The Rituals of Dinner

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The Rituals of Dinner Page 13

by Visser, Margaret


  Normally what the guest is offered is food, the symbol of fellowship with the host. To refuse food is to reject the fellowship, and also to prevent the host from playing the hostly role, which is to confer honour. So important was the rule among the Franks that guests must accept what is proffered, that a guest who refused food was in duty bound to accept a drink. When the wicked Fredegonda was blamed for having murdered Praetextatus, archbishop of Rouen, she asked her accuser to dinner. He refused to eat, but she was ready with the obligatory drink. He accepted it, knowing his danger, and died poisoned.

  Researchers into the dynamics of family relationships assure us that most quarrels in the home take place at table. But so successful is the conviction among us that physical fights must not break out during dinner, that we almost never imagine that they might. We do make rules about the handling of utensils, and especially the knives. Knives must be set at the diners’ places with blades facing in, towards the plate; they should never be held upright, or in the fist: one’s grip on a knife at table must suggest concentration upon small, delicate, specific, and entirely necessary operations within the confines of the plate. When the meal is finished, once again the blade should be set towards the middle of the plate, and not facing neighbours. When great banquets used to begin with processions into the hall, all knives had to be sheathed until carving began. The points of formal dinner-table knives in the West became rounded during the seventeenth century, apparently beginning in France. We have learned to use forks instead of knives for introducing food into our mouths, partly in order to spare our companions the faintest suggestion of the consequences which could result from that knife-point approaching our faces. You never point at anybody else with a knife, of course—neither do you do so with a fork or spoon.

  In the past, people were often far more amenable to the violence which knives and meat could arouse in them, and to the heady combination of hosts, guests, warmth, and plenty of liquor. Athenaeus tells us that the ancient Celts whetted their appetites by watching bloody gladiatorial combat during dinner, and that Roman orgies could include the same kind of entertainment. The motif of the severed head being brought to the table on a dish is not confined to the martyrdom of John the Baptist; Alexander the Great, for instance, was urged to receive a delegation bearing the heads of his enemies during dinner.

  People have always longed to fling food at each other, and to smash the crockery. Louis XIV (he who ruled over the etiquette of Versailles) is said to have baited his brother, the august Monsieur, by splashing soup at his wig until Monsieur lost his temper and flung his bowl of boiled beef at the king. The ancient Greeks were capable of hurling cups of wine at each other if sufficiently annoyed. The favourite game at Greek symposia was kottabos; it involved the guests taking turns to swing a great flat wine-cup, twirling one handle of it round the index finger, so that the wine left in the cup shot across the room and struck (if the turn was successful) a small pan balanced on a pole, so that it fell onto a bronze disk. The word kottabos probably referred to the reverberating clang signalling a winning strike.

  The hilarity occasioned by custard cream pies flung in faces must be part of the same complex of emotions. In the Baroque period in Europe, when food was spectacularly arranged—it often took kitchen staff days to sculpt and decorate pyramids, pièces montées, and architectural fantasies for a banquet—and a royal feast was like an opera, with gorgeously dressed players at the table and spectators standing round about to view the eating, it was common for the inner circle of noble guests to retire after dinner, leaving the onlookers to move in for the kill. They would rush the table and demolish all the exquisite culinary edifices, with a pleasure perhaps like that of children knocking down sandcastles or towers of building blocks. They would eat some of the food, and throw the rest at each other. John Evelyn, describing a great dinner for the Garter Knights in the Banqueting House in Whitehall on April 23, 1667, says the feast ended with the “banqueting-stuff,” that is, the elaborate sweet course of the meal, being “flung around the room profusely.” When eastern Europeans traditionally toast each other and then smash their glasses, they are declaring the intensity and the permanence of the sentiments expressed: “Never again [after this dramatic pronouncement] shall this glass hold wine.” But surely there is a simple thrill in extravagantly and publicly smashing one’s glass to smithereens.

  INVITATIONS

  Anyone giving a dinner party must begin by rounding up guests. The people on the list may include close friends asked repeatedly for the sheer pleasure of seeing them, and those who “ought” to be entertained because contact with them is rare and the relationship could fail because of it, or because there was an obligation set up at a previous occasion where this evening’s host was that evening’s guest. There are useful or otherwise important people, people the host would like to know better, those invited out of concern that they might never otherwise be asked out, and some invited only to please other guests or to add lustre to the gathering because of their reputations. Since dinner parties permit unrelated people to meet on intimate terms, they are also one of the primary methods of advancing social ambition. “Markby, Markby, and Markby?” notes Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell with approval, in The Importance of Being Earnest. “A firm of the very highest position in their profession. Indeed I am told that one of the Mr. Markby’s is occasionally to be seen at dinner parties.”

