Le Roman à table: Nourritures et repas imaginaires dans le roman français, 1850-1900 (review)

Like desire, the body, and the garden, food has become of late a recognized focus or, perhaps more precisely, locus of research in French literary and cultural studies. Like them, too, despite its fairly recent "discovery," food has of course always been there, a pre-Columbian literary continent awaiting its explorers and exegetes. These have been over the past twenty years or so a busy crew, with evidence of their explorations in many genres and periods not hard to find in symposia, journals, and monographs of both general and specialized interest. In Le Roman à table, Catherine Gautschi-Lanz has chosen both a genre and a time particularly rich in culinary associations: a nineteenth century "obsédé par la nourriture" (10; cf. 16, 17), with brilliant writers eager to reflect that obsession in their fiction and use it to represent, "realistically" or "naturalistically," the society of their day.

Although her study treats principally novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century, its introduction aims at providing a background both for the history of gastronomy and of realist literature. In this it is not entirely successful. Such preambles are of necessity summary in nature, but this one seems excessively so. In adapting her doctoral thesis for publication, she could usefully have provided a wider perspective. Balzac, for example, does not appear at all, although he is without doubt critically important both from the literary and the gastronomic points of view. (Here the book of recipes taken from Balzac's works and knowledgeably annotated by Robert Courtine, several of whose works are cited in the bibliography, would have been a useful reference.) Her account of the birth of what she calls "une littérature gourmande" (14) is brief indeed, with only passing mention - not of much use to the large number of readers unfamiliar, I suspect, with their works - of such key nineteenth-century figures in the history of writing on food and society as Grimod de la Reynière, Eugène Briffault and even Brillat-Savarin. There is no mention at all of the gastronomic writings of Charles Monselet, so typical of the time (e.g., La Cuisinière poétique [1859]; L'Almanach des gourmands [1865]). Oddly, her slightly longer allusion to Antonin Carême, who died in 1833, mentions him not as the most celebrated French chef of the century, but mainly as a "gourmet raffiné" and an "homme de lettres" (15). There is no doubt that, although entirely an autodidact, he wrote a great deal: his works are contained in over a dozen volumes, of much interest to culinary historians. I'm not sure that makes of him an "homme de lettres." Gautschi-Lanz cites only the title of one of his books, albeit an essential one (but cf. the later mention of Le Pâtissier pittoresque, 181, n. 1). Some more searching looks at what he wrote would, I think, have advanced her thesis as well as the reader's knowledge.

That she centers her study on Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola and Huysmans should come as no surprise. Any account of their fiction must confront, in one way or another, memorable and significant food scenes: Emma's wedding banquet, for example; the erotic eating in Bel-Ami or Boule-de-Suif; Zola's masterly portrayal in Le Ventre de Paris of cheese and fish stalls at Les Halles; and Huysmans's depressingly exact account of dreary gargotes in A vau l'eau. All these set-pieces are to be found in this study, but she expands their meaning considerably in the larger context she provides of the chosen authors' abundant use of imaginary meals and all they imply: those who provide the food, those who eat it, the private and public spaces in which it is eaten.

As Gautschi-Lanz points out early on, in most cases meals in the works of the four writers are "des moments-cl...