By Izzy Simoes
“These fruits are not just figures.”
In English professor Elizabeth Blake’s book Edible Arrangements: Modernism’s Queer Forms, she delves into how modernist writing about eating explores questions about bodily and literary pleasure, drawing on both food and queer studies. On February 19th, Blake delivered a talk in Dana Commons to discuss said topics, specifically fruit, and hand selected modernist poems.
“Modernist form is something that moves.”
In her introduction, Blake claims that modernist poetry ignores, complements or refutes fruit eating in the biblical sense. The form itself is a sensual mode of relation and an exploration of what form what may be made to do. This aligns with what Blake claims queerness is in this poetry. Blake builds on the work of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who describes queerness as an “open mesh,” where identity cannot be monolithic. Queerness in Blake’s analysis is the open spaces and the threads between them, and she urges us to resist the logic that conflates queerness with identity. Instead, she calls on us to see queerness as sensuality.
“Like sex, eating is risky, because it might not feel good, but it might feel good in a way that we can’t explain.”
In the second section of her talk, Blake discusses a pear poem titled “Priapus” by H.D., published by Poetry in January of 1913, and a peach poem titled “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot. “Priapus,” she argues, is an exercise in queer excess, specifically the celebration of the pleasure of eating. Fruit in this poem has the power to disturb, so much so that the speaker of the poem pleads to be spared “from loveliness,” and from the pleasure that overwhelms them. Here, fruit eating and sex offer a momentary escape from the everyday oppression of life under capital.
Blake acknowledges in this section of her talk that queerness is hard to define, especially as terms evolve. However, in her analysis, the word “queerness” invites a focus on embodiment and desire, calling pleasure itself an art through eroticism and gustatory processes.
Prufrock’s peach brings about the most famous question of modernist poetry: “do I dare to eat a peach?” This daring question becomes the frame of the poem and is insistent on this choice of snack, a juicy stone fruit. Blake argues that, in this poem, to eat a peach is “to disturb the universe.” She claims that fruit, like sex, can lead to jouissance, what Leo Bersani calls “a loss of all consciousness of self,” as the sensation of eating has a disruptive potential that we often find in sex. To conclude, Blake claims that these revolutionary modernist poems offer a vision of queer pleasure in the eroticism of eating.