Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg (review)

Abstract

folk practices with cutting-edge research” (183). While noting that Joyce found Russell’s concerns for food security in times of war and emphasis on older farming techniques to be tainted with nationalist mythologizing, Martell also acknowledges Russell’s agriculturally informed expertise. In contrast to Russell, Joyce’s characters enjoy imported “weak tea” (195) and “sugared white bread,” thumbing their nose at “Revitalist milk drinkers” like Russell. Martell presents an astute reading of how Ulysses’s infamous penchant for gustatory, abject bodily profusions—in all its rule-breaking, defiant splurge of abundantly inclusive populations—should be read as an example of defying social control to rewrite famine scarcity as profundity. Her analysis of the “‘Oxen’ episode” (202) keenly illustrates how “Joyce triangulates food, birth, and death in an arrangement that positions sterility as slaughter and carnality as life-giving” by using Thomas Carlyle as an ironic speaker who imbues images of vegetables with sterility in contrast to the “red, raw, bleeding” beef fed to expectant mothers. This scene is then related to Odysseus’s sacrifice of divine cattle in defiance of Zeus, allowing Martell to show how these strategies rewrite Irish defiance of the British “gods of empire” (203). Farm to Form’s coda, “From a Morning World,” playfully combines scenes of milking with homages to modern-world pagan presences that appear in multiple authors’ texts, suggesting alternating energies of loss and promise. Using Joyce’s homophones mourning and morning as touchstones, Martell reminds us that the fraught modernist struggles with industrial food production, control, and farming resilience are poignantly relevant today. Indeed, the cultural and literary revelations within Farm to Table provide important insight for contemporary readers as we reckon with the capitalist forces mandating farming production goals amidst the threat of global climate change and food scarcity.