Scott Samuelson: 'The Art of Living' in Springfield, Ohio
What John Gardner's masterful short story tells us about ourselves, the "other," and eating dogs.
By Scott Samuelson
Donald Trump has rightfully received a lot of negative attention for having asserted in the recent debate that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating dogs and cats. It’s a shameless amplification of a baseless claim that’s now causing truly serious problems for the people of Springfield, Ohio.
But I’m not sure that we’re really getting what’s going on—either with Trump or with us more generally.
I’ve been working on a book on the philosophy of eating. Among many other things, I’ve been thinking about the categories we use to carve up the world of food.
Nowadays we’re likely to shake our head in amazement about, say, ancient Biblical prohibitions against eating animals that chew their cud but don’t have cloven hooves.
But our contemporary American categories concerning which animals can and cannot be eaten also have little to do with nutritional value or even taste and a lot to do with our conceptual categories of carving up the world.
Though cats and dogs are perfectly good sources of meat, most people I know are deeply disgusted by the idea of eating them: they fall into our category of pets. They’re basically holy. (For just this reason, JD Vance’s rhetorical clunkiness was on full display with his ridicule of cat ladies.)
The rhetorical genius of Trump relies on his ability to zero in on deep categories of holy and unholy—not in the religious but the cultural sense of those terms. Arguably the two things that now inspire the most primordial rage and horror in us are just what Trump has invoked to advance his candidacy: the rape of our daughters and violence against our pets. Both are violations—pollutions—of all that’s holy to us.
The idea of walls and protection against cultural invaders, Trump’s signature issue, is bound up with this sense of the sacred, which he has an eerie ability to poke and prod.
Even darker is Trump’s savvy rhetorical use of race. Nowadays even religious people don’t have much trouble with taking God’s name in vain. But we all know that saying something racist is truly taboo. A big part of Trump’s appeal to his base is that he knows just how to enrage the priests of culture who enforce that taboo. He’s like a punk rocker desecrating a way of life that his crowd both relies on and feels alienated from.
Thus, his remarks about Haitian immigrants are a rhetorical double-whammy: he’s simultaneously evoking the sacred against immigration and violating the taboo against racist remarks.
As far as I’m concerned, the only good news on this front is that this schtick is getting old. In a perceptive analysis of the recent debate, Fintan O’Toole writes, “Saying the unsayable works—until it ceases to be unsayable because it has been roared from the rooftops over and over again by a once and potentially future president. It is hard for Trump to increase the volume when he long ago turned it up to eleven.”
But there’s something else I couldn’t help but think about in the wake of Trump’s comments, something that’s about more than moving on.
In my thinking about food, I’ve had occasion to reread the great American writer John Gardner’s short story “The Art of Living,” which happens to be about just what Trump invoked: eating a dog in small-town America.
The story revolves around Arnold Deller, a superb cook in an Italian restaurant in the late 1960s, and a gang of relatively harmless greaser kids who hang out to chat with him because he speaks with gusto and insight about the meaning of life.
Halfway through the story, the cook tells of a letter he received from his son Rinehart before he was killed in Vietnam. It describes an unforgettable meal that Rinehart had there. Arnold says, “It wasn’t just food. It was an occasion. It was one of the oldest dishes known in Asia. Sit down to that dinner—this is what he wrote, and he was right, dead right—you could imagine you were eating with the earliest wisemen in the world.”
The dish was Imperial Dog—made of dog meat. Arnold becomes obsessed with recreating his dead son’s favorite meal, and the greaser kids are reluctantly convinced to help him by stealing a dog from a pet store. He slaughters the animal, cooks it with artistic expertise, and serves it up after hours to a small band in the restaurant.
In Gardner’s story, violating the taboo against eating a dog becomes a ritual at the core of not just the cook’s art but the entire “art of living”—the story’s title. When Arnold is preparing the meal of Imperial Dog, everyone in the restaurant is on edge. In fact, they’re beyond the edge—in a kind of spiritual freefall. But they’re suddenly given a panoramic vision of the whole world: their superficial culture, the brutality overseas, their grief, their love, even the dead.
The narrator says:
There was no sign of the thousands and thousands of dead Asians, or of Rinehart either, but it felt like they were there—maybe even more there if there’s no such thing in the world as ghosts, no life after death, no one there at the candlelit table but the few of us able to throw shadows on the wall. Say that being alive was the dinner candles, and say they burned forever over this everlasting meal of Imperial Dog. Then we were the diners there now, this instant, sent as distinguished representatives of all who couldn’t make it this evening, the dead and the unborn . . . . The dog was terrific, by the way, once you talked your stomach past the idea.
Like Trump, Gardner zeroes in on the act of violating one of our society’s few taboos. He evokes just what disgusts us most. But he’s seeing it from the other side, from the perspective of an artist with a tremendous insight into our humanity, in which the conflicting culinary categories of Vietnam and America become curiously restorative.
Though I’m hoping that we’re sick enough of Trump to move on from his whole brand of politics, I’m also hoping that we don’t just turn our back on the deep issues he chooses to use manipulatively.
There’s something genuinely scary about accommodating people from elsewhere. There’s something even scarier about trying to fit into a whole new culture! There’s also something difficult about living with any set of social norms, especially when they’re shifting fast. Many people suffer at the boundaries of their identity. And, once again, we’ve lost loved ones in wars overseas.
As Gardner’s story suggests, and as our great religious traditions teach with their emphasis on hospitality, it’s when we confront our fears and the strange power of our taboos that we have a chance of healing as individuals and as a nation. Arnold’s genius is that he doesn’t just try to move on. He goes into the most tangled contradictions of his grief to make a life worth going on with.
At the end of “The Art of Living,” one of the gang’s members, who can’t abide eating a dog, walks out when it’s being served. The narrator says of him, “He was the one who’d been right—sane and civilized from the beginning. But also his walk was oddly mechanical, and the way he shook his head when he looked back at us from the door, it was as if under his hair he had springs and gears.”
Scott Samuelson is a writer and teacher. His most recent book is Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour. He’s currently working on The Angels of Bread: On Making Food and Being Human.
When I finished this, it made me think of a poem I read last night by Hafiz:
The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He
Knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.
I wouldn't embarrass you dubbing you a sage, Scott; but, I am willing to embarrass you by saying I always appreciate your droppings. It is joyous to see you still stubbornly drinking from the deeper well, offering your conversations of invitation.
And Sir Michael, we're due for a cheers!
“Many people suffer at the boundaries of their identity.” Brilliant and beautiful as ever, Scott.