  In the modern world, where openly stratified hierarchy is an affront to the egalitarian myth, people are rarely permitted to display naked social ambition; snobbery must go decently disguised as creativity, free choice, good taste, and so forth. There must be enough money to pay for such social feats as carrying off dinner parties to which the Right People would agree to come. A currently fashionable term for some of the guests required in such enterprises is “the glitterati.” It perceptively combines, in what Lewis Carroll would have called a portmanteau word, two necessary ingredients for success in some of the top echelons: celebrity (for whatever reason) in the art world, plus money displayed upon the person.

  To be successful in such a milieu, a host must have not only money but also the social power which is needed to attract more power, in the shape of guests who are “in demand,” yet amenable to accepting this invitation and turning down the others being offered. At the same time, hosts should know how to evade whatever and whoever might cost prestige. They must be in a position above all to persuade other people to remain a part of their “scene,” attaching to their coterie even those who are expected to play subordinate roles. Indispensable as this last achievement is to social success, it is especially difficult to maintain in a world where mobility and fluidity continually provide avenues of escape. To be able to control the stage upon which the social spectacle is enacted is to experience massive power. A dinner table is one such stage; presiding over it, a host can be a conductor, a director, an impresario—and occasionally also a star performer. He or she has to engage the right cast, or expect the production to fail.

  Invitations are tricky, because people on the host’s list might either want too much to come, or try to get out of accepting the invitation and thereby ruin the whole projected configuration. This kind of problem is avoided in many small traditional societies, where community is of an unconditional nature. People know each other, and everybody’s business, so well that someone’s desire to give a party may be common knowledge long before inviting begins. Everyone knows who is eligible to go, and who cannot absent himself without insulting not only the host but the entire community.

  The Javanese slametan described by Clifford Geertz is a gathering which is called together for the achievement of slamet, or bodily and mental equanimity. Guests are needed to show support, renew neighbourly bonds, and help the host reach accommodation with the supernatural. Some of the reasons why a host would call a slametan include a birth in his family, marriage, sorcery, death, bad dreams, house moving, or opening a factory. Guests come because they live nearby; they are the a
ppropriate people for the event, and they know their friend, relative, or neighbour so well that the call to a slametan comes as no surprise.

  Accordingly a messenger, often the host’s child, is sent to call the guests, after the special ritual food has been set out. (The women, who are never allowed to attend a slametan, have worked hard preparing the food—a fact of which the neighbours are probably aware.) No more than five to ten minutes’ notice are given, and everyone must drop what he was doing and come. The guests sit in a ring on the floor as the house slowly fills with the smoke of burning incense, and listen to a speech given by their host, explaining why he has called them together, and sometimes pointing out the symbolic meaning of the food they are to be given. They respond politely, helping him to achieve slamet. Chanted prayer follows, and then everybody eats quickly and silently, being served not by the host but by one or two of the guests. After a ritual five minutes’ eating, the guests go home, carrying the rest of their food with them to eat with their wives and children.

  When a Sherpa host wants to give a dinner party, it is made extremely difficult for a guest, unless he or she is willing to insult the host, to refuse an invitation. For example, he sends a small child as a messenger to call the guests. This is a matter of convenience, certainly, but it is often also an ingenious pressure tactic; the child is not told the time or occasion for the party, so that guests have no information to manipulate in sidestepping acceptance of the invitation. In any case, the child is too young to be entrusted with carrying back correctly phrased explanations—complex and subtle as unreal excuses always are—for nonappearance at the party. All must come. Where parties are large and important, of course, Sherry Ortner says that guests are “more likely to feel offended at not being invited than put upon when the invitation comes.” They are entertained, and (if the event is successful) they are pleased; bonds of future obligation and continued interrelationship have been tied.

  Modern Western society works extremely hard to prevent human relationships of any kind from lasting; claims to anything like unconditional loyalty are experienced by many of us as a fearful imposition. Our invitation techniques are accordingly different from those in small, close-knit, honour-bound groups. There is rarely the sort of tribal duty or social pressure to attend functions that the Sherpas and the Javanese understand and cultivate in their own interests. The closest equivalent for us is a family reunion, where invitations are scarcely necessary and obligations are the stronger for it. So great is the duty to entertain relatives among the Tanga of Melanesia that if a distant kinsman fails to be included in the celebration, he can appear at the feast and make his claim known to the host. If the claim is upheld, the kinsman is allowed to take the first bite from the best pig on the menu. Louis XIV, on the other hand, is said to have solemnly invited his brother, every day of his life, to eat with him. Monsieur had daily to accept. Ceremonial invitations are for strangers, not family: the result would have done a great deal to distance the brothers, and so balance the familiarity and the fractiousness which had once permitted them to fling food at each other at table.

