[In the following essay, Méchoulan discusses themes of food and orality in several of Perrault's tales in the context of contemporary religious and political concepts of the body.]

Once upon a time there was a body. This body was peculiar indeed. One, it was only produced by a speech act. Two, the subject of its enunciation gave his body as a body which was obviously heterogeneous. Three, this heterogeneous body was manifested only by a deixis, by a “this.” Four, this body alone must represent a whole community of other bodies united by the repetition of this very speech-act. The more we progress into the investigation of this body, the more we come up against language as the sole materiality which could force it to appear, or rather which could bring it to move from one invisibility to another, and then appear in the very process of this movement. Once could think that I am talking of a wonderful fairy tale. But not at all. I am just referring to these well-known words of Jesus Christ telling his disciples, while breaking up some bread, “This is my body,” Hoc est corpus meum. To think that Jesus Christ, being able to prognosticate his own sacrifice, could anticipate the Austinian theory of speech-acts, is not a problem. But because of its legendary irony, such a speech act, even successful, “cannot” be as unproblematic as Austin would have wished. A number of these problems appear during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries when the new reading of the Bible by the Protestants finds in this commemoration of the Eucharist enough to “feed” their opposition to Catholic practice. There is something in the Eucharist that Protestants cannot digest, and this is precisely this particular speech act.

Let us quickly look at a text published in 1685 by Jacques Abbadie, a well-known Protestant thinker. He accuses Catholics of mixing up spiritual and literal meanings. According to him, figural and literal meanings are totally disconnected. But the spiritual can be enveloped in the sensible and Abbadie insists on Jesus Christ's ability to talk in tropes in order to develop the spiritual side. The practician of the Bible is not a hermeneut anymore, he becomes a stylist in order to apprehend “le stile de ce divin Redempteur”¹ (p. 28). He does not read the signs of the world any more, but the signs of the language: “comprend-on bien que pour faire commémoration de la mort de Jésus Christ jusques à ce qu’il vienne, il faille que la chair & le sang de Jésus Christ entrent réellement dans nos estomacs; & qu’il ne suffise point pour cela d’avoir devant les yeux un signe, qui étant établi par Jésus Christ & honoré du nom de son corps, représente perpétuellement dans l’Eglise son corps rompu pour nous?” (p. 44, my emphasis). The disconnection between figural and literal, spiritual and sensible, sign and real does not arrive at a hierarchy, it only requires a calculus in order to determine what will be received as real or as sign, but the sign is sufficient enough to produce an effect. Protestant thought recognizes that a trope or a sign can produce an effect-of-body, a visual effect of an invisible, providing that this sign is validly established: the effect-of-body is not a body but the name of this body, that is to say “my body,” corpus meum. For Abbadie, Catholics want to preserve the preeminence of the literal and of the real over the figural and language: so they are forced, first to mix up two meanings under the deictic “this,” bread and Jesus Christ's body, and second to play on a temporal predicament: that which is bread at this moment of time, becomes Christ's body at this other moment. But the Catholic position is more subtle than the Protestants would like to admit.

The argument of the Catholics rests on the very heterogeneity of deixis: “this” indicates a determined object and at the same time means Being in general as it is given in time. The hoc is only an indication, whereas corpus meum is already a meaning. “Bread,” “this” and “my body” do not function at the same level of the sentence. And we are brought again to a kind of linguistic calculus in order to determine what is indicated and what is meant. We can find in the Logique de Port-Royal such a beautiful analysis of deixis, but Arnauld cannot maintain a radical disconnection between indication and meaning because that would revoke the Cartesian subject always present to himself and to what he is saying. Then he tries to show that the “excited ideas” (or what is “indicated”) are supplemented by a spiritual operation which is able to assign an object to deixis. As Louis Marin expresses it: “le sujet d’énonciation substitue à sa présence invisible dans la généralité vide de la chose en général, la figure où il se représente, où il se détermine dans le discours comme la signification «corps».”² Such a position is not so far from the Protestant one. We can understand it since the modeling of the body is a general topic of classical thought. It is no coincidence if the theological model of the Eucharist intervenes in the main points of the logical and grammatical researches of Port Royal, as well as in a justification of the political theory of the king's two bodies (the symbolic one, and the private one).

