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Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question
Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Claude Rawson
Conrad's Heart of Darkness offers a more complicated picture. In that modern fiction of Empire, the narrator Marlow is haunted by the call of the African bush and the atavistic seductions of tribal drums. Kurtz, his alter ego, succumbs to that call: he goes native, and performs "unspeakable rites," a phrase, common in Victorian adventure stories, which referred darkly, with a nudge and a wink, to what the natives get up to round a fire, itself a fictional stereotype going back at least as far as Robinson Crusoe, and ultimately deriving from travel books. Kurtz seems literally to have consumed human flesh, as Plato's tyrant does not, or so we are teasingly encouraged to think. But we are never explicitly told what these "rites" were, even as we are teased into guessing. On the other hand, when some black crew-men refrain from eating human flesh at Marlow's request they are nevertheless spoken of as cannibals, while Kurtz is not. In this fiction so permeated by the idea of "our" kinship with the other, it still cannot be said outright, any more than in Montaigne, that our representative is cannibal (though it's hinted that he must have done the deed), while the native "other" is called cannibal, though we know he didn't do it.
Such blurred and ambiguous treatments are characteristic of most of the fiction which deals with this subject. If we know the deed was done, as in Kurtz, we don't know what it was; if we know what it was, as in some episodes of cannibal fantasy in Jean Genet's Funeral Rites (Pompes funebres) or Monique Wittig's Lesbian Body (Le Corps lesbien), two homosexual novels of great power, we are never sure whether it was actually done.(17) Cannibalism is almost never treated, in modern fiction, in the manner we associate with the realist tradition, even by writers, from Defoe to the present, who are closely identified with that tradition. Circumvention, ambiguity, hinted denials, melodramatic horror or the nervous joke, invariably take over, in narratives otherwise remarkable for their parade of sober factuality. Jokerie, in particular, is endemic: a newspaper announcement of a radio program I once did on this subject, printed before the talk itself existed, quipped that it should be "something to chew on." And a retreat into cannibal metaphors, where the forbidden idea can be entertained without danger, as in Montaigne, is common: the novels of William Golding are an unusually interesting illustration of this.
Freud, however, is the classic example. Most of his many references to cannibalism are metaphorical, dealing with the oral phase of sexuality, incorporation, introjection, narcissism and homosexuality.(18) Set alongside Freud's tendency to deny the fact of literal cannibal survivals, this drift to metaphor on his part is an exceptionally clear case of the phenomenon observed in Montaigne and other authors, as well as in some of our ordinary ways of speaking: when, for example, lovers say "I could eat you up," or call their beloved sugar or honey, or experience a devouring passion; or when a woman is called a dish; or when retiring Speakers of the United States House of Representatives say their congressional colleagues are cannibals;(19) or when a tyrant or a conquering nation swallows up its victims; or when we batten on one another in our personal relations; or when mechanics cannibalize a car for spare parts; or when literary theorists use cannibal language to mean whatever literary theorists mean. This compulsion to metaphor appears to be universal. In the sexual department, as Levi-Strauss tells us, it seems to exist in all languages, including non-Western or "tribal" ones. It shows better than any other example an endemic obsession with the subject and a reluctance to face its various realities.
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