Cultures of Taste/Theories ofAppetite: Eating Romanticism

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Cultures of Taste/Theories ofAppetite: Eating Romanticism

Edited by

Timothy Morton

CULTURES OF TASTE/THEORIES OF APPETITE

© Timothy Morton, 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in anymanner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of briefquotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

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ISBN 978-0-312-29304-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cultures of taste/theories of appetite / [edited] by Timothy Morton.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Food habits. 2. Food preferences. 3. Taste. 4. Appetite. 5. Food habits in literature. 6. Dinners and dining in literature. I. Morton, Timothy, 1968–

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ISBN 978-0-312-29304-8

Contents

List of Illustrations viiAcknowledgments ixNotes on Contributors xiPreface xv

Introduction Consumption as Performance:The Emergence of the Consumer in the Romantic Period 1Timothy Morton

Part I Constructions, Simulations, Cultures 19Chapter 1. William Henry Ireland: From Forgery

to Fish ’n’ Chips 21Nick Groom

Chapter 2. The Taste of Paradise:The Fruits of Romanticism in the Empire 41Timothy Fulford

Chapter 3. The Politics of the Platter: Charlotte Smith and the “Science of Eating” 59Penny Bradshaw

Chapter 4. Sustaining the Romantic and Racial Self:Eating People in the “South Seas” 77Peter J. Kitson

Chapter 5. Eating Romantic England:The Foot and Mouth Epidemic and Its Consequences 97Nicholas Roe

Part II Waiter,There’s a Trope in My Soup:Close Readings 113

Chapter 6. Hegel, Eating: Schelling and the Carnivorous Virility of Philosophy 115David L. Clark

Chapter 7. Byron’s World of Zest 141Jane Stabler

Chapter 8. Beyond the Inconsumable:The Catastrophic Sublime and the Destruction of Literature in Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion and Shelley’s The Triumph of life 161Arkady Plotnitsky

Part III Disgust, Digestion,Thought 181Chapter 9. The Endgame of Taste: Keats, Sartre, Beckett 183

Denise Gigante

Chapter 10. A “Friendship of Taste”:The Aesthetics of Eating Well in Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View 203Peter Melville

Chapter 11. (In)digestible Material: Illness and Dialectic in Hegel’s The Philosophy of Nature 217Tilottama Rajan

Chapter 12. Romantic Dietetics! Or, Eating Your Way to a New You 237Paul Youngquist

Afterword Let Them Eat Romanticism: Materialism,Ideology, and Diet Studies 257Timothy Morton

Index 277

vi Contents

List of Illustrations

James Gillray, A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion(London, 1792). Copyright the British Museum, London. xvii

James Gillray, Temperance Enjoying a Frugal Meal (London, 1792).Copyright the British Museum, London. xix

James Gillray, Substitutes for Bread (London, 1795). Copyright the British Museum, London. 61

James Gillray, Germans Eating Sour-Krout (sic) (London, 1803).Copyright the British Museum, London. 260

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Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank Denise Gigante for herinspiring and unstinting work on early drafts of this book. Thanks to my superb and varied contributors for their constant attention to

their work. My discussions with David Clark have been particularly spir-ited and I extend my gratitude to him for his warmth and encouragement.I would like to thank the University of Colorado and in particular theGraduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities for their award of aFaculty Fellowship during the academic year 2001–02, during which I hadthe chance to do major work on this project. I have also been supportedby a generous subvention from the Dean’s Committee on Excellence tohelp with reproduction costs.This book was seen into production by theconsistent expertise of Kristi Long, Melissa Nosal, Rose Raz, and IanSteinberg.

An earlier version of Denise Gigante’s essay was published inRomanticism on the Net (2002) and Studies in Romanticism (2001).An earlierversion of Tim Fulford’s essay was published in European Romantic Review(Fall 2000).

