The Poetics of M. F. K. Fisher

Style, Fall, 2003 by Susan Derwin

M. F. K. Fisher once said, "I do not consider myself a food writer" (qtd. in Lopate 545). Notwithstanding her view, she remains known for her copious body of writing on gastronomy and her English translation of Brillat-Savarin's famous 1825 treatise on eating, The Physiology of Taste, though she also wrote poetry, novels, a screenplay, essays, and stories, all on topics other than food. How do we reconcile Fisher's self-perception with her reputation? Phillip Lopate suggests that we consider food to be Fisher's defining metaphor. He writes, "Certainly food was her primary subject matter, and her achievement was to use this seemingly mundane concern as a metaphor for the analysis of human appetite, disappointment, and rapture" (545). According to Lopate, Fisher's knowledge of food and her interest in it served as the medium through which she expressed a wider scope of thought. In what follows I will suggest that Fisher's power to transform food into a metaphoric language came from what she knew about her own hunger and what she believed to be true of hunger in general: that it was its own kind of metaphor; that it was the expression of desires that no food could ever satisfy

In an interview Fisher commented, "One has to live, you know. You can't just die from grief or anything. You don't die. You might as well eat well, have a good glass of wine, a good tomato" (qtd. in Lopate 545). This remark seems to imply that, for Fisher, food was part of life that remained in face of loss. Fisher herself was on intimate terms with loss, having survived the deaths of her second husband, Dwillyn Parish, and, shortly thereafter, her brother, David. About these losses she said, "Death left me crippled. Timmy's death preceded David's death by several months. Part of me didn't survive it" (qtd. in Lazar 530). These were life-defining losses, but they were not all-consuming. Fisher could not "die from grief or anything." She faced grief, and when she did, food lined up with all other facets of her continued existence. It was a concern, no more or less weighty than any other. At the same time, it was part of a greater impulse to lire that held steady in her, even when she was confronted with devastating loss.

Decades after the deaths of her husband and brother, Fisher's vital impulse was evident in one of her lifelong practices and pleasures: room arrangement. Jeannette Ferrary describes how the eighty-year-old Fisher used to move furniture around: "In small ways she was always rearranging just about everything in the house [...]. Once her mobility started to become curtailed, she could no longer pick up everything and move on or plan an impromptu trip to Aix" (205). Moving furniture, not just physically but also mentally, was something Fisher wrote about in 1933: "I shift everything in a room, as some people strip the clothes from a desirable body, without moving more than the eyeballs," she stated (Stay 14). The comparison Fisher draws between moving furniture and undressing a body reveals what grief could not extinguish: her desire. Fisher might have felt her survival threatened by the loss of two people whom she dearly loved--"part of me didn't survive"--but she did not disparage the desire that remained. She survived because she desired; she desired, so she ate. Eating sensibly was a sign of life as measured by her desire. And because she respected both life and desire, she upheld that "you might as well eat well, have a good glass of wine, a good tomato."

The desire manifest in Fisher's imaginary rearranging of rooms "without moving more than the eyeballs" brings to mind another mental activity, namely reading. Like Fisher's mental regrouping of furniture, reading is an activity of interpretation that consists of recognizing the connections between the elements of a text, of seeing their interrelationships. It is noteworthy that Fisher gave the final place she lived the same name as the final text she worked on: Last House. In so doing, she underscored how texts and spaces converge: houses are meaningful texts to be read; and texts are like houses, structures that take on a personality through the interrelation of their elements.

The resemblance between texts and houses suggests where the reader should go to discern the shape of Fisher's desire: to the structure of her writings. Fisher hints at as much in a comment she made about why she never wrote about the deaths of her husband and brother. Her decision to keep these topics out of her work came from her "sense of literary decorum" (Lazar 530). Literary decorum: upon first reading, the phrase seems transparent enough, indicating a distinction Fisher observes between her public and private affairs. But decorum alone would have sufficed to express this idea. Why, then, did Fisher use the word literary? It may be because the coupling of these two words enabled her to indicate something about her writing, apart from the themes it addressed. Literary decorum raises the possibility that for Fisher, decorum, or concern for proper forms, was both a social and a literary question. As such, the phrase could be read as a comment on Fisher's sense of what constitutes the literary in her writing, namely, its form. Seen in this way, the phrase invites us to pay close attention to the formal or structural aspects of her texts. Indeed, to see questions of form, rather than theme, as the defining dimension of Fisher's writing would be consistent with Fisher's perception of herself as a writer (not a food writer) and also with a comment she made in 1980 about the way she reads literature. She stated, "It's hard to get interested in the characters. I focus on the structure" (qtd. in Lazar 529). It is thus by analyzing the structure of Fisher's works--more broadly put, its poetics--that we stand to gain insight into the shape of Fisher's desire as it persisted beyond the grievous losses of her early adulthood.