titus's own hand which he had himself hacked off in a false and futile bargain for his sons' lives; the remorseless Aaron, who laments only that he may have ever done one good deed, is last seen buried chest deep awaiting the devouring scavengers; vicious Tamora is thrown to the birds of prey. The play is withal dark and relentless, more Greek or Jacobean than Elizabethan, which may to some extent account for the infrequency of its production and it being relegated to the position of the least read or taught of Shakespeare's tragedies. But surely what adds to our seeming aversion to the play is the blatancy with which it depicts the cannibalistic revenge Titus takes on Tamora. In recipe-like fashion Titus describes to Tamora's sons, Chiron and Demetrius, how he will slit their throats, drain their blood, grind their bones, make a pastry of the blood and bones in which he will bake their "vile heads," and serve the results to their mother. And, indeed, Titus enters "like a cook" and serves the sons to their mother who feeds daintily on the vengeful dish, "eating the flesh that she herself hath bred" (V, iii, 61). It is worth noting that the apex of his revenge, like that of Melville's Babo and consistent with the imaginings of Stoker and the reveries of Conrad's Marlowe, is not only oral and cannibalistic, but accomplishes its sadistic ends by having made of the enemy/victim a cannibal. While Titus's having killed his daughter to end her shame is labeled "unnatural and unkind," and his having severed his own hand is treated as a father's sacrificial valor, his culinary act is deemed "frantic madness." It would seem that it is this unconscionable cannibalistic madness, enunciated blatantly, that is the point at which we psychically turn away and disavow. Shakespeare has, of course, given us a rich array of portraits of what might be called human madness. Macbeth, like Titus Andronicus, delivers plenty of bloody deeds, and depicts the descent into guilt-ridden madness that attends them, Lady Macbeth's "mind diseased" a prime example. And it surely could be argued that what makes Macbeth the more palatable and popular play may have much to do with the poetry of its language, or its thematic universal of ambition, or even the inevitability of its outcome. Or, in brief, it could simply be said that it's a better play. And yet it may be worth considering, in the context of this study, how it is that the murderous thoughts and acts of Macbeth pass by our psychic sentinels, while those of Titus Andronicus are for the most part blocked if not banished.

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Macbeth's actions-bloody, betraying, even ruthless-if found to be reprehensible are somehow finally comprehensible. For one thing, Macbeth articulates his ambivalence as well as his guilt. His hesitation makes him something less (or more) than monstrous, and, significantly, the "inadmissible" element of human oral aggression is left out. Almost. Looking closely at the text, we find the language of the play repeatedly implicating the oral in its aggression. In particular the once nurturing maternal is shown to be capable of perversion to a remarkable ferocity: I have given suck, and know How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: 1 would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this. (I, vii, 54-59)

(Lady Macbeth could not have been Freud's model of maternal exception to aggressive instinct.) The maternal breast and its milk also appear as metaphor for passivity: Macbeth is "too full 0' the milk of human kindness" (I, v, 15), and Lady Macbeth seeks to steel and "unsex" herself in similar terms: "Come to my woman's breast / And take my milk for gall" (I, v, 45-46). Along with these images of an ambivalent if not ultimately corruptible nurturing breast, the play also draws attention to the issue of sustenance in the banquet scene at which Banquo's ghost appears. And Duncan, too, was "supped" before he was murdered. But along with these more or less routine mentionings of the oral, one reference in particular seems conspicuous by its non sequitur nature. Ross and the Old Man are discussing the strange happenings the day has witnessed, and conclude with Ross saying: "And Duncan's horses (a thing most strange and certain), / Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race, / Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out, / Contending against obedience, as they would make War with mankind" (II, iv, 14-17). As far as this goes, we can easily read the parallel and prefiguring of Macbeth's rebellious actions. But to Ross's report the Old Man replies: " 'Tis said they eat each other" (II, iv, 18). And Ross confirms this with "They did so, to th' amazement of mine eyes / That looked upon 't" (II, iv, 19). Nothing more is made of the matter, and we are left with the "unnatural" image of horses eating each other. Although we can dismiss Macbeth's final faint reference to having "supped full with horrors" as mere metaphor, the weird sisters give us something more immediate to consider. In their last appearance in the play, they are gathered 'round a cauldron, tossing in bits of this and that-fillet of a fenny snake, eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, tongue of dog, lizard leg, tooth of wolf. The brew becomes something else when they announce the addition of human body parts-liver of blaspheming Jew, nose of Turk,

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Tartar's lips, finger of birth-strangled babe. There is no textual suggestion that Macbeth partakes of the witches' brew. But it is his question and the witches' response that is most telling: "How now, you secret, black and midnight hags, what is it that you do?" Answer "All": "A deed without a name" (IV, I, 42-43). This singular response-a refusal to name the cannibalistic nature of the deed-epitomizes what has become our cultural compulsion to deny the sadistic oral. It is made the final measure of madness, the work of demons, witches, werewolves, vampires, aliens, monsters and others. And it is categorically banished from consciousness by having it go without saying.

If we consider, however briefly, popular culture's treatment of this taboo, it is easy to note that in recent decades there has been a spate of films-Parents; Eating Raoul; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover; Suddenly Last Summer; Fried Green Tomatoes; to name a few-which have dealt more or less directly with human cannibalistic acts. They range in degree of graphic depiction from the discreet, off-camera treatment of the unrecognizable stew that almost poetically gets rid of the evidence of a justifiable homicide in Fried Green Tomatoes to the "primal scene" of Parents in which the corpse devouring parents are discovered, slathering in a sort of raw meat coitus, by their wide-eyed, dumb-struck son. But despite the appearance of these films, the staging of a Sweeny Todd, or the resurgence of the vampire genre, human oral aggression remains a shadowy, veiled thing. When it is represented it continues to shock us in a way that most represented violence no longer does. Here I'm thinking of the scene in the recent remake of Cape Fear in which the Robert DeNiro character unexpectedly bites off a hunk of his sex partner's face. Although the film stages any number of scenes of bashing, brutal and bloody violence, it is the viciously oral scene that announces like no other that his determined vengeance is that of a madman. More often representations of cannibalistic acts occur off camera. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover does not flinch at depicting on camera its opening scene-the enforced eating of dog shit-or the scene in which the wife and lover make their naked escape in a van full of rotten meat, or even the scene in which the lover is killed by having the pages of a book rammed down his throat. In fact, the film goes so far as to show the lover's body as having been baked (braised?) to a golden brown and presented to the ruthless thief as ultimate revenge. A forkful of her lover's cock is presented at gun point by the wife to her vicious husband. The picture fades. The piece de resistance is resisted. The psychic camera averts the eye. This is also true in the 1989 bastardized film version of Cooper's Last of the Mohicans. (Hawkeye, played by Daniel Day Lewis, is depicted as the love interest of Cora!) The Fort William Henry massacre and the particular revenge of Magua against Cora's father, Colonel Munro, is prefigured

