 The
sausage figures prominently in 19th century literature and was
present at the birth of the existential novel. Pig and pork references color
the writing of Dickens, Hamsun, Sartre, Camus, Bulgakov, and Dostoevsky,
shattering the comfy world of the self-satisfied bourgeois and replacing
it with something more, well, sausagey. These authors look beyond the taut
and regular skin of urban existence to an offaly underside that is ready to
burst through the seams at the slightest provocation. They are tormented
by the city, yet they cling to it like men possessed. Hopped up on coffee
and cigarettes, they crave a good meal. What better vehicle than the sausage
to convey their fevered dreams and nightmares? |
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Dickens, in Great Expectations, serves up his sausages in the
suburbs, but the city is never far off. Pip, the eager young protagonist,
visits the fortified home of that perfect bureaucrat, John Wemmick, who
excels at keeping his home life absolutely separate from his job as a
dodgy solicitor's clerk in the greasy heart of London. Wemmick assures
Pip that "the office is one thing and private life is another. When
I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into
the Castle, I leave the office behind me." (208) At home Wemmick
has set up his own version of The Good Life, including a vegetable
garden and a pig that, according to Pip, "might have been farther
off." (209) The same pig is turned into sausages not long afterwards
and Pip is invited to have a nibble:
"You look very much worried, and it would do you good to
have a perfectly quiet day with the Aged -- he'll be up presently -- and
a little bit of -- you remember the pig?"
"Of course, said I."
"Well; and a little bit of him. That sausage you toasted was
his, and he was in all respects a first rater. Do try him, if it is only
for old acquaintance sake."(373)
Wemmick's homemade sausages remind us comfortingly of his artisanal private
life, successfully shielded from the soullessness of the big city. But the
unnerving demise of the pig also evokes Wemmick's blood-chilling occupation
in the heart of London, where he is employed chiefly in securing the "portable
property" of condemned men for himself and his employer Mr. Jaggers.
Unsurprisingly, Jaggers' law office is located slap bang in the center of
the Smithfield slaughterhouse district where, as Pip notes, the streets
are "all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam." (165) |
 Knut
Hamsun, Hunger
Not content with suburban sausages, Knut Hamsun jumps right to the urban
butcher's shop where bangers of an unhealthful shade of pink push themselves
on the fevered imagination of the main character -- a young, highly strung
man who is voluntarily starving himself on the streets of Christiania
(the old name for Oslo), for no particular reason. He sustains himself
by writing delirious articles for the local newspaper for which the kindly
editor occasionally tosses him a few Kroner, and is gaily on his way to
the park to begin writing his masterpiece on Crimes of the Future when
he meets with the sausages:
In front of a butcher's shop there was a woman with a basket
on her arm, debating about some sausage for dinner; as I went past, she
looked up at me. She had only a single tooth in the lower jaw. In the
nervous and excitable state I was in, her face made an instant and revolting
impression on me -- the long yellow tooth looked like a finger sticking
out of her jaw, and as she turned toward me, her eyes were still full
of sausage. (7)
Having glimpsed the gaping horrors and suffocating routine that lies beneath
the cosy familiarity of the high street, our young man is quite thrown off
his game and accidentally pawns his only pencil, sabotaging another day's
work. Christiania, "that strange city no one escapes from until it
has left its mark on him," (3) torments and exhilarates the hero of
Hunger and it is only by escaping its confines on a cargo ship that
he regains his sense of proportion. |
 Jean-Paul
Sartre, Nausea
A similar fate awaits Sartre's hero, Antoine Roquentin, a historian who
is holed up in the stuffy town of Bouville (based on Le Havre) writing
a biography of long-dead local dignitary, the Marquis de Rollebon. Out
and about for the Sunday promenade, Roquentin's gaze is drawn to one of
the townsmen outside the butcher's window:
Standing against the window of Julien, the pork butcher's
shop, the young designer who has just done his hair, still pink, his eyes
lowered, an obstinate look on his face, has all the appearance of a voluptuary.
This is undoubtedly the first Sunday he has dared cross the Rue Tournebride.
He looks like a lad who has been to his First Communion. He has crossed
his hands behind his back and turned his face towards the window with
an air of exciting modesty; without appearing to see, he looks at four
small sausages shining in gelatine, spread out on a bed of parsley. (46)
The sausages are just the start of it. Roquentin, beset by dissolving,
palpitating chestnut trees and visions of pimples that split open to reveal
laughing eyeballs, soon finds he can't write another word about M. de
Rollebon and is completely suffocated by Bouville, which has something
distinctly sausagey about it.
I am afraid of cities. But you mustn't leave them. If you go
too far you come up against the vegetation belt. Vegetation has crawled
for miles towards the cities. It is waiting. ...They let plants grow between
the gratings. Castrated, domesticated, so fat they are harmless. They
have enormous, whitish leaves which hang like ears. When you touch them
it feels like cartilage, everything is fat and white in Bouville because
of all the water that falls from the sky. I am going back to Bouville.
How horrible!
Before long he packs up and runs screaming for the brighter, steelier
city of Paris, where we hope for but don't expect him to find contentment. |
 Albert
Camus, L'Etranger
Like Sartre's hero, Camus' Meursault is relieved to get back to his city
of Algiers, yet seems maddeningly hemmed in by it. The white flesh in
the red earth dug up for his mother's funeral outside the city is reminiscent
of the cartilage in Sartre's account of Bouville:
Then there was the church and the villagers on the sidewalks,
the red geraniums on the graves in the cemetery, Perez fainting (he crumpled
like a rag doll), the blood red earth spilling over Maman's casket, the
white flesh of the roots mixed in with it, more people, voices, the village,
waiting in front of a cafe, the incessant drone of the motor, and my joy
when the bus entered the nest that was Algiers and I knew that I was going
to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours.
Throw in a sausage and the reader's sense of security in this urban nest
is immediately shaken, replaced by an air of foreboding. To be extra sure,
in L'Etranger Camus makes his a blood sausage. Meursault the impossibly
low-key bureaucrat is invited round to the thuggish Raymond's house for
some blood sausage and wine:
We went upstairs and I was about to leave him when he said,
'I've got some blood sausage and some wine at my place. How about joining
me?' I figured it would save me the trouble of having to cook for myself,
so I accepted. He has only one room too, and a little kitchen with no
window. Over his bed he has a pink-and-white plaster angel, some pictures
of famous athletes, and two or three photographs of naked women.
Before long, Meursault is in deep with Raymond and murdering an Arab
on the beach in the midday sun. |
 Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Crime & Punishment
By all of these accounts, the sausage has an unsettling effect, especially
on the jangled nerves of the sensitive young man about town. Pink and boastful,
cheerfully overfed and sure of itself, its underside neatly concealed beneath
the taut regularity and neat twists of its surface, the sausage captures
the artificial splendour of the bourgeois city. Crammed with offal, ready
to burst, adulterated with sawdust, the sausage has a cheeky existence that
seems ready to overflow its boundaries and reveal sinister underpinnings
and hypocrisies. Poised ready to overflow the neat and orderly existence
bestowed upon it by the sausage machine it points beyond the orderly flowerpots
of the town square toward something chaotic, intestinal, and dark.
The handsome megalomaniac Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment,
wakes up after a troubled sleep and the first thing he wants is sausage:
'Here, Nastasya, please take this,' he said, feeling in his
pocket (he had slept in his clothes) and pulling out a handful of copper
coins, 'and go and buy me a roll. And a bit of sausage, too, whatever's
cheapest, at the pork butcher's.' (29)
The housemaid, Nastasya, talks him into some cabbage soup instead but,
regardless, he is soon out killing the old moneylender and her halfwit
daughter Lizaveta in cold blood. Admittedly the sausage connection is
here tenuous at best, but the grip of the Petersburg summer on Raskolnikov's
sensitive young mind captures well the sense of suffocation of the highly
strung young man in the city:
It was terribly hot out, and moreover it was close, crowded;
lime, scaffolding, bricks, dust everywhere, and that special summer stench
known so well to every Petersburger who cannot afford to rent a summer
house -- all at once these things unpleasantly shook the young man's already
overwrought nerves. (4) |
 Mikhail
Bulgakov, The Master & Margarita
Pip, Roquentin, Meursault, Hamsun's nameless hero, and Raskolnikov all
feel the city pressing on them and intensifying their highly strung natures.
And all of them, with the possible exception of Raskolnikov, have unsettling
encounters with sausage. Leaving the city for the countryside provides
only temporary solace, and the rural is invariably a hinterland that is
quickly unsatisfying or plain disturbing. Only the taut sausage skin of
the urban environment can keep this untamed and oozing void in its place,
albeit on a superficial level that our protagonists quickly penetrate,
getting themselves into all manner of trouble.
In Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, events take a Satanic turn
in the guise of a gentleman-magician by the name of Woland who wreaks havoc
on Moscow. Woland, who turns out to be the devil himself, pays a visit to
the home of the extremely hungover theatre manager Stepa Likhoyedev and
invites him to dine on small pan of sausages before casting a spell that
transports him instantaneously to the seaside resort of Yalta, fifteen hundred
kilometers away.
'I cannot,' put in the new arrival, 'understand how he ever
came to be manager' --his voice grew more and more nasal--he's as much
a manager as I am a bishop.'
'You don't look much like a bishop, Azazello,' remarked the cat, piling
sausages on his plate.
'That's what I mean,' snarled the man with red hair and turning to Woland
he added in a voice of respect: 'Will you permit us, messire, to kick
him out of Moscow?'
Like the others, Bulgakov points to something gone wrong beneath the
surface of the city, a chaos bordering on madness that has crept ominously
into the daily life of the capital, threatening to erupt at any moment,
especially if helped along by Woland's trickery.
|
 John
Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Finally, it remains to mention the hot dog as a particularly adulterated
form of the sausage that has crept into more recent literature, underscoring
the idea that we are on a road to hell of one sort or another. In A
Confederacy of Dunces, Ignatius J. Reilly's stint as a Rabelaisian
hot dog salesman is just one of his many bullseye attempts to turn his
hometown of New Orleans upside down, exposing its more farcical elements
along the way. Arriving at the hot dog magnate's headquarters, Ignatius
ventures to sample the wares:
'May I select my own?' Ignatius asked, peering down over the
top of the pot. In the boiling water the frankfurters swished and lashed
like artificially colored and magnified paramecia. Ignatius filled his
lungs with the pungent, sour aroma. 'I shall pretend that I am in a smart
restaurant and that this is the lobster pond.'
While bent on its destruction, Ignatius is at one with his city and recalls
his one attempt to leave it with unmitigated horror:
'Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside
of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.'
|
 Conclusion
As Ignatius reminds us, aside from all this yawning chaos there is something
very tasty and comforting about the sausage. In the sausage imagery there
is an attraction to the civilized stomach gurgles of the bourgeois dining
in his comfortable city dwelling or cafe. So what, really, is the role
of the sausage in these diverse novels? Is it put there on purpose or
are the authors just hungry? Some of them, it is certain, existed on coffee
and cigarettes, and could have done with a good meal to settle their nerves.
After all, you do not write a novel like Hunger on a full stomach.
Hamsun, who purportedly cured himself of consumption by riding on the
top of a train from Oslo to Bergen taking in large gulps of air, was literally
starving in Oslo in 1879-80 and in 1886, the period of his life from which
many of the experiences in the book are drawn.
While the sausages in the butcher's shop window are disturbing, they
also suggest something eminently desirable. When the hero says goodbye
to Christiania, "where the windows of the homes all shone with such
brightness," he is already feeling nostalgic. The sense of horror
is gone and the city is safe and warm without being dangerously mundane
or shallow. While these writers bring into sharp focus the hypocrisies
of modern living, the gnawing meaninglessness of existence, their angst,
one feels, is nothing that a nice girlfriend and a home-cooked meal wouldn't
cure. While the sausage imagery presents an immanent critique of the self-satisfied
and the superficial, it also talks back to the author, counseling, "eat
me, and everything will be OK." Makes you want to put down your espresso
and order some bangers and mash. It really does.
|
The
sausage figures prominently in 19th century literature and was
present at the birth of the existential novel. Pig and pork references color
the writing of Dickens, Hamsun, Sartre, Camus, Bulgakov, and Dostoevsky,
shattering the comfy world of the self-satisfied bourgeois and replacing
it with something more, well, sausagey. These authors look beyond the taut
and regular skin of urban existence to an offaly underside that is ready to
burst through the seams at the slightest provocation. They are tormented
by the city, yet they cling to it like men possessed. Hopped up on coffee
and cigarettes, they crave a good meal. What better vehicle than the sausage
to convey their fevered dreams and nightmares?
