The Food/Books of Austin Clarke, Hiromi Goto, Tessa Mcwatt and Fred Wah
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Université de Montréal Literary Meals in Canada : The Food/books of Austin Clarke, Hiromi Goto, Tessa McWatt and Fred Wah par Alexia Moyer Département d’études anglaises Faculté des arts et des sciences Thèse présentée à la Faculté des arts et des sciences en vue de l’obtention du grade Doctorat en Études anglaises Avril 2012 © Alexia Moyer, 2012 Université de Montréal Faculté des arts et des sciences Cette thèse intitulée : Literary Meals in Canada : The Food/books of Austin Clarke, Hiromi Goto, Tessa McWatt, and Fred Wah Présentée par : Alexia Moyer a été évaluée par un jury composé des personnes suivantes : Robert Schwartzwald, Président-rapporteur Lianne Moyes, Directrice de recherche Nathalie Cooke, Membre du jury Dominic Pettman, Examinateur externe Najat Rahman, Représentante du doyen de faculté des arts et sciences i RÉSUMÉ Literary Meals in Canada étudie Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit d'Austin Clarke, Chorus of Mushrooms et The Kappa Child de Hiromi Goto, This Body de Tessa McWatt, ainsi que Diamond Grill de Fred Wah. Cette thèse entreprend d’établir la signification de la nourriture dans ces récits, ce qu'elle permet aux auteur(e)s d'exprimer par rapport à divers thématiques—les structures sociales, la culture, le langage, ou encore la subjectivité—et comment ils/elles établissent des connexions entre elles, et quelles conclusions ils/elles en tirent. En d'autres termes, cette thèse s'interroge sur les stratégies utilisées par ces auteur(e)s lorsqu'ils écrivent de la “nourri-téra-ture.” Ma lecture de ces œuvres est aussi ancrée au sein d'une conversation sur la nourriture au sens large: que ce soit dans les cercles académiques, dans les supermarchés, par l'intermédiaire des étiquettes, ou dans les médias. J'examine comment mon corpus littéraire répond, infirme, ou confirme les discours actuels sur la nourriture. Divisé en quatre chapitres—Production, Approvisionnement, Préparation, et Consommation—ce mémoire précise la signification du “literary supermarket” de Rachel Bowlby, en s'appuyant sur les travaux de Michael Pollan et Hiromi Goto; compare la haute cuisine d'Escoffier à la “hot-cuisine” d'Austin Clarke; recherche les connections entre l’acte de faire la cuisine et celui de l’écrire chez Luce Giard, Austin Clarke, et Fred Wah; confronte les préceptes d'Emily Post concernant les bonnes manières de la table à la cacophonie et aux bruits de mastication chez Hiromi Goto; et relie Tessa McWatt et Elspeth Probyn qui partagent, toutes deux, un intérêt et une approche à la sustentation des corps. ii Les textes qui composent ce corpus sont des “foodbooks” (“aliment-textes”). La nourriture, et les différentes activités qui y sont associées, y est transcrite. C’est pourquoi cette thèse accorde une grande importance aux particularités de ce moyen d'expression. Mots-clés : repas littéraires au Canada, aliment-textes, Austin Clarke, Hiromi Goto, Tessa McWatt, Fred Wah. iii ABSTRACT Literary Meals in Canada examines Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit, Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and The Kappa Child, Tessa McWatt’s This Body, and Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill. It asks, what does food mean to these stories, what does it allow the writers in question to say—about social structures, culture, language, and subjectivity—and how do they go about making these connections or drawing these conclusions? In other words, what are their food-writing strategies? I also read these texts as part of a larger conversation about food, a conversation taking place in academic circles as well as at the supermarket, on food labels, on television, and other media outlets. I look for moments in which my literary corpus responds to and challenges food-centred discourse. Comprised of four chapters—Production, Procurement, Preparation, and Consumption—this dissertation explicates Rachel Bowlby’s term, “literary supermarket,” through Michael Pollan and Hiromi Goto; it compares Escoffier’s haute cuisine with Austin Clarke’s “hot-cuisine”; it tracks the kinship between “doing-cooking” and writing cooking, as articulated by Luce Giard, Austin Clarke, and Fred Wah; it reads Emily Post’s advice on table manners against Hiromi Goto’s cacophony of gnashing and nibbling; and it pairs Tessa McWatt with Elspeth Probyn, both of whom share a similar approach to, and interest in, bodies that eat. The texts that make up this corpus are foodbooks. Food and the activities and processes associated with it are therefore mediated by language. For this reason the dissertation attends to the particularities and the potential effects of writing food. iv Keywords : literary meals in Canada, foodbooks, Austin Clarke, Hiromi Goto, Tessa McWatt, Fred Wah v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: Production .......................................................................................................... 