Some years ago, on a late-night radio programme, Howard Jacobson and I discussed subjects that all novelists should avoid. Car chases were our first candidate, then long descriptions of sunsets, then sex. We spent quite a lot of time on sex. But as we talked it became clear that what we really meant was sensual pleasure. Fraught with danger, we agreed. Descriptions of touch, taste and smell could veer into cliche with terrifying ease, luring the unwary writer into thickets of purple prose, or unintended comedy, or descriptions that read like a badly translated medical textbook. Avoid the sensual, we agreed that night. Forget it. Don't even try.
A year later I embarked on a novel, set in the 17th century, whose central love story is conducted through the sensual pleasures of food.
I hadn't forgotten mine and Howard's discussion, and EM Forster had warned specifically about food in Aspects of the Novel. Characters, he wrote, "seldom enjoy it and never digest it unless specifically required to do so". But other writers must have written successfully about food. Scanning my bookshelves for guidance, my eye alighted first on a 1960s paperback edition of Petronius's Satyricon complete with bad line drawings of bare-breasted women, pigs, fish and a ham. Trimalchio's feast occupies almost a quarter of The Satyricon and features dormice roasted in honey, quinces stuck with prickles to resemble sea urchins, stuffed pea-hen eggs, 12 zodiac-themed hors d'oeuvres, a boar stuffed with live thrushes (which escape when the beast's flank is slashed) and dates in place of part-digested acorns. The dishes arrive borne by naked slaves while the drunken guests bicker and attempt (and mostly fail) to fornicate.
Trimalchio's feast stands at the head of a tradition of culinary excess whose next great landmark is Rabelais. The dishes listed in the "other" Chapter XXXII of Book V of Gargantua and Pantagruel (two versions survive) include the wild boars of Erymanthus, Olympus and Calydon, the swan into which Zeus metamorphosed to seduce Leda, and the genitals of the bull beloved of Queen Pasiphae. A sequence of untranslatable punning foodstuffs is headed by an enigmatic dish called "corquignolles", which I attempted (and failed) to describe in The Pope's Rhinoceros. Several pages later the list is still going, and the trope of fanciful food continues too, reaching an apogee 350 years later when the protagonist of JK Huysmans's À rebours (published in 1884) concocts his infamous black-themed funeral feast in which "naked negresses wearing only slippers and stockings" serve caviar and black puddings amid ponds filled with ink and paths strewn with charcoal.
But the strange thing is that no one actually eats these dishes. No one chews. No one tastes. Petronius's real subject is not the food but his feasters' jaundiced appetites, their unassuageable craving for novelty as they party their way through Nero's Rome. Rabelais has gluttony, not pleasure, in his sights. Huysmans's dark purpose remains obscure to me but it is not black pudding. If anyone ever truly gobbled down dormice roasted in honey, we miss the crackle of the caramelised glaze, the sinking of incisors into juicy flesh, the Malteser-like crunch of mousy skulls.
Of course, some fictional protagonists do eat. Fielding's Tom Jones wolfs down great trenchers of English beef. Saint-Loup is quite as heartily carnivorous in Proust. Plum puddings and other edible Victoriana bounce through the works of Dickens. But these dishes are barely invoked before disappearing down enthusiastic gullets or vanishing amid exclamations of pleasure. They are ciphers of plenty, of health and good cheer – not food. The closer I read, the more the food seemed to disappear before my eyes, like a fairy feast when the spell is broken. Was EM Forster right?
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After a fashion. All meals begin with a motive, I realised. Not feasts but their cooks are the key. Jonathan Franzen's mixed grill barbecue in The Corrections begins with sausages, steak and good intentions, but ends with charred meat, recriminations and a hand injury. Similarly, in Hans Ulrich Treichel's criminally underrated Lost, the pig's head that is prepared each Christmas to bring the family together grows ever more repulsive as it is eked out over the following months, driving its consumers apart. We care about what these people eat because we care about them in a way that we do not about the fabulous dishes of Trimalchio's feast or Trimalchio's guests.
To cook for someone is an intimate act. To prepare food that another will place in their mouth, that will be tasted and swallowed and then pass through that person's body, is a primal exchange. We care about food in literature not when it is deployed as a symbol but when it becomes a language. One cooks. Another eats. It is a simple exchange, perhaps the simplest of all. The pleasure taken by one becomes the reward of the other. EM Forster, Howard Jacobson and I were nearly right but still wrong. Eating, far from being too sensual an act to be paraded on the page, is only half the story. Behind every dish stands a cook, and every cook has a story too.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/06/lawrence-norfolk-food-literature-eat
