Download PDF | Sarah Gordon - Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature - (2006).
231 Pages
Introduction
Long before tales of gargantuan gluttony regaled early modern audiences, and centuries before pie-in-the-face or banana peel gags enlivened vaudeville slapstick, medieval French poets employed food as a powerful device of humor and criticism. Food and humor both have the power to satisfy, to entertain, and to construct identity; this power is doubled when they are combined. Unexpected usages of food may be humorous to large numbers of people because food is a universal, necessary, and sometimes banal part of everyday life. However, eating and drinking represent more than just basic or mundane elements of survival. Food may be perceived as a coveted object of desire or may figure at the center of a traditional celebration or ritual.
The consumption of food and drink defines cultures and periods. As suggested by the now ubiquitous adage “you are what you eat,” alimentary customs may define an individual or a community. Diet and table manners are indicators of social status in a complex system of codified culinary norms. Food choice, preparation, and modes of consumption contribute to the construction of individual identities. Food and laughter, as two essential elements in human existence, can both be used to question and redefine meaning in culture—meaning linked to the role of the body and sexuality, to religion, to class hierarchies, and to gender relations. In general, both humor and food are identity markers; that is, they each entail belongingness to or exclusion from a given group. Because humor and food may be exclusionary, each defining group and community identity, humor about food in comic texts functions as effective social satire. Comedy about how one eats and what one eats (or does not eat) may involve self-evaluative humor for a given group, or on the other hand, may target members outside the group. Thus culinary comedy may mock either “us” or “them.” Those who eat similar food and have similar manners are acceptable while those who differ in their foodways may be perceived as other, strange, even disgusting or vulgar. Foodways help to define social hierarchies and boundaries, also marking status within a given community. In the Middle Ages, these communities may be clergy, bourgeois, vilains, nobles, or several more exclusive communities, such as the knights of the Arthurian court. Culinary comedy both satirizes and reinforces the conventions of these groups and their food preferences and behaviors as distinct from other groups.
Through examination of medieval conventions surrounding both food and narrative, we may better interpret what may have provoked laughter and invited criticism for audiences of courtly literature. Gastronomy is beyond a doubt an integral element of French culture and history. Literary representations of food, eating habits, and drinking are central to centuries of French literature. Significant gastronomic elements in Rabelais, Molière, Brillat-Savarin, Balzac, Zola, Proust, Ponge, and countless others come to mind. Descriptions of symbolic foods and customary meals amplify themes. Protagonists are characterized by what and how they eat. Gastronomical discourse is rich in a broad spectrum of codes and symbols, particularly in medieval French art and literature. Medieval gastronomy is a complex form of material consumption; medieval culinary discourse consists of its conventional portrayal. In the Middle Ages consumption of food is marked by three very real possibilities of life: hunger, adherence to conventions of consumption, or gluttony. Extravagant feasting existed alongside voluntary fasting and catastrophic famine, any of which could be daily preoccupations, depending on one’s status in society. Evidently both extremes of bounty and hunger were cause for humor and ridicule.
The ritual of the communal medieval feast was an elite social event that constructed identity and modeled courtly conventions. In courtly literature, any unanticipated deviation from courtly conventions and practices, particularly at mealtime, is shown as a playful provocation of laughter or a grave infraction with negative consequences. Because consumption was and is a powerful indicator of identity, medieval attitudes toward food are complex. Eating and fasting were tied to religion and morality. What one ate or abstained from eating could alter one’s spiritual identity, most obviously in the case of the Eucharist, hermetic vegetarianism, or the observance of feast and fast days (Crossley-Holland counts between 182 and 227 meatless days per year during this period, depending on observance). Religious food symbols were mocked by many parodic ecclesiastical texts, mock sermons, and in fictional literature by such blasphemous comic images as Renart’s holy andouille sausage. Pilgrims, hermits, and some clerics had ascetic diets, the physical manifestation of their spiritual devotion. Vegetables and grains or a vegetarian diet were seen as more pious fare than the courtly feasts of abundant roasted meat and game, the rich diet of aristocrats and knights.
