Review | Edible Arrangements: Modernism’s Queer Forms
Reviewed by Lauryl Tucker, University of the South
Elizabeth Blake’s Edible Arrangements: Modernism’s Queer Forms leads with the mouth and stays there, where queer theory, modernist studies, new formalism, and critical eating studies all converge. To describe this as a satisfying book would run counter to its aims, but to call it tasty feels trivializing. But this, Blake might observe, is the problem: we describe what we read as though it were broccoli—challenging, nutritious. To crave it like chocolate suggests . . . well, we don’t talk that way about texts in scholarly venues. So, let’s describe this book as tasty, and let’s call on Blake’s argument to defend the choice.
Blake’s subjects range from Rabindranath Tagore to mid-century Jane Bowles, and reading them queerly means registering the ways that taste, gustatory and aesthetic, is bound up with heteronormativity. As such, it is also always a site of queer potential. Setting aside the question of whether to critique or recuperate a literary work, Blake proposes instead to “sit within the cringe, to center the embarrassment, and see what our discomfort can tell us” (107). Her close readings locate that discomfort right alongside the pleasures in the text, lingering “pruriently” on passages that make “our mouths water or our jaws ache” (98). Her phenomenological approach to her archive shows how the most oft- (or over-) read modernist texts can yet unfold in surprising ways. Blake returns consistently to the utopian potentiality of queerness in these texts, but without recourse to promissory vagueness or glossing over the racialized, classed, and ableist constraints on feeding and being fed. Following José Esteban Muñoz, Blake identifies moments of pleasure that are “at best an interruption, a moment of disorientation or reorientation amid the structuring realities of everyday life,” rather than a means of overturning “normative systems of taste” (37).
Her first chapter, “Bad Taste,” posits a reparative way of reading modernist satire in Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Richard Bruce Nugent “not as a closed and coded system that relies on a set of preexisting knowledge to allow readers to be ‘in on the joke,’ but as a mode of writing that uses humor to identify moments of productive slippage in language and thought” (23). In this state of play, we find “a sensibility of otherness that is queer precisely in its refusal to systematize the senses” (23). Blake traces this kind of satire back to the queer sensibility of camp, and she ingeniously teases out the phenomenological implications of how aesthetic and gustatory taste are intertwined. For instance, in Mansfield’s short story “Bliss” (1918), Blake demonstrates how the protagonist Bertha “applies aesthetic taste to foods . . . emphasizing its embodied, subjective, and fleeting pleasures” (53). This pleasing confusion of tastes also characterizes Stuartt, Nugent’s Black dandy protagonist from Gentleman Jigger, a gourmand whose sophistication is as excessive as his appetite, thus pushing boundaries of quantity and supposed quality. In her readings of Nugent and Woolf, Blake argues persuasively for the “disruptive potential of bad food” (46) and anticipates the original line she takes on Leopold Bloom’s taste for kidney in the next chapter, a savor she calls “both queer and obscene” (76).
In this second chapter, on James Joyce, Barnes, and Rabindranath Tagore, Blake departs from legal understandings of literary obscenity to propose an alternative model in which hunger acts as “an organizing (or disorganizing) principle that permeates every aspect of form” (61). Despite its public controversy, Blake locates the obscenity of Ulysses as much in the hunger of Bloom and readers as in (may it please the court) the spicier passages of the novel. The “obscure” obscenity of Nightwood likewise emanates from its empty belly, the abstract hunger that drives and describes Robin Vote for much of the novel. But, Blake argues, its notorious final scene replaces this abstraction with a disconcertingly visceral intimacy in which we perceive “a body that moves and feels and wants, rather than a black hole” (87). The dominance of hunger queers these narratives not primarily because desire attaches to an inappropriate choice but “because of its intensity, excessiveness, and insatiability” (99). In Tagore, the insatiability arises in part from the way “The Hungry Stones” thematizes the substitution of hunger for sexual desire, and this pattern suggests that this deferral will just continue, always, to tantalize. Tagore’s narrator stops short of describing the lusty history behind the hungry stones, and, as Blake observes, “part of how we know it’s obscene is that it’s not here” (93). We’ve come a long way from Justice Stewart’s threshold test for obscenity, in which we know it when we see it.
Blake’s concept of “dinner theatricality” calls together three dramatists—Tennessee Williams, Jane Bowles, and Thornton Wilder—in the third chapter, in which Blake argues for the “homology between the play and the dinner party in order to reflect on both” (116). If the dinner parties in these plays reveal how like a play a dinner party always is, then their scriptedness—reinforcing the heteronormative family—and the improvisational potential of the scene generate conflict. In all three plays, Blake perceives a “kind of oscillation between immersion in the action of the play and awareness of its theatricality” (119). This ambivalently ironic performance foregrounds audience desires—putative expectations for and from the characters around these tables. In The Glass Menagerie, for instance, “the play’s queerness is located not only within these characters but within their shared awareness of and resistance to the way commensality can become a tool of heteronormativity” (115). As Blake notes, “sharing a table can bind people together, [but] it can also force them apart” (130). The sometimes cringey, sometimes funny, always stagey failure to form the expected bonds is where dinner theatricality makes room for “the queer experience of wanting another form of relation than the conventions of the table allow” (102).
The last full chapter, “Feeding and Figuration,” centers scenes of refusal in works where feeding is a constitutive element in the mother-child relationship. To frame the analysis, Blake explains how that maternal dyad “haunt[s]” most scenes of feeding in modern literature, no matter how subversive or far removed the scene is from a domestic context. This important critical move gives a queer new angle on the literary child, closer to Katherine Bond Stockton’s “sideways” figure than to Edelman’s trope of heterofuturity (see Blake 148). Olive Moore’s Spleen and Barnes’s Nightwood do not simply reject the constraints of maternal domesticity; rather, they open up queer alternatives to the usual narratives of influence, family, and nourishment. Moore’s protagonist, Ruth, queers the mother-child relationship by declining to impose her own will on her child in the form of regular feeding of bland fare. (The chapter makes a compelling case against porridge—a figure of whiteness, sameness, and parental coercion.) Alongside this refusal to feed, Blake places Barnes’s refiguring of the mother-child metaphor as a framework for Robin and Nora’s relationship. The figure is there, as many critics have observed, but Blake shows that it is not static: when Robin is described as a “beast turning human,” Blake suggests that “turning is not an action but a state of being” (165). Both texts point beyond the mother-child relationship towards alternative ways of seeing relationality.
Edible Arrangements is tidily symmetrical, with the first three chapters each reading a trio of authors and the fourth—about the mother-child dyad—presenting two pairs. But the shape of Blake’s argument, like many of the forms it reads, is sly and playful. The second chapter begins with the legibly obscene (a novel on trial) and concludes with an uncontroversial story, but her argument belies this apparent retreat from the risqué. By chapter’s end, we see that the censor’s raised eyebrows are an altogether false flag, and that we’ve gotten steadily more of the prurient content we’re here for. Connections and affinities spark puckishly across Blake’s readings. The dinner theatricality chapter calls back to, for instance, Bertha’s dinner in “Bliss” in the chapter on reparative satire, so that we have been given multiple angles on every text. It also bears noting—and this cannot be said of any other scholarly monograph I know—that this book is a stone fruit sandwich: it begins with H.D.’s pears and T.S. Eliot’s peach, and it concludes with William Carlos Williams’s plums. If this fact alone doesn’t tempt you, then tell yourself it’s broccoli—either way, it’s good for you.