Falk's Ideas of Gastronomy

Early on in his story, the unnamed narrator of “Falk” makes it clear that he has no interest in gastronomy, or in theorizing about the meaning of dinner:

What, then, justifies the claim that “Falk” is centrally concerned with such ideas?

The narrator, a “man of over fifty” who “had commanded ships for a quarter of a century,” is reminiscing to a small party, “all more or less connected with the sea,” in a “small river-hostelry not more than thirty miles from London” (77).Footnote ⁵ He tells the assembled company of “an absurd episode . . . now many years ago, when I first got command of an iron barque, loading then in a certain Eastern seaport.”Footnote ⁶ This “absurdity,” he explains, “concerns only me, my enemy Falk, and my friend Hermann” (78).

The narrator has first encountered Falk in a professional capacity, and he is introduced to the reader with a description of his “conduct in matters of business”:

Falk's vessel is steam-powered, and, as the narrator reflects, “this is an age of steam. The exclusive possession of a marine boiler had given Falk the whip hand of us all” (103). When Falk suspects that he and the narrator are in competition for the affections of the niece of the narrator's “friend” Hermann, Falk simply drags Hermann's ship out of the harbour.

To the narrator – who is at the time unaware of Falk's unfounded suspicion – the act is a mystery. Having complained at the agent's office and received no explanation, the narrator drops in for tiffin at one of the town's two hotels. Over his “stale Dutch cheese,” he is told of Falk's peculiar “ideas of gastronomy” by the keeper of the hotel, the notorious gossip Schomberg.Footnote ⁷ Having offered his opinion that “Falk isn't a man to make mistakes except on purpose,” and that his motive is to “curry favour on the cheap with Hermann” (97), Schomberg embarks on a bitter account of Falk's refusal to eat at the hotel:

Two immediate explanations are suggested: “He's a vegetarian, perhaps,” offers the narrator; “He's a miser,” insists Schomberg (98). Although the narrator tactfully avoids pointing it out to Schomberg, Falk need be neither miserly nor vegetarian to avoid dining at Schomberg's hotel. The meat is both bad and expensive, as well as of dubious origin. The narrator speculates about “infamous buffalo meat” (98). Nor has the rest of the European community (for whom the table d'hôte is exclusively intended) rushed to take up Schomberg's hospitality. The narrator dines surrounded by empty chairs, feeling “as if I had intruded upon a tiffin of ghostly Presences” (98).

Schomberg's “irrelevant babble” (99) about Falk's eating habits has not come to an end, however. His dismay extends beyond what Falk eats to how he does so. Indeed, this is what Schomberg claims is “the most degrading thing”: “They take the dish up to the wheelhouse with a cover on it, and he shuts both the doors before he begins to eat. Fact! Must be ashamed of himself” (98). Schomberg has heard from Ferdinand da Costa, Falk's engineer, that the Captain will not allow his crew to cook meat either:

“Is he expected to eat his meat raw?” Schomberg asks in outrage.

This apparent digression into the proprieties of dining is likely to seem as irrelevant to the reader as it does to the tale's baffled protagonist. If there is a connection in the passage between “conduct in matters of business,” “ideas of gastronomy,” and “decency,” it is Schomberg's own grasping, hypocritical “psychology” that seems to be illuminated.Footnote ⁹ Of course, as the narrator has subsequently discovered, and readers of “Falk” soon will, there is an explanation for Falk's behaviour that hinges neither on vegetarianism nor miserliness. For the origins of Falk's unusual domestic arrangements lay in the fact that he has been compelled, in extremis, to kill and eat another human. Most likely raw, if that would compound Schomberg's horror.

