Gastronomy According to Peter Greenaway

eugenie brinkema Rot’s Progress: Gastronomy according to Peter Greenaway The pheasant is an enigma whose secret meaning is known only to the initiate; they alone understand how to enjoy it to its full. —Brillat-Savarin The argument I intend to earn arrives in three courses: First, criticism errs in taking gastronomy as a theme in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989), a film whose universe admittedly revolves around the kitchen and dining room of an elegant French restaurant; gastronomy is, rather, its form. Then, criticism errs in taking gastronomy’s interest in good taste as self-evident; on the contrary, that which tastes good and is in good taste in both gastronomy and aesthetics is constituted around a negative in the form of a revolt against taste, a cultivated decay that appends a dis- to the gustatory. Finally, criticism errs in taking rot as a fixed, concrete, knowable thing made available in film as an “image of . .” or an emblem. Quite the opposite: rot is neither immediate nor visceral nor obvious, and decay is certainly not a metaphor for moral declivity or ideological distaste; instead, putrescence is a structure-in- process, a textually constituting gesture that must be read for.1 As with Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridian thought, in the violent baroque of Greenaway’s film, much depends on an a. In the minutes preceding the appearance of that letter, the scarlet curtains have Volume 21, Number 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-2010-010 © 2010 by Brown University and differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 74 Rot’s Progress been thrown open, the heavy majesty of Michael Nyman’s score has been instated, and, in the darkened lot outside the restaurant Le Hollandais, the thief of the film’s title, Albert Spica, has materialized dog shit to rub into the yielding canvas of a struggling naked man’s skin. Progressing from left to right, introducing the severe horizontality of the film’s four central theatrical spaces, the thief, his wife Georgina and gang of brutes in tow, marches into the hangar of the garishly green, industrially gray, haute cuisine kitchen. Parading along with them are the stagehands for the cruel play Spica demands of the classical French chef Richard, a farce of forced protection, extortion, and bullying epitomized by the giant letters bearing his name to be added in neon to the exterior of the restaurant, now his restaurant, now named by his letters. Those blocks of signification placed on high scaffolding, the sneering Spica glances up to note a confusion; they have been written “aspic,” and he demands a correction. “Now what’s that? a-s-p . That’s nonsense. Spell it right, for Christ’s sake,” he barks, and the hulking “a” is lifted, to be placed, once more, at the end of the collection, the mise-en-scène of restaurant and film now naming correctly their vile protagonist. All this takes place in the distant and chaotic background of the lofty room, littered with chefs in various states of frenetic rhythmic activity, aurally overtaken by the plaintively sung Miserere of the young boy Pup and a near-constant stream of speech by the homonymic speaker Spica, a monologue in which the errantly ordered letters figure as only a minor interrupting concern. But much depends on that a. For, like a Freudian parapraxis, the error of Spica’s misspelled name forms a nonerring sign of the cultural milieu of the kitchen: the universe of haute cuisine to which Spica, in name and flesh, stands in relation, not quite one of opposition, but of awryness— one letter off. The “aspic” named by the letters in the mere seconds before being rearranged is, of course, the savory molded jelly made of meat stock, synonymous with the development of classical French cuisine. Indeed, Auguste Escoffier writes in his 1903 Guide culinaire that jellies may be more important to classical cookery than consommés or stock (59). Aspic is a preservative: it prevents bacteria from forming on the objects suspended within, halting the effects of time on the quality of ingredients, and it holds objects in visual suspension, its transparent and glistening clarity a glazed frame in three dimensions. Aspic’s mold thus freezes both space and time, halting rot’s ineluctable forward progress and presenting and bringing to presence floating and fixed objects for a hungry gaze—and in that sense, differences 75 its powers are not so very unlike the spatiotemporal suspensions of film itself, the stock for which is also made of gelatin. If aspic is, on the one hand, synonymous with desecrations beyond death—a boiling of animal skins and bones in water to produce the wiggling broth upon cooling—it is also, in its immobilizing functions, a heralding of immortality, a refusal of decay, cuisine’s photograph. Aspic is irreducibly linked to the aesthetic. Used to add glisten and shine to ter- rines, or cut into