When their Stomachs were Cloy’d, what their Bellies Denied,
Each clap’d in his Pocket to give to his Bride;
With a Cheese-cake and Custard for my little Johnny,
And a Handful of Sweet-Meats for poor Daughter Nanny.
The left-overs of a meal have often been a matter for concern—they should not be left lying around and wasted (“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost,” said Jesus after the multiplication of the loaves and fishes). The poor would gather about the gates of a house where a great feast had been held, expecting to be given what was left: hosts in the Arab world today cook far more than is required for the party, in order to display this largesse afterwards. Some restaurants now offer “doggy bags” in order that their patrons may take home the expensive food they have not been able to ingest at one sitting; Chinese restaurants have an old tradition of permitting this. Proust has a society hostess use this gesture of generosity to crush a guest, turning him into a kind of parasite: “‘You shall have some galantine to take home,’ said Madame Verdurin, making a cruel allusion to the penury into which Saniette had plunged himself by trying to rescue the family of a friend.”
When everyone is dressed for the outdoors and ready to go, there follow the ceremonies of recrossing the host’s threshold. This was a dangerpoint when important people used to need to restrict their acquaintance even further than the exclusivity of the party ensured, or when women had to exclude the possibility of recognizing merely interested, rather than interesting, males. The hostess rises, according to a nineteenth-century writer who calls him- or herself a “Member of the Aristocracy” (1881), and shakes the hand of everybody. Guests, he or she goes on, must on no account formally say goodbye to one another, but only to their host and hostess. They may salute other people only if they are nearby, or if they necessarily walk past them. Guests have come to honour their hosts; they must not seem to be openly using the occasion in order to rub shoulders with others. (The coarseness of the expression gives some idea of the danger: dinner brings people into close contact.)
In Japan, in the Arab world, and elsewhere, there follows the threshold business of putting on shoes. In many traditional societies the host would have to dress up as well and accompany his guests to the gates of his estate, or even take a guest of honour part of the way home. In Latin America, visitors—who are supposed to protest by saying “No se moleste!” (“Don’t bother!”)—must be accompanied without fail to the outside exit or to the street. A host will walk with them to the bus stop, and even wait there till the bus comes; or at the very least stand for a moment or two, watching the guests as they disappear down the street. A Tanga feast had not ended until, by means of a log-gong, all the villages in the vicinity had been informed about the details of the feast: how much food had been distributed, how long the party had lasted, how many people had graced it with their presence.
Later, there must be another feast. Sometimes the left-overs are kept especially for a smaller, more intimate party, or several of them, soon after. During the banquet, there has occasionally been time set aside for planning a future meal: who will give it, and at what date. When it does take place, the hosts of the present feast may be given special delicacies, to remind them and everybody else of their previous generosity. In our own culture, it has been the custom to call and leave visiting cards within a few days after a party; nowadays, thoughtful guests telephone, or better still send a card or letter with their thanks. They ought soon, of course, to plan a return invitation. At a Tanga feast, guests who have finished eating simply gather up their food-baskets and leave without a word. They do not say goodbye, because feasting never ends, and to sound valedictory might be to insinuate that socializing—indeed, society itself—might conceivably grind to a halt.
