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A recipe for mourning: Isak Dinesen's "Babette's Feast."
Style, Fall, 1995 by Esther Rashkin
Partly as a corrective to Freud's blurring of the distinction between mourning and melancholia, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok endeavored to reinstall their difference and to offer a new way of understanding the related concepts of fixation and fantasy. They did this in their essay "Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation" (1972), by first reinstating what they considered the lost distinction between introjection and incorporation.(5) Recalling that Ferenczi, the originator of the term "introjection," identified it as a normal process by which libidinally charged objects are gradually included within the ego which is thereby enlarged and enriched (see Ferenczi), Abraham and Torok elaborated, explaining that it is also the process by which a necessary alteration in the ego's topography is effected so that the reality of a loss may be integrated within the psyche. They further proposed that the conversion of a loss into language is a critical sign of its introjection and of the psyche's accommodation of that loss. They held that an early paradigm of this process is found right after birth in the infant's experience of an "empty mouth" (Abraham and Torok 127). The absence of the maternal object (the breast) leads to crying and howling, and these eventually give way to speech addressed to the mother as a partial replacement for absent satisfactions of the mouth. Ultimately, the mother's presence itself is replaced by words.
The absence of objects and the empty mouth are transformed into words; at last, even the experiences related to words are converted into other words. So the wants of the original oral vacancy are remedied by being turned into verbal relationships with the speaking community at large. Introjecting a desire, a grief, a situation means channeling them through language into a communion of empty mouths. This is how the literal ingestion of foods becomes introjection when viewed figuratively. The passage from food to language in the mouth presupposes the successful replacement of the object's presence with the self's cognizance of its absence. Since language acts and makes up for absence by representing, by giving figurative shape to presence, it can only be comprehended or shared in a "community of empty mouths." (Abraham and Torok 128; their italics; translation slightly modified)(6)
This linking of normal mourning with introjection and the conversion of a loss into speech resonates strongly with the pattern just identified in "Babette's Feast" where a character's refusal or inability to speak about loss gives way to an articulation of loss through a form of "communion" with bereaved others. Abraham and Torok's idea that the literal ingestion of food can function as a figure of the introjective process specific to nonpathological mourning also seems highly pertinent since the transformation of loss into speech in Dinesen's story occurs following the consumption of a feast. I would indeed propose that the repeated absence of language about loss in the narrative be read as a sign that the process of introjection has been blocked, that normal mourning has for some reason been obstructed for the characters, and that the literal consuming of the dinner somehow facilitates the removal of this obstruction.
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