cookbooks as literature

Speaking of community cookbooks in her introduction to Recipes for Reading (1997), Anne Bower writes “Usually put together by women to raise funds for a church, temple, school, museum, or other cause, these texts seem innocent of narrative force. After all, what do they contain? A preface explaining the group’s philanthropic intent and/or a few words on how the cookbook was compiled, a few illustrations, chapters dividing food by categories, paid advertisements (sometimes), and mostly, of course, the recipes, normally accompanied by their donors’ names.
It is the contention of Recipes for Reading that fund-raising cookbooks comprise a genre containing much more than the discrete elements listed above. The contributors to this volume find that these cookbooks tell stories – autobiographical in most cases, historical sometimes, and perhaps fictitious or idealized in other instances. The discourse of the discrete textual elements and their juxtapositions contribute to the creation of these stories, which quietly or boldly tell of women’s lives and beliefs. In community cookbooks women present their values, wittingly or unwittingly (we often can’t know which).” (pp.1-2)

She poses the question “Could I value this book not just as a fun source of recipes but as a literary text whose authors constructed meaningful representations of themselves and their world?” (p.2)

“As we come to see the links between what Susan Arpad classifies as “literary artifacts (diaries, letters, reminiscences, and oral histories) and material cultural artifacts (especially quilts and other needlework, photographs, and gardens),” we acquire more and better techniques for reading all texts related to women’s self-representation.” (p.5)

“Part of what we’re coming to see about these varying texts, once considered decorative and/or private and/or trivial, is how they have served the communication needs of women. Scholars, particularly those in women’s studies, or feminists in literature and history, have demonstrated that, although women were often limited in access to recognized status-bearing discourse forms such as poetry and fiction, public speaking, and journalism, they expressed themselves through other print and nonprint materials. And in those materials they not only recorded and reflected the world around them, they worked to construct their world. Whether complicit with or pushing against the constraints and categories that bound them, women acted to shape the communities around them. Thus, what we may designate as fairly private activity or discourse (sewing, the writing of letters, contributing to a cookbook) may actually have been seen by women of the past as forms of public participation.” (pp.5-6)

“Karen L. Blair reminds us that because a “male definition of activity” has dominated discussions of history and social change, only women engaged in public work such as suffrage have been termed active.” (p.6)

“scholars have for a long time seen the great cultural significance of food, though they did not contribute directly to discussions of community cookbooks until recently. Mary Douglas puts it bluntly in a discussion of ethnic food: “Ethnic food is a cultural category, not a material thing.” She goes on to explain that “food is a field of action. It is a medium in which other levels of categorization become manifest. It does not lead or follow, but it squarely belongs to whatever action there is. Food choices support political alignments and social opportunities.” This kind of insight is immensely applicable to research into the compiled or charitable cookbook.” (p.10)

Ref: (emphases in blue bold mine) Anne Bower ‘Bound together: recipes, lives, stories, and readings.’ pp.1-14 in Recipes for Reading, Ed. Anne Bower, Amherst, Massachusetts, University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

the feminist kitchen

Ksenija Bilbija sums up much of the interest in the kitchen as site of story in Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate when she wrote:

“For feminists, the kitchen has come to symbolize the world that traditionally marginalized and limited a woman. It represents a space associated with repetitive work, lacking any “real” creativity, and having no possibility for the fulfillment of women’s existential needs, individualization or self-expression.” (p.147)

[As an aside, I also found her discussion of the kitchen and the alchemist’s laboratory, especially as the two spaces might be read in Cien años de soledad, p.149-, interesting)

Ref: Ksenija Bilbija ‘Spanish American Women Writers: simmering identity over a low fire’ STCL 20(1) Winter, 1996; pp.147-165

Abjection and Fictional Girl-Animal Relationships

I’m not usually big on the psychoanalytic tradition, but Jennifer Marchant’s analysis of fictional girl-animal relationships (including Lessa’s relationship with her dragon, Ramoth, in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight (1968)) is interesting. The questions she poses are worth considering and the approach she takes is fruitful. Her explanation of ‘abjection’ is also perfectly accessible and fits rather perfectly!

