The majority of early modern accounts of discovery and travel
narratives about America reflect a peculiar fusion of a utopian
and paradise-like idyll of the new continent with cruel cannibalistic
practices of the natives. This apparently paradoxical side-by-side of
a benevolent Nature and obvious horror, which dates back to ancient
and medieval texts, can be traced as a leitmotif in the travelogues of
Columbus and Vespucci, as well as in many of the eyewitness accounts of
the sixteenth century, not to mention literary adaptations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. The following analysis juxtaposes
illustrative textual and pictorial examples of sixteenth-century travel
narratives with ancient, medieval, and early modern texts, thus attempting
to provide an explanation for the striking interdependence of cannibalism
and utopian concepts in the first images of America.
The early myth of America is very much rooted in the tradition of ancient
and medieval utopian projections in travel literature. Many utopias,
such as Plato's Atlantis myth, the widespread notion of the "insulae
fortunatarum," or the mysterious islands in the Atlantic according to
the Irish abbot St. Brendan depict a utopian West beyond the known
world. Parallel to these utopias of the West, ancient and medieval
sources use the Far East to situate the Earthly Paradise. Marco Polo's
fourteenth-century travelogue and the fictional geographic fantasies
of Sir John Mandeville are the most prominent advocates of these eastward
projections. The westbound voyage of Columbus, which was supposed to lead
to the East via the West made it possible to fuse both utopian traditions
in the early image of America. The major gaps in the knowledge of the
new continent could therefore be bridged by recourses to ancient and
medieval utopian concepts of the East and the West.
[End Page 389]
A central aspect among these projections in the early image of America
is the notion of a benevolent Nature which eagerly provides everything
necessary for human life.
1
This basically feminized concept of Nature as an alma mater or
nourishing mother has a long tradition ranging from ancient notions
of a Golden Age, the concept of a locus amoenus, and modern
pastorals, to the first descriptions of America. Already Columbus
characterizes the new continent through images that are reminiscent of
classical utopias: "[T]he other islands of this region, too, are as
fertile as they can be. This one is surrounded by harbors, numerous,
very safe and broad, and not to be compared with any others that I have
seen anywhere; many large, wholesome rivers flow through this land;
. . . All these islands are most beautiful and distinguished by various
forms; one can travel through them, and they are full of trees of the
greatest variety . . . and I believe they never lose their foliage. At
any rate, I found them as green and beautiful as they usually are in
the month of May in Spain."
2
Vespucci introduces a similar topos of the "locus amoenus" tradition
to describe the fertility of these islands: "The climate, moreover,
is very temperate and the land fertile, full of immense forests and
groves, which are always green, for the leaves never fall. The fruits
are countless and entirely different from ours."
3
The fertility of the Caribbean islands, for example, appears like a
mirror image of the utopian Island of the Phaeacians in the Odyssey.
4
The most striking example of how classical utopian topoi are introduced
is Columbus's description of the alleged Earthly Paradise as a woman's
breast that makes indirect use of the alma mater topos. Columbus
describes the earthly Paradise as a "prominence like a woman's nipple,
this protrusion being the highest and nearest the sky, situated under
the equinoctial line, and at the eastern extremity of this sea,--I call
that the eastern extremity, where the land and the islands end."
5
Columbus's constant references to gold, that is, the lack of iron,
also situate the new continent side by side with ancient notions of
the Golden Age as rendered by Hesiod and Ovid.
6
The uses of these ancient and medieval utopias in texts which make America
appear as a real manifestation of diverse temporal and geographical
utopian projections in the here and now of the Renaissance, marks a
decisive counterpoint to the repulsive cannibalistic practices attributed
to the natives. Originating in the texts of Columbus and Vespucci,
cannibalism not only serves as a leitmotif in all major subsequent travel
narratives, but also functions as a seemingly irreconcilable counterpart
to the utopian setting of the continent.
Famous misconceptions in the context of the discovery of America include
erroneously calling the natives "Indians" as well as the term "cannibal,"
which also derives from semantic shortcomings indirectly
[End Page 390]
expressed
by Columbus in the following passage: "All the people I have encountered
up until this time greatly fear the people of Caniba of Canima . . . The
Indians with me continued to show great fear . . . insisting that the
people of Bohío had only one eye and a face of a dog, and they
fear being eaten. I do not believe any of this. I feel that the Indians
they fear belong to the domain of the Great Khan."
7
Christopher Columbus, who interpreted the name of the tribe of the
"Canibe"--due to the first syllable "can"--as subjects of
the Great Khan or man-eaters with dog-like snouts (from the Latin
canis--dog), provided the basis for subsequent treatments of these
"cannibals" in the texts of the sixteenth century (see figure 1).
8
Columbus and his successors project a number of ancient and medieval
topoi of anthropophagy onto the newly-discovered continent. The early
travel narratives--especially the ethnographic curiosa of Amerigo
Vespucci--employ the exotic motif of man-eaters and expand it as a
popular feature. As early as the sixteenth century, the term "cannibal"
replaced the older "androphage" or "anthropophage." The neologism thus
changed from an ethnographic-geographical term into a general technical
term for man-eater, and simultaneously serves as a pars pro toto
for the new continent and its native inhabitants.
