8 - Veganism and the Monstrous

Summary

Introduction

In his review of Carol J. Adams’s 1990 The Sexual Politics of Meat, the conservative journalist and novelist Auberon Waugh speculated, facetiously, that the book might be

a gigantic Nabokovian practical joke, written by some male academic, no doubt an émigré from Eastern Europe, whose misogyny is so enormous that it can find adequate expression only by posing as a madwoman trying to establish common cause between the two separate causes of radical feminism and evangelical vegetarianism.

Waugh here conflates Adams’s iconic work of vegan literary studies with Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire. Vegan literary studies, in Waugh’s reading, appears as the hideous progeny of identity-based criticism: an offshoot of postmodernism that, like the satirical commentary of the vegetarian Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire, subjects literary texts to monstrous distortion, drawing implausible connections in order to support the author’s own agenda.

Vegan studies has attracted increasingly negative press over the past few years as a field that is seen to embody the worst, most monstrous, excesses of the humanities, associated with a form of “identitarian madness” and so-called “grievance studies” (Lindsay et al.). Samantha Pergadia notes in her contribution to this volume that “As an interpretive strategy 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” in contrast to “[g]ood literary criticism [which] has become synonymous with extending ambiguity, refusing political takeaway, and attending to questions of form or genre” (241). Pale Fire offers therefore a particularly prescient conflation of vegetarian moralism with acts of bad literary criticism. Formally resembling a scholarly edition of poetry, Kinbote’s extensive commentary to the diegetic “Pale Fire” poem of the fictional poet John Shade reveals the former to be Charles the Beloved – vegetarian, homosexual, and deposed king – and his narrative works to satirize acts of literary criticism that impose the biography of the critic onto texts.

This essay considers the function of Kinbote as an embodiment of the monstrous excesses associated with vegan identity and a signifier of repellent vegan reading practices. In this way, I position Kinbote as a monstrous vegan figure, one who exemplifies veganism’s resistance to delimitation as a consistent or stable subjectivity.