“…what did that relationship between girl and dragon mean to [the protagonist of Dragonflight,] Lessa—and to me, the young reader? In this article, I want to suggest that, in Dragonflight and many other novels, the powerful relationship between adolescent female protagonist and animal plays a vital part in the protagonist’s psychic development. Moreover, I wish to make the argument that Kristevan theory is an especially useful lens for examining this bond and for considering the appeal these books have for many adolescent readers.” (p.3)

Abjection
“The time of boundary establishment is difficult and painful for the infant. On the one hand, she longs to continue the blissful unity with her mother’s body. But on the other, she fears being reincorporated with her mother, “falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling”. In order to establish herself as autonomous, she needs to separate herself from her mother’s body. Kristeva calls this period between unity-with-mother and autonomy “abjection.” Abjection is uncomfortable, both to the abject and to those within the social order. Kristeva describes it as that which “disturbs identity, system, order. [It is] what does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”. This is where the imaginary father comes in, comforting the child with “his” love, and thus preventing her from merging back into nonidentity. Abjection is not confined to infancy; it appears at any point in which someone is temporarily or permanently in a state of in-betweenness, not really one thing nor the other. This in-betweenness occurs both on a relatively small scale (concerning the individual and/or her relationships with family members) and on a larger one (concerning the individual’s relationship with community or country). The need for an imaginary father, then, is not outgrown, but continues throughout adult life, although “he” may change form. [-p.5] For example, the imaginary father may reappear in adults’ search for totally satisfying sexual relationships and/or a loving and comforting God.
Adolescents may have an especially strong need for imaginary fathers. Kristeva suggests that adolescence is a time of “psychic reorganization,” a time when people “begin to question their identifications, as well as their capacities to speak and to symbolize”.” (pp.4-5)

“Not only is the adolescent trying to establish boundaries between herself and her parents, but between her own community(ies) and those she deems “outsiders.” In addition, she must deal with her developing sexuality.” (p.5)

“Thus, the adolescent may have to deal simultaneously with several sorts of abjection, and so be powerfully drawn to descriptions of fictional imaginary fathers and their relationships with similarly abject protagonists. Such descriptions may not only reassure the reader that her experiences are not unique, but suggest that abjection can be resolved.
Lessa, in Dragonflight, is a good example of adolescent abjection and resolution.” (p.5)

“It is through Ramoth that Lessa is eventually able to come to terms with both her social and sexual states of abjection.” (p.6)

“Moreover, Lessa’s uncertainties about her sexuality and her relationship with F’lar are resolved when Ramoth mates with F’lar’s dragon.” (p.6)

“For both Lessa and Opal [in Because of Winn-Dixie], companion animals play a vital role in drawing boundaries.” (p.7) “The animals also help the girls move from being “outsiders” in their new communities to being accepted members. In these ways, they act as imaginary fathers.” (p.7)

“Considering the animals as imaginary fathers suggests one way in which to interpret a common motif in girl-animal stories. While a child may have to share her parents’ love with siblings, the imaginary father’s love is for the child alone. In a similar fashion, the animal in these stories often displays a marked preference for the protagonist. Usually, this is for an unusual aspect of her personality, rather than because she is the one who feeds it.” (p.7)

“Freud suggested that the ego ideal—one’s internalized sense of what is right and good—is founded on the infant’s identification with the “father in prehistory” (or, to use Kristeva’s term, the imaginary father). The child’s later identification with her parents reinforces this. However, an adolescent has presumably already incorporated her parents’ standards, and is now in the process of separating herself from her family. At this stage, then, one might expect an imaginary father to help her explore parental standards as she decides whether to keep or reject them. Indeed, this pattern often appears in girl-animal stories—although, at least in the ones I surveyed, the animals are far more likely to reinforce the parents’ standards than to instigate rebellion against them.” (p.8)