5
No Offence
When Gargantua was a very young giant, he was “brought up and disciplined” as his father Grandgousier (Great Gullet) ordained. But the process took time, and Gargantua was not only “untamed” at first as ordinary infants are, but—such is the nature of giants—too big to control easily. Before he began his education under Ponocrates, and long before Rabelais’s culminating utopian vision of the good life lived in communal harmony in the Abbey of Thélème, baby Gargantua’s manners were abominable. His misbehaviour while eating, though joyful and natural, was especially hard for other people to take, and something would have to be done about it: “He was always rolling in the mud, dirtying his nose, scratching his face, and treading down his shoes … He pissed in his shoes, shat in his shirt, wiped his nose on his sleeve, snivelled into his soup, paddled about everywhere, drank out of his slipper, and usually rubbed his belly on a basket. He sharpened his teeth on a shoe, washed his hands in the soup, combed his hair with his wine-bowl, sat between two stools with his arse on the ground … drank while eating his soup … bit as he laughed and laughed as he bit, often spat in the dish, blew a fat fart …” He also threw up his food, picked his nose, ate his white bread before his brown, reckoned without his host, scraped his teeth with a pig’s foot, and let his father’s little dogs eat out of his dish, while he ate with them. He was rambunctiously dirty, grotesquely lacking in discrimination, ignorant of order and decorum, heedless of the squeamishness of others, and incapable of keeping his body under control for their sakes.
Claude Lévi-Strauss says that one difference between our own attitude and that of the “so-called primitive people,” the American Indians he describes, is that good manners for us are a means of self-protection, whereas they seek to protect others from themselves. The etiquette of “pre-modern” people arises from an anxiety above all to spare others from their own impurity. We, on the other hand, “wear hats to protect ourselves from rain, cold, and heat; we use forks to eat with, and wear gloves when we go out, so as not to dirty our fingers; we drink through a straw in order to protect ourselves from the coldness of the beverage, and we eat preserved foods to make things easier for ourselves or to defend ourselves from the theoretical dangers associated with rawness or rottenness. Yet in other societies, today as in former times, hats, gloves, forks, drinking tubes and preserved foods are meant as barriers against an infection emanating from the body of the user” [Lévi-Strauss’s italics].
We are certainly more selfish than the Indian tribes as Lévi-Strauss describes them; but in fact we too are taught to consider the feelings of others, if only because we want to be accepted and approved by them. We learn as we grow up that behaviour like that of Gargantua makes people recoil from us in disgust—and unless we suffer from mental sickness we are all intensely aware of the reactions of others, and want to be favourably received. At table we are not only together but separate: we protect ourselves, but we also protect others from experiencing us as threatening, unpredictable, or disgusting. We know that we cannot commune unless “respect” (which entails social distance and physical propriety) is maintained. Our avoidance of disgusting behaviour when in company (and even, if we are “socialized” enough, when we are alone) corresponds in part to the American Indians’ “protection of others from their own impurity” which impressed Lévi-Strauss with its generosity of spirit.
Many breaches of table manners arouse disgust in the people obliged to witness them. “Gust” (French goût) is “taste,” a culinary metaphor, and disgust is perhaps most primevally a reaction to dangerous or otherwise revolting food. It is actually bad manners openly to rejoice in gristle, spines, and cartilage (Athenaeus), or, like Dickens’s villainous dwarf Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, to crunch eggs with their shells on and prawns complete with heads and tails. Disgust is also aroused by the improper treatment of food, by indelicate grabbing, slopping, splattering, and messing, by failures in bodily propriety while eating is performed. Inadequately controlled behaviour calls forth several gestures of avoidance from others. The face alone, apparently universally, evinces some or all of the following when disgust is aroused: lowered eyebrows, partially closed eyes, nost
rils narrowed or shut by the nose being screwed up, upper lip raised, corners of the mouth turned down and back (the opposite of a welcoming smile), tongue moved forward or protruding (a metaphorical facial version of arms pushing something away). Expressions of disgust serve to warn other people, and to share the shock and disapproval with them. The human face does not produce all aspects of this expression, however, until its owner is between two and four years old—at the very age when children begin to learn how to be embarrassed. Before this stage, children know fear and shyness, but they never blush or cringe or react in other bodily ways to social faux pas.
Embarrassment, which often results from the disgust of others, is a mechanism that maintains awareness and teaches never-to-be-forgotten lessons in decorum. It is a painful experience of social pressure. We blush, fidget, go cold, or turn pale when we fail to live up to the expectations of others; embarrassment arises when one is revealed to be incompetent, in the presence of other people. Both factors are necessary: first wanting to look good, and second the audience to whose expectations one fails to measure up. It is immediately obvious that eating in a group sets the stage for possible misdemeanours of an embarrassing kind. There is at table a level of competency that everyone hopes for, a concerted determination to prevent the occurrence of disgust, and a circle of witnesses to every performance. Any kind of falling off—thinking spaghetti may be eaten in one’s hands and proceeding to do so, letting custard drip down one’s beard, a sudden involuntary noise—reveals incompetence, and gives rise to the possibility of disgust and therefore to embarrassment, not only in the perpetrator but in everyone else as well, for embarrassment is contagious. Embarrassment arises not from wickedness but from impropriety, from not “fitting in” or “measuring up,” from letting everyone down and introducing into the company what everyone had hoped to avoid.
Both embarrassment and disgust are expressions of social pressure and exaction, yet they arise so intensely in the individual that they often produce involuntary physical reactions as well. They are symptoms of the power of interaction between the person and the group. The effects of both embarrassment and disgust are to halt and impede—disgust causing us to recoil when we encounter something offensive, and embarrassment freezing and inhibiting us when we have been caught out ourselves offending others and betraying the image we wish to present of ourselves to the world. Table manners, even nowadays, are underwritten by both sanctions; to know and practise them is to have nothing to fear, but to flout them is necessarily, sooner or later, to be required by others to pay.
POLLUTION
Human beings have always found it easy to believe that wickedness might have physical consequences, and conversely that visible and tangible things “out of place” can reflect something evil being done, or a past evil deed lying hidden and unrequited. Odysseus’ men killed the forbidden cattle of the Sun, and the meat, cut up and skewered as shish-kebabs, wriggled and mooed at them, as a sign of the anger of Zeus. A prophet can see—they themselves cannot—that the outrageous Suitors, eating up the substance of Odysseus’ fortune, are sitting down to a meal with the blood of their future deaths dabbled disgustingly over their food and dripping down the walls of the hall. Knocking over the salt cellar can be perceived as the sign of an evil fate: the gesture is a symptom of heedlessness and poor control, and probably reveals a psyche troubled. Blood—like salt—is to be kept where it belongs, in blood’s case within the body, in salt’s within the cellar. When it is spilled, it means violence: past viciousness and carelessness, and violent consequences. Modern people, who pride themselves on escaping such a primitive concept as a perceived connectedness between morality and physical symptoms, have found a new meaning for the word “pollution”: black ooze covers golden sand beaches, the sky rains poison, plants and animals grow stunted and die—and we conclude that heedless human greed has come to haunt us in physical form. We ourselves are not only moral but physical beings—and we tend, often cruelly and irrationally, to accept the possibility of physical punishment resulting from moral corruption.
Pollution has always meant matter out of place, and rules broken. The threat of pollution has therefore been a powerful sanction for the rules and the categories by which a society organizes its life. Where there is a strong desire for clarity, for keeping people carefully in “their proper place,” barriers are set up between societies and social classes, and the barriers are commonly “manned” by fears of pollution, which automatically infects anyone who tampers with the arrangements. Where pollution reigns, it is infectious, and no one can associate with a person polluted without receiving automatic contagion, until that person has been officially purified. Physical contact is an essential part of ideas about pollution: at their most direct, such laws achieve the desired avoidance and distance through the command, “Don’t touch!” Eating food, cooking it, serving it, sharing it out, and passing it to others requires intensely intimate contact, both with the food and with the dinner companions. Pollution rules hedge food about, therefore, with particular fierceness.
The most famous and most complex examples of pollution-protected eating are to be found in India. There, social groups are set apart, as they often are elsewhere, by what they eat. If one society loves chicken, for instance, and another abominates it, an effective barrier has been erected between those groups: it is hard to draw close to someone with whom one never eats, and whose eating habits one finds unacceptable. On the other hand, the people who do eat chicken together identify themselves and one another thereby, and that symbol, interlocking with others, leads them on to discover how much more they have in common.
In India, where the caste system divides groups of people from other groups, prevents social mobility, and simultaneously fortifies the solidarity of those groups, eating rules sort people out and determine whether they are “high” or “low”—from the point of view of caste, and not necessarily of power—in relationship to one another. A person acceptable at one’s table is also someone whose family might be eligible for alliance through marriage. Rejecting an offer of food is a sign of superiority towards the would-be giver—and it inevitably means that no daughter or son of the refuser could conceivably marry a child of the refused. It follows that weddings involve the powerful drama of families ceremonially and publicly eating together, with the bride and groom, and other members of their respective families, solemnly exchanging and eating pieces of food.
From the point of view of caste, the Brahman or priestly caste is the top of the heap, and the point of reference for classifying everybody else. Typically (and over-simply, for food rules are enormously complex and vary from group to group), castes are “higher” in the hierarchical order depending on whether or not Brahmans will accept food from them. To be able to give a Brahman water without his being polluted thereby is to be high-caste. If he will take fried food from you, your social level is higher still, and if he will allow you to give him boiled food, it is very high indeed. A low-caste person pollutes water on contact for those higher than himself; one lower still pollutes an earthenware receptacle by touching it; and if a brass receptacle cannot stay pure when you handle it, you are on the very bottom rung. (When someone becomes a holy ascetic, a sannyasi, he or she opts out of the caste system altogether. She, to take a female example, is much holier than a Brahman, who will bow to her and grasp her basest part, her foot—but will not eat with her, even if she was of a high caste before her religious conversion. The sannyasi scorns pollution rules, and is honoured for doing so; but Brahmans inhabit the world of human regulations, and the “indiscriminate” holy woman is therefore dangerous.)
In Bengal, Hindu society is divided as follows: first, Brahmans; second, those from whom Brahmans will accept water, that is, the royal or warrior Rajputs; then the nine branches of relatively pure serving castes; then those who can offer water but cannot have any but inferior Brahmans as priests. Below the water-givers come the groups who cannot offer water to a Brahman. The highest of these are the
people who keep up their distinction from others lower than themselves by refusing to eat meat; then come people who will not eat beef, but permit themselves other kinds of meat and fowl. At the very bottom of the heap are people who stoop to eating beef, working leather, and other degrading—though entirely necessary—tasks. Because their pollution is so continuous and grave, other people cannot touch them. Contact itself has degrees of possible danger. In one village, touching is sorted into the following categories, in ascending order of gravity: touching your children, touching you, smoking your pipe (even without using the same mouthpiece, which would be horrendous behaviour), touching your brass utensils, serving you fried food, and (worst of all) serving you a boiled dish. People may in certain circumstances be considered so dangerous that they pollute by mere proximity, without any actual contact at all.
It is interesting to notice that, in India as elsewhere, purity is a state of being, and utterly passive—it can be lost, but not transferred, and it is powerless in the face of the impure. Pollution may be removed once it is incurred, and purity regained, by means of washings and other rituals. Also, the more intimate people habitually are, the less they pollute one another: they “belong together,” and pollution is a separating mechanism. In India, the most ordinary everyday food is boiled rice—to which the most pollution danger attaches. Boiled, fatless, ordinary meals called uta are from this point of view kacca, or “imperfect”; you would tend to avoid eating these with strangers. Fried tindi or “snacks” are pukka, “perfect”: they are purified by sacred butter (ghee), less liable to impurity, and therefore more “public” fare. Also, it matters desperately who cooks one’s meal, for cooks touch pots, bowls, and the food itself. (They avoid tasting it, however, and learn to test doneness with their fingers and by smell.) When a Brahman gives a feast and wants as many people as possible to come, he chooses a menu of pukka food and cooks it himself, for his touch can pollute nobody.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 37