listen.This is an expanded transcript of a talk broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on January 30th and February 2nd 2000, as the last in a series of four 'philosophical adventures in the everyday' entitled Rough Magic. The programmes were produced by Tim Dee.
listen.
So great a sweetness flows
I shake from head to foot.
W.B. Yeats, 'Friends'.
The most magical objects of all are objects that do something to us, and seem to have their own lives, even if they are also lives that we can control. Perhaps all such objects are things that we dream of ultimately making part of us, or dream actually already are. And perhaps the most magical of these objects are those which we can actually incorporate and make part of ourselves, in the process effecting changes in them and in us.
Edible objects are of this kind, though we would be wrong to think that we only ingest actual objects. There is an imaginary form of swallowing up and incorporation for every object that is important to us, for every object that we think of as amenable or pleasurable. We appear to be the kind of beings for whom a pleasurable or important object must always be in some sense also edible.
Sweets constitute a whole lifestyle, a whole folklore of their own. Everybody remembers the collective mythology attaching to sweets from their own childhood, and everybody has their own personal mythology for eating sweets. Adverts often focus on these individuating methods for consuming particular sweets, and incommunicable pleasures in eating them, suggesting that a sweet is not so much an object, as a whole repertoire of eating techniques ('how do you eat yours?').
Doing magic is a way of insisting that the world is not neutral, but pulsing with human meaning and value. Magic - the assumption of our power over the world and its over us - adds weight and density and colour and taste to the two-dimensional world disclosed to mere understanding or calculation of ends. And there is no form of value, no taste, more important than the value of the sweet.
What is sweetness? Sweetness is not just one taste among others, not just a good taste. It is the the taste of goodness as such, the measure of edibility. Sweetness is the good of eating. If you could taste what tasting tasted like, it would be sweet. This is why sweetness is always more than taste. Being the essence of taste makes sweetness also gratuitous, luxurious. It also makes it dangerous, disallowed, disreputable.
Sweets and sweetness are the essence of eating, and therefore the opposite of it, too. This is why we do not want to swallow sweetness, because we know that swallowing is its end. If sweetness has evolved in plants and fruits in order to encourage consumption, just as sexual attractiveness is there to honey copulation, then in humans sweetness is perverse, turned aside from its seemingly proper end or purpose. We want to keep sweetness apart from the vulgarity of hunger and the purposes of nutrition.
We seek to detain sweetness. That is why so many sweets are designed to be held in the mouth - or, in a perverse reversal of the perversity of the sweet, to melt, yearningly and disappointingly on the tongue. Sweetness is identified with the excess of taste over aliment, with prolonging itself. In learning how to make sweetness last, children learn on their tongues the lesson of deferment upon which all cultural life is based.
'Don't play with your food', adults say to children. But sweets are made to be playthings, protests against the good citizenship of eating routines. Perhaps this is also why we treat sweets as playthings. Sweets are things that we do things to. We want to handle them before we commit them our tongues, where we play with them anew. Are there any more elaborately erotic coverings than the wrappers of sweets, waxy, crackling, filmy-wrinkled? Sweets systematically break the gustatory rule that once something is in your mouth it must stay there until it is swallowed, since, once in your mouth, food has already become a kind of excrement. But sweets are meant to go in and out. Sweets are the only kind of food that we are allowed to see the results of eating. They give us access to an otherwise most secret and invisible process, the proces of rendering something part of the outside world part of us. The multi-layered lolly or lozenge encourages us to keep taking it out to see what colour it has changed to, in a striptease for the tastebuds. Chewing gum is never swallowed at all, and is therefore perhaps the most essential sweet. Once we have had the sweetness from it, the substance of the gum is a mere nothing, which can be dispensed with.
Sweets are of course beyond words. All sweets are gobstoppers. When we eat sweets, we say `mmm', the sound of speech's superseding, the replacing of speaking by sweetness. Or perhaps it is truer to say that sweets are the rivals of speech. They encourage the production of an alternative language, one made up of slurps and slobbers, suckings, dribbles, pops and crunches; all of this an oozing, elemental anti-language that is most of the time kept inaudible, or disciplined into speech. Sweets let us hear all the things you are never allowed to hear in the radio voice. Sweet talk is also, of course, babytalk, an infant and infantilising language, which is on the border between eating and speaking, and lets us hear eating, and eat meaning. The words gum and gobstopper cram and glue the mouth like the things they name. The words jelly and lolly and lollipop let the tongue that pronounces them loll and lick. Even the grown-up names of sweetmakers and sweetowners become suffused with magical, nestling comfort. You could never, I think, take a philosopher called Cadbury seriously (I know, I know, saying this in public means I am bound straight away to hear of, or worse, from one), but if a Cadbury should ever run for prime minister, they would be unopposable. To hear these words on the lips of a grown-up, or to hear them in one's own mouth, is to be in two places, or two times at once; to surrender to the indignity and bliss of infancy. All magical objects are objects out of time. Sweets hold time up, and therefore are intensely anachronistic. They always belong to our past. They help us last.
