The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0031 Tuesday, 20 January 2009
From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Subject: SBReview_1: The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity
SBReview_1: Elena Levy-Navarro. _The Culture of Obesity in Early and
Late Modernity: Body Image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and
Skelton_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ISBN-13:
978-0-230-60123-9; xi + 238 pp. US$74.95.
Reviewed by Arthur Lindley, Institute for Advanced Research, University
of Birmingham
Since I will be making some rather critical observations about this
book, let me begin on a positive note. _The Culture of Obesity_ is an
extremely ambitious work, one that attempts an analysis of the obesity
crisis in contemporary America and links that crisis to a survey of
(mostly) major works of early modern English literature from _Piers
Plowman_ to Ben Jonson. If its scope is too great for two hundred pages
of text, that length may have been imposed by the publisher. Its stated
intent is to present a partisan case and to provoke disagreement. In
that, it certainly succeeds with me. If you regard fairness and balance
to be things fit only for Fox News, this may well be the book for you.
Considered strictly as polemic, at least the chapters on the _Henry IV_
plays and Ben Jonson are worthy of a place on a longish list of
recommended reading that includes alternative points of view.
This work is, essentially, a grudge with a book of essays attached. Its
primary purpose is cultural: to "transform our political and aesthetic
commitments" (p. x). That statement can be counted as fair warning:
I make no pretenses toward writing a study that is objective. Rather, I
seek to write a history that is rooted in our own historical moment as I
understand it. I also intend my history to intervene in our historical
moment. (1)
Any literary criticism that may be involved is secondary to the task of
writing a history and analysis of what she sees as the suffering and
resistance of fat people in history. This polemic drives the criticism,
shapes it, and with some frequency misshapes it, just as it drives a
"constructionist fat history" that is as remarkable for its omissions as
for its distortions.
Levy-Navarro's basic thesis can be simply stated. Our culture-she claims
universality but her focus is exclusively American-is governed by a
"representational regime" (30) that privileges and normalizes thin
bodies while stigmatizing fat ones. We are currently undergoing a "fat
panic" (1) about a purported obesity epidemic that is, in fact, a
dehumanizing moralistic attack on the fat (and indirectly on the poor
and non-white who are more likely than middle-class whites to be
overweight). Under this regime, "the fat body is marked, stigmatized,
and understood to be the emblem of our collective excess" (30). What we
take to be a health crisis-the fact, for example, that 66% of Americans
are now classified as overweight-is an illusion fostered by government
propaganda disguised as medical science to promote the authority of what
she calls "thin elites" (9). This arrangement, in turn, reflects a
pervasively ascetic culture of "reproductive futurism" (23) in which
straight Americans habitually defer gratification in the name of their
future children while punishing the fat and gay for appearing to enjoy
themselves. The roots of this "lean, mean," militaristic culture lie in
the Reformation and in the protestant valorization of discipline,
self-containment, and progress. The emergence of this tyranny-and this
finally brings her to the body of the book-can be traced in a small
selection of literary texts from the sixteenth- to the mid-seventeenth
century: Skelton's _Elynour Rummynge_; Shakespeare's _Henry IV, Parts I
and II_; Middleton's _A Game at Chess_; _Bartholomew Fair_ and the later
(i.e., the pudgy period) poems of Ben Jonson.
The problems with this argument, as you may already have gathered, are
legion. Anyone who thinks Americans habitually sacrifice the present to
the future has not watched the Bush administration running up
trillion-dollar debts to finance its wars of choice. For that matter, no
consumer culture ignores the present in the way she says ours does.
Consumption is about consuming now; it is about just doing it, because
"you only go around once in life." It only promotes deferral when it is
selling insurance, pension plans, and sub-prime mortgages.
More troubling is an attitude toward science that resembles nothing so
much as climate change denial. Levy-Navarro wants to get beyond what she
calls "mere objective data" (27) because queer theory has taught her
that data -- especially data you do not want to hear -- is just a form
of rhetoric. Inconvenient facts are habitually dismissed. Statistical
studies do not show things, they "are made to" show things (25). Words
like 'proof' and 'health' habitually appear in scare quotes. "[T]hose
biomedical experts who give 'sound medical reasons for watching weight'"
(21) are mentioned only to be dismissed. In a way that will strike many
foreign readers as peculiarly American, the only thing that ultimately
matters is feeling good about yourself. Fatness is just a "cultural
construction" (30) and only wimps worry about longevity (see p. 5). If
there are no objective definitions of health, if fatness carries none of
the medical consequences implied by a clinical term like obesity, then
the only possible reason for calling anyone overweight is to make them
feel bad. Of course, if you are literal-minded enough to believe that
having a body mass index more than '30' lowers your life expectancy by
as much as ten years and greatly increases your chance of suffering
heart disease, stroke, bowel cancer, breast cancer, type-2 diabetes,
arthritis, hypertension and (at the very least) elevated serum
cholesterol, you may find her argument at best silly and at worst
pernicious. As someone who has recently survived an entirely
non-rhetorical heart attack directly traceable to being overweight, I
would opt for the latter judgment.
Levy-Navarro's cultural history, unfortunately, is not much better than
her science. It is not true, for example, that thin bodies are
customarily unmarked. Think of the negative connotations that attach to
a term like "fashion model," only beginning with anorexic. Skinny male
bodies are marked as unhealthy and/or non-virile. While American popular
culture indeed stigmatizes fat people (as the recent work of Eddie
Murphy reminds us), it also contains a long line of iconic lovable ones,
from Oliver Hardy through Fats Waller and Jackie Gleason to Seth Rogan.
Those may not be sufficiently defiant, heroic examples for
Levy-Navarro's taste, but they do suggest that the culture's attitude,
like Hal's toward Falstaff, is considerably more complex than she is
willing to admit.
As she regularly reminds us, however, she does not intend to be
objective, much less fair or comprehensive. Her readings of individual
texts, though considerably better than her reading of contemporary
culture, reflect that attitude. _A Game at Chess_ is treated as a
pro-protestant, anti-fat treatise; all the other texts are treated as
subversions of anti-fat prejudice. She has great difficulty getting away
from the idea that any text is not, however covertly, polemical.
The most interesting of several ambitious chapters argues that
Shakespeare privileges Falstaff's "fat-witted" humanity over Hal's cold
militarism in the Henry IV plays. Like those other chapters, it is
marred by Levy-Navarro's eagerness to subordinate critical analysis to
fat activism and wish fulfillment. She insists throughout on a danger
that Falstaff does not pose and a virtue he does not possess. Contrary
to her repeated assertions, he never threatens to "absorb" or even
"obstruct" Hal (see, e.g., 89) and Hal cannot seriously imagine that he
does. The arc of their relationship is from the promised rejection in
Hal's first soliloquy in Part I-and the mockery that precedes it-to the
fulfillment of that promise at the end of Part II (and beyond that to
Jack's death in exile at the beginning of Henry V). Any audience is
expected to know that mythic history. If they are ever tempted to forget
it, Hal is there to remind them. "Banish not him thy Harry's company,"
cries Falstaff at the climax of the greatest of the tavern scenes. "I
do. I will," replies Hal, speaking for the present and the future.
Falstaff is always already rejected. He is not a threat to Hal, though
Hal is certainly one to him. And, by the way, it is not warmth and
companionship that the future Harry rejects in Eastcheap. Pervasively,
what happens in the tavern scenes are baiting, cheating, sponging, and
manipulation. Hal is simply better at most of those nasty arts than his
companions. Falstaff, for his part, makes it clear to those willing to
listen that he will throw anybody under the bus to preserve his
relationship with the prince. "Banish Poins," banish them all, he
pleads, but not me. If Levy-Navarro does not hear that plea, it is
because she is too busy listening for a kind, fat, feudal contrast to
her lean, mean villain, a tendency that reaches an ironic climax when
she denounces Hal for paying the Hostess what Jack owes her (98-9). Mrs.
Quickly, she thinks, would rather be cheated "warmly" than paid coldly.
Fat chance.
Elsewhere, the book is marred by great and small omissions, as when
Hotspur is omitted from her version of Hal's career or the Sons of Ben
from her account of Jonson's. A larger example is the absence of any
cited experience of the plays in performance. She habitually talks about
how audiences "would" respond to a given point (e.g., 106, 179) but not
about how they "do." The largest omission is, of course, the three
hundred and fifty years between _A Game at Chess_ and the Zone diet.
