The Fat Man Sings
It's a pity that eating disorders have been
pasted over with banal notions such as "body image" and "self-esteem," and
unappetizing medical terms such as "morbidly obese," because obsession with
food is by no means a dull subject. How much could be said that has nothing to
do with olestra or the bad example set by supermodels about a person absorbed
in strange, hostile negotiations with her own body! There is no end to the
mental, or at least non-nutritive, uses to which food can be put; and no end to
the rituals surrounding that perverse form of group auto-eroticism known as a
meal.
Richard
Klein's EAT FAT tries to reclaim one aspect of eating--getting fat and
feeling bad about it--from the boring debates about health and fashion in which
it's usually stuck. EAT FAT is a "postmodern diet book," as Klein puts
it (employing a rather eccentric definition of postmodern, which seems roughly
to amount to "counterintuitive"): an encomium to corpulence and an excoriation
of all the industries that encourage you to be skinny. Klein's goal is to
transform an uncontrolled and miserable hatred of fat (his and yours) into a
flabophilic delight that, by robbing fat of its malevolent power, will lead to
becoming thin. His idea is that you can dissipate an obsession by
aestheticizing its object and embracing your urge to indulge in it.
Klein, a professor of French and literary critic of the
deconstructive variety, has done this kind of thing before: A couple of years
ago he wrote a book (his first, Cigarettes Are Sublime ) in praise of
smoking, in order to stop. It worked then, and so Klein--who, as we discover,
is on the chubby side--is doing it again. But while the Klein who wrote
Cigarettes had succeeded in mastering his obsession (by the time he'd
finished the book he'd quit smoking), FAT Klein is still in the process
of recovering from the throes of diet. Consequently, he has written an
extremely strange book: In reading it, you are subjected to changes in
personality as abrupt and jarring as nasty little electric shocks administered
to the base of your spine.
You'll be
floating contentedly along in Klein's pleasant, foamy prose--"the gorgeous
display of her colossal adiposity, her thundering, moonfaced, creviced
posterior, evokes a vastly delicious, (sub)lunar landscape in which an explorer
could lose himself in pleasure forever. O blessed fat!"--when all of a sudden,
Dzzzzz! "Science and authority come together to serve each other, to make money
and murder fat." The writing gets bubbly for a bit--"the profusion of their
décolleté, flesh billowing up and cascading down over and out of their
dresses"--and then, Dzzzzz! "Evil doctors foist new drugs on desperate people.
... Thousands die of starvation, and the rest, sooner or later, get fat."
There are, you are forced to conclude, not one
but two Richard Kleins lurking in this book. Richard Klein No. 1 is an urbane
critic who delights in a clever, lyrical celebration of creamy fleshiness. His
evil twin, Richard Klein No. 2, is hurt and angry at the system for making him
feel bad about himself all his life and perpetuating evil, unattainable images
of thinness to get him addicted to its demonic diet drugs and make him sick and
miserable; plus it's not just him but men and especially women all over America
who are falling victim to the greedy maw of the medical-industrial
conspiracy.
Richard Klein No. 1 has
written an elegant, seductive book that sets you to musing how nice it might be
to put on 80 or 90 pounds to feel that sensual, private, fatty softness all
over. Klein No. 1 can tell any number of amusing fat-related anecdotes. Did you
know that Socrates used to dance every morning to keep his weight down? That
the 19 th -century French writer Théophile Gautier declared he could
not, in his youth, "have accepted as a lyric poet anyone weighing more than 99
pounds"?
Best of
all: fat Hamlet! Citing an essay by one Laura Keyes, Klein quotes lines from
the play (e.g. Queen Gertrude, about her son: "He is fat and scant of breath.")
that suggest that Hamlet's indecision may be due more to the lymphatic
temperament of a pudgy little porker (Ham-let, get it?) than to heroic
paralysis. The interpretation certainly makes the play funnier. Is not this
line of Hamlet's, for example, lent a certain zing when read as a diet
fantasy?: "Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt,/ Thaw, and resolve
itself into a dew!"
But Richard Klein No. 2 delivers snoozy tirades against the
Beauty Myth, "designed to oppress and exploit us all ... invented,
manufactured, sustained, and promoted by a vast industrial, ideological system,
in order to obscure the reality of our bodies." (Why is it, one wonders, that
the Beauty Myth is oppressive, while the Superbly Rendered Sonata Myth or the
Brilliant But Also Commercially Successful Book Myth is not?) Klein No. 2
throws around the silly word "vast" in order to convey a sense of imminent diet
apocalypse (as in, "vast unknown consequences," "administration of these drugs
on a vast scale"). And he displays a certain naïveté about scientific standards
--asking, for instance, about a diet drug: "What perfect assurance can the FDA
give that the dex effect won't be the same on human brains? Why take chances on
a massive scale with human neurons, until proof of dex's safety can be
unambiguously established?" (How does Klein propose to establish a drug's
safety with perfect assurance? Surely "safety" is the product of an ad
hoc cost-benefit analysis, rather than some kind of empirical property that a
drug does or doesn't have.) In short, Richard Klein No. 2 quenches our pleasure
in Richard Klein No. 1 in much the same way that the health and beauty
industries are supposedly determined to quench our pleasure in fat.
Klein,
being a post-structuralist, is fascinated by the materiality of signs--that is,
in this case, by the way words look and sound, as opposed to what they mean.
This fascination crops up in the book in a number of ways, which will seem
thought-provoking or irritating, depending on taste. The book is liberally
seasoned with wordplay and typographical experiments (the words "eat fat" are
always in capitals, with "FAT" printed directly under "EAT," so you can see how
similar the two words are) and rhymes ("why this should be so at this moment in
history is a mystery. A mystery of history."). The book's first sentence is:
"SKIP THIS PREFACE!"
The most pervasive sign of Klein's brand of
French post-structuralism, though, are his narrow ideas about pleasure and
control. For Klein, control is always bad--whether it's the evil
health-and-fashion industry dictating our ideas about beauty, or the
beleaguered dieter struggling to curb his cravings in a spirit of misguided
self-hatred. Klein has a horror of what he rather predictably perceives to be a
New Puritan movement in America attempting to eliminate bad-for-you indulgences
such as fat or cigarettes. Pleasure, for Klein, is the opposite of control:
It's all about gratification and excess.
But there are two kinds of
pleasure: the pleasure of doing, and the pleasure of not doing; the pleasure of
indulging, and the pleasure of abstinence. Control can be fun. And it is a
rather uninteresting, one-sided kind of hedonism that fails to take this into
account. If only Klein weren't so categorically averse to American health
culture, he might allow that a little self-imposed Puritanism now and then--a
little punishing exercise here, a little culinary deprivation there--can be a
sensual pleasure too, albeit of a different sort.
In Cigarettes ,
Klein's mascot was the Baudelairean dandy--that rare figure for whom the
cultivation of personal elegance is more important than health (and who is,
therefore, a model for the unrepentant smoker). So Klein, of all people, should
appreciate the stricter kinds of pleasures. Because while the dandy stands for
beauty and elegance, he also stands for the restraint and self-discipline
required to appear refined at all times. As Baudelaire put it in his essay "The
Painter of Modern Life": "All the complicated material conditions to which
[dandies] submit, from an impeccable toilette at every hour ... to the most
perilous feats of the sporting field, are no more than a system of gymnastics
designed to ... discipline the soul. ... The strictest monastic rule ... [was]
no more despotic."
You would think that
cultivating a taste for such ascetic modes of enjoyment would be at least as
effective a diet strategy as glorifying blubber, but Klein fails to entertain
this possibility. Alas, all he writes about, all he thinks about, all he wants
to do, is give in to fat.
