If actress and talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell ever slims down
a lá Oprah Winfrey, she'll probably view it as a
victory. Not Richard Klein.
"I'll be bitterly disappointed," he says. "Rosie O'Donnell is the most beautiful woman on television."
Klein, a professor of French in Cornell's Department of Romance Studies, has written a new book, Eat Fat (Pantheon, 1996), that extols the virtues of fat and condemns America's obsession with getting rid of it. The book follows Klein's first, equally iconoclastic, book of a few years ago, Cigarettes Are Sublime.
Though his latest book is liberally sprinkled with humor, Klein said its intent -- to contextualize fat and fat-phobia -- is serious. "The humor arises from pointing out the madness, the insanity, with which we approach the fat on our hips and on our lips," he said recently in a telephone interview from Sarasota, Fla., where he spends half the year.
Eat Fat does not advocate obesity. But it says Americans' Herculean efforts to eradicate fat are more harmful, not just because they occupy so much of our time, money and energy -- but because they just don't work.
From 1980 to 1991, Klein points out, at the height of the diet and fitness craze, Americans grew 10 percent fatter; today, half of all American women wear a size 14 or larger.
"All the diet books, all the diagnoses and prescriptions . . . conclude with the same advice: eat less, move more," he writes. "And so people take control: they start to diet and they take up physical exercise, and within three or four years 95 percent of them are even fatter."
Meanwhile, as Americans keep getting fatter, their models keep getting thinner. By decorating women's magazines with painfully thin models like Kate Moss, Klein believes, the fashion industry is inviting ill health and low self-esteem.
Just maybe, he says, it is our fate to grow fatter. If so, all the models, low-fat cookbooks, exercise videos and diet drugs are doing is tempting fate. Or, more accurately, tempting fat.
Eat Fat calls for a "transvaluation" of fat into something beautiful and desirable. "Rather than working to get thin," he writes, "we should all be working to love fat." He goes on to show it's not such a far-fetched idea.
The book abounds with examples showing that "fat" as a noun may be scientifically measurable but as an adjective it is, and always has been, a relative -- amorphous -- term.
The ancient Venus of Willendorf and Buddha statues, the nudes of Rubens and Renoir demonstrate fat's long association with fertility, health and beauty. Only in the last 100 years, Klein writes, has it been so disparaged.
Even today, perceptions vary: studies show that African-American women are less repulsed by fat than white women. And pornographic magazines like Plumpers and Bulk Male graphically demonstrate that for many people, more is definitely better.
Klein gives his own personal take on fat's relativity this way: "There is fat and fat. If that fat had come from, say, the hips of Elizabeth Taylor, we might fall on our knees with gratitude for the pleasure it has given humanity."
Fat deconstructed
It may seem incongruous for a French professor to write a book on the cultural meaning of fat. But for Klein, it is a good fit -- and not just because he has struggled with weight all his life.
Klein, who received his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Cornell and Yale universities, respectively, is a deconstructionist theorist. As such, he has spent his career deciphering the cultural portent of objects -- be they cigarettes or pounds of fat.
"The common ground is Richard's critical questioning of established models or ideas," said Jonathan Culler, chair of Cornell's English department, "especially the way in which established ideas are connected. So the book on cigarettes doesn't contest that smoking is dangerous; it contests the failure to imagine that the danger, the relationship to death secreted by cigarettes might not be the deepest source of their allure."
Though the simple writing style of Klein's books contrasts with the jargonistic, often abstruse style of Diacritics, the theoretical journal he co-edits with Culler, the publications share the deconstructionist's yen for extracting multiple, even contradictory, meanings from simple objects.
"I think the breakthrough that made [Klein's] books possible was the discovery that you could elaborate complex positions without writing the complex sentences that we find in theoretical discourses," Culler said.
"Many of the insights and perceptions available in a journal like Diacritics never get translated into a style accessible to a larger audience," Klein said. "In my books I made a conscious effort to translate some of that diacritical argument into terms that people would be able to grasp."
The approach seems to be working. Fresh from an eight-city book tour, Klein said he encountered little hostility from the public -- though he did note that "telling people on the West Coast to eat fat is like preaching paganism to the pope."
Now, Klein is working on a second book for Pantheon, on the cultural meaning of jewelry. He hasn't lit a cigarette since finishing Cigarettes Are Sublime (which he says helped him quit), but he makes no promises about keeping down the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch, 200-pound frame.
"Losing weight is much harder than giving up smoking," Klein said.
Bon appetít.