He felt perfectly happy, his eyes intoxicated [se grisaient] by the

splendour of these jewelled corollas, ablaze with colour against a

golden background. Suddenly he had a craving [appétit] for food, unusual
for him, and soon he was dipping slices of toast spread with superlative
butter in a cup of tea, an impeccable blend of Si-a-Fayoun,
Mo-you-Tann, and Khansky—yellow teas brought from China into
Russia by special caravans. (117, 57)
Reading Torok through Lacan, des Esseintes turns to food to incorporate
that which remains unresolved, to satisfy an unintrojected desire. The
aesthetic experiment, the torture of the tortoise, is understood here as
an attempt to approach the missing object of desire through an intermediate
surrogate (the objet petit a in Lacanian terms), but it is one that
satisfies only momentarily. The tortoise as aesthetic object is intoxicating,
language here already auguring the culinary, but unable to slake des Esseintes’s
desire for longer than that single moment. Almost immediately,
he turns to the phantasm of eating in an attempt to incorporate—in a mimesis
of introjection—a desire that forever eludes him. The hunger here
notably arrives as an “appétit,” the French connoting a craving. This term
is suggestive. On the one hand, its physical impact suggests it arrives as a
bodily need, but, on the other, such a suggestion is immediately undercut
by the intricacies of its resolution—any “natural” need here is always already
subordinated to the phantasy of desire.38 Thus the meal itself must
be turned immediately into an aesthetic object, just like the tortoise that
preceded it, and is performed with a ritualistic relish full of sensuous and
indulgent Oriental connotations.
As with Wilde’s Algernon, there is clearly a metonymy underwriting
des Esseintes’s relationship with food. The entire breviary of des Esseintes’s
various aesthetic experiments, like those of Dorian, seem to be a
series of attempts to approach the original object of desire that forever
eludes them both. No matter how much is incorporated or consumed (in
all senses of this term), something remains stubbornly unintrojected.
But in the case of À rebours, it is important to note something that is
not so openly discussed by Wilde: how the act of incorporation, whatever
its potential significations, gradually becomes an object not of pleasure
but of disgust.