Oyster

by Rebecca Stott

  ‘The First Oyster-eater’, from Chatterbox: Stories of Natural History, 1889.

  Will knowledge come with the oyster as it did with the apple? An illustration in Chatterbox: Stories of Natural History of 1889, probably influenced by Watts’s painting, provides another less grotesque version of prehistoric man’s opening of the oyster. Here the woman has been removed and the man’s disgust has been replaced with an expression of curious pleasure. His mouth is open, finger already in the oyster-shell. His heavy lids are almost closed in the pleasure of anticipation.

  Such illustrations and meditations are complex, for the first oyster eater, conceived in these ways, forms a bridge between conceptions of the civilized and the barbaric, a bridge back into a primeval past. They seem to claim that just as the oyster has remained essentially the same in its functions and pleasures since deep time, so has man – at least in his love for oyster flesh. The smile on the face of the male oyster eater here, his curious touch of oyster flesh suspended in time, is also a marker of humanity’s curiosity: as Figuier puts it, the oyster eater made ‘the most important discovery’. These pictures express a degree of fascinated revulsion at the first oyster eater – how could he? – and at the same time an admiration: it is because of such curiosity that man has discovered so many of nature’s secrets. When oyster eaters are animals, however, the story is quite different. Animal oyster eaters like the rat in La Fontaine’s ‘The Rat and the Oyster’ are condemned as stupid and punished for their curiosity.

  OYSTER SENSITIVITIES

  Oysters have also been the occasional subject of discourses on the nature of civilization, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when cannibalism stood as a marker of the opposition between the civilized and the barbaric.3 Montaigne published an essay called ‘On the Cannibals’ in The Essays, or Morall, Politicke, and Militarie Discourses as early as 1580, and in Robinson Crusoe, for instance, published in 1719, the shipwrecked Crusoe lives in fear of his life at the hands of cannibals and meditates upon the nature of barbarism.4 He describes cannibalism as proof of ‘the Horror of the Degeneracy of Humane Nature’ and thanks God that he ‘was distinguished from such dreadful Creatures’. In the mid-seventeenth century, the natural philosopher Robert Boyle scripted a dialogue in Occasional Reflections (1655) between two characters, Lindamor and Eugenius, on the practice of eating raw oysters, which he compares to the cannibalism of ‘barbarians’. Lindamor maintains that:

  We impute it for a barbarous custom to many nations of the Indians that like beasts they eat raw flesh. And pray how much is that worse than our eating raw fish, as we do in eating these oysters? Nor is this a practice of the rude vulgar only, but of the politest and nicest persons amongst us, such as physicians, divines and even ladies. And our way of eating seems much more barbarous than theirs, since they are wont to kill before they eat, but we scruple not to devour oysters alive, and kill them not with our hands or teeth, but with our stomachs, where (for ought we know) they begin to be digested before they make an end of dying. Nay, sometimes when we dip them in vinegar, we may, for sauce to one bit, devour alive a shoal of little animals, which, whether they be fishes or worms, I am not so sure, as I am, that I have by the help of convenient glasses, seen great numbers of them swimming up and down in less than a saucer full of vinegar . . . but I will demand, how much less we do ourselves, than what we abominate in those savages, when we devour oysters whole, guts, excrements and all?5

  Lindamor argues that what marks out civilization from barbarism is the reluctance to eat living flesh. He seems not to be making an argument for humankind to cook oysters or to kill them more humanely but rather to be using the consumption of raw oyster flesh by all members of society as a way of challenging absolute demarcations between the civilized and the barbaric and, by extension, some of the ideologies underpinning the expansion of empire (how can we presume to be civilized?). In this way Boyle’s argument works in a similar way to the illustrations of the first oyster eater. For the oyster thus works as a bridge between prehistoric man (supposedly barbaric) and modern man (supposedly civilized) and a marker between ‘us’ (civilized westerners) and ‘them’ (barbaric Indian tribes). It isn’t just the consumption of raw flesh that seems to be repellent but the consumption of raw, living flesh. It is disturbing; it stimulates a degree of abjection; it strikes at what it means to be human and distinct from the animals.