The body figures in many kind of discourses (for example in political discourse, with the development of the notion of the “body-politic,” in the medical and philosophical discourses, with the exploration of the body as a machine, and so on), but at the same time, it seems to evaporate as such from the public sphere (lexical praxis exercises a prohibition on the use of vulgar words which goes so far as to replace certain street-names for example, the reference to the body is even proscribed from the language of love, while science considers it only as a transparent machine, etc.) It is as if the effective power of the body in the discourses was dependent on its material and visible retreat: the underwriting of the body operates only insofar as it is used as a trope, literally, the body under-writes such discourses. That is to say that the body, as a trope, literalizes, and then stabilizes, the social use of language: in the seventeenth century the body is constituted by this two-fold operation.

At the end of the seventeenth century the body will also occupy a strategic position in the new division of knowledge which takes place at that time. From the disintegration of what Jean-Marie Apostolidès has called the “mythistoire” which constituted the institution of the social imaginary of the state, emerge history, arts, economy and theology as autonomous discourses. Culture (or tradition) is no longer the analogon of society; rather it appears as a separate entity requiring new cognitive procedures. Hence it is interesting and important to follow this movement of culture. All the more so since it is one of the ways by which the bourgeois progression into the social spheres of influence is able to circumvent the growing opposition of the nobles.

Culture, in order to be interesting, as Bourdieu would say, must also exhibit its specificity, and one way is to divide itself. This leads to what we shall call “popular culture.” The sudden fashion of fairy tales is an important part of this process. With the scholarly writing of popular fairy tales, the notion of “popular” is, at the same time, exhibited and neutralized. As with the figure of the body, the popular is a referent as far as it is, in its materiality, absent. It is not surprising then that popular culture is often characterized by the very terms of the body as opposed to the learned culture characterized in terms of the spirit. And this opposition ties into the new confrontation between child and adult.

In the preface to his Contes en vers, Perrault claims that people of good taste appreciate fairy tales because these tales are more than what they seem to be: they envelop, in their simplicity, a sensible moral which can be developed more or less according to the degree of insight, that is the degree of knowledge. These fairy tales may be representative of the popular, but only learned people are able to read their hidden value. Nevertheless “ils excitent dans les enfants le désir de ressembler à ceux qu’ils voient devenir heureux,”³ while, for Arnauld, the deictic “this” excites in the mind the desire to represent a material body. The problem is pedagogical: how can we educate children as yet deprived of reason using stories which are themselves without reason. We must then imagine stories which are themselves stories of the imagination: imagination here is both an operation and the product of this operation. Moreover, in order to educate children one must imagine oral tales, whereas in order to educate princes and kings, one shows the written image of the production of these oral tales: “ces Contes donnent une image de ce qu se passe dans les moindres Familles, où la louable impatience d’instruire les enfants fait imaginer des histoires dépourvues de raison, pour s’accommoder à ces mêmes enfants qui n’en ont pas encore; mais à qui convient-il mieux de connaître comment vivent les Peuples, qu’aux Personnes que le Ciel destine à les conduire?” (p. 89). The problem is a political one, and pedagogy is used not only for the profits of knowledge, but above all for the privilege of power: it is a matter of control, and the imagination, even if it must be itself controlled, serves in controlling young individuals. In Perrault everything is connected to the notion of taste: as he remarks culture is a matter of taste, and since it is in the nature of children not to be able to taste the truth, they must swallow it in agreeable tales. It is a question of proportion and a calculus of these proportions. Writing is to fairy tales what geometry is to space, or dieting to hunger.

