Following The Lobster

Emma Jones is a writer based in the UK. She specialises in Art Writing and Non-Fiction and has been longlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize. Emma is Curatorial Assistant, Photography at Tate and holds an MA in writing from Royal Holloway, University of London.

As The Lobster is a creature that moults, regularly shedding its hardened exoskeleton to become a newly formed self, it is not surprising that we find it dressed in so many different guises. The Lobster transcends taxonomic ranks. It is, after all, a fiction. The Lobster is a synecdoche , a symbol of something far larger than itself.  This image has managed to overtake The Lobster’s living sisters and brothers, until it is as if these lobsters are fake, and it is the representation that is real. Let us follow this lobster, The Lobster, and see if we can find it in some of its many forms. 

We come across The Lobster in the flatlands of The Dutch Golden Age, at the beginnings of the world’s first consumer society. In the C17th the still life flooded the market with scenes of excess. Here is Jan Davidsz de Heem’s Still-life with Lobster (1684). The Lobster is surrounded by tumbling peaches, a large cut of ham and the finest silver. What a cacophony of feasting and delight! How at home it looks, among all those other signs of wealth and prosperity, its reddish tinge set against lemon peelings and glassy green grapes. Time is fixed here. There is no mention of the labour that brought the food to the plate. No bodies that cut the sugarcane, the hands that drew up the nets. Surrounded by food that does not spoil, The Lobster stares blankly out of the painting, smooth and hot as gold sweating in a palm. 

The Lobster understands what it means to have its body hardened into a form it cannot name. Until it has no history and is unrecognisable to itself. After all, The Lobster is not meant to be Lobster Pink. That orange-y blush across the shell is an alluring makeup. Although, like a blush, it does surface from within the body, responding to a rising heat. There is an old wives tale that The Lobster does not feel pain, but in the process of cooking it is known to hit its claws and scrabble against the metallic heat of the pot. The very term Lobster Pink suggests  this version of The Lobster, the dead version, is what we want The Lobster to be. It is the colour we see in the darkly comic PANTONE swatch 16-1520 TCX, Lobster Bisque. This is The Lobster we have named a colour after, as if this pink is its natural hue, rather than the far drabber uncooked version, its cold-blooded self. As Ann Sexton writes in her poem Lobster, we “take his perfect green body/and paint it red”. 

When The Lobster is dressed in Lobster Pink it is playful and fun. How frivolous this Lobster seems, how interested in immediate, material gratification. In fact, The Lobster can be too much of a good time – a joke about sunburnt skin leads to a kind of metamorphosis. Perhaps we lounged for too long on  The Lobster while on holiday. Filled with air, it sits on top of the still water of the swimming pool, occasionally hitting the sides but never making it under. This Lobster is a contemporary pop art icon: the subject of Philip Colbert's Lobstertropolis exhibition earlier this year,  it is dressed up in suits, smokes cigarettes, holds its claws up in the air in an act that could look either like an invitation, or a type of surrender. “The lobster is my materialistic alter ego” Colbert said in an interview promoting the show, a pertinent choice of symbol indeed. 

There are more sparse renditions. You could be forgiven, at first glance, for thinking that The Lobster in Charles Collins’ Lobster on a Delft Dish (1738) is alive. It is too large for the tiny blue and white porcelain it sits in, one of its giant claws drooping over the lip of the otherwise bare larder. One of The Lobster’s  legs is bent in a way that suggests a scuttling as if, at any moment, it could uncurl its tail and walk out of the frame. Only a single eye is visible, shiny black and as dark as the deep. The Lobster’s antennae ribbon outward, trying to find something to touch. The Lobster is a tactile creature, with thousands of tiny hairs protruding from its body-shell. In David Foster Wallace’s seminal essay on lobster sentience he quotes T.M. Prudden: “...although encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armour, the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin”. If The Lobster receives the world through its skin, then let us too move away from vision and go somewhere darker, somewhere where we aren’t able to use our eyes at all. 

The symbolic lobster, The Lobster with a capital T and a capital L, begins to emerge from another shell, and meets its living counterparts. It breaks out of the frame of the image and finds a means to touch. Here, finally allowed to dip under the water, the lobster cools. The plastic pink fades into dark and speckled brown. The body takes in its surroundings, a caress that engulfs every single surface. The taste of watery air. There is something buzzing across its shell. Fading further now, away from our attempts to name and hold it. And as it crawls off into the gloom, we are left alone, and  realise what it means to be looked at.