Selected Essays of John Berger (61 page)

On the bourgeois table everything that can be is kept untouched and separate. Every dish has its own cutlery and plate. In general plates are not cleaned by eating – because eating and cleaning are distinct activities. Each eater (or a servant) holds the serving dish to allow another to serve himself. The meal is a series of discrete, untouched gifts.

To the peasant all food represents work accomplished. The work may or may not have been his own or that of his family, but if it isn’t, the work represented is nevertheless directly exchangeable with his own work. Because food represents physical work, the eater’s body already ‘knows’ the food it is going to eat. (The peasant’s strong resistance to eating any ‘foreign’ food for the first time is partly because its origin in the work process is unknown.) He does not expect to be surprised by food – except, sometimes, by its quality. His food is familiar like his own body. Its action on his body is
continuous
with the previous action of the body (labour) on the food. He eats in the room in which the food is prepared and cooked.

To the bourgeois, food is not directly exchangeable with his own work
or activities. (The quality attributable to home-grown vegetables becomes exceptional.) Food is a commodity he buys. Meals, even when cooked at home, are purchased through a cash exchange. The purchase is delivered in a special room: the domestic dining-room, or restaurant. This room has no other purpose. It always has at least two doors or ways of entry. One door connects with his own daily life; through it he has entered in order to be served with food. The second door connects with the kitchen; through it the food is brought out and the waste is taken away. Thus, in the dining-room, food is abstracted from its own production and from the ‘real’ world of his daily activities. Behind the two doors lie secrets: secrets of recipes behind the kitchen door; professional or personal secrets, not to be discussed at table, behind the other.

Abstracted, framed, insulated, the eaters and what is eaten form an isolated moment. This moment has to create its own content out of the air. The content tends to be theatrical: the décor of the table with its silver, glass, linen, china, etc.; the lighting; the relative formality of dress; the careful seating arrangements whenever there are guests; the ritualistic etiquette of table manners; the formality of serving; the transformation of the table between each act (course); and, finally, the leaving of the theatre together for a more dispersed and informal setting.

To the peasant, food represents work done and therefore repose. The fruit of labour is not only the ‘fruit’ but also the time taken from work time, spent in eating the food. Feasts apart, he accepts at table the sedative effect of eating. The appetite, satisfied, is quietened.

To the bourgeois the drama of eating, far from being reposeful, is a stimulus. The theatrical invitation of the scene often provokes family dramas at meal times. The scene of the typical oedipal drama is not, as logically it might be, the bedroom, but the dinner table. The dining-room is the place of assembly where the bourgeois family appears to itself in public guise, and where its conflicting interests and power struggles are pursued in a highly formalized manner. The ideal bourgeois drama, however, is entertainment. The use of the word ‘entertain’ meaning to invite guests is significant here. Yet entertainment always proposes its opposite: boredom. Boredom haunts the insulated dining-room. Hence the conscious emphasis placed on dinner talk, wit and conversation. But the spectre of boredom also characterizes the way of eating.

The bourgeois overeats. Especially meat. A psychosomatic explanation may be that his highly developed sense of competition compels him to protect himself with a source of energy – proteins. (Just as his children protect themselves from the emotional cold with sweets.) The cultural explanation, however, is as important. If the scale of the meal is
spectacular
, all the eaters share in its achievement, and boredom is less likely. The shared achievement is not, fundamentally, culinary. The achievement is that of wealth. What wealth has obtained from nature
is an affidavit that overproduction and infinite increase are natural. The variety, the quantity, the waste of food prove the
naturalness of wealth
.

In the nineteenth century with partridge, mutton and porridge for breakfast (in England), and three meats and two fish for dinner, the quantities were net, the proof extracted from nature arithmetical. Today with modern means of transport and refrigeration, the accelerated pace of daily life and a different use of the ‘servant’ classes, the spectacular is achieved in another way. The most varied and exotic foods are acquired out of season, and the dishes come from all over the world. Canard á la Chinoise is placed beside Steak Tartare and Boeuf Bourguignon. The affidavit obtained is no longer just from nature concerning quantity. It is also from history to testify how wealth unites the world.

By using the vomitorium the Romans separated the palate from the stomach in the pursuit of ‘pleasure’. The bourgeois separates the act of eating from the body so that it can become, first, a spectacular social claim. The significance of the act of eating asparagus is not: I am eating this with pleasure; but: we
can
eat this here and now. The typical bourgeois meal is for each eater a series of discrete gifts. Each gift should be a surprise. But the message in each gift is the same:
happy the world which feeds you.

The distinction between the principal regular meal and the celebration or feast is very clear for the peasant, and often blurred for the bourgeois. (Which is why some of what I have written above borders, for the bourgeois, on the feast.) For the peasant what he eats and how he eats daily are continuous with the rest of his life. The rhythm of this life is cyclic. The repetition of meals is similar to, and connected with, the repetition of the seasons. His diet is local and seasonal. And so the foods available, the methods of cooking them, the variations in his diet, mark recurring moments throughout a lifetime. To become bored with eating is to be bored with life. This happens, but only to people whose unhappiness is very pronounced. The feast, small or large, is made to mark a special recurring moment or an unrepeatable occasion.

The bourgeois feast usually has more of a social than temporal significance. It is less a notch in time than the fulfilling of a social desideratum.

The feast for the peasant, when once the occasion has been given, begins with food and drink. It does so because food and drink have been reserved or put aside, on account of their rarity or special quality, for just such an occasion. Any feast, even if it is impromptu, has been partly prepared for for years. A feast is the consuming of the surplus saved and produced over and above daily needs. Expressing and using up some of this surplus, the feast is a double celebration – of the occasion which gives rise to it, and of the surplus itself. Hence its slow tempo, its generosity and the active high spirits which accompany it.

The feast for the bourgeois is an additional expense. What distinguishes its food from that of an ordinary meal is the amount of money spent. The true celebration of a surplus is beyond him, because he can never have a surplus of money.

The purpose of these comparisons is not to idealize the peasant. Peasant attitudes are mostly, in the strict sense of the word,
conservative.
At least until recently, the physical reality of the peasant’s conservatism has hindered his understanding of the political realities of the modern world. These realities were originally a bourgeois creation. The bourgeois once had, and still to some degree retains, a mastery of the world of his own making.

I have tried to outline by using comparisons two modes of acquisition, of possessing, through the act of eating. If one examines each point of comparison, it becomes clear that the peasant way of eating is centred on the act of eating itself and on the food eaten: it is centripetal and physical. Whereas the bourgeois way of eating is centred on fantasy, ritual and spectacle: it is centrifugal and cultural. The first can complete itself in satisfaction; the second is never complete and gives rise to an appetite which, in essence, is insatiable.

1976

In Turkish, the Bosphorus is called the straits of the throat, the place of the stranglehold. It has featured for millennia in every global strategy. In 1947 Truman claimed an essential strategic interest in Turkey, just as, after the First World War, Britain and France had done. But whereas the Turks fought and won their war of independence (1918–23) against the first claim, they were powerless against the second.

American intervention in Turkish politics has been constant ever since. Nobody in Turkey doubts that the destabilizing programme of the right is backed by the CIA. The United States probably fears two things: the repercussions in Turkey of the fall of the Shah in Iran, unless there is a ‘strong’ government in Ankara; and Ecevit’s reform programme which, though moderate, is not compliant with western interests, and revives some of the promise of Atatürk’s independence movement. Among many other consequences, if Ecevit is ousted, the American-trained torturers will return to their prison posts.

When the ferry leaves Kadikoy on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, on your right you see the massive block of the Selemiye barracks, with its four towers, sentinels at each corner. In 1971 – the last time there was martial law in Istanbul – many political prisoners (nearly all of the left) were interrogated there. If you look the other way, you see the railway station of Hayderpasa and the buffers, only a few yards from the water, stopping the lines which
come from Baghdad, Calcutta and Goa. Nazim Hikmet, who spent thirteen years in Turkish prisons, wrote many lines about this railway station:

Across the water, in the early morning sunlight, the mosques are the colour of ripe honeydew melons. The Blue Mosque with its six piercing minarets. Santa Sophia, taking advantage of its hill, immense, dominating its minarets so that they look no more than guardians of a breast. The so-called New Mosque, finished in 1660. On overcast days the same buildings across the straits look dull and grey, like the skin of cooked carp. I glance back now at the bleak towers of the Selemiye barracks.

Thousands of jellyfish of all sizes, as large as dishes, as small as eggcups, contract and distend in the current. They are milky and half-transparent. The local pollution has killed off the mackerel who used to eat the jellyfish. Hence their profusion in hundreds of thousands. Popularly they are called water cunts.

Hundreds of people crowd the boat. Most of them commute every day. A few, who stand out because of their clothes and the amazement to be read on their faces, are crossing into Europe for the first time, and have come from distant parts of Anatolia. A woman of thirty-five, wearing a scarf over her hair and baggy cotton trousers, sits on the uppermost deck in the sunshine which dazzles off the surface of the water.

The plain of central Anatolia, surrounded by mountains, with deep snow in the winter and the dust of rocks in the summer, was one of the
first sites of neolithic agriculture, and the communities were peace-loving and matriarchal. Today, eroded, it risks becoming a desert. The villages are dominated by the
aghas
, thieving officials who are also landowners. There has been no effective land reform, and the average annual income in 1977 was £10–£20.

Deliberately the woman holds her husband’s hand. He is all that remains of the familiar. Together they look across at the famous skyline which is the breathtaking, incandescent, perfumed half-truth of the city. The hand which she holds is like many of the hands resting on laps on the deck. The idiom of the popular male Turkish hand: broad, heavy, plumper than you would guess (even when the body is emaciated), calloused, strong. Hands which do not look as if they have grown out of the earth like vines – the hands of old Spanish peasants, for example – but nomad hands which travel across the earth.

Speaking of his narrative poems, Hikmet once said he wanted to make poetry like a material for shirts, very fine, half silk, half cotton: silks which are also democratic because they absorb the sweat.

A beggar woman stands by the door to the saloon on the lower deck. In contrast to the heaviness of the male hands, the woman’s hands are light. Hands which make cakes of dried cow dung for burning in central Anatolia, hands which plait the daughter’s hair into strands. On her arm, the beggar woman carries a basket of sick cats: an emblem of pity, off which she scrapes a living. Most of those who pass place a coin in her outstretched hand.

Sometimes first impressions gather up some of the residue of centuries. The nomadic hand is not just an image; it has a history. Meanwhile, the torturers are capable, within a few days, of breaking entire nervous systems. The hell of politics – which is why politics compulsively seeks utopias – is that it has to straddle both times: millennia and a few days. I picture the face of a friend perhaps to be imprisoned again, his wife, his children. Since the foundation of the republic, this is the ninth time that martial law has been declared to deal with internal dissent. I see his clothes still hanging neatly in the wardrobe.