The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  There were guests designated, sometimes officially, as jesters and buffoons. (Often a parasite at a Greek or Roman party was given this role.) Jesters were part of the entertainment at medieval banquets. Henry II of England gave a serjeanty to a man named Roland “le Pettour” or “le Fartere” and to his heirs, provided they could be counted on to perform at his annual Christmas Day banquet saltum, siffletum et pettum or bumbulum (“a leap, a whistle, and a fart”); and a minstrel in Piers Plowman (ca. 1380) complains that he lacks the skill to “fart in tune at feasts.”

  I have myself seen a self-appointed jester perform a less specific role at one of the French moungetades described earlier. He was known as Fil de fer (“Wire”), and was a migrant labourer, not a native of the village. He stood throughout the meal, remaining physically apart from the seated diners. Striding about, he harangued the crowd in patois, picking on certain well-known characters present and abusing them till the other diners wept with laughter at his raillery. He was not expected to pay like the other guests for the food he was given. Athenaeus tells us of various comic parasites in the ancient world who were expected to mimic their hosts’ disabilities. The point of this was perhaps to draw the sting of the guests’ critical glances, or simply to make the host’s blindness or his lameness less singular, his power to command more obvious.

  A Roman guest of honour, or an especially powerful man, was allowed to bring one or more people with him. These were called umbrae, “shades” or “ghosts.” They helped to make the VIP feel comfortable, and enabled him to poach on the host’s power, since he had himself invited some of the guests. The umbrae were also a sort of bodyguard or extension of him as “more than other men.” Powerful modern guests, visiting film directors perhaps, or famous art collectors, often arrive at social gatherings flanked by minions, with a very similar effect. Ancient Athenian men out on the town might move from party to party; it was apparently to be expected that uninvited guests would burst in on a symposium, often bringing with them a revival of the party spirit among those already installed.

  The ideal number of guests at a dinner party has always been a matter for strong opinions in Western traditions, where meals have been organized for a set number and planned, typically, round a meat course. In many other parts of the world, dinners are mostly vegetarian and divided in advance into small morsels; they lend themselves to the serving of quite elastic numbers of guests. Varro said that diners should number no fewer than the Graces (three) and no more than the Muses (nine)—the latter figure being the number which could be comfortably accommodated in a Roman triclinium or dining room. (The mad emperor Heliogabalus enjoyed choosing guests for their physical peculiarities: eight bald men, eight one-eyed men, eight fat men, and so forth—he himself being always the ninth.) Thirteen people sitting down to dinner is considered unlucky—and not only because either Judas or Jesus was the thirteenth man at the Last Supper. The superstition is also found in pre-Christian Greece (where there were, for instance, twelve Olympian gods, so who could be the thirteenth?), and in many other cultures as well. The Greeks and Romans disliked even numbers in any case because two meant conflict; also, “one” was male, but “two” was female and therefore malign. They tried hard not to allow an even number of guests to eat together, believing that it produced sinister silences in the conversation, which would result in danger for somebody present.

  It has been the rule until recently in our own culture, and it still is the tendency, to ask an equal number of men and women. (The convention itself is fairly recent, because respectable women have tended not to be invited to men’s dinner parties during most of human history.) Hosts have had to keep lists on hand of unattached people who could be invited to fill a gap where somebody, and especially a woman, lacked a “partner.” The problem was compounded, of course, if a party of fourteen lost a guest: it was imperative that someone be found, to keep thirteen from sitting down to table. An institution called the quatorzièmes (“fourteenths”) existed in nineteenth-century Paris. These were men who waited at home between 5:00 and 9:00 p.m. every night, all dressed up and ready to step into the breach where any dinner party threatened suddenly to number thirteen. You could hire a presentable, experienced “fourteenth” whenever you needed one.

  Since invitations, and especially dinner invitations, can be fraught with hope and danger, and dinner parties are dramatic events at which decisions can be made and important relationships initiated, tested, or broken, the act of inviting is often surrounded with care and regulation. How invitations are written can be a matter of strict etiquette. They should still, ideally, be handwritten, and until quite recently it was not “done” in high society to send them in the mail: they were supposed to be delivered by hand. For socialites, invitation cards, like Christmas cards, are physical expressions of how much honour one can muster. The outlay—of time, effort, honour, and care—by people who take hosting seriously can be considerable. Lady Sybil Colefax, a London hostess famous in the 1920s and 1930s, was capable of writing hundreds of dinner invitations in a month. She wrote them at home, in trains, at every spare moment, just as a different kind of woman would never waste time while she could be knitting. Colefax invitations would pour in to people whose company was greatly in demand. “Resistance was futile,” Brian Masters writes. “… She simply issued another, and another, she would mount up scores of them if necessary, until the prey eventually succumbed, like a fox pursued by hounds, through sheer weariness.” Her nearly illegible handwriting was famous. People used to puzzle over their invitations for days, trying to make out when they were supposed to appear for dinner, and who the other guests would be. “One usually placed the card on a mantelpiece and glanced at it from time to time, hoping that its secrets would suddenly be revealed; or threw it on the floor in the hope that the odd angle would make all clear.”

  But very soon they would have to reply. The guest’s obligation is in the very first place to reply, as soon as possible. Hosts should be told within days—the Victorians made that twenty-four hours—whether guests will be coming or not, so that substitute invitations can be issued to similarly dazzling people. Once an invitation has been accepted, it must at all costs be honoured. “Nothing,” wrote Emily Post, “but serious illness or death or an utterly unavoidable accident can excuse the breaking of a dinner engagement.” The flatness and clarity of this ruling rests on a guest’s knowledge of what goes into a full-dress dinner party, or even a much simpler but carefully home-cooked meal: of the hard work, the cost, the skill and attention to detail which every good host expends on guests. It would be unthinkable for polite people to neglect playing their part, and risk ruining the host’s evening and that of the guests who do go.

  The obligation is underlined by myth: the issuing of an invitation to dinner is so solemn, the agreement to arrive so binding, that even a guest who is no longer wanted (so the stories have it) will insist on keeping the appointment. A host who murders an invited dinner guest really should consider cancelling the projected party, because such guests are likely to turn up anyway and ruin the evening. Supernatural beings are fairly accustomed to sitting down to dinner with the living. Many are the stories of dead men who arrive to appal the host and terrify the other guests. Sometimes they are invisibly present, sometimes not.

  An ancient Greek ghost attends a wedding feast, dripping with mud from his grave or from the Underworld:

  Lame, branded, wizened with age, like a wandering stranger he came,

  Begging for a lump of fat, when Meles celebrated his wedding. Uninvited, he demanded soup. In the midst of them he stood, A ghost, risen from the mire.

  Macbeth murders his invited guest, then dares to provoke criticism of him for not coming to the feast. Suddenly the dead man occupies the stool reserved by the other guests for Macbeth. With his gory locks, marrowless bones, and glaring eyes, the ghost of Banquo drives Macbeth mad with fear and forces his hostess to end the meal and dismiss the guests, throwing etiquette to the winds: “Stan
d not upon the order of your going,/But go at once.” Don Giovanni’s impudent dinner invitation to the statue of the man he had killed is heard, accepted—and fate must be fulfilled. The Commendatore arrives at the appointed hour, to pound at his host’s door with his stone fist. Since banqueting tables unite large groups of chosen guests, interventions by ghosts can make a most theatrical effect. In the legend of the Singing Bone, a murdered prince’s bone, found in the forest and carved into a flute, announces to the entire banquet-hall as the bard innocently plays it that the king, their host, has murdered his brother and usurped his place.