[End Page 391]
In a short passage from Vespucci's account of his second voyage, some
of the above-mentioned contradictory elements in the image of America
coincide in a very graphic manner. Vespucci's detailed description in
this example consciously or unconsciously combines cannibalism with
notions of femininity, that is, Nature, subliminally interwoven with
the new continent:
The young man advanced and mingled among the women; they all stood
around him, and touched and stroked him, wondering greatly at him. At
this point a woman came down from the hill carrying a big club. When
she reached the place where the young man was standing, she struck him
such a heavy blow from behind that he immediately fell to the ground
dead. The rest of the women at once seized him and dragged him by the
feet up the mountain . . . There the women, who had killed the youth
before our eyes, were now cutting him in pieces, showing us the pieces,
roasting them at a large fire. (AV 138-39)
9
The depiction of these cruel practices is a good example of the
paradoxical nature of the image of America. Shortly after having gently
touched the young sailor, the female Indians murder, dismember, and
devour him. The structure of the passage is paradigmatic for a majority
of concepts of cannibalism in early travel narratives. A benevolent,
feminine setting as familiar from the alma mater tradition
suddenly turns into a cannibalistic monster (see figure 2). The
notion of a tempting but devouring Amazon is a very popular motif which
is increasingly expanded in the iconography of the travel narratives.
10
In many of these allegorizations, America is rendered as a voluptuous
temptress and/or an Amazon-like monster before the background of
dismembered (mostly male) human bodies, which are often in the process
of being prepared for consumption.
This apparently contradictory combination of a utopian Nature with
anthropophagy is by no means an invention of early modern texts. It
stems from a long-standing tradition in ancient and medieval sources. The
most famous classical example of cannibalistic practices in the utopian
context of a "travel narrative" is the description of the Island of
the Cyclopes in Book IX of the Odyssey. The fact that Columbus
depicts cannibals as "men with one eye . . . who eat men" (L 4
Nov. 1492) corroborates the theory that the one-eyed Cyclopes served as
a model for his man-eaters.
11
Interestingly enough, in both the Homeric Isle of the Cyclopes as well
as the narratives on America, the descriptions of an idyllic Nature with
an abundance of food coincide with anthropophagy, as in this passage
from the Odyssey:
Thence we sailed on, grieved at heart, and we came to the land of the
Cyclopes, an overweening and lawless folk, who, trusting in the immortal
gods,
[End Page 392]
plant nothing with their hands nor plough; but all these things
spring up for them without sowing or ploughing, wheat, and barley, and
vines, which bear the rich clusters of wine, and the rain of Zeus gives
them increase. Neither assemblies for council have they, nor appointed
laws, but they dwell on the peaks of lofty mountains in hollow caves,
and each one is lawgiver to his children and his wives, and they reck
nothing one of another. (TO IX, 105-15)
As in passages from the early accounts of America, the idyllic description
of Nature as a benevolent giver permits the Cyclopes to remain in a
pre-agrarian state of being including cannibalism.
12
"Two of them at once he [Polyphem] seized and dashed to the earth like
puppies, and the brain flowed forth upon the ground and wetted the
earth. Then he cut them limb from limb and made ready his supper, and ate
them as a mountain-nurtured lion, leaving naught--ate the entrails, and
the flesh, and the marrowy bones" (TO IX, 288-93). The
concept of pre-agrarian, precivilization cannibalism is intricately
interwoven with ancient theories of cultural evolution. The Neolithic
revolution, that is, the transition of man from hunter-gatherer to
peasant, was generally explained as a substitution of anthropophagy
for agriculture. This concept does not end in antiquity but continues
in various forms in cultural history.
[End Page 393]
For example, a passage about man-eaters in John Mandeville's
fourteenth-century fantastic travelogue, which combines a utopian idyll
with anthropophagy, appears to be a model for sixteenth-century accounts
of cannibalistic American Indians: "From this country men go through
the Great Sea Ocean by way of many isles and different countries, which
would be tedious to relate. At last, after fifty-two days' journey,
men come to a large country called Lamory [Sumatra]. In that land it is
extremely hot; the custom there is for men and women to go completely
naked and they are not ashamed to show themselves as God made them
. . . for they say that God made Adam and Eve naked . . . for nothing
natural is ugly" (TT 127). After establishing the traditional
topoi of paradisiacal conditions on the island, Mandeville introduces
some motifs of classical utopias such as communal property (including
women and children), as well as an abundance of gold, silver, and other
natural resources. The description ends with a reference to cannibalism
among this people: "Merchants bring children there to sell, and the people
of the country buy them. Those that are plump they eat; those that are
not plump they feed up and fatten, and then kill and eat them. And they
say it is the best and sweetest flesh in the world" (TT 127).
An illustrative example of how these concepts of anthropophagy are
adapted for religious purposes is the anonymous Andreas.
13
This Old-English text in the Vercelli Book (tenth century),
which goes back to an ancient Latin or Greek source, shows a number of
the features of the cannibalistic text mentioned before.
14
Although these topoi are present in Andreas they are employed
in a highly stylized form. Again the setting is that of a travel
narrative; again a nonbarbarian is confronted with a cannibalistic
people; again the plot is situated in a utopian setting. As in most
other texts, Andreas superficially condemns cannibalism and places
this phenomenon in opposition to the utopian setting. While many
texts on cannibalism introduce the utopian element as a descriptive
Cockayne-idyll with a benevolent Nature of a Golden Age, the utopian
features in Andreas manifest themselves indirectly through
the Christian hope of redemption. The text starts with a description
of the island Mermedonia where God had sent his disciple Matthew as a
missionary to the Androphagoi: "There was no bread in the place to feed
men, nor a drink of water to enjoy, but throughout the land they feasted
on the blood and flesh, on the bodies of men, of those who came
from afar. Such was their custom, that when they lacked meat they made
food of all the strangers who sought that island from elsewhere. Such
was the savage nature of the people."