  We, however, are accustomed to choosing not only our guests but the parties we wish to attend; family reunions and similar obligations are few and far between. One problem for us is how to get out of an unwelcome invitation. A refusal immediately suggests that one is saying no out of a simple preference for going elsewhere that night, or even for not going anywhere. Because we are all so well supplied with transport and mostly so unencumbered with responsibilities for other people, all we can do, often, is claim that we have a previous engagement. We hope we can persuade the hostess not only to believe this, but to think that we would have chosen her party if she had invited us earlier. The hostess in turn owes it to her honour, and to any hope for a future relationship with the recalcitrant guest, to ensure that the excuse has a chance of being as plausible as possible. Invitations must not, for this reason, be sent or telephoned too early, because that deprives the recipient of a chance to refuse politely by claiming a prior appointment, and removes the possibility that the would-be hostess might convincingly believe the excuse.

  Telephoning an invitation, which most of us almost invariably do, is always slightly rude because it forces a quick decision, which might be regretted later. A preferable invitation might, for example, be expected but not have materialized yet. We all know masters of the adroit and graceful sidestep, but most of us are slower and less convincing than we need to be to get out of a date when suddenly importuned on the telephone. On the other hand, a guest must not be asked too close to the date, because that looks as though he or she is really being asked to fill in for a preferred guest who has dropped out. Friends need to be very close and compliant if they are to be asked on short notice to fill a gap.

  Among the Min Chia of Yunnan in China during the thirties, guests had to receive a written list of all the other people invited; they were then given several days in which to weigh up whether they wished to go or not. This must have been nerve-wracking for the host, but at least it placed a good deal of the burden of responsibility on the other guests if somebody refused to attend. The use of the telephone makes this kind of delicacy all but impossible to achieve, even though most of us would like to know who else is coming before we accept an invitation. Also in China, guests would once have been affronted to find themselves among people of a status lower than their own; a host could ruin his reputation by subjecting guests to such insensitivity. The Baronne Staffe, the doyenne of late nineteenth-century French etiquette, warns would-be hosts never to invite people richer than themselves. For one thing, such guests would have to be offered food, cutlery, plates, and wines of the level to which they are accustomed. Even if you could pull it off, you would not only impoverish yourself, but you would commit the social gaffe of pretentiousness. The nineteenth-century rich, like the aristocratic class earlier, had to protect themselves because hosts are, at least ritually and temporarily, more powerful than guests.

  It is polite in many Eastern societies, for example among the Yao of northern Thailand, not to hear an invitation clearly, and certainly not to accept it, until it has been made three times. In this way the host has time to reconsider his project of extending hospitality, or alternatively a host with no food to offer may still invite, and so show benevolent feelings: when the third invitation is not stated, guests sensitive to the social complexities will understand. The guest who is asked three times before responding, on the other hand, makes it clear that he or she is not hanging about dying to be asked. In New Testament times, invitations were issued in two stages: a first, formal request was always refused with thanks (which added ritual stature to the guest). There followed—if the host really wanted to pursue the matter—a much more urgent and personal badgering; eventually the guest might allow his or her resistance to crumble. An example is the hospitality offered Paul and his friends by Lydia, the dealer in purple textiles, in the Acts of the Apostles. She first asked them, then “constrained” them, or, as we still say, “prevailed upon” them.

  The word “invite” appears to come from the Sanskrit in (“towards”) and vitas (“pleasant”). But there is a possibility (appropriately reflecting the ambiguity) that “invite” is related to Latin invitus, meaning “unwilling”; in- is more frequently a negative than a positive prefix. Inviting guests is always a delicate operation; the unwillingness of the guest at being laid under an obligation, and at being made into what we might call an “honour object,” is therefore allowed expression. Behind the etiquette, the guest might also shelter from suspicions that he or she was ever anxious to be invited.

  The host, meanwhile, must try to set up a well-balanced grouping of guests. He would be wise to include a guest of honour, somebody witty, someone relatively unknown to him or to the group, someone in need of kindness; it would be useful to discharge some of his own obligations at the same time. This conventional set of suggestions roughly corresponds to what were once very clear, set roles for di
nner guests.

  A Roman banquet would include parasites. The word designating these people literally means “bread with,” like the root of the term “companion.” Parasites were clients or retainers, fed at the table of a rich man. (A “parasite” now means, in English, a person who lives off others or a creature that feeds on another animal, known as its “host.”) Parasites, in ancient Greece and Rome, lived under a permanent obligation to their benefactor: they were guests who could never turn into hosts, and who therefore had to render other—doubtless more useful—services instead. Parasites were often placed in a demeaning position at dinner. They might sit on a stool, for example, instead of reclining on a couch; they could be served last, or not given any of the delicacies. They were made the butt of jokes, and were expected to fawn, flatter, and be ridiculed for it. The emperor Augustus had an Etruscan parasite called Gabba, whose wife was as welcome at dinner as he, for Maecenas, the emperor’s powerful friend and patron of the arts, was fascinated by her. Gabba would keep his eyes closed while Maecenas ogled his wife. One day when a slave attempted to filch his wine, he remarked, “I am asleep only as far as Maecenas is concerned.”

 

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