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.His task requires a very developed capacity tomediate between alien cultures.When we first meet Marq, he is doing business witha large and blue sentient being,  who tended to come apart into jellylike pieces onlyto flow together about the translator pole. The creature is trying to make small talkand to be polite:If you re hungry, I d be highly complimented if you d eat some of me.Indeed, if there sany of you you can spare: body, hair, nail pairings, excrement, dried skin.? Really, ourtwo chemistries are very similar, notoriously complementary.One speculates that it s thebasis for the stable peace that endures between our races throughout the lowlands of thisworld.(Delany 1985: 69).Cannibalism becomes a sort of gift exchange between races.Interestingly, this in-vitation to ritual ingestion is uttered by a being that does not have a defined andfixed body, but an always recomposing matter that changes hues of blue to expressdifferent emotional states.Once again, unstable bodies become a material metaphorfor the intrinsic inconsistencies of cultures and identifications.As a consequence, onVelm, Marq Dyeth s planet, no flesh is consumed if not cloned and artificial.MarqDyeth recalls with horror when on another world he happened to chew on a bone,a piece of animal meat.Nevertheless, one of Marq s relatives does not hesitate tocollect cellular material from a visiting guest in order to produce meat from him,adding:  We will savor the complexities of your flesh for years to come, and it willlend its subtleties to myriad complex meals (Delany 1985: 303).Velm is inhabited by two kinds of sentient beings: the humans and the evelmi,dragons with wings, scales, and multiple tongues used to express and taste differentthings,  the taints and feints that humans could communicate through body odoralone if our olfactory systems had not fallen by the evolutionary wayside (Delany1985: 120).We are informed that  evelmi have twelve basic tastes and no nasal-based olfactory sense  though they can detect, with some tongues, even a moleculeor two lingering in the air (Delany 1985: 310).Eating is for the evelmi a legitimatemeans of intellectual and emotional knowledge, so that their multiple tonguesbecome heuristic tools.She leaped against me.small tongues playing in my mouth.I opened wide, so shecould be sure to taste me properly.While with her nether tongue, the one below thethree she was tasting my mouth with, she was saying in that slow-motion basso:  Marq,you re back! Where have you been? What did you see? Tell us how many stars you veswallowed since I last saw you? How many worlds have you chewed up and spit out?(Delany 1985: 187)82 " Bite MeFor the evelmi, taste is a relevant part of communication: as a customary greeting,an evelmi friend of Marq s, Santine, offers him several stones to lick (Delany 1985:108).Furthermore, the members of the same family, which is not biological but basedon adoption, including both humans and evelmi, drink from each other s tongues,lick each other s mouths, and so on.These unusual acts of familiarity betweendifferent beings hint also at the fact that the two species are capable of receivingsexual pleasure from each other, an eventuality that is not accepted in other parts ofthe planet Velm, where humans and evelmi are constantly at war.Since eating is afundamental social activity, charged with emotional and intellectual connotations,it is performed in highly codified fashion, which includes hands, implements,communal and individual feeding.In a key sequence, a ritual battle is waged duringan official dinner between Marq s family, the Dyeths, and another clan, the Thants.While the Dyeths support the  Sign, a sort of political organization that promotesnon-identitarian socialization, where difference is celebrated at all levels, the Thantshave shifted to the Family, favorable to a rigid and uniform cultural stability.Duringthe dinner, while the Dyeths engage themselves in complicated rituals that includealso mutual feeding, the Thants refuse to accept food and even to acknowledge theirpresence.They keep on stigmatizing in loud monologues the supposed corruption ofthe Dyeths, referring to their alleged sexual perversions and avoiding engagement insymbolic exchange with them.Food and dining become arenas for the clash betweenidentitarian and non-identitarian politics.As a matter of fact, the metaphoricalconnection between eating and politics is frequent in the novel.Several centuries ago, a northern tribe developed a ceramic cooker, essentially a largeclay pot, called a kollec.You put water (or sometimes oil) in the kollec s bottom,and on top of that you put a complicated seven-layer shelf with various perforationsfor rising steam, various ducts to conduct juices down from one layer to bypass anotherand shower over another still lower.Food on the different shelves cooks at differentrates.Juices percolate to form a general gravy at the bottom.Individual essences arecollected in draining cups at shelf edges on their respective levels.Elaborate meals canbe prepared with a single kollec, and in a number of northern cities humans have all buttaken it over for their own foods  omitting the inedible flavored stones and unchewablebarks that still make up a large part of Velmian cookery but that we humans in the southare learning to appreciate if not actually enjoy.(Delany 1985: 290)The ceramic cooker becomes the image of the whole of society.For the people ofVelm, society and its political life cannot be separated from their material basisand food, which, like a pot, is not  natural but man-made, an effect of culture andperformance.Even so, in the throngs of desire for his lover, Marq Dyeth exclaims: Metaphors of taste are so inadequate to describe what in reality is an appetite!(Delany 1985: 339).The act of eating has always something that cannot be fullyexpressed.Tasty Utopias " 83In the novel, food expresses all its political values: the sharing of eating, desire,and sex with alien beings requires a complete rethinking of one s subject positionand individuality.One s role in society and one s relationship with otherness cannotbe but deeply influenced.The reader is implicitly invited to embark on the samepath, which implies a revision of ideas and practices concerning body, sex, gender,and race.Food, the body, and its arrangements, considered to be as cultural and as arbitraryas language and customs, reveal the political negotiations and the power strugglesthat generate them.These tensions become even more powerful when they influenceour daily activities and our relationship with our own bodies and our images.Whatwe think of our bodies, the way we perceive and experience them, are also deeplydetermined by the society and the culture we inhabit.Even our desires might be lesspersonal and autonomous than we think.Food becomes a tool, and sometimes even aweapon, in the struggle waged to respond to the expectations and the ideals proposedto us through pop culture in its various expressions [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]