Oyster

by Rebecca Stott

  I sing the Oyster! (Virgin Theme!)

  King of Molluscules! Ancient of the stream!

  Thy birth was Time’s – soon as th’ affrighted world,

  A quivering mass, in space immense was hurled –

  In darkness cradled – mid chaos nursed

  Tumultuous! – Ambiguous, till burst

  Thy unctuous beauty on a world where none

  Could know they merit; there, alone

  Thou pineds’t forlorn, ‘mid mud and flood and slime

  Ere man came on the stage, far in the time

  Cosmogenetical.1

  At the same time increasingly powerful microscopes showed how complex and beautifully adapted the oyster’s small body was. Now evolutionary naturalists, seeing it much magnified, wondered at the sophistication of its evolutionary strategies in public lectures, using the oyster as a way of popularizing evolutionary ideas. Thomas Huxley, charismatic and imaginative popularizer of Darwin’s ideas, for instance, described it in the 1880s: ‘I suppose that when the sapid and slippery morsel – which is gone like a flash of gustatory summer lightning – glides along the palate, few people imagine that they are swallowing a piece of machinery (and going machinery too) greatly more complicated than a watch’.2 Huxley could assume that his audience – rich and poor – would be familiar with the anatomy of the oyster – most would have eaten oysters regularly, would have remembered levering open the shell of an oyster with a knife, and some might have already contemplated the oyster’s anatomy at close hand before they tipped up the shell and slithered its flesh into their mouths.

  This rusty bicycle, covered in oysters, was retrieved from the sea at the French town of Marennes in May 1990.

  Other nineteenth-century naturalists, writing in a tradition of natural theology, worked hard to maintain the hierarchies of nature now threatened by evolutionary ideas. They were determined to see God’s work in the oyster and to argue for a nature characterized by fixed hierarchies. From the observation of such lower creatures, natural theologians could sermonize on ‘right’ ways of living within nature, arguing for instance that if you look at nature you can see that God has made each organism to ‘know its place’ within a hierarchy with man at its pinnacle. An anonymous poet from the Preston ‘Oyster and Parched Pea Club’ satirized this tradition of using nature to tell the working man to stay in his place in a poem on the oyster published in 1816 in the Preston Chronicle:

  A novelty oyster watch, made in China in 2004. Rolex launched the classic ‘oyster’ range of watches in 1926 – the first wristwatches to be considered waterproof.

  A something monastic appears amongst oysters,

  For gregarious they live, yet they sleep in their cloisters;

  ’Tis observed too, that oysters, when placed in their barrel,

  Will never presume with their stations to quarrel.

  From this let us learn what an oyster can tell us,

  And we all shall be better and happier fellows.

  Acquiesce in your stations, whenever you’ve got ’em;

  Be not proud at the top, nor repine at the bottom,

  Be happier they in the middle who live,

  And have something to lend, and to spend and to give.3

  By the middle of the nineteenth century oysters were being used, then, to argue for or illustrate different versions of nature – one God-ordained and fixed, the other in a process of constant mutability. They were used to muse on time, or on harmonious adaptation to environment, or on progress, or to moralize on divinely ordained ways of living. This knowledge helps to make sense of certain peculiarities in Victorian culture, such as the fact that when Mary Ann Evans (later George Eliot) and John Chapman relaunched the Westminster Review in 1852 as a radical journal dedicated to publishing philosophical and political ideas about progress, they commissioned for the first edition an article from the Scottish naturalist and mollusc expert Edward Forbes on – of all things – shellfish. ‘Shell-fish: Their Ways and Works’ was published alongside articles on employment rights and representative reform.

  Mr Beville of Great Wakering, Essex, shows off his unusual model of Canterbury Cathedral constructed from oyster shells. The model contains 660 shells and took four months to build in the 1930s.

