On Refusal

Westwood, Benjamin

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-73380-7_8

Benjamin Westwood⁶

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ((PSAAL))

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6 Citations

Abstract

This essay proposes that refusal is at the centre of vegan modes of being in the world. Noting the frequency with which refusal is connected with tragedy, Westwood explores a diverse range of vegan and non-vegan examples of this association—ranging from Melville’s iconic “Bartleby, the Scrivener” through Thoreau, Christina Rossetti, Franz Kafka, and Margaret Atwood to Han Kang’s recent The Vegetarian—and proposes instead a non-tragic “grammar of refusal.” From within familiar scenes of anti-social withdrawal and heroic resistance, he recovers a less melodramatic, less combative understanding of refusal in the language used to make them. This provides, he suggests, a truer and more usable reflection of the daily negotiations and repeated declinations that shape vegan forms of life.

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Notes

1.
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver (London, 1985), p. 71.
2.
Ibid., p. 98.
3.
Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford, 2012), p. 56.
4.
Ibid., p. 65.
5.
Han Kang, The Vegetarian, trans. Deborah Smith (London, 2015), p. 12.
6.
Ibid., p. 154.
7.
For a detailed expositoin of the figure of the “vegan killjoy” see Richard Twine, “Vegan Killjoys at the Table—Contesting Happiness and Negotiating Relationships with Food Practices” Societies, 4 (2014): 623–639.
8.
Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (London, 2015), p. 74.
9.
Laura Wright, The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (Athens, 2015), p. 91.
10.
See, for example, Chlöe Taylor, “Abnormal Appetites: Foucault, Atwood, and the Normalization of an Animal-Based Diet,” Journal of Critical Animal Studies 10, no. 4 (2012): 132; and Wright , Vegan Studies Project, p. 113.
11.
Steven Kellman, “‘The only fit food for a man is half a lemon’: Kafka’s Plea and Other Culinary Aberrations,” The Southwest Review 95, vol. 4 (2010): 532–45.
12.
Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan, “Vegaphobia: derogatory discourses of veganism and the reproduction of speciesism in UK national newspapers,” The British Journal of Sociology 62, no. 1 (2011): 134–53, <http://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2111/wol1/doi/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01348.x/full>.
13.
Ibid., n.p.
14.
“History,” The Vegan Society, https://www.vegansociety.com/about-us/history
15.
Meaning, of course, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Franz Kafka. “A Hunger Artist” may not be about a vegetarian or vegan, but Kafka was an outspoken and committed vegetarian. See Kellman, “Kafka’s Plea.”
16.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, 2011), p. 122.
17.
Ibid., p. 122.
18.
Ibid.
19.
On this, see Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford, 1999). This is because refusal presents the “threat of skepticism,” as he puts it. For “the skeptic can be cloaked as the thinker wishing to bring assertion to its greatest fastidiousness, refusing our knowledge as of the world, so refusing the world,” Disowning Knowledge: In Six of Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge, 1987), p. 12.
20.
Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore, 1986), p. 94.
21.
Russ Castronovo, “Occupy Bartleby,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 2, no. 2 (2014): 253–72.
22.
Melville, Bartleby, p. 68. Emphasis added.
23.
Ibid., p. 76.
24.
Ibid., pp. 68, 74, 72.
25.
Ibid., p. 74.
26.
Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises (London, 2002), p. 287.
27.
Ibid., p. 288.
28.
Ibid., p. 294.
29.
Rossetti, The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti vol. 1, ed. R. W. Crump (Baton Rouge and London, 1979), p. 23, ll. 468–74.
30.
Ibid., p. 24, l. 494.
31.
Ibid., p. 25, ll. 544–45.
32.
Ibid., p. 26, ll. 562, 65.
33.