“I think it is probably significant that so many of the protagonists in this genre are attached to animals associated with power and freedom—horses, large dogs, wolves, dragons, and falcons. It is also worth noting that animals are outside the patriarchal social and linguistic systems that marginalize women. In identifying with animals, girls and women may seek an alternative social system in which they are not regarded as the inferior “other.” Although animals are not generally believed to use language, many of those in girl-animal stories communicate very effectively via vocalizations, body signals, and/or telepathy. In this sense, they may represent an alternative to male-privileged language. Thus, while the animals still ultimately function to integrate the protagonists into patriarchal society, they may also imply that this society can be questioned, subverted, and perhaps eventually changed.” (p.9)

“In a number of novels, the protagonist learns that the animal itself is less important than the supportive structure it has helped her develop.” (p.13)

Ref: (emphases in blue bold mine) Marchant, Jennifer ‘An Advocate, a Defender, an Intimate”: Kristeva’s Imaginary Father in Fictional Girl-Animal Relationships’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 30(1), Spring 2005, pp. 3-15

urban change questions

These questions are posed in the context of sustainable urban development, but I think them both interesting and relevant to fictional concerns (perhaps especially those of urban fantasy and fiction more generally?):

“Ultimately,” write, “the green city will reflect a rather different future for work. On this topic there are some very large questions: can a future of cities competing against one another in world markets be reconciled with a benign future for the environment? What are the limits of competition and how can they be enforced? Does economic growth itself have limits? How can growth be steered into environmentally benign forms of production? What forms of governance are required to regulate world markets in order to guarantee social security and environmental conservation? How do culture, place and climate influence work patterns, and consequently the physical accommodation of work?” (p.132)

Ref: Nicholas Low, Brendan Gleeson, Ray Green and Darko Radovic (2005) The Green city: Sustainable homes, sustainable suburbs. Routledge, Abingdon and New York; and UNSW Press, Sydney

Mapping Suburban Fiction – Long

I’ve just been reading an interesting article by Christian Long on the (general) absence of travel between work and the suburbs in suburban fiction – and what might be read into this absence.

Long begins by aligning two quotes in a way I find quite powerful: “Suburbanization, probably more than any other single factor, hid the poor from view … Suburbanization nourished the solipsism of the middle class, which looked around its new environment and concluded, short-sightedly, that it was alone in America.” (Barbara Ehrenreich, quoted p.193)
“Then you make a map of the book, and everything changes.” (Franco Moretti, quoted p.193)

Long then goes on to write: “…the suburbs are more than cookie-cutter tract houses and depersonalizing offices; they also are the roads and rails on which suburbanites ride. In spite of the practical importance of commuting, of all the routine segments of everyday suburban life, moments of transit seem most prone to disappearance from fictional narratives and their critical engagements. The critical history of suburban literature more often than not defines suburb/suburbia/suburban/suburbanite/suburbanization in terms of houses, workplaces, and the discursive regimes that order them, drawing a line between the urban world of work and the suburban world of ‘home.’” (pp.193-194)

Long proposes that we might “redirect examination of suburban fiction outside and beyond the bounds of houses and workplaces. By ignoring representations of in-between moments like commuting to get to the easy pickings of the ranch house or copy room, we risk ignoring an important factor of suburban life—that is, all the time and space spent coming and going.” (p.194)

“[Sinclair Lewis’s] George Babbitt’s attention to the space within which he commutes models an active engagement with his environment—an engagement that pays attention to the economic inequality embodied within the built landscape. In contrast, representative post-war suburban fictions like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and The Corrections narratively and formally normalize a disconnection from the spaces between home and work, between the suburbs and the city. In these narratives—which represent the standard suburban narrative of American culture—the protagonist shuttles between the conflicts of suburban life—at home and at work—with as little interference from the built environment as possible.” (p.194)

