Cannibals

If bowels and toilets are considered unmentionable by so-called polite society, then cannibalism is much worse: a topic that normally can be expected to generate in its audience horror and revulsion. For that reason, cannibalism is understandably favored by our satirists. In Inferno 32, Dante, having descended to the lowest and vilest circle of hell, encounters Count Ugolino eternally gnawing upon the neck and brain of his betrayer, Ruggieri, the archibishop of Pisa. We know that we are in the pit of hell, for cannibalism remains for mankind—even for our own jaded century—a dreadful and all but unspeakable crime. One modern critic, Robert J. Lifton, suggests that death has become “unmanagable” for us in our era, has become a topic wholly repressed: “We hide from ourselves the very fact of death.” Exactly the same may be said of cannibalism. With offhanded wit, Hans Zinsser takes a casual view of recurrent spates of cannibalism among the various species; he observes that “in the imperfect development of cohabitation on a crowded planet, the habit of eating one another—dead and alive—has become a general custom, instinctively and dispassionately indulged in.” But it is not so; civilized society has insisted upon passionately denying such “indulgence” in any form whatsoever; any aboriginal interest in anthropophagy has been vigorously refuted and repressed. Even psychiatry is certain in its condemnation: “Coprophagia,” Frederic Wertham flatly asserts, “is always an indication of mental disease, and cannibalism in our time, with the exception of extreme catastrophic hunger situations with impending death, is unthinkable for any person in his right mind.”¹ It is a highly charged topic, commonly taboo.

For precisely this reason the vestiges of tales of man-eating hold for us a grim fascination. We are awestruck before the child-eating feasts of primitive mythology—the gruesome dinners of Thyestes in Seneca’s drama, of Tereus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of Tantalus in Pindar’s Olympian Odes. Indeed, the classically mythic theme of Saturn’s eating of his own children has captured the imagination of innumerable later generations; Goya’s original wall painting, Saturno devorando a un hijo, is one of the most powerful and frightening in the annals of art, just as Titus Andronicus remains one of Shakespeare’s (and the Renaissance’s) most macabre plays.² As a matter of fact, one of the Enlightenment’s “justifications” for the slave trade out of Africa remained the proliferating tales of cannibalism and cruelty among the tribes; benign Europeans were, it was claimed, “rescuing” natives and transporting them to the new world of Christianity and civilized captivity where they would be forced to adhere to more sanitary diets.³ Doubtless the high point of so-called Christian tolerance assuredly occurs in the course of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), when the irate and self-righteous protagonist slowly comes to terms with his spontaneously eager desire to slaughter all the South American cannibals he happens to encounter.

To this day such a subject arouses in us a sense of shock, together with an uneasy attraction. Therefore, it is no accident that an all-time best-seller, since its appearance in 1897, had been Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The theme of the malevolent vampire sucking a maiden’s blood has continuously horrified and titillated—throughout innumerable editions, as well as upon stage and screen. More recently, the story of the Donner party, trapped in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846, and of its members’ survival by the consuming of the dead, has again received attention in book-length recapitulation by Richard Rhodes. The Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes in 1972, that similarly led to the eating of the dead, has now appeared as a novel and as a motion picture, Alive!⁴

The problem of our taboo and our dis-ease results from, of course, our unconscious sense of our own roots, our own origins. A mere three or four thousand years ago our ancestors were savages, lurking in the bush. Scholarship into the origins of primitive rites has pretty well established that the ancient burnt offering was at one time a human sacrifice, that the communal feast of old consisted of decoctions of human flesh and blood.⁵ We were there. Now we see through a glass, darkly; yet what we shall perceive is apt to be our own contorted and malignant face.

