The Banquet as a Feast of Reconciliation

Xavier  Escribano

The Banquet as a Feast of Reconciliation

2019, Revista de antropología y filosofía de lo sagrado =

Abstract

Using the guise of a simple supper of commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of a charismatic Protestant pastor, who had gathered around him a community of devoted disciples in a small village in Norway, Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen shows us a banquet in which, through the food prepared with the eye of an artist, the senses are awakened for the first time to a kind of experience where what is corporal and what is spiritual cease to be at odds with each other. Thus, a reconciliation of a lost unity between the body and the soul, matter and spirit, is celebrated and achieved. From this first step, with which the fundamental internal fragmentation is overcome, the other levels of unity (unity with others, with the cosmos, and with God) occur in a chain sequence, so to speak. As in all religious situations, there occurs here the coming together of two orders that seem unreconciliable: the temporal and the eternal, the limited and the infinite, the profane and the sacred. The mediator between both orders is Babette, who takes on a genuine sacerdotal function. However, there is an unexpected inversion, and paradoxically what is profane and mundane comes to the rescue of what is spiritual and sacred.

A common charge against traditional theistic views is that they promote a problematic otherworldliness that denigrates our this-worldly existence and so fails to affirm it properly. The charge is familiar from Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche. For instance, Nietzsche's Zarathustra remarks: "I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary." In the background of Nietzsche's criticism here is a concern to address the problem of cosmodicy, which is the problem of justifying and affirming life in the world as good and worthwhile in the face of hardship. Thus, another way to put the charge against traditional theistic religions here is in terms of a failure to address the problem of cosmodicy. It is true that theists have sometimes adopted a problematic otherworldly posture that denigrates our this-worldly existence. However, such a posture is at odds with biblical theology, since in the first creation story in Genesis 1, God creates the world and declares it "very good." Indeed, if it is to address the problem of cosmodicy, then it seems that a theistic perspective must find its way to a similar affirmation of the world, a yes-saying that is based not merely on willpower (as it is for Nietzsche) but rather on an appreciative attention to the given good of the world. In other words, it requires a kind of receptivity to grace, where "grace" is understood phenomenologically as something that is experienced as coming to us from without, a given unmerited good to which we need to be properly responsive. In this essay we will make the case for the claim that a theistic posture of receptivity to grace in the world can enable us to address the problem of cosmodicy and become properly at home in the world. We will do so through reflecting on Gabriel Axel's 1987 film Babette's Feast, which is an adaptation of a short story of that title by Isak Dinesen (the pen name of Karen Blixen), first published in 1958. We will show how it offers a depiction of a Hegelian-esque dialectic where a problematic worldliness (thesis) meets a problematic otherworldliness (antithesis), which is resolved in a vision of life where a kind of receptivity to grace enables us to affirm life in the world and become properly at home within it (synthesis). We will take up each stage of this dialectic in turn.

Isak Dinesen's 1958 novella Babette's Feast tells the story of how a small, quarrelsome Lutheran community in Norway comes to be transformed by the arrival of a stranger, the French cook Babette. In her deceptively simple tale, Dinesen adopts explicitly Eucharistic language and imagery to convey the connection between eating and faith, exploring via rich use of metaphor the way in which we come to be inhabited and nourished by the other. In this paper, I follow Dinesen's sacramental perspective by offering the Catholic notion of transubstantiation as a model for furthering psychoanalytic theorising about the presence of the other within. Following an outline of Dinesen's story, I draw on Freud (1921), Abraham and Torok (1994) and Kristeva (1990) to explore differing notions of unconscious identification, incorporation and the metaphorical basis of subjectivity. I develop these ideas through a discussion of the central celebratory dinner given by Babette and conclude by considering some of the implications of the story for psychoanalytic practice. version of Grandmother's Footsteps. I stopped as soon as I heard the words: 'the body of Christ', obediently repeating what Mother Gabriel had told me to say: 'amen'. I felt a firm pressure in my palm. When I opened my eyes, I saw a small, light, paper-coloured disc in my hand which I gingerly picked up (so light! was that all?) and put in my mouth. To my dismay, it promptly and firmly stuck to the roof of my mouth; and whilst my tongue, at first apologetically, then more urgently and finally with distinct alarm attempted to dislodge it, it dissolved and disappeared before I could get back to my seat. Guiltily, I sat down, taking sidelong glances at my friends who all appeared to be self-consciously chewing and swallowing Jesus, sitting back with satisfied smiles on their faces. Clearly, I needed more practice and I resolved to do better next time. The problem was, as I decided later, it didn't look like a body. Actually, it didn't really look like bread either, resembling more the rice-paper that clung to the bottom of the coconut macaroons I was rather fond of. If, as I had been told, it was really the body of Christ-His Real Presence-how could I eat it? Didn't that make me a cannibal? And anyway, what happened once the wafer was in my tummy? How long did it last there? Of course, I knew that I had to fast before taking communion, but what would happen afterwards, when I had my Zing bar during break? It seemed vaguely sacrilegious to eat chocolate on top of the Body of Christ; and besides, there was the complicated and delicate matter of digestion. These were perhaps not quite the sacred mysteries that I was supposed to be contemplating, but they were deeply important matters to my confused seven year old self. Alas, there wasn't time for me to work out the answers before the great First Holy Communion Day arrived, and what with the glamour, flowers and crowds at school, the photographs, the proud parents and the delighted nuns, the vexed issue of exactly how what appeared to be bread could also, at one and the same time be something divine, faded into the background.

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