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specifically when Magua repeatedly promises that he will "eat his heart." The film goes so far as to show the venerable, if unenlightened, Colonel falling beneath Magua's tomahawk, and it shows Magua with what is to be taken to be the colonel's heart in his hand, but that's as far as the representation will go. Arguably the most popular and pointed examination in contemporary film of the cannibalistic urge is the portrayal of "Hannibal the Cannibal" Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. The film clearly intends to deliver a series of chilling scenes. One of particular interest is the encounter between the heavily manacled and muzzled Hannibal and the female Senator who is the mother of one of the serial killer's victims. Hannibal questions her: had she breastfed her daughter. Although the film doesn't trace the implicated relationship between cannibalistic psychopathology and the original oral mother/child connection, this bit of narrative non sequitur nevertheless succeeds in putting the nurturing (or non-nurturing) maternal in the cannibal's mind and mouth. It should be noted that Hannibal Lecter has emerged in the cultural consciousness as an acceptable, even admirable, figure. His superior intellect recommends him to the audience, as does his benign restraint if not affection toward the protagonist figure, Clarice Starling. But what most permits his passing as a dark hero is both our conviction that he can't help it-he is obviously and insanely abnormal-and he is funny. His telling us that he ate his last victim's liver "with a glass of good Chian-ti and a side of fava beans" takes the matter safely into the realm of dark comedy. What's more, or what is significantly less or lacking in the film, is any representation of Hannibal having at a human filet. This goes without seeing, however much is said. I would also assert that the much less successful--commercially and critically-sequel to Silence of the Lambs owes its tepid reception to its oral blatancy. Hannibal crosses the comfort line of conscious encounter with the human cannibalistic urge. Dr. Lecter is not the hero-not even the man-he was when we were permitted to avert our mind's eye from the deed. In this film he is no longer one of us. He is a madman, a freak, a monster, no longer welcome in our cultural camp. I want finally to consider two contemporary figures and our literal as well as figurative coverage of them. In the summer of 1994, Jeffrey Dahmer exploded into the language, more as a verb or adjective than a proper noun, when the grisly details of his killing spree were discovered and universally publicized. The manifestly sexual and necrophilic nature of his urges propelled him to the pole position of deranged serial killers. And certainly a case could be made for his registry in any hall of infamy without reference to his cannibalistic offenses. Yet watching the A&E television special on Dahmer, we encounter a clear hierarchy in the realm of horrors: "the biography of a serial killer whose dark sexual obsession

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drove him to murder, mayhem, necrophilia and even cannibalism." The narrator of the piece speaks of Dahmer's deeds of "unimaginable savagery" that "stretched the boundaries of depravity." The world, it was said, "cringed," and the narrator of the piece refers repeatedly to "the monster within." The dark irony of Dahmer's working at a blood bank and a chocolate factory is cited, and his confession is used to offer an explanation of sorts for his compulsions, in particular his desire to feel his victim's "were a permanent part of me." He describes using meat tenderizer as he found "the thigh muscle too tough." One clip of a home video of Dahmer taken shortly before he was caught, was recorded during a visit with his father at his grandmother's house. Dad is complimenting son on looking good and fit. Son laments that he's been eating poorly-"mostly MacDonald's"-and unflinchingly adds: "I have to start eating at home more." What is striking about this small bit of footage is both the absolute normalcy of the exchange and the apparent disassociation of Dahmer's language and his actions. There is no sign of self-recognition, no hint of the dark irony in "eating at home more." A further irony, however, is revealed but unexamined in Dahmer's request that he be cremated: "I want to be wiped out." But of all the testimony and detail of the Dahmer case, one incident is especially germane here. Before the Milwaukee County judge pronounced Dahmer's 937 year sentence, family members of the victims were permitted to address the court. The sister of one of the victims launched a verbal assault, even physically charging at Dahmer, saying: "Jeffrey, I hate you. You mother-fucker. I hate you." Of all the things he was, Jeffrey Dahmer was apparently not a mother-fucker. Language itself fails. It does not contain or convey the deed. To call him a "brother-eater" will not work. The devouring, incorporative act is displaced. The darkest deed goes without saymg. In the summer of 1997, Dan Rather of CBS led off the evening news with the remark: "Last night was not only a dark day for boxing, it was a dark day for western civilization." This was the lead-in to the report on the Tyson-Holyfield fight in Las Vegas, during which Mike Tyson twice bit his opponent, the second time biting off a small portion of Evander Holyfield's right ear. What is striking about this incident is not only its occurrence but the outrage it produced. If we remember that professional boxing has as its objective the pummeling of one's opponent to the point of unconsciousness-literally or "technically" knocking him out-it might occur to us that the physical harm done by biting your opponent's ear isn't nearly as damaging and dangerous as splitting open an eye, breaking a nose or jaw, or inflicting permanent brain damage from a potentially lethal blow to the temple. But biting is where we draw the line. It may be simply too "unmanly" to tolerate in this categorically masculine arena. Whatever the case, the notoriously suspect Boxing Commission voted on banning Tyson from

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boxing for life. This was, of course, the same group that had permitted Tyson, a convicted rapist, to don his silk robe and Everlast trunks and enter the ring, guaranteeing him a cool $12 million regardless of the outcome. It would seem that, physical or sexual, assault is admissible. What is taboo to the western psyche is oral assault. The aggressive oral is too hauntingly shameful to tolerate. As final testimony to the powerful, even categorical, denial in western culture of the oral-sadist urge, I offer what I found to be an amazing fact: There is no law against cannibalism. As a fair example I cite the statutes of the State of Wisconsin which regulate everything from permitting one's dog to defecate in someone else's yard to how much growth hormone can be fed to cows to which variety of cheese shall be known as the "state cheese." And case law delineates thousands of additional criminal precedents by which criminal cases can also be adjudicated. But nowhere is it written that it is unlawful to eat a human body.6 The law does stipulate that corpses must be disposed of in deference to public health, that cremated remains cannot be scattered willy-nilly about, and that it is criminal to "disturb or mutilate a dead body with the intent of destroying evidence." But our greatest taboo is itself unmentioned. In this we can recall that the JudeoChristian commandments likewise make no mention of it. No where is it written: "Thou shalt not eat thy friend nor thy foe." To consider the orality of existence-its necessity, its complexity, its fundamentality-is to consider the aggression therein. To suck, to chew, to incise and tear off a hunk of something, to bite down hard on any thinga bourbon-laced ice cube, a bit of rare beef, a wad of peppermint gum, the metal-sheathed end of a yellow No.2 pencil-comes to us so naturally. Yet it seems we've had to produce our most elaborate set of social regulations, rituals, and garnishments to manage this mouthwork of ours. The when, the what, the how, the how much, the who of eating are all markers of class, of creed, of cultural human identity. But the oral urge seems finally, as it must have originally, to be dangerous as much as delightful, sadist as much as sustaining, devouring as much as defining.

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Afterword Last Suppers: Final Words "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings."