15
God sends his disciple Andreas, whose cruel martyr's death at the hands
of the Androphagoi saves the condemned Matthew. An interesting feature
of this text is the fusion of
[End Page 394]
ancient notions of anthropophagy
with the Christian doctrine of salvation, which also makes use of a
cannibalistic form of incorporation. Already with the fall of Adam
and Eve incorporation as the eating of the forbidden fruit functions
as a central motif later taken up in the Eucharist, although with new
valences. Utopia and anthropophagy coincide as apparently irreconcilable
principles constituting an integral part of the Eucharist. Incorporation
of the Other thus serves as a prerequisite for the restitution of a
prelapsarian unity or utopia.
Like a number of early accounts of America, Andreas executes the
equation of Christian communion and anthropophagy in an indirect and
encoded manner. The Christian concept of salvation superficially
opposes cannibalistic primitivism as uncivilized atrocity, although
both phenomena function according to analogous structures of
incorporation. While cannibals devour strangers to reestablish the unity
of subject and object, Christians eat the "body" of Jesus as a guarantor
for a utopian unity or oneness with their God. Andreas and the
early accounts of America thus work with a utopian hope which is deeply
entrenched in Western cultural tradition and manifests itself in more
or less stylized forms of incorporation of the Other.
Most of the ancient-medieval texts and the modern travel narratives set
cannibalism in opposition to utopian imagery of the territories described
by employing anthropophagy as a sign of primordial savagery. Michel de
Montaigne in his famous essay "Des Cannibales" (1580) was the first
to analyze these two apparently contradictory images of utopia and
cannibalism as interdependent mechanisms. He bases the new continent in
the ancient tradition of utopian thought like the Platonic Atlantis myth
and other westward geographical projections.
16
These geographical utopian extrapolations in "Des Cannibales" are
followed by examples of ancient temporal reprojections into a utopian
past of a Golden Age, which Montaigne also links with the American
continent: "I think that what we have seen of these people [Indians]
with our own eyes surpasses not only the pictures with which poets have
illustrated the golden age, and all their attempts to draw mankind
in the state of happiness, but the ideas and the very aspirations of
philosophers as well" (110). The following description of the idyllic
fertility of America's Nature is reminiscent of Homer's utopian island
of the Phaiacians in the Odyssey, Diodorus's depiction of the
Jambulian Sun Island, or Christopher Columbus's newly discovered islands
in the Caribbean: "For the rest, they live in a land with a very pleasant
and temperate climate, and consequently, as my witnesses inform me, a
sick person is a rare sight; and they assure me that they never saw
anyone palsied or blear-eyed, toothless or bent with age . . . They
have a great abundance of fish and
[End Page 395]
meat" (110). Like most
of the ancient and medieval descriptive utopias, Montaigne's image of
America is characterized by a benevolent Nature and a lack of law as
well as civilized achievements:
17
This is a nation, I should say to Plato, in which there is no kind of
commerce, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no title of
magistrate or of political superior, no habit of service, riches or
poverty, no contracts, no inheritance, no divisions of property, only
leisurely occupations, no respect for any kinship but the common ties,
no clothes, no agriculture, no metals, no use of corn or wine. The
very words denoting lying, treason, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and
forgiveness have never been heard. How far from such perfection would
he find the republic that he [Plato] imagined: 'men fresh from the
hands of the gods.' (110)
Montaigne's long list of various "things" can be explained as a general
lack of difference. Neither figures, letters, clothes,
property, nor kinship, which could oppose a total unity, disturb
this prelapsarian wholeness. Montaigne continues in his enumerations
by stressing conventions of the native Americans that bear likeness to
ancient notions of a communism of women and children which is generally
introduced to utopian visions in order to do away with differentiating
family ties.
18
This is also a very common topos in early accounts of America; here it is
employed to emphasize the symbiotic wholeness of the inhabitants of the
New World. The absence of separating difference, which Montaigne depicts
on various levels, is epitomized in his interpretation of cannibalism. It
marks the abolition of the ultimate "difference"--the division of
subject from object, that is, interior from exterior. Montaigne's noble
savages--just like Andreas in the apocryphal gospel--want to be devoured,
since they comprehend incorporation as a necessary consequence of a view
of the world based on total unity. The savages do not eat their prisoners
immediately but give them the opportunity to beg the victorious party to
feed on them. Montaigne uses an Indian condemned to die as a mouthpiece
for a ballad which expresses the desire for this utopian wholeness:
"I have a ballad made by one prisoner in which he tauntingly invites
his captors to come boldly forward, every one of them, and dine off
him, for they will then be eating their own fathers and grandfathers,
who have served as food and nourishment to his body. 'These muscles,'
he says, 'this flesh, and these veins are yours, poor fools that
you are! Can you not see that the substance of your ancestors' limbs
is still in them? Taste them carefully, and you will find the
flavour is that of your own flesh'" (117; see figure 3).
19
Montaigne's essay, like a number of early travel narratives, belongs to
an age of drastic changes in the interaction of men with animate and
[End Page 396]
inanimate Nature. The year 1600 marks a turning point in Western
philosophy of science which can be described in simplistic terms as
a process of replacing an organic-holistic concept of Nature with an
overall mechanistic view of the world.
20
Holism considers Nature as an organic whole, very much resembling a
living creature as a self-contained unit. Implicit in this organicist
notion is a Nature connoted as being feminine: like a nourishing
mother, she provides everything men need. Most of the descriptive
utopias in ancient, medieval, and early modern texts are part of this
tradition. The lack of agriculture and a general abundance of natural
gifts are signs of a feminine deep-structure manifesting itself in
notions of an alma mater or Mother Earth. The younger mechanistic
concept explains Nature as a conglomerate of supposedly feminine elements
which achieve form and structure through a masculine spirit. Nature
is primarily chaotic, lacking any kind of organization without the
structuring male principle. These contradictory
[End Page 397]
positions within the
philosophy of science in the early modern period are not only present
in scientific discourses but also dominate literary utopias of
that age.
21
Francis Bacon's Nova Atlantis (1627) and Tommaso Campanella's
Civitas Solis (1602) represent these two opposing traditions in
an overt way. In Civitas Solis, all human actions are part of a
cosmic wholeness. Stellar configurations, seasons, and the plan
of the city mirror a holistic worldview into which man is integrated
as one of many members. In Francis Bacon's technocratic vision, male
scientists can combine matter in almost limitless variety. Thus the male
spirit opposes Nature, exploiting Nature for the benefit of mankind.
Montaigne subliminally refers to these two traditions by equating the
culture of the discoverers with mechanism and by describing the concept
of Nature found with the Cannibals in holistic-organicist terms: "These
people [cannibals] are wild in the same as we say that fruits are wild,
when nature has produced them by herself and in her ordinary way; whereas,
in fact, it is those that we have artificially modified, and
removed from the common order, that we ought to call wild. In the former,
the true, most useful, and natural virtues and properties are alive and
vigorous; in the latter we have bastardized them, and adapted them only
to the gratification of our corrupt taste" (109). Montaigne seems
to foreshadow Francis Bacon's mechanist concepts when referring to the
"modern" practice in European science of imitating nature's living
creatures: "With all our efforts we cannot imitate the nest of the very
smallest bird, its structure, its beauty, or the suitability of its form,
nor even the web of the lowly spider" (109). The cannibals of America,
however, "are still governed by natural laws and very little corrupted by
our own" (109). While Montaigne, and with him the proponents of an organic
concept of Nature, argue for man's integration into a cosmic whole, the
advocates of the new mechanistic worldview aim at the subjugation of
Nature, or as Francis Bacon puts it: "The end of our foundation is the
knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of
the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."
22
Montaigne's natural-theological interpretation of transatlantic
cannibalism, in which a human being offers his body for a "Communion"
with the cosmic whole, is definitely the most obvious convergence
of the two poles of utopia and anthropophagy in the context of the
Christian doctrine of salvation.
23
Most travel accounts of the sixteenth century subliminally reflect
this religious-ritual component, but superficially present it with
utter disgust or in obvious conflict with the Christian ethic of
love for others.
A striking example of the interdependence of Christian belief in salvation
and cannibalism is the 1557 account of the German Hans
[End Page 398]
Staden
entitled The True History and Description of a Land of the Wild,
Naked, Grim Man-Eaters, Situated in the New World America.
24
Like most authors of sixteenth-century accounts of America, Staden
juxtaposes the "grim man-eaters" with Christians, who are deeply rooted
in their faith. In continuous variation he comments on the deeds of the
cannibals with recourse to Christian doctrines. The similarities to
Andreas are striking, especially when Hans Staden soothes his
fellow Christians who are about to be devoured by the cannibals with
Christian hope of salvation. "They asked me whether they will also be
eaten; and I said that they have to leave that decision to the will of
the heavenly Father and his dear son Jesus Christ, who was crucified
for our sins" (94). In his detailed depictions Staden clearly situates
the rituals revolving around the devouring of the Christians in the
vicinity of liturgical practice. Concepts of fertility and death are
intertwined when, for example, a woman of the victorious tribe attending
to a prisoner even has sexual intercourse with him. "If she conceives a
child from him, they raise it until it is grown, then slay and eat it"
(138). The prisoner, who is subjected to various ritual practices all
reflecting sexual and fertility symbolism, is ultimately killed
with a phallus-like club.
25
They take egg shells, "crush them to powder and cover the club with
it" (139). After a woman has drawn something into the powder of the egg
shells the club is subject to a night-long ritual. The club is then stuck
between the legs of the executor--again stressing the sexual connotation
of the ritual action: "The chief of the hut takes the club and sticks it
once between his legs. This is considered an honor among them" (143). The
following detailed description of the killing, preparation, and eating
of the prisoner is quoted in its full length since it will later serve
as major example in the discussion of the connection between Renaissance
folk-culture and images of cannibalism in the early image of America:
Then he hits the prisoner on the back of his head, making the brain gush
out; and immediately the women take the dead man and drag him across
the fire, scratch off his skin, make him completely white, and seal
his anus with a piece of wood to make sure that nothing goes to waste.
When his skin is scraped off, a man takes him, cuts off his legs above
the knees as well as the arms close to the body. Then four women take
the four pieces and run around the huts screaming joyously. Then they
separate the back with the buttocks from the front. That they share among
them. The women keep the entrails. They boil them, and with the broth they
make a thin pulp, called mingáu, which they and the children lap
up. They eat the entrails as well as the meat of the head. The children
devour the brain, the tongue and anything else from the head that is
edible. When everything has been distributed, they return home taking
with them what is their share. (146; see figures 4 and 5).
[End Page 399]
Hans Staden's account fusing culinary preparation and anatomical medical
discourse is not only representative of numerous other travel narratives
but also reflects a topos of grotesque literature in the sixteenth
century. The revival of cannibalism in the modern travel narratives has
its counterpart in the folk culture and literature of the late Middle
Ages and early Renaissance. The most striking example of this fusion of
utopian and cannibalistic imagery can be found in carnival practices of
the time. These carnal motives in literature and travelogues coincide
temporarily with the strengthening of the Carnival in Europe, which
sees itself as a inversion of current hierarchical order of European
social reality.
