"Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
(attributed to) Anton Chekhov

I have just read, sort of in conjunction with this week’s “Food” theme, David Foster Wallace’s classic essay, “Consider the Lobster,” which can be found in his book of essays of the same title (NY: Little, Brown-Back Bay Books, 2006. 235-74). It is ostensibly about a snippet of everyday life: the cooking of lobsters, this in turn deriving from Wallace’s visit to the annual Maine Lobster Festival on Penobscot Bay. But, in typical Wallace style, he soon advances the subject far beyond an inside look at this rather banal bit of seafood preparation: “You get the water boiling, put in the lobsters one at a time, cover the kettle, and bring it back up to a boil. Then you bank the heat and let the kettle simmer—ten minutes for the first pound of lobster, then three minutes for each pound after that” (242). Fair enough. This is akin to the literature of a cookbook, except that quickly Wallace reminds us, “A detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle” (242). And then he asks, “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure” (243). Uh?!

Wallace then tacks to port and we get into deep neurophysiological and philosophical waters, and before you know it the whole matter of what lies behind our carnivorous behavior is there in your head. And always, Wallace’s description of “the [kettle’s] cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around” (248) rattles in your brain. We realize that, deep down, we would just rather not deal with this sort of thing. Lobster should be lobster, not a dead lobster, just as a hamburger should be a fried meat patty, not a ground up part of a dead cow.

I mention this in conjunction with Chekhov’s quote (I am writing this on his birthday, January 29 [1860]) because, in a sense, if we really thought (and/or worried) about everything that goes into the mundane, like the boiling alive of lobsters, or whatever it is that constitutes the “live hanging” (pollo vivo) section of the assembly line at the Tyson Foods Arkansas chicken abattoir (Striffler 70), it really might do far more than just “wear you out.”

Further, if you carefully parse Chekhov’s observation you get to the purpose of, or at least the selling point of, the attraction of, literature: to escape the quotidian. Novels “demand” a crisis; it is the third of the five classic Aristotelian narrative elements: exposition/initiating event, rising action, reversal of fortune/crisis, climax, and resolution/denouement. Careful attention to Aristotelian structure is no longer considered mandatory, Joyce’s Ulysses—which, in fact, is a wonderful portrayal of everyday life in fin de siècle Dublin—being exhibit #1. But a novelist surely must at least consider Aristotle, whether or not one acknowledges (or realizes) this. Storytellers, who probably served as Aristotle’s evidence, have never been without this talent. Storytellers, even more than novelists, must hew to the mystique of Aristotle. Because “we dwell in the everyday” (Highmore, “Dwelling on the Daily,” 38) we hardly even notice it. It dwells in us as much as we dwell in it, and thus the everyday must inform all we do as writers and readers. We can hardly escape it. Unfortunately for the lobster, it is worse off than an idiot: it cannot escape its reversal of fortune.

Jay Caldwell
English 549 Blog
29 January 2009