I would like to thank David Simpson for his unfailing support andcogent, insightful advice. I am grateful to Jeffrey Cox and the Center forthe Humanities and the Arts at CU Boulder for their timely invitation tome to present my work for this volume at their work-in-progress seminar:in particular I would like to thank the participants Bud Coleman,AndrewCowell, Steven Epstein, Bruce Holsinger, and John Stevenson. I would alsolike to thank Brad Johnson and Alice den Otter. Jamie Oliver’s recipebooks provided much of my culinary reading and practice while I waspreparing this volume: can I recommend his very fine risottos? Finally, myhead and stomach would have come apart long before now if it had notbeen for the inspiration of my wife Kate, who has worked with me wellbeyond the call of duty.

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Notes on Contributors

PENNY BRADSHAW is Lecturer in English at St. Martin’s College,Lancaster. She has published articles on women writers of the Romanticperiod in Women’s Writing and Romanticism on the Net, and has contributedto The Encyclopaedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850 (forthcoming). She iscurrently working on a study of nineteenth-century women writers andUnitarianism.

DAVID CLARK is Professor of English Literature at McMaster University.His work includes Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and CriticalTheory (2002), New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice (1994), andIntersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory (1994).

TIM FULFORD is a professor at Nottingham Trent University.Among hismany books are Landscape, Liberty and Authority (1996) and Romanticism andMasculinity (1999). He is the coeditor of Travels, Explorations and Empires, aneight-volume anthology of travel writing from the period 1770–1830. Hehas also completed the first scholarly edition of Southey’s Thalaha andcowritten a study of Romanticism and Imperial Science. Long-term pro-jects include a book on British perceptions of Native Americans.

DENISE GIGANTE, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford, has justcompleted a book on taste and appetite from Milton through Romanticism,parts of which are available in diacritics (2001) and Studies in Romanticism(2002).

NICK GROOM is Reader in English Literature and Director of theCentre for Romantic Studies at the University of Bristol.Among his booksare The Making of Percy’s Reliques (1999), Introducing Shakespeare (2001), andThe Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (2002). Hehas edited Thomas Chatterton’s poems (2003) and Percy’s Reliques (forth-coming), and is currently again working on the English ballad tradition.

PETER J. KITSON is Chair of English at the University of Dundee. Heis the editor of Romantic Criticism, 1800–25 (1989) (with T. N. Corns),Coleridge and the Armoury of the Human Mind: Essays on His Prose Writings(1991), Coleridge, Keats and Shelley: Contemporary Critical Essays (1996) (withTim Fulford) Romanticism and Colonialism:Writing and Empire, 1780–1830(1998), and (with Debbie Lee) Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation:Writingsin the British Romantic Period (1999). He has published several essays on therelationship between the English and French Revolutions.

PETER MELVILLE recently received his Ph.D. from McMasterUniversity. His publications include recent and forthcoming articles inEuropean Romantic Review, Mosaic,The Dalhousie Review, and Arachne. He iscurrently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canadapostdoctoral fellow at Cornell University.

TIMOTHY MORTON is Professor of Literature and the Environment atthe University of California, Davis. He is author of three books on foodand eating: The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic(Cambridge, 2000); Radical Food: The Culture and Politics of Eating andDrinking, 1780–1830 (Routledge, 2000); and Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge, 1994). He is also coauthor, with Nigel Smith, of Radicalism in British Literary Culture,1650–1830: From Revolution to Revolution (Cambridge, 2002).

ARKADY PLOTNITSKY is Professor of English and a University FacultyScholar at Purdue University, where he also directs the Theory andCultural Studies Program. He is the author of several books and many arti-cles on English and European Romanticism, Continental Philosophy, andthe relationships among literature, philosophy, and science. His most recentbooks are The Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Science, NonclassicalThought, and the “Two Cultures” (2002), and Reading Bohr: Physics andPhilosophy (2004). He is currently completing the book entitled MinuteParticulars: Romanticism, Science and Epistemology.

TILOTTAMA RAJAN is Canada Research Chair in English and Theoryat the University of Western Ontario. She is the author of Dark Interpreter:The Discourse of Romanticism (1980); The Supplement of Reading: Figures ofUnderstanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (1990); and Deconstructionand the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard(2002); the editor of Mary Shelley’s Valperga (1998); and the coeditor of

xii Notes on Contributors

Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory (1995);Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre (Cambridge, 1998); andAfter Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory (2002). Herfurther projects include a book on Romantic Narrative, and a book onencyclopedism and interdisciplinarity of which the present essay will forma part.