  An empty chair, with its empty place at the table, easily becomes an eerie, uncomfortable sight: it insistently calls to mind the person who ought to be sitting there. Children used regularly to be expected to leave the table before the end of dinner; it was a sixteenth-century rule of etiquette that they should take their place setting and the chair with them. At a Jewish Seder, a goblet of wine is set out ready for the prophet Elijah, who is invited to the feast and expected to attend. It is still a custom that, if an expected guest does not arrive, his or her place may be laid, with the glass or goblet turned upside down; during World War II this tradition was followed when a pilot’s plane failed to return from its mission. In Rembrandt’s painting of the Supper at Emmaus in the Louvre, a glass upside down is on the table, signifying the despair of the disciples at Jesus’s death. The moment portrayed in the picture is that of the bread being broken, to reveal that the unknown guest is really he.

  COMING RIGHT IN

  The metaphor of crossing a threshold is used for rites of passage, initiations, and psychological turning points all over the world. The humble, ordinary act of stepping over the boundary which demarcates the inside of the house from outside is used to dramatize some of the great oppositions upon which social and physical categories are based; it differentiates for example such concepts as public and private, light (sunshine) and dark (shade), male (working away from home) and female (whose “place is in the home”), profane (in front of, pro, the temple, fanum) and sacred (inside the temple walls).

  Moving from one of these categories into its opposite is always, ritually speaking, a momentous act. The acceptance of an outsider into one’s house can also be thought of as potentially dangerous; a guest, even somebody well known, is in many cultures a temporary “pollution,” which chiefly means something out of place. (The modern concept of physical pollution is curiously and strikingly analogous with this social attitude. Oil in a lake pollutes it, and socks in the soup would be disgusting: both oil and socks have places assigned to them; they pollute places where they do not belong.)

  A “polluting” stranger in one’s house needs to be incorporated and, as we say, “made to feel at home.” The status of a guest lies somewhere between that of a hostile foreigner and that of a family member. “Guesthood” is an artificially created ritual role, participating in both extremes; hence its ambiguity and the need for care in its regulation. Guests must do everything to reassure their hosts that they bear nothing but good will, and a determination to subordinate themselves to them while they are under their roof. There are various ritual ways in which entry to a house is noted and “managed.”

  In Japan or in the Middle East, one takes off one’s shoes. Outside the house is dirt, and leaving shoes at the door not only respects cleanliness, but also ritually recognizes the sacrality of “inside.” In the past, when people usually walked to where they were going even if the distance was great, guests had their feet washed by the host or the host’s servant on arrival. Water, the great purificatory symbol, brings about not only physical but also ceremonial cleanliness. In hot countries a drink of water, or of a staple liquid such as beer, is offered on arrival, and immediately the guest has entered into a pact of obligation. The entry of a guest begins the whole complicated drama which the roles of host and guest impose. The guest, who is penetrating into the host’s most vulnerable and intimate space, often makes motions of ritual deference. A man used to leave his hat and stick (vestiges of helmet and sword) with the maid on entering a house; or he would be required to leave his stick at the door, take his hat off, and go into the drawing room holding it. Baring one’s head or “uncovering,” like the bowing that used to accompany it, shows deference, a ritual lowering of oneself before another. The taking off of shoes is a very practical gesture, but it also means to a Middle Eastern guest that he is disarming himself, showing respect, and making himself similar to the host, who himself is shoeless. A milder version of this takes place when guests arrive at our houses and wipe their shoes on a mat with “Welcome” printed on it. After having rung the bell and been let into the house with ritual handshakes, cries, and kisses, in snowy weather they take off their boots and put on “indoor” shoes, or in the presence of intimate friends remain shoeless, then remove hats, gloves, and coats, and hand them over to be put away in the host’s closet. All this having taken place in the hallway—a semipublic, neutral area of transition—the next step is reached in the guests’ progress, the introduction into the living room.

  Dinner guests often bring gifts, typically flowers, wine, or chocolates, which they give to the host on arrival. This is a part-payment for the hospitality about to be given, and for this reason it is possible for such a gift to be thought lacking in civility: a gift already bestowed might mean less pressure to return the invitation. But the custom has spread in recent years, even to previously immune Anglo-Saxon countries. Dinner gifts, it should be noted, ought still to consist of food or flowers because these things do not last. A durable and inappropriately valuable gift would upset the delicate imbalance created by a dinner invitation.

