Abstract
Jean O’Malley Halley’s The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows: Meat Markets is an astonishing book, both in its meticulously researched presentation of the origins and development of the American beef industry, and in its approach to that subject through trauma memoir. If Upton Sinclair famously “aimed for the public’s heart, and by accident . . . hit it in the stomach” (p. 130) with The Jungle, Halley’s work continues the tradition of powerful exposé while achieving his original goal of moving her readers on an emotional level. She does this by interspersing archival research about beef, the Irish famine and subsequent waves of emigration that sent her ancestors across the Atlantic, and the conquest of what is now the Western United States, with the affective archives of her own memories. And because the memories she explores are those of trauma, the entire book is shaped as a trauma narrative, shaped by the violence Halley experienced as a girl and that with which she and her abusers were surrounded on the cattle ranch where she grew up. Like the memories, which loop and repeat around barely representable experiences of sexual abuse and exposure to cruelty, the story of cattle becoming capital circles back on itself to fold in such layers as migration, race, conquest, and dehumanization. From the outset, Halley explains,
I use repetition in this book as a means to express trauma. In my memoir writing, repetition happens at the sentence level, the same words said two or three times in two or three sentences again and again . . . trauma often grips the survivor in waves of repetitive experience. (p. 5)
The result is an almost incantatory prose, as gripping of the reader as the stories it tells were of its writer.
Halley’s experimental writing charts a new course for study of the social that reads and represents affective experience. As the co-editor with Patricia Ticinto Clough of the widely influential The Affective Turn (2007), Halley works at the cutting edge of a methodology that takes into consideration the network of body, feelings, and intellect that exist not only in the subjects we study, but in the authors of studies as well. 1 Prominently inspired by Foucault, Halley and other scholars of affect who work in the social sciences and humanities register the workings of power at its most invisible—and hence most forceful. They build on his practice of scouring the archive for evidence of social meaning and change by incorporating into such work their own, personal archival material including memoir, diaries, and memory poems—materials that can be understood as an affective archive in the sense that, given the vast trove of individual memories we each have, and the even greater gaps between them, writing memories into evidence is an act of self-archiving that, when incorporated into more traditional research, reveals social meaning that has long remained hidden in the shadow of method. How is one to objectively observe, or to quantify, that which has been thoroughly normalized, as Foucault would put it—and therefore escapes inquiry? Halley puts it thus: “even at a cellular level in my family, we became gendered and sexual beings through violence. It was like water to a fish, so close we could not see it, know it, realize it, speak it” (p. 17). There is no external record of this state of being, no psychologist’s notes or witness accounts on which to draw. There is, however, an internal, psychic record, and this is what Halley records in her book.
Halley frames her self-portrait of “girl-consciousness” with a rigorously researched analysis of the beef industry, in part because it is the context of her childhood and in part because it forms a backdrop to American history and identity. Today, 130,000 cattle and 7,000 calves are slaughtered every day in the United States; the average life span of a beef cow is slightly over a year; cows are, daily, skinned while alive and conscious; workers spend their days stunning, “shackling,” and slicing up cows’ bodies hour after hour, a system of slaughter that regularly puts them in harm’s way—and people regularly take this violence into their bodies in the most intimate recesses of familial life, the table and home. That this aspect of daily existence, for many, is a source of indifference means that cows and humans are bound in a normalized relationship of violence. As Halley demonstrates, beef consumption is practiced in such a way that it sends shivers of violence out into the world yet remains a socially acceptable act. And the “parallel lives” that Halley describes, between women and cows, are similar in that both are predicated on forms of violent masculinity; she explains that “[b]oth the story of U.S. beef and my childhood illuminate the defining and disciplining of contemporary life” (p. 16), and therefore her history of the meat industry underscores and often mirrors her personal history of trauma.
As a companion narrative to her memories, then, the story of beef bears national scars. Halley traces the violence that erupted westward after a shift in ranching strategy, from the early colonial practice of letting cows run wild and hunting them to that of herding them as capital. Herding, unlike hunting, demanded much more space and Halley explores the complex meaning of the “frontier-as-cow” as a site of profound violence. From genocidal acts of conquest to those of massive scale animal slaughter and the racialized labor practices that attend such work today, the history of beef records the expansion of the geographic frontier as well as the frontier of race in that “the frontier-as-cow made a border between the supposedly civilized and those deemed uncivil” (p. 26). Halley’s history and assessment of the beef industry touches on every aspect of the industry from the fearful efficiencies of slaughter and meatpacking that have landed beef at the center of the American diet to the ripple effect that cow consumption has had on agriculture more broadly. No longer grassland creatures, cows are now fed mostly corn [“the plant that one might argue has colonized us all” (p. 57)] and, until the process was recently found to spread mad cow disease, “rendered” cow products, which meant that cows literally ate cow in a closed loop of capital (some other forms of rendered animal products are still used as cattle feed).
The conversion of beef from sustenance to capital is thus the essence of the American beef story, as Halley explains in spectacular style. Indeed, not all of us, whether scholars or journalists, can do the kind of work that Halley does. One must be not only fearless in one’s investigations; one must be a beautiful writer—and this Halley is. In writing about beef, she observes that “beef cow bodies compile cow populations mattering only for the matter—meat—that their lives produce by living. Cows literally embody capital” (p. 14), thus playing on multiple levels of signification to etymologically cinch together meat and matter, cattle and capital. The Oxford English Dictionary reveals that “meat” long referred, literally, to nourishment of any kind whether grain, vegetable, or animal and that, figuratively, this “meat” was also used to signify nourishing matter in the abstract. Similarly, the word “cattle” derives directly from the word “capital”; it was precisely the establishment of bovine animals as objects of wealth that prompted the word “cattle” to appear in its historical adjacency to “capital.” One could go on to observe, for example, that “capital” can be traced in its next iteration after “cattle” to the word “chattel,” a linguistic history that further reinscribes the violence of capital, but the point is this: how often can a literary critic dig into a single sentence of academic prose in this manner? 2
If Halley’s prose is compelling when she writes about the history of beef, it is visceral in the passages of memory in which she comes to grips with the violence through which “girl consciousness” is produced. In her analysis of the ways in which the historical narrative of a penetrating masculinity based on conquest plays out on the bodies of girls and women in the home, she delves into her memories of her father and grandfather. She observes of her grandfather Clarke that
Clarke, Clarke it seemed to me was simply cruel. Clarke was cruelty out of nowhere. Or maybe the cruelty came from the world. Maybe the world rotted Clarke. Maybe the job of living was too much for him and he gave into killing instead. I don’t know. (p. 82)
Halley’s argument that gender becomes manifest through acts of male violence on female bodies, and similarly that her Irish family became “white” by choosing racial privilege, and hence racism, over economic solidarity with African Americans, is all tucked into the “world” that “rotted Clarke.” So when Clarke and his son enact violence and violation on the most vulnerable members of the family, little girls, these acts are socially freighted even as they are acts of cruel individuals.
Halley makes this confluence terrifyingly clear in a recurrent memory that surfaces throughout the book in the pattern of the cyclical repetitions of trauma. The memory is of her father forcing his two very young daughters to stand in a cold garage in the middle of the night while he takes her sister’s beloved cat, “all black, soft and sleek,” and slaughters it, telling the girls: “I am a man” (p. 24). The gutted cat reappears in the course of Halley’s narrative of beef, linking as it does the site of trauma with that of masculinity, and the act of slaughter that is normalized on a cattle ranch with deeply intimate harm in the home. This primal scene lays bare the effects of normalized violence whether against humans or animals—it invokes the effects of slaughter on human workers who enact gutting day after day in repetitions powered by the conversion of cattle into capital. As Norman K. Denzin (2013) notes in his reading of this scene, the father’s declaration, “I am a man,” means “[I am] a man who kills animals” (p. 5). His gendered identity is predicated on violence, on slaughter. After a repetition of the memory, Halley writes, “Real men could never be submissive, never be entered, but only actively move forward, entering others, entering the conquered” (p. 27), and the intimate corollary to the history of national conquest is the inscription of “real” masculinity on the bodies of girls and women within the realm of the family. This is not to say that Halley suggests a purely causal relationship between violence against animals and sexual violence, although in her own experience the two are implicated in one another. Through her titular concept of parallel lives, Halley allows readers to see violence toward animals and girls as sometimes causal, sometimes mutually reflective, and sometimes co-extensive. The link between the two, though, remains a gender narrative whereby “being a man meant rupturing the other, bursting through barriers of skin and flesh in violence, all too often sexual. To some extent I think this reflected manhood in the larger normative culture” (p. 88). The same men in her story who tear apart the bodies of cats and cows, violate the bodies of little girls. Hence, in her chapter about “The Production of Girl Life and the Lives of Girls,” Halley shows how the encryption of violence into American masculinity works to normalize “girl-experience” as a state of “no-longer-being-embodied. Instead my form became the surface for the pleasure of another” (p. 81).
