My Year of Meats

She says, just prior to the section you quote, “In the Year of Meats, truth wasn’t stranger than fiction; it was fiction.... Maybe sometimes you have to make things up, to tell truths that alter outcomes.” Without the power of the imagination we lack the power to alter outcomes, so if we can’t imagine better outcomes in a better world, we cannot act to achieve these. You can’t make something you can’t imagine first.

In the end, though, it is a tribute to the power of the imagination. You cannot make a better world unless you can imagine it so, and the first step toward change depends on the imagination’s ability to perform this radical act of faith. I guess I see writing as a similar endeavor.

Of course, the climax occurred when I came across the information that the synthetic hormone D.E.S. had a history of misuse, as not only as a pregnancy drug for women, but as a growth stimulant for cattle. Suddenly the metaphor was no longer simply a literary conceit. It was frighteningly real: women weren’t just like cows; women and cattle were being given the identical drug, with equal disregard for safety. I realized then that Jane was a D.E.S. daughter, and it was a moment of exquisite and horrifying resonance.

But your question is interesting so I’ll turn it around: What is it that frightens us about a “novel of causes,” and conversely, does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? Can it not be politically and temporally specific and still be in good literary taste? We are leery of literature that smacks of the polemic, instructional, or prescriptive, and I guess rightly so—it’s a drag to be lectured to—but what does that imply about our attitudes toward intellectual inquiry? While I enjoy reading kitchen-table novels in which characters are distilled to their emotional essence and their lives stripped of politics and commerce, it simply is not reflective of my experience. I see our lives as being a part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman’s fallopian tube. This is the resonance I want to conjure in my books.

I want to write novels that engage the emotions and the intellect, and that means going head to head with the chaos of evils and issues that threaten to overpower us all. And if they threaten to overpower the characters, then I have to make the characters stronger.

The juxtaposition of first-person and third-person narrative voices is another transgression of sorts. As a former documentary filmmaker, this question of voice and point of view is interesting on several levels, not the least of which is the effect of extreme subjectivity on notions of absolute or objective truth. Of course, this is a topic that Jane discusses quite overtly in the novel, and that forms its thematic underpinnings.

meat took on a variety of metaphorical resonance: I was thinking of women as cows; wives as chattel (a word related to cattle); and the body as meat, fleshy, sexual, the irreducible element of human identity.

There’s no denying, I thought. In the Year of Meats, truth wasn’t stranger than fiction; it was fiction. Ma says I’m neither here nor there, and if that’s the case, so be it. Half documentarian, half fabulist... Maybe sometimes you have to make things up, to tell truths that alter outcomes.

I had started my year as a documentarian. I wanted to tell the truth, to effect change, to make a difference. And up to a point, I had succeeded: I got a small but critical piece of information about the corruption of meats in America out to the world, and possibly even saved a little girl’s life in the process. And maybe that is the most important part of the story, but the truth is so much more complex.

I am haunted by all the things—big things and little things, Splendid Things and Squalid Things—that threaten to slip through the cracks, untold, out of history.

Coming at us like this—in waves, massed and unbreachable—knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment—becomes bad knowledge—so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness. I have heard myself protesting, “I didn’t know!” but this is not true. Of course I knew about toxicity in meat, the unwholesome-ness of large-scale factory farming, the deforestation of the rain forests to make grazing land for hamburgers. Not a lot, perhaps, but I knew a little. I knew enough. But I needed a job. So when My American Wife! was offered to me, I chose to ignore what I knew. “Ignorance.” In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence.

I would like to think of my “ignorance” less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes pro-active, a political statement. Our collective norm.