Precisely because of his terror and decorum, then, man is peculiarly subject to the assaults of satirists, who will not let him disavow or disremember his past, the skeletons, as it were, in his pantry closet. Because of its perennial power to startle, therefore, cannibalism has been throughout history the subject of satire; the satirist repetitiously rubs the spectator’s nose in a topic the observer would ardently prefer to leave alone. Ronald Paulson proposes that the regular theme of cannibalism serves as “a metaphor for aggression,” suggesting “the corruption of an ideal.”⁶ The forthright portrayal of a voracious cannibalism is aggressive, all right, but it is too blatantly distasteful to most of us merely to indicate a deviation from a norm. Here would be an instance of overkill; the subject is too horrible to contemplate. Rather, satire belabors the reader with the dreadful exactly because it does shock; the topic repeatedly serves as a time-honored attention-getting device—capable of breaking down our papier-mâché walls of dignity, aloofness, and high seriousness. Satire insists upon the descent into the bestial, like Circe converting men into swine. Let’s face it: for the cultured and fastidious, cannibalism leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Diogenes and other early Cynics antagonize and startle audiences by advocating, among other things, free love; even “incest and cannibalism may be justifiable in certain circumstances,” A.A. Long observes. Juvenal mockingly reports of the Egyptians that their dainty preferences banish goat meat and mutton from their tables, but not the carcasses of men. He proceeds to recount how the citizens of Ombi enjoy tearing their enemies apart and eating them raw. Petronius has the apparently opulent Eumolpus insert in his will the mandate that his heirs, clients, and obsequious parasites must literally swallow his body before they can devour his wealth. Montaigne whimsically defends such barbarous savages, suggesting that they are perhaps more respectable than the denizens of Europe.⁷ In Candide, Voltaire amusingly recounts how the Princess of Palestrina came to lose one buttock to furnish a banquet in Russia, and Byron’s Don Juan sweetly records how a shipwrecked crew, cast for many days in a lifeboat upon the sea, drew lots and then dined upon Pedrillo, Don Juan’s own beloved “pastor” and “master.” Even the staid H.G. Wells in The Time Machine (1895) takes a dim view of man’s future. He introduces into the grim later history of the planet a society of ruined, classically dressed aristocrats preyed upon and consumed by the vestiges of the factory laborers long since gone underground and now evolved into a weak-eyed species of molelike Morlocks, or cannibals, who, turning the tables of history, now feed upon their superiors. Doubtless the most famous instance in literature of purposeful, reasonable cannibalism remains Jonathan Swift’s sardonic masterpiece “A Modest Proposal.”

One might well expect, with such a recurrence over the centuries of this theme in satire, the subsequent tapering-off and diminution in the modern era. Yet such is distinctly not the case. If anything, our age witnesses a sharp increase in the treatment of cannibalism. Mark Twain introduces a mad, cannibalistic parliamentarian in one of his tales. Ambrose Bierce “proves,” in an essay, that our ancestors were anthropophagous and hopes to induce readers to return to past tried-and-true traditions. Lord Dunsany, with an O. Henry twist, solves the mysterious case of a girl’s vanishing, when it is discovered that her boyfriend, at the time of her disappearance, purchased appetizing meat sauce, in “The Two Bottles of Relish.” Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief recounts how Basil Seal, at a festival among the headhunters in the bush, unknowingly (and imprudently) dines upon his girlfriend Prudence. T.S. Eliot creates a revue-and-ragtime little ditty about Sweeney the Cannibal eating the missionary Doris. Even two scientists, Stanley Garn and Walter Block, can aloofly analyze the nutritional value of man-eating, only to conclude (perhaps a little wistfully) that people-as-food hardly supply us with enough calories and protein; we would therefore, they explain with tongue-in-cheek and mock solemnity, require with human flesh a dietary supplement. Similarly, Norman Mailer, in Cannibals and Christians (the title richly suggests former New World tribal cuisine), concludes that man’s “modern condition,” “psychically so bleak,” implies acts of destruction, even of cannibalism, lying just below the surface within us all.⁸

In fact, increasingly in our century cannibalistic satire becomes more prevalent, more ferocious, more grim. We have witnessed mass slaughter—culminating in the bomb and the gas chamber—what has been designated the Holocaust.⁹ Given such an atmosphere, artists are hard put to exceed reality—or even to capture its terrible dimensions. In seven novels, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has never been able, as he explains, to approach the fire bombing of Dresden, which he lived through during World War II. Nevertheless, he skirts about the issue in Slaughterhouse-Five with images of “corpse mines” and of schoolgirls “boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen.”¹⁰ In short, the horrors of the twentieth century have incited satirists to refurbish, to reanimate, older treatments of cannibalism in order to cope with the extravagance of the present scene. In such a manner are old myths vitalized and reestablished.

For in our era of massive technology and mass communications, we are simply inundated by a plethora of revolutionary ideas and weapons. In such a dangerous world, all things are possible—and indeed positively in evidence. The anarchist in a Chesterton novel is perfectly willing, on principle, in fact, to violate any principle or order.

“I say we are merciful,” [claims one anarchist], “as the early Christians were merciful. Yet this did not prevent their being accused of eating human flesh. We do not eat human flesh—”

“Shame!” [cries another]. “Why not?”¹¹

On the other hand, absolute service to the “people’s” totalitarian state is comically portrayed in Slawomir Mrozek’s drama Out at Sea. Among three “comrades” cast out on a raft, the two hefty survivors brainwash the frail thin one into “electing freedom” and nobly sacrificing himself for the state, allowing the others to apportion him as food. It is all a matter of patriotic Communist rhetoric.¹²

Similarly, the dispassionate scientist is capable of investigative laboratory murder; in Čapek’s War with the Newts, for example, the humanlike salamanders, who have been taught all man’s qualities and abilities, are nonetheless subject to “experimentation” in the laboratory and as “inferiors” are offered cheerfully up to destruction. Newt fat is found to be good industrial lubricant, but newt flesh persists in being unpalatable. The scientist, however, devoted to his vocation, perserveres:

Dr. Pinkel ascertained after many experiments performed on himself that these harmful effects disappear if the chopped meat is scalded with hot water . . . and after washing thoroughly it is pickled for twenty-four hours in a weak solution of permanganate of potash. Then it can be cooked or stewed, and tastes like inferior beef. In this way we ate a Newt called Hans; he was an able and intelligent animal with a special bent for scientific work; he was employed in Dr. Pinkel’s department as his assistant, and even refined chemical analysis could be entrusted to him. We used to have long conversations with him in the evenings, amusing ourselves with his insatiable thirst for knowledge. With deep regret we had to put Hans to death, because my experiments on trepanning him made him blind. His meat was dark and spongy, but did not cause any unpleasant effects. It is clear that in case of war Newt flesh could form a welcome and cheap substitute for beef.¹³

Furthermore, our advanced machines threaten to consume us. Thus, in John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, the gigantic WESCAC computer, that controls society’s motives and methods, continuously, ominously threatens to EAT (by “Electroencephalic Amplification and Transmission”) the citizenry.¹⁴ Even our utopias (or, more properly, dystopias) dramatize the descent of man, as in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, to the point at which boys ferret one another out, as one would hunt wild boars in the jungle bush. Utopias otherwise frequently characterize a dull and overpopulated future, as in Barry Hannah’s “Eating Wife and Friends,” in which in a future American Depression citizens declare open season for stalking and dining upon relatives and intimates. In Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed, with the breakdown of social order, cheerful mobs increasingly engage in overt cannibalism—forming “dining clubs,” then slaughtering, spitting, baking, and basting their savory fellow men. In Aylesbury, where man is more “refined,” corpses were canned, and the inhabitants are considered “civilized cannibals.” “It makes all the difference,” one of the inhabitants placidly and contentedly explains, “if you get it out of a tin.”¹⁵

Doubtless the height of “gentility” and “propriety” is achieved in J.P. Donleavy’s manual of etiquette and good manners for all occasions, when he describes how to consume one’s neighbors like a gentleman. Saul Bellow ironically has his conservative writer-protagonist, Charles Citrine, make something of a fortune when an old script of his work “Caldofreddo,” concerned with cannibalism and forgiveness, becomes a smash film hit across two continents.¹⁶ Satire vehemently and savagely responds to the nineteenth century’s talk of “progress” and an idealism that prescribed the inevitable emergence of idyllic supermen and socialistic superstates. Decline, degeneracy, and descent are the central themes of our reactionary literature.

If possible, it is with a kind of escalation, in the latter portion of this century, that the literary picture becomes still more nightmarish, hallucinatory, and grisly. Burgess’s reference to “tinned” delicacies is echoed by the surrealistic savagery of George P. Elliott’s story “The NRACP,” in which America’s entire black population is systematically rounded up, shipped to a massive concentration camp in Nevada, butchered, cooked, and efficiently distributed in cans for everyday human consumption. By a horrible conjunction, methodical social planners have at one stroke resolved both the “Negro Problem” and the “Food Problem” with wonderful simplicity. In a similar vein, dramatist Fernando Arrabal contributes his share to the trend that presents the sickening in the open, for in his play The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, he dramatizes the architect’s slaying and eating of the emperor onstage. In one scene the diner genteelly cuts off a foot for consumption and nicely taps the corpse’s brain behind the ear so that he might suck off the nutritious nucleic acids. In the next scene, the victim’s bones are patently strewn about the set.¹⁷ We have been forced to partake of it all.

