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A recipe for mourning: Isak Dinesen's "Babette's Feast."
Style, Fall, 1995 by Esther Rashkin
In incorporation, the words associated with the loss cannot be used figuratively to express or convert loss into language, as they are in normal mourning, since the tainted secret must not be shared in a communion of other mouths. The rhetoric of mourning, in this instance, could be called a pathological rhetoric because it consists of the subject's literalizing the words associated with the lost object's shame as a means of undoing or nullifying that shame. The central figure of this rhetoric is what Abraham and Torok call antimetaphor (131), which in its most dramatic form manifests itself as the "fecalizing" of the lost object: the subject will literally swallow excrement or engage in coprolalia, for example, as a way of saying that the lost object is not filthy or vile, but good, edible, even delectable. The shame associated with the loss is thus denied by one's destroying the metaphoricity of words, by vitiating their "capacity for figurative representation" (132).
As opposed to what I would term the pathological psychoanalytic aesthetic that emerges from this form of psychic disturbance (examples of which may be found in the writings of Sade or the films of John Waters), the effect produced by "Babette's Feast" comes from what could be called a curative psychoanalytic aesthetic, which produces a sublime, uplifting affect that announces the transcendence of a psychopathogenic trauma. Babette's inability to speak of her loss does not come from the shame attached to her lost objects. It results from the metapsychological double bind that suspends her between two incompatible alternatives of speech that render her acknowledgment of one part of her loss an implicit denial of the other part. Her dilemma does not lead her to avoid or void metaphor through a radical literalization of her trauma of loss. It prompts her instead to create a comestible artifact whose very ingestion gives itself to be read as a metaphor of introjection and whose readability as a trope unblocks speech and opens the way to the symbolization of loss. Babette's culinary art, in short, does not aim to demetaphorize language or flatten out the figural in order to nullify its threat to silence. Her artistic creation functions as the vehicle for a metaphorization of loss that has resisted language. It serves as a medium of figuration that gives voice to the unmourned, unstated grief that has effectively left her mute for twelve years and prevented her from living life as her own. The aesthetic production of the feast can therefore be construed ontologically and metapsychologically as a psychic response to a blockage to being, as a symbolic narrative created as a means of filling in the gap in Babette's speech that has prevented her self-realization. The feast, to put it another way, is readable anasemically - via a hermeneutic movement back toward (ana) an earlier signification (semia) that lies beyond immediate perception - as the symptom produced as a means of transcending a trauma that has arrested figuration, impeded mourning, and obstructed Babette's ability to live as a subject in and of loss.(11)
