The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) by Adams Carol J

Author:Adams, Carol J. [Adams, Carol J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781501312847
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

The narrative strategy of interruption

Central to all [Woolf’s] thinking is the revelation of interruption, heralding change, and the growing expectation that society is on the verge of radical transformation.

—Lucio Ruotolo, The Interrupted Moment52

The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.

—Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter53

We have examined novels in which feminist insights catalyze connections between vegetarianism and political violence. Each of these novels appears to employ the same literary technique for summoning these connections—a technique I call interruption. Interruption provides the gestalt shift by which vegetarianism can be heard. Technically, it occurs when the movement of the novel is suddenly arrested, and attention is given to the issue of vegetarianism in an enclosed section of the novel. The author provides signs that an interruption has occurred. Dots or dashes; the use of the word “interruption”; stammering, pauses, inarticulateness, or confusion in those who are usually in control; the deflection of the story to a focus on food and eating habits; or the reference to significant earlier figures or events from vegetarian history: all become the means for establishing an interruption, a gap in the narrative in which vegetarianism can be entertained.54 Although the interruption is set apart, the meaning it contains speaks to central themes of the novel, unifying the interruption and the interrupted text through acute critical comments about the social order and meat eating.55

In the works of modern women writers the intrusion into the text of a vegetarian incident announces a subversion of the dominant world order, enacted through the subversion of the text itself by the textual strategy of interruption. What was once silenced breaks into the text, deflecting attention from the forces that generally silence it, both thematically and textually. Interruption provides an opportunity for refocusing the trajectory of the text, as well as providing a protected space within the novel for expanding the front. Interruption does battle with the novel for meaning, wresting meaning from the dominant culture as represented in the text itself.56 In essence, expanding the front requires extending the scope of the novel, taking it to new topical territory, and this is the function of interruption, which provides the needed space for such expansion. A vegetarian presence destablizes patriarchal concerns.

Isadora Duncan’s meditation on the connection between war and meat eating in her autobiography My Life exemplifies the interruption of narrative. She interrupts a discussion about her life during the Great War to assert: “Bernard Shaw says that as long as men torture and slay animals and eat their flesh, we shall have war. I think all sane, thinking people must be of his opinion.” From her wartime experience she concludes:

Who loves this horrible thing called War? Probably the meat eaters, having killed, feel the need to kill—kill birds, animals—the tender stricken deer—hunt foxes.

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