It is not very surprising then that fairy tales often thematize the question of food in order to better nourish the childish mind. And it must be remembered that both feeding and popular tales refer to orality. For example, what can “Little Red Riding Hood” tell us about the ambivalence of orality. This tale belongs to what is usually described as a “warning tale,” but as such it is a warning tale without any warning: “la pauvre enfant (…) ne savait pas qu’il est dangereux de s’arrêter à écouter un loup” (p. 113). Little Red Riding Hood is punished for a fault which is both an absence of knowledge and a listening. She listens without understanding and she sees without insight as the well-known final dialogue shows (we must remember that in Perrault's text, and different from Grimms' version, the little girl is eaten and that is that!). She is, so to speak, structured by the sight and the insight of others, or even by their desire (be it the wolf's or the grand-mother's). Her nickname (le chaperon rouge) is nothing but a synecdoche of her visibility. If the listening is brought back to an absent knowledge, it could become a possible object of manipulations by subjects of knowledge. The wolf proves that he is a fine rhetorician and tactician. He proposes a fixed competition: he will take this lane (the shorter one), Little Red Riding Hood the other, and they will see who arrives first. Then he runs as quickly as possible along the shorter lane, while “la petite fille s’en alla par le chemin le plus long, s’amusant à cueillir des noisettes, à courir après des papillons, et à faire des bouquets des petites fleurs qu’elle rencontrait” (p. 114). The little girl does not seem interested in the competition at all, and the text does not give any answer to the wolf's proposition. It is as if the wolf and the little girl lived in two heterogeneous worlds, one constituted by strategy, rhetoric, economy and work, the other by non-knowledge, pleasure, innocence and expense or consumption. And perhaps that is precisely why Little Red Riding Hood will be consumed. The little girl seems to live only in the beatitude of pure reception, she is constituted by her meetings (the wolf as well as the flowers) and her name is the result of a gift (her grandmother gave her this chaperon rouge). Problems arise when she has to provide counter-gift: that is “la gallette et le petit pot de beurre,” a kind of ritual offering to the ancestors in order to make them benevolent. Here, not only does she reveal her aim to the first wolf coming along, but she strolls and dallies around instead of going straight to her grandmother's house. The little girl is then eaten in place of the offering. The symbolic of the initiation is reduced to a rhetorical competition by the wolf or to a simple game by the girl. But there is an exemplary value for the reader: the little girl does not respect the ancient world of symbols any more, but she has not yet opened her mind to the new world of knowledge. The moral reduplicates the opposition between sight-insight and listening as if it were an opposition between oral and written. Perrault legitimates his own position as story-teller by defending the very notion of work and seriousness through his position as writer: he is the one who regulates the libidinal economy through the narrative economy; the story reports events and yields a profit of knowledge. The moral is then shifted from the oral economy of the village to the written privilege of urban society and is only valuable for the elite. The written feeds on and, so to speak, digests the oral. To tell the moral of this moral, we could formulate it so: “who uses the oral, will perish by the oral.”

In some way the written capitalizes by clinging to the backside of the oral, without receiving any feed-back. It misappropriates a legacy. That is the topic of another tale, the “Chat botté.” Everything begins with the death of a miller. His three sons share his goods, but “ni le Notaire, ni le Procureur n’y furent point appelés. Ils auraient eu bientôt mangé tout le patrimoine” (p. 137). The learned men then are shown as ogres who threaten to eat the name of the father (patronumios). The sharing is quickly done: the mill for the first, the donkey for the second, and a cat for the youngest. The latter of course is desperate for it is a poor gift indeed: as he says “lorsque j’aurai mangé mon chat (…) il faudra que je meure de faim” he says. Happily for him, the cat is a learned one: not only does he understand what his master says, but will also improve his situation. With a bag he goes to the woods, tricks a young rabbit, and brings it as a gift, not to his master, but to the king. He does this for two months, telling him each time that it is a gift from the Marquis de Carabas. One day he tells his master to bathe in the river knowing that the king and his beautiful daughter are going to ride along it. When the cat sees the king, he yells for help, crying that robbers have stolen his master's clothes. The king is then obliged to respond to the man who had given him so much with a counter-gift: he dresses him royal clothes and invites him into his coach. The cat, eager to establish his master's legacy, runs ahead and commands the local farmers to tell the king that all the surrounding land belongs to the Marquis de Carabas “sinon vous serez tous hachés menu comme chair à pâté,” that is to say “good to eat.” And actually the king cannot help recognizing that “Vous avez là un bel héritage.” But this legacy belongs in fact to an ogre and the formula “hachés menu comme chair à pâté” operates because it is a recipe as well: how to transform human flesh in game is the same as how to transform, through a ritual enunciation, an absence of goods into the gift of a legacy. The cat arrives at the ogre's castle, meets him and asks him if it is true that he is able to transform himself into animals—something which is quite obvious since he is able to transform the human flesh into game. As soon as the cat has expressed his incredulity, the ogre transforms himself into a lion, and then into a mouse. But as soon as he is a mouse, the cat just eats him. The cat knows how to control the transformations of bodies by the production of speech acts. When the king, in turn, enters the castle, he cannot not help but offer his daughter to the young man. If the moral makes a case for an economic reading: “L’industrie et le savoir faire / Valent mieux que des biens acquis,” that is because the tale is the example of a new economic status: the new young men must know how to manipulate the economy of the gift in a merchant economy, how to transform the power of words into the power of representation, and the effect of this representation into the representation of a social standing.