NICHOLAS ROE’s most recent books are Romanticism: An Oxford Guideand Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life. He teaches at theUniversity of St.Andrew’s.

JANE STABLER is Lecturer in English at the University of Dundee. Sheis the editor of the Longman Byron Critical Reader (1998) and the author ofBurke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, 1790–1830 (2001) and Byron, Poetics andHistory (2002).

PAUL YOUNGQUIST is Associate Professor of English Literature at Penn State University, and writes on British Romanticism, science fiction,and Black music. He is the author of Monstrosities: Bodies and BritishRomanticism (2003) and Madness and Blake’s Myth (1989).

Notes on Contributors xiii

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Preface

The reason the poet in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”becomes taboo in the final stanza is quite simply what the poemsays: he is enjoying, and showing the symptoms of it. He is

no longer entirely a self-possessed subject. He has consumed, and beenconsumed by, those Dionysian, ecstatic foods, milk and honey. His eyes donot merely look,passively,but actively “flash.”His hair is really enjoying itself,floating like Robert Smith’s of the British pop band The Cure. Is this ametaphor for opium intoxication? Is intoxication here a metaphor for poet-ics? What Coleridge is offering here is the image of a de-sublimation.The poetwill make a poem about Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome—a sublime prospect—but the real reason people are in “dread” of him is his having eaten anddrunk. Coleridge was fascinated with states that fall out of the aesthetic.

All too briefly, the kinds of observation I have just made map out theareas that occupy this collection of essays. Cultures of Taste/Theories ofAppetite is a study of the ways in which food and eating appears in theRomantic period. It casts as wide a net as possible in its attempt to catchdifferent types of literary, philosophical and cultural phenomenon. Theessays in this volume are surprisingly wide-ranging: from deconstrution tohistoricism, from cultural criticism to close reading.

Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite contributes both to literary theoret-ical and cultural-historical approaches to literature. In doing so it breakswith the habit in contemporary criticism of drawing boundaries betweenthese areas of sudy, as is visible in the various panel titles and personnel ofconferences on the Romantic period.This rich, varied collection is of valuesimply for the range of scholars that it has grouped together. It is, however,more than that. As the scholars assmbled here cross various disciplinaryboundaries, a startling picture emerges of the many ways in which food andeating was not simply an empirical reality in the Romantic period, but amixture of ideas, practices, figures, debates, and philosphical speculations.

In developing the current negotiation between philosophical and his-torical approaches to literature, this volume does not resolve contradictionsso much as illuminate their tensions and paradoxes.This collection is morethan a medley of essays on food, a merely haphazard arrangement. On theother hand, to theorize is not necessarily to integrate under a single rubric.Walter Benjamin has shown how collage and juxtaposition can have sur-prising, helpful effects. For Theodor Adorno “A successful work, from theperspective of imminent criticism, is not one which resolves objective con-tradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of har-mony negatively by embodying contradictions, pure and uncompromised,in its innermost structure.”1 It is a pity that the finely nuanced Marxism ofthe Frankfurt School is so little taken up in post-structuralism, as MichelFoucault himself complained.2 Despite the export of post-structuralismfrom English Departments into the humanities and even the social sciencesat large, history has not fully attended to the material and the physical inMarx, Nietzsche, and Freud.3 Studies in the history and culture of foodhave meanwhile often taken refuge in the magical realness of food as aholdout against theory, thus establishing an opposition between empiricismand “theory.”

The collision between philosophy and history is a symptom of the period investigated in this book. Let us look briefly and directly.Thefigure of the Prince Regent embodies the productive asymmetry betweentaste and appetite.Alan Bewell noted in his study of dietary figures that heis the consumer of the 1790s.4 The Regent is often portrayed in ways thatemphasize the bodily aspect of appetite. Richard Davenport-Hinesobserved that this man put laudanum in his breakfast along with beef andpigeon pie, white wine, champagne, and brandy.5 But look at his face: he islost in speculation, or not. Is it contemplation or dyspepsia? To what extentis contemplation itself a form of dyspepsia? What kinds of dyspepsia—thehunger of the workers for example—are ignored by a mild, overstuffed,contemplative gaze? James Gillray’s cartoon shoves thought awkwardlyagainst the physical world.

