Cooking for everyone through Bande Dessinée: gender, race, and the limits of culinary democracy in Guillaume Long’s À boire et à manger

ABSTRACT

On the rise since the mid-2000s, the gastronomic bande dessinée merges two quintessential French art forms—cuisine and comics—prompting inquiries into the relationship between the visual, haute cuisine, and high/low culture in the French imaginary. Among the earliest gastronomic BD artists, Guillaume Long suggests that his work ‘democratises’ France’s culinary legacy by rendering quality home cooking accessible to a greater number of individuals. This article probes the possibilities and limitations of this ideal through Long’s four-part À boire et à manger. I argue that Long accomplishes ‘democratic’ culinary access through the creative devices particular to the BD, such as closure and direct address, which construct reader participation through cooking and reading. Additionally, Long’s modelling of gender ‘play’ through his self-titled character affirms culinary participation across the gender spectrum while reinforcing masculinity as the creative norm. However, the series’ uneven treatment of non-European cooks denies their full participation in Long’s democratising project. À boire et à manger joins efforts aiming to popularise haute culture but defining participation along the lines of French/foreign, supporting agonistic political reasoning that democracy requires the constant renegotiation of the bounds of inclusion.

Résumé

En hausse depuis les années 2000, les bandes dessinées gastronomiques proposent de faire le lien entre deux arts classiques français, la cuisine et la bande dessinée, envisageant par-là de renouveler l’étude classique des relations entre art visuel, haute cuisine et culture populaire dans l’imaginaire français. Guillaume Long, un des premiers artistes à émerger dans le genre, soutient que son travail « démocratise » les contributions gastronomiques françaises en les rendant accessibles au plus grand nombre. Cet article examine les possibilités de cet idéal en étudiant À boire et à manger, œuvre en quatre tomes. Je soutiens que Long atteint cet objectif à travers les figures de style de la BD à sa disposition qui démontrent la participation du lecteur au travers de la lecture et la cuisine. La capacité à ‘jouer’ avec le genre à travers son personnage principal affirme la participation culinaire de tous les genres tout en renforçant la créativité masculine. Mais le traitement inégal des personnages non européens nie leur participation au projet démocratique de Long. À boire et à manger finit par définir un lectorat populaire par son origine nationale, ce qui confirme le raisonnement de la politique agonistique selon lequel la démocratie dépend de la renégotiation continuelle de l’intégration sociale.

Disclosure statement

My article references a personal interview performed with Guillaume Long and published in The French Review (‘Entretien avec Guillaume Long,’ 2019). I have also translated the second volume of Long’s À boire et à manger for Omi Press (To Drink and To Eat: No Sugarcoating, forthcoming). I receive no financial gain from the increased visibility of these works that may result due to the publication of this article with Taylor & Francis.

Notes

1. Master chocolatier Jacques Genin asserts that comics’ effectiveness is founded in one’s childhood: ‘C’est par elle que je suis venu à la lecture, je ne connais pas mieux pour toucher les gens.’ Chef Yves Camdeborde attributes comics’ culinary success to its lack of photography: ‘Quand on feuillette un recueil de cuisine, on regarde surtout les photos. Avec une bédé, je suis sûr que les jeunes vont aussi lire les textes et pointer ce que je cherche à transmettre’ (Médioni 2015).

2. Notable scholarly exceptions include Jennifer Howell’s 2015 study on Vietnamese postmemory in the graphic narrative and Margaret Flinn’s 2018 work on bande dessinée and ecocriticism.

3. Parallels with reader-response theory could be made to this reading of the gutter, such as Wolfgang Iser’s definition of ‘gaps.’ See Wolfgang Iser (2014), ‘Interaction between Text and Reader,’ in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation.

4. The fourth volume, À boire et à manger chez Sonia Ezgulian (Eating and Drinking with Sonia Ezgulian), is omitted from this article due to its divergence from the first three albums in organization and tone.

5. This number is drawn from Long’s estimate of the sales of his first three volumes, as calculated during a personal interview on 23 May 2016.

6. As of 10 January 2020, Long had 5,500 followers on Twitter and 16,000 likes on Facebook. This number has changed little since 2018.

7. Many published works counter Long’s narrative regarding the incompatibility of BD and the French canon, including Stéphane Heuet’s interpretation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (from 1998) and Jacques Ferrandez’s illustration of selected works of Albert Camus (from 2009).

8. Excessive hunger has historically been noted as a feminine trait; Susan Bordo (1993, 3) reports that Plato’s mind/body dualism linked women with the ‘lower bodily drives’ including hunger, ‘embodying appetites and desires that weigh down men in their attempt to achieve freedom from materiality.’

9. See Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat for examples on the relationship between meat, privilege, and gender.

10. Adams (1990, 26–27) describes that for the majority of history ‘second-class foods,’ like fruits and vegetables, have denoted women and children, history’s ‘second-class citizens.’