Food could signify the self as distinct from members of other communities. This was especially true in the diets prescribed by different religions. Muslims, Christians, and Jews have dietary codes or food habits that set them apart. Fictional narratives often remark on the differences of the “Saracen” diet with wonder or scorn. The Muslim diet with its food restrictions was seen as exotic and other, and was used to represent cultural differences in literature. Outside of the ecclesiastical arena, socioeconomic identity was dictated by food in both courtly and urban life. In short, much more so than in today’s diverse and globalized world, what one consumed showed how one lived, worshipped, celebrated, and sinned in the Middle Ages. Uniting the cultural and literary study of food with theoretical approaches to comedy, humor, and parody proves a fruitful methodology. Previous studies on medieval food have addressed primarily the socio-historical perspective, concentrating on the history of diet and alimentary practices. Though very successful in reconstructing a complex cultural history, they tend to overlook the considerable comic literary use of food in medieval French secular narrative literature.
The chapters that follow reflect on ludic cultural representations of food and consumption in late-twelfth- through early-fourteenth-century French fictional verse narrative: epic chanson de geste, chantefable, verse romance, fabliau, and beast epic. Culinary comedy and non-humorous references to food nourish three highly conventional genres in particular during this period. Courtly romance, the fabliaux, and the multi-branch Roman de Renart contrast traditional convention with many levels of humorous and unexpected transgression, or contravention of the rules. The investigation of the way in which humor and the literary images of food interact in all of these genres, in conjunction with a discussion of didactic manuals and cultural expectations, will reveal much about medieval French literary production and reception.
As will be observed in further detail in the following chapters, specific foods were often considered funny, their mere presence in a scene lending the opportunity for laughter and the occasion to cross the boundaries and go beyond the limits of what is socially acceptable. In romance and epic, roast poultry can be comic, because it often figures in food fights with knights, and because such food fights are a waste of that which is traditionally considered an expensive food and cooking technique preferred by nobles. Statistically speaking, the most commonly consumed food items in the fabliaux are: bacon, capons and geese, cakes, bread, and wine; given their frequency and the potentially high cost in the diet, these items are often the main ingredients of culinary comedy. In the fabliaux, poultry, fish, and bacon also become objects in the endless gender tugof-war, a sort of sexual currency. Appetite for poultry, such as roast chicken or partridge, is associated with sexual and financial appetites. Gluttony for char, viande, and vin are connected to lechery and sins of the flesh, while some fruits are viewed as aphrodisiacs. Oats and porridge are likened to bodily fluids in vulgar metaphors. Pork, bacon, lard, and larders come to represent corrupt members of the clergy—as symbols of gluttony, greed, lust, with the suggestion of corporeal resemblance to meat. Attempts at stealing cabbages or mutton, both common staples in the peasant diet, poke fun at vilain poverty and ignorance.
Rotten foods, cooked foods, and fresh foods alike are employed as projectile weapons, allowing narrators to laugh in the face of famine and to mock warfare at the same time as foodstuffs are wasted in nonfatal battles. Spices are apt to be derided for their strong somatic effects, medicinal properties, high prices, and elite consumers; furthermore, just as spices transform the flavor of a dish, they may also be used to alter the narrative, providing a ridiculous twist. Poorly cooked or poor quality fatty foods, along with overripe fruit, provide comic relief in scenes of indigestion. Foods that are associated with heat, humidity, and flatulence become comic ingredients because of their sexual, aphrodisiac, and scatological associations. Round or phallic shapes of foods (in particular during this period, nuts, radishes, eggs, onions, roots, asparagus, carrots, cucumbers, sausages, etc.) also convey humorous sexual connotations, so that the mere presence or consumption of such objects, because of the resemblance to male genitalia, may signal comic intention. It is useful to review for a moment approaches to humor, laughter, and the comic.
Aristotle put forth the idea that humor is one of the defining characteristics of humanity, yet comprehensive or definitive accounts of terms such as humor, laughter, and comedy have eluded scholars for centuries, beginning with Plato and Quintilian. The universality and broad nature of the phenomena of laughter and humor make an all-inclusive definition impossible. Humor and reactions to comedy may be subjective, culturally specific, and often based on diverse societal and personal factors. In the Poetics Aristotle defines comedy in part as: . . . an imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain. In addition to this Aristotelian quality of the below-average ridiculous action or individual fault, harmless amusement is a key aspect of the comic. Marcel Gutwirth has provided a general definition of the term comic, denoting “. . . the range of events, willed or unwilled, aimed at bringing amusement (or simply having that effect)” (6). No attempt at an all-encompassing explanation of these social phenomena of comedy is made here; rather a concise review of existing theories and a synthesis of certain elements and terminology applicable to the present discussion of medieval literary and culinary humor are offered.