  Forbes’ shellfish article is one of the most lyrical pieces of mid-nineteenth-century natural history writing. Most of it is a kind of prose poem about oysters. Forbes could assume both that his readers had seen oysters close up and also that they had overlooked their extraordinary anatomy and ancestry. He begins:

  Look at an oyster. In what light does the world in general – not your uneducated, stolid world merely, but your refined, intellectual, cultivated, classical world – regard it? Simply as a delicacy – as good to eat. The most devoted of oyster-eaters opens the creature’s shell solely to swallow the included delicious morsel, without contemplation or consideration . . . And yet there is a philosophy in oyster-shells undreamed of by the mere conchologist! A noble and wondrous philosophy revealing to us glimpses of the creative power among the dim and distant abysses of the incalculable past, speaking to us of the genesis of oyster-creatures ere the idea of man occupied the creative mind; giving us a scale by which to measure the building up of the world in which we live, such as the mathematician and the natural philosopher, and the astronomer, all combining, could not furnish; unfolding for us the pages of the volume in which the history of our planet, its convulsions and tranquilities, its revolutions and gradualities, are inscribed in unmistakable characters.

  For Forbes the lesson of successful adaptation illustrated by the oyster is not ‘stay in your place’ but ‘enjoy life’ for, he argues, the oyster shows us that an organism in happy harmony with its surroundings is one that will survive:

  In that soft and gelatinous body lies a whole world of vitality and quiet enjoyment. An undisturbed oyster-bed is a concentration of happiness in the present . . . each individual is leading the beatified existence of an Epicurean god. The world without – its cares and joys, its storms and calms, its passions, evil and good – all are indifferent to the unheeding oyster. Unobservant even of what passes in its immediate vicinity, its whole soul is concentrated in itself, yet not sluggishly and apathetically, for its whole body is throbbing with life and enjoyment.4

  The oyster had become in Forbes’s hands a model of an organism in successful and harmonious balance with its surroundings – a creature that knew its place but which was also adapting into a future. Interestingly, other writers around the same time portray oyster dredgers in a similar way, as if they are a natural extension of the oyster’s harmony with its environment. In 1859, for instance, a curiously nostalgic article about oyster shops and oyster farmers appeared in Dickens’s journal All the Year Round, entitled ‘The Happy Fishing-ground’. Searching for a lost pre-industrial Englishness, the author finds it among the oyster dredgers of Whitstable. He refers to these people as

  incorporated free-fishers . . . joined together by the ties of a common birthplace, by blood, by marriage, capital and trade. It has always been their pride, from time out of mind, to live in these dwarfed huts on this stony beach, watching the happy fishing grounds that lie under the brackish water in the bay, where millions of oysters are always breeding with marvellous fertility, and all for incorporated company’s good . . . They are all equal; they are all working together for good. The father meets his son . . . the nephew meets his uncle, the uncle meets his cousin, the cousin inquires after his aunt, who is laid up with lumbago; the grandson lends a helping hand to his grandfather; the brother-in-law is in attendance upon his relations by marriage, and the whole scene is a picture of quiet, profitable, patriarchal trade . . . They have lived amongst oysters, and thought of them so long, till, at last, it is possible to trace something of that steady, stationary shell-fish in their nature. They have fallen upon favourable ground where they fatten and thrive; they show no disposition to wander and move.5

  Curios from the collection of t
he late Johnny Noble, founder of Loch Fyne Oysters: an oyster plate in majolica, a Japanese oyster plate adorned with crabs, and one of a pair of four-tier revolving oyster-serving dishes, also in majolica.

  The writer’s romantic portrayal of the oyster dredgers as a relic of old England, the embodiment of lost values, is typical of this period of rapid industrialization and of social unrest in the lead-up to the Second Reform Act which would enfranchise the working man in 1867. This romantic piece is full of class anxiety in its celebration of the oyster-dredging community and this is hardly surprising at a time when a large number of the middle and ruling classes were concerned about the future of a country in which supposedly uneducated workers would be given the vote. But it also strives to reassure – these simple people are the backbone of an older England. They are good citizens; they know their place; they are not to be feared.