It is worth stating at this point that the opposition between written and oral is not only a matter of discursive or sociological operations, but a political matter as well. And what politics means, in the 17th century, is the very necessity of joining all the members of a community in one body, as the members of the Church are joined in Christ's body. This brings us to another successful book of fairy tales, The Thousand and One Nights, where we find exemplified this relationship to politics. Galland's translation doesn’t concern me as such and I will take it here as an original production.⁴ I would like to investigate the starting point of the story. Two sultan-brothers discover that their wives have lovers. Moreover, and in the case of Shariar, the eldest, the lover is a black slave. Shariar decides to leave and to bury his shame by traveling around until he can find someone unhappier than himself. This reaction might seem out of proportion, but it must be remembered that a king's place in society is more than just central: symbolically, he is the society itself. To deceive him simply means to ruin the entire social body. Interestingly, the same thing occurs in the first of Perrault's Contes: The prince does not want to marry because he thinks that women are always deceitful and, above all, always craving for control. Anxious because he lacks an heir, and in order to convince him to marry and have children, the population goes to him “en corps” (in body) as Perrault puts it. To go back to The Thousand and One Nights, Shariar discovers a black genie who has been deceived by his wife one hundred times. He feels, then, that it is something like an immanent revenge, and returns to his throne. But to avoid other deceptions, he orders his wife's death and swears “d’en épouser une chaque nuit et de la faire étrangler le lendemain” (34). One can imagine the consternation of the population, since it means the destruction of the community: the king impresses on the social body what has ruined his symbolic body.

Is there a solution to such an aporia? Following the example of the “Chat botté,” we need “un tour de souplesse.” Sheherazade proposes herself as the Sultan's next wife. Once in the Sultan's bed, she asks for her young sister, who is authorized to sleep at the foot of the bed during Sheherazade's last night. One hour before dawn, as agreed, the young sister asks her to relate one of her wonderful stories. The trick is that the length of the story does not correspond to the imparted time before sunrise: the story makes an “enjambment” into the next day. If the sultan wishes to know the end of the story, he has to postpone the execution. The motivation then is one of curiosity, and this curiosity is fed not only by the unequivalence between tale time and social time, but also by a principle of raising the ante: first night: “la suite en est encore plus surprenante,” second night: “Ce qui reste est le plus beau du conte,” sixth night: “Ces aventures (…) ne sont pas comparables à celles que j’aurais à vous raconter la nuit prochaine,” and so on. The purpose of such a repetitive raising over the bet is to prevent any loss of curiosity: the sultan must be left hanging or, so to speak, he must still feel hungry; if the sultan, one night, feels fed to death, it will mean Sheherazade's own death.

It is striking that the first story she chooses to tell precisely describes this strategy. One day, in an oasis, a merchant is eating dates and throwing the pits. The son of a genie, remaining invisible, gets one pit in his eye and dies. Straight away his father appears and wants to behead him. The merchant asks for some time, so that he can, at least, organize his legacy. The genie accepts and one year later, the merchant comes back. While he is waiting, an old man with a doe sits deside him, then another old man with two dogs and finally one man by himself. To each the merchant tells his story. These men decide to stay, because they think “la chose digne de leur curiosité.” But when the genie comes, curiosity changes hands: the first old man wants to make a deal with the genie: if he tells him a story more marvelous than the story of this merchant, the genie would give him, and each for the other two, one third of his revenge. This upping the ante works, and the genie says then to the merchant that “il doit bien vous remercier tous trois de l’avoir tiré d’intrigue par vos histoires.” The locution “tiré d’intrigue,” which means to be out of danger, is interesting insofar as the “intrigue” means also plot, and “intriguant” is something exciting curiosity: hence it is through the means of storytelling that the merchant is, so to speak, put out of the plot.

What are these stories talking about to be so successful? The first one describes a superb process of endogamy, not very far from incest. The man has married his cousin who is only 12 years old at the time: he points out that he is her parent, her husband and almost her father. But she is not fertile: therefore no lineage. After 30 years, he buys a slave who bears him a son. His wife transforms the slave into a cow and the child into a calf. At the next feast, the cow, who seems to be pretty fat, is sacrificed despite the man's hesitations, but since she has no flesh, she is, in turn, also not fertile. He gives the cow to his farmer with permission to eat it and asks for a fat calf. But as he cannot kill his own son, and thus ruin his own lineage, he refuses to sacrifice him. The farmer's daughter, who knows a bit of magic, recognizes the son, and informs her master that she would transform him back on the condition that she may marry him and punish the bad wife. The father accepts this new process of exogamy, thereby condemning the old process. This is a classical anthropological tale of a move from an endogamous to an exogamous society, yet remaining within the framework of gift and obligation.

The second tale seems very different indeed. There are three merchant brothers. At the death of their father, each one has an equivalent legacy (1000 sequins). The eldest takes the money and goes off to travel and trade, but he fails and looses all his money. The youngest, by that time, has doubled his fortune. He shares it with his unfortunate brother, as well as with the second brother whose luck has also gone bad. Then his brothers wish to go into trade with him. He accepts, but his brothers have already lost everything again. By that time he has increased his fortune six times, he suggests dividing it into 3000 sequins (1000 each) for the trade and to bury the other 3000 in case of failure. They go trading, the youngest increases his fortune ten times, but his brothers do not have any success. Before they come back, the youngest meets an attractive but obviously poor woman who asks him to marry her. He says yes, but during the journey home, his envious brothers throw him and his wife in the sea. As a matter of fact the woman is a fairy, she saves him and transforms the brothers into dogs. The tale, then, is no longer about lineage as such but about how to control the economy of a legacy. The first tale is vertical, this one is horizontal. The young man has demonstrated his ability to manipulate both an economy of gifts and a merchant economy, but in such a way that the sum is always zero. The legacy remains the same all the time. The elder brothers show what is going on when you do not know how to manage your business, nor subscribe to the principle of gift. From one tale to the other, we see the historical move from a traditional society structured by lineage, gift economy and obligation to a modernized society structured by a mixed economy (gift and capitalism) and social stratification instead of lineage continuity. But what about the third story? The second one describes a perfect point of equilibrium between the two economies. What is going on in the third one? The answer is wonderful and unique for the whole book: there is no third story: “le troisième vieillard raconta son histoire au génie; je ne vous la dirai point, car elle n’est pas venue à ma connaissance” (63). This third story by its absence is an allegory, literally the presentation of an otherness. At the beginning of the 18th century it is impossible for historical representation to present what allows it in the first place—precisely its representation framework. With these three stories, we can see the transformation of economies by means of fairy tales about transformations. And the very process through which Sheherazade saves her life and the sultan's lineage as well as the social body, is precisely by exchanging economic life for speech acts: the third story cannot be told because it is itself the whole story.