Anti-fat prejudice seems, as a result, to have been passed directly (and
quite improbably) from Jacobean playwrights and courtiers to
contemporary nutritionists. When you omit that great space of literary
and cultural development, you are liable to miss certain obvious facts
such as that jolly fat men and thin, pinched meanies are perennial
staples of the "modern" culture, she insists, has relentlessly
stigmatized the fat and endorsed the thin: Squire Western, Uncle Toby,
and Mr. Pickwick (not to mention, the Pilgrim Chaucer) on the one hand;
Blifil and Scrooge on the other. Even sinister fat men like Count Fosco
in _The Woman in White_ and Sidney Greenstreet in _The Maltese Falcon_
play off the expectation that they must be kindly because fat.
Similarly, you will also ignore that Victorians and Edwardians, like
modern-day Tongans, regarded fatness as a sign of prosperity and
success. There was, after all, a time when the king of England was
Edward and the president of the United States was William Howard Taft.
If the universal dominance of the thin ever arrived, it must have been
after that time and not before Henry VIII. If World War I produced a
demand for a leaner, fitter populace, this demand is more likely to have
been a response to the culture that immediately preceded it than to
Jacobean drama.
For the time and research that went into it, this is an unfinished book
marked by yawning gaps of attention. How, for example, does she write an
entire chapter on the emergent thin, fat-hating aesthetic of Henry
VIII's court without asking herself what happened when Henry became the
most prominent fat man in Europe. What aesthetic is Holbein's famous,
full-frontal portrait of the king supposed to represent?
For that matter, if she wishes make large claims about Middleton based
on one very atypical play in a large canon, she needs to refer to some
of the others. Vindice has a famous speech about skulls as the "terror
of fat folks." DeFlores is not fat, but his body is literally marked and
he displays many of the qualities -- defiance, pained
self-consciousness, a refusal to be confined -- that Levy-Navarro finds
in fat characters, defiant or otherwise. What does she think the
connections are?
If, similarly, she wants to derive Shakespeare's attitudes from fat and
thin bodies in the two _Henry IV_ plays, she should at least remember
that Falstaff also appears in _Merry Wives of Windsor_ as well as being
recalled in _Henry V_. What do the middle-class Windsorites think of
Jack's girth and how does that compare with what his prince thinks? I do
not necessarily expect her to notice that Hal and Falstaff -- the chilly
representative of the new age and the superficially generous
representative of the old one -- are replayed by Octavius and Antony,
but I would certainly expect her to comment at some point on Caesar's
preference for "fat, sleek-headed men" over the likes of lean and hungry
Cassius. Mostly thin and generally angry Hamlet, come to that, has a
plump, placatory, non-combatant antagonist.
In all these cases, great inverted pyramids of generalization about
authors, periods, and indeed Western Civilization are being erected on
small points of reference. When an author bases an account of the entire
"premodern" (aka medieval) period on a dubious reading of one passage in
_Piers Plowman_ -- in which she insists that Gluttony is not fat because
"gret" could (also) mean strong (42) -- then some spoilsport like me is
going to remind her that there are a fat Monk and a thin, choleric Reeve
among the Canterbury pilgrims and that the former's bulk is moralized in
a way she claims does not happen until the sixteenth century. I might
also remind her that Robyn the Miller, Harry Baillie, and Geoffrey are
all plump and ask what she thinks that tells us. What Levy-Navarro does
not have to say about the nineteenth century is as nothing compared to
what she does not know about the Middle Ages.
She is, however, intermittently capable of shrewd and thoughtful
analysis. If she filled the gaps in her "fat history," she might write a
book that is persuasive rather than merely argumentative. That task
would require a much longer narrative, but eliminating the extraordinary
wordiness and repetition that marks this one would free a great deal of
space-perhaps fifty or more pages. In the present work, no point is made
concisely and every point is repeated endlessly. A single phrase --
"wealthy, plump plebeians" -- may be repeated four times within two
pages (136-7), as if the reader had the attention span of Justice
Shallow. Palgrave should find an editor who is willing to edit. This one
has done Levy-Navarro no favors. The result is a very fat thin book.
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