Unlike Schomberg, the narrator of “Falk” is openly sceptical about gastronomy – in the sense of a science or philosophy of food and eating.Footnote ¹⁰ Certainly the narrator does not seem familiar with Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's aphorisms, which include the claim, “Tell me the kind of food you eat, and I will tell you the kind of man you are.”Footnote ¹¹ Nor does he appear to have read Beeton, in whose text the phrase is translated and approvingly quoted (367). To Schomberg's dismay, Falk refuses to eat like what he is: “A white man should eat like a white man, dash it all,” he cries, “Ought to eat meat, must eat meat” (98). Like Beeton, Schomberg asserts that “Dining is the privilege of civilization” – or at least race. Not to eat like or even with the other Europeans is, according to Schomberg, an outrage to racial and gastronomic propriety. It is, of course, the financial effect that this has on Schomberg that he seems to feel most deeply. Schomberg's attitude represents a reductive parody of Brillat-Savarin's aphorism: his judgements about Falk are rooted not in what Falk eats, but in who gets the financial benefit. “I won't talk about the fellow,” Schomberg claims, inaccurately. “I don't think he has six drinks from year's end to year's end in my place” (89). Although Schomberg appears to be acknowledging his unfamiliarity with Falk, he instead offers this information as a bitter criticism of him.

However, it is not only Schomberg who is obsessed with the meaning of dining. The narrator's dismissive, facetious reference to Falk's “ideas of gastronomy” paradoxically directs our attention to the ways in which the tale as a whole is based on an attempt to investigate the relationship between dining, civilization, and psychology. Despite the narrator's rejection of Brillat-Savarin's aphorism, nevertheless it is Falk's cannibalism that seems to offer the key to explaining his behaviour. “Falk” itself can be seen to dramatize Brillat-Savarin's aphorism, hinging as it does on the attempt to explain the relationship between what “kind of food” Falk has eaten, and “what kind of man” Falk is. As the next section of this paper explores further, “Falk” is a tale in which food and eating play a remarkably prominent part.

Before going on to consider what previous critics have made of this proliferation of references to eating, however, I would like to explain why I have detached the narrator's conversation with Schomberg from its context in “Falk” as a whole. Rather than “irrelevant babbling” (as the narrator calls it), it is tempting to interpret the significance of the scene as revealed only by what Ian Watt has dubbed “delayed decoding” (Watt 276). That is to say, what seems like a pointless conversation is later illuminated by the discovery that Falk has been a cannibal. I want to suggest that this is not in fact the case – or at least not entirely. Falk rejects not only meat, but also commensality. Obviously, the two are deeply entangled, but the tale's interest in eating is distinct from its interest in dining. While Falk is the only cannibal in the tale, he is far from being its only solitary eater. Rather than a series of meals that all prefigure the revelation of Falk's act of cannibalism, “Falk” can instead be read as a series of dinners that fail, each in different ways, and which comment both on each other and on what it means to dine.

“Tell me the kind of food you eat, and I will tell you the kind of man you are,” Brillat-Savarin claims. But in another aphorism, he shifts this emphasis from the question of what is eaten to suggest that “the destiny of great nations depends on the manner in which they are fed” (also quoted in Beeton 367).Footnote ¹² It is how, and with whom, we eat that distinguishes a dinner from a meal – the questions that trouble “Falk” are how it does so, whether this distinction is tenable, and what such a distinction might mean.

Critical Responses to “Falk”

In his 1919 “Author's Note” on “Falk,” Conrad observes that the tale “offended the delicacy of one critic at least by certain peculiarities of its subject” (219). Punning on “delicacy,” Conrad offers an acknowledgement of bad literary taste that wilfully compounds the offence. For subsequent critics, of stronger stomach perhaps, it is this very “peculiarity” that has drawn them to the tale and provided the basis of their ruminations.