  Other writers have used the consumption of raw, living oyster flesh to prove the cruelty of man towards animals, again as a means of challenging man’s supposedly civilized nature. In the late eighteenth century debates began to emerge about the moral rights of animals in the wake of antislavery campaigns and legislation. In 1781 Jeremy Bentham published An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation in which he argued that animals should be given protection under the law, claiming that suffering was the vital characteristic that gives beings the right for legal consideration. The final sentence of his famous footnote has been much used since in animal rights campaigns: ‘The question is not, Can they reason? Not can they talk? But can they suffer?’6

  At around the same time, natural philosophers were trying to define the distinctions between the animal and vegetable worlds in relation to degrees of sensitivity to suffering. The characteristics of the animal were frequently defined as the ability to move at will, to feel / suffer and to digest. Yet there were animals and vegetables that seemed to defy these categories. The sea sponge, for instance, appeared to be completely inert and insensitive, whereas the mimosa, otherwise known as the sensitive plant, seemed to have sensitivity to touch. In the 1820s an Edinburgh physician, Robert Grant, conducted a series of experiments on the sea sponge to see if it reacted to pain: ‘I have plunged portions of the branched and sessile sponges alive into acids, alcohol and ammonia, in order to excite their bodies to some kind of visible contractile motions, but have not produced by these powerful agents, any more effect upon the living specimens, than upon those which had long been dead’.7

  In a poem by William Cowper (1731–1800), ‘The Poet, The Oyster and the Sensitive Plant’, the poet uses the oyster to philosophize on sensitivity and suffering in the animal and vegetable worlds. The poem opens with the oyster bemoaning its fate:

  Ah hapless wretch! Condemned to dwell

  For ever in my native shell,

  Ordain’d to move when others please,

  Not for my own content or ease,

  But toss’d and buffeted about,

  Now in the water, and now out.

  ‘Twere better to be born a stone

  Of ruder shape and feeling none,

  Than with a tenderness like mine,

  And sensibilities so fine!

  The oyster’s lamentation ends with a wish that its sensibilities might be as coarse as that of the mimosa it sees close by. The mimosa then scornfully replies that the oyster should make no such assumptions. She is a sensitive plant, much studied by botanists. Her excess of feeling, she claims, makes her more to be pitied than the oyster, for her life is ‘spent, oh fie upon’t! / In being touch’d, and crying, don’t’. Now a poet in his evening walk joins the conversation arguing that: ‘Your feelings in their full amount, / Are all upon your own account’.

  You would not feel at all, not you.

  The noblest minds that virtue prove

  By pity, sympathy, and love,

  These, these are feelings truly fine,

  And prove their owner half divine.

  His censure reach’d them as he dealt it,

  And each by shrinking showed he felt it.8

  In the same period in which natural philosophers were seeking to define the higher animals in relation to degrees of feeling, The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was formed in London in 1824. Most of the Society’s early legal battles and campaigns centred on domestic animals, particularly horses, dogs, cats and cattle. But the oyster had a small part to play in these disputes. After Parliament passed an 1822 bil
l preventing cruelty to animals, George Cruikshank caricatured a cookery writer, Dr Kitchiner, notorious for his greed for oysters, being arrested for eating oysters. But, more powerfully, in the early nineteenth century the French naturalist and animal campaigner M. Moquin-Tandon criticized the work of the SPCA for not being inclusive enough. Members were, he wrote, too concerned with domestic and territorial animals. Their arguments could be strengthened, he argued, by the widening of human compassion to include marine animals: if we are repelled by such suffering, how much worse is the suffering of the higher animals? To make his point, he anthropomorphized the oyster, telling its tale as a biography of suffering: in this tale the oyster is wrenched from his natural home, captured and taken to the cruel city to be sold. This is, of course, also a familiar narrative structure to those used in the anti-slavery campaigns. Here he describes the arrival of the enslaved oyster in London:

  This is a critical moment for the unhappy bivalve. Thrown into a tub of clean water, its hopes are cruelly revived, and for a moment it fancies its tortures are at an end, and once more it is in the sea. If ever it possessed such thoughts, they are soon dissipated, as it finds itself taken for the third and last time out of its native element. It is now in pitiless hands – a blunt knife, in spite of its most strenuous efforts, is thrust between its valves, and with a horrible wrench its shells are forced asunder. The muscle by which they were closed is cut or rather jagged through, and the hinges are violently detached. It is now laid on a plate, exposed to every current of the air, and in this state of suffering it is carried to the table. There the thoughtless being for whose pleasure it has suffered untold woes, squeezes over its wounded and bleeding body the abomination of its race, the acrid vinegar; and then, alas! with a silver knife, which only jags but cannot cut, he wounds and bruises it a second time; or worse still, he saws and tears and rends it from its remaining shell; then he impales it with a three-pronged fork, and – horrible dictu! – still living and palpitating, he throws it into his mouth, where the teeth cut, and crush, and grind it’.9

  OYSTER FLESH: COOKED, RAW AND ABJECT

  Whilst there are those who have been morally repelled by oyster consumption, there are many more who have been physically repelled. There are three types of people in the world as far as oysters are concerned: those who love oysters, those who are indifferent to them and those who are passionately revolted by them. The nineteenth-century novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, for instance, found oysters abject. When, like Dickens, he visited New York, he was fêted as a celebrated author. Invited to the Centurion Club, he was given the usual Centurion dinner: saddlerock oysters, nearly as large as a dinner-plate. Thackeray is reputed to have paled and then whispered to his host ‘What do I do with this animal?’ to which his host replied ‘We Americans swallow them whole’. Thackeray closed his eyes and swallowed the oyster. When his host enquired how he had liked the ‘animal’, Thackeray replied politely that it had been ‘like swallowing a live baby’.10 Later, in Vanity Fair, he described Mrs Frederick Bullock’s kiss as like ‘the contact of an oyster’ (chapter 11).

  So when Woody Allen most famously claimed ‘I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead – not sick, not wounded – dead’, he was expressing a feeling of physical revulsion towards the oyster which has been shared by many since the first oyster eaters. When oysters are mentioned in conversation, faces light up or grimace. There is a ‘how could you?’ in the air for those who have never tasted raw oysters and will never do so, because the thought conjures dark thoughts – abject thoughts. In Powers of Horror the philosopher Julia Kristeva meditates on abjection as a ‘violent, dark revolt of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from outside’. Food revulsions are the most elementary and the most archaic of abjections, she claims: ‘It is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’.11 Later she claims again that ‘Food becomes abject only if it is a border between two distinct entities or territories. A boundary between nature and culture, between the human and the non-human’.12

  Oyster farmer eating oysters in the US in the 1960s.

  Western culture is underpinned by a series of binaries between, for example, sun and moon, male and female, light and dark, cooked and raw, land and sea, civilized and barbaric, culture and nature; within each of these binaries is an implicit assumed superiority of the first of the pair over the second. The cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss reminds us that because of such deep structures in language and myth, the raw is always associated with nature and the cooked with culture. The oyster, raw food of both epicure and savage, from the sea, looking at the same time both like an open wound and sexual organs, reminiscent of the translucence of flesh and bodily fluids, sits on that border between culture and nature and between male and female, between land and sea, between cooked and raw.

