David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering. 19 The logic of this (preference [[Right arrow]] suffering) relation may be easiest to see in the negative case. If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going about their vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that there’s no sign the worms know anything bad has happened or would prefer not to have gotten cut in half.

Lobsters, though, are known to exhibit preferences. Experiments have shown that they can detect changes of only a degree or two in water temperature; one reason for their complex migratory cycles (which can often cover 100-plus miles a year) is to pursue the temperatures they like best. 20 And, as mentioned, they’re bottom-dwellers and do not like bright light — if a tank of food-lobsters is out in the sunlight or a store’s fluorescence, the lobsters will always congregate in whatever part is darkest. Fairly solitary in the ocean, they also clearly dislike the crowding that’s part of their captivity in tanks, since (as also mentioned) one reason why lobsters’ claws are banded on capture is to keep them from attacking one another under the stress of close-quarter storage.

In any event, at the MLF, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings … and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here — at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF begins to take on the aspect of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.

Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why? Or what about this one: Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme — and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings; 21 and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven’t succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

Given this article’s venue and my own lack of culinary sophistication, I’m curious about whether the reader can identify with any of these reactions and acknowledgments and discomforts. I’m also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused. For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and — presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, lobster, etc.: Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)? If, on the other hand, you’ll have no truck with confusions or convictions and regard stuff like the previous paragraph as just so much fatuous navel-gazing, what makes it feel truly okay, inside, to just dismiss the whole thing out of hand? That is, is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don’t want to think about it? And if the latter, then why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it? I am not trying to bait anyone here — I’m genuinely curious. After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? Or is all the gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be sensuous? Is it really all just a matter of taste and presentation?

These last few queries, though, while sincere, obviously involve much larger and more abstract questions about the connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality — about what the adjective in a phrase like “The Magazine of Good Living” is really supposed to mean — and these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right here. There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other.

2004

HAVE A PROLEGOMENOUS LOOK at two quotations. The first is from Edward Dahlberg, a Dostoevsky-grade curmudgeon if ever in English there was one:

The citizen secures himself against genius by icon worship. By the touch of Circe’s wand, the divine troublemakers are translated into porcine embroidery. 1

The second is from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons:

“At the present time, negation is the most useful of all — and we deny —”“Everything?”“Everything!”“What, not only art and poetry … but even … horrible to say …”“Everything,” repeated Bazarov, with indescribable composure.

As the backstory goes, in 1957 one Joseph Frank, then thirty-eight, a Comparative Lit professor at Princeton, is preparing a lecture on existentialism, and he starts working his way through Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground . As anyone who’s read it can confirm, Notes (1864) is a powerful but extremely weird little novel, and both these qualities have to do with the fact that the book is at once universal and particular. Its protagonist’s self-diagnosed “disease”—a blend of grandiosity and self-contempt, of rage and cowardice, of ideological fervor and a self-conscious inability to act on his convictions: his whole paradoxical and self-negating character — makes him a universal figure in whom we can all see parts of ourselves, the same kind of ageless literary archetype as Ajax or Hamlet. But at the same time, Notes from Underground and its Underground Man are impossible really to understand without some knowledge of the intellectual climate of Russia in the 1860s, particularly the frisson of utopian socialism and aesthetic utilitarianism then in vogue among the radical intelligentsia, an ideology that Dostoevsky loathed with the sort of passion that only Dostoevsky could loathe with.

Anyway, Professor Frank, as he’s wading through some of this particular-context background so that he can give his students a comprehensive reading of Notes, begins to get interested in using Dostoevsky’s fiction as a kind of bridge between two distinct ways of interpreting literature, a purely formal aesthetic approach vs. a social-dash-ideological criticism that cares only about thematics and the philosophical assumptions behind them. 2 That interest, plus forty years of scholarly labor, has yielded the first four volumes of a projected five-book study of Dostoevsky’s life and times and writing. All the volumes are published by Princeton U. Press. All four are titled Dostoevsky and then have subtitles: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (1976); The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (1984); The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (1986); and this year, in incredibly expensive hardcover, The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 . Professor Frank must now be about seventy-five, and judging by his photo on The Miraculous Years’ s back jacket he’s not exactly hale, 3 and probably all serious scholars of Dostoevsky are waiting bated to see whether Frank can hang on long enough to bring his encyclopedic study all the way up to the early 1880s, when Dostoevsky finished the fourth of his Great Novels, 4 gave his famous Pushkin Speech, and died. Even if the fifth volume of Dostoevsky doesn’t get written, though, the appearance now of the fourth ensures Frank’s status as the definitive literary biographer of one of the best fiction writers ever.