Savoring Power, Consuming the Times: The Metaphors of Food in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature

Conclusion

Conclusion Is It Food for Fiction or Food for History? Analyzing food within the context of the semiotic system, Roland Barthes asserts that what one eats is not just a series of ingredients and products. To the contrary, he argues that food is“a system of communication , a body of images,”a defined—and, one could add, frequently a refined—“protocol of uses, situations, and behaviors.”1 Based on this, he maintains that food is an alimentary language.According to him, this language inherently possesses the same properties as a verbal one. As such, it includes, among other things, rules of exclusions as well as of associations. The rhetoric of this language, Barthes contends, surfaces in the rituals of food uses. To this end, he explains that buying, consuming, or offering specific foodstuffs summarizes and “transmits a situation.”2 Thus, he affirms that on the scale of values, the nourishment food provides occupies the bottom rung. For him, the more important value of food rests on the messages it conveys within the system of communication it establishes between and among consumers. One could argue that in this respect Barthes follows Giovanni Boccaccio’s marchioness of Monferrato’s deep and accurate understanding of food as conveyor of meaningful information. Barthes’s discourse, developed in the wake of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological work, lends modern cogency to the notion that foodstu ff stands for much more than nutritional usefulness. As the French philosopher emphasizes, food presents and signifies an entire world and 317 social environment, while it also “has a constant tendency to transform itself into situation.”3 Understood in terms of sign and system capable of capturing as well as of defining situations and events, food and its rhetorical functions within any historical context cannot be regarded as inferior to words. On the contrary, they illustrate the absorption of a whole system of sociocultural values. The marchioness of Monferrato’s story exemplifies this point. The awareness that food is a code used to decipher meanings broadens the metaphorical implications that it holds in any given time. Juxtaposed to situations, events, cultures, and people preparing,consuming,or offering it,the ostensible ordinariness of foodstu ff turns into the commentary on a complex if unspoken set of beliefs and way of life. There is a paradox, however, in the gastronomic system food engenders: while a culture always determines its gastronomic preferences, they, in turn, shape a culture. This phenomenon emerges in all the works analyzed in this book. Still, as a sign and symbol of the unstated, the gastronomic code manifests itself in life as well as literature . And in both instances it transcends the personal to embrace the universal. Throughout this book I have argued that the medieval and Renaissance literary discourse on food is unequivocally circumscribed by social, cultural, political, and theological boundaries. Historically, it retrieves the convivial atmosphere of Boccaccio’s Decameron.There the vivande served and consumed in the novelle analyzed are the immediate referent for the cast of characters that through food define themselves, their actions, and their cultures. Although with a more ironic tone, in these novelle food also retrieves Dante’s stern judgment on gluttony in Inferno, 6 and Purgatorio, 24.Yet within these boundaries, the discourse on food operates unproblematically through the concepts of social ethics ,metaphorical values,and literary traditions.But just as in Boccaccio’s novelle, in Luigi Pulci’s, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s, Ludovico Ariosto’s, and Pietro Aretino’s respective works,food becomes an incisive commentary on the authors’ cultures. At the same time, it is also a bittersweet assessment of the human condition.Through food,these authors voice the incongruities , limitations, and hollowness of rigid rules and philosophical abstractions their societies espouse. Indeed, although these authors are clearly distinct individuals with eclectic interests, tastes, and personali318 Savoring Power, Consuming the Times ties,in their respective works food invariably brings out the intensely personal and reassuringly universal timelessness of human concerns: ambitions and frustrations, loves and losses, freedom and dependency, power and weakness. As these authors are acutely aware, these “ingredients”— these struggles—among others, shape the human condition and, by extension , human history. Through food, they add meanings and nuances to the events they narrate—sometimes with a bitingly wry and ironic tone, sometimes with a more tolerant one. On one level, this occurs when these authors suggest that cooks’ inventiveness turns common ingredients...