Falk is the only survivor of the Borgmester Dahl, a cargo steamer that broke down on its maiden voyage “somewhere halfway between Good Hope and New Zealand” (136) ten years before Falk's encounter with the narrator. Stranded at sea, the ship falls into chaos, the men giving themselves up to despair and pointless quarrelling. “The organised life of the ship had come to an end. The solidarity of the men had gone,” Falk recalls (139). Rather than “delayed decoding,” the horror of Falk's account derives from our advance knowledge of what is about to occur. The rest of the crew have given up hope of survival, becoming “living skeletons” (139) or destroying themselves. Only Falk and the ship's carpenter are resolved to preserve themselves by any means. It is the carpenter – at least according to Falk's account – who first speaks of cannibalism, commenting (not quite accurately) that, “There was nothing eatable left on board” (140). The crew, “listless feeble spectres, slunk off to hide in fear of each other,” leaving only Falk and the ship's carpenter on deck (140).

Rather than allying themselves to choose a weaker victim, Falk and the carpenter turn on each other. After the carpenter attempts to bludgeon Falk to death with a crossbar while he is drinking at the water-pump, both arm themselves with revolvers and take up positions, waiting for a victim to approach the ship's only supply of fresh water. After a day and a night, having snuck to a porthole of the cabin into which Falk has barricaded himself, the carpenter reaches through it and tries to shoot Falk. He misses, and he is himself shot dead. By Falk's logic, “The best man had survived” (141). Falk then proceeds to eat the carpenter, having first thrown his former shipmate's revolver into the sea – “He was a born monopolist” the narrator comments (141).Footnote ¹³

Falk finally reveals his secret because he wishes to marry Hermann's niece, but he refuses to wed her before having told her and her family of “his terrible misfortune” (129). Indeed, the desire to do so is “gnawing” away at him (134). Rather optimistically, Falk suggests that his revelation “would affect the domestic arrangements of their home, but, once told, it need not be alluded to again for the rest of their lives” (128). Hermann, who refuses to listen to the details of or circumstances behind Falk's confession, puts his main objection to the marriage succinctly: “The thoughts that would come into their heads every time they sat down to a meal. Horrible! Horrible!” (132). Hermann's outburst echoes Kurtz's more famous cry of “The horror! The horror!” in Heart of Darkness (112) and is similarly open to a variety of interpretations. Is Hermann's horror at the act of cannibalism itself, or at Falk's decision to tell them about it? Notably, Hermann's outraged denunciations of Falk repeatedly fail to get to grips with what is distinctively horrific about cannibalism. Falk is a “creature,” “a beast, an animal” (132) – epithets which, in denying Falk's status as a human, ignore or avoid the central fact that Falk is a man who has eaten other men. The narrator hears Hermann talking about Falk in German and catches the following: “the word ‘Mensch’, man, and also ‘Fressen’, which last I looked up in my dictionary. It means ‘devour’” (131). In contrast to “essen,” the kind of eating people do, “fressen” indicates the gnawing, gorging, and gobbling of feeding animals.

Falk's insistence that this was the survival of the fittest – that in the collapse of order on the ship, “it was everyone for himself at last” – has encouraged several critics to see “Falk” as a tale of reverse evolution.Footnote ¹⁴ O'Hanlon and Anderson, for example, discuss the ways in which Falk justifies his behaviour with echoes of and coded appeals to Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer and locate the tale in contemporary anxieties about the social implications of theories of natural selection. Certainly, Falk himself would have us believe that as order on the ship breaks down, the naturally strong begin to feed on the naturally weak. Yet the tale's reservations about the naturalness or inevitability of events may be registered in the fact that Falk's survival depends less upon his own physical strength or even cunning and more on his retention of the ship's sole remaining revolver, which he uses to hunt down his remaining shipmates. Only three others live to be rescued by a whaling ship, and they, too, have died by the time Falk reveals his secret to the narrator. Falk's monopoly of power on the ship depends on technology, just as his steam-powered tugboat gives him the “whip hand” in port.