In terms of method, it is noteworthy that Halley presents a distinct formal approach to the inscription of family trauma within national violence. She does this by clearly delineating the voices in which she writes so that they tell two distinct narratives that play off of one another, and the most prominent way in which she does this is to record her memory passages in a different font than those that present her scholarly research. The simple, blocky font of the memories echo their rawness, as though the letters are as stripped down as the stories they tell, while the slightly more ornate script of the research flows around the harsh fragments. This stylistic choice also enables the reader to take in, in a glance, the path of each page as when, for example, a blocky scrap stands apart on the page: “And he took the cat. I am a man he told us” (p. 29), and Halley goes on to observe in the other font,
Really, everyone is always transformed, always changed by their encounter with the edge of themselves. And when it comes to cows, they actually do change us as we encounter them. They are the animal edge, the frontier that we incorporate into us. We devour them and they transform our bodies anew. The cows quite literally become something more, something else. They become us. (p. 29)
By presenting her own story in free-standing passages upon which she makes relatively little commentary, Halley offers it as evidence alongside that of her scholarly research, evidence that the quotidian slaughter of animals functions as a bullet hole that sends slivers and shards of pain along the pane of the social—to invoke one of Halley’s many guiding metaphors, this one about how violence and trauma ripple like “the tiny cracks in glass that surround the small hole made by a bullet. The hole itself is empty, clear open space. The cracks simply, gently, mark the glass, remaining in it, of it and distinct, all at once” (p. 5).
The interlocking forms of manhood and “being-girl” that Halley describes have been explored, as she notes, by radical feminists dating back to the 1970s who understood violence to be “at the heart of gendered power” (p. 88). Halley substantiates her own analysis of gender and power with a trauma memory that, symptomatically, exceeds language and representation. Trauma theorists Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1994) refer to trauma as a “phantom” housed in a “crypt” of the psyche, and Cathy Caruth (1995), whose work Halley invokes, argues that trauma is not “a possessed knowledge, but instead possesses, at will, the one it inhabits” (p. 6). Trauma makes for scant evidence. By drawing on her affective archive, though, Halley renders the haunting, unknowable content of trauma as such. While the scene with the cat repeats in the elliptical pattern of trauma flashbacks, she presents as well another traumatic memory that exceeds representation: “I remembered but I cannot take the memory out of my pocket. I remembered but I cannot show you the memory and say, see, here it is. I have nothing to show, only vagueness” (p. 86). However, by harnessing the force of affect, she conveys through feeling what she cannot illustrate through evidence. Her construction of girl-being around silence, around that which is unspeakable and invisible, captures its traumatic essence. Moreover, the memory that does not exist is yet remembered, and the dissociation between the act of remembering and the material of memory serves as a crucial means of gaining leverage on trauma in Halley’s memoir sections. Her clear claim that “I remember” enables her to establish agency in her narrative and to conclude her book as a survivor for whom trauma “sometimes, pushes life forward” (p. 160). Through her ability to remember, her use of knowledge that resides in the body and in very real, representable feelings, Halley ultimately tells her story cathartically and as an activist enabling her readers to see long hidden, covert forms of violence enacted upon humans and animals alike. Like Halley, her readers “learn to see what had happened on the other side of the story we had called reality” (p. 159), and that is precisely what makes The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows: Meat Markets the “crack in the wall of power” (p. 160) that she hopes it to be and that it in fact is.