Eating together is a sign of friendship and equality, and yet people have always used the positioning of the “companions” as an expression of the power of each in relationship to the others. Hierarchical seating arrangements make up one of the most intricate aspects of protocol, for placing guests at table is a deeply political act. Where diners are not ranked, a political, or social and religious, statement is just as surely being made. A great and deliberate distinction is always created between meals that are formal and carefully structured, and those that are casual and relaxed. Intimacy can be fostered by “breaking the rules” (though one of the apparent paradoxes of social communication is that some level of formality must be maintained or relationship among dinner companions will be forfeited). Seating arrangements are made to be rigidly adhered to, kept only in part, or rejected; in every case they are important.
Hierarchy at dinner is usually enforced when a group comes from a mixture of social backgrounds. We hear a good deal about what seems to us the outrageously discriminatory practices at medieval banquets. (One source of frustration for the scholars who research the history of medieval food is that the texts of the period—and the Middle Ages are not unique in this—seldom describe the food served at a banquet in any detail; but they do make clear everything to do with precedence in the seating arrangements. This is because food was regarded as beneath literary consideration, whereas the seating was fascinating enough to be recorded.) Special guests and the hosts of the banquet sat at the raised “high table,” upon which stood a huge silver salt cellar, marking the place of the host or of an outstandingly important guest; the other people sat therefore “below the salt,” and the further away from it the lower. The high-ups were deliberately given better food, and more of it.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aristocrats in Europe, on the other hand, increasingly ate together in small groups, and would not hear of hierarchical seating; their hosts decided who would be a compatible group to invite, and guests sat down near the people they preferred. Tables were often quite small and, significantly, round. What had in fact happened at these “intimate suppers” was that the people who sat “below the salt” had simply been banished from the party. During the course of two centuries, the lord of the manor had gradually removed himself, during dinner, from the sight of his retainers, to eat with chosen companions in a room set apart from his great hall. It is easy—and so very modern—to be egalitarian once the lower orders have been placed in a totally different sphere, out of sight and out of mind, and certainly not invited to one’s table.
The presidents of the revolutionary United States began by insisting, on diplomatic occasions, that all foreign envoys be treated equally on American soil. Thomas Jefferson’s Rules of Etiquette (1803) removed all precedence from visiting dignitaries, and the resulting rage and confusion they felt must have been deeply satisfying. George Washington had insisted that as head of the nation he could never be anyone’s guest; his reasons were deeply moral, but he probably also understood very well the ritually subordinate role of guests. After 1815, when, as we shall see, diplomatic protocol was redefined by the international community, the American presidency restored precedence as a device for ordering ceremonial proceedings. But the tradition of amazing foreigners with American informality has remained. Casual manners can be delightfully warm and direct. Yet snobbery is apparently inescapable, for it is chic nowadays to be relaxed, and it can look old-fashioned and ridiculous to be formal. It is also an ancient status-enhancing device for those whom everyone knows to be the most powerful to waive pernickety rules and treat their inferiors with familiarity.
A space is often made where people can meet on equal terms, freed for a time from social structures and at least partly relieved of power struggles. Modern large cities are socially viable perhaps only insofar as they provide such places, where people can appear, unknown and unasked, with no past unless they feel like revealing it; no one they meet (provided they are careful with their manners, dress, and speech habits) should be able to “place” them. Image becomes everything—consciously projected, instantaneously perceived, and either corresponding to reality or not. Close-knit, stable community having been sacrificed, its alternative, anonymous separateness and mobility, must be provided. The birth of cafés in the late seventeenth century in Europe was one of the prerequisites for the growth of modern city life. Almost at once, anti-hierarchy and the shrugging off of social roles not only made economic sense for the cafe owner, widening the clientele as it did, but it provided an important service. The Rules and Orders of the Coffee-House (London, 1674) begin with the following:
First, Gentry, Tradesmen, all are welcome hither,
And may without Affront sit down Together:
Pre-eminence of Place, none here should Mind,
But take the next fit Seat that he can find;
Nor need any, if Finer Persons come,
Rise up for to assigne to them his Room.
A deliberate contrast is being made in these verses with the customers’ experience of formal dinner parties, where guests are first selected by their hosts, and then carefully seated with regard for rank, etiquette, and protocol.
The word “etiquette” is said to come from the idea of labels or stickers attached to things (and now people) proclaiming what they are and where they belong. “Protocol” comes from the Greek protokollon (proto, first, and kollan, to glue), a sheet glued to a manuscript case, giving some idea of its contents. Places at a formal dinner are designated by a card set at every cover, with the diner’s name on it. It was once de rigueur to give each male guest an envelope addressed to him, with the name inside of the woman to whom he should give his arm for the procession into the dining room, and who would be his dinner partner. The hostess may dispense with cards, but she must have the seating planned, and be able to direct her guests to their places. For in our society it is the hostess (or the host) who decides (unless he or she formally renounces this right) where guests shall sit, and this order determines that in which diners will be served their food.
