Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Claude Rawson

   ... when one town had a big feast-day, the leaders and chief Citizens of
   its rival decided to ... wreck the gay merrymaking And break up the fun of
   the party, the tables that would be spread ... for the day-and-night
   junketing That can last a whole week non-stop.

      (Il. 38-44)(7)

But the poem is less concerned with rival gangs, like West Side Story, than with the fact that both reflect undifferentiated barbarism. It's not just a question of a "plague on both their houses," as in the famous prototype for West Side Story, but of "what else do you expect from such people?" It is mainly a xenophobic outburst against Egyptians, in the way that much of Juvenal's satire is fueled by xenophobia, though that, as I said, is usually against foreign riff-raft infesting the streets of Rome, rather than, as here, aliens in their own native habitat. The incident is at least partly authenticated by independent evidence (of a kind sometimes said to be lacking in cannibal narratives). One thing we can be sure of, however, is that the cannibal imputation, irrespective of its truth, is targeting the foreignness of aliens.

The account continues, evoking the drunken, orgiastic excitations of "mob violence," tribal provocations and incitements to riot, and a climax of gory combat that yields nothing to X-rated movies:

   [They were] ... slurred of speech and lurching from booze ... all greasy
   with rank pomade and Sporting garlands galore, wreaths all askew on their
   heads. ... Insults Began the affray ... oaths volleyed back, battle was
   joined With naked hands as weapons. Few jaws got through This punch-up
   unscathed, hardly anyone had an unbroken Nose by the end. Throughout the
   ranks there appeared Faces half-bashed to a jelly, features knocked out of
   true, Fists bloodied from eyes, split cheeks laid wide to expose the bone.

      (ll. 47-58)

Then, there is a decisive escalation: a ritual tearing to pieces, reminiscent of Dionysiac festivals, the so-called maenadic sparagmos, followed by the collective cannibal orgy:

      But one of them, panic-stricken, pressed on A little too fast, tripped,
   fell, and was captured. The victorious Rabble tore him apart into bits and
   pieces, so many That this single corpse provided a morsel for all. They
   wolfed him Bones and all, not bothering even to spit-roast Or make a stew
   of his carcass. Building a proper fire-pit Was a bore, and took time - so
   they scoffed the poor devil raw.

      (Il. 77-83)(8)

Eating raw is a final indignity, the deepest mark of barbarism. If cannibalism is the ultimate pariah act, doing it raw was the lowest possible way of doing it. Juvenal is drawing on an old idea of the savagery of raw-eating, which went back to ancient Greece (I will give a Homeric example) and reappears in many later forms. It was often invoked as an incremental savagery, compounding the basic barbarity of the cannibal act.

In the Renaissance, European imaginations were especially stirred by the reported anthropophagy of the indigenous inhabitants of the New World. Indeed, as we have seen, we owe the word cannibal to Columbus. For two or three centuries, Amerindians became the official exemplars of the man-eating barbarian, fit for imperial missions of conquest and civilization, or (if they were lucky) merely candidates for ethnic defamation. Not only the Caribs, but the Inca of Peru, the Tupinamba of Brazil, the Aztecs of Mexico, the Iroquois of North America were to many Europeans what the Scythians and other barbarians were to the Greeks, and what the Egyptians represented to the rather special imagination of Juvenal. They became the subjects of an extended debate in which the distinction between raw and cooked anthropophagy reappears much as in Homer or Juvenal, and the issue of raw versus cooked even became mixed up in the parallel and contemporaneous debates in Europe over the sacrament of the Eucharist.