Garval on Beizer (2024)

Janet Beizer’s Harlequin Eaters explores the surprising yet deep connections, within nineteenth-century French literature and culture, between leftover food, the patchwork figure of the harlequin, and emergent modernist aesthetics. In so doing her book stakes out bold positions at the forefront, and at the intersections, of contemporary literary, visual culture, and food studies, while also pointing suggestively toward the key role that leftovers of all sorts play in the modern world.   

It opens with a chapter on “the business of leftovers in nineteenth-century Paris,” that considers those unfortunates relegated to eating others’ leftover food, commonly sold as so-called arlequins. In the same spirit in which Dominique Kalifa’s 2013 Les bas-fonds. Histoire d’un imaginaire probes the abundant and fraught cultural representations of this supposed underworld, Beizer scrutinizes the period’s fascinating verbal and visual depictions of leftover food consumption. Moreover, for those of us with at best rusty knowledge of the harlequin figure and the context whence it arose, the appendix—“A Brief History of the Commedia dell’Arte in France”—fills in gaps and frames the history of the Commedia dell’Arte in a way that enables a more informed reading of the main argument, with its persistent focus on the harlequin. 

Over the past dozen years or so there has been increasing interest in French popular literature of the mid nineteenth century, especially Eugène Sue’s novels. French scholars like Kalifa or Marie-Ève Thérenty, and American ones like Andrea Goulet or Anne O’Neil-Henry, have helped bring about a Sue revival, as has the 2015 Penguin Classics edition of Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, with an excellent translation by Carolyn Betensky and Jonathan Loesberg. Further expanding this critical reevaluation, Beizer’s second chapter probes Sue's literal and metaphorical treatments of arlequins, to get at the broader “narrative, philosophical, and ethical stakes” of his work. Juxtaposing Les Mystères de Paris with Sue’s maritime novel Atar-Gull, it also extends into a metropolitan, urban setting the rich imaginary of cannibalism that Valérie Loichot explores, in a colonial context, in her 2013 The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature. 

Attentive as well to late nineteenth and early twentieth century France’s burgeoning visual culture, Harlequin Eaters adds significantly to our understanding of postcards in particular. Chapter three, “Postcards from the Edge,” covers substantial new ground, both in its formal conceptualization and cultural framing of the postcard medium, and in its careful readings of specific cards, as well as in its evocative juxtaposition of those featuring the urban poor purchasing and consuming leftovers with ones of colonial and indigenous subjects preparing and eating food. As in the book’s literary analyses, this chapter is keenly attuned to the complex issues of race, class, and gender raised by these intriguing visual artifacts. 

The fourth and final chapter turns to Émile Zola who, unlike Sue, has long been a fixture of the French literary canon. However, while earlier criticism may have distanced itself somewhat from an author construed as perhaps more “classical” and bourgeois than some of his contemporaries (notably Flaubert), recent scholarship has examined how Zola engages suggestively with matters, like energy, sexuality, or colonialism, of keen interest to us today. Taking such analysis into exciting new territory, this chapter uncovers a “harlequin” vision of modernity in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris, at once shimmering, fragmentary, and kaleidoscopic, yet haunted by poverty, hunger, violence, and oppression. 

Harlequin Eaters dialogues productively with earlier work along similar lines, like Larry Schehr’s seminal 2006 article, “Deipnomachy, or Cooking with Zola,” which considers literary representation of la cuisine du pauvre, venturing “a true poetics of poverty” in Zola’s Germinal; Madeleine Ferrières’s 2007 Nourritures canailles, which locates the origins of cuisine bourgeoise in la cuisine du pauvre, and includes sections on arlequins and the related category of rogatons; Jean-Claude Bonnet’s 2015 La Gourmandise et la faim: Histoire et symbolique de l’aliment (1730-1830), which traces the rise of French gastronomy against the backdrop of persistent hunger and famine; Ruth Cruikshank’s 2019 Leftovers: Eating, Drinking and Re-thinking with Case Studies from Post-war French Fiction; or, perhaps most of all, Marni Kessler’s 2021 Discomfort Food: The Culinary Imagination in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art. And Harlequin Eaters shares with such studies a commitment to gaze beyond the sparkling surface of French cuisine and gastronomy at all that lies beneath this facade, however disconcerting, unsettling, or unsavory. 

While remaining focused on the nineteenth century, this book in subtle and profound ways gets at central concerns of our own time, about a world awash in discarded consumer goods, endless leftovers recycled, upcycled, and downcycled, circulating inequitably between rich and poor, Global North and South. In this sense, Harlequin Eaters’ intellectual lineage traces as well to Agnès Varda’s 2000 documentary Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, about various forms of gleaning—the collection and consumption of unused food, but also the filmmaker’s work assembling and repurposing scraps of all sorts in her film. As this suggests, Varda’s film, like Beizer’s study, bridges the alimentary and the aesthetic.  

Harlequin Eaters is beautifully illustrated with twenty-three figures and thirty-nine color plates, including many intriguing, thought-provoking images unfamiliar to most modern viewers. It is also at times highly personal, as Beizer shares her postcard hunting adventures or, in the epilogue, her own experiences volunteering at the Saint-Eustache Soup Kitchen where, amid ghosts of the great, bygone Parisian food market at Les Halles (Zola’s Ventre de Paris), she ponders the deep-rooted, lingering French stigmatization of leftovers, that traces right back to the nineteenth-century culture of arlequins. This, as she lets on slyly, is the genealogy of the French disdain for doggie bags.  

It should be obvious by now that this important book has many strengths, not the least of which is its author’s willingness to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty. Meticulously researched, theoretically sophisticated, persuasively argued, and engagingly written, Harlequin Eaters ranges with ease over diverse literary and iconographic evidence. At the same time, Beizer has the intellectual integrity to share with us whatever, in the murky realm of the arlequins, remains unclear or just unknowable, despite her best efforts. This is humanistic inquiry at its best, rigorous yet supple as it probes these fascinating vestiges of our kaleidoscopic past.