Title: Surprised by grace.
Source: Parabola, Winter90, Vol. 15 Issue 4, p86, 4p
Author(s): Baker, Rob
Abstract: Reviews the motion picture `Babette's Feast,' written and directed by Gabriel Axel based on a story by Isak Dinesen.

SURPRISED BY GRACE

Babette's Feast

A film written and directed by Gabriel Axel, based on a story by Isak Dinesen. 102 minutes, 1988, Orion Home Video. Starring Stephane Audran, Birgitte Federspiel, Bodil Kjer, Bibi Anderson, Jarl Kulle, Jean-Philippe La-font, and Ebbe Rode.

SOME OF THE most memorable moments of hospitality seem to come virtually by surprise: unexpected, uninvited, they are like gifts that the recipient--and at times even the donor-didn't anticipate. Though there has to be a readiness, a preparation, inherent in a person's attitude--on the part of both the host and the guest--that allows hospitality to take place, the actual act itself often comes without warning or is, at best, a sort of accidental by-product of a purposeful but ordinary gesture of hospitality that somehow went slightly awry in an interesting way, obtaining higher results than those involved intended. These elusive, almost indefinable moments are instances of "amazing grace," in the words of a favorite Christian hymn. A character in Isak Dinesen's tale "Babette's Feast" (recently made into a film by Danish director Gabriel Axel and now available on videotape) tries to explain it as follows:

"We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble .... We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty."[l]

The character, General Loewenhielm, is admittedly somewhat in his cups when he makes this speech-and is a bit of a pompous bore to begin with. But he does speak during, and about, a very real moment of unexpected grace, which has profoundly affected the lives of twelve dinner guests in a little Danish town on the rugged Jutland coast. Still, as always in a Dinesen tale, shards of glimmering truth and beauty pop up in the oddest locations--even the mouth of a general. Nothing should be dismissed--or adopted as truth--too quickly or easily in her stories. Meanings always come in layers: the more you peel them away, the more there is beneath them.

The feast of the title is just such an ironic twist or gentle joke on Dinesen's part, being an oblique instance of an inner gift's being hidden within an outer hospitable act--quite touching in its own rather sentimental way, but far more interesting when examined as an example of a higher grace (not at all unlike that described by the tipsy general) that comes unannounced and unattended.

The story concerns a middle, aged Frenchwoman named Babette who arrives in Jutland as an exile-whether sexual, social, or political we're never quite sure (another Dinesen touch)--one stormy winter night and collapses on the doorstep of the home of two spinster sisters. The sisters are the daughters of a now deceased hell-fire-and-brimstone preacher who had founded an extremely dour and very Protestant sect in the little town well over fifty years before. One of the two, Philippa, had once studied singing with a French baritone who had been in Jutland on vacation after a singing engagement and found her and her talent irresistible, putting his career on hold to train her. On realizing his secular ambitions, for both her and her voice, she sent him packing. But Achille Papin never forgot Philippa, nor the hospitality she and her sister and father had shown him in Jutland, and when an old friend of his who was a cook in Paris ended up in deep trouble, he remembered the sisters' generosity and sent Babette to them for refuge.

Martina, the other sister, had been jilted in her youth by none other than General (then Lieutenant) Loewenhielm. By the time Babette arrives, the sisters are now well into middle age and are in charge of their late father's flock, which has dwindled over the years to eleven members, including themselves and old Mrs. Loewenhielm, the general's aunt.

Achille Papin's letter to the sisters, borne by Babette as an introduction and plea, draws upon the Biblical paradigm of Mary and Martha: they are two Marys who have "chosen the better part," and he is offering them Babette as their Martha, to do the housework while they continue their good works. (Papin thus touches exactly the right note in the sisters' hearts, stimulating the impulse of Protestant hospitality exemplified in hymns like "New Jerusalem," with its refrain, "Never would you give a stone/ To the child who begs for bread. ")

"Babette can cook," Papin adds casually in the note, which proves to be one of the more marvelous understatements in all of Dinesen's wicked canon.

TWELVE YEARS PASS and Babette cooks very well indeed, not only the standard fare of the region (dried cod and ale-bread soup), but special treats and occasional delicacies as well. The sisters at first blush at such luxuries, until they realize that with Babette in charage, the housekeeping bills are "miraculously reduced."

Then, unexpectedly of course, Babette wins the lottery, back in Paris, where a friend (Papin?) has been renewing her ticket every year. She wins 10,000 francs, and the sisters assume that they've lost her to her old life.

