It took me two tries to read David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that it wasn’t captivating, I just realized that longform writing about lobster ethics mixed with general anxiety about the current atmosphere makes for a confusing philosophical combination. Finally I dedicated my afternoon to sitting down and really reading it, which for me means reading it out loud to myself. Sounds neurotic but it helps me with tone, and Wallace’s writing is full of voice and tone. He writes like he talks, full of interjections and moral ramblings, which are two of my favorite things in a writer. He was able to turn an assignment into a very long essay that really caught my attention and made me think about myself, the culture I surround myself with and my morals. I’m familiar with a lot of David Foster Wallace’s writing like Infinite Jest, so I knew that this wasn’t just going to be a surface level article about Maine Lobster Festival, and I knew that his endnotes and footnotes weren’t just technical “cover my ass”, so I read them all (sometimes twice because god this man could write).
At the beginning he does start off the description of the Maine Lobster Festival in a crazy descriptive way, a la travel brochure, but the further you read on the more personal and philosophical the content gets. He begins to talk about the festival as an event, not being advertised, summarised or demonized, but in reference to life. He zooms out the audience’s lens and forces them to look at not only the festival, but fishing practices, gatherings and cuisine from an anthropological and epistemological point of view. His writing is so similar to fat books on moral philosophy that I read when I went through my Immanuel Kant phase. Wallace writes like he’s barely staying in the lines of his subject, he’s able to track so far off from his assigned topic of the MLF, and entertain the reader with crazy ethical questions while also completing his assigned work. He asks his reader to think which, most writers covering events don’t do, about the way they go about cuisine and the moral involvement in meat eating. As a vegetarian, whose family is WILDLY from crab-eating Maryland, some of these questions I was far too familiar with. Actually, you could hardly call me a vegetarian, as I do eat shrimp, crab and lobster, but not fish so I’m not a pescatarian either. I’m just a good old Maryland vegetarian, whose family holds a Crab Fest every year. When Wallace talks about the moral responsibility of cooking lobster I was so captivated, as this was a topic that I had grown up with. I have been the one to pry struggling crab claws off the corners of barrels into boiling water and have often asked the same questions Wallace asks to my parents. “Can they feel pain?” The only difference was that my parents also had Kant phases so they would tell me “yes and we have to take responsibility for their pain”. So to be someone from a very similar background as the culture that Wallace delves into, I was extremely captivated.
anna hilbert 