Reconsider the Lobster: On the Persistent, Joyful Cruelty of Bipedal Hominids by Ron Currie

Let’s just state it plainly right at the top: the principal feature of the Maine Lobster Festival is not the crowds, or the admittedly impressive engineering feat known as the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, or the food or sketchy carnival rides or even the postcard Maine coast in summer. The principal feature of the Maine Lobster Festival is the ambient, omnipresent weirdness of the whole enterprise, which David Foster Wallace recognized and articulated to near perfection twenty years ago in “Consider the Lobster,” an essay originally published in Gourmet that turned out, quite infamously, to be anything but an epicurean puff piece. 

There’s almost no amount or quality of weirdness that we can’t get used to, of course (the term du jour for this neurological elasticity is normalize, which, like most buzzwords, is almost unbearably inane, but there you go), and most of the thousands and thousands who attend the Lobster Festival each year appear not to be bothered by its particular brand of weirdness, appear, honestly, to not even really notice how weird it is. This fact ends up creating a tremendous sense of isolation for someone like me, a native Mainer from the state’s interior who, for better or worse, can’t stop noticing how weird life is, how fuzzy and spooky it gets at the edges of our ability to perceive. Standing on the side of Main Street in downtown Rockland, I feel myself buffeted, adrift as in rough seas, while the thing considered by most Festival enthusiasts to be the highlight of the three-day event —the Lobster Festival Parade—rolls by. 

At the head of the procession is a cruiser from the Rockland police, the passenger seat occupied by an alarmingly manic McGruff the Crime Dog in his signature detective’s trench coat, repeatedly giving a thumbs-up to indicate his approval of something—the weather? Lobster Thermidor?—and tossing candy to the kids.

After a couple of standard-issue marching bands and the Daughters of the American Revolution float, we’re approached by a loose grouping of cartoon characters that are both immediately recognizable and completely off-brand. Sure, that’s Woody from Toy Story, but also it’s totally not Woody from Toy Story. This clear copyright infringement doesn’t bother the children, of course, who sit rapt at the edge of the street as knock-off Ninja Turtles and someone who’s probably supposed to be the snowman from Frozen saunter by. 

It goes on. There’s a random pirate wandering around slapping five with paradegoers. A group of kids dressed as lobsters in a giant pot, with soap bubbles meant to simulate steam. A dump truck with a few of those diamond-shaped road work signs on its side, except these ones read “BE PREPARED TO STOP FOR LOBSTER” and “LOBSTER—500 FEET AHEAD.”

There’s roughly another hour of this to go.  

Suicide comes in different forms. Or at least it can be argued that it does. My grandfather, for example, packed several lifetimes’ worth of drinking and smoking into just 49 years; his death was, in all the ways that count, a suicide. Ditto for my father, who smoked like a barbecue joint for the better part of four decades, quit too late, and died of lung cancer at 57. I don’t think either of them meant to kill themselves—not consciously, at least—but that’s what they did, in effect. 

I’ve lost a lot of people to deaths that wouldn’t rate as suicides on a coroner’s report but that, in terms of the quality of grief they inspire, sure feel like the friends and family in question chose to call it quits, often right in front of me, day by day, drink by drink, Big Mac by Big Mac. 

Then there’s the more straightforward version of suicide, the kind we usually refer to when we invoke the word: a moment; a single, irretrievable act. This is the kind of suicide David Foster Wallace committed, famously, in 2008. After a lifetime that resembled a Greco-Roman wrestling match with depression, after a crushingly bad year during which nothing he or the doctors or his wife or his family did seemed to help, he organized the novel manuscript he’d been working on for a decade, moved his beloved dogs into another room so they wouldn’t see what came next, and hanged himself.

Wallace’s essay for Gourmet magazine purported, at the outset, to be a straightforward if verbose travelogue, like if Rick Steves had swallowed an OED and cultivated a moderate case of social anxiety. But about a third of the way through, Wallace drops a question he’s been slyly building toward, one that changes both the tone and the direction of the piece entirely: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?”

This question, and the contemplation of casual cruelty and crustacean neuroanatomy that follows, caused no small amount of consternation among the readers of Gourmet at the time; the sacks of angry mail that showed up at the magazine’s offices remain legend among those who staff what’s left of the periodicals industry.   

Although Wallace takes pains, in the essay, to make clear he himself is undecided on the morality of boiling lobsters—”I am…concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy,” he writes, “when what I really am is confused”—it seems evident to me that to be worried enough about suffering to wonder in the first place whether lobsters are capable of it, you must first be well-acquainted with suffering yourself, and moreover must realize that, through laziness, malice, willful blindness, or all three, you regularly contribute to the sum total of suffering in the world.

Thus Wallace, the unrepentant carnivore, dismisses as hyperbole his own comparison of the Lobster Festival to a Roman circus, condemning his indifference to suffering while  he also condemns the average Gourmet reader’s own indifference.         

It’s precisely this hypocrisy that I find most appealing about the essay. The person before us is not Saint Dave, the self-help guru of This is Water fame, which is how most Americans know him (and more’s the pity). It’s Dave Wallace, a flawed, brilliant, deeply sensitive, callous man, whose inability to reconcile how he was with how he wanted to be brought him, eventually, to that grim night in September 2008, with the dogs and the manuscript and a length of rope.

Wallace’s insistence that he’s simply asking the question of whether we should boil animals alive, rather than pushing an answer, is if not disingenuous, at least part of the essay’s overall tactical aesthetic. He’s making room for the reader to join him in the realization that, when you set aside all the moral inquiry and “hard-core philosophy” in the piece, you’re left with a very simple conclusion that you really only can deny if you choose to: that it is not, in fact, all right to boil something alive, and that’s probably just common sense.

The principal feature of the unexamined life may be an inability to conceive of a way of thinking or feeling that a) differs from your own and b) is legitimate. I see hints of this phenomenon all the time, and mostly among men. Sports radio and pickup basketball games are good places to get acquainted with it—a kind of mildly grumpy, default-conservative worldview that takes its own legitimacy for granted and demonstrates little curiosity about, well, really much of anything—least of all testing its own assumptions.

This same worldview is what one sees on display at big dumb fun like the Maine Lobster Festival. People love it, and that they love it is conclusive proof it must be great. It celebrates all the wonderful things about Maine in the summer, plus the proceeds go to charity, so only a crank or a crazy person would call into question the morality of the whole thing, or wonder out loud if a party centered around boiling thousands of animals alive might actually be fucking barbaric.

The guys I play basketball with twice a week are, by and large, unexamined-life types, and I say that with all affection—I would cut off one of my own digits without anesthetic, Yakuza-style, if it meant I could breeze through my days the way most of them seem to. They have families and honest jobs and definitely don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about how the meat they cook at backyard barbecues is so cheap because its real cost is borne by the animals themselves, in the form of inconceivable suffering.

Sometimes I imagine how befuddled these guys would be if I told them I think that life, far from being a gift, is actually an irredeemable evil. That consciousness—and its attendant, unavoidable suffering—is to me a morally indefensible thing to inflict on someone else. Some of them know I’m a writer, and so probably consider me suspect in a general way, but mostly I present as a typical guy among guys—I talk shit and get into good-natured squabbles and am not above sharpening my elbows if someone pisses me off. So if I piped up one day about how I love my children the best way I know how—by not having them in the first place—I might find myself quietly removed from the game’s ongoing email thread. And rightly so. As Wallace wrote, “there are limits to what interested parties can ask of each other.” I don’t even want to think about these things—I just don’t seem to have much of a choice.

The usual knock against Wallace’s writing is that it is cerebral and chilly, self-aggrandizing, all head and no heart. I wonder if, as is sometimes the case with the criticism we level at others, those who make this contention about Wallace are themselves emotionally deficient, or otherwise have agendas to serve. Because everything he wrote was shot through with a pain so obvious it’s like a lit cigarette placed lengthwise against your forearm and left to burn slowly down to its filter. Infinite Jest is about the pain of addiction, so acute and unbearable that it makes you willing to tolerate “some old lady with cat-hair on her nylons com(ing) at you to hug you and tell you to make a list of all the things you’re grateful for today” just so you can learn how to make that pain stop. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is about the pain caused by toxic masculinity, decades before there even was such a term. The Broom of the System is about the pain of the inescapable isolation we all live in, “lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and “Big Red Son” are about the pain of discovering that certain things advertised as unequivocally good times are anything but. And “Consider the Lobster” is about the wholesale pain we as a species inflict on ourselves and creation, and how we turn a blind eye to that pain so we can keep eating, and doing, whatever we want.

Wallace’s focus on suffering remained until the end. “Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain,” he wrote in the unfinished novel, The Pale King, “because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.”

I’m not going to attempt to influence what you think and/or feel about the gap between what Wallace wrote and how he behaved, according to some who knew him.

I will invite you to consider, though, several questions:

Are our ideals rendered null and void by our failure to live up to them? 

If I am never as smart or compassionate or articulate or even-handed in life as I am on the page, does that make the whole of my work a lie? 

Can suicide be thought of as the ultimate expression of disappointment in oneself—in Wallace’s case, a much more permanent and irrefutable condemnation than anyone has managed since?

In the western frontier states there’s a practice with the whimsical name “wolf whacking” that some people consider a fun pastime of sorts. It involves using a snowmobile to run a wolf to exhaustion, and then, when it’s too tired to flee anymore, running it over repeatedly until it’s dead. If on a given day you feel the urge to do some wolf whacking but the wolves aren’t showing themselves, coyotes—more numerous and less elusive—will do in their stead.

This practice came to my attention through the case of a man named Cody Roberts, a resident of Wyoming who not long ago ran a wolf over with his snowmobile and, when the wolf failed to die right away, decided to tape its mouth shut and bring it to town and show it off at a bar before finally taking the animal out back and shooting it dead. If you’re interested and can stomach it, photographic evidence of Mr. Roberts’ night out is available online, because pics or it didn’t happen, of course. In the photos, he seems to be enjoying himself quite a lot.

When I was in junior high, one of the boys’ favorite pastimes involved going to the golf course across the street to abuse, torture, and kill the frogs that made their home in the water hazard. There were baseball bats. There were firecrackers inserted into amphibian orifices and set alight. There were, of course, more workaday methods of dispatching frogs, as well: literally stomping their guts out, for example, or hurling their soft bodies against the brick foundation of the pro shop.

It’s commonly assumed that such displays of cruelty in childhood presage violent or anti-social behavior in later years. But as far as I know, none of the guys who killed frogs at the golf course grew up to be Jeffrey Dahmer. They all live average, unremarkable lives now. They’re cops and lumber yard workers, call center operators and middle-management flunkies. They’re husbands and fathers. They play beer-league softball and drive minivans. They’re normal. 

Here’s my thesis: the frog pogroms I witnessed and did nothing about as a child indicate there is something fundamentally wrong with us as a species, something that can only be mitigated, but not solved, by law or reason. This isn’t about ideology, but biology. Some evil that lurks in us all. Some intractable, sadistic chromosome, insufficiently counterbalanced by whatever grace or kindness we’re capable of.

And that’s why, when I read about Cody Roberts of Wyoming dragging the wolf around to show off to his buddies before finally killing it, I have two concurrent reactions. First, I feel a surge of hatred for my own species, like vomit rising in my throat. I hate what we are by both divine and natural law, an inscrutable house ape that takes grotesque, gleeful pleasure in the suffering of creatures we consider inferior to ourselves. 

Second, and more narrowly, I experience a howling desire for five minutes alone in a locked room with Cody Roberts. I want to break my hands against his face, tape his mouth shut and drag him around to show off to my buddies, snap pictures of him suffering and terrified while I grin widely with my arm around his shoulders.  

But as those fission-hot first reactions burn away, I realize this is not, in fact, what I want. Hurting Cody Roberts would be both too easy and too obvious. What I really want is to know how to make him understand, completely and for all time, how terrible what he did is. I want him to be haunted by that poor animal for as long as he lives, and to have no peace even when he sleeps. I am tormented by the need to see him tormented.

This means, of course, that I am no better than Cody Roberts. I can’t change my nature, any more than he can.

Which brings us back around, I think, to the topic of suicide.

I’ve contemplated suicide here and there over the years, never attempted it. 

Sometimes when I’m in a bad stretch, which means among other things that I’m being watched pretty carefully by professionals, I have to fill out these crude little surveys meant to quantify how pathological my thinking has become. They feature questions like, “In the past two weeks, have you felt like life isn’t worth living?” The surveys are multiple-choice and don’t provide space to ad lib, probably to keep smartasses like me from answering: “Haven’t you?!?” But as my buddy Gary wrote, when he found himself being asked similar questions in a locked ward, one must realize good boys get to go home and bad boys should have their mail forwarded, so answer accordingly. As with the TSA and the Secret Service, psychiatrists don’t get paid to appreciate levity.

It seems odd, doesn’t it, that we’re given no choice about life on either end? Certainly, no one inquired whether we wanted to be here in the first place, and now that we are, the full power of the state will be brought to bear to ensure we stick around. Someone alert the Federalist Society and Planned Parenthood! From what I understand, both those organizations are foundationally concerned with bodily autonomy, but neither seems to have anything to say about the fact that the most meaningful form of bodily autonomy is denied us, with near-unanimous support from our fellow citizens. The only thing we seem to agree on more than that life is precious is that meat is mighty tasty.

It’s not surprising, in retrospect, that I had to leave America to learn life is in fact dirt cheap. This was more than two decades ago. I was in Cairo, hurtling through that loud, heaving megalopolis in a black-and-white cab, alternately groaning and holding my breath, terrified not for myself but for the pedestrians scampering across six lanes of warp-speed traffic. The system, if it can be called that, was to sprint as far as you could across the road and, when you had to pause for cars, which was often, to stand up as straight as possible between lanes and hold very still as vehicles whizzed past only inches away. This probably goes without saying, but not everyone made it. That day alone, I saw two or three bodies on the side of the road, covered in sheets. No one seemed in a hurry to identify or otherwise deal with them.   

Where did we get the idea, in America, that life is so precious anyway? We worship at the altar of the market economy, the simple overarching rule of which is supply and demand. Diamonds and gold are valuable not because they’re pretty, but because they’re rare. Life—human life—on the other hand, we’ve got plenty of. Way more than enough, in fact, if the general state of things, with eight billion of us and counting, is any indication.

But here in America, star-spangled Land of the Free, you are hardly free to end your life should you wish to. You’re going to live, whether you like it or not. And neither bemeasled patriots nor champions of women’s self-determination will come to your aid on that count.

On the marquee of a restaurant, a cartoon pig in a bib napkin grins as it gets ready to eat…a rack of pork ribs.

On a cardboard display in the dairy section of the grocery store, a smiling cartoon cow encourages you—practically begs you, in fact—to drink its breast milk.

The cognitive and moral dissonance such images should provoke—pork is so unspeakably delicious, even pigs want to eat it!—is nowhere in evidence in the culture as a whole. And the ubiquity of these images, once you start to notice them, inevitably raises the question of how they’re supposed to function. Is this some strip-mall version of the pagan impulse to honor the animals we eat through artistic rendition? Or is it just our old friend advertising doing what it does best—salving our conscience, laundering difficult truths until they come out sparkling clean and ready for retail?

