Food, Narrative, and Fantasy in David Leavitt’s 'The Body of Jonah Boyd'

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to analyze food as a system of signs, narrative fantasy, and metanarrative elements in the novel The Body of Jonah Boyd (2004) by David Leavitt. In the first part, I illustrate some implications of, and strategies for reading food practices as systems of signs and/or cultural narratives; then I move on to argue that this signification can be related to an idea of fantasy as the imaginary relation between individual subjects and a given form of reality. In the second part, I use the relationship between food, signification, and fantasy as a critical tool for reading Leavitt’s novel, one that features food and its rituals as a code through which fantasies and fictions shape reality—taking, in turn, the form of (meta)literary, combinative clues to be deciphered.