  The notion, however, that man might have evolved from primitive sea creatures, as some comparative anatomists had been proposing since the end of the eighteenth century, filled many nineteenth-century intellectuals with revulsion. Several writers used the notion of man’s evolution from the oyster as a way of pouring scorn on evolutionary ideas. In Silver-Shell; or, the Adventures of an Oyster (1856), for instance, the Revd Williams writes with ridicule: ‘And so it has been said, by a series of transitions the monad became an oyster, the oyster a monkey, and the monkey a man.’6 And in the months that followed the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection in 1859, the oyster was again used to mock Darwin’s ideas. In January 1860, for instance, Jane Carlyle wrote to a friend:

  But even when Darwin, in a book that all the scientific world is in ecstasy over, proved the other day that we are all come from shell-fish, it didn’t move me to the slightest curiosity whether we are or not. I did not feel that the slightest light would be thrown on my practical life for me, by having it ever so logically made out that my first ancestor, millions of millions of years back, had been, or even had not been, an oyster. It remained a plain fact that I was no oyster, nor had any grandfather an oyster within my knowledge; and for the rest, there was nothing to be gained, for this world or the next, by going into the oyster-question, till all more pressing questions were exhausted.7

  In the following year – 1861 – the marine painter Edward William Cooke, who had a special interest in geology and the new biological sciences, went to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Manchester. The discussions that year in the wake of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection were all about human–animal kinship. Cooke described in his journal how he was suddenly overcome by a sense of revulsion and misanthropy standing amongst all the well-dressed men and women discussing Darwin’s book, as he imagined their kinship to animals. He fled the meeting and took himself off to the seaside where over the next few weeks, suffering a degree of fascinating existentialist disgust, he drew a series of animal–human caricatures that he called his ‘Darwin creatures’ and which he published as a Christmas book in 1872 called Grotesque Animals Invented, Drawn and Described.

  Edward William Cooke, ‘Darwin Animals’, a plate from his Grotesque Animals Invented, Drawn and Described (London, 1872). The head of the middle figure is an oyster shell.

  Cooke’s grotesques were, of course, drawn in the tradition of Jean-Ignace Gérard Grandville and Paul Gavarni, but they have a peculiarly late nineteenth-century nightmare vision about them. The animals are drawn to look like humans standing talking to each other, much as Cooke would have seen them at the BAAS meeting, but they are made up of human / animal body parts, most of which are drawn from sea creatures, including oysters, rather than apes as one might have expected.

  By the late nineteenth century the idea of human–animal kinship began to take on a darker quality of nightmare in the hands of the science-fiction writer H. G. Wells, who had been trained as a zoologist. Wells’s fictional monsters are often slimy and tentacled. When someone is asked to describe the Martian invaders in War of the Worlds, for instance, the closest they can come to an analogy is an octopus. Giant crabs stalk the time-traveller; the Morlocks are a strange hybrid of ape and marine creature; Dr Moreau works on making animal–human hybrids through vivisection; and the final vision the time-traveller sees at the end of time itself is a tentacled creature hopping about fitfully in the waves of a blood-red sea.

  The possibility of degeneration took a while to dawn: if some species had evolved, others become extinct, might not others be moving backwards? And just as oysters had been used to embody evolutionary progress at mid-century, now they could be used by late nineteenth-century writers to exemplify degeneracy. In 1880, for instance, the marine zoologist and moral prophet Edwin Ray Lankester claimed in Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism that until recently naturalists had assumed that all organisms either improve or stay the same. But, he argued, there was also a third way – degeneration – and he listed oysters, sponges, polyps, starfishes, coral animals, mussels and clams as examples of degenerated creatures. He was determined to make sure his readers understood the moral lesson:

  Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and its safety very easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to Degeneration; just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organisation in this way. Let the parasitic life once be secured, and away go legs, jaws, eyes and ears; the active, highly gifted crab, insect, or annelid may become a mere sac, absorbing nourishment and laying eggs.8

  And the object of this moral lesson for Lankester was the aristocracy. He believed that, leisured and lacking the need to compete for food, the aristocracy were now parasitic and degenerating. Like the Romans, life for the oysters and for British aristocracy had became too easy, the food supply too rich. In Lankester’s hands, oysters had become an object lesson in the work ethic, a warning against parasitism.

  Nineteenth-century natural philosophers were all in their different ways committed to asking ‘what is natural?’, ‘what is progress?’ and ‘how can we learn from nature’s apparent laws?’ How apt then that at the heart of all their empirical practices and abstract speculations should be found embedded that most nineteenth-century of creatures – the oyster. But of course nature’s laws are as difficult to read as the oyster itself, which means that – depending on what was being argued – the oyster was used by nineteenth-century writers as an object lesson for a plethora of different and sometimes contradictory ‘truths’.

  In 1865 the French painter Edouard Manet, inspired by seeing Velázquez’s extraordinary paintings of Aesop and of other beggar-philosophers in the Prado in Madrid, painted his own pair of philosophers. In the second of the two, entitled simply Philosopher (Art Institute of Chicago), Manet painted an old man who stands looking out at us against a black background. Only two pools of light emerge from this magnificent range of blacks, greys and browns: the upper part of the philosopher’s face and eyes and the gleaming white flesh of two opened oysters, which stand out against the brown pile of oyster-shells in the bottom right-hand corner. The oysters, of course, suggest the philosopher’s lowly status and his simple street food, but it also marks out his strangeness. Beggars, Manet reminds us, though they are, like oyster-shells, ubiquitous and overlooked, can be philosophers. Appearances are often deceptive; the rough brown shell may bear no relation to the astonishingly delicate and complex interior. Once again Manet has used the oyster to embody the drama of the seemingly commonplace, and indeed to challenge the very notion of the commonplace itself.

  Edouard Manet, Philosopher (Beggar with Oysters), 1865–7, oil on canvas. Manet’s painting enigmatically couples the philosopher with the oyster as apparently commonplace but invisibly complex.

  7 Oyster Arts

  Why did certain Dutch a
nd Flemish artists in the seventeenth century stop painting madonnas and saints and begin instead to paint the commonplace objects around them: men and women eating or sitting in conversation in cool, shadowed interiors where the light catches the rim of a spinning wheel or wineglass, the sheen of a grape or the gleam of a pearl? And why did others abandon the human form entirely to compose richly shadowed and textured still lifes of bread, oysters, wine, fruit and meat, now the enthroned subjects of their own space and time?

  For a short time in the seventeenth century, in the Low Countries, the oyster, until now neglected in Western art, found its place in oil paintings alongside lemons, fruit, silver platters or glasses of champagne, each object distilled against a crow-black background. In these still-leven, or still-lifes, the complex whites of oyster flesh gleam and shimmer, next to the nacreous whites of mother-of-pearl, against the russet-blue-whites of oyster-shells. Why was the oyster summoned into paint for the short-lived decades of the still-leven’s ascendancy? What part did the oyster have to play? What did these pictures mean?

  The art historian Liana de Girolami Cheney proposes that the oyster is used as a symbol in Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century art and – as symbol – the oyster’s meanings change through the century.1 Oysters first appeared, she says, when Flemish painters painting the popular ‘feast of the gods’ in the sixteenth century represented it as a bacchanal in which the gods banquet voluptuously amongst discarded oyster-shells. In 1550, for instance, Frans Floris painted his Feast of the Gods with Jupiter reaching for an oyster, Aphrodite sitting on a large oyster-shell and Cupid cupping an oyster in his hand, his arrows fallen to the ground. The oysters mark the gods’ pleasure but also their excess and abandon. The painter, by showing us these gods naked, exposed and opened up, seems to want to show us how vulnerable even divine flesh becomes in the experience of pleasure.