What is going on in the fairy tales which is of such an importance for the valorisation of high culture? First we can see that the world of fairy tales is the world of imaginary. And it was crucial to control precisely the imaginary. With the “mythistoire,” the state pretends to be the main producer of images. The diffraction of those images in different discourses requires a new means of controlling their movements. But this very diffraction prevents any will to totalization. The solution for the state is then to focus its interest on the process of the imaginary itself. In philosophy that will become the role of associationism and the development of the imagination as a productive faculty. The success of fairy tales takes part in the same concern—all the more so since fairy tales investigate the very locus of the body and its specific economy.

Les mille et une nuits shows how to form and transform a body, how to figure and defigure it, and so reveal the power of language upon it as a rhetorical technique. The excess of the imaginary is controlled precisely by the application, the impression on a body of the multiple expressions of the laws of figuration. But this excess must be thematized as well: a tale is always more than a tale: the principle of upping the ante.

That is why fairy tales are able to demonstrate the problem of economy—that is to say, the disjunction between merchant economy and gift economy. In the fairy tales the subjects are those who receive gifts passively, and who, actively, are able to introduce them into an economy of interest and capitalization, those who can produce something from the initial gift, something beyond to the mere adventure. Or, more broadly speaking, the fairy tales describe the adventures of those new economic subjects when they try to deal with the junction/disjunction between the two economies. The danger and the seduction of fairy tales resides in its circulation on the frontier between these economies.

The success of fairy tales is due also to their focus on the family. The split between public and private becomes wider and wider, and the body in its materiality has withdrawn itself, so to speak, within the private sphere, into the family. When rhetoric falls into crisis, Fairy tales take over its social role. They provide much rhetorical instruction about how to deal with familial operations and public success or failure, with lineage and legacy. Even if the models are mainly those from a rural and pre-bourgeois society, they are more or less readable as a “life-technè.” That they are rural models is important: we have to remember that “rural popular culture” is very far indeed from what we could call the new “urban popular culture.” The fantastic development of urbanization brings together in cities men and women from different origins, different languages, different habits, and brings to birth a new type of culture: a multi-cultural one. The “invention of popular culture” is one means, for high culture, to maintain this popular urban culture and its potential dangers in suspension. The high culture, with this “invention,” already has its otherness. And the body of this otherness is nothing but the figural shadow of the embodiment of culture as such.

Sometimes curiosity kills the cat, but sometimes the cat knows how to inverse the process. In the 17th century, Curiositas is another name for this desire of knowledge which will come to be called “science.” As such it represents a means of instruction. But as far as knowledge is concerned, it must be articulated on gentleness in order to provide a social model. That is the way of Sheherazade: by her suavitas, she circumvents the aporia. Performatively the fairy tales say, through a body of tale, what a body politic must be. That is the point of Galland in his Avertissement: “En effet qu’y a-t-il de plus ingénieux que d’avoir fait un corps d’une quantité prodigieuse de Contes dont la variété est surprenante” (p. 21, my emphasis). If today we are able to see this “bodytelling,” there are two reasons, to my mind, for this: first we could now tell the third story unknown to Sheherazade, that is to say the incorporation of the economic model of capitalism; and second, since culture is maybe no longer reduced to ideology, falsehood, pure imagination or spirituality, we can once again begin to think about culture in terms of an anologon to society (but of course in total contrast to a traditional community). What is the story then of this new extension of culture? This is exactly the story I cannot tell you yet, not only because I cannot know it, but because of my lack of time: you will have to wait for the next night.

Notes

1. Jacques Abbadie, Réflexions sur la présence réelle du corps de Jésus-Christ dans l’eucharistic, La Haye, A. Troyel, 1685, p. 33.

2. Louis Marin, La Critique du discours, Paris, Minuit, 1975, p. 297.

3. Charles Perrault, Contes, Paris, Garnier, 1987, p. 89.

4. Les mille et une nuits: contes arabes, trad. d’Antoine Galland, Paris, Flammarion, 1965.