The parallel (pointedly drawn by the narrator) between these two types of monopoly has lead critics to argue that the tale demonstrates not the exceptionality of Falk's experience, or the ways in which it suspends the rules governing civilized European behaviour, but its continuity with economic and sexual behaviour in the rest of the tale. As Tanner has noted, the tale emphasizes the “inter-relationship” between “three planes of human activity: the biological – eating, hunger, the sexual drive; the economic. . .; and the linguistic” (22). Thus Falk is a “bloated monopolist” both literally and metaphorically, extracting from the harbour shipping his “pound and a half of flesh” (89). Falk himself comments of his desire for Hermann's niece, “he was hungry for the girl, terribly hungry, as he had been terribly hungry for food” (133). She is “a fine lump of a girl,” Schomberg agrees, smacking his lips as he does so (112).

“Falk” is a text invitingly open to both Freudian and Marxist readings. Thus when the title character's secret is considered not as the opposite of his role as modern European capitalist monopolist, but instead as of a piece with it, Karl Marx's famous comparison of capital to a vampire – which “lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (342) – comes to mind. “Falk” renders the metaphor literal. A similar claim can be made in relation to Freud's suggestion that sexuality originates in “the oral, or as it might be called, cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization,” where “sexual activity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food” (7: 198). Discussing Freud, and Melanie Klein's claim that “[t]he first gratification which the child derives from the external world is the satisfaction experienced in being fed” (Klein 290), Maud Ellmann has argued that “since sexuality originates in eating, it is always haunted by the imagery of ingestion” (38). Falk's sexual appetite is more haunted than most.

It is helpful in this context to note Diana Fuss's observation that Freud's “specific choice of cannibalism to figure psychical identification reminds us that Freud's theory of self-other relations takes shape historically within a colonialist context” (35). Discussing Totem and Taboo (1913) in particular, Fuss points out that, “From the one side,” Freud

The cannibal or cannibalistic marks the earliest stage in Freud's schemata of both psychosexual and cultural development, as well as providing the figure that links the two. Freud would perhaps agree with Conrad's narrator Marlow when he comments in Heart of Darkness (1899) that cannibals are “men one could work with” (61). Marlow famously observes, “Fine fellows – cannibals – in their place” (61). “Falk,” however, is a tale in which cannibalism occurs out of place, disrupting or at least unsettling the attempt to rank cultures on a developmental scale.

Rather than the opposition Conrad presents between the “commonplace sentimentality” of European civilization and Falk as an “almost primitive man,” critical consensus has emphasized the imbrication of the two. Sewlall argues that Falk's cannibalism collapses the role anthropophagy has played in “the grammar of colonial discourse” as “a signifier of alterity” to unmask the symbolic cannibalism of European civilisation itself (1). Sewlall approvingly quotes Tanner's observation that “all the main characters are involved in different kinds of hunger, different kinds of devouring and assimilating” (Tanner 22; Sewlall 3). Likewise, Watts argues that “Conrad had little to learn from Freud, who in 1912 declared: ‘Even today, love . . . is in essence as animal as it ever was’” (xvii). “Culture may refine and elaborate it,” Watts suggests, “but basically love is appetitive and egoistic.”

All three of these critics of “Falk” share two basic assumptions, which demand reinvestigation.Footnote ¹⁵ The first assumption is that Falk's acts of cannibalism are the central meals in the narrative, and that they provide the model of consumption to which all other eating in the text alludes. The second is that eating is an essentially selfish act – the implication behind Watts's association of “egoistic” and “appetitive.” Mrs Beeton would be outraged. It is precisely such a charge – that selfishness, self-gratification, is the defining characteristic of all eating – that the discourse of dining attempts to dispel. By implication, all the eating in the tale is like Beeton's “aboriginal Australian” meal – a naked lunch which exposes the self-centredness of each atomized consumer, satisfying their own appetites. There is no such thing as “essen,” only “fressen” with varying degrees of sophistication. The idea of commensality or the benefits of dining as opposed to eating are just examples of what Conrad calls “commonplace sentimentality.” The next section of this paper challenges these assumptions about the role of eating in “Falk” by examining Conrad's own comments on dining.

