The Perils of Veggielit

VS Naipaul and Jonathan Franzen’s new writings lack meat. Blame their Brahminical standards of judging cultures different from their own

Before I began Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, I chanced upon a recent piece of his in The New Yorker on the trapping and killing of endangered migratory birds in Europe. At one point in the article, Franzen tries to stop himself from throwing up after eating the minuscule breast muscles of two songbirds: ‘The world was feeling especially empty of meaning, and the best I could do to fight this feeling was to unwrap the two dead birds from the napkin, put them in the hole, and tamp some dirt down on them.’

As I read the words, I could not but help think of VS Naipaul’s new book, The Masque of Africa. Hearing a woman describe how many South Africans still sacrifice a cow or an ox to their ancestors— the animal has to scream so that the ancestors hear it—Naipaul notes: ‘And that idea of the cow being made to bellow in death was so painful that I thought of the way they killed cats in the Ivory Coast, putting them in a sack and then dumping the sack in boiling water. And just as that Ivory Coast way of preparing cats for table made everything else in the country unimportant, so that sacrificial way with cattle darkened everything else here.’

In the course of his career, Naipaul’s Brahminical sensibilities have looked for situations that provoke his capacity for feeling slighted (intellectually and emotionally), and his genius has constructed compelling narratives from what has ensued. But never before has he been so crude in his judgment.

In a far more meditative and worthy book of his, The Enigma of Arrival, a young Indian from the Caribbean, living and writing on a farm near Stonehenge, meditates on the fate of the cows he sees passing by every day: ‘Some would have been sold; but whether sold or not, what would have happened to them would have been what always happened to cows when their time was judged to have come: batches of them were regularly taken off in covered vans to the slaughterhouse.’ Somehow, the death of these cows (and how difficult would it be to imagine their bellowing in the slaughterhouse?) seems to suggest nothing derogatory about the English to the narrator.

Franzen suffers from a similar amnesia. He is not averse to eating flesh. In the same article, before he prepares to eat the songbirds, he is served the meat of a song thrush: ‘ I thought of a prominent Italian conservationist who’d admitted to me that song thrushes are ‘blood tasty’. The conservationist was right. The meat was dark and richly flavourful, and the bird was enough bigger than an ambelopoulia (songbirds) that I could think of it as ordinary restaurant food, more or less, and of myself as an ordinary consumer.’

Consider this description of a cattle farm (chicken farms are worse) from Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation: ‘Each of them can hold up to one hundred thousand heads of cattle. At times, the animals are crowded so closely together it looks like a sea of cattle, a mooing, moving mass of brown and white fur that goes on for acres… During the three months before slaughter, they eat grain dumped into long concrete troughs that resemble highway dividers. The grain fattens the cattle quickly, aided by the anabolic steroid implanted in their ear.’ Franzen, with such knowledge, seems to have little problem eating ‘ordinary’ restaurant food in the US, but a morsel of endangered songbird meat is enough to make his stomach churn.

The trouble in either case is similar. Attempting to study the cult of the hallucinogen eboba, Naipaul relates a conversation that bares the key to this failure: ‘Hallucinogenic for you,’ one professional Gabonese lady said unexpectedly. ‘But for Africans it’s their reality.’ This opens up a whole vista of the relativity of perceptions, too much of a quicksand pit for the short-term traveler to go into.

What remains of non-fiction writing if we cannot place ourselves in the other person’s shoes? Naipaul’s age and Franzen’s gut get in the way. In Franzen’s case, we know of his passion for birdwatching, thanks to an article in Time. Many newspaper articles have alluded to Naipaul’s love for cats. Are not the above observations then—absurd when seen in isolation—merely a case of personal likes and dislikes being imposed as universal standards?

To be fair, it is almost possible to forgive the Naipaul of this book his judgment. It is the book of an old man who is perhaps making his last journey. Habits acquired over a lifetime of travel on a tight budget have stayed with him. He still worries about the money a witchdoctor may charge him for sharing his story, about the money he may have to pay out for any hospitality extended to him. The Naipaul of today has no reason to worry so, but he cannot help himself.

The book is less about Africa than it is about the man Naipaul, who, even at his age, cannot forgo the quest that has driven him much of his life—the search for belief. What he wants is to understand the power of magic in Africa—‘To witness this, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of my book.’ But he cannot reach that beginning. A journey to see the ancestral bones of a tribe, a powerful source of magic in Africa, falters when he can no longer go on. A wheelbarrow is conjured up, but it turns out to be ‘an African job, heavily rusted, and not sturdy, sagging below my weight when, leaning back far too much, I tried unsuccessfully to sit in it’.

The description contains a jibe he still cannot resist—an African job— but the picture we are left with is of a Naipaul who can no longer take the last few steps to see for himself. His judgment has to be peremptory.

Franzen, on the other hand, has no excuse. He is supposedly a writer at the height of his powers, but what does that really amount to? The eating of the songbird is the strangest sequence in his article. It adds nothing to the piece, it takes away almost everything. Never has Naipaul written anything quite so fatuous or self-indulgent as this—‘the world was feeling especially empty of meaning’. Over a morsel of meat? Perhaps it is too harsh to dismiss an author on the basis of so little, but Franzen clearly doesn’t have the stomach for writing. If anyone is looking for an unread copy of Freedom, feel free to ask me.

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