“While suburban literature thickly describes domestic-house space and office-work space, maps of Babbitt, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and The Corrections reveal that between the house and office lies a nearly-blank, unrepresented space. Such empty space on the map represents a blind spot in the suburban imaginary: inequality. Recognizing the space between suburb and city—both narratively and as a critical reading strategy—makes it possible to understand the history of suburban discourses and to challenge the inevitability of the current sprawling, stratified suburban way of life in America.” (p.195)

“…this separation of home and work also generates a blindness to the in-between spaces through which suburbanites travel—highways, bridges, streets, sidewalks, trains, trolleys, and even subways—and a similar blindness to the price non-suburbanites pay for the convenience of that infrastructure. Deconstructing the home-work binary allows us to understand and highlight that price, to uncover the hidden structures of exploitation and inequality which the conventional account of postwar suburbia glides over.” (pp.194-195)

Reading this, I was wondering how urban fantasy deals with this space between suburb and city (if, indeed, it does)…?

Note: Long also points us to the following work: “The best book-length analysis of suburban fiction I have found—Catherine
Jurca’s White Diaspora: The Suburbs and the Twentieth-Century American Novel—uses a metaphor of movement.” (p.194)

Reference: (italics in original; emphases in blue bold mine) Christian Long (2013) ‘Mapping Suburban Fiction’ Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 6(3)Dec, 193-213 DOI 10.1179/2051285613Z.00000000019

Abstract: “In spite of the practical importance of commuting to everyday suburban life, moments of commuting are rare in American fiction. While the experience of commuting offers chances for reflection and self-knowledge for the suburbanite’s psyche, that time for introspection comes at the cost of ignoring the built environment. The separation of home and work that the often-elided moments of commuting perpetuate generates a blindness to the suburban built environment and infrastructure. This article redirects an examination of suburban fiction outside and beyond the bounds of houses and workplaces by paying attention to scenes of commuting. Placing the space between home and work at the centre of the analysis allows us to understand and highlight the price of the suburban way of life, and to uncover the hidden structures of exploitation and inequality which a conventional account of post-war suburbia glides over.”

Quotes referenced more fully as: Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Harper
Perennial, 1989), 42.

and: Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 36.

The myth of the Highlands

I’m just a bit interested in representations of the Highlands of Scotland at the moment… In 1989, Peter Womack wrote:

“We know that the Highlands of Scotland are romantic. Bens and glens, the lone shieling in the misty island, purple heather, kilted clansmen, battles long ago, an ancient and beautiful language, claymores and bagpipes and Bonny Prince Charlie – we know all that, and we also know that it’s not real. Not that it’s a pure fabrication: on the contrary, all the things on that rough-and-ready list actually exist, or existed. But the romance is not simply the aggregate of the things; it is a message which the things carry.

“Around 1730, an English gentleman called Edward Burt described the mountains near Inverness: they were, he observed, ‘of a dismal gloomy Brown, drawing upon a dirty Purple; and most of all disagreeable, when the Heath is in Bloom’. Here, preserved by chance, is one of the things without the message. Burt doesn’t know what heather ‘means’; for him, the plant is innocent of romance. This is because when he was looking at it, the romance had not yet been invented.

