Cannibal Feast

Those who have read Robinson Crusoe will recall the point when the hero discovers that he is not alone on his island when he rather ludicrously finds a single footprint! A duffelpud, perhaps? Defoe is really setting the mood, one of horror and one of fascination. And it’s with horror and fascination that the cannibals made their way into the western imagination, from Robinson’s Island to the feasts of Hannibal Lector.

I had so much in picking my way through An Intellectual History of Cannibalism by Catalin Avaramescu, translated by Alastair Blyth and published earlier this year by the Princeton Press, which is really helping to put the practice in a the wider context of history and civilization.

I love Hannibal Lector as much as the next girl but-oh my-when it comes to the real thing some of the details of the cannibal life are truly hard to take in. I remember when I was in my teens reading about the case of one Armin Meiwes, who lived in the German town of Rotenburg an der Fulda. This man went into a website called Cannibal Café and there advertised for a “well-built eighteen to thirty-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.” Yea, sure; who on earth is going to volunteer for that? Well, someone did, someone by the name of Bernd Brandes. The actual details of what followed are truly repellent. Let me just say that dinner began while Brandes was still alive, the hors d'oeuvre being a certain part of the anatomy that most men find dear. Found to be too rubbery, it was sautéed and fed to the dog!

To a certain extent, as Avaramescu explores, cannibalism began really as an invented concept, a dividing line between civilization and savagery. It was another form of ‘here be dragons’ filling out the space on empty maps, those barbarous places “of the Cannibals that each other eat…” Cannibals, in other words, entered the western imagination alongside such fabulous creatures as the dog-headed men and monopods.

For Thomas Hobbes the cannibal was a useful concept, a warning the depths that the war of all against all could descend in the absence the social contract and the state. But it became something more in the real world; for the discovery of real cannibal ‘savages’ became an excuse for far greater savagery, as the Spanish fully demonstrated in the Americas. The hypocrisy, not just in this, but in much of the practice of ‘civilization’ was touched on by Montaigne;

I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but lately seen, not among the inveterate and mortal enemies, but among neighbours and fellow citizens, and which is worse, under the colours of piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is dead.

Quite!

I suppose the modern cannibal, cannibals in the form of the fictional Lector or the factual Meiwes, are really the creation of civilization rather than savagery, a notion supported by arguments advanced by the Marquis de Sade, who saw the absorption of ‘the other’ as a perfect expression of one’s freedom. Alas, there are some forms of freedom one would rather not have. :-)