Elizabeth Blake's "Edible Arrangements"

Elizabeth Blake is Assistant Professor of English at Clark University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Edible Arrangements: Modernism's Queer Forms, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a very short page of my book. It’s the final few sentences of the final paragraph of the book’s second chapter, on queer obscenity and narratives of hunger:

Indirection both helps elude the censor and enables an especially queer version of obscenity, as it invites the reader to turn back to their own hungers, and see what it is they desire. Indirect obscenity contains a queerness that is not identical to homosexuality but encompasses it; it is queer in that it is not governed by the logic of heteronormativity. More broadly, it is not governed at all. In these texts, desire is a destabilizing force. This is not because it is inappropriately directed but because of its intensity, excessiveness, and insatiability. By writing desire as hunger, even “straight” writers like Joyce and Tagore strip sex of the trappings of sexuality, revealing its power to both ravish and ravage. While the staged obscenity of burlesque mirrors back to the audience what it thinks they want to see (and thereby teaches them what they ought to want to see), these textual obscenities interrogate desire itself, inviting us to imagine what exactly happened inside a walled palace, to attend to the ways our own minds and eyes might stray and where they linger as we move through a text or the world, and finally, to confront the ways our desires construct us.

Even though it only addresses one part of the book’s argument—each chapter pairs a specific literary form with a distinct relationship to food or eating—page 99 provides a good sense of how my thinking about queerness emerges from possibilities illuminated by modernist texts, rather than a fixed understanding of sex and sexuality. While the page only mentions two of the thirteen writers whose work I discuss, the fact that one is Irish and the other Bengali does hint at the breadth of the book’s transnational archive. What’s less obvious is that most of the writers whose work I discuss were not straight (even in quotation marks), and that the book thinks across a range of genres, including poetry, plays, essays, and fiction.

Most pages of the book involve more specific engagement with the literary texts themselves, including a lot of close reading, but this page offers a distilled moment of argument that doesn’t require readers to be familiar with the texts or writers than I’m referencing (though I of course hope that it incites readers’ desire to track them down!). I’m also particularly delighted that this page is all about desire and pleasure, which are central concepts of the book: I argue that modernist writing about eating has the capacity to unsettle ideas about what feels good in both corporeal and textual bodies.

Learn more about Edible Arrangements at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue