‘Tasting Joyce’ – a reflection on taste as a potential space of curation and interpretation

Tasting Joyce took place at the James Joyce Centre, Dublin on Nov 2^nd 2017. Utilising ‘tasting’ as a process of enquiry and facilitation the event consisted of an 8 course curated tasting menu devised from food referenced and consumed in the novels of James Joyce. Employing taste as an interpretative tool is in sympathy with much current utilisation of food by, amongst others, artists such as the Crossmodalists, and Jozef Youssef’s Kitchen Theory venture, to create a kind of synesthetic experience which is both total in its play to all the senses but also provides perhaps the most direct bridge possible to period and place. This extends the established idea of creativity and synaesthesia in the arts in which a neurological condition produces dual sensory stimulation resulting in, for example, numbers being understood in terms of colours.1 The naturally embodied experience of eating would appear ripe for this kind of encounter but there has until recently been little discussion of synaesthesia in this context and further, and most directly relevant to this project, limited identification of food and gastronomy itself as a valid art form. This raises further questions about the means by which much current art and food activity seeks to confront that exclusion and the manner in which taste might be used as a mode of interpretation and understanding as part of that confrontation.2  

It is in this direct link to the body that food in ‘Tasting Joyce’ was employed to get us closest to a reconnection with Joyce’s Dublin and access the experience his writings sought to engender with their emphasis, particularly in Ulysses (1922), on food and digestion. Through taste there is an immediate and acute sense of the present, the moment in which you are ingesting, but equally awareness that this taste is frequently more or less unchanged by time.  The orange as fruit, scent and taste developed, as a thread throughout ‘Tasting Joyce’, tasted the same for Joycean Dubliners as it did for diners on November 2017.

Strangely that knowledge therefore seems to take us to the universals of aesthetic experience while at the same time remaining totally subjective enabling it would seem, to quote Clintberg again, the possibility to “present other opportunities for reflective perception”6 rather than undermining such a position.  Taste then gets the audience directly connected and creates a time travelling oscillation that enables connection, reconnection and redoubling as the past intersects with the present. The journey of ingredients, identified in shifts in presentation and combination, but within which core flavours and ‘taste’ remain consistent heightens, I would suggest, the reflective possibilities of food hinted at by Clintberg.7

Developing such possibilities the evening included works by artists Nuala Clooney and Kaye Winwood that expand the understanding of the relationship of food, body and identity opening up food related meanings and connections. Clooney’s ‘Memory of You’ (2014) comprises a glass cast of the artist’s mouth in-front of which is placed a spoon dripping with honey.8 Referencing literature, psychology and philosophy Clooney’s works explore the inter-space of inside and out that the mouth encompasses: the point of entry and exit and in this way the sentry post of identity definition and dissolution. Clooney’s mouth is honeyed, conveying oral pleasure but also food as memory as the warmed liquid lingers on the tongue and in the mind. The context of ‘Tasting Joyce’ allowed a clear resonance from ‘Memory of You’ to the chewed seed cake passed from Molly’s mouth to Bloom’s in Ulysses, expression of her desire and imbuing seed cake forever with a trace of the memory of sexual and culinary consumption. Contemporarily Clooney’s piece underlines the importance of food in constructions of memory, self and the engendering of pleasure. Clooney developed some of these concerns in partnership with Kaye Winwood in the collaborative project ‘Expanded Intimacy’ (2017).9 Developed as part of Birmingham’s Art and Science Festival the project created bespoke glassware that worked to extend the sensory connections between taste, touch and smell and the direct link to hand, nose and mouth as glassware was made to directly fit the body. ‘Lips’ (2017) by Clooney and Winwood was a drinking glass designed to fit over the lips and fitted on the hand via the insertion of one finger. The vessel exaggerated the action of drinking and holding, bringing both mouth and finger closer together, and making explicit the sensual relationship of object to body and body to eating and drinking. The oral delights of food and their possibilities were literally made visible in these pieces. This reverberated with the pleasures of the mouth employed by Joyce’s writing in a range of contexts: from the nurturing of mother’s milk to the sexual consummation of Molly and Bloom in the passing of seed cake from one mouth to another.10 These art works were projected in the space throughout the meal facilitating an expanded space of meaning for taste.

