All my life I have despised and taken pains to avoid all contact with that villainous emulsion known to the world as mayonnaise. Stinky, eggy, gooey, unholy goddam mayonnaise. The name itself disgusts me, the suffix -naise in particular, somehow; it suggests a festering or putrefying, a rank emanation, something unwholesome and baleful. To me, anyway. In fact I do much more than despise the stuff, for even a word as seemingly uncompromising as despise can be located on a continuum where the difference between revulsion and delectation, though large, is only one of degree. No, I’m off the continuum with mayonnaise. I’m off the whole grid. Mayonnaise is a food event horizon for me. Across its bourne light and motion are annulled; the world is unmade.
Once, at the company I used to toil for, finding myself as I occasionally did in a meeting room with a number of other people trying to initiate a project of no conceivable interest or value to the company, or to any possible company, or to any imaginable living human being–moreover one that every person in the room knew had not a prayer of surviving the next 48 hours–a person of higher rank than myself was moved in the guise of offering a helpful analogy or precedent to recall her tenure as the mayonnaise product-line manager of a well-known condiment and salad-dressing purveyor. ”In those days,” she said, “I ate, slept, and breeeaaathed mayonnaise.” (Emphasis in the original, Jack.) I am unable to tell you what happened right after that. I came to myself about 25 minutes later, trembling in the middle of the parking lot. My shirt and one eyebrow were gone.
Mayonnaise poisons my joy and floods my consciousness with abjection. Julia Kristeva begins her book Powers of Horror, which she may as well have titled Powers of Mayo, this way:
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exhorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but cannot be assimilated.
Hear, hear. And think about it. You are smearing this looming, inassimilable shit on your very sandwiches, people. You have made this foul and funky glop, redolent of hellish gasses and Stygian mists, the reigning bread-moistening agent of Western civilization.
And on top of all this, I have even found mayonnaise a burdensome drag on my otherwise goggle-eyed admiration for the actor Whitman Mayo, who created the character of Grady on Sanford and Son–and played him, gentle readers, right into America’s heart.
I bring all this up because there happens to be a hair-raising episode involving mayonnaise in Pynchon’s Against the Day. I have decided that reproducing that passage here is as close as I’m ever going to get, as far as mayonnaise is concerned, to a G. Gordon Liddy-style ritual of homeopathic fear-mastery. Pynchon’s character Kit Traverse, at this point in the novel turning up in Ostend, Belgium, and having recently left a café that was “like a museum of mayonnaise,” presently finds himself in the Usine Régionale à la Mayonnaise (the Regional Mayonnaise Works). When he arrives the machinery is idle and the place appears deserted. Then suddenly everything grinds into operation–but still no sign of a single human being. So here we go. If I break off before the end, something has happened and I’m probably out in the street stripped to the waist.
He didn’t exactly start running, but his step might have quickened some. By the time he had reached the Clinique d’Urgence pour Sauvetage des Sauces, for the resurrection of potentially failed mayonnaise, at first all he noticed was the floor getting a little slippery–next thing he knew, he was on his back with his feet in the air, in less time than it took to figure out that he’d slipped. His hat had been knocked off and was sliding away on some pale semiliquid flow. He felt something heavy and wet in his hair. Mayonnaise! he seemed now actually to be sitting in the stuff, which was a good six inches, hell make that closer to a foot deep. And, and swiftly rising! Kit had blundered into flash-flooding arroyos slower than this. Looking around, he saw that the mayonnaise level had already climbed too high up the exit door for him even to pull it open, assuming he could even get that far. He was being engulfed in thick, slick, sour-smelling mayonnaise.
Trying to clear his eyes of the stuff, slipping repeatedly, he half swam, half staggered toward where he remembered having seen a window, and launched a blind desperate kick, which of course sent him flat on his ass again, but not before he’d felt a hopeful splintering of glass and sashwork, and before he could think of a way to reach the invisible opening to climb through, the mayonnaise-pressure itself, like a conscious beast seeking escape from its captivity, had borne him through the broken window, launching him out into a great vomitous arc which dropped him into the canal below.
Phew.
