Cailles en sarcophages

Currently at Toronto Pearson: -3. High today: 1.

Whenever I think about Babette's Feast, I wonder whether or to what extent Dinesen intended General Loewenhielm's final words of wisdom to be belied by the preceding events, as it seems to me that they are (whether Dinesen intended it or not). Loewenhielm says to Martine, who had, out of piety, been cold to his love decades earlier, "I have been with you every day of my life. You know, do you not, that it has been so?" And she replies, "Yes, I know that it has been so."

"And," he continued, "I shall be with you every day that is left to me. Every evening I shall sit down, if not in the flesh, which means nothing, in spirit, which is all, to dine with you, just like tonight. For tonight I have learned, dear sister, that in this world anything is possible."

"Yes, it is so, dear brother," said Martine. "In this world anything is possible."

What the dinner most obviously seems to have shown is that the spirit is nothing without the flesh. This might be said to be the distinctive message of Christianity, which is (what else but?) the religion (perhaps better to say the muthos) of incarnation--not of carnality but of incarnation, not of glorification of flesh as flesh but as reminder that spirit, which so often yearns for deathly freedom in escape from flesh, must be brought back to flesh, which is where it must find itself as what it is, and without which it is nothing. (As I love to point out, this, I think, is Plato's great warning, against "Platonism". The philosophers must continually be forced to return to the cave. The intellect allowed to spin off into empty space becomes vacuous.)

During the dinner, there is this:

General Loewenhielm stopped eating and sat immovable. Once more he was carried back to that dinner in Paris of which he had thought in the sledge. An incredibly recherché and palatable dish had been served there; he had asked its name from his fellow diner, Colonel Galliflet, and the Colonel had smilingly told him that it was named "Cailles en Sarcophage." He had further told him that the dish had been invented by the chef of the very café in which they were dining, a person known all over Paris as the greatest culinary genius of the age, and--most surprisingly--a woman! "And indeed, this woman is now turning a dinner at the Café Anglais into a kind of love affair of the noble and romantic category in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety!"

Loewenhielm is involved twice in a love affair with a woman he has never met, never will meet, and, remarkably, has no desire to meet, namely, Babette, who is the chef in the kitchen at the Café Anglais and at the house of Martine and Philippa. Babette as chef is an unalienated worker who actualizes herself in the products of her work and makes herself known as what she is to others (at least those others who are prepared to recognize the products as what they are) through them. (It is the distinction of (especially) "creative" people--"artists"--to be able to make themselves known to others through their work as particular individuals rather than as one of some kind of people.) To meet her would be in an important way irrelevant and inappropriate--she has already been met in the flesh of her creations--though it leaves her lacking recognition; she is recognized by others such as Loewenhielm and Galliflet, but their recognition is not reflected back to her. (There is a fleshy connection between Babette and Loewenhielm in the same way as there is between the mower and the narrator in "The Tuft of Flowers". It may be that we work together whether we work together or apart, but it is not all the same whether we work together or apart.) At the end, she says that as an artist all she wants to do is her very best, and she seems to be self-assured that she herself knows whether she has done her very best or not. This is after all a common notion about "true artists", that they create in the first place if not exclusively "for" themselves alone according to their own inspiration, and don't want or need the affirmation of others to know whether they have done well or not. I don't know what in the end is to be said about whether that is true or not; if you care only about meeting your own standards then you are a narcissist, but inevitably many would be happy to say that only narcissists can be true artists. If you follow Hegel and Marx then you suppose that the only way to be satisfied with yourself as what you are is for you to be recognized by others and have that recognition reflected back to you; you can't know anything about yourself unless your self-image is tested in fleshy encounters with other people. Whether this line of thinking reflects a specifically philosophical prejudice that socially un-tested knowledge can't be known to be knowledge and so can't be satisfactory, I'm not sure--although I would want to say again at this point, as I often do, that as soon as you start to think, including about what you are and whether what you are is good or not, you are drawn into the "justification game", and this is a game that you can't play by yourself; if this is so then that philosophical prejudice is one we all share, at some times, to some extent. Babette does, at least, instruct the serving boy to make sure the general's glass, in particular, is always filled, so she does have some sense of how and in whom her work is recognized.

Anyway: the sisters recognize her in a general way as an astoundingly generous person (although this is perhaps a misrecognition, because Babette has spent all her money on the dinner to "satisfy herself"--and yet, in another way, of course, Babette is profoundly generous because her creations are created for the "enjoyment" of others; her creations embody an extraordinary care for others) and as someone who has performed some magic that has brought the community together, enlivened their world, and lit up the earth for them. Philippa, the artist who had refused art in refusing Achille Papin, recognizes Babette in a more particular way, and calls her an artist; maybe, as an artist, Philippa has actually recognized the artfulness of the dinner. But still, she says, and she gets the last word in the story (and the film) with this:

"Yet this is not the end! I feel, Babette, that this is not the end. In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be! Ah!" she added, the tears streaming down her cheeks. "Ah, how you will enchant the angels!"

This always brings tears to my eyes, not because what she says is beautiful and true, but because her saying it is beautiful and true. Her saying it embodies--Dinesen emphasizes its embodiment with the interjection about her tears--that yearning for perfection in freedom from embodied existence that the message of incarnation speaks against. (If what I'm saying here is actually what Dinesen means to do--if she means for this profound last word that, on its face, is given as the moral of the story (and which many readers and viewers will actually take as the moral of the story) to be belied by the story itself, even by the manner of its utterance, such that the moral of the story is more or less the opposite--then Dinesen is a genius on the order of Plato. (This of course reminds me of the opening statement in Tree of Life, which seems like a thesis statement, and which the film goes on to refute.)) But what she says is false: the fleshlessness of Paradise that makes resistance to desire impossible because there can be no poverty or other scarcity also makes the fulfillment of desire impossible, and it makes art impossible because art is nothing but incarnation. Philippa remains an artist "in spirit" but not in flesh and so remains incapable of recognizing Babette as the particular artist she is, not only in the event of the dinner but in the fish dinners she delivers to the poor in town every day (even though these don't allow for the same range of creative expression). This is indeed not the end for Babette, but she doesn't have to wait for another lottery win or life after death to be once again the artist that she is (even if, like artists often are, she will be frustrated by the limitations of the materials available to her--not to mention the audience! ... and the patrons, though perhaps now they will allow her to do more than boil dried fish). In any event, the ones she can enchant are not unembodied angels but human beings who can attend to flesh with their flesh, like General Loewenhielm.

The "climax" of the dinner, before Loewenhielm's parting words to Martine, is Loewenhielm's speech, in which he tries to express the epiphany he has received in the dinner about his life without Martine:

"Man, my friends," said General Loewenhielm, "is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble ... " Never till now had the General stated that he trembled; he was genuinely surprised and even shocked at hearing his own voice proclaim the fact. "We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given to us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!"

I am almost afraid to comment on this because I feel like it ought to be left as a puzzle and a problem. But: the idea that grace is infinite is surely something like what I have said before when, quarreling with Annie Dillard, I said that the light is always in the trees. And all the problems involved in saying that, the American Beauty problem at their forefront, are invoked here. Speaking of Annie Dillard, and grace, there is of course this: "It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage." Grace may be infinite and everywhere, in what you have chosen and what you have rejected, but it simply can't be denied that there are places where you can be overwhelmed by it and places where you're oblivious to it because somehow it just doesn't catch your attention and places where everything around you actively gets in the way of your attending to it--and of course any particular place will be all three in some proportion. Loewenhielm, I suppose, is thinking that not only is it enough to have been for a moment in the gap where the creeks and winds pour down and remember it, and not necessary to stay there, but it is even enough to know that there is such a place, to have heard of it or seen it from a distance, and not necessary ever to have been there. But enough for what? (That one moment of joy with Zarathustra, which eternally will have been, may be enough to call for affirmation of existence on the whole, but ... it's not enough. I don't want to just say "yes" on the whole to the whole, I want to affirmingly recognize, in as fitting a way as possible, as much as I can.) Is it, for Loewenhielm, that what it's enough for is to know that grace is there as well as here, in what is rejected as well as what is accepted, since grace after all is everywhere? Knowing it in this sense means having the idea of it--it means having it in one limited way of its being. Knowing "in the biblical sense", having it in the flesh, "experiencing" it, means having it in all the manifold ways of its being, out of which the idea of it, more and more of the idea of it, may be abstracted. Having the idea that grace is everywhere may be enough to say that all is good with the world, and so how can I be sad? But if I have the good of the world only through the idea of it, how can I not be sad?

Loewenhielm is not unambiguously wrong, but he is profoundly mistaken, just as Philippa is profoundly mistaken. Everything is possible in a fleshless world or a world in which the flesh is held to be nothing, but everything is--only, merely--possible because nothing is actual ... but then, if possibility is (as it must be) the possibility of actualization, and if actualization is impossible, then (actually!) nothing is even possible. I have written before about Kierkegaard's despair of necessity lacking possibility, but there is also--in Kierkegaard, and in fact--a despair of possibility lacking necessity. If you are un-grounded in the world, and everything is possible for you, then you have no ground on which to choose; you are "abandoned", as Sartre says, to your own naked freedom. But I think there is a problem in Sartre about why if we are "abandoned" as he says we are, with no ground of value except our own choices, this should make you anxious as he says it does. You choose in fear and trembling because you may choose wrong, because you feel, you know in your gut, that it is not all the same whatever you choose, which is to say that you are never completely ungrounded: the trouble lies not in having no grounds but in having multiple (apparently) conflicting grounds, though it may still be the case that you are ultimately abandoned to an undetermined choice between those (again, apparently) conflicting grounds. The choice is undetermined in the sense that you have no way of determining which ground should prevail; you tremble because you believe that there is, or at least there may be, one that should prevail, and you don't know which one.

We are right to tremble, but we are right to tremble at grace as well as with fear. Loewenhielm, surely, has felt this, he knows it--in the biblical sense!--but his spirit seduces itself again away from the flesh, and the spirit seduced away from the flesh always gets the wrong idea, because it loses touch with what ideas are about. I imagine an epilogue to Babette's Feast (which would diminish its Platonic genius): sometime later, Loewenhielm sits down to his dinner, alone, and says, "I was wrong."