To have bourgeois taste is to know how to recoil in horror.Where is thehorror in A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion? The Regent is nothimself experiencing revulsion.The horror is in the eyes of the middle-classconsumer who cannot quite match his aristocratic rites of consumption.The wistful contemplation in the Regent’s eye more nicely suits aRomantic poet than a tyrannical gourmand. It was an awkward wistfulnessfor a radical such as Shelley, keen in his own dietary habits to differentiatehimself from this kind of body image; or Byron, whose diet of lettuce and

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vinegar was designed to stave off the fat and attract the ladies. In Tenniel’sillustration to Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” the walrusis weeping and contemplating the sentience of oysters precisely at themoment at which he has devoured them. Philosophy bites.

Food enabled Gillray’s satire to cut in different directions. In TemperanceEnjoying a Frugal Meal, he placed the Regent’s father next to a boiled egg and

Preface xvii

James Gillray, A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion (London, 1792). Copyright the BritishMuseum, London.

a copy of the writings of George Cheyne, vegetarian doctor to SamuelRichardson. Is George III being compared with his son lovingly or contemp-tuously? Are diet books being mocked, or is Cheyne there as a politicizedadmonition? It gets a little easier to read things in French Liberty and BritishSlavery: in typical Burkean manner, Gillray juxtaposes French theory withBritish organicism, a starving carrot-eater with a plump John Bull. Gillray’scartoons exemplify the reified ways in which his society tried to think mindand body, theory and history. Moreover the issue of reification itself revolvesaround ideas and practices of food and eating. The study of sensibility hasproduced detailed accounts of the history of the physiology of nerves butfrequently imagines its field as a scene of classical epistemology.The view ofthe body as bombarded by sense data could become a form of reificationreproducing an asymmetrical world of subjects coming to know objects.

To summarize this volume is a trepidatious task indeed: there are somany different guests at this symposium. Normatively empiricist historiesof food jostle awkwardly with cultural materialist studies seeking to explorethe ideological comportment of eating.The study of eating in philosophytraces how eating complicates such basic metaphysical assumptions as thedifference between an inside and an outside—something every oystershould ponder as it slips down the throat of a sentimental poet.The intro-duction establishes two parameters for examining food and eating: theperformative idea of “consumerism” (a role emerging in the Romanticperiod), and a structuralist model that lays bare four sets of binary opposi-tions pertaining to specific representations of food and eating in the period.

It has not been easy to divide the essays into subgroups, but for the sakeof clarity in indicating the volume’s major concerns, I have separated theminto three parts. Part I, “Constructions, Simulations, Cultures” featuresthose essays that most strongly indicate trends that we would associate withculture—broadly understood as the context in which texts may be read,whether literary or not. Here the reader will find Nick Groom’s pioneer-ing work on fish and chips as a construct of the Romantic imagination.Before the railways brought potatoes from Lancashire to London and fishin the opposite direction in the 1840s, this simulated-English meal hadbeen imagined in poetic language. Indeed, Groom establishes that fish andchips symbolized the French Revolution.Timothy Fulford analyzes the fig-uration of breadfruit in colonial language about the South Sea Islands. Indelineating the particular ideological landscape of those islands in theBritish colonial imaginary, Fulford reveals that “Romantic nature first tookshape not at home but in the distant tropics of the mind” (49).This idea of nature was palpable, sensual, and focused upon the breadfruit as a

xviii Preface

symbol of the racialized innocence that the colonial project constructed.Penny Bradshaw furthers the investigation of the sociopolitical implicationsof food by showing how Charlotte Smith uses food imagery to relate consumerism and consumer values more closely to the development of amarket economy. Peter J. Kitson investigates Romantic representations of

Preface xix

James Gillray, Temperance Enjoying a Frugal Meal (London, 1792). Copyright the BritishMuseum, London.

cannibalism. Kitson’s essay engages with the anthropological cultural criticism of current schiolars, such as Nicholas Thomas, and examines howlate eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concepts of “race” wereinformed by discussion of eating and diet. Specifically Kitson shows how the Enlightenment classification of the peoples of Oceania into thedivisions of Polynesian and Melanesian was interwoven with an assessmentof such peoples’ practice of or tendency to anthropophagy. For Kitson,Byron’s late poem The Island, which depicts a fictionalized version of theBounty mutiny, is complicit in this politics of diet and demonisation in the “South Seas” of the European scientific and cultural imagination.