Conrad's Ideas of Gastronomy

Perhaps the key reason that critics have dismissed Schomberg's and Hermann's claims for a distinction between eating and dining is that both frame the distinction in racial, indeed racist, terms. As Beeton makes clear, they are far from unique in nineteenth-century gastronomic theory in doing so. For Schomberg, a “white man should eat like a white man, dash it all . . . Ought to eat meat, must eat meat” (98). For Hermann, Falk has revealed himself as both a “beast” and a “common cannibal” – there being little if any distinction in his mind between the two. Beeton similarly comments, “Creatures of the inferior races eat and drink; man only dines” (363). Somewhat unsettlingly, when Conrad himself discusses dining, he sounds a lot like all three of them.

In the 1923 preface to his wife Jessie's Handbook of Cookery for a Small House, Conrad claims that “Good cooking is a moral agent,” adding that “the intimate influence of conscientious cookery promotes” the “serenity of mind,” “graciousness of thought,” and “indulgent view of our neighbour's failings,” which combine to produce “the only genuine form of optimism.” These are cooking's “titles for our reverence,” he concludes (v–vi). Conrad illustrates this claim by comparing the serene, gracious, indulgent “Small House” of his wife's title to the “wigwam” of the Native American. “A great authority upon North American Indians,” Conrad explains, “accounted for the sombre and excessive ferocity of these savages by the theory that as a race they suffered from perpetual indigestion. . . . The Noble Red Man was a mighty hunter, but his wives had not mastered the art of conscientious cookery – and the consequences were deplorable” (vi). In addition to the tendency towards “unreasonable violence” that is produced by this indigestion, he is “in abject submission to the wiles of a multitude of fraudulent medicine men” (vi–vii). Developing Schomberg's argument, Conrad's preface seems to claim that a white man “ought to,” “must,” eat like a white man, or they will end up like a “Red Man.”

Tanner makes the necessary distinction between “Conrad writing as Jessie's husband, the sane and contented Western citizen” (18) and the (much younger) Conrad writing as a novelist. For Tanner, the preface sets up an opposition between the “morose irritability,” the “unreasonable violence,” and “gloomy imaginings” produced by life in the wigwam and the “decency,” “serenity,” and “graciousness” of life in Jessie's “Small House.” In contrast, he claims, Conrad's fiction “works to dissolve the dangerous habit of dualistic (i.e. oppositional) thinking” (18). Tanner argues that Conrad's Native American should be associated with Falk himself – both are prey to “gloomy imaginings” and “morose irritability” brought on by inappropriate eating.

“Falk” subverts this opposition, according to Tanner, by collapsing the distinction between eating and dining. In making this claim, however, he oversimplifies Conrad's preface – and underestimates what it has in common with “Falk.” No reader of Conrad's preface can ignore the fact that “gloomy imaginings,” “morose irritability,” and outbursts of “unreasonable violence” are not unknown even among civilized European diners. It is worth noting, however, that Conrad's Native Americans are predisposed by their diet not simply to violence but to “unreasonable violence” (vi–vii). It is the apparent irrationality of their violent outbursts that the preface sees as markers of alterity and savagery, rather than the violence itself. “Unreasonable,” furthermore, carries the double sense of the violence being both irrational in itself and also apparently resistant to rational analysis.Footnote ¹⁶ But Tanner overgeneralizes about the perceived audience of the Handbook by describing it as the “Western kitchen” and the “stable edifice of the settled bourgeois” (18). Jessie Conrad herself is quite clear that the cookbook is aimed at a specific class: the dweller in a small house, who must undertake many of the household tasks personally, including cooking. As Joseph Conrad's preface is well aware, this is precisely the class identified most strongly with indigestion. L. Leney's Indigestion and How to Cure It (Reference Leney1904) identifies such digestive complaints as most common not amongst “Red Men,” but amongst “Clerks, typewriters, dress-makers, milliners, shop-assistants” and “workers in factories” (66) – the urban and suburban audience to whom Jessie Conrad's cookbook addresses itself. At roughly the same time Conrad was writing his preface, F. A. Hornibrook's The Culture of the Abdomen (Reference Hornibrook1924) was addressing the digestive problems of those with sedentary occupations by counselling a return to the dining patterns, posture, and evacuative position (crouching over a specially designed toilet) of “primitive” peoples. An examination of the variety of texts suggesting solutions for the problem of poor digestion suggests both that the problem was pervasive and that it was not only Native Americans who were subject to the advice of a variety of “medicine men” of varying degrees of usefulness.