HOME AND AWAY

Served in ’Plumtree’s Potted Meat’ jars this course was an inversion of the sexual slang of potted meat that reverberates throughout Ulysses. An advertising man Bloom sees the advert ‘no home is complete without potted meat’ throughout his wanderings in Dublin. A sense of home in all its senses is implicit here but feminised through its vegetarian conversion. Food was often an indicator of home for Joyce and he frequently listed ingredients and everyday meals in a process of delineating the space of home.

ABSENCE AND PRESENCE

Please cup the bowl in your hands to drink. Select a wafer from the communal plate or maintain your faith by resisting temptation! (instructions delivered to diners). In continued reference to the famine the potato is symbolically identified as key to Irish history and identity. This is seen in the way Bloom holds the potato as a talisman as he walks Dublin. In the menu it ‘refers to the phenomenon of ‘Souperism’ a process born of the Irish Famine whereby children in orphanages were offered soup on the condition of receiving Protestant religious instruction. It was a case of conversion or starve.

The menu transforms the potato soup into a contemporary veloutè and recreates its nurturing aspect by having diners cup the soup and drink directly from the bowl rather than using cutlery. The wafers and the element of choice insert a loop back to the religious function of this soup.

PLAYING ON THE TONGUE

Epps cocoa and hot chocolate is mentioned frequently by Bloom and by Joyce who lists it in meals he has both ‘home’ and ‘away’. At this stage Epps was identified as a health digestive being dark and not over sweet connecting to today’s promotion of dark chocolate as health giving. Chocolate both solid and liquid is often felt to be the height of ‘oral’ pleasure. Joyce references it in relation to hospitality/hosting, as Bloom makes hot chocolate for Stephen, playing on the religious reference to the idea of ‘host’ /Eucharist standing in for the body of Christ. Ulysses provides a long ritual related to the making of hot chocolate as Bloom returns with Stephen to 7 Eccles Street.  This was recreated in ‘Tasting Joyce’ by providing diners with glasses of hot milk and having them stir orange truffles into them to make a hot chocolate drink. Again sound and smell dominated underlining the immersive bodily experience that food generates and reiterates.

SWEET SINS

This section pulls through the ideas of body in the menu playing against cannibalism that in Davy Byrne’s restaurant drives Bloom to eat the famous Gorgonzola sandwich having been disgusted by the meat eaters at the Burton Hotel and addresses further ways of ‘eating’ or consuming the body. Milk and cream are referenced in Joyce as part of sexual innuendo the ‘creamy,dreamy’ of female flesh, and the white milk of the skin-like strawberries and cream –good enough to eat. As mentioned previously this often reduces female characters like Molly to being the object of male consumption but as Bormanis points out there is a complex appropriation of the female in Bloom in a tangle of concerns around nurturing and creativity that Joyce plays out by making Bloom both father and mother to Stephen and Molly.27 Served decanted onto pink plates a sense of Molly’s ‘yes’ is foregrounded in this communal consumption of milk ‘flesh’ in the ‘fleshy’ panna cotta.

As people left to return home a trace of orange was left in coat pockets via orange chocolates, like the trace of food itself in the mouth a sense of the on-going journey of food and the space it delineates around memory and place was retained.  Taste therefore was evoked as an on going point of reference and contact utilising a range of bodily responses from memory to gut to literally ‘taste’ Joyce and provide a particular mode of processing and understanding Joyce’s writing and Dublin past and present.

All images ‘Tasting Joyce’ –The James Joyce Centre, Dublin, Nov 2^nd 2017, photography by Gregpurcell unless otherwise credited.

Audio texts read by Catherine Russell and Ben Heather recorded by Marty Gilroy the James Joyce Centre, Dublin 2017.