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Esprit Fall 2008 Home
Awards
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Contents
Front Cover:
gone
Inside Front Cover:
Metropolis
Windowed World
Sincerely, Holden Caulfield
From My Wanderings
Untitled
Meeting Marge
Volume IV
Mosaic Reflection
Happiness Is a Warm Gun
Untitled
Whitman's Words
Metacliché
Stagnation
no school today
"Where's the Beef?": A (Very Close) Critical Reading
Untitled
Cranberry Sauce
Cast
Broken Muses
Majestic
Astigmatic
Inside Back Cover:
Verticalité
Back Cover:
Sprite
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"Where's the Beef?": A (Very Close) Critical Reading
Eric Pencek
Despite its deceptive
surface simplicity, Wendy’s advertisingslogan-cum-poetic
masterwork “Where’s the Beef?” continues to daunt
critics and defy easy interpretation. By ending with an unanswered
question, “Where’s the Beef?” establishes itself in a
tradition of speculative poetry including Shelley’s “Mont
Blanc” and Yeats’s “The Second Coming”; yet by
including no content beyond the question itself, challenges the reader
to discover the context in which the question is asked.
The obvious Freudian dimensions implied by
“beef ” rely on the associations of “meat” with
the male member, as in the colloquial phrase, “playing hide the
salami.” Most such interpretations rely on the assumption that
the poem’s speaker is intended to be the old woman of the
advertisement, which assumption itself raises interesting questions
regarding the textuality of the recorded medium; granting this
assumption, the speaker’s advanced age suggests she has not had a
good piece of “meat” in some time. The depth of despair to
which the speaker’s sexual longings have driven her finds
expression by a clever play of vowels. In the text as presented, all
five vowels are the letter “e”; this draws attention to the
difference of the missing vowel eliminated from the contraction, the
“i.” The speaker (perhaps unconsciously) eliminates the
letter identified with the personal pronoun–significantly, in a
form of the verb “to be”–thus implying an
annihilation of her own existence; she has been entirely consumed in
her longing for “meat.”
“I” has in fact been replaced by an
apostrophe, which plays on the literary-rhetorical meaning of
“apostrophe” as a turning-aside from the primary subject of
an oration to address a secondary subject, suggesting that the
speaker’s all-consuming search for “beef ” has
distracted her from her primary purpose. Hints of that primary purpose
lie cleverly imbedded in the poem’s structure.
“Where’s the Beef?” consists of thirteen, fifteen, or
seventeen characters, depending on whether one counts letters only,
letters and punctuation, or both of these plus spaces; regardless of
how they are counted, the central character is “t,” the
cruciform shape of which suggests Christianity. The speaker is tacitly
implied to be a moral failure, having neglected the spiritual-religious
“center” of her life in favor of the carnal lusts of the
body.
This analysis hopefully answers the charges of
those critics who have thoughtlessly dismissed “Where’s the
Beef?” as “simplistic,” “commercial,” and
“not even a friggin’ poem.” More serious attention
must be paid to charges leveled by critics of the Vegetarian school,
who have accused “Where’s the Beef?” of dietary
insensitivity and promotion of a carnivocentrist ideology, but this is
not the place to respond to these. For now we can only say that the
koan-like simplicity of “Where’s the Beef?” permits a
multitude of interpretations beyond the one presented here, many of
which will, no doubt, serve to resolve the ideological controversies
which such a text invariably provokes in its readership. We must be
open to such a text, and respond to its invitation to seek in it - and
perhaps someday discover - our own beef. |
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