A literary equivalent to the preface's uncomfortable Native American resides not in Falk, but in the eponymous protagonist of H. G. Wells's The History of Mr Polly (Reference Wells1910), who “suffered indigestion now nearly every afternoon of his life, but as he lacked introspection . . . projected the associated discomfort upon the world” (7). Mr Polly's indigestion is also imagined to lead to violence (although only metaphorically):

Here, the association is not between primitive eating and savage violence, but between industrialized eating and colonial violence. By locating the preface in contemporary discourses about eating and identity, what Conrad is doing becomes more clearly evident. This paper makes a similar claim about “Falk.”

As Tanner wittily notes, Conrad undoubtedly did not intend that “readers should start to question the prevailing vocabulary of the Western kitchen” (19). Rather, Conrad is putting forwards a semi-serious claim about the effects of bad diet – presumably to be remedied by the advice his wife provides in her cookbook. While Conrad reverses the racialization of the division between dining and eating, in other words, the distinction itself remains valid.

“Much Depends on Dinner”: “Falk,” Mrs Beeton, and Don Juan

As Falk tells the story of the Borgmester Dahl, the narrator admits that he has a “head full of preconceived notions as to how a case of ‘cannibalism and suffering at sea’ should be managed” (135). Watts directs the reader's attention to two contemporary (and widely reported) cases: that of Thomas Dudley and Edwin Stevens in 1884, and that of Andersen and Thomassen in 1899 (226–27). He further notes that such “preconceived notions” may also be partly literary in inspiration, derived from the depiction of maritime cannibalism in Byron's Don Juan. In canto 2 of the poem, Don Juan is trapped in an open boat after the ship on which he has been travelling, the “Trinidada,” has sunk in a storm. Juan has to watch as his tutor is eaten, after the survivors have drawn lots to determine their fate (Don Juan 2.73–75.577–600). It is certainly possible that the narrator has this in mind when he comments to Falk, “You were then so lucky in the drawing of lots?” (135). Falk laughs scornfully at this suggestion: “Do you think I would have allowed my life to go for the drawing of lots?” (135).Footnote ¹⁷

It is not only in relation to cannibalism, however, that echoes of Don Juan reverberate in “Falk.” Like Conrad's tale, Byron's poem is one in which the links between dining and human progress are subjected to sceptical examination. This section explores the relationship between “Falk” and the depiction of the dinner at Norman Abbey in canto 13 of Don Juan. Furthermore, it suggests that Conrad's use of Byron contrasts revealingly with Beeton's more explicit appropriation of the same meal in her Book of Household Management, which quotes Don Juan at length. This juxtaposition not only underscores what ideas of gastronomy these texts share, but also illustrates the ways in which they are distinctive from each other.

Like Schomberg, like the preface to the Handbook of Cookery for the Small House, the narrator of Don Juan is much concerned with the connection between eating and civilization:

In his next stanza, however, Byron expresses greater scepticism about dining as a symbol of human progress:

Like “Falk,” this stanza disturbingly associates sexual, economic, and gastronomic appetites. Indeed, in Don Juan the appetite for “Ambrosial” cash displaces (or consumes) all other appetites. For Freud, the confusion of appetites is characteristic of the earliest phase of sexual organisation and the most primitive phase of human civilization (the cannibal). For Byron, the opposite is true. Where, then, does this leave Beeton's attempts to “rank” a “people” in the “grand scale” according to “their way of taking their meal” (Beeton 363)? How, furthermore, can she enlist Byron's poem in such a schema?