24 Chapter 2: Procurement........................................................................................................ 58 Chapter 3: Preparation.......................................................................................................... 97 Chapter 4: Consumption .................................................................................................... 132 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................... 163 vi À Madame de Scélo et ses goûters. À Franck et son potager. vii Acknowledgements Many thanks: —To my supervisor, Professor Lianne Moyes, who guided this project from its initial, tentative stages to completion. I am most grateful for her critical insight and her kindness. It has been a privilege to learn from her. —To Professors Robert Schwartzwald and Heike Härting, who have been most generous with their knowledge and their time. —To Madame Johanne Ménard-Simard for her administrative support. —To the members of the études anglaises Peer Editing Group and the Canadianist Research Group, from whom I have learned so much about writing, research, and collaboration. —To Naqaa Abbas, Richard Cassidy, Julia Christensen, Lilianne Dang, Sandra Duric, Sarah Henzi, Karis Shearer, and Warren Steele, for their invaluable feedback and encouragement. —To Professor Nathalie Cooke, for her support of my postdoctoral research. —To Professor Caroline Rosenthal, for sharing her unpublished work with me. —To Margot Auber, for her gracious and well-timed offer to proofread the final draft. —To my grandparents, Donald and Gertrude Moyer, for their interest in, and support of, learning in all its forms. —À mes beaux-parents préférés, Jean et Christine Scherrer, pour leur soutien tout au long de ma thèse. viii —To my parents, Ian and Lilyane Moyer, who approach their work and play with dedication and enthusiasm. —À Bertrand, for your keen (yet kind) critical eye, and for all the moments between the research and the writing. Introduction 2 People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our basic needs, for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . and it is all one. —M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me, (vii) If there is one sure thing about food, it is that it is never just about food. Terry Eagleton, “Edible écriture” (204) What is a foodbook? A search engine responds to my initial inquiry with a question of its own; do you mean food book? No, I mean foodbook. It is a combined word, a neologism if you will, like gastrotext,1 gastropoetics,2 food fictions,3 gastro-graphy.4 The terms are very similar. Each prefix (or similar) references all things alimentary: food, ingestion, and digestion. Each suffix is about writing, narration, poetry, representation. A foodbook, as I shall attempt to articulate in the next few paragraphs, is many things. It is the title (in part) of this thesis. It is the neologism I have chosen to describe this project of mine about food and written representations of food.5 It is a pithy term which, 1David Bevan's Introduction to Literary Gastronomy. 2Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. 3Tobias Döring, Markus Heide, and Susanne Mühleisen. Food and Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food. 4Rosalia Baena, “Gastro-graphy: food as metaphor in Fred Wah's Diamond Grill and Austin Clarke's Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit,” in Canadian Ethnic Studies. 5 I prefer foodbook over the other options: gastrotext, gastropoetics, food fictions, gastro-graphy, for its inclusivity. “gastro” invokes consumption, the chewing and swallowing kind, but does not allude to the other activities, production, procurement, preparation that are also the focus of this project. “Fictions” 3 most notably, appears on the cover of a cookbook / “literary symposium” / fundraiser compiled and edited by Margaret Atwood, published by Totem Books, and produced for P.E.N. International (1987). I refer here