  But as Sigmund Freud and Mikhail Bakhtin remind us, the abject, the repressed or the repellent object in society (whether it is bodily fluids, sexual organs or revolting food) is also a source of rich comedy. The oyster is an interesting example of Bakhtin’s grotesque body in that it echoes and shadows sexual organs, wounds and raw – even bruised – flesh. The comic American writer and journalist Roy Blount Jr wrote a poem in the 1940s in which the comedy turns precisely on the tension between desire and revulsion which the oyster frequently provokes:

  SONG TO OYSTERS

  I like to eat an uncooked oyster.

  Nothing’s slicker, nothing’s moister.

  Nothing’s easier on your gorge

  Or when the time comes, to disgorge.

  But not to let it too long rest

  Within your mouth is always best.

  For if your mind dwells on an oyster . . .

  Nothing’s slicker. Nothing’s moister.

  I prefer my oyster fried.

  Then I’m sure my oyster’s died.

  But Anne Stevenson’s poem, ‘Oysters’, published in 2000, turns, in a much more sinister, and to my mind more successful, way on the conjunction between flesh, sex and death that the oyster stimulates in the most social and intimate of places: the restaurant. In this poem, fattened oyster flesh slips easily into fattened human flesh; laughter echoes, but so does death, enshrined in the references to the crypt of the basilisk dress that encases the dangerously alluring flesh of the man’s fleshy companion. In an extraordinary slippage, the woman’s breasts, bearing a diamond brooch, become dunes on a beach where oysters grow fat on sewage – so that we are reminded that this oyster being consumed has grown fat and radioactive on human waste. This is all quite ‘beyond the laughable’ as poisoned flesh slips into poisoned flesh in an endless cycle of poisoned and poisoning nature:

  the fat man laughed because

  the restaurant told him to,

  though the oysters that slipped

  at atrocious expense

  through his pinguid lips

  were poisonous,

  and the hock at his elbow

  hardly less,

  and the lady too,

  so svelte in the crypt

  of her basilisk dress

  was dangerous

  beyond the laughable.

  Wasn’t that diamond

  clipped at her cleavage

  an oyster between

  white dunes on a beach,

  grown luscious on sewages

  steamy tureen

  of barely detectable

  radioactive garbage?13

  6 Oyster Philosophies

  Oyster-shells tell of time; they are the silent witnesses of an early world that rang with the sound of the hunting cries of scaly lizards long before the evolution of mammals that would become recognizably human. And later, when humans built their first encampments on rocky shorelines and in sheltered inlets, they left behind piles of discarded oyster-shells – the remains of their smoky oyster feasts – to mark th
eir passing. Geologists use fossilized oyster-shells to date rock strata; archaeologists use oyster middens to date early human settlements. Charles Darwin searched for fossil oyster-beds in South America, for he knew that when continents cracked and severed and drifted apart millions of years ago, oyster-beds had moved with them.

  When Victorian naturalists began to accept and develop the idea of the evolution of species, they used fossil evidence – the fragments of bones and plants and animal fossils and rock samples piled in museums – to try to imagine what they called ‘deep time’, a world before human habitation, populated by monsters. Oysters and other shellfish appear in many of these nineteenth-century paintings and drawings, as Martin Rudwick has shown in Scenes of Deep Time. For the Victorian observer, the existence of oysters in these pictures of deep time must have created a kind of temporal dislocation, for they would have been looking at a bafflingly strange landscape populated by fierce and alien creatures such as the pterodactyl and tyrannosaur and yet at the same time full of that most familiar of nineteenth-century urban street objects, the oyster.

  In the light of geological evidence and evolutionary ideas, then, the oyster began to be understood differently in the nineteenth century, as a creature which had predated man’s arrival on the planet by possibly millions of years. Natural philosophers began to use the oyster as the object of meditations on the nature of time or survival. In these philosophical narratives oysters were heroic; they had out-survived the great lumbering carnivorous species, had found a way of adapting to their environment so that few further changes had been necessary in millions of years. The American lawyer and judge James Watson Gerard, for instance, published this stanza in a longer poem about the oyster in his satirical work Ostrea; or the Loves of Oysters, published in New York in 1857: