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Dr Willeford's Paper, though stimulating and many-layered, as a good feast should be, left me grappling with a sense of dissatisfaction that is not easy to define. Reflecting that this might mean that I was carping enviously at a bountiful display, I concluded that the author's emphasis on abundance as an essential component of mutuality ‘from the outset’ was in fact the ingredient of his paper that I felt was hardest to digest. ‘Festival’, he states, ‘affirms mutuality in the special way of satiating appetite’, and again, ‘It offers its participants more than enough’. Satiety, according to the dictionary, implies glut, over-abundance. Implicit surely in humanity's recurring need for extra satisfaction, a periodic state of overflowing fullness such as festival is designed to provide, is the keen awareness of the opposite state, emptiness or hunger, which may carry with it the threat of deprivation, the haunting fear of death or dearth and the attendant shadow of destructive greed.
Something of this vital tension of opposites seems to me to be lacking in Dr Willeford's paper, despite his careful underlining of the distinction between appetitive behaviour and non-consummatory experiences of mutuality such as Winnicott describes. As a result his faith in ‘the self that knows what is good for itself’, which he sees as more often than not expressing itself in a positive way, representing ‘the evaluative aspect of the vital core’, could be seen as dangerously close to Rousseau's optimistic belief in the natural goodness of savage man, who is at peace with the world after he has dined. Because it may deny a certain weight to that condition which theologians term original sin, the paper left me confronting this dismal spectre, the negative and destructive potential inherent in all mortals from the moment of birth, and I am still wondering whether a concept of mutuality defined in terms of ‘abundance’ can effectively contain it.
The roots of festival are complex and obscure, b