-Joe Garragioia, on opera and baseball

A

s children, my brothers and sisters and I occasionally played a sort of mental dare game I'll describe by its set-up question-"Would you rather be shot or hanged?" We'd take turns, then, blithely spinning off permutations, producing pairs of options which grew more and more grisly, until someone would just give up, refusing to repeat back and choose between the gory options. (Anything involving maggots or moths usually eliminated me.) Giving voice to, and thereby no doubt defending against, dreadful and gruesome imaginings was part of the game's unspoken purpose. Competition another. But there was also a critical element of this particular exercise that distinguished it from other mental or physical "gross-out" games. There was in it an illusion of choice, and a modicum of associated control, that was implicit in having chosen from paired options, however unappealing they both were. Like Conrad's Marlowe being true to the nightmare of his own choosing, there was a display of tolerability or, in this case, "utterability" because the player had to remember and repeat verbatim each of the grisly details of the option he or she would rather be subjected to. With the act of choosing, we produced a thin verbal veneer of toughness, though, truth to tell, we were neither especially brave or gruesome as kids go. A similarly artificial, if less macabre, question of choice is the premise of a recent "coffee table" book by James L. Dickerson, entitled Last Suppers (1999). The book is a compilation of responses to a question posed to fifty (famous?) people: "If you were told that life as you know it were coming to an end tomorrow, what would be your choice of a last supper-and with whom would you want to share it?" Along with discovering that most of the respondents were people about whom I have little or no curiosity (Patti Page? Vanna White! The Amazing Kreskin?), I found the project ultimately unconvincing. There was a mildly interesting division in responses: while many responded with elaborate menus and associated recipes but with no

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mention of companionship, others focused on the company-everyone from Socrates and Shakespeare to in-laws and Nancy Reagan-but gave little attention to the menu. A handful gave more or less equal time to both food and company. And I did find one response (that of political commentator Ann Coulter) credible in its concision: "Margaritas." But finally the project and its leading question appeared to me to be a rather benign and ultimately unrevealing version of my sibling dare game, here really involving a question of favorites, rather than any eleventh hour truth-telling. Of course that is not to say that the question of last meals is insignificant. On the contrary, what and whether or not we eat in the face of death seems enormously significant. To probe that significance I would like to consider briefly two accounts of last suppers, one fictional, the other factual, and likewise examine the record of last meals of the 179 men and two women inmates executed by the State of Texas from January, 1982 (when Texas reinstated the death penalty) to July of 1999. I am mindful that the expression "Last Supper" conveys both a prediction and an accomplishment or finality, and, as it has come down in Christianity, a promise of remembrance and repetition. But what led me to consider the last meals of condemned men was not so much any New Testament parallel, but the possibility of a clarity of meaning that might be more transparent in the light of the compulsory consciousness associated with imminent and certain death. Ernest Gaines' novel, A Lesson Before Dying (1993), is a story of hardwon human identity. The identity at stake is that of Jefferson, a young man whose bad luck and misjudgments collude with the racist climate of a small Louisiana town in the late 1940's, resulting in his being convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to die in the electric chair. His attorney's demeaning and unsuccessful defense strategy had involved suggesting to the jurors that they forego the death sentence because it would make as mush sense as "putting a hog in the electric car" (8). The narrative's lesson of reclaimed human dignity depends on the enlisted, reluctant-at-first efforts of a black plantation school teacher, Grant Wiggins. It is played out in particular through scenes of food offered, refused, and finally accepted. At one point, nearing the date of his execution, Jefferson is being visited by his elderly aunt and ailing "Nannah," who despite her failing health has been sending lovingly-prepared food which the condemned man has pointedly rejected. His initial refusal to partake of the gumbo she made for this occasion is addressed explicitly by the teacher: "It would mean so much to her if you would eat some of the gumbo.... Will you be her friend? Will you eat some of the gumbo?" (191). What follows is a breakthrough-an understanding of the heroism of simple self-recognition in the face of oppressive disregard-and it is made manifest by Jefferson wordlessly breaking his fast and eating his nannah's food.

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An earlier break-through occurred verbally, when after repeated refusal to engage with the teacher, Jefferson responds to Wiggins' offer to bring him ice cream: 'I want me a whole gallona ice cream!' he said still looking out the window. I saw a smile come on his face, and it was not a bitter smile. 'A whole gallona vanilla ice cream. Eat it with a pot spoon. My last supper. A whole gallona ice cream .... Ain't never had enough ice cream. Never had more than a nickel cone.' (120)

In response to Wiggins' promise to bring him ice cream on his next visit, Jefferson tells him he'd rather wait. His smile is interpreted by the teacher: "He smiled now because he had something pleasant to look forward to, though it would be on that last day. And he would save it until the very last moment" (171). But more than merely "something pleasant," the idea of final uninhibited indulgence, without regard to cost or convention ("with a pot spoon"), would seem to contribute to the smile of articulated desire. In the end Jefferson records, with his newly-acquired literacy, a different final request, one that combines his fantasy of self-indulgent desire with the lesson of the love that is exchanged in the giving and receiving of food: I want nanah to cook me some okra an rice an some pok chop an a conbred an sam claba an ... for desert ... jus a little ice crme in a cup an a moon pie .... my food was yer an I et it ever bit an it was the bes meal I kno my nanah ever cook. (232)

The reparative value of the food as it conveys and recalls the love in and of life is captured poignantly here, making this fictional last supper and the execution which follows intensely human. The "real" last suppers in accounts of death row executions, such as Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song (1993), which details the pizza Gary Gilmore was at first denied because he hadn't formally requested it and then permitted but subsequently rejected by Gilmore, and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1965), which reports that both condemned men order shrimp and French fries for their last meal but that one eats heartily while the other doesn't, underscore the complicated significance attached to this final choice. There is a clear and completely understandable element of control at stake in the condemned person's last meal. This final vestige of control is in choosing whether or not and what to eat. Sister Helen Prejean's Dead Man Walking (1993) describes her work as a "spiritual advisor" to two death row inmates in Louisiana's Angola State Prison. Patrick Sonnier is the convicted killer of two teenagers, and Robert Willie is sentenced to death for the brutal murder of a young woman. As the men in turn near execution, they give special attention to the last meal.

