Food as Communion
Recently, I’ve been reading Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, which has been occasionally illuminating, not only for reading literature in general but also in terms of reading the Bible. (I hasten to add that the Amazon reviews point out a number of genuine problems with this book, too.)
Reading literature (including the Bible) is not like doing math. When you do math and come up with a certain solution to a problem, you can go back and prove your solution so that anyone else who understands math can follow along with you. But “solutions” in literature aren’t often that way.
Sometimes, of course, you can point to a particular passage that spells out your point. Sometimes you can appeal to the grammar (“That verb is past tense and so it must be talking about something that happened in the past, not something that’s still happening today”) or to history (“The Scarlet Pimpernel is set during the French Revolution, which went through various phases, and therefore…”) to establish your point.
But sometimes you can’t. When a writer sets a scene in the winter and describes the bleakness of the setting, is that symbolism? Well, it sure feels like it sometimes, especially if what happened just before winter arrived is that the main character’s beloved left. When a writer includes a meal — think of the extended meal scene in the movie Babette’s Feast — is that a form of communion? You might think so, but it would be difficult to “prove,” because reading is not a science.
Foster’s book is intended to help readers spot things they otherwise might not. Food as communion is just one of the themes he spends time on, and his comments in that chapter are quite helpful, shedding light on Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (sometimes a meal in a story can substitute for sex), Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Heartbreak Restaurant (why can’t the mother get the whole family to sit down together for a meal, until the end of the book?), and James Joyce’s “The Dead.” About the latter, Foster writes:
No writer ever took such care about food and drink, so marshaled his forces to create a military effect of armies drawn up as if for battle: ranks, files, “rival ends,” sentries, squads, sashes. Such a paragraph would not be created without having some purpose, some ulterior motive. Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius. His main goal, though, is to draw us into that moment, to pull our chairs up to that table so that we are utterly convinced of the reality of the meal. At the same time, he wants to convey the sense of tension and conflict that has been running through the evening — there are a host of us-against-them and you-against-me moments earlier and even during the meal — and this tension will stand at odds with the sharing of this sumptuous and, given the holiday, unifying meal. He does this for a very simple, very profound reason: we need to be part of that communion. It would be easy for us to laugh at Freddy Malins, the resident drunkard, and his dotty mother, to shrug off the table talk about operas and singers we’ve never heard of, merely to snicker at the flirtations among the younger people, to discount the tension Gabriel feels over the speech of gratitude he’s obliged to make at meal’s end. But we can’t maintain our distance because the elaborate setting of this scene makes us feel as if we’re seated at that table. So we notice, a little before Gabriel does, since he’s lost in his own reality, that we’re all in this together, that in fact we share something.
The thing we share is our death. Everyone in that room, from old and frail Aunt Julia to the youngest music student, will die. Not tonight, but someday. Once you recognize that fact (and we’ve been given a head start by the title, whereas Gabriel doesn’t know his evening has a title), it’s smooth sledding. Next to our mortality, which comes to great and small equally, all the differences in our lives are mere surface details. When the snow comes at the end of the story, in a beautiful and moving passage, it covers, equally, “all the living and the dead.” Of course it does, we think, the snow is just like death. We’re already prepared, having shared in the communion meal Joyce has laid out for us, a communion not of death, but of what comes before. Of life (13-14).
I don’t know that Foster is right to say that all meals in literature are communion in one way or another. If a writer says, “I was grabbing a burger at Joe’s when the trouble broke out,” the burger isn’t likely to be communion. Food serves other roles beyond just communion. Food can be fuel; it can also be reward.
But it does seem likely to me that any extended meal in a story is going to be significant (why else write about it?) and that shared food — or even, as Foster mentions in the chapter, shared cigarettes — forges bonds between people, not just in stories but in real life. Of course, as in the example from Joyce, meals may also be taken in isolation or may be times of hostility, not communion, and the lack of communion in such cases may be significant.
The point, then, is not to take every meal as “communion” but to have communion on your mind when you come to the meal and to ask “Why is this here? What’s really going on? Are these people being bonded by the food they’re sharing? If not, what else might the author be showing us?”
God has designed food as a form of fellowship. Think of the dietary laws in the Old Covenant and how they symbolize the bonds that Israel may or may not form with the Gentiles. Think of the sacrificial system, where the worshiper is represented by his offering, which is then consumed in the fire on God’s altar as “food for God.” That’s what we want to be, and symbolically that’s what’s happening to the worshiper. Think, too, of the times people prepare a meal for the Angel of Yahweh, sometimes without recognizing Him, and He refuses to eat with them. You don’t usually eat with people you’re angry at, and neither does God. And think, of course, of the Lord’s Supper in which we partake of Jesus, the great sacrifice, and are nourished by Him, but in which also we become one bread, one body, with one another.
Without committing ourselves completely to Foster’s dictum (“food is communion”), his chapter ought to alert us to a common function of meals in the stories we read and especially in the Bible. If you’re interested in pursuing more food theology in the Bible, I’d highly recommend Peter Leithart’s Blessed Are the Hungry.
September 7th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
Thank you, John. Very edifying “meal,” I must say! I enjoy reading your new posts.