D. M. R. Bentley, “The Meretricious and the Meritorious in Goblin Market: A Conjecture and an Analysis,” The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David Kent (Ithaca, 1987), pp. 57–81.
34.
Mary Wilson Carpenter, “‘Eat me, drink me, love me’: The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market,” Victorian Poetry 29, no. 4 (1991): 415–34.
35.
The Letters of Christina Rossetti vol. 1, ed. Antony H. Harrison (Charlottesville and London, 1997), p. 163.
36.
Kang, The Vegetarian, p. 40.
37.
Ibid., p. 30.
38.
Ibid., p. 174.
39.
Rossetti, Poems, p. 21, ll. 408–11.
40.
Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman (London, 2004), p. 75.
41.
Tracy Brain, “Figuring Anorexia: Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman,” Literature Interpretation Theory 6, no. 3 (1995): 301.
42.
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (London and Berkeley, 1993), p. 100.
43.
Atwood, Edible Woman, pp. 153, 161, 171.
44.
Brain, “Figuring Anorexia,” p. 299.
45.
Atwood, Edible Woman, p. 209.
46.
On this, see chapter four of Wright , Vegan Studies Project.
47.
Atwood, Edible Woman, p. 153.
48.
Ibid., pp. 217, 178.
49.
Ibid., p. 257.
50.
Ibid., p. 271–72.
51.
What “was essentially bothering her was the thought that she might not be normal,” ibid., p. 203.
52.
Ibid., p. 281.
53.
This trope is, in fact, legible across Atwood’s fiction. On this, see Emelia Quinn’s essay in this collection.
54.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Reviews and Essays in Criticism, ed. Owen Thomas (New York and London, 1966), p. 227.
55.
Ibid.
56.
Ibid., p. 231.
57.
Ibid.
58.
It seemed to Emerson “as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise. It cost him nothing to say No; indeed he found it much easier than to say Yes. It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient was he of the limitations of our daily thought.” “Thoreau,” from Atlantic Monthly, August 1862, in Walden and Civil Disobedience, pp. 266, 268.
59.
Ibid., p. 232.
60.
Janet Gezari, Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems (Oxford, 2008), p. 3.
61.
Wright, Vegan Studies Project, p. 6.
62.
Thoreau, Walden, p. 9.
63.
Ibid., p. 41.
64.
Ibid., p. 61.
65.
Thoreau, “Thoreau,” p. 271.
66.
Thoreau, Walden, pp. 41, 44.
67.
Ibid., p. 140.
68.
Ibid.
69.
Ibid.
70.
Ibid., p. 141.
71.
Ibid., p. 142.
72.
Ibid.
73.
Ibid., p. 143.
74.
Ibid., p. 142.
75.
Ibid., p. 143.
76.
Ibid.
77.
We might note that the pleasure of abstinence is one of the more curious of those cultivated by Thoreau, as when, imagining he owned almost all the land he could see, he pictures having so much that he “even had the refusal of several farms,” avowing that the greatest pleasure from this flight of fancy was being in a position to say no: “the refusal was all I wanted,” (ibid., p. 55).
78.
Ibid., p. 143; emphasis added.
79.
Ibid.
80.
Ibid.
81.
Ibid., p. 145.
82.
Ibid., p. 144.
83.
Ibid., p. 145.
84.
Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, p. 231.
85.
Atwood, Edible Woman, p. 267.
86.
Cavell , Disowning Knowledge, p. 16.
87.
Giorgio Agamben, “On Bartleby, or On Contingency,” in Potentialities, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, 1999), pp. 260–61.
88.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, 2003), p. 146.
89.
Kang, The Vegetarian, p. 36.
90.
Ibid., p. 98.
91.
Adam Phillips, “On Composure,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, MA., 1994), p. 42.
92.
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 144.

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Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Benjamin Westwood

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Wolfson College, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Emelia Quinn
Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Benjamin Westwood

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Westwood, B. (2018). On Refusal. In: Quinn, E., Westwood, B. (eds) Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73380-7_8

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73380-7_8
Published: 25 May 2018
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