Nicholas Roe’s study of foot and mouth disease shows how the culturethat grew up around the recent epidemic in Britain had strong Romanticovertones. Roe discovers the lineages of a suburban pastoral aesthetic thatdepends upon figures of food and eating, of H. P. Sauce and Heinz Ketchup,for its ironic effects. One of these ironies is the simultaneous presence andabsence of extreme violence toward animals and industrial farming tech-niques that are carefully managed in preserving an image of English pastoral.The very countryside of Britain is shaped by figures of food and eating.

Part II is entitled “Waiter,There’s a Trope in My Soup: Close Readings.”It is a selection of varied ways in which a close attention to Romantic-period texts can yield striking and surprising results in the field of dietstudies. I have deliberately chosen here to make no distinction as towhether it is specifically literature or philosophy that is being close-read.I believe that in doing so this collection is not only in line with thepostmodern or deconstructive approaches to the text such as JacquesDerrida’s, but also to interdisciplinary cultural studies that mix history,literature, and philosophy. David Clark opens the section with a fine-grained reading of figures of meat-eating and masculinity in Hegel. Hisessay proceeds by identifying the ways in which Schelling engaged Hegel’sidealism, which like the omnivorous vacuum cleaner in the Beatles filmYellow Submarine, sucks up everything in its way. Jane Stabler reads closelythe poetry of Byron, discovering that poet’s particular engagement withfigures of milk and blood, and his interest in generic and literal mixeddishes.These figures have wide implications in cultural representations ofdiet in the Romantic period. Finally,Arkady Plotnitsky’s essay on Keats andShelley examines the significance of the idea and imagery of excessive con-sumption in their late poetry.This examination leads him to consider theextent to which their poetic engagement with excessive consumptioncauses problems for normative ideas of the sublime and of literature itself.

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Part III, “Disgust, Digestion,Thought,” accounts for the ways in whicheating appears in, and falls out of, Romantic philosophy. For example, it canbe shown that the idea of the aesthetic is subtended by disgust at the ideaof appetite.This disgust is as it were the little piece of grit that irritates phi-losophy into making the pearl of the aesthetic. Disgust is thus both “inside”and “outside” the realm of what counts as proper philosophy. Eating notonly troubles the neat boundaries of speculative thought—it producesthem. Denise Gigante opens this section with a detailed account of the fig-ure of disgust in Romantic literature. Through the study of allusion, heressay boldly associates the work of Keats with that of Sartre and Beckett.Peter Melville’s essay on Kant’s view of group eating is a queer theory closereading, a valuable contribution to our understanding of that philosopher’sfiguration of what it means to inhabit a community.Tilottama Rajan’s essayon Hegel focuses upon the idea of digestion, exploring the relationshipbetween the idealist Hegel and materialist philosophy.This leads to a dis-cussion of ideas about the “constitution” of bodies in Hegel and inmaterialist science, giving rise to an even wider analysis of the idea of dis-ease in Romantic literature and culture. Paul Younquist investigates theways in which Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing is formed and deformed byideas about digestion. To this task he brings the long history of modernthinking on digestion and excretion, from John Locke onward.

The Afterword outlines the range and scope of the study of food andeating, focusing upon the specific conditions that affect the study of theRomantic period. It develops the idea of a broad and critical approach tothis kind of scholarship: “diet studies.” It makes a case for the value ofstudying the interrelated issues of materialism and ideology.

Notes

1. Theodor Adorno,“Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1981), 32.

2. Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings,1977–1984, tr.Alan Sheridan and others, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York:Routledge, 1988), 27.

3. See David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature:A Reporton Half-Knowledge (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1995).

4. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,2000), 132.

5. I am grateful to Denise Gigante for discussing this with me. See RichardDavenport-Hines, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics1500–2000 (London:Weidenfeld, 2001).

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