The Art of Carnism

This review of Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian (2007) introduces the concept of the art of carnism through which a reading of the novel is undertaken.

HAN KANG

THE VEGETARIAN

LONDON: PORTOBELLO BOOKS, 2015

“The spectre of our eventual “becoming object”—of our (live) flesh one day turning into (dead) meat – is a shadow that accompanies us throughout our lives.” (175) So writes Maggie Nelson in The Art of Cruelty (2011), the book from which I derive the title for this review. The art of carnism describes the way meat-eating peoples use denial as a psychosocial defence to silence the rights, voices and subjectivities of other species (Joy 2011). It also describes art works that enliven us to the unconscious prejudice (speciesism) reinforcing the violence that defines the way humans relate to other beings. Han Kang’s novel, The Vegetarian (2007), makes both meanings visible. As the novel opens, the reader is confronted with a woman, Yeong-hye, who has experienced a sudden associative experience of disgust in relation to meat. She has had a dream, a particularly visceral dream. And now she is haunted by the spectres of all the animals she has eaten in her life. For Kang the novel started with the image of a woman literally transforming into a plant. She wrote that transformation into the short story ‘The Fruit of My Woman’ (2016). The transformation that takes place in The Vegetarian is more ambiguous, more indistinct, and more deeply disturbing.

Overwhelmingly, the concept of humanity functions as a kind of mega-nationalism: it stands towards animality in some of the same ways the Australian government currently treats asylum seekers and Australia’s first peoples. In short, they are the subjects of state sanctioned and institutionalised violence. There are no simplistic comparisons to be made here. Cows, refugees and Indigenous peoples are animalised by dominant culture in particular ways, at particular times, and in relation to specific contexts. However, if as Matthew Calarco argues (2014), animalisation works by defining others according to what they lack, while never giving a justification for why that supposed lack necessitates their having less ethical consideration and standing, the above claim needs to be more widely acknowledged.

Humanity is an identity that manifests in the process of refusing a common animality. It is, by now, a matter of ethical urgency that we come to understand humanity as a particularly potent and sophisticated kind of fiction. As Joan Didion says, we tell ourselves stories in order to exist (1979). We also tell ourselves stories to know how we exist, and at what cost to others. To acknowledge others, writes Luce Irigaray (2011), is a kind of hospitality. It requires us to curtail (and put into perspective) our habits, beliefs and language. Doing so might allow us listen to realities still unknown to us, realities that have never before entered our language or our logic. For Yeong-hye, veganism offers a way of being and knowing the world that stands outside carnist hell-norms that situate mass-produced animal death at the centre of human life.

In a recent lecture, Ghassan Hage defined the concept of humanity as a form of domination that relies first on diminishing the life force of others—other species and other peoples. From this position, distinctions of equality and non-equality are made. As he puts it, this is humanity as colonial speciesism. For Hage, and many human-animal studies scholars and activists, the concept of a common humanity is, paradoxically, an exclusionary fiction, always hard at work staking out zones of sacrifice. That is, literal and conceptual spaces where those who are not seen to have the “right” qualities to qualify as properly human can be put. Against these excluded, isolated, sequestered beings humanity defines itself. Why must it be such a fragile, paranoid, inconstant, flickering and narcissistic thing?

As Calarco writes, it is a mistake to think that the category of ‘the human’ has ever been neatly drawn along species lines. Some species are loved as pets while others are eaten for dinner. Some are rejected as invaders while others are made into national symbols. And some species (I am thinking here of kangaroos) are turned into national symbols and massacred. Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1967) offers a gutful of images that show the way a certain kind of virile Australian masculinity asserts and accomplishes its identity and power by getting drunk and heading out for an epic kangaroo slaughter session.

All of this is to say that the perceived human-animal boundary is actually populated by multiple categories that bleed into one another. Binary thinking that posits a human/animal distinction misses the finer, messier and more interesting point—there is an intricate and violent hierarchy that people draw on to separate others into narrowly defined categories such as humanised human, humanised animal, animalised human, animalised woman, feminised animal and animalised animal (Adams 1990; Wolfe 2003). The lowest point of this devolutionary chain of being is only ever a knife’s edge away from being turned into dead meat.

Meat, Carol Adams argues, is a story humans apply to the lives of other animals (1990, 2003, 2007). It is a way of holding and maintaining power in the act of producing a certain kind of body—a ‘meatified’ body. This is what Maggie Nelson describes as the “situation of meat” (2011, 175). It is a shadowy situation and one that is more present, thicker, denser and darker for some than others.

Yeong-hye discovers that the shadow of meat is cast over all flesh. This revelation turns her off consuming any animal products. She becomes a vegan. In the opening pages of the novel we find her standing in the shadow of meat-death, cast by the dim light of her refrigerator. Haunted by dreams of murder, of the body-made-meat, she begins to feel the residue of all the meat she’s eaten in her life sticking to her insides—“Yells and howls threaded layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there” (49). Filled with visions of slit flesh, pools of blood, butchered bodies, screams, breathlessness and darkness, the dreams form a council of images that repel her.

It is only Sue Coe’s intricate drawings of immense plains of slaughter; of pigs’ bodies skittering off platforms and into funnels only to be sprayed out the other side (2000), that I begin to get a feel for calibre of horror show Yoeng-hye sees when she shuts her eyes at night. As Kang puts it in an interview published on Lit Hub, “Yeong-hye refuses meat to reject human brutality from herself.” Faced with the impossibility of being liberated from human violence, Yeong-hye desires to uproot herself from the very category of humanity. She begins to believe she is transforming into a plant.

Originally published in South Korea as three novellas—‘The Vegetarian’, ‘The Mongolian Mark’ and ‘Flaming Trees’—The Vegetarian is now described as a triptych novel. It burrows into the social, cultural and political fibres of patriarchal violence, transgression and taboo, the (im)possibilities of human innocence, and the ways in which ‘doing food’ is an important part of ‘doing gender’.

The profound entanglement of meat eating and masculinity has been examined from a variety of scholarly perspectives (Adams 1990, 2003; Fiddes 1991; Kristeva 1984; Luke 2007). Carol Adams defines the sexual politics of meat as an attitude and an action that assumes a natural, normal and necessary link between masculinity and meat eating (meat eating is thereby associated with virility). In turning men into consumers, the sexual politics of meat works along dominant heteronormative lines to turn women into consumables—thus animalising women, feminising animals, sexualising meat and ‘meatifying’ women. There is a chicken shop by the side of the road on the way to the Mornington Peninsula that quickly elucidates Adams’ argument.

Food life is gendered life. That is the argument laid down by Jeffrey Sobal in his essay ‘Men, Meat, and Marriage: Models of Masculinity’ (2006).  Elaborating on that point he writes gendered scripts that posit meat-centred diets “ …as masculine and virile accomplishments” (138) play into a kind of singular masculinity—an essentialist perspective that assumes dominance of one set of male norms in a particular society and historical period. Repetition and reproduction of this script is the way Man-the-meat-eater has become the constitutive centre of subjectivity.

More generally, food functions as a tool to construct and maintain power relations in families. Beyond this, family relations work to maintain wider socio-cultural structures (Roth 2015). And so it is that the family meal becomes an important vehicle for the maintenance of dominant, in particular patriarchal, culture. Food choices help us all to create, express and maintain relations with others. Kristeva has written that experiences with, and reactions to, food are fundamental to the construction of individual subjectivity (1982). You are what you eat is a phrase as familiar as the idiom the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

The sexual politics of meat are not lost on Meat & Livestock Australia whose 2016 campaign “You’re Better on Beef” targets women, reminding them of all the ways beef will help them achieve their full potential. Like something out of Ruth Ozeki’s novel, My Year of Meats (1998), the MLA website identifies the need to promote and give women permission to consume more beef. They’ve got the fire, writes MLA, and beef is their fuel. If, as MLA point out, women are the gatekeepers of the family meals repertoire, and if the family meal is a vehicle for the transmission of culture, what happens when a woman refuses to eat or prepare meat or any other kind of animal product?

Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat is an interruptive and citational act. It begins as a protest written on her body. Her family pace through all the stages of denial, refusal and incredulity families can go through when one of their own takes up food preferences that disrupt tradition and point to the violence of meat production. Yeong-hye refuses to be tricked, tempted, coerced or intimidated into eating meat. Her husband and father see her dietary difference as a social protest that threatens the family structure. And of course it does. Her refusal to eat animal products stands as an attempt to move into a social order that does not exist. An order free from institutionalised violence, no longer defined by carnism or limited to the structure of inter-species violence.

The Vegetarian leaves me feeling unsettled, disturbed. Heterosexual marriage and family foodways (cultural practices relating to the production and consumption of food) are presented as deeply ossified structures. At every turn, Yeong-hye is refused the opportunity to flourish into the vegetal life-world she desires. In turn, she refuses to be. Full stop. She stops eating. Forces her family to watch her flesh become meat, slip off her bones and disappear. In Sharman Russell’s book Hunger: An Unnatural History (2005) I read that when you stop eating your body turns on itself, devours itself with precision. Yeong-hye’s refusal to be is a refusal to be othered by a system that demands her subjugation.

Her family, and community are quick to designate her as irrational, incomprehensible, hysterical, mentally unbalanced, and finally, anorexic. It is as if they have given her the key (words) to her own undoing. Her veganism is translated as a condition of lack, stubbornness, self-denial. They simply cannot imagine asking the question: What do vegans want? Answering the question is beyond them, too. In a system that privileges carnivorous masculinity the question of what carnists want is, food wise, relatively easy to imagine.

To eat is never neutral. And for Yeong-hye, food becomes a war fought by other means. In a motif that occurs in each section of the novel, men attempt to force-feed Yeong-hye. Each instance is bound up with physical violence or restraint. Each instance drives her further and further into her refusal of all kinds of nutrients. Soon, it is only air and sunlight that she desires in the end. But, in truth, she desires to undo her humanity.

If the political act of the vegan is refusal, the political act of the carnist is denial. Denial is a kind of fabrication. It is a fiction supported by a complex arrangement of political processes where, as Timothy Pachirat writes, “the unacceptable must be rendered acceptable, where the morally and physically disgusting must be made digestible…” (32).  Fabrication departments are literal spaces where killing happens – slaughterhouses, wars, death chambers were legal “executions” take place. Language is also a kind of fabrication department in which individuals, with rich life-worlds that we should not seek to assimilate, are conceptually converted into objects and then consumed. In this way, words become enabling fictions and the stories we tell “make the status quo liveable” (Pachirat, 32).

Carol Adams writes that the stories we tell are, overwhelmingly, texts of meat. Texts of meat are stories that maintain a distinct teology, one that jettisons towards death-as-climax. If you want to access a profound understanding of linear narrative you could look to the model of the slaughterhouse. Pushing towards death, that story is relentless and unidirectional. The Vegetarian is not a novel about vegetarianism or empathy. It is about the violence of the status quo wherein the production of mass animal death stands, unbridled, at the centre of human life. If only Sue Coe’s anti-carnist slogan could have been true for Yeong-hye: Go vegan and nobody gets hurt.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Carol J. (1990). The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum.

(2003). The Pornography of Meat. New York, N.Y.: Continuum.

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