The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  One of the uses to which extremely rich people can put their money is giving frequent parties, and especially dinner parties. Being a famous host or hostess is a gruelling enterprise: the rich who attempt to achieve the honour are people for whom money is not enough. They need to know “everybody who is anybody”; they have what the Germans call Geltungsbedürfnis, a need to acquire value through association with the acknowledged great. They also revel in the power derived from being able, through their money and their connections, to bring “everybody” together. Like food in itself, money in itself cannot create a good evening’s entertainment. “To make those eat who lack appetite, to make the wit of the witty sparkle, to help the would-be witty to find some witty saying, these are the supreme achievements of the gastronomer as host,” wrote the great-nephew of Brillat-Savarin, Lucien Tendret, in the late nineteenth century. A good host or hostess must bring together wit, talent, and variety, so as to achieve the correct “mix,” the right atmosphere, the indefinable feeling in the air that this dinner is where all the really “interesting” people have gathered, that this is “where it’s at.” To be included in the list of the invited at such an event is to have reached the pinnacle of social ambition. The “happy few” are happy just because they are few, and have been chosen. The happy host is elated to have done the choosing, to have created a memorable event, and to have placed these powerful or promising people in his or her debt.

  A person we like, we find “sympathetic,” sympathique or sympa in French; this is a person we can literally “feel with.” The ancient Greeks had another term which is more precisely used of dinner guests: one we get on with at such an event is sympotikos, a person with whom we can enjoy a symposium, or dinner followed by a drinking party. A dinner party held in somebody’s own home, with table, courses, drinks, and conversation in common, is always a closely “hosted” event. It requires effort, time spent, and at least some expense; it must therefore be worth the while of hosts and guests alike. If it is not, then rancour will inevitably result.

  HOSTS AND GUESTS

  Don’t hit the person across from you with bits of toast,

  And don’t, when dinner is nearly through, say “Who’s the host?”

  It isn’t done.

  —Cole Porter

  The etiquette books reiterate that dinner parties are extremely difficult to carry off. Giving one is “not for the novice.” If you are the host, your house is on view; your food (offered as the result of your best efforts) is open to judgement; your taste, your social connections, your ability to manage are all potentially “on the line.” Things can go dreadfully wrong. Emily Post, in 1922, gave a description of the horrors of trying to give a dinner party without prior experience and without her advice.

  The servants, insufficiently instructed and trained, are most likely to let you down, and a servant’s clumsiness is her mistress’s fault. Sigrid the maid, “instead of bowing slightly and saying in a low tone of voice, ‘Dinner is served,’ stands stiff as a block of wood, and fairly shouts, ‘Dinner’s all ready!’” She clashes the plates, she piles them up (you never pile plates, says Post in edition after edition; the most that may be carried on any one journey to or from the kitchen is two, one in each hand, even if the plates have not been used). Sigrid even goes so far as to deal the plates out. The fire smokes, the soup is brown rather than amber, there is too much food on the serving dishes. Disaster follows disaster until you feel “Mrs. Worldly looking with almost hypnotized fascination—as her attention might be drawn to a street accident, against her will.” Later on, “You notice that none of your guests eats anything. They can’t.” Mr. Kindhart offers sympathy: “‘Cheer up, little girl, it doesn’t really matter!’ And then you know to the full how terrible the situation is … Your husband, remembering the trenches, tries to tell you it was not so bad!”

  Post makes it very clear that it is the woman, and she alone, who bears the brunt of any horror that might occur at a dinner party; her husband is never mentioned except when he is imagined condoling. “You know that it will be long—if ever—before any of [the guests] will be willing to risk an evening in your house again.” They will also ruin your reputation in speaking to other people: “Whatever you do,” they will advise, “don’t dine with the Newweds unless you eat your dinner before you go, and wear black glasses so no sight can offend you.” But hosts continue to give parties in spite of the suspense and the risk, and guests accept invitations even though the evening might turn into a disaster, and often if they do not especially want to go. The benefits to be gained from being either a host or a guest are very real, otherwise dinner parties would not be given.

  Confusing as it seems to us at first sight, the words “host” and “guest” originally meant the same thing. They both derive from Indo-European ghostis, “stranger.” This is the origin of the Latin hostis, which meant “stranger” and therefore “enemy”; from it English derives the word “hostile.” In Old French, hoste used to mean both “host” and “guest,” as hôte still does (though the French increasingly call the guest an invité). What this single term refers to is not so much the individual people, the host and the guest, as the bond that unites them. (The origin of the word “hospitality” gives us some idea of the web of interchangeable and alternating identities and obligations that are interwoven in this complex notion. It seems to have referred to the power of a citizen “host” [hospes] who was benevolent enough to represent before Roman institutions someone who was not a Roman citizen. The hospes was thought of as impersonating—the full meaning of our term “representing”—the foreigner on those occasions. He “was the stranger himself.”)

  One role cannot exist without the other: host and guest participate in one action, and together they submit to the laws of hospitality and their jurisdiction over the offering, and the accepting, of food and shelter between “strangers.” Those laws in turn are based on ambivalence, in the full sense of “power on both sides.” Hostility might always lurk in the background, either existing before the event or arising out of it. To receive a guest or to accept an invitation into someone’s house is to be ritually bound for a time to another person or group. Both sides accept, for the sake of peace, order, and the benefit of the whole community, to be constrained by intricate sets of obligations.

  One way of understanding table manners is to recognize that they are a system of civilized taboos which come into operation in a situation fraught with potential danger. They are designed to reduce tension and protect people from one another. Listen, in Homer’s Odyssey, to Agamemnon, a resentful ghost in the Underworld, describing how his life ended:

  It was Aegisthus who designed my death,

  he and my heartless wife, and killed me, after

  feeding me, like an ox felled at the trough.

  That was my miserable end—and with me

  my friends butchered, like so many swine

  killed for some troop, or feast, or wedding banquet.

  but these were murders you would catch your breath at:

  think of us fallen, all our throats cut, winebowl

  brimming, tables laden on every side,

  while blood ran smoking over the whole floor.

  Murder at dinner is especially horrendous, “worse than death in war,” just because it is so easy to achieve, and therefore so unexpected: it is “not done.” Everybody present is armed, with knives. Their teeth—formidable human weapons—can scarcely remain invisible, in spite of every effort, as they chew. (Table manners commonly forbid what we call belly-laughs, partly because uproarious mirth is expressed by the baring of teeth. Erasmus advises that “If something so funny should occur that it produces uncontrolled laughter … the face should be covered with a napkin or with the hand.”) Agamemnon and his men were invited guests; he trusted his hosts, who included—another horror—his own wife. She had taken Aegisthus for her lover while Agamemnon was away at the war, so betrayal is heaped upon betrayal.

  The ancient Greek
myth of Agamemnon’s death is told in two distinct versions. In one he is butchered at table; in the other his wife offers him a bath, as wives were expected to do for homecoming warriors. Having reduced her man to nakedness in his tub, she flings a net over him, rendering him utterly defenceless; she then hacks him to death with an axe. The story of Agamemnon’s death in his bath does not contradict the version in which he died at dinner: the two stories are mythic equivalents, and in that sense the same thing. The essential points are the betrayal of trust and the horrific pollution. In the story of the bath, water—the symbol of purity—is stained with the blood of the helpless victim, as in the appalling murder scene in the shower in Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. The dinner table, too, is polluted; the blood flowing; the table, which has been laid in orderly and civilized fashion for the fellowship expressed in the dinner, desecrated by the blood of the guests—including the guest of honour, the king himself.

  For this is the theme that underlies all table manners: we may be slicing and chewing; we may have killed or sacrificed to supply our feast; we may be attending to the most “animal” of our needs; but we do so with control, order, and regularity, and with a clear understanding of who is who and what is what. We are neither beasts nor monsters with no manners, but men and women of culture. We do not treat people as though they were the swine or the oxen slaughtered for the feast: we do not get the guests mixed up with the dishes. For the point is that we so easily could. At table we are both armed and vulnerable; we are at such very close quarters.

  The laws of hospitality deal firstly with strangers—how to manage their entry into our inner sanctum, how to protect them from our own automatic reaction, which is to fear and exclude the unknown, how to prevent them from attacking and desecrating what we hold dear, or from otherwise behaving in a strange and unpredictably dangerous manner. We remember that we too might one day need a stranger’s help. So we behave in the prescribed civilized manner, hostis to hostis. Abusing a defenceless stranger is disgraceful. Strangers are especially protected by the gods in many cultures; in ancient Greece, Zeus himself is called Xenios, Protector of Hospitality. Many are the cautionary tales where the unknown beggar or the needy traveller turns out to be a god in disguise, testing the level of morality in the host. Generosity in this circumstance is proof of greatness, as was the unhesitating hospitality given the three strangers by Abraham at Mamre, or the gift of everything they had by the poverty-stricken couple Philemon and Baucis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The punishment for failure to help strangers who throw themselves on your mercy or to treat guests with the proper hospitality is severe; it was administered in ancient Greece by the Furies, demonic fiends who were capable of pursuing then sucking the blood of offenders, until they were as hard and dry as mummies. In Christianity the law has a much broader application: not only the guest—invited or not—but everybody is God in disguise, and what you do to others you do to Christ.

  Hosts and guests, even in our own most casual gatherings, play very different roles: the host is at home, and giving; the guest is away, receiving. A decided imbalance is set up and deliberately maintained, the purpose being that the reciprocity or equalization which is forbidden at present will have to be achieved later—there will be a return invitation. It follows that being a host can be a bid for power, a way of placing people under an obligation, very possibly unwanted. If the host, for example, gives a party which is so lavish that it cannot be returned by the guest, then the debt will have to be paid in other ways. The host will decide what he or she wants in return, when the time comes to collect his or her due.

  A primitive form of prayer is the setting up of God as the recipient of a gift which must receive recompense later: do ut des, “I give so that you might give in return.” One form of this ritual demand is to invite the gods to dinner. The ancient Greek version of this kind of transaction was called theoxenia, “hospitality for the gods”: couches would be set up on which the gods were invited to recline, with food provided for them. The Roman version of the ritual was lectisternium, “lying on couches.” Statues of the gods were crowned with wreaths and laid out, with cushions for their comfort; food was then served to them as at a dinner. These feasts took place at times of national crisis—or, alternatively, as thanksgiving for favours received. The gods, having accepted this hospitality, were expected to provide the help so much hoped for, or to accept thanks and continue to be benevolent.

  In cultures where the dead are especially honoured, they might be invited regularly to meals. The celebration of Halloween is a staged propitiation of the ghosts—a precaution against their mischief-making—by giving food to impersonators of them at the point of entry to our houses. Because sharing food is so essential to human fellowship, bonds are felt to be created with the other world by offering its denizens food. We hope they will be satisfied for the time being, and possibly also nagged by their knowledge that the “done thing” is to respond, to “discharge,” as we put it, the obligation placed upon them.

  The myth of Amphitryon was one where not the guests but the host turned out to be a god. Zeus took Amphitryon’s shape in order to sleep with the latter’s wife, Alcmena, and—according to a medieval addition to the Greek myth—gave a banquet in her honour. When the real Amphitryon got home, Zeus’s trick was discovered, but not before the god had engendered Heracles. Amphitryon retrieved his wife, but everyone agreed that the host of the feast had been not the head of the house, but he who, in spite of being an impostor, had invited the guests and presided over the feast: Zeus himself, as “Amphitryon.” As Molière put it in his play Amphitryon (1668), “The real Amphitryon is the Amphitryon with whom one dines.” The food and the expense are less important than is the actual presence of everyone at the feast. The French still call a host an “amphitryon”—partly to relieve the confusion arising from the word hôte meaning both “host” and “guest.”