In fact, sweets may be beyond words, but the language of sweets is a vital part of their point and power. The names of sweets often hint at sublimity or transcendence; 1960s sweets in particular suggest experiences of cosmic reach: Milky Way, Mars, Galaxy.
Sweetness is so important to us, that it generates rituals and protocols. Sweets are surrounded by complex rules and prescriptions, the infallible signs of the presence of magic. They are intensely private, the stuff of dark and unmasterable addictions and obsessions; and also, for children at least, intensely social. Sweets function as the universal medium of exchange, a kind of manna or mana, an all-purpose magical stuff for building and cementing alliances, marking transitions and passages, focussing and enacting antagonisms.
Sweet-making and sweet-eating are closely and mysteriously associated with the arts of magical picturing and effigy. We eat things we like the look of; teddies, bunnies and gingerbread men. Themed birthday cakes give us the opportunity of eating ourselves: the Arsenal supporter, or the Spice Girls fan eats their loved object, and and encounters anew its sweetness. This is as it should be, for sweet things really do not taste of themselves; they taste of our own pleasure in them. We also eat things that we fear and loathe, but wish to neutralise by consuming: spiders, snakes, insects, dinosaurs; even, in a bizarre, unaccountable but stubbornly persistent tradition, mechanical tools. It is as though we were celebrating our capacity to render the whole world fit for our consumption; there is nothing, we seem to brag, that our eating cannot make sweet.
The shape and texture of a sweet, its characteristics as an object, are vital supplements to its taste. Why does it matter so much that a kola cube is crunchy, that a walnut whip has the striations it does, that a Milky Bar is so snappy-thin, that a Toblerone is, as the advertisement has it, `triangular chocolate'? Why does the shape of a sweet matter so much? I know now. It is because sweets are there to have their shapes transformed. As Willy Wonka and Alice knew, their meaning is pure metamorphosis. Through sweets, we enact the experiencing of merging and dissolution. Sweets are magical objects, because their shape is there to be transformed, to transform themselves under our touch. They are subtle, paradoxical, alchemical, polymorphous substances. Sweets are designed to suggest matter in extreme or ultimate conditions: iron-hard in the case of the aniseed ball, clinging and viscous in the form of fudge, fizzy and explosive like sherbert, clinging and elastic like toffee, spun and insubstantial like candy floss. They are as heavy as mud and as light as air, savagely hot and tooth-jarringly chill. We like sweets that wrap up holes or bubbles, because they let us taste vacancy. They can be dryer than the dry, and wetter than wetness can be. Their colours are like nothing ever seen in nature and represent a victory over it. No wonder cartoons are used to sell sweets, because sweets are the cartoons of eating experience. But sweets don't only represent matter in extremity; they also enact the promiscuous coupling of different substances. The very stickiness of sweets is a triumph over distinctions and codes of polite behaviour designed to keep things apart and in their proper places. They are what the philosopher Michel Serres has called mingled bodies: jelly beans, dolly mixtures, baked alaska, liqueur chocolates. It is not for nothing that the makers of sweets bear the noble name of confectioners, literally those who make things come together.
Sweets mean and enact flowing, dissolving, merging, metamorphosis. Why so many bombs, so many detonations in the names of sweets, why so many teasing deceits and promises of amazement and teeming transmogrifications in their manufacture, if we are not really always saying to sweets and they to us: 'Surprise'? Sweets let nothing persist as what it merely, drearily is.
Perhaps this is part of the reason why eating sweets is not meant entirely to be a pleasure. In the eating of a sweet, the entire being is concentrated around the drawing out of the taste. Look at somebody who has just got the first sour spurt out of a sherbert lemon, or the spreading drowsiness of a lump of milk chocolate. The eyelids are flickering, the eyes dimming like a junkie after a hit. There is nothing there but ardour, ordeal, and the toil of bliss. Sweets challenge and provoke us: 'Eat me', they say. And then they eat us back. It seems right that sweet-eating should be such a risk, that sugar should damage our teeth. Pills are so easily mistaken for sweeties, because they are designed to look like them, to remind us of the narcotic potency of sweets. We have always known that nothing can be stronger than sweetness.
If sweets are perverse in a general sense, then they are like sexual perversions in being intensely parochial. I have said nothing, because I know nothing, of girls' sweets - lovehearts and the like. Have I dreamt this, or did they not use to wear necklaces and bracelets made out of sugar, that would linger diminishingly through the day? And then there are aunties' and grannies' sweets: parma violets and other enigmatic perfumed stuff, living amid hankies in bags. Mystery, mystery. This is another reason why the language of sweets makes all the difference. When Mars decided to rationalise the nomeclature of its international product range, Opal Fruits became Starbursts, and in the process became an entirely different product and experience. There is a fundamental distinction between the Anglo-European and American metaphysics of confectionery, a distinction marked by the difference between the two words candy and sweets. Candy suggests a single, amorphous, all-purpose substance, or sweet-essence, which is moulded into different forms. In English, there is no such essence, no quiddity; sweets are just that, sweets, in the plural, a plenitude of uncommutable singularities. The thing that all English-speaking sweets have in common is that no one sweet resembles any other. In sweets, we live out a world given to plurality. Allsorts.