As part of my university paper on horror films, we have to write 4 mini-essays on different topics. They’re fairly casual opinion pieces, and the latest was on ‘abject objects’. A lot of people seemed to write about drains (which are, to be fair, quite disgusting – a reasonable choice of subject). I decided to write about the little ‘node’ growths on potatoes. Ew. Disgusting.
(Yes, this passes for a valid component of assessment at a higher learning institution these days. I’m actually pretty happy about that, for all the griping I could do… There is a fundamental comprehension of concepts required. Do I pass though?)
“Mash Them to Hell”
I generally think of potatoes as a pretty regular root vegetable. Depending on the variety, they are excellent for roasting, mashing, or making a nice potato aloo.
But sometimes potatoes sprout unpleasant nubbly bits called ‘nodes’, even in the growth-retarding dark of your temperature-correct cupboard. What is wrong with these nodes?
First of all, their texture. Potatoes are rough, earthen veggies. Even the washed and waxy ones have a hardy surface. The nodes are different – smooth, rubbery, fleshy; they wobble under your touch, like under-formed foetal limbs.
Their baby-like fleshiness makes them, as Carroll puts it, ‘interstitial.’ But this transgression of category goes beyond texture. Consider the following quotation, taken from Wikipedia:
“Potatoes are stem tubers, which are the development of enlarged stolons thickened into a storage organ. The tuber has all the parts of a normal stem, including nodes and internodes, the nodes are the eyes and each has a leaf scar.”
Disconcert begins with words like ‘tuber’ and ‘stolon’ – they sound like ‘tumour’ and ‘colon.’ The potato itself is now gross, and the nodes that come out of it even worse. The cross-over with humanness is furthered, but also degraded as generally animalistic.
The categorical blasphemy Carroll dwells upon is reflected back at me. Can I be like the potato? Might I become one day just a root veggie, lying inert, touched by others but unable to react even though my ‘eyes’ absorb every event? Often unsavoury jokes are made about ‘vegetable’ people – quadriplegics and the brain-dead.
And of seeing, or worse having, large misshapen growths myself… Jeff Goldblum’s body in The Fly is essentially one big fly-tumour by the film’s end. Might the nodes overtake the potato and become its unbearable whole? Might a tumour become me?
Other horror film scenarios come to mind. The term ‘eyes’ could be taken literally – where a potato develops actual eyes (à la the cake in Drag Me to Hell). There is also the analogy to vampires and zombies. A potato, dug from its earthen grave, continues to live and to hunger. Imagine it, a vampire potato!
The potato might become anthropomorphic like the ginger-root baby in Pan’s Labyrinth. This, to me, was a revolting creature, mainly because of its categorical confusion between ‘flora’ and ‘fauna’.
It has always been the touch of a potato node I’ve disliked most. The look of them has been incongruous and unsightly too. But writing this and thinking upon them more has worsened all the sensory impacts.
Next time I eat potatoes – with or without nodes – I will certainly mash them to hell.