shapes for the excesses of garnishing, it is synonymous with gastronomic presentation in the address of cuisine to the eyes, and, therefore, in addition to its preservative utility, it is also aligned with aristocratic pleasures in eating in place of the necessities of brute repetitive nutrition that mark low or ordinary cuisine. Put another way, aspic may be thought of as the distillation of a cuisine less concerned with the (visceral) taste of a mouth machine and more concerned with the (refined) taste of discernment; in the language of Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of cultural capital, it is associated with the “tastes of luxury (or freedom)” over the “tastes of necessity” (177). Holding fast in its clear grasp, putting suspended objects on display, aspic is a medium and a frame, a preserving and a presenting that not only shows, but that shows that it shows. Criti- cal arguments for the modernist reflexivity of Greenaway’s film usually note the frontality of the film’s four central spaces (restaurant parking lot, kitchen, dining room, and lavatory), or the proscenium delimited by curtains that open and close the film; but this visual naming of “aspic” is yet another self-conscious display of the signs of artifice and one that bridges the representational and the gastronomic concerns of the film. Aspic transgresses the breach between flesh and sense, between tasting and cultivated taste, between hunger and aesthetics, and between the two uses of the tongue: softening bits of intake for survival and pronouncing the complex succor of that which is judged good. In contemplation of the eternal paradoxes of human corporeality and subjectivity, one could do worse than meditating a bit on aspic. Gastronomy according to Peter Greenaway does not figure Spica as the easy negative of aspic, but rather as its rotation, the one the troubling or deferral of the other. The crude, violent Spica is a problem for aspic and all that it represents: the restaurant Le Hollandais, classical French cuisine, taste as refinement, and the moral qualities ascribed to the aesthetically high. s-p-i-c-a is a perversion of a-s-p-i-c as metonym for the “haute” tout court, just as Spica and his gang, despite their mimicry 76 Rot’s Progress of color, dress, and arrangement, are a perversion of the 1614 Frans Hals mural Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Civic Guard Company hang- ing in the stately-cum-garish dining room. In matters representational and gastronomic, Spica is held apart from the world of good taste—by just one letter, but one letter is enough. Aspic and Spica comprise only one of many difficult relations in this film: with its invocations of Dutch painting, Jacobean revenge tragedy, and the master signifier of terror in the form of the Revolution, the film poses the relations among the Dutch, English, and French. Haute cuisine itself was made possible through a new mode of literal culinary relation; what we think of as aristocratic cuisine, begin- ning in the seventeenth century, relied on an “increasing technical com- plexity—centered on the major technical innovation of the modern liaison (the use of flour to bind, or vinegar to emulsify, butter and cream sauces)” (Weiss 89). 2 The era of rabid classification as identified by Michel Foucault comes to its most delicious apex in the resulting eighteenth-century rubric of mother sauces and their variations. Indeed, the name of the restaurant in Greenaway’s film translates “from Holland,” a name given to the most dairy rich of Marie Antoine Carême’s grandes sauces, a difficult culinary relation in the egg and butter emulsion’s infamously breakable colloidal system. Even the film’s title poses a series of troubled relations on the level of the pronoun, with its series of relational deferrals pivoting on the uneasy association between Aspic (The Cook) and Spica (The Thief), then the intimate possessive adjectives: His Wife, and Her Lover. Greenaway’s explicit claim that his film critiques Thatcherism in the figure of Spica (invoking Oscar Wilde’s quip about “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”) has produced a spate of ideological work arguing about whether the film critiques consumerism or whether it is as “symptomatic as much as analytic” of Thatcherism.3 But ignored in most of the literature—or invoked solely as a political metaphor for class—is the most visible system grounding the film: the formal language, with its themes and variations and strict technical rhythms, of high French cuisine. My contention is that gastronomic logic shapes the cinematic form of the film, specifically the way in which color and space are mapped onto each other and, ultimately, decoupled from each other.4 This is not a gastronomy theme so much as a gastronomy form organized around a damp core, a world organized around the figure of disgust in the specific form of decay and rot.

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