Food in Film and Literature: Transcendence of the Quotidian

Phyllis Mitchell

Wheaton Coll.

phyllis.mitchell@wheaton.edu

“Maruja Torres’ Un calor tan cercano: Bread and Chocolate, Idylls and Anchors”

by Christine Goring Kepner, Wheaton College

The abundant food imagery in Maruja Torres’ 1997 novel Un calor tan cercano provides the scaffolding on which the themes of memory and identity, development and community build. Food and its preparation are tied closely with the narrator’s recollection of a period pivotal in the formation of her adolescent self, in this postwar novel set in Barcelona’s Barrio Chino. Her mother’s death prompts the adult narrator to return to her childhood home to revisit, reassess, and reconstruct both her childhood past and the mature woman she is now becoming. As recent critics such as James Gilroy and Carol Bardenstein have noted, the senses of taste and smell—both evoked in Un calor--are the most powerful repositories of past experiences. This paper seeks to explore the symbolic and narrative processes by which memories of food are linked to the revising and re-formation of a sense of identity and community, mediated by the dynamic of exile, return, and redeparture, and also inflected in terms of class, gender, and ethnicity. As we shall see, the protagonist’s movements between family groups and physical places, and the evocations of the foods associated with these relocations, result in a particular vision of postwar Spain, postmodern reality, and hybrid identity defined less by national borders than by relationship and affiliation.

“Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida: Garbanzos, Torture and Survival”

by Phyllis Patteson Mitchell, Wheaton College

According to Food Anthropologist Dr. Carole Counihan, an adequate supply of food is crucial to a society’s ability to function normally. The era that Dulce Chacón evokes in her thinly fictionalized novel of repression in post-civil war Spain, La voz dormida (2002), reflects a time of biting hunger and near-starvation for Franco’s victims. But while the many references to the scarcity of food illuminate the Republicans’ struggle for survival, the novel’s characters are simply too vital to be overcome by the brutality of their circumstances. This paper will discuss the author’s use of food as a convention for foregrounding a number of aspects of post-war suffering and privation, as well as the incredible strength of human relationships it helps to forge. It will also investigate how the written word, invested by the author with the sustaining power of food, nourishes a daughter’s relationship with the parents she never knew and helps her follow in their footsteps years after their deaths. And, finally, the consideration of these aspects of the novel will suggest reasons for post-war Spaniards’ ability to transcend the social disasters brought on by the lack of food that Counihan describes and to eventually triumph in their efforts to build a modern Spain.

“Rosetta: Foxes, Food and the Forging of a Social and Relational Identity”

by Alan D. Savage, Wheaton College

In 1999, the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes. In addition, Émilie Dequenne won the Prix d’interprétation féminine for her beautiful performance as the young and tough, yet vulnerable Rosetta. Many have interpreted Rosetta as a bleak, hopeless tale of a young woman trapped in the vice-like grip of poverty. Many find that it portrays a “hopeless case.”

As this paper will show, such interpretations of Rosetta are possible if one—to use a food metaphor—skims only the surface of the film. An in-depth analysis of the film, on the other hand, reveals that Rosetta is actually a sort of modern fairytale, the conventions of which are concurrently employed and subverted. And all of this is done through food: food as symbol of life in general, food as the élan vital which propels the story forward—and backward—and food, specifically the Belgian waffles Rosetta eats, as a visual reminder of her physical hunger and of her hunger to fit into society, and the Belgian waffles she makes and sells as a tangible expression of her movement toward the “normal life” she so steadfastly tries to attain. In the end, when the many-layered implications of food in this film are taken into consideration, one sees that in Rosetta a large dose of hope and vitality coexist with the bleakness of the film and even threaten to overtake it and transcend it.