Precedence at table was rehearsed, as it were, by performance of the procession into the dining room. In the nineteenth century, house guests at a mansion would gather, sometimes in the ground-floor hall, descending the great staircase to do so, wearing the formal toilette they had changed into for dinner, before the gaze of the others assembling. The butler announced that the meal was ready: “Dinner is served.” “Madame est servie” was the ritual French phrase: Proust describes a manservant intoning it so mournfully that it sounded as though Madam was dead. Then the previously instructed guests would line up, the host leading the way with the senior woman guest holding his arm. (Women attaching themselves to an arm of their partnering males became usual during the eighteenth century; earlier guides took their charges, as men took women, by the hand.) The guests followed in the order of the women’s precedence, with the partners pre-ordained for them by their hosts. The hostess (who in English-speaking countries sat at the foot of the table facing her husband at the head) went in last, with the senior male guest accompanying her.
Guests are allowed, in some cultures, to demand the “honours” they consider their due at table; the host remains responsible, however, for justice overall, and must ask an over-ambitious guest to move over if someone more distinguished than he would more fitly occupy that seat. Relying on the host’s competence in this matter, a more intelligent guest can seize the initiative, even if only temporarily. He can do more than accept his host’s decision (as he finally must if he is to remain polite), by seating himself in a lower place than he deserves. “After you is manners,” a sixteenth-century English proverb has it: begging someone to precede oneself indicates attention being paid and a desire to respect others. Deliberately taking a lower place shows contempt for rank, and since rank is mere “culture,” an artificial facade, it is always admirable to demonstrate an underlying indifference to it. Taking a lower seat will also constrain any host worth his
salt to close the gap between appearance and social reality by inviting the guest to “come up higher.”
The New Testament is full of dinner parties and stories about feasts. Humility, which is for Christians an aspect of wisdom, is presented in a parable about a guest who lowers himself instead of competing for the best place at dinner—but is rewarded with higher consideration. It typically expresses spiritual values in terms familiar to participants in the worldly rat race. Dinner, because of the exigencies of table manners, was one of the rare contexts where competitive and powerful people were likely to have witnessed adjustments being made, where the low were asked to move higher and those at the top embarrassed by being demoted to a more fitting place. (There is a culturally specific aspect to the parable’s setting, however. Today, it might be considered quite rude to take a seat other than the one to which the host motions you. In our society the host has to make the decisions and the guests must obey. Branchereau’s book on manners for priests [late nineteenth century] says that seating is very difficult to get right. It would be false humility, therefore, and only cause trouble, to upset the host’s seating arrangements.)
The role of the host or guest who begs to defer to others, only to be overridden after a lengthy struggle the outcome of which everybody knows in advance, is fairly common. An Arab guest murmurs “Tafaddal” (“Be so good”) to the host, trying to get him to go first to the eating area, but the guest eventually yields because going in first is his role; he has precedence. This procedure is called “wrestling for the merit” of giving way; the struggle itself is an expression of polite good will, even though etiquette has already decided who will win. Chinese and Japanese etiquette is perhaps the most full-blown example. Dinner in China begins, B. Y. Chao tells us, with a fight over yielding precedence on entering the dining room: “Among familiar friends, it may come to actual pushing, though never to blows.” An elder guest, after the ritual time has been allowed for a struggle to occur, may take it upon him- or herself to permit entry at last to be effected by pronouncing Góng jìng búrù cóng-mìng, a saying which means roughly “Better obedience than deference.”
Another fight follows, this time over seating precedence—a subject which Chao says is far too complex to explain to Westerners. “Sometimes we seem to be actually quarrelling and fighting when we are really each trying to be more polite than everybody else.” One ingenious way in which “culture” defeats “nature” is by keeping the aggression but changing its goal. This is an example, where competition is recast as a battle to lower oneself, and thereby to win a reputation for politeness. A struggle, furthermore, inevitably implies contact between the fighters; the playful quarrel over the lowest seat forces people to relate with each other as they perform their manoeuvres.
Arjun Appadurai, describing how food can be used to express conflict in a Tamil Brahman household, shows how the women responsible for cooking and serving food in a large family can “abbreviate” the meal to express any grievances they might be harbouring. They can also direct members of the family to inappropriate places—for example, a teenager being seated with the children, or a senior member of the family next to a “poor cousin”; or they might serve the food in an order calculated to insult someone who has offended them. Relatives or guests who are in disfavour can be “put down,” as we say, in what amounts to revenge by seating and serving order.
Invited guests who are affronted by the host’s estimate of their rank can do nothing about it, unless they are prepared to break up the entire proceedings by walking out. A rather clever compromise was once possible within the boundaries of diplomatic etiquette, whereby a guest who thought himself misplaced could turn his plate over to indicate silent displeasure: he was preventing the drama of serving food and eating it from continuing, until such time as his host could redress his slighted honour, or at least notice his protest. The action did not count as an insult to the host, with all the consequences that would necessarily ensue.
Examples of the sort of hard feeling which could be aroused by seating offences may be taken from The Court of civill Courtesie, translated from the Italian in 1591. The “young gentleman” for whom the tract is written is given a whole list of ploys, complaints, and repartee which he should learn and have ready in case of such a slight. If for instance the host is shameless enough to make no redress for an error made in seating him, “The young Gentleman should be furnished with some guirding speeches or els some pleasaunt scoffes, to countenance out the matter, with those that sit by him, that the rest may see he chose the place in scorne of the other. As thus:… Beware friends, pride will have a fall: Speake not so loud, your betters be in place.” It is very clear that not receiving his due situation at dinner is “an abasement not to be suffered.” And yet, a civil man cannot start a fight. He should confine himself to saying things like “If it were not for troubling this company, I would be your carver with a peece of my Dagger: but doubt not but I shall find a time for you.”
In many societies the host has normally no need of telling guests where to go: each person knows his or her place. (An American manners book of 1855 explains that the reason why seating poses such difficulty is “because distinctions are not so explicit now.”) Usually, though not always, guests must position themselves with reference to the host, the guest of honour being at his right, or at his left, or diagonally across from him as in Japan. The other guests find their rank, by juxtaposition and distance, without a word needing to be said. Everybody must play the game, however: even one change can wreck the whole picture. Louis XIV was so incensed when a woman once sat higher than her place at table that he could scarcely speak, and almost left the table altogether; he said later that only his consideration for her husband restrained him. He was just as angry with the woman whose seat was taken, for not remonstrating, and he let it be known that he took this dislocation of table ranking as an insult to himself. Once again we notice how hosts and guests rely upon each other. In Louis’s view, his dinner companions were supposed to know their rank, and accept it without question; he was the hub of the whole system, with reference to whom all took their different places.
Diplomatic protocol is supposed to prevent rather than provoke arguments among guests. Diplomats are not merely themselves: they represent, and exist to make known, the wishes of their governments, and the ability of the people they represent to get what they want. A diplomat needs to be as sensitive to punctilios (on behalf of his country, of course) as a Spanish grandee. Hence the endless wrangling about the shapes of conference tables, the insistence on the use of correct titles and forms of address, and the order of the “receiving line” where hosts formally welcome guests at the top of the carpeted stairs. Fights and struggles over diplomatic precedence used to be savage; we hear for example of eighteenth-century horses and carriages galloping across town so guests could arrive early enough to ensure that they got their “due” seats.
Finally, in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna, the nations present made an ingenious choice, to keep protocol but remove from it any reason whatsoever, so that conflict would become pointless. They submitted ranking to chance. Ambassadors have been ranked ever since by the date and hour of their accreditation. For example, an ambassador who presented his letters in February is placed at a higher place at table than one whose credentials were submitted in March, even if the representative of a more powerful nation completed his ritual later. Any doubt about two diplomatic rivals is often ended by resort to the alphabet: the nearer the first letter of a name is to “A,” the nearer the name’s owner is to first place. Choice being removed, protocol is demoted to being a tidying device whose very meaninglessness helps prevent resentment.
At the opposite extreme, perhaps, from using fate to decide precedence is the “casual” modern manner of allowing guests to sit wherever they like (which in fact presupposes a fairly high level of internalized good manners among the guests themselves), or of the hostess seating guests as she believes they would like to be seated
. She thinks she knows, and her guests can only hope she does. There are guidelines, of course: never seat business rivals side by side, or people of opposing ideologies, or heavy thinkers with frivolous fun-lovers. But the hostess must take risks, too, or her party could be dull. In the end, freedom to choose where to put her guests makes her task so complex—far more so than even the dizzying intricacies of ancient Chinese protocol—that no one can give her advice; every single dinner party is a totally new enterprise.
A modern move back as it were towards the fatal attitude is the spreading custom of making guests move during the meal. The men (supposing that, as the modern tendency still is, men and women alternate, which already restricts seating freedom) all rise after each course and seat themselves two “male places” down, so that everyone speaks to someone new—even if they do not want to. It is in effect a variant of a custom called “the turning of the table,” which is said still to be employed at extremely formal dinners: at the merest turn of the hostess’s head, from the guest on her left to the guest on her right, every couple has to interrupt their conversation. The women take the responsibility of turning in the direction the hostess has initiated; the gentlemen, turned from and turned to, merely submit. It would of course be exceedingly rude, not only to the host but to everyone present, to become so engrossed in conversation that you failed to notice the command, or refused to change partners; chorus-line precision is required, or else at least two people would be left “staring alone at their plates.” The hostess, Emily Post says, should in such a case cry out, “Sally, you cannot talk to Professor Bugge any longer! Mr. Smith has been trying his best to attract your attention.” The device certainly ensures that no one is ignored in dinner-time conversation.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 16