Nobody but me seems preoccupied with such questions at the Maine Lobster Festival, and that’s hardly a surprise—everyone’s too busy rushing around in lobster shirts and lobster shorts and lobster hats (meaning hats with images of lobsters on them, as well as strange red hats with eyes and antennae designed to make the wearer look him- or herself like a lobster, sort of, and which are made available for sale by a gentleman with a small cart full of summertime kitsch no doubt manufactured by befuddled Chinese workers) and lobster socks and lobster pants and so on. More than one person is dressed in a full-body lobster suit, complete with claws and lobster-head hoodie. The summer residents in attendance, urbane types from Boston and New York who always stand out from the locals as though lit in neon, have lobster gear on, too, though in their case it looks expensive and probably designer and tends to be more tasteful (e.g. a light beach-cover type of dress in understated and symmetrical lobster print).

In “Consider the Lobster,” Wallace never mentions all the people who come to the festival dressed as the thing they intend to eat. Which seems odd to me—it’s precisely the kind of low-key, vexing detail that launched a thousand other footnotes in his work. Did it somehow escape his attention? Did he consider it not germane to the rest of the piece? Did it get axed in the (considerable, by Wallace’s account) back-and-forth between him and his editor at Gourmet?

My own attention is drawn mostly to the kids in their lobster clothes. Like everyone else, they’re just here to eat and have fun playing dress-up, but what if they clued into the fact that the thing they’re eating is also the thing they’re dressed up as? What if, as kids sometimes can, they saw clearly what the adults choose to turn away from? What if we were upending crates of live puppies into the World’s Largest Puppy Cooker? What story would we tell them about why that’s okay?

A few years ago, I worked on a television show set in the near future about climate change. Early in the process, we spent time tossing around ideas for episodes, and one concept some of us thought had potential was that of thousands of children, led by a Greta Thunberg-type personality, threatening to commit suicide en masse if the adults don’t get it together and actually meet the obligations of a climate agreement on time. We envisioned a kind of march, the kids moving from town to town and growing in numbers, until tens of thousands of them arrive at the latest installment of the fictional climate conference, ready to kill themselves.

And then what?

We never found out. One of the writers spoke up and said she couldn’t abide the thought that a real child, watching the show, might decide to kill herself. The rest of us instantly realized she was right, and the idea went in the trash can. But all this time later, I still think about it.

The lesson, for me, of middle age—that is to say, the cumulative lesson of the time that has passed since I first read “Consider the Lobster” and now—is that I know nothing and I am nothing. This likely makes me a lousy American, giving up my claim to a preeminent self like that. But it has also, counterintuitively, made life a little easier to take. Because if the unalterable fact of existence is confusion and cosmic irrelevance, it kind of takes the pressure off, doesn’t it? 

I have a tattoo on my right forearm that reads, “I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.” David Foster Wallace wrote that line, and it helps too, a little. As alternately a devotee and a critic of Wittgenstein, Wallace grappled with the difficulty of using language to bridge the chasm between two minds. Which is another way of saying Wallace wrote about loneliness, and more specifically the loneliness that can afflict us even when we’re surrounded by other people. Like, say, at a big, dumb, orgiastic slaughter disguised as a culinary festival. 

I’m not glad that Wallace died, but I think I understand why he did. I miss the work he’ll never write. I wish I could ask him what he thinks of all these people in lobster swag.  

I’ve done my best, over the years, to smother hope with a pillow while it sleeps, but despite all the ways in which it seems to have no place in how I think or feel, hope has proven harder to kill than bedbugs. You can find it, tenacious as weeds, in my novels. In one of them, the world comes to a definitive end, but life, and its worth, are somehow affirmed in the process. I didn’t put hope there, or even give it permission to show up. It just keeps crashing my nihilist party, over and over. 

And maybe that’s my real confession, and the simple, essential difference between me and Wallace: he died because he killed his hope, and I’m still alive because I’ve failed, thus far, to kill mine. 

So: I hope you will try not to cause more suffering than you have to, either directly or indirectly. I hope you will be merciful, in ways large and small. I hope you find your own suffering bearable, when it inevitably comes to perch. I hope there is a tenth circle of hell, a sub-basement too awful for Dante to mention, and I hope Cody Roberts of Wyoming spends eternity there. I hope the animals, and God, will forgive us. I hope. I hope. I hope.