Coffee, Truffles and Other Delights in Anne Enright’s “The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch”. Anne Enright’s novel The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch follows its pregnant protagonist’s journey into the city of Asunción and Dr William Stewart’s away from the city, into the more innocent but war-ravaged Cordillera mountains in mid-nineteenth century Paraguay. Food and its lack are a leitmotif of Enright’s novel, variously featuring banquets, rampant consumerism, famine and cannibalism. A fictional biography of historical figures and also a commentary on contemporary consumerism, The Pleasure foregrounds Eliza’s embodied experience of pregnancy, with its cravings and physiological transformations, and displaces the historical perspective onto the European observer, Dr Stewart, who echoes the baffled fascination and revulsion and the patriarchal moral stance of male historians writing about the colonies. Moreover, in a country on the brink of modernisation, Stewart’s ambivalent reaction to the viscerality of both sexuality and wartime violence typifies the experience of abjection that pre-dates and triggers the formation of norms and the establishment of the symbolic order in subject formation. My essay draws on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection in order to show how Enright uses representations of food and the female body to problematise historical processes and the position of women within the order of discourse.

Keywords: Anne Enright, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, Julia Kristeva, the abject, food, the female body, the mother, history