It is not a question of personal taste. Burt thought the heather-covered mountains ugly, but he might have liked them; most people nowadays find them beautiful, but it’s perfectly possible for a modern individual to dislike them. What it is not possible to do today, whatever our personal tastes, is to see the heather he saw. Trying to see that neutral, unappropriated flower would be like trying to see, say, a swastika as nothing but an abstract design. For us, the moment when we set eyes on a heather-covered Highland hillside, and see what it is, is also the moment when we register the presence of the Highland romance. Thus, while Burt’s observation is an exemplary demonstration that the things and the romance are separable in principle, it is equally a reminder that they are inextricable in practice. The highlands are no longer just a place where people and animals and plants live; they have been colonised by the empire of signs; they are what Roland Barthes called a myth: that is, an object which is signified within an ordinary linguistic sign, but at the same time serves as the signifier within a secondary sign, having been, so to speak, pressed into the service of a concept. The concept, the mythic signified, is vague: as Barthes also notes, ‘the knowledge contained in a mythical concept is confused, made of yielding, shapeless associations… Not at all an abstract, purified essence [but] a formless, unstable, nebulous condensation’. It would be right to say that Highland heather signifies Scottishness, wild freedom, naturalness, antique valour. But that is talking loosely; it is not the point of myth that it should specify denotations in that way; this is not a question of symbolism. Rather, the heather (together with the other Highland differentiae) is made the instrument of an intention, saturated with ideological imperatives which, by merging themselves with it’s incontestably organic fibres, win for themselves the opaque and self-evident charm of a natural contingency. The concept, no longer recognisable as such, is just there, for all to see. Botanically, no doubt, calluna vulgaris is exactly as it was in the 1730s. Semiotically, it has been irrevocably hybridised.” (Pp1-2)

“…the Highlands are romantic because they have been romanticised.” (P2)

Womack Writes that this “began , fairly decisively, with the military defeat of the Jacobite clans in 1746, and can be regarded as complete by 1810-11, when a flurry of publications, including most notably Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, both depended on and confirmed a settled cultural construction of the Highlands as a ‘romantic country’ inhabited by a people whose ancient manners and customs were ‘peculiarly adapted to poetry’. Although I have strayed across both these chronological boundaries in pursuit of particular motifs and developments, the 65 years between them are the essential epoch in which the story is set.” (P2)

“During this period, the dominant theme in British discourse concerning the Highlands was Improvement.” (P2)

“The ‘Improvement’ of the Highlands… signified (a) that the region was to yield a better return on capital; (b) that it was to become, very generally, a better place; and (c) that (a) and (b) were substantially identical.

“This was evidently a project fraught with contradictions both internal and external; and it was out of its contradictions that the Highland myth was generated. At every stage of its elaboration, the code of Improvement gave rise to discordant tones, dysfunctional ideological traces which it was obliged to elide or exclude: these, precisely because of the hegemonic unity of Improvement itself, formed a coherent counter-image to it, matching it’s powerful but limited rationale with a utopian but impotent irrationalism, mirroring its economist in a quixotic denial of self-interest, haunting its progressivism with a voluptuous love of the past. These oppositions can occasionally make the romance look like a counter-ideological formation, but as their symmetry suggests, the conflict is illusory. Rather, it is the ideological function of the romance that it removes the contradictory elements from the scope of material life altogether; that it marks out a kind of reservation in which the values which Improvement provokes and suppresses can be contained – that is, preserved, but also imprisoned. I began by pointing out that the romantic Highlands are not real; this is not an incidental drawback; not to be real is what they are for. Officially, Romance and Improvement were opposites: native and imported, past and present, tradition and innovation. But in reality they were twins. The story of Highland romanticisation is essentially the story of that covert complementarity.” (P3)

Ref: Peter Womack (1989) Improvement and romance: constructing the myth of the highlands. Macmillan: London

Horst Kornberger on Harry Potter and Narnia

Horst Kornberger offers the following opinion on Harry Potter (I haven’t decided what I think about his comments yet, but it’s one opinion!):

