Feasts and Meals — Cultural-Historical Perspectives
by Albrecht Classen
Hardly any other Renaissance painting has been ingrained in people’s mind as deeply as Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” (1495-1498), housed in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy, hanging in their dining hall. It was originally commissioned by Leonardo’s patron, Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. Here we see Jesus Christ surrounded by his twelve apostles to whom he is announcing that one of them will betray him (Gospel of John, 13:21). Even though the apostles express their deep consternation and fear, Christ does not reveal what he already knows about Judas, who is depicted as holding a money bag, the bribe for his betrayal. Instead, he uses this last supper with his companions to convey to them his last, most important message, sharing wine and bread with them, both of which are supposed to represent his own flesh and blood. Until today, Christians celebrate the Eucharist in memory of this last supper. Even though the dinner table in Leonardo’s painting is not sumptuously decorated, and even though there are not many dishes to be seen, the essential idea of a feast is unmistakably expressed in this painting. The feast is the central moment in human life when a community is formed and its members enjoy the meal together in a festive mode.
Since biblical times, the communal meal has always mattered fundamentally, conveying a sense of belonging and being at home. Every family, every social group, friends, co-workers, lovers, and others have tended to enjoy a meal together at a special moment in their time. But a meal is not simply a meal. Much depends on the circumstances, the context, the function of the meal, and its performance. Here, leaving the feast aside for the time being, a meal serves, first of all, to feed the hungry. Beyond that, however, a meal is a cultural event, which can quickly change from being a simple dinner and transform into a feast, once specific measures have been taken.
Every people throughout time has had its own cultural norms determining the meaning of a meal. In many parts of the world, individuals sit down at a table or on the floor to enjoy the meal together as a group. In the modern world, however, many people simply eat at fast-food restaurants, care little about the actual quality of the food, and watch the time it takes to consume the food because work requires the individual to return to the job as soon as possible.
Nevertheless, the meal can still a time when people take a break, pause in the daily schedule, and find relaxation, refreshment, and refueling. If properly performed, sitting down for a meal provides people with a sense of structure and meaning. All this might no longer be in place today in our postmodern society, but this does not change anything regarding the cultural significance of meals, not to speak of feasts. Unfortunately, the world of fast-food restaurants has wrought havoc on the traditional idea of the meal and hence the feast. This invites us to reflect further on the consequences and relevance of food for culture at large. While in European societies it is an absolute norm to wish “a good appetite” for the others sharing a meal (in German, for instance, “Mahlzeit,”, “Guten Appetit”), mainstream American culture no longer seems to subscribe to this traditional custom. A meal is thus just a meal, that is, food on the table, and not much more. How many people simply keep watching TV or playing on their computer while eating? The meal is then nothing else but a necessary moment of food in-take and has lost all of its spiritual meaning.
Of course, even in post-modern societies, there are many occasions when people come together for a real feast as a major cultural event. A feast carries meaning and is a significant cultural ceremony for all participants. The feast has always been regarded as the pinnacle of all social and cultural activities. As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the feast may take place during a religious ceremony, such as a holiday in honor of a saint or the founder of a religion; it can serve in memory of a specific event in the past, such as the foundation of a settlement (Thanksgiving). Or it is a banquet in honor of guests or a community in recognition of a major feat, supported by exquisite food or a rich treat.
Already in the Old English Beowulf (early eighth century) King Hrothgar organizes feasts as public demonstrations of his power, fame, and esteem. The monster Grendel, representing evil incarnate, finds this most objectionable. He arrives at the king’s court in the middle of the night and kills and eats as many of Hrothgar’s men as he is able to. Only when Beowulf comes to the rescue can that monster be overcome, and feasting sets in again, to be interrupted soon enough when Grendel’s mother appears to avenge her son’s death. Beowulf manages to kill her as well, although almost at the risk of losing his own life. Nevertheless, afterwards public joys return and feasting can be resumed. The feast thus emerges as a public demonstration that chaos has been overcome and order reestablished. External dangers have been maintained or removed, so the internal group can relax and enjoy their company during a festive meal. This represents a universal and timeless phenomenon, both in the early Middle Ages and today.