Beeton's chapter on “Dinners and Dining,” which is the focus of this paper's interest in the Book of Household Management, begins with a lengthy compilation of literary quotations in praise of dining. Locating the beginning of civilized dining in Classical Greece, Beeton's chapter provides quotations in chronological order from Milton, Keats, and Tennyson. Perhaps more surprisingly, she also includes two lengthy quotations from Don Juan. The chapter then proceeds to offer course settings and bills of fare for a wide variety of dinners. Other than Byron, Beeton's examples of literary meals – Adam and Eve in Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), the meal served by Porphyro in Keats's “The Eve of St Agnes” (1884), the picnic from Tennyson's “Audley Court” (1842) – are all meals which emphasize intimacy between a couple. All contrast with the savage eating of the Australian aborigine and his “squaw.” It is furthermore somewhat unclear, in Beeton's example, whether it is the Australian or the bone that is “half bare” – an ambiguity that raises a disturbing spectre of cannibalism.

Beeton quotes Byron's lines on Lord Henry's feast, but then skips ahead to stanza 69 of canto 15:

In so doing, Beeton avoids the entanglement of economics, sexual desire, and eating emphasized in Don Juan to have Byron instead commenting unironically on “the curious complexity of the results produced by human cleverness and application catering for the modifications which occur in civilized life, one of the simplest of the primal instincts” (363–64). Where Byron suggests acidly that commercial appetites have usurped all others, Beeton enlists Don Juan to attest to the continual (and mutually inalienable) upward progress of civilization and dining.

Like Beeton, Conrad rewrites Byron, but to a different end. Like the narrator of Don Juan in stanza 99, the narrator of “Falk” imagines himself dining surrounded by ghosts. In “Falk,” these are the “ghostly Presences” of those who have (wisely) avoided Schomberg's table d'hôte, ironically summoned into existence to fill the empty chairs ignored by Schomberg's self-evidently false assertion that, “There's first-rate company always at my table” (98). While Beeton avoids the relationship between eating and economics that Byron asserts – the idea that economic appetite displaces or subsumes the physical, deadening all pleasure in food – Schomberg's attempt to do so fails. The table d'hôte parodies the ideas of dining that Schomberg spouts – it pretends to ideas of hospitality, commensality, fellowship just as its buffalo meat aspires to pass itself off as beef. It is all too clear, both to the reader and to the narrator, that it is economic considerations that lie behind Schomberg's hospitality and which frequently surface in his anger at Falk. It is Schomberg, not Conrad or his narrator, who sees participation in such a meal as a marker of being civilized.

Conrad himself undermines the supposed relationship between dining and being civilized even more strikingly in a well-known episode in Heart of Darkness. Travelling upriver with a group of pilgrims as his passengers and a group of self-professed cannibals as his crew, Marlow faces a potential mutiny when the pilgrims throw the cannibals' supply of “rotten hippo-meat” overboard. The pilgrims compensate the outraged crew in the regional currency, “pieces of brass wire, each about nine inches long” (70). However, as Marlow observes, this exchange is useless, since there is nowhere for them to purchase food with this “extravagant salary” (70). Like Freud's cannibals, Marlow's belong “to the beginnings of time – had no inherited experience to teach them, as it were” (69). What surprises Marlow, however, is that the “cannibals” refuse to act according to type: “Why in the name of all the gnawing devils of hunger they didn't go for us . . . and have a good tuck-in for once, amazes me now when I think of it” (70). Like Beeton, Marlow imagines (even defines) the primitive as a place without dining etiquette, in which the boundaries between people and food are blurred.Footnote ¹⁸ However, and to Marlow's bafflement, the only confusion of categories that occurs during this incident is on the part of the pilgrims, who confuse food and money. Furthermore, it is the pilgrims who commit a breach of table manners. For both Conrad and Byron, it is commercial modernity, not primitive savagery, that is the antithesis of true dining. This is an apparent paradox to which Conrad returns in the frame narrative of “Falk,” a discussion of which concludes this paper.