“I am in two minds about Rowling’s creation,” Kornberger writes, “particularly as literature for young children. I think the books and films are often encountered too [-p.143] early. Harry Potter is great fantasy, but a certain foundation of soul needs to be established before a child enters the gothic labyrinth of Hogwarts.
The Potter books are based on the mystery novel and the emotional suspense created by this genre. In most mystery novels we do not know who the murderer is until the very end. In the Harry Potter books, the murder is yet to come. Though we know it is the Dark Lord who is attempting to kill Harry, we do not know under which mask he is hiding. This makes the books even more harrowing for the soul than conventional mysteries.
The dark forces in the Harry Potter series are hidden and unscrupulous, and ever more brilliant as the books progress. The portrayal of evil echoes the racial ethos of the Nazi regime and procedures of black magic. All this may be exciting and highly stimulating reading for the imagination-deprived teenager, but it is not appropriate for younger readers, who need to know who is good and who is bad so they can morally orientate themselves in a story.
In fairytales, evil and cruelty are dealt with imaginatively. The wolf that devours Red Riding Hood spills no blood and the child is soon revived. But the killing in Harry Potter is real and irreversible. The blood that is spilled is ‘real’ blood that will leave a mark on a young child’s soul. The cruelty of a sinister figure like Voldemort is too convincing to be digested before a child is equipped to face him. Too young, they may fall prey to his schemes – and as the book tells you, he is eager to kill then as young as he can.
I recommend you to the advice of the world expert in all matters concerning Harry Potter and the care of the magical and endangered child: Albertus Dumbledore, Director of Hogwarts School of Magic. The wise Professor protected Harry from all contact with the shady and dangerous world of magic until he had reached the age of eleven. I take this as the story’s own explicit advice for its appropriate use: children should reach this age before being admitted to the school of sorcery.
I have said I am in two minds about Harry Potter. While I am concerned about its premature use, it nevertheless provides a good dose of fantasy for teenage consumption. It also speaks directly to contemporary myth – its popularity shows that the stories answer a dire need in our culture: the story deprivation of contemporary childhood.
Children recognise themselves in Harry. Like the modern child he starts off deprived of imagination and magic, denied his birthright to be an adventurer in any realm other than this world. Like the modern [-p.144] child he is endowed with imaginal gifts and has been brought up by parents who are ‘muggles’ – totally unmagical folk. Most parents are ‘Dursleys,’ not only lacking imagination, they suppress it with any means at their disposal.
The imaginal part in every modern child is as maltreated by parents and education as Harry Potter is by the Dursleys, while the child’s conventional and unmagical part is as spoiled as his stepbrother Dudley – who is the very kind of insensitive and competitive bully our world seems to reward while the Harrys are locked in closets and punished for who they are.
Harry Potter exemplifies the drama of the imaginative child. This is what makes his story a modern myth. He is the hero who escapes the prison of convention, breaking though the brick walls of King’s Cross Station into a new dimension of imaginal adventure. Harry is a symbol for the imaginal child and her adventures in this world and the next – but for a young child there are smoother ways to break the brick walls of convention. A new dimension may be more easily entered through an old wardrobe hung with fur coats.” (pp.142-144)

Harry vs The Chronicles of Narnia

Interestingly, Kornberger also compares Harry to The Chronicles of Narnia:

“C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are a masterpiece of children’s literature. A nine year old can appreciate the imaginative treasures this series contains, and there is no need to censor their use, for the stories have a purity that will protect them from misuse. The children who are the heroes of many of the Narnia tales are aged between seven and twelve, and that seems a good indication of their age-appropriateness.” (p.144)

“Harry Potter is fantasy with mythological elements. The Chronicles of Narnia are much stronger myth, a product of exact imagination, revealing realities beyond the apparently real. The Narnia stories meet the soul on its own home ground. They speak the imaginative language of the heart and carry the power of transformation that only this language can provide.
It is this transformative capacity that Harry Potter lacks. He is a likeable hero and remains so, even as he becomes more adept in magic. He is protected by the love of his mother, but he is not touched by the love that changes the heart. He remains a somewhat superficial hero, the master of outer accomplishment and victories. He is Superboy equipped with magical powers and all the gadgets of the trade: owls and broomsticks, invisibility cloak and miraculous maps.” (p.145)

Again, I’m not yet sure what I think of these last comments, but I do find them interesting.

Ref: (italics in original; emphases in blue bold mine) Horst Kornberger (2008) The Power of Stories: Nurturing Children’s Imagination and Consciousness. Floris Books: Edinburgh