  The guest, at the opposite end of the bond of hospitality, also has power. Who of us are such dutiful housekeepers that we can afford not to look at our living arrangements with a sharp eye, and adjust and improve them before guests arrive? The sharp eye is that of the imagined guests: we are putting ourselves in their place and seeing ourselves from their point of view. So we rush about, dusting formerly forgotten surfaces, organizing the visible reading matter so as to give a better impression of our taste, polishing the glasses as we would never polish them for ourselves. Guests must be satisfied; if they are not, they will become demanding, irritable, discontented. They will look with less charity than ever upon us and our houses, and after they have gone home they will talk, ruining our reputation. Guests are invited because we want their friendship and cooperation; we may even crave their approval. An angry or contemptuous guest is the very opposite of what the dinner party sets out to achieve.

  It is the host who is bestowing generosity by having people to visit, and yet any well-mannered host treats guests as if they are honouring the host by their presence. This could well be true as well as polite, since the number and quality of the guests add honour to the host. Honour is part of the hospitality bond, and honour is in this case, as in so many others, a force moving in two directions at once. Guests are given precedence, fed first, their wishes constantly ascertained and if possible granted. Any visiting strangers must become guests by ritual means; the transformation means that instead of being treated with guardedness or disdain, they must receive the opposite treatment, being cosseted, helped, and honoured. But the host, in spite of every protestation to the contrary, is normally, and from a ritual point of view, more powerful than the guests. In our own culture, for example, a guest is placed close to the host if he or she is being especially honoured. We should note however that the rule is: the smaller the distance from the host, the greater the honour.

  Guests have no real say in how their host will treat them: while they are in another’s house they have to become ceremonially passive, and accept what is offered. For a person cannot be called a “guest” in a
place where he or she has any responsibilities; no obligations, other than respect for the host, can be laid upon a guest while he or she is under the host’s roof. “Respect” for the host includes not fighting with the other guests (they were the host’s choice, and now are temporary dependents), and perhaps living up to an expected role: being witty if invited because of one’s entertainment value, telling the story of one’s adventures if invited so that other people can hear what happened. Guests are not allowed to usurp the host’s role. They cannot, for example, take what they have not been offered, give orders to the host’s children, or demand different food, except where there is danger of violating a taboo. Since health is regarded with awe in our society, and protected by unconditional sanctions against anything which might even conceivably endanger it, we are permitted to ask for alternatives to be served us because of something like an allergy—but only if we make our request with all the elaboration and the deference that politeness demands.

  Ancient Greek myths make the ultimate crime of a host the murder of his guest: a person invited is vulnerable, trusting, and dependent; the host’s role is that of protector of whoever is under his roof. (A wife, in traditional Mediterranean societies, is in some respects like a permanent guest, who comes as a “stranger” from another family, and is supposed to be “looked after” and “respected” by her husband—and to play a subordinate role.) A guest’s archetypical crime against a host is adultery: making off with his wife (or her husband). The Trojan War was caused by Paris running off with his host’s wife, Helen; the crime was always called not so much adultery as a crime against hospitality—Paris had dreadfully insulted his host, Menelaos. A host “lays himself open” to a guest by letting him into his house and permitting him contact with his wife; this advantage is freely given, and must never be abused. Several societies are on record as permitting a host to offer his wife, for a prescribed period of time of course, to a visitor whom he wished especially to honour. The guest would have been very rude to refuse; it would have been thought impolite to ask in the first place, and ruder still to do what Paris did and take without asking. (Zeus, who impersonated Amphitryon, took his wife, and hosted his dinner, had broken all the main rules of hospitality for guests, but ancient Greek gods were allowed liberties denied to human beings; they could for example marry their sisters. They did these things, of course, partly to remind mere mortals of what lay out of bounds.) Our own typical example of impropriety in a guest is trivial partly because we mean to express our contempt, but it shows the same fear of theft: a bad guest is “the sort of person you would not trust with the teaspoons.”