Instead, Babette asks them a favor--her first in twelve years, she points out firmly: Would the sisters allow her to prepare a dinner for the centennial anniversary of their father's birth? Not just a dinner, but "un vrai diner francais." And she begs them one last condition: that she be allowed to pay for it herself. The sisters be-grudgingly agree.

The movie viewer--or the reader--quickly catches on at about this point (as Dinesen no doubt intended): Babette is going to make real turtle soup from a real live turtle, and plans to import great quantities of quails and truffles and caviar and a different wine for every course. The meal is going to cost her every last franc of the lottery money. The feast is going to be a culinary tour de force that the good brothers and sisters will never forget, nor will the other surprise guest: General Loewenhielm, who just happens to be visiting his old aunt for the first time since jilting Martina, all those years ago.

Why this act of selfless hospitality? Just because of the generosity she has been shown, the sanctuary she has been given? Not completely--and perhaps not even primarily. As she proudly proclaims to the two sisters after the feast--so sumptuously realized in every way in the film: in its preparation, in its execution, in its presentation, and most certainly in its consumption--the dinner was not "For your sake? No. For my own." She was, she announces with considerable gusto, "once cook at the Cafe Anglais in Paris" (where General Loewenhielm had once sampled her Blinis Demidoff and Cailles en Sarcophage, as he announces with considerable stupefaction to the others at the meal): "I am a great artist, Mesdames, and a great artist is never poor."

But Dinesen has at least one twist left. Though the feast has been, in a sense, a kind of final flourish of ego on Babette's part, it is largely wasted, in the "artistic" sense: certainly of the guests in attendance, only the general could even begin to read the menu, and he doesn't count for much. But the hospitality is functioning on a higher, subtler level: the meal's more important effect on the twelve guests is that it creates a space where they can come together and see each other in a way they haven't done in years. They experience a moment of real grace, individually and collectively.

Without the old preacher around, the disciples have bickered increasingly, forming schisms and cliques and behaving rather nastily to each other most of the time, in spite of all the sisters have tried to do to restore peace. And all--except the general--have come to the feast sure that it was devilish, Papist gluttony: they have agreed to sample the various dishes, and even the wine, out of politeness and Christian charity, but they've vowed to neither taste nor speak of what they eat or imbibe:

"Even so," said a white-beareded Brother, "the tongue is a little member and boasteth great things. The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. On the day of our master we will cleanse our tongues of all taste and purify them of all delight or disgust of the senses, keeping and preserving them for the higher things of praise and thanksgiving."[2]

They try their best, but soon the guests are smacking their lips and asking for another glass of champagne which, one of them reasons, is "not wine, for it sparkles--it must be some kind of lemonade." With both their tongues and taste buds free of these restraints, their hearts also open and they greet each other warmly and openly again at last. As Dinesen phrased it (again no doubt slightly tongue-in-cheek):

Of what happened later in the evening nothing definite can here be stated. None of the guests later on had any clear remembrance of it. They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air.[3]

Old feuds are settled, old accounts squared, old flames rekindled. The General even confesses his long-repressed love to Martina, and Philippa, through Babette, relives the memory of her duet from Don Giovanni with Achille Papin. Babette's feast has been a smashing success for all concerned, though not in quite the way that any of the guests--or the artist-cook--had intended.

Dinesen called the collection in which the story appears Anecdotes of Destiny, and it was just such twists of fate that she delighted chronicling, with a kind of iron objectivity--and her own brand of grace:

The old Dean's flock were humble people. When later in life they thought of this evening it never occurred to any of them that they might have been exalted by their own merit. They realized that the infinite grace of which General Loewenhielm had spoken had been allotted to them, and they did not even wonder at the fact, for it had been but the fulfillment of an ever-present hope. The vain illusions of this earth had dissolved before their eyes like smoke, and they had seen the universe as it really is. They had been given one hour of the millennium. [4]

As these quotes from Dinesen's original tale make clear, the written word is probably a bit more hospitable to this elusive idea of grace than is the visual medium: there are simply more subtleties, more layers in the text. Axel treats Dinesen's tale with great respect, retaining most of her dialogue verbatim, changing only a few details (setting the story in Denmark, not Norway, for example), and he's made a splendidly entertaining and quite visually arresting film, one which manages, especially, to capture the physical and emotional impact of the meal itself with great gusto. But like any literary adaptation worth its salt, Axel's film should not compete with the tale but should draw the viewer back to the original, where equally rich--and even richer--rewards await the reader.

NOTES

1. Dinesen, Isak, Babette's Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny, originally titled Anecdotes of Destiny (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), p. 40. (All quotes cited are from Dinesen's original tale)

2. Ibid., p. 27.

3. Ibid., p. 41.

4. Ibid., p. 42.