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Patrick Sonnier, whose story was featured in the film based on Prejean's book, tells Sister Helen what he ordered: "a steak, medium-well-done, potato salad, green beans, hot rolls with butter, a green salad, a Coke, and apple pie for dessert" (86). He decides to eat inside his cell so that his hands can be uncuffed, and Sister Helen is permitted to be just outside his cell, where she is served a tray of standard prison fare, which she cannot bring herself to eat. The final call, announcing that his last appeal was turned down, comes with the food. Sonnier's response to the warden's message is recorded as: "He waves his spoon in the air and then points it toward the heaping plate and laughs. 'At least I got me this good meal off you, and I'm sure going to enjoy every bit of it'" (87). Prejean reports: "Pat talks and eats and talks" (87). He eats everything on his plate except some of the green salad, and then says: "There, finished, and I wasn't even hungry." And he asks the warden to send his compliments to the chef: " 'The steak was perfect'-he makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger-'and the potato salad, and really great apple pie .... And tell him ... that I am truly, truly appreciative'" (87). The good sister also records his last hour request for a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Her account of Robert Willie's final hours similarly focuses on "his last supper." (The expression is italicized in Prejean's text.) Like Sonnier, he gives signs of delighting in the food: "he smiles and rubs his hands together and says this is one meal he's going to enjoy" (204). However, he has chosen to eat in the small visiting room outside his cell, which means his hands remain manacled though detached from the leather belt, allowing him to feed himself. Again, Sister Helen is served the standard prison menu, but this time she fights off her wave of nausea enough to manage to take a sip of iced tea and taste the stew, knowing the communal nature of her gesture. Robert has ordered "fried shrimp, oysters, and fish, fried potatoes, and salad" which arrives on three trays which a guard places on three chairs in front of him. Sister Helen "teases" him, saying, "Hey, what about your saying you wouldn't accept any favors from these people?" (204), to which he responds that "that principle applies to everything but fried seafood. He loves fried seafood" (204). Again, Prejean reports that the soon-to-be-executed man: "eats and eats and talks and eats" and talks (204-205). What I take from these moving accounts is not limited to the observations which follow. Yet to consider last suppers is to consider last suppers. Prejean's accounts make particular what the public record of last meals served to inmates executed in Texas reveals in the aggregate. Of the 179 men and two women executed there between January of 1982 and July of 1999, only nineteen declined any final meal. Some requested simple things: "a coke," "one flour tortilla and water," "freshly squeezed orange juice," "ice cream," "an apple." Others made huge requests of multiple entrees; one of the largest was that of William Little, executed June 1, 1999:

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"Fifteen slices of cheese, three fried eggs, three buttered toasts, two hamburger patties with cheese, ~ tomato sliced, one sliced onion, French fries with salad dressing, a pound of crispy fried bacon, one quart of chocolate milk and one quart of strawberries" (No. 177). It is recorded that one man, executed in 1998, had indicated "none" for a final meal request but: "Last minute he decided to eat a hamburger at his Mother's request" (No. 157). Many requested cigarettes and/or beer, but were denied because it is prohibited by a policy of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. (Texas executes by lethal injection and I speculate that these substances would be thought to affect the efficacy of the execution.) One entry was particularly striking. Recorded in the "Requested" column was: "Shrimp and salad." Next to the request was a notation that reads: "Shrimp not available. Served cheeseburger, french fries and cola" (No. 151). Huntsville, the site of Texas executions, is located on the Gulf coast and accounts for nearly half of the shrimp harvested annually in the United States. In making application for this information from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, I spoke by telephone with Larry Fitzgerald, the director of public relations. Yes, he told me, last meal requests are part of the public record, but added, "We don't record whether or not they ate it-if they cleaned their plates." Through him I learned that the final words of executed inmates are also recorded and are available to the public, but that they are in individual execution packets and not collected in any sort of composite file as is the case with last meals. My thought was to see if there was any correlation between appetite for food and desire for words. Mr. Fitzgerald encouraged me to contact death row Chaplain Kenneth Brazzill, whose duties include spending the last five or six hours with the condemned inmates. His remarks to me were understandably guarded, observing his sacramental and ethical obligation to these men. What he did convey, however, was that the condemned men he spent final hours with generally ate their last suppers "with enjoyment," and that they talked (some prayed) to the end. Some, he said, had little or nothing to say, but most talked through their final hours, recalling childhood memories-good and bad-mentioning mothers, fathers ("when they had one"), siblings, lovers, children, adventures, exploits, and their crimes. Many expressed concern for their final "performance" and appearance. Most offered apologetic messages to their own families and to the families of their victims. Many, he suggested, seemed reconciled to their execution, if not at peace, though he added, "sometimes the fear comes through." As the conversation was coming to an end, Chaplain Brazzill offered an explanation of his work, something I had not asked for. He said he thinks of ministering to the condemned inmates as being with "people who are dying from long-term illnesses. " Here, in life and death, was compelling common ground. People eat and talk. It means they are alive. And then they die. The appetite for and

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reported delight in the last meal may serve to signify a desire for retaking control of some one thing, or to distract the mind with the workings of the mouth, or finally to deny or defy the impending end. But whatever else it demonstrates, this tenacity of the oral also speaks unmistakably and powerfully of the force of life. The last supper is the body's last deliberate yes. I have long been intrigued by the dance of eating and speaking-its bolero, if you will. My attempted focus throughout this book has been on the first part of the pair, associating it with the mother, her pre-symbolic language, and its identifying and indelible effects and affects. But of course I need and use the word to speak the thing. More than that bit of selfevidence, I would also observe that there is a significant convention of pronouncement-before, during, and after eating-that would seem to point to something more than simple good manners. I have in mind those many expressions of invitation, anticipation, blessing, commendation, evaluation, appreciation, and satiation, as well as dissatisfaction, rejection, refusal, and disgust, which attend our eating. It is as if eating is bracketed, perhaps disciplined, by language. Certainly it is circumscribed by it. Without the words, when eating is not only solitary but non-communicative, even if only to the self, that is, when it is thoughtless, the experience carries an imputation of our being something less than human. Our own words-"wolfing down," "scarfing up," "grazing," "gobbling," "chowing down," and "pigging out"-betray us here as being not merely ungodly but for the dumb brutes we are. Walt Whitman prevaricates I think when he says: "I think I could turn and live with the animals / They are so placid and self-contained." He may admire in contrast to human kind their unwhining quietude (and certainly they are largely uncomplaining eaters), but the poet needs must sing of himself. So, it would seem, must the eater. There is a final phenomenon, related to these pronouncements that are attached to the eating occasion, but which is more distant, by time and place. This is the practice of reporting or telling on the eating experience. Formal restaurant reviews fall into this category, as do book-length accounts of gastronomical experiences of a particular region or cuisine, such as Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence (1989) and Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun (1996). But it happens that my reflections on this convention are inflected to a large extent by personal experience; my mother could contend as its supreme practitioner. Whenever my mother returns from any sort of outing at which food was served-from the simplest dessert or standard church dinner (the menu and recipes of which haven't varied for decades) to the more unusual or distinctive dining experience-she seems veritably compelled to deliver an exorbitantly detailed accounting of whatever was offered and eaten on that occasion. Sometimes this is days, weeks, even months, after the experience. Whenever it comes, hers is no mere iter-

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ation of the menu. Each dish, every sauce or dressing or condiment, all the accoutrements of the meal, merit her assessment. The rareness ("Truthfully, 1 didn't eat any because it was bloody") or over-doneness ("I don't like mine raw, but this was like shoe leather" or "charcoal" or "a piece of roofing shingle") is a particularly common refrain. Sometimes, one or the other of us, depending on who is within earshot, will try to short circuit what we impatiently take to be her descriptive (and, less charitably, pointless) excess: "It sounds really nice. Have you seen the ... ?" But her descriptions don't end until they've run the full course. I've considered at times that this need to tell about food isn't so different from other confessional or narrative urges-telling about a misdeed, or about a vacation, or a concert, or a funny or frustrating experience at the bank or in the check-out lane. And perhaps now, in my mother's advancing years, the preponderance of food accounts are a sad indication that there is often too little else to tell about. So, after all, 1 think, her penchant is easier on the listener than alternative tales: infirmities, rising costs of everything, bathroom difficulties, unwanted and outdated advice, recitals of irremediable aches and pains, of losses-little or large. But that is truly another story. Here, however, at the end of this consideration of eating and its meanings, it occurs to me that her obsession (I'll still call it that) with the details of her out-of-home eating is peculiar only in its extreme, and that it isn't so much that she noticed that Mrs. Ebert's pot-luck tuna casserole had both green and black sliced olives in it, but that she needed to tell someone about it. Whatever the oral experience, it isn't fully accomplished until it is put into words, which what? Constitute a judgment. Which is precisely where, from Freud, we put judgment and instinct, discernment and knowledge, fear and aggression, in the first place-the mouth. Before language, eating is good enough. With language, it remains an indispensable and enduring half-told tale.