In the world of King Arthur, mostly developed during the high and late Middle Ages, the courtly ideals are best expressed during the feast where the individual knight’s accomplishments are celebrated. The focus then does not rest so much on the menu, the table setting, the drinks, and the like, but on the celebration, the exchanges among the participants, the accompanying music performed by minstrels, and the king’s pronouncements. Speeches are given at feasts, whether on the occasion of a wedding or of a meeting of political and economic leaders. The feast serves as the fulcrum for the Round Table to reaffirm its values and ideals. Nevertheless, many times this ideal setting is suddenly disrupted or proves to be a failure because fundamental flaws in society are exposed unexpectedly.
Most dramatically, young Perceval or Parzival (in Chrétien de Troye’s or Wolfram von Eschenbach’s eponymous romances, respectively) is allowed to participate in the feast at the Grail castle, but he fails to ask the decisive question regarding the Grail king’s suffering, which then has catastrophic consequences for society at large because King Anfortas’s shortcoming is not redeemed by the young man, so he as well as his entire court continue to grieve. It takes the protagonist many years following that event to regain his status as the future successor to the throne, but once that has happened, making it possible for him to ask the long-awaited question, a feast is organized to celebrate his accomplishments.
It is necessary, however, that the participants in a feast understand the fundamental values and ideals sustaining this festive ceremony. To put it in modern terms, a buffet overflowing with food, such as at an all-you-can-eat restaurant, does not constitute a feast. Instead, it feeds to people’s lack of self-control, greed, or, to put it succinctly, their gluttony. Quantity is not quality; the more access to food we have today, the more we should remind ourselves of the hunger and famine all over the world. Western societies waste huge amounts of food on a daily basis, and as important as feasts certainly are at specific times and under certain circumstances, they easily turn into bitter testimonies of the vast differences between the haves and the have-nots, between East and West.
The feast itself is a semiotic system determined by many sensory signals: taste, smell, sound, and haptic sensations, accompanied by words, music, colors, festive clothing, laughter, joyfulness, and dance, so it really represents a Gesamtkunstwerk, an event at which the entire community comes together and celebrates its shared values and ideals in many different ways focused on the festive meal. Two forces, however, can bring about a disruption, if not even the destruction of the feast: external and internal. The company of feasting individuals can be disturbed by disrespectful outsiders, who might create disharmony or who might actually attack the company with violent measures, as is the case in Beowulf. Similarly, the company of revelers can experience the collapse of its feast when the participants demonstrate a lack of willingness to abide by the basic rules and ideals determining the feast.
This phenomenon emerges in the famous peasant satire, the late medieval German Der Ring, composed in verse by the Constance public notary Heinrich Wittenwiler around 1400. Although two peasant communities come together to celebrate the wedding of the two protagonists, Bertschi and Metzli, very soon disruptions occur, violence erupts, which then quickly translates into group aggression, leading to the end of the harmonious festivities. Both sides separate on hostile terms, with those from the village of Lappenhausen continuing with the festivities, naively assuming that they have decisively defeated their opponents, whose women they have captured and raped. However, the members of the two villages quickly prepare for war and ask their allies for support, and so the two rural communities clash against each other, with those from Nissingen defeating those of Lappenhausen, killing the entire population, except for Bertschi, whom they leave alone at the end because they are afraid he might have become insane.
Wittenwiler drew on the concept of the feast to illustrate the consequences of a fundamental misunderstanding of its intentions and purposes. Instead of celebrating the happy event of a marriage, everyone tries to consume a maximum amount of food and drink, jealously observing all the others and being ready to fight them to get the best pieces of meat. There are also wedding gifts, but they prove to be miserable objects that ought to be put in a waste dump. There is no formal component to this feast, especially because there is no focus on the newly married couple. Everyone pursues only his/her own goal of getting the most out of the meal in material terms. This is, in short, no feast, but a frenzied feeding orgy, which naturally results in a violent confrontation.
