Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Claude Rawson

I should perhaps say something about this pamphlet by Swift, published in 1729, whose full title is A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland, from being a Burden to their Parents and Country; and for making them beneficial to the Publick. This proposal is based on a parade of demographic research and statistical analysis, and it advocates the idea of rescuing the Irish economy by selling off for food the babies of parents who can't support them. Contrary to popular misconceptions, this piece of black humor is not a Dickensian cry of compassion for the beggars of Dublin (Swift thought they ought to be, in the Biblical phrase, destroyed from the face of the earth), or for the plight of their children. Nor is it mainly an attack on the English exploitation of Ireland, though Swift did sometimes attack that. Its point is that the Irish are so feckless in promoting their own self-interest that they are pursuing a course of self-destruction tantamount to eating each other up. It is the same point that Joyce's Stephen Dedalus makes when he speaks of Ireland as "the old sow that eats her farrow."

This is a fantasy which made Andre Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, identify A Modest Proposal as an inaugural text of humoir noir, a mode of imagination which is unchecked by satirical or moralistic agