(Re-)Thinking with Eating and Drinking

There is an extraordinary convergence of post-war French thought which, knowingly or not, uses or is legible through food and drink and carries the potential for re-thinking overlooked psychological, ideological and historical meanings in representations of eating and drinking. Some thinkers are associated with eating and drinking: Lévi-Strauss’ culinary triangle; Barthes’ ideological and psychosociological readings of food and drink; or Certeau, Giard and Mayol positing cooking and shopping as creative ‘poaching’ on capitalist scripts. Food and drink exemplify arguments, with Bataille’s potlatch illustrating economies of excess; Sartre’s sweet, viscous lure of bad faith; Beauvoir’s skewering of how domestic labour constructs women as man’s negative other; Bourdieu on how food choices perpetuate class division; the leftovers of weaning in Lacanian lack and repressed trauma; and Kristeva’s skin of milk evoking abjection. More metaphorically, Cixous figures mother’s milk as ‘white ink’ and reading as ‘eating on the sly’, whilst for Derrida, traces and remainders are necessary leftovers of meaning and ‘eating well’ may counter carno-phallogocentrism. Introducing how Fischler’s theorizing of the incorporation of food fuels new readings, and noting the influence of Marx and Freud (and their dependence on food), new critical combinations emerge, creating a flexible mode of re-thinking with leftovers.

Introduction

The introduction establishes the untapped interpretative potential bound up with food and drink and representations of it. An extraordinary nexus of post-war French thought that uses or is legible through figures of eating and drinking is identified, along with the new critical combinations which here provide a framework for re-thinking eating and drinking in four case-study novels. The conventional literary potential of food and drink is established, before introducing the contrasting novels which exceed those conventions. These are well-known, prize-winning works, all translated into English. They are self-consciously literary and differently theoretically-informed about intersecting questions of language, trauma, gender, class, race and global market economics. Chapter 1 is introduced as providing a flexible critical apparatus for the ensuing case studies and as a suggestive tool for re-thinking representations of eating and drinking in other genres or media. Optimizing accessibility, case studies can be read singly or severally (references to relevant sections of Chapter 1 are provided), and the novel, writer and any relevant critical material are introduced before re-thinking the representations of food and drink in each post-war French fiction. Thus, culturally-specific insights emerge together with a springboard for examining leftover interpretations in other forms of representational practice from other times and places.

Weighing up the Potential of Literary Consumption

Houellebecq’s La Carte et le territoire/The Map and the Territory (2010) provocatively problematizes the potential of art, literature and the French economy in the global marketplace. Meals and drinks in bars, cafés, restaurants, luxury hotels and the home of a soon-to-be-murdered fictional Houellebecq are the premise for discussions of late capitalism, whilst unwittingly – along with the dislocated gastro-anomie embodied by supermarket shopping and excessive drinking – underscoring how lack imbues twenty-first-century relationships. Literary intertexts related to food and drink expose the problematics of the consumption of the writer in the twenty-first-century marketplace, yet artfully distance the writer from some very problematic discourses. Traces and remainders in leftover bits and pieces of charcuterie and questionable fusion food which pepper the novel magnify Houellebecq’s attempts to represent the world with scraps of more or less throwaway culture. These – deliberately or not – both evoke catastrophic excesses of late capitalism and the interpretative and transformative potential of representations of eating and drinking (although not ecocritical concerns about the planet). Although evoking global systems of exploitative violence fuelling the twenty-first century’s economics of excess, analyses of food and drink in the novel reveals a more positive conclusion: that writing can still create from remainders, whatever the market conditions.

Feeding and Reading Ambivalence

Les Armoires vides/Cleaned Out (1974) is the first of Ernaux’s many texts exploring how gender and class have indelible leftovers. Enduring traces of the working-class rural café-épicerie of narrator Denise’s childhood with its ambivalent desires and constraints are explored in terms of abjection and of her ambivalent incorporation of the discourses of the Church, education and the patriarchy which affects her senses of value, shame and sexual appetite. The analysis supplements understandings of how class difference may be perpetuated through the (food) ‘choices’ which are effectively determined. Secret eating brings arousal but also (along with poor diet and alcohol in excess) offers insights into the traumatic effects of post-war modernization, as well as the Second World and Algerian Wars. Eating whilst reading offers solace and fuels the narrative with intertexts, but also evokes the transformative dangers of (inter)textual ‘eating on the sly’. Representations of eating and drinking raise questions of the politics of both narrative and sexual reproduction. Indeed, food and drink are bound up with psychological and embodied remainders of gendered prejudice which counter conventional feminist perspectives, and the narrator reads and consumes in bad faith, lacks freedom over her reproductive future and cannot escape inevitable remainders.

Re-thinking the Story

His first nouveau roman [‘new novel’], Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes [The Erasers] (1953) eschews conventional storytelling, anthropomorphizing meanings and psychological motivations, instead focussing on ‘the adventure of language’. Food, drink and the places they are consumed are part of a strategy of subverting literary realism, noir conventions and classical tropes as Robbe-Grillet seeks to deny readers narrative satisfaction. However, the interpretative multiplicity of eating and drinking counters such intentions, notably in frequently food-premised mises en abyme (including and exceeding the famous tomato quarter), intended to encapsulate the narrative but full of leftover political, social, cultural and psychological meaning. Robbe-Grillet’s subversion of Oedipus Rex and its scenes of nourishment (and its withdrawal) along with references to hunger point to characters and a narrative fuelled by lack. Constructs of gender and of class distinction are revealed in Robbe-Grillet’s representations of food and drink, as are coercive and excessive effects of capitalism in everyday life. Descriptions of eating and drinking are shown to have ambivalent remainders of trauma (from the Second World War and the impact of consumer culture). Re-thinking the novel through its representations of eating and drinking shows how writing and reading – like feeding – are necessarily transformative, multiple and conflictual processes.

Conclusion

Leftovers concludes as it begins: by identifying the untapped interpretative potential in representations of eating and drinking. It recalls how the critical approaches re-thought in terms of leftovers in Chapter 1 are used in new ways and combinations to explore representations of food and drink in the literary case studies. Writing, reading and feeding emerge as simultaneously ambivalent and transformative processes, which always exceed intentions, spanning the symbolic and the material and evoking leftovers of psychology, ideology and identity. As well as insights into the sample of critical and literary texts (and into post-war France), there are new understandings of the effects of gender, race and class power relations, of unregulated excess and of the impossibility of escaping leftovers of language, desire and repressed traumas. Necessarily only a taste of re-thinking with leftovers, the book offers a springboard for interdisciplinary developments across and beyond comparative, cultural, ecocritical, film, food, gender, modern languages and literary studies. Leftovers offers creative, critical inspiration to explore other theoretical and aesthetic projects which use or are legible through food and drink, enabling a re-thinking of the roles that eating and drinking may play in any kind of representational practice, historical or contemporary, from across the world.

Food Questioning Values in Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes/Pig Tales

Darrieussecq’s scandal-provoking Truismes/Pig Tales (1996), set in a near-future, neo-fascist France, involves much eating, drinking and consumption of others, whilst deliberately chewing up literary, political and feminist discourses. The naïve first-person narrator (as unaware of being a sex worker as she is of the intertexts which feed her retrospective account written in porcine form) experiences a metamorphosis oscillating between sex worker, submissive lover and sow, the flux marked by being consumed physically by food cravings and sexually by male abusers. Until momentarily fueled by acorns and truffles, self-expression through writing and eating involves danger, exemplifying the implications of the squandering of excess. Ambivalent traces of meaning in food-related truisms bring into question the possibility of countering patriarchal, capitalist violence – structural and overt. Carno-phallogocentric, cannibalistic, food- and sex-fueled soirées and the ‘others’ who serve and are sacrificed at them evoke the trauma of colonialism, the Holocaust (and French co-implication in it); excesses in turn linked to late capitalism. With the opposite of nurturing mother’s milk, and countering expectations of feminist readings, re-thinking representations of eating and drinking in Truismes raises questions of the conditions of production for and the consequences of (un)critical writing about gender, race and contemporary modes of consumption.