16 - Realism

Summary

What is it that frightens us about a “novel of causes,” and conversely, does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? Can it not be politically and temporally specific and still be in good literary taste? We are leery of literature that smacks of the polemic, instructional, or prescriptive, and I guess rightly so—it’s a drag to be lectured to—but what does that imply about the attitudes toward intellectual inquiry? … I see our lives as being a part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman’s fallopian tube.

Ruth Ozeki, “A Conversation with Ruth Ozeki”

Introduction

There is no missing the political message of Ruth Ozeki’s 1998 novel My Year of Meats. As protest literature, the novel lodges a vigorous critique of the meat industry: from its abuse of workers, to its treatment of animals, chemical and hormonal poisoning of consumers and residents near sites of industrial farming, and work as an extension of US imperialism. The epigraph above comes from an interview with Ozeki appended to the novel. She responds to the unnamed interviewer’s question about whether she worried that My Year of Meats would turn into a “novel of causes,” a pejorative label attached to literature that reeks of the political, the didactic, the prescriptive. The division between aesthetic and political literature summons Ozeki’s recitation of “literary taste,” a metaphor that, beginning with David Hume, equates gustatory appetite with aesthetic appetite (Hume 231–58). Yet to politicize the appetite is considered poor literary form. As an interpretive strategy prescriptive of how one should eat, vegan literary studies may seem like bad literary criticism, reducing complex or ambiguous meaning to a single political and ethical agenda. Good literary criticism has become synonymous with extending ambiguity, refusing political takeaway, and attending to questions of form or genre. Ozeki reworks this division between the aesthetic and the political to envision a continuous interconnection of the private with the political, of gustatory appetite and aesthetic appetite, of conditioning that folds questions of aesthetic taste onto political conditioning. In My Year of Meats, the political seeps into the biopolitical, creating an indistinguishability between the politics and art that shape consumers.