Feasts are organized when special events call for such splendid dinners. Already the New Testament knows of such events, such as when the return of the Prodigal Son is celebrated, even though his older brother who had not left home grumbles over his father’s decision to throw a feast for the lost son (Luke 15:11–32). For the father, obedience, service, and hence reward, as valuable as they are, mean less than love and graciousness. The feast was justified because the young son had returned, had rediscovered the path back to his father, had demonstrated true contrition, and thus deserved the feast to be prepared for him. The older brother’s criticism might seem understandable in pragmatic, rational terms, but Jesus intended to underscore the importance of rewarding those who had gone through a process of profound restoration of their faith, while those who simply followed the law were still loved, but had not gone through such internal turmoil as the Prodigal Son did. In short, the feast highlights an individual’s accomplishments, trials and tribulations, and ultimate triumphs. The feast is not an ordinary event but brings together people under extraordinary circumstances.
A feast is called for when the entire community has reason to celebrate, to express its thankfulness, to cheer on the victories of one of their own, and to reconfirm its own values and ideals. Society and individuals take a break from their daily routine in order to sit down to a feast which punctuates a special moment in life. Significantly, feasts appear in many literary texts throughout history. Subsequently I have put together a list of major texts at least in western literature where the feast matters centrally, either culminating the events or profiling unique developments: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1844-1846), Ulysses by James Joyce (1918-; 1922), Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen; 1950/1958), Embers by Sándor Márai (1942), The Judge and His Hangman by Friedrich Dürrematt (1950), The Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954), It Does not Always Have to be Caviar by Johannes Mario Simmel (1960), The Redwall series by Brian Jacques (1986-), Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (1989), Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery (2009), The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (2011), The Book of Salt by Monique Truong (2003), and the short story “Sorry Fugu” by T. C. Boyle (2016) (https://theamericanscholar.org/the-11-best-literary-feasts/#.XIAcrihKg2w). The feast also assumes critical importance in many other texts, old and new, such as in the late fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (anonymous), in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843), in The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (first vol. in 1930), in The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008), or in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (1997). Of course, the treatment of a feast has no direct bearing on the literary quality of a text, but we observe each time that all these authors realized the great significance of a major meal for the finding of truth, for the celebration of the community, and for the reconstitution of the shared values and ideals.
The feast has many meanings, and it is organized for political, religious, cultural, and familiar purposes. Little wonder, then, that both religious and secular authors have regularly included feasts in their accounts. A true feast, not just a buffet or an ordinary meal, constitutes a central point for human culture because people come together and form a community, sharing not only delicate dishes and a plentitude of food, but particularly because there is a dinner table, a symbol of harmony, the site where the sharing of values and ideals is possible, that is, a piece of furniture in a festive room where cultural performances can take place. Hence, the famous Round Table for King Arthur and his knights brings them all together. Similarly, Holy Scriptures relate of numerous feasts, especially when dramatic events have occurred and the time has come to celebrate the recovery of the covenant between people and God.
The topic of feast thus opens many perspectives toward the fundamental conditions of human society past and present. A feast is organized when the common situation has changed, being crystallized by individual actions, or when the community has gained new insight and needs to celebrate a major success, both in political, religious, and generally cultural terms. Leonardo developed this in his ingenious fashion, driving home powerfully the central importance of the feast for Christ to teach his last and most fundamental lesson. At that feast, every one of his disciples is critically challenged and faces the ultimate question: whether he truly believes in the Messiah or not. In other words, a feast is not necessarily defined by the amount of food and drink, but by the cause that brings people together at the same table to enjoy their meal together in a festive manner.
