Hal Porter, in his 1971 novel The Right Thing, delves, via his character the landed matriarch Mrs Ogilvie, into the anthropology of the dinner ritual - and tempts his readers with the concept that it - or at least its hyper-formality, is outdated:
The dinner-table and what was expected at it epitomised, as much as anything, (Mrs Ogilvie’s) attitude which was not one of anti-modernism but anti-retrogression - a centre-of-the-tunnel stand. Farther back in the tunnel her earlier Scottish ancestors, gathered together for their evening meal in a smoky granite hut, had more or less pigged it. Later ancestors, generation by generation, had advanced to more and more lighted parts of the tunnel, to smoother manners. Her father and mother had dined at Kildermorie under the chandeliers she had inherited, as she had inherited the idea that this last meal of the day should mean a family concurrence, an interchange of civilities: knives used for cutting into lamb chops, not for slitting throats, or stabbings in the back. At the seemliness of a well-appointed table, and a family behaving as it would if an archbishop were present, at this decently lit section of the tunnel, she called a halt. The tunnel seemed to her to descend from here on, to grow murkier, to seethe with ill-bred families who, clutching their knives wrongly, were slumped to guzzle, in much the same manner as her remoter ancestors had around a peat-fire, around a television set. To her this was more than unhealthy and incomprehensible. It was not to be countenanced. Had the family unthinkably dug in its heels, and insisted on eating from trays on its knees while staring at advertisements for filter-tip cigarettes, or at ugly adolescents trying to sing, she would have dined in solitude at the round table, straight-backed beneath the chandelier and the steady-eyed gaze from an oil-portrait of her grandfather, a sheriff-depute of Edinburgh in the eighteenth century.
Porter’s 1971 novel toys with a new-found rejection, following the liberated 1960s, of what was rightly or wrongly regarded as pretension. After all, what’s wrong with watching television while eating? People are tired. They don't want to make small talk. For that matter, what’s wrong with someone coming to a well set table and dumping a two-litre plastic bottle of Coke amidst the china and cutlery? The answer is obscured. Porter is not judgmental. There's more to the story. While literature routinely parodies the protocols of the table as either a kind of bourgeois decadence, or a crusty remnant of an upper class grimly fighting a long-lost battle - grasping down the ages for a cultural artefact that is no longer there - Porter digs deeper, into an ancient human instinct that is almost - if you are pessimistic - extinct. Except that human instincts cannot be extinguished. The clue is in the ‘incomprehensible’ television set ‘not to be countenanced’. Why? Because television is a thief of time as well as being unconscionably low-rent, a sewer of smiling faces in a blue light of stupor.
Meanwhile, daughter-in-law Emma and her stepson Angus, returning late to the dinner on a hot summer night seething with nocturnal life, approach through the glass conservatory from where they can see the diners in silhouette, statue-like, lit too brightly, ‘like effigies in a waxworks’. Emma senses:
… the rich and frightening stealth she felt all about her as they walked through the garden; stealth to the right and left, before and behind, between the interlaced stalks and tendrils and curled-up petals; stealth underfoot; stealth in the very air which was criss-crossed and re-crisscrossed by the tracks of infinitesimal creatures hunting and fleeing, rending and looting. Twilight and windlessness had brought these battalions upon battalions out from their kraals of twigs and down; from pits bored in the bark of trees; from under pebbles and shards of leaf, and filmy tents spread like Arab encampments between crumbs of earth; from winding minuscule tunnels as crammed and over-furnished as Tutankhamen’s tomb; millions of minute beings, unseeable, crazed with lusts and energies, armed, galvanic and gluttonous, unsparing. Webs shook to bitter throes. Wings were slashed and torn, the visors masking edible faces cracked and smashed. Poisons to paralyse were injected between the crevices of armour into the softnesses beneath, the living meal within. Legs, arms, heads, swelling eyeballs were wrenched off or pulled from their sockets, and borne away into the deadly neatness of underground nurseries …
Porter seems to suggest the formality of dinner is a construct designed to ward off the concept of life inexorably moving towards death. In ancient days it was the time, before sleep, when most could trade stories, build traditions, commiserate, sing, laugh, cry, eat, argue. You couldn’t do that under harsh sun - or heavy snow - in the fields or chasing a deer. Dinner was the crucible of oral history. The advent of night's dread was eased, or at least deferred, via company, food and wine. But if you woke in the night ... One of the diners soliloquises at two in the morning:
I know the moon is somewhere there but it’s cut off behind a tar-black province, is beyond its alps … skipping and bounding fecklessly in another country. … I think it’s the texture of the dark itself, so close-grained that it has the unreal compactness deep-sleepers conceive the night to have. I have, a little later, the sense of being stretched out, elongated, arranged like the corpse of an emancipated warrior in some half-remembered tale, atop a bier sliding in a starless after-midnight along a river on its black way to the black sea.
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The Right Thing. Hal Porter, 1971. Rigby, Adelaide. Arresting psychological portrait of a farming family in the daunting early 1970s of rapidly changing social standards. A lost Australian classic, now almost unobtainable. My copy from Adelaide Booksellers, 907 South Road, Clarence Gardens SA 5039. 'Antiquarian, Collectable, Second hand, Out-of-Print'
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And when I die and when I’m gone/there’ll be one child born in this world/to carry on, to carry on
- Laura Nyro
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