The carnivalesque traits of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel,
as
[End Page 400]
discussed by Mikhail Bakhtin, show obvious formal parallels to
early travel literature, which incorporated structural features of the
carnivalesque into the descriptions of the New World.
26
Both phenomena--the European Carnival and the imagery of the new
continent--are characterized by utopian features which turn current
conditions upside down. E. R. Leach describes this utopian inversion
as follows: "we find an extreme form of revelry in which the
participants play-act at being precisely the opposite of what they
really are; men act as women, women as men, Kings as beggars, servants
as masters, acolytes as Bishops. In such situations of true orgy, normal
life is played in reverse, with all manners of sins such as incest,
adultery, transvestitism, sacrilege, and lèse-majesté
treated as the order of the day."
27
Leach's characterization of the carnival as an upside-down state
of affairs could also serve as a summary of the protoethnographic
depictions in the early travel narratives. They are full of these
carnivalesque inversions of European perspectives. Masculinizations
of women or feminizations of men in the contexts of Amazon myths, role
reversals, and above all grotesque
[End Page 401]
corporeality and anthropophagy
are central motives in the early image of America that largely correspond
to elements of the Carnival (see figure 6).
Mikhail Bakhtin tries to find a common denominator for carnivalesque
Renaissance culture when using the cosmic human body as the center
"uniting all the varied patterns of the universe" (RW 365). In
his focus on the human body, Bakhtin draws a direct link between
carnivalesque folk culture and utopian hope as reflected in concepts
of the Golden Age, the ancient Saturnalia cult, and Christian visions
of salvation: "Even more, certain carnival forms parody the Church's
cult. . . . The tradition of the Saturnalias remained unbroken and alive
in the medieval carnival, which expressed this universal renewal and
was vividly felt as an escape from the usual official way of life"
(RW 7-8). The "carne vale" or "farewell meat," despite its
superficial negation of the consumption of meat, ultimately leads
into the Last Supper as the "cannibalistic" part of
[End Page 402]
the Christian
ritual. The cannibalistic deep-structure in Christian tradition is thus
indirectly reflected in the carnival of early modern times.
The analogy to the New World can hardly be overlooked. America becomes,
even more than the European Carnival, "the potentiality of a friendly
world, of the golden age, of carnival truth" (RW 48). While the
European Carnival represents a temporary, though cyclical, enclave of
utopian conditions in the course of the year, its basic elements are
permanently transferred to the new continent. Grotesque motifs, which
are part of the ritual renewal of the old world in the carnival,
are realistically projected onto America. Bakhtin coins the term
"grotesque realism" (RW 21) for these basic features in the
European carnival, which characterize both the structure of grotesque
physical disfiguring and the cannibalisitic elements in the
early image of America. In other words, the concepts of a continually
regenerating world derived from folk rites are transported onto the
newly-discovered continent, thus making America an expression of these
subliminally regenerative deep-structures, or as Bakhtin put it in his
characterization of the carnival: "People were, so to speak, reborn for
new, purely human relations. These truly human relations were not only
a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced. The
utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience,
unique of its kind" (RW 10). What Bakhtin says here about the
carnival characterizes to an even greater degree the conceptions of
America in the sixteenth century. The New World across the Atlantic
materialized as the carnivalesque--a world whose main features include
the utopian inversion of social, political, and personal structures, all
indirectly reflected in anthropophagy. A number of examples from
premodern periods already illustrated the interrelation of carnal motifs
with utopian topoi. This is especially true of the works of Rabelais,
which are roughly contemporaneous with many of the travel narratives
and also treat the motif of incorporation or introjection in a very
similar way. Rabelais's texts are full of references to dismembered
human bodies, and their diction indirectly reflects the language
of anatomy as well as the butcher's craft: "He beat out the brains of
some, broke the arms and legs of others, disjointed the neck-bones,
demolished the kidneys, slit the noses, blackened the eyes, smashed the
jaws, knocked the teeth down the throats, shattered the shoulder-blades,
crushed the shins, dislocated the thigh-bones, and cracked the fore-arms
of yet others. . . . Others he smote so fiercely through the navel
that he made their bowels gush out. Others he struck on the ballocks
and pierced their bum-gut."
28
Rabelais not only describes dismemberment and bodily mutilation in
culinary metaphors, but also depicts the preparation of food and eating
in such a way that they appear in an almost cannibalistic context:
"So they made their
[End Page 403]
prisoner their turnspit, and at the fire
in which the knights were burning they set their venison to roast"
(GP 252). In another episode in Turkey, Panurge is covered with
lard to be roasted over the fire: "The rascally Turks had put me
on a spit, all larded like a rabbit" (GP 214).
Even the most detailed account of the cannibalistic practices of Brazilian
man-eaters refers to this very passage about the cannibalistic Turks by
Rabelais. Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre
du Brésil, auterment dite Amérique is--despite its
overt distancing from Rabelais--very much rooted in the same grotesque
and carnivalesque tradition.
29
Léry argues that the cannibals of the New World always dismember
their victims before they roast them on grids over the fire. Despite
this negation of Rabelais, Léry's text abounds in imagery
reminiscent of the culinary language that is used in Gargantua and
Pantagruel; for example, the prisoners are "being fattened like
pigs at the trough" (HV 122) and "[The cannibals] come forward
with hot water that they have ready, and scald and rub the dead body
to remove its outer skin, and blanch it the way our cooks over here do
when they prepare a suckling pig for roasting" (HV 126).
Like Staden, Léry also introduces the motif of woman as a
tempting and devouring monster, when relating the tribe's practice of
giving the prisoners to their own women: "[A]fter the woman has made
some or another lamentation, and shed a few feigned tears over her
dead husband, she will, if she can, be the first to eat of him"
(HV 125-26). Many passages in travel narratives, including
Vespucci's account of the cannibalistic Amazons (quoted above) as well
as Léry's devouring women, fit perfectly into Bakhtin's
explanation of the carnival: "Earth is an element that devours, swallows
up (the grave, the womb) and at the same time an element of birth, of
renascence (the maternal breasts). . . . Degradation here means coming
down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and
gives birth at the same time. . . . To degrade also means to concern
oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and
the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation
and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth" (RW 21). The
passage from Hans Staden about the cannibals which was quoted in full
above contains all the same elements that Bakhtin includes in his
characterization of the carnivalesque. Regeneration through conception
and birth is directly linked with incorporation. Even Staden's peculiar
reference to the sealing of the anus "to make sure that nothing goes
to waste" (146) fits into the overall concept in which excrement
is regarded as an integral part of the pan-corporal universe, or as
Bakhtin puts it, "Dung and urine lend a bodily character to matter, to
the world, to the cosmic elements . . . It transforms cosmic terror
into a gay carnival monster" (RW 335; see figure 7). In
these
[End Page 404]
quasi-historical discourses, incorporation and regeneration
manifest themselves in a form Bakhtin labels as "grotesque realism," which
transfers all latent ritual-theological aspects of the European tradition
of cults onto a material level by grounding them in the New World.
One can therefore trace a common denominator among traditional concepts of
anthropophagy in classical myths, medieval religious texts, early travel
narratives, grotesque and carnivalesque literature of the Renaissance,
and the philosophical notions of holism of Montaigne, always linking
utopian hope with motives of incorporation regarding the human body. All
the various manifestations of the cannibalistic, despite their rather
divergent appearances, share a utopian longing for unity through sublation
of difference, or as Bakhtin summarizes this latent wish for completeness:
These traits are most fully and concretely revealed in the act of
eating; the body transgresses here its own limits: it swallows,
devours, rends the world apart, is enriched and grows at the world's
expense. The encounter of man with the
[End Page 405]
world, which takes place
inside the open, biting, rending, chewing mouth, is one of the most
ancient, and most important objects of human thought and imagery. Here
man tastes the world, introduces it into his body, makes it part of
himself. . . . Man's encounter with the world in the act of eating is
joyful, triumphant; he triumphs over the world, devours it without being
devoured himself. The limits between man and the world are erased, to
man's advantage. (RW 281)
To explain the fusion of utopia and cannibalism by recourse to Bakhtin's
notion of the "carnivalesque" is both fashionable and at the same
time under attack for various reasons. Bakhtin's entire reading of
the carnival in general and Rabelais in particular have been severely
criticized for not being sufficiently grounded in textual and
historical evidence. Dietz-Rüdiger Moser, for example, attacks
Bakhtin's approach by accusing him of utopian projections: "Much more
did he [Bakhtin] turn his attention to the west, since he thought to be
able to find there--in the carnival--two things, which he missed in
the all so progressive new socialist society: The freedom of the people
. . . and the liberation of the pressure resting on many of them."
30
The structure is not to be overlooked: in both cases, the utopian
descriptions of America and Bakhtin's utopian delineation of the
carnival, a westward projection tries to ground a utopian wholeness
in a spatial manner. Bakhtin's procedure of extrapolating his utopian
carnivalesque in the medieval West thus parallels Renaissance discursive
practices that also inscribe carnivalesque motives into the territories
in the west to make utopian notions materialize in a spatial manner.
This utopian urge for a restitution of a lost unity with the world or
the Other, which Bakhtin calls the "most ancient . . . objects of human
thought" (RW 281), also serves as the basis for psychoanalytic
theories of identity. All the major theoretical movements in the
twentieth century ground their arguments on binary oppositions or
difference: signifier and signified in linguistics, the raw
and the cooked in structural anthropology, as well as subject and object
in psychoanalysis are only a few of the numerous manifestations of basic
dichotomies which--if one wants to go that far--ultimately "boil down" to
the opposition between inside and outside, that is, edible and inedible.
31
The constitution of the subject in Freudian Oedipal theory is directly
linked to incorporation or introjection: "The original pleasure-ego
tries to introject into itself everything that is good and to reject
everything that is bad. From its point of view, what is bad, what is
alien to the ego, and what is external are, to begin with, identical."
32
The subject-object dichotomy can thus be traced back to the opposition
of the edible and inedible. The prelapsarian--or in this case
pre-oedipal--wholeness of man, which was lost
[End Page 406]
through eating
and not-eating is consequently ritually restored through various forms
of incorporation or introjection.
This also sheds light on the causal relationship between utopia and
cannibalism ranging from the earliest ancient theories of cultural
evolution and theological discourses, to the grotesque-realistic
materialization in the image of America propagated through the early
travel narratives. Rites, myths, and historiography, which link
cannibalistic incorporation with utopian spaces, reflect this
subliminal human drive for a restitution of primordial oneness through
an incorporation of the Other. In the early modern image of America,
these two very contradictory concepts--the utopia of the Golden Age or
terrestrial Paradise and anthropophagy--seem to fuse and materialize
through a realistic and material projection of stylized utopian rituals
of incorporation onto the New World.
Universität Innsbruck
Mario Klarer is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Innsbruck (Austria) and the president of the Austrian Association of
American Studies. His published and forthcoming books include: Frau
und Utopie (1993), Introduction to Literature (1999), and
Ekphrasis as a Theory of Representation (1999). He has completed
the book-length manuscript Seeing through Bodies: Ekphrasis and the
Historicity of Representation from Chaucer to Spike Lee. He has
been a two-year Erwin-Schrödinger Fellow at the Getty Center for
the History of Art and the Humanities and a one-year Rockefeller Fellow
at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.
Notes
*This is a revised version of a paper presented at the National Humanities
Center (North Carolina) during a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1995-96. I
received valuable suggestions for revision from the fellows of this
year's class.
1.
On the gender-specific utopian aspect of the early image of America
see Mario Klarer, "Woman and Arcadia: The Impact of Ancient Utopian
Thought on the Early Image of America," Journal of American
Studies, 27.1 (1993), 1-17.
2.
Christoforo Colombo, Epistola de Insulis Nuper Inventis, tr. Frank
E. Robbins (Ann Arbor, 1966), pp. 9-10.
3.
Amerigo Vespucci, Account of the First Voyage, in Martin
Waldseemüller, Cosmographiae Introductio by Martin
Waldseemüller and the English Translation of Joseph Fischer and
Franz von Wieser (1507) (Ann Arbor, 1966), p. 112; hereafter cited
in text as AV.
4.
The analogous passage in the Odyssey describes comparable conditions on
the island of the Phaiacians: "Therein grow trees, tall and luxuriant,
pears and pomegranates and apple-trees with their bright fruit, and sweet
figs, and luxuriant olives. Of these the fruit perishes not nor fails
in winter or in summer, but lasts throughout the year; and ever does the
west wind, as it blows, quicken to life some fruits, and ripen others;
pear upon pear waxes ripe, apple upon apple, cluster upon cluster, and
fig upon fig. . . . There again, by the last row of the vines,
grow trim garden beds of every sort, blooming the year through, and
therein are two springs." Homer, The Odyssey, tr. A. T. Murray,
2 vols. (1919; rpt. Cambridge, Mass., 1960), VII, 114-32; hereafter
cited in text as TO with book and line number.
5.
Christopher Columbus, Four Voyages to the New World: Letters and
Selected Documents, tr. and ed. R. H. Major (Gloucester, Mass.,
1978), p. 130.
6.
"There are also remarkable pines, vast fields and meadows, many
kinds of birds, many kinds of honey, and many kinds of metals, except
iron." Colombo, Epistola de Insulis Nuper Inventis, p. 10.
7.
The Log of Christopher Columbus, tr. Robert H. Fuson (Camden,
1992), 26 Nov. 1492; hereafter cited in text as L with date. For
further references to the Canibe see the Log, 4 Nov. 1492; 23
Nov. 1492; 11 Dec. 1492; 17 Dec. 1492. John Mandeville also
talks about the so-called "Cynocephales" (people with dog's heads), who
practise cannibalism. "Men and women of that isle have heads like dogs
. . . If they capture any man in battle, they eat him" (The Travels
of Sir John Mandeville, tr. C.W.R.D. Moseley [Harmondsworth, 1983],
p. 134; hereafter cited in text as TT).
8.
As early as 1520 Spanish texts considered the etymology of the
word "Cannibale" and concluded that it was derived from the Latin
canis--"dog"; see Peter Hulme, "Hurricanes in the Caribbees:
The Constitution of the Discourse of English Colonialism," in 1642:
Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century: Proceedings of the Essex
Conference on the Society of Literature, ed. Francis Barker, Jay
Bernstein, John Coombes, Peter Hulme, Jennifer Stone, and Jon Stratton
(Colchester, 1981), p. 67; see also Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters:
Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London, 1986), p. 22,
and Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation
of the Cannibal from Columus to Jules Verne, tr. Rosemary Morris
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1997), pp. 15-22.
9.
Interestingly enough, this passage is preceded by an account of four young
male natives who had been castrated by a hostile neighboring tribe: "In
the canoe which they had abandoned, there were four youths, who did not
belong to the same tribe, but had been captured in another land. These
youths had recently had their virile parts removed, a fact which caused
us no little astonishment" (Amerigo Vespucci, Account of the Second
Voyage, in Waldseemüller, p. 122).
10.
See, above all, the numerous illustrations on female allegorizations
of America in Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of
America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York, 1975),
pp. 84-117.
11.
The account of Magellan's first circumnavigation of the earth
(1519-1522) by his scribe Antonio Pigafetta also speaks of "men,
as tall as a giant . . . called Canibali, who eat human flesh"
(Antonio Pigafetta, Maggellan's Voyage: A Narrative of the First
Circumnavigation, tr. R. A. Skelton, vol. 1 [New Haven and London,
1969], p. 45).
12.
"Neither with flocks is it [island] held, nor with ploughed lands,
but unsown and untilled" (The Odyssey IX, 123).
13.
See The Vercelli Book, ed. George Philip Krapp (London, 1932).
14.
See Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry: The Major Latin
Texts in Translation, tr. Michael J. B. Allen and Daniel G. Calder
(Cambridge, 1976), pp. 14-34.
15.
Anglo Saxon Poetry, ed. R. K. Gordon (New York, 1970), p. 181.
16.
"Plato interpolates a story told by Solon, and learnt by him from the
priests of Sais in Egypt, to the effect that there was, long ago before
the Deluge, a great island called Atlantis . . . The other testimony
from antiquity with which some would connect this discovery [America]
is in Aristotle . . . He there relates that certain Carthaginians,
after sailing for a very long time through the Straits of Gibraltar
out into the Atlantic Sea, finally discovered a large fertile
island, well covered with woods and watered by broad, deep rivers"
(Michel de Montaigne, Essays, tr. J. M. Cohen [Harmondsworth,
1958], pp. 106-7; hereafter cited in text).
17.
Among the few medieval examples of texts that could be labeled utopian,
one finds Chaucer's retrospective vision of a Golden Age in his
The Former Age, but also the anonymous Land of Cokaygne,
which was incorporated into many national literatures of the time, and the
anonymous Middle English The Isle of Ladies. These medieval visions
of a terrestrial paradise draw upon the central topoi that formed the core
of both classical modern utopia, such as communal property, supernatural
fertility of the land, health, and long life. See Mario Klarer, "Topoi
antiker und mittelalterlicher Utopievorstellungen im mittelenglischen
The Isle of Ladies," Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 42.2
(1992), 160-77.
18.
"If of the same age they generally call one another brothers; those
who are younger are called children, and the old men are fathers to all
the rest. They leave to their heirs the undivided possession of their
property, to be held in common, with no other title than the plain one
which nature bestows on her creatures when she brings them into the world"
(Montaigne, Essays, p. 114).
19.
Jean de Léry's account of 1578 shows such obvious parallels to
Montaigne's essay that it almost certainly served as a direct source for
"Les Cannibales." Especially the depiction of the prisoner appears to
have served as a model for the Montaigne savage who recites a ballad:
"Even he who . . . will be clubbed to death in all his feathered
regalia, is by no means downcast; on the contrary, leaping about and
drinking, he will be one of the merriest ones there. . . . [W]ithout
his offering any resistance, even though both his arms are left free,
he will be walked for a little while through the village, and displayed
as a trophy. . . . [W]ith an incredible audacity and assurance, he
will boast of his past feats of prowess, saying to those who hold him
bound . . . 'I have eaten your father,' and to another, 'I have struck
down and boucané your brothers'" (Jean de Léry,
History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, tr. Janet Whatley
[Berkeley, 1990], pp. 122-23; hereafter cited in text as HV).
20.
In her book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the
Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980), Carolyn Merchant
has highlighted these two traditions in the modern philosophy of science
by stressing their inherent gender structures.
21.
See the chapter "Organisches versus mechanisches Weltbild in der
Renaissanceutopie" in my book, Frau und Utopie: Feministische
Literaturtheorie und Utopischer Diskurs im anglo-amerikanischen Roman
(Darmstadt, 1993), pp. 28-40.
22.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis
(London, 1969), p. 288. The project of Nova Atlantis
can be subsumed under the headings "imitation," "manipulation," and
"creation." The central term is certainly that of "imitation," since
here science aims at simulating natural processes in an artificial
laboratory situation. In Nova Atlantis scientists try to imitate
"meteors . . . snow, hail, rain, . . . thunder, lightnings," as well
as all kinds of creatures (289). Sensual perceptions are perfectly
imitated as well. In the so-called "sound-" (294), "perfume-" (295)
and "perspective-houses" (293) scientists invent, for instance, for the
purpose of the "deceit of the senses . . . all manner of false apparition,
impostures and illusions" (296). In all the enumerations the emphasis is
always put on the artificiality of these processes, which are to be
understood as "artificial . . . imitation of the natural sources"
(289).
23.
Jean de Léry links American cannibalism with transubstantiation
in the Catholic Eucharist to an even greater degree than Montaigne. When
speaking of the eucharistic host, Léry's priest says: "Thou hast
willed and obtained from God Thy Father that Thy justice be ascribed to
believers, who by their eating of Thy flesh and blood, Thou has made
one with Thee and transformed into Thee, nourished by Thy flesh
and substance, their true bread, to live eternally" (Léry,
History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, p. 40). Léry
directly compares the Catholics with the cannibalistic Quetacas: "[T]hey
wanted not only to eat the flesh of Jesus Christ grossly rather than
spiritually, but what was worse, like the savages named Quetaca,
of whom I have already spoken, they wanted to chew and swallow it raw"
(41). Although the Calvinist Léry condemns anthropophagy, using
it as an example for Catholic heresy, his descriptions also follow a
traditional organic-holistic deep-structure, which regards incorporation
as a restitution of universal oneness. For a more detailed treatment
of this Calvinist view on cannibalism see the chapter on Léry in
Lestringant, Cannibals, pp. 68-80.
24.
For the original German text of 1557, see the facsimile edition: Hans
Staden, Wahrhaftige Historia und Beschreibung eines Landes der wilden
nackten grimmigen Menschenfresser, in der neuen Welt Amerika gelegen,
ed. Günter E.Th. Bezzenberger (Kassel and Wilhelmshöhe, 1978);
hereafter cited in text in my translation.
25.
Staden even includes a woodcut illustration of this club in this printed
edition.
26.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène
Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984); hereafter cited in text as RW.
27.
Edmund Ronald Leach, Rethinking Anthropology (London, 1962), p. 6.
28.
François Rabelais, The Histories of Gargantua and
Pantagruel, tr. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth, 1955), pp. 99-100;
hereafter cited in text as GP.
29.
"However, I shall here refute the error of those who . . . have
represented and painted the Brazilian savages roasting human flesh on
a spit, as we cook mutton legs and other meat. . . . Since these things
are not truer than the tales of Rabelais about Panurge escaping from
the spit larded and half-cooked" (Léry, History of a Voyage
to the Land of Brazil, pp. 126-27).
30.
Dietz-Rüdiger Moser, "Lachkultur des Mittelalters? Michael Bachtin
und die Folgen seiner Theorie," Euphorion 84.1 (1990), 91-92.
31.
See also Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy
of Metaphors of Incorporations (Princeton, 1990), pp. 3-19.
32.
Sigmund Freud, "Negotiation," in General Psychoanalytical Theory,
ed. Philip Reiff (New York, 1963), pp. 214-15.
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