Three major modern theories help to explain human humor and laughter, all three of which have been challenged, modified, and qualified over the course of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Elements of these broad approaches may be combined and related to different types and forms of humor, more specifically to food humor. Remaining the most accepted of the three approaches today, the Incongruity Theory of humor and laughter was developed by Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and many others. Inappropriate juxtapositions were comic for Aristotle too, particularly in the context of expectations surrounding socio-economic classes. Henri Bergson’s well-known treatise on humor, Le rire, highlighted the juxtaposition of the mechanical on the human, the “mécanique plaqué sur du vivant,” as the essential comic incongruity. The Incongruity perspective dictates that for a situation to be humorous or laughable, it must involve incongruity, or an unexpected juxtaposition. It is therefore elements of absurdity, incoherence, unlikely combination, or strangeness that may provide comic distance and cause us to laugh. Furthermore, exaggeration, overturning of conventions, or the inappropriate use of realistic detail can be incongruously funny. John Morreall gives a broad new definition for humor and laughter, based in part on the Incongruity Theory, seeing them as amusement that results from the enjoyment of a conceptual “shift.” Amusement is an important qualifier for Morreall, who points out that not every incongruous situation is necessarily funny or laughable; some may in fact provoke fear, for example. In working toward a new general theory of laughter, Morreall sees a shift in what is perceived as the most important element: “Laughter results from a pleasant psychological shift” (133).
Providing a critical corrective, Morreall adds a caveat to the Incongruity Theory: “. . . though humor always involves the enjoyment of a perceived or imagined incongruity, often this enjoyment is accompanied by and boosted by our simultaneous enjoyment of an affective shift” (135). Michael Clark underlines that it is the perception of incongruity that is amusing (146). The Incongruity Theory of humor and laughter raises the fewest number of theoretical objections of the three theories and involves the fewest number of possible exceptions. One notable exception is the amusement and laughter expressed at actions or images that are expected, that is, those instances that are funny because we expect them to happen— because the punch line is known in advance. For instance, a certain behavior of a well-known character provokes laughter because of its repetition, foreshadowing, and inevitability based on familiar character traits. In addition, Victor Raskin’s linguistic theory of joke scripts, related to the Incongruity Theory and to the General Theory of Verbal Humor, provides a useful perspective. Jokes, according to Raskin, involve an opposition to the “expected state of affairs” and are connected to the abnormal. This type of comic turn of events may be seen in possible or partially implausible situations, but usually it deviates from the appropriate linguistic, societal, or narrative norm.
Though the analyses that follow do not adhere to a linguistic perspective, which has its limitations, reference will be made to the terminology proposed by Raskin, who provides a useful typology of these playful “scripts” that we may borrow to better address and classify comic motifs in Old French literature, particularly in the narrative fiction of the fabliaux and the Roman de Renart (such as the scripts of Cunningness, Craftiness, Stinginess, Sexual Ignorance, and Sexual Opposition, evident throughout these short texts). In the second major theory, the Superior Theory, humor and comedy incite laughter through derision. The Superior Theory dictates that one will find amusing those situations in which one feels superior; in other words, we laugh at someone inferior—friend or foe—when we laugh. The humiliation of others is thus funny in the sense that it raises the amused person above the object of their laughter and amusement. This hypothesis, favored by Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, requires hostility and/ or humiliation to be present in the intent or the reception of the humor and explains why some people laugh when they see another person fall down in the mud or receive a cream pie in the face.
Finally, the Relief Theory, or Release of Restraint Theory, holds that laughter is a release of pent up emotional and physical tensions. More physiologically based than the other theoretical approaches, the Relief Theory is limited, far from addressing every instance of comedy or laughter. The Release Theory of humor and laughter was expounded for example by Herbert Spencer and in Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The Relief Theory sees laughter as almost a cathartic moment, a positive physical reaction that relieves negative emotions based on anxiety, anger, stress, sexual frustrations, or societal constraints. Bakhtin’s notion of carnival shares some similarities with this perspective (though unfortunately limiting the exploration of the condoned liberation of laughter to primarily the Early Modern period). We may draw on elements of all three major perspectives on humor and laughter, as well as classify some of their structures according to Raskin’s scripts. Culinary narrative, when allied with comic narrative, becomes a multifaceted literary device of critical ridicule. No doubt, incongruity forms a basis for most medieval humor, especially in comic situations involving unexpected behavior and incongruous use of objects, such as food fighting. But the humorous in the Middle Ages is constituted by more than just the incongruous.
The Superior Theory is applicable with ease to the amusing trickery and hostility of the fabliaux and the Roman de Renart, texts in which the punch line is based on the humiliation, suffering, and incompetence of others who are often of a lower status. Moreover, many instances of culinary comedy have a tone that is both didactic and amusing, involving a feeling of moral superiority among the audience members who evaluate the caricatures and burlesque actions of the fabliaux characters. The Release Theory is relevant to medieval French comic narrative, which treats explicit social and psychological tensions, often questioned, ridiculed, or overcome through laughter at otherwise taboo or unquestionable subjects. The composition and reception of the fabliaux may be addressed by the Release Theory.
A combination of the three theories provides the most useful framework for the study of culinary comedy in the Middle Ages. As for a brief typology of comic techniques, a distinction may be drawn between the basic types of comedy that occur in the selected texts: verbal comedy, physical comedy, and situational comedy. All of these types of comedy may be integrated into a culinary element; surprise and suspense surround the audience’s anticipation of what will happen with a given food item, the formal object of amusement. The incongruity of exaggerations, complications, characters’ reactions, and misunderstandings, in contrast to (or in tandem with) our expectations provoke our laughter in parody of highly conventional genres. Food may serve a satirical or parodic function when coupled with unconventional, inappropriate behavior.
The power of culinary comedy is its ability to disrupt. Conversely, culinary comedy helps on occasion to reinforce the same conventions it ridicules. The first chapter presents a discussion of the roles of food and of literary convention in the Middle Ages and the complex manner in which they intertwine, setting literary culinary comedy in its socio-historical context. Medieval attitudes toward food and the implications of codified consumption in the Middle Ages are explored, making reference to textual culinary convention in romance and epic and to extant written cooks’ treatises. An overview of the functions of food in culture and medieval culinary narratives accompanies a discussion defining the functions and effects of this humorous device. A contrast is drawn between the ubiquitous image of the bountiful feast and the daily realities of hunger. The focus is on the conventions of feast hospitality and on the excesses of gluttony and food play, with examples of culinary comedy found in romance, chanson de geste, and chantefable.
The chantefable of Aucassin et Nicolette serves as a primary illustration of literary food fighting in a mock-epic battle that presents a violent inversion of convention; that is to say, such actions transgress, or infringe upon and violate, accepted social codes and cross the boundaries and limits of appropriate behavior in a courtly setting. The humorously incongruous use of food and exaggerated hunger in epic is equally striking. Certain young epic heroes of the chanson de geste, in particular Guillaume and Rainouart, are portrayed as brutish gluttons whose offensive and sinful actions are dictated by their demanding bellies rather than any traditional sense of duty. The other three contemporary genres treated in subsequent chapters are illuminated by close analysis of culinary humor because they are characterized by irony and ambiguous meaning, all of which are enhanced by incongruous and out-of-the-ordinary consumption.
The French verse narrative texts selected for the present study are generally considered comic because they aim at entertainment, amusement, and happy or successful conclusions. Considering the comedy of eating that transgresses the acceptable and expected boundaries of the otherwise highly conventional world of Arthurian romance, Chapter 2 takes Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal, the thirteenth-century verse Perceval Continuations, Durmart le Gallois, the Roman de Fergus, the Roman d’Hunbaut, the Merveilles de Rigomer, and the Vengeance Raguidel as examples. A portrait of the conventional feast is drawn and then ruptured through an exploration of incidents of unknightly culinary conduct. Feasts and hospitality are fundamental elements of courtly culture, ridiculed by these derivative texts that situate comicorealism in opposition to convention.
Audience expectations are presented and compared to unconventional situations, as we consider incongruity, irony, and ambiguity in romance. The guest-host relations discussed in Chapter 1—consisting of sharing, giving, and receiving food and lodging—provide an opportunity for verbal and culinary exchange and thus offer an occasion for culinary comedy to advance the comic plot to its happy ending. It is remarkable that in richesse of the romance genre, so typified by opulent feast and the generosity of courtly largesse, we discover images of hungry knights searching for nothing more than a good, solid meal in a bleak landscape. At the Grail castle in Chrétien’s Perceval and the Continuations, the naïve Perceval keeps his mouth shut except to eat and drink. Excessive eating is linked to his excessive silence. He commits many other social and culinary faux pas representing moral failings. The later romance heroes who follow a derivative trajectory exhibit even less admirable table manners, resorting to food fights. We find that as appetite grows in cultural and literary references, respect for convention diminishes. For Perceval, the blind following of seemingly empty convention is punished from the start. Conversely, for the thirteenth-century verse character of Gauvain, eating is an impetus to deviate from chivalric perfection and courtly convention in the Vengeance Raguidel. The portrayal of the reputation and renown of the twelfth-century Arthurian court is made suspect by the poor table manners of its best knights in the thirteenth century. Even the formidable Lancelot is degraded when forced to become a lowly kitchen servant in the Merveilles de Rigomer.
Thirteenth-century French romancers composed with a glance toward past written and oral traditions and a knowing wink to the audience; such imitative romances use food and laughter to evaluate and rewrite. Chapter 3 turns to the essentially ludic genre of the Old French fabliaux in an investigation of the humorous use of food combined with other subjects, or scripts of comedy. The function of food in episodes involving alimentary, sexual, scatological, social, and religious topics is examined. All three theories of humor, as well as semantic joke scripts, illuminate the comic logic of the fabliaux. Unlike culinary descriptions in romance, limited for the most part to aristocratic consumption, the fabliaux treat food in great detail, from preparation to consumption and (in)digestion in all members of society. We also consider the contemporary dramatic text of the Jeu de Robin et Marion in this light. Culinary comedy in the fabliaux treats the status of vilains, bourgeois, knights, merchants, innkeepers, prostitutes, performers, students, members of the clergy, and others who populate a predominately urban world with comicorealism. Eating brings members of these groups together in a shift in focus from social classes presented in romance and epic.
As familiar communal spaces in the fabliaux, the kitchen and dining table are the appropriate venue for blatant mocking of certain social classes and for the subtle derision of human shortcomings. Food may be an item of trade in a mercantile exchange, a form of hospitality, a means of seduction, or the coveted object of bumbling thieves. Fabliau episodes of culinary comedy are far more concerned with gender and sexuality than are the romance culinary comedy episodes. Husbands and wives bicker over the menu and steal food from one another. Female sexual and gastronomic appetites are combined in a misogynistic perspective, with the criticism that the female appetite is uncontrollable and sinful, leading men to gluttony and lechery, or tricking husbands and lovers through devious ruses.
Furthermore, human relations to food are often constituted as erotic. This relation may be either verbal or corporeal. Rampant female and male appetites are unleashed in unexpected ways as the fabliaux use eating and cooking to explore gender dynamics. In narratives where our disbelief is suspended for the sake of fabliau logic or fabliau humor, where female orifices are portrayed as hungry and male body parts are often mistaken for sausages and meat, food or food-talk may substitute for sexuality. Sexual activity, in particular adulterous activity, is linked to foodstuffs, occurring around food or food-related objects such as tables, pantries, and knives. Moreover, meals may serve as a means to hide or facilitate such activity.
More than one fabliau lover hides from a jealous husband under the cover of the dinner table or in the pantry. Meat cleaving and castration are confused. Cheating with food items doubles for cheating in the domains of sexuality and finance. The didactic and moral aspects of culinary comedy are explored in relation to the fabliaux and contemporary exempla, as well as in the chapter on the Roman de Renart.
The final chapter investigates food humor as it functions in the verbal comedy and cunning ruses of the beast fables, a genre in which most of the anthropomorphic and human characters are driven by the hunger for pleasure, the hunger for revenge, and the hunger for food. Throughout the many branches of the Roman de Renart there is a union of human and animal nature, particularly in relation to food. One aspect of life that animals and humans have in common is the need for nourishment, though humans dine whereas animals feed.
The characters’ rapports with food and with each other reveal much about their qualities and flaws. In the Roman de Renart, hunger, food seeking and stealing, and consumption reveal a cynical perspective on human nature, from which few occupations or classes are spared an evaluation of their stereotypical weaknesses and corruption. As in the fabliaux, hunger is associated with violence and deception, here heightened by the urgency and brutality of the animal kingdom. The Superior Theory of humor, in particular, sheds light on the laughter Renart’s hungry antics invite.
The social injustices of renardie are ripe for the humor and societal criticism allowed by culinary comedy. Food and hunger are recurring elements in most branches of the Roman de Renart in text and image. An analysis of manuscript miniatures, as illustrations accompanying the literary text, further our understanding of contemporary interpretation because these telling images reveal an animalistic world obsessed by food, with the characters feeding on weakness and gullibility while surrounded by humor, hunger, playfulness, and ignorance. Culinary comedy represents a significant ludic element of the means by which twelfth- and thirteenth-century poets read, imitated, and (re)interpreted their predecessors with a critical eye.
Food humor and food play are both amusing and dangerous. Like other types of play in human culture, food play involves adherence to rules, as well as trickery and pretense. In all of the texts explored, playing with food and different forms of food humor serves to quash both alimentary and literary conventions, calling into question accepted practices and audience expectations.
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