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concrete one relating to the fact that "in any·cuisine, nothing is simply
cooked, but must be cooked in one fashion or another." He then sets up
the triangle of the roasted, the boiled, and the smoked, but his main
emphasis is on the difference between roasting and boiling. His
argument, based on the varying degrees of mediation between the raw
food and the heat used to cook it, concludes "the roasted is on the side
of nature, the boiled on the side of culture." Since eating human flesh
(the manner of its preparation,
pace
Jessie Conrad, unspecified) Falk,
at least in his eating habits, wants to limit himself
to
"culture,"
insisting on the boiled and abhorring the roasted and fried. This might
seem a slight point, but is is related to Levi-Strauss's more general
observation that the cooking of any society is a kind of language which
in various ways says something about how that society feels about its
relations
to
nature and culture. Seen in this light Falk's gastronomic
habits are not an irrelevance but a very important utterance connected
with a desire to reassociate himself with "culture." More generally, I
think it does suggest that Conrad was well aware of the basic ideas from
which Levi-Strauss is working-namely that cooking is, with lan–
guage, a universal phenomenon among men, and in deciding what is
"food " and what isn 't, and then how to cook it to remove it from its
natural continuum and, as it were, socialize it, man is exploring and
articulating his sense of his complex relationship to both nature and
culture. Since he participates in both and belongs wholly to neither
realm , man must find this relationship endlessly ambiguous, endlessly
engaging. Levi-Strauss as anthropologist concentrates on how men
think about nature and culture and then use the ensuing categories.
Conrad as novelist concentrates on how individual men in specific
circumstances articulate (perhaps unconsciously) their ambiguous
position in nature and culture at a certain moment in time. In
particular he was interested in men who, for whatever reason and in
whatever set of circumstances, deviate from the prevailing prescriptive
classifications and normative categories-whether these be categories
of conduct (what "one of us" should or should not do) or classifica–
tions of edibility (what "one of us" should or should not eat). For it is
in such acts of deviation-whether a jump from an apparently sinking
ship, or the desperate consumption
in extremis
of a fellow human
being-that the apparent stability and binding power of the categories
themselves is questioned. Thus, by implication, all the ways in which
we describe ourselves to ourselves are available for scrutiny; they can be
de-reified, and "discussed and even mistrusted" to use Conrad 's own
words.
In this connection let me just refer to Marcel Mauss's and Dur-