Novelist Gabriel García Márquez tells of the enormously aged and depraved Caribbean tyrant who grows mad from fear and pain until he imagines one further conspiracy against him that involves his minister of defense, the one man who had been his friend and “soul comrade,” General Rodrigo de Aguilar. At midnight during an annual banquet held for the suspect presidential guard, all anticipate the arrival of the great minister of defense. The tyrant gives a sign,

and then the curtains parted and the distinguished Major General Rodrigo de Aguilar entered on a silver tray stretched out full length on a garnish of cauliflower and laurel leaves, steeped with spices, oven brown, embellished with the uniform of five golden almonds for solemn occasions and the limitless loops for valor on the sleeve of his right arm, fourteen pounds of medals on his chest and a sprig of parsley in his mouth, ready to be served at a banquet of comrades by the official carvers to the petrified horror of the guests as without breathing we witness the exquisite ceremony of carving and serving, and when every plate held an equal portion of minister of defense stuffed with pine nuts and aromatic herbs, he gave the order to begin, eat hearty gentlemen.¹⁸

We can be absolutely certain that under the surveillance of such a tyrant, everyone dined with stupor and alacrity.

Possibly the most haunting and ghoulish of such recent grotesqueries is John Hawkes’s novel The Cannibal. The entire book portrays modern Germany’s interminable repetitive cycle—brutish boastfulness and militant jingoism that leads to disastrous warfare, defeat, and nationwide misery, desolation, and waste. Then the cycle stupidly commences again. Seen in such a light, all Germany is an actual madhouse, ever on the verge of opening its doors and unleashing a ravening insanity upon the Western world.¹⁹ At the center of this mythic spiral and whorl is portrayed the aged duke at his “fox-hunt,” symbol of a decadent and mirthless martial artistocracy and its “games.” But the “fox” that he stalks relentlessly throughout the novel is in fact Jutta’s little son. In a spine-tingling climax, the boy is captured by the aristocrat, mutilated and murdered, then methodically hacked, sliced, and cut into pieces.

He hacked and missed the joints, he made incisions and they were wrong as the point of the blade struck a button. The fox kicked back. . . . It took all his ingenuity to find, in the mess, the ears to take as a trophy, to decide which were the parts with dietician’s names and which to throw away. . . . It was necessary to struggle, first holding the pieces on his lap, then crouching above the pile, he had to pull, to poke, and he resented the dullness of the blade. . . . Every time a bone broke his prize became mangled, every piece that was lost in the mud made the whole thing defective.²⁰

Subsequently, this rumpled, amputated mass is boiled in a broth and served with Prussian ceremony and poise as a welcome repast to the boy’s aunt. The point is made brutually clear: the modern world is at heart a wretched inversion of Rousseauistic innocence; in the place of romantic simplicity, optimism, and perfectability is set a barbarous killer instinct in a cursed race. Instead of spiritual progress, there is demonic regression and reversion. Man moves downward and backward.

Thereafter, it is but a short step from the Kafkesque lunacy of John Hawkes to the epical presentation of John Gardner’s Grendel. Here is Beowulf retold from the monster’s, the cannibal’s, point of view. With his musings, his hesitations, his hang-ups, and his acute self-consciousness, Grendel slowly transforms into a wayward, neurotic twentieth-century man. Or, to put it the other way, contemporary man is revealed as a monster. “All order, I’ve come to understand,” muses the ratiocinating monster, “is theoretical, unreal—a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world—two snake-pits. The watchful mind lies, cunning and swift, about the dark blood’s lust, lies and lies and lies until, weary of talk, the watchman sleeps. Then sudden and swift the enemy strikes from nowhere, the cavernous heart. Violence is truth.”²¹ Grendel is such a potentially dangerous and violent man—but without the mask. On the contrary, in much of recent literature, the disguise has been doffed, the false face lifted, only to reveal (and to expose) the bloodthirsty fangs of your commonplace joe, your everyday guy. The beast in the jungle is the man in the street. That is our current mythology. Like any other myth in its flower, it is vigorous and flourishing; it is credible, appalling, and—gustatorily or disgustingly—alive.