Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Claude Rawson

When Hecuba actually speaks in Book XXIV, her intervention has thus been ironically prepared for in Book XXII, and she now repeats the same cannibal velleity as Achilles, but in a significantly modified form. After mourning that the dogs will feed on Hector (which in the end they do not), she says of the imputedly raw-eating Achilles (who doesn't do such things):

   I wish I could set teeth in the middle of his liver and eat it. That would
   be vengeance for what he did to my son

      (XXIV. 212-14)

Now this says she wants to do it, not that she wants to want to; that she would if she could, not that she couldn't if she had the chance. In a context where the parallels are so close and the subject so horrifyingly memorable that we are bound to remember the earlier scene, a reverse symmetry points to an inescapable distinction. Hecuba, the broken-hearted old queen, will do it, and Achilles, the ferocious fighter, won't. Is it because he is a Greek and she is not? or because she is a woman, and women, especially older women, are a recurrent type of voracious cannibal ogre, encountered also among Montaigne's Tupinamba, and in the cannibal lore of the French religious wars of Montaigne's lifetime, as well as that of the Irish famines reported by the seventeenth-century English writer Fynes Moryson, to whom I shall return. It is apposite, in this connection, that the wolf in "Little Red Riding Hood" is disguised as a grandmother. In a post-Homeric story, Hecuba ended up, incidentally, changed into a bitch.(13)

The cannibalism of the French, in Montaigne's account, is worse than the Brazilian cannibals' real man-eating, but it remains after all metaphorical, and therefore not so bad as the real thing. In this, it resembles the Eucharist, which may not be called metaphoric but may not be allowed to be anything else. The complicated pudeur about these issues is radically exemplified in the Catholic Church's insistence on the "real" presence in the Eucharistic rite, which Freud and others have interpreted as a sublimation of pagan rites of ingesting a dead god or leader. The Church professed the sacrament to be (on the contrary) a demonstration that it, unlike pagan cults, avoids sanguinary sacrifices. In reality, the insistence on the "real presence" as literal, and the actual practice of physically employing bread and wine as metaphors of Christ's flesh and blood, is a remarkable phenomenon in which physical objects, rather than words, are used in a figurative way, shielding us from a literalness which, however stridently asseverated, cannot be countenanced. It is comparable to the use of substitute animals or objects in human sacrifice, though more striking in its defiance of semantic appropriateness. It epitomizes in a particularly stark and specialized form the fact that we can't face the idea of cannibalism straight but can't leave it alone. Montaigne's insistence that Frenchmen are more cannibal than the cannibals, and his effective denial that Frenchmen do it literally as distinct from metaphorically (against evidence we know he knew, which he refers to as having "not only read but seen within fresh memory", and which, as I suggested, would have powerfully and literally strengthened his ostensible argument), suggests a similar pattern, repeated with variations by other authors, including Swift on the Irish in his famous "cannibal" pamphlet, A Modest Proposal.