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Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION I

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1

4

In offering this abbreviated itemization of my junk food habits, I am reminded of another more extensive inventory of eating practice. In 1974, at the age of 38, Parisian-born writer George Perec kept a careful record of his food and drink intake for that year. His attempted inventory appeared without explanation or admonition in the winter 1995 edition of Granta (Food: The Vital Stuff). His itemization is grouped, more or less, by meal course. It begins with "nine beef broths," includes "one tuna," a score of omelet types, lots of beef, dozens of poultry entrees, seventy-five named cheeses, 181 named bottles and an unspecified number of anonymous bottles of wine, and ends with "three Vichy waters." I found the list intriguing and striking: except for perhaps the "one yogurt," his inventory doesn't include a single packaged food item. What's more, I continue to muse over what would prompt Perec to make this record of his annual intake and what insight, if any, might result from our being required to replicate this exercise. My former husband and his friend told me that on their recent visit to Paris they spotted "Peeps" for sale in a window of a patisserie near the Jardin du Luxemburg. I'm not sure how I feel about this particular cultural exchange. I should note that M.F.K. Fisher (Long Ago in France, Serve It Forth, Gastronomical Me, With Bold Knife and Fork, Consider the Oyster) has inflected much of my thinking about deliberative eating. I would venture as well that her softly seductive Long Ago in France (1985) has served as inspiration, if not model, for such recent and popular works as Peter Mayle's A Year in Province (1989) and Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun (1996), the appeal of which, I would suggest, is in no small part attributable to their attention to the gustatory component of their respective experiences. I was first drawn to the powerful workings of eating in fiction when reading a sampling of short stories by Katherine Mansfield. In particular her "Modern Soul," "The Governess," "At the Bay," "The Baron," and "The Garden Party" deploy images of food preparation, exchange, and consumption that echo long and strong. Her work underwrites much of my conviction about the incomparable impact of the oral image in fiction, as when she writes in "The Garden Party"

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of girls "licking their fingers with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream." NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE-REPAST: MOTHER, IDENTITY, AND MEMORY 1

2

.1

Jessica Benjamin's provocative work on the nature and source of domination and submission, in The Bonds of Love (1988), offers another set of terms for the relationship between mother (parent) and child, describing the developmentally necessary interaction as the phenomenon of "intersubjectivity" and stressing the "tension" that must be established and maintained between sameness and difference. In this she borrows from Daniel M. Stern (The Interpersonal World of the Infant [1985]) his delineation and valuation of mother-infant "attunement." While Benjamin seems to dismiss object-relations theory as inadequate underpinning to her project, and in particular takes no real interest in the mouth-breast site or the eating/feeding experience, I suggest that object-relations theory may be more "up to the task" than she finds it to be, and that especially the body of Melanie Klein's work contains the component elements of what Benjamin terms "intersubjectivity." What's more, I would propose that the space of mouth and breast is a quintessential site of the contestation, acquiescence, resistance, recognition, and bonded love that she investigates. Proust's seven-volume work has been published under several formats. Page citations here are from the Random House two-volume printing (1932) which includes Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, and The Guermantes Way in Volume I and Cities of the Plain, The Captive, The Sweet Cheat Gone, and The Past Recaptured in Volume II . It had been several years since I had read Remembrance of Things Past and marked passages I thought I might use for a still-to-be-defined project. So I found, when it came to writing, that I had lost track of Marcel's mother. Daunted by the prospect of tracking her down in two thousand pages of Proust's text, I called my very erudite friend William Veeder at the University of Chicago. "What happened to Marcel's mother?" was my pragmatic inquiry. He, too, hadn't recently read Proust, but he kindly put me onto his wife's colleague at Loyola University, Anne Callahan, who was good enough to take my call. She didn't have an answer at hand, but did some checking and e-mailed a colleague in Prague, who happened to be vacationing in Paris, who e-mailed back: "Yes, you're right. The last we see of Marcel's mother, she is departing Venice." Beyond that (I now have it on good authority) she appears only in Marcel's recollection. Mentioning my unconventional methods and, at that time, still unresolved search to Kathleen Woodward, then Director of UW-Milwaukee's Center for Twentieth Century Studies, she spoke to Herbert Blau who was with their daughter in Paris just about to take an excursion to, of all places, Venice. When 1 told her of Anne Callahan's report of the missing mother's last known whereabouts, Woodward alerted Blau to be "on the lookout" for Marcel's mother. Her bulletin might have read: "She may be diminutive in stature, but she is a cold-blooded creature, unarmed but decidedly dangerous." I mention all of this not only because I think it confirms my sense of the narrative vanishing of this mother, resulting in the even greater certainty of her psychic "trace," but especially because it gives me the opportunity to acknowledge the generosity and good will of these scholars in aiding a fellow reader.

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In particular, I want to thank Anne Callahan for encouraging me to look at Sand's Francois Ie Champi (The Country Waif), which proved to be most useful to my reading of Marcel and his missing mother. 4 Mansfield's "Bliss" is a very short and widely anthologized piece. I am foregoing the convention of formal page citation in the body of my text, confident that the location of the quoted material is clear from the context I provide . .I I want to call attention to the first page of another text that deals, by in large, with this related emotional state. It begins: "Call me Ishmael." In contrast to Mansfield's Bertha, Melville's Ishmael presents himself to the reader very much "in person." He is self-aware. He knows what his problem is. He has a course of treatment-take to the sea. To press the comparison just a bit, Ishmael, like Bertha, is beset by urge. His is markedly aggressive. He wants knock bonnets off of strangers' heads. Seemingly without the need of or recourse to aggression, Bertha wants instead to run, dance, bowl a hoop, or "to throw something up in the air." Reading closely, we might merely wonder what that something is. But we can't help noticing, should we put the two narratives side by side, the enormity of the difference-that Bertha's mania is dispensed with in a matter of a dozen pages, while the run of Ishmael's (and of course behind his, Ahab's) depression is just this side of endless. • There is a curious and emphatic change or "split" that takes place in the form of address used for this other mother figure. Until Bertha comes into the nursery Little B's caretaker is referred to consistently as "nurse." But from then on-and no fewer than eight times in less than a page-she is "Nanny." I offer a speculative account of this instance of splitting that suggests that Bertha is comfortable with the phantasy of the surrogate mother (wet nurse) being "at home" for her own infantile needs, but in the presence of Little B, Bertha does not want the nursing figure to be at stake. Hence, the less corporally connected, euphemistic "Nanny." NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO-CONSUMING CULTURE: THE LINGUISTICS OF LOCATION I

2

It is interesting that Rich must travel to Peru for her image of women laboring tediously over food preparation. Without condoning or condemning women's long-standing role as food makers, I would observe that food preparation-snapping beans, shucking corn, canning pickles, shredding lettuce, peeling potatoes, trimming the fat, kneading the dough, and even washing the dishes-is at least as meaningful (or meaningless) as the repetitious labor of all economy. The difference is in the dignity we assign it. And, of course, the pay. To Martha, whom Christ admonishes to forego her jealousy of her sister Mary having "chosen the good part" (that of sitting at his feet and listening to his words, leaving Martha to the kitchen chores), I would somehow want to say: "Martha, Martha, don't be so sad-though you're left to pluck the chicken, bake the bread, and serve the wine, at least you don't have to listen to someone else's boring stories." I offer the last chapter of Food in the Social Order (1984), edited by Mary Douglas, as graphic illustration of the futility if not impossibility of trying to make sense come from the deployment of scientific calibrations and classifications to this vast, and ultimately evasive, territory. Even if we could plot every category

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Notes to Chapter Three

and point in place and time of food consumption, we would not have begun really to know why, or whether anyone liked it. I was understandably delighted to see the front page of the July 19, 1999 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, with a full color photo of a nicely presented entree, announcing its lead story: "A Place at the Table" (A17-19). The article reminds the academy of the growing interest in food studies, touts the strengths of several established university programs of food studies, and offers a selected bibliography of scholarly publications on the subject. It also outlines a debate about how the subject ought best be pursued. Ironically, the main criticism leveled at this field of inquiry, emblematized in the teaser line on the cover, which reads: "Food studies makes inroads in academe, but critics say it's scholarshiplite," was predicted, and I would say answered, by Barthes in his essay from 1967. A question that lingers for me regarding The Chronicle's piece is another: where might I sample the food in the photograph? I would observe here that it has become commonplace to refer to eating ethnic fare not simply as, for example, "eating Chinese," but to make a displacing substitution in the expression so that we hear people say: "Let's do Chinese." Whatever the expression-what we do or eat-there is an implication of identification which has become quite muddled especially in this era of cuisine tourism. Yet there is still the aphoristic but apt imputation: "You are what you eat." See Houston Baker's "Caliban's Triple Play" in Race, Writing, and Difference (1986), edited by Henry Louis Gates. Baker's discussion of the "possession"-of and by language-especially for Caliban confirms and underwrites much of my reading of the linguistic half of Cali ban's bad bargain, though Baker does not note that the signs of "nature" Caliban exchanges for Prospero's language are overwhelmingly food signs, derived from, wicked or not, mother. Thinking of Ellison's chitterling epithet brings to mind a short piece by Betty Fussell, anthologized in A Literary Feast (1993), entitled "On Murdering Eels and Laundering Swine." This very edgy and funny essay describes a bathtub full of stinking hog bowels and makes palpable the physical and psychological challenge entailed in killing and preparing an eel. This particular eel in question scoffs at bashings, knives, cleavers, mallets, even freezing, but finally succumbs to a massive dose of salt.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE-LESSER CRIMES: ANOREXIA'S PLEA I

2

3

There are, of course, many other works which take disordered eating as their focus. I mention here only a few that may be of interest: Hilde Burch's The Golden Cage (1978), Susie Orbach's Hunger Strike: The Anorexic's Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age (1986), Matra Robertson's Starving in the Silences (1992), Marian Woodman's The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter (1980), and Binge Eating (1993), edited by Christopher Fairburn and G. Terence Wilson. Apparently there are several acceptable spellings of this term: anorexic, anorectic, anoretic. "Anorexic" serves as both noun and adjective, according to Webster's Collegiate Dictionary of the English Language (1999). I use this spelling throughout because it seems the slimmest of the options. See again Kaja Silverman on weaning as castration. Klein herself gives striking testimony to the psychic pain of weaning in "Love, Guilt and Reparation" asserting that "it is an extremely painful process for the baby to do without the supreme sat-

Notes to Chapter Four

4

5

149

isfaction of being fed by her" (116) and that "the child's early attachment to his mother's breast and to her milk is the foundation of all love relations in life" (90). The obvious, but inadequate, missing instinct would be Freud's death instinct. Yet the anorexic is not typically suicidal. Instead the anorexic "drive" seems only inevitably death-aimed; and perhaps no more so than smoking, drinking, driving fast, over-eating, or over-working. Rather, anorexia seems to be a determined regression to a non-gendered or pre-gendered state of existence, where I would point out, there is no possibility, issue, or responsibility for reproductive decisions and their unconscious imputations. Dan McCall uses this term in his book, The Silence of Bartleby (1989). Although his reading of Melville's story is quite comprehensive and convincing, he makes nothing of the woman in the narrator's attic.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR-IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING: ORAL AGGRESSION AND ITS MUTTERINGS 1

2

In this chapter (and in my earlier reading of Ellison's accusations against Bleds'oe) I use the terms "shame" and "guilt" with a distinction I've drawn in part from Freud's assertion that guilt is the precipitate of repressed or otherwise internalized aggression, which in the aggregate forms a super-ego or conscience (Civilization and Its Discontents) and from an understanding, again following Freud, that guilt is largely experienced in association with the subject's desire-after the fact, if it is acted on, and as if it were fact, if it is repressed. Shame seems the more primitive feeling, and, as such, does not seem to be dispensed with by the more mature psychic mechanisms of denial, displacement, sublimation, or even repression. Shame, then, would be an identity-linked emotion, closely associated with the earliest experience we have with oral identification in which we think we are what we experience, while guilt involves the more accessible experience of responding psychically to what we do or want to do. Primitive cultures appear to deal more consistently in shame and shaming behavior than in the finer distinctions of guilt. Freud offers a re-enforcing association of fear and the figure of the wolf in his extensive case study "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1918) or "Wolf-man." It is interesting that Freud's deployment of the label is descriptive of the object of this patient's obsessive fear rather than of a man's dreaded transformation into the fearful devouring form, as in the werewolf legends. However, Freud's case study does in fact make the man-as-wolf connection in that the patient is particularly disturbed by the image of the fairy tale wolf who is figured as standing upright, which Freud concludes is doubtless a conflation and then displacement of the image of the father, specifically as performing intercourse a tergo. In Freud's reading of Wolf-man's "primal scene"-which by the end of the case study Freud allows to be his patient's psychic composite of the actual witnessing of animals (especially dogs) copulating, early unconscious memory of being in the parents' bedroom where sex would have occurred, and the wish fulfillment of the repressed erotic desire for the father as well as ambivalent identification with the father-Freud largely dismisses the patient's fear of the wolf as a devouring figure. Here I will limit myself to two observations about Freud's analysis. One is that in Freud's otherwise thorough explication of the a tergo-more ferarum-(really his commitment to reading Wolf-man's primal scene as being one of copulation from behind), he omits any consideration of the

150

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4

S

6

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possibility of fellatio or cunnilingus having contributed to the scene, and furthermore does not consider that copulation from behind (and his patient's conspicuous preference for this approach) does away with the need to confront the mouth of the sex partner. The other is that there is a significant omission in Freud's analysis of Wolf-man's identification with Christ. Among the parallels he drawsWolf-man's birthday is Christmas, their fathers give them over to be ill-treated and sacrificed, they both submit to the father's will-Freud does not mention that Christ is most commemorated through the Eucharistic meal. He is eaten. In sum, I suggest that in constructing for us the "primal scene" (of Wolf-man or any man), Freud is giving us a significantly incomplete picture. The oral may not be all in this, but if the scene is to be truly primary, the mouth must surely be at work there, however repressed we need it to be. I continue to find this passage in Crevecoeur most unsettling, not only because he depicts a horrific scene, but because the scopophilic titillation at work here (and elsewhere in Letters) has gone largely unexamined. Because Crevecoeur is so often cited, along with de Tocqueville, as defining the American character, it is at least worth considering the extent to which readers of this frequently anthologized letter align themselves uncritically with this narrator's point of view. This is not to say that the American character is better or worse than Crevecoeur would have it, but only that this passage warrants critical attention. I am reminded here, through Marlowe's musings on his desirability as a cannibal temptation, of the more commonplace derivatives of the notion of desirability being orally inflected. As for example, we say someone looks "good enough to cat," or commonly use food or taste terms as signs of endearment and desirability: honey, sweetie, (she'S a real) peach, sugar, beefcake, mon petit chou, apple of my eye, etc. There can be little doubt that beneath the convention there is the primitive and profound desire for and dread of devouring incorporation. Barbara J. Baines-"Ritualized Cannibalism in 'Benito Cereno': Melville's 'Black Letter' Texts" in ESQ 30.3 (1984)-offers one of the few readings of Melville's text that addresses the cannibalization of Aranda's flesh. However, neither Baines or, to my knowledge, any of the other few critics who take up this subject in their reading of "Benito Cereno," consider Cereno's more profound grief to be his inexpressible apprehension that he had been fed his friend. Working on this chapter, I happened to pick up my local newspaper (Manitowoc's Herald Times Reporter) and read in amazement its front page banner headline: "VAMPIRE BILL PROPOSED." The article recounted the dilemma faced by law enforcement officials and prosecutors who dealt with a case in June of 1999 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, involving a forty-year-old man who induced juvenile girls to cut themselves so that he could drink their blood. The bill, proposed by State Senator Jim Baumgart, would carry a five-year sentence for inducing a minor to "cut himself," a ten-year sentence if there was "great bodily harm," and a fifteenyear sentence if "the child's blood is consumed." Sheboygan County District Court accepted the guilty plea of Phillip K. Buck to a charge of "fourth degree sexual assault and causing bodily harm to a child," and sentenced him to ten years and nine months in prison. An aid to Senator Baumgart explained the drafting of the legislation, saying: "The problem was, when this guy was caught, there wasn't anything specifically related to what he was doing in the statutes. So the Sheriff's Office had a lot of difficulty charging him." The Sheboygan County prosecutor asked for a thirty-year sentence, and opined: "Mr. Buck is not a vam-

Notes to Chapter Four

151

pire. Mr. Buck is a pervert." Buck testified that he had been "depressed and saw drinking the blood as a means of bonding with someone." We might note that the proposed legislation will apparently not address blood drinking between consenting adults, nor will it address the cannibalization of a corpse. That will continue to go without saying.

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Index

Atwood, Margaret The Edible Woman, 9, 70, 82-88 Auden, W. H. "First Grub, Then Ethics (Brecht)," 41

A Abraham, Karl, 4, 7, 8, 13, 70, 71, 103, 108, 109 "The First Pregenital Stage of the Libido," 108 aggression and attachment, 14 and love, 14 Akst, Daniel St. Burl's Obituary, 9 anorexia, 67-100 and control, 72 and culture, 76 and distortion of body perception, 84 and masochism, 71, 73 and obsession with food, 96 and oral contraceptives, 77 and refusal of motherhood, 74, 80, 100 as means of controlling reproduction, 77 characteristics of, 69, 71 "Hansel and Gred," 72 male, 89, 98 Arens, William The Man-Eating Myth, 104 Armelagos, George, 104 Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating, 43 attachment human, 13

B Barnes, Djuna Nightwood, 54 Barthes, Roland "A Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption," 45 Mythologies, 29 Benjamin, Jessica The Bonds of Love, 7 Blau, Herbert "Making History: The Donner Party, Its Crossing," 116 Bordo, Susan Unbearable Weight, 69, 70 Boswell, James, 48 Bowlby, John, 14, 73 Attachment, 12 Loss, 12 Separation, 12 Bradford, William, 121, 123 breast, 30 and mouth bond, 12 and rooting reflex, 12 -feeding, 11

163

164 loss of mother's, 95 mother's as origin, 28 separation from, 39 withholding milk, 19 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 6 The Physiology of Taste, 2 Brumberg, Joan Fasting Girls, 69, 70 Bynum, Carolyn Walker, 98-100 Holy Feast, Holy Fast, 69, 98

C Cameron, Elspeth, 84 "Famininity, a Parody of Autonomy," 83 Campbell, Joseph, 104 cannibalism, 134, 103-35 affectionate (endophagy), 105 aggressive (exophagy), 105 and avoidance, 118, 127, 129, 135 and incorporating the victim, 105 and mother, 106 and otherness, 124 and restraint, 125 forced, 119, 130 non-human, 119 Cape Fear, 132 Capote, Truman In Cold Blood, 15, 139 Carver, Jonathan, 121 castration and weaning, 31 female, 31 male, 94 Cather, Willa, 9, 83 My Antonia, 117 Shadows on the Rock, 9, 70, 80-82 Catherine of Sienna, 81, 98-100 Chernin, Kim The Hungry Self, 6, 69 Chodorow, Nancy The Reproduction of Mothering, 7 Chopin, Kate The Awakening, 8 communion rites, 45 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness, 9, 124-27 Cooper, James Fennimore The Last of the Mohicans, 122

Index Crevecoeur, Michel Guillaume St. John de Letters from an American Farmer, 122,123 cummings, e.e., 51 Curtin, Deane Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, 44

D Dahmer, Jeffrey, 133-34 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe, 117-19 devour, 120 fear of devourment, 72 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 69 Dickens, Charles, 9 Dickerson, James L. Last Suppers, 137 Dinesen, Isak Babette's Feast, 9 Dinnerstein, Dorothy The Mermaid and the Minotaur, 7 disorder, 92 disordered eating, 68, 69 atmosphere of, 68 Douglas, Mary, 104 Food and the Social Order, 44, 50 Implicit Meanings, 44 dyadic relationship between mother and child, 13

E eating alone, 26 and life and death, 46,141,142 and oral, 140 as cultural identifier, 54 destructive, 26 fear of being eaten, 84 lack of, 28, 29 eating disorders and women, 69 types of, 68 Eating Raoul, 132 Eliade, Mircia, 104 Eliot, T.S., 35

165

Index Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man, 54 Erdrich, Louise Tracks,9,41,55,56-57 Esquival, Laura Like Water for Chocolate, 9 Euripedes The Bacchae, 116

F Farb, Peter, 104 Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating, 43 fasting, 81, 100 and feasting, 99 Faulkner, William, 9, 16, 21, 23, 27 As I Lay Dying, 23, 49 Light in August, 9, 16,21-27 female development, 74-76 Fisher, M.F.K., 4, 5, 8 Long ago in France, 8 The Gastronomical Me, 4 Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby, 9, 16, 27-32 food adaptability, 44 american, 50 as occasion, 44 codes, 44, 45 commonality of, 3 definition of, 2 distance from sources of, 5 refusal of, 138 Fort!-da, 49, 70, 72-73 Foster and Ranum Food and Drink in History, 44 Fraiberg, Selma Every Child's Birthright, 15 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 4, 6, 7, 13, 14, 32, 35,70,73,74,75,91,106, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 49, 72 Civilization and Its Discontents, 32, 103 Fort!-da, 49, 70, 72-73 Interpretation of Dreams, 112 "Negation," 35, 73, 107 negation, 71, 89

"Rat Man," 7,55 Totem and Taboo, 106, 110-14, 115 Fried Green Tomatoes, 132 Frye, Northrop, 84 Anatomy of Criticism, 83

G Gaines, Ernest A Lesson Before Dying, 138 Girard, Rene, 104

H Habermas, Tillman, 77 Heldke, Lisa Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, 44 Hemingway, Ernest A Moveable Feast, 9 homophobia and homosocial, 92 hunger, 65 Hurston, Zora Neale Their Eyes Were Watching God, 120 Huysmann,9 hysteria, 75 I identity, 39, 60 and oral, 59 and parents, 31 cultural, 41-66 and food, 61 and mother's milk, 49 and oral, 43 and the body, 41-42 double, 28 human, and oral bond, 15, 25, 40 lack of, 26 losing, 83 self-, 24, 64

J

jones, Gayl Corregidora, 43 joyce, james The Dead, 9

166

K Kartiganer, Donald, 26 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 64 The Woman Warrior, 9, 41,55, 57-60 Klein, Melanie, 7, 8, 13, 14, 31, 34, 35, 70, 71, 72, 103, 108, 109,110 Love, Guilt, and Reparations, 71 object-relations, 71, 108 Kofman, Sarah The Enigma of Women, 74 Kristeva, Julia, 7, 8,24,41,48,49, 75,95,103,110,116 "Place Names," 75 Powers of Horror, 24, 47, 110 Kuper, Jessica The Anthropologists Cookbook, 44

L language, 48, 49, 58 and diet, 49 and fear, 11 0 as cultural identifier, 53 as protector, 123 refusal of, 57, 61 Last of the Mohicans, 132 Lessing, Doris The Fifth Child, 121 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 104 The Raw and the Cooked, 44 Lewin, Bertram, 35 The Psychoanalysis of Elation, 36 Lorenz, Konrad On Aggression, 14 Lourd, Audre Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, 64

M Mailer, Norman Executioner's Song, 139 male development, 89 mania, 33 and control, 35 and depression, 34, 35, 36 as coping (defense mechanism), 34 denial, 34, 36

Index replacing mother-infant bond, 38 splitting, 35 Mansfield, Katherine, 55 Bliss, 9, 16,32-39 masochism, 72, 73, 99 Mayle, Peter A Year in Provence, 142 Mayes, Francis Under the Tuscan Sun, 142 McCullers, Carson The Ballad of Sad Care, 9 Melville, Herman, 9, 116 "Bartleby, the Scriviner," 70, 88-98 "Benito Cereno," 124, 127-28 memory, 11-40 through food/oral, 16,32 Metraux, Alfred, 104 mother absence of, 29 and infant bond, 13, 20, 25 and oral, 7 denying child, 36 devouring, 37, 107, 113 dysfunctional, 29 nurturing, 22 past and orality, 39 refusal of, 82 rejecting traditional roles, 88

N Naylor, Gloria The Women of Brewster Place, 9 necrophilia, 134 nurturance, 23

o O'Connor, Flannery, 9 oral, 3,4, 6 aggression, 113, 116, 124, 135 and avoidance, 103, 117, 131 and madness, 121 biting, 63, 85, 101, 102, 119, 121,134 human, 103 and human development, 13 as words, 8 in images, 8 marken, 53

167

Index replacing phallic, 91 taboo, 115 original sin, 45

p Palazzoli, Mara Selvini Self-Starvation, 69 Parents, 132 Parkman, Francis, 121 peeps, 2 personal/communal axis, 3 Prejean, Sister Helen Dead Man Walking, 139 pre-verbal, 12, 23 Proust, Marcel, 27 Remembrance of Things Past, 9, 16-21,28

R Rado, Sandor, 36 reproduction, 90 Rhys, Jean Wide Sargasso Sea, 9, 41,55,60-64 Rich, Adrienne Blood, Bread, and Poetry, 42-43 Richardson, Samuel, 83 Clarissa, 9, 70, 77-80

S sadistic oral, 109, 114, 127, 132, 134 Sagan, Eli, 105, 106 Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form, 104 Sanday, Peggy Reeves Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System, 104 Schofield, Mary Anne Cooking by the Book, 44 separation anxiety, 106 Shakespeare, William, 41 Caliban,9 King Lear, 74 Macbeth, 9, 124, 130-32 The Tempest, 51-54 Titus Andronicus, 130 Shield, Carol Stone Diaries, 9 Silence of the Lambs, 133

Silverman, Kaja The Acoustic Mirror, 31 Slotkin, Richard, 123 Regeneration Through Violence, 104, 121 Spivak, Gayatri, 41, 64 "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," 55, 60 Sprengnether, Madelon, 28 The Spectral Mother, 7, 74 Stein, Gertrude, 9 Stoker, Bram Dracula, 119 Suddenly Last Summer, 132 Sweeny Todd, 132 symbolism, 105 and redirecting oral aggression, 106 symbol formation, 109, 110

T Tannahill, Reay Flesh and Blood: A History of Cannibalism, 104 The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover, 132 The Joy of Cooking,S Turner, Christy Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest, 104 Tyler, Anne Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, 9 Tyson, Mike, 134

u unattachment and absent father, 22 and absent mother, 19, 22, 27 and foster care, 15

v Visser, Margaret The Rituals of Dinner, 44

W Walker, Alice The Color Purple, 4 Winnicott, D.W., 8,23,41,48, 76

168 "The Location of Cultural Experience," 46 playing, 47 Playing and Reality, 46 potential space, 46, 47 transitional objects, 46 womb/tomb, 87, 98 Woodward, Kathleen, 103 "Tribute to the Older Woman," 75

y Young, Dudley Origins of the Sacred: The Ecstasies of Love and War, 104

Index