  Many and various are the rules about what gifts one may present to one’s host. Flowers are particularly laden with symbolic meanings which might trap a foreign guest into committing a faux pas. Roses, in eastern Germany, mean you have romantic intentions; yellow flowers mean hatred in Bulgaria, and in Norway carnations and white flowers generally refer to funerals and death. Chrysanthemums are usually inappropriate gifts in Europe because they are commonly placed on graves, chrysanthemums being at their best at the time of the Feast of the Dead. Offering wine is an insult in Portugal, Spain, or Italy, because it looks as though you think your host might not be prepared to supply enough of this basic commodity. (All these rules are modified, of course, by the principle of politeness, which enjoins people on their own home ground to make allowances for the ignorance of foreigners.)

  The way hosts accept gifts also varies. In Turkey, the hostess would not dream of opening a gift you have presented because she would be taking her attention off you, the guest, and that would make you feel unwanted. In other countries, a gift might be ceremonially ignored so that the host will not look greedy, or it might be opened at once with cries of delight, together with reproaches for the giver’s generosity. In North America, gifts tend to be opened immediately. Flowers are displayed so that everyone can enjoy them, whereas in other cultures it might be thought rude for the hostess to absent herself in order to find and fill a vase; a gift of wine should if possible be served during the meal, and chocolates handed out after dinner, so that the hosts do not appear to be gleefully hoarding gifts for themselves, and so as to display the gift-giver’s generosity to the other guests. In France, a gift bottle of wine might not be served at dinner because a host is supposed to have complex and subtle reasons for having chosen specific wines as a function of the dishes to be served, or to have chosen the dishes to complement the wines.

  On a Middle Eastern guest’s arrival at a traditional house, he or she must give a formalized greeting and then sit down at the place designated, on the floor. This immediate lowering of the body is a ritual act of deference to the host and his household. Not to do it, say the people of the United Arab Emirates, “would be sitting on the head of the host.” For the rest of the visit, guests must take care not to rise while the host is sitting. The aim is never to stand higher than the host; if somebo
dy leaves, they bend while exiting, demonstrating a desire to stay lower: physical demeanour is an outward sign of one’s will and intent. Great care must be taken when sitting not to let legs straggle over the floor, taking up too much room. (Our dining chairs automatically prevent people from appropriating extra space; but we do request that their occupants refrain from extending their legs out as far as possible. The correct position of the seat and spine in an upright dining chair helps keep shins decorously vertical.) People who sit on the floor to dine must keep their naked feet in their proper place, tucked decently away from the eating space and from the other people present. Feet, like shoes, are “low” and potentially polluting: one never knows what they have trodden on. They are also extremely intimate parts of the body, and to feel free to present them to another person at an occasion like a dinner party is likely to be interpreted either as a deliberate insult or as a sign of great pride.

  The Arab hostess, giving an all-female party, now pours coffee, which in this culture is an opening ritual as well as a closing one. Then she provides food, eats it with her guests, pours coffee again, and finally offers perfumes and incense: guests will return home bearing the perfumes of the house they have visited. All these rites are performed by the host personally. A guest shows honour and deference by placing herself entirely in the hands of her hostess; indeed, she has no say, as long as she is in the hostess’s house, about how she is to be treated. Resentment for any incivility may be expressed, and revenge exacted—but normally only later, when the guest has left the house and tells everyone else what happened. The perfumes and incense are intended to purify the pollution represented by the outsider’s presence, in addition to lavishing attention and respect. In ancient times Arabs and Jews would pour perfumed oil over the heads of arriving visitors. Jesus rebuked Simon the Pharisee at a dinner party when criticized for letting a prostitute approach him and then wash his bare feet with her tears. Simon had not welcomed him as a truly caring host should, had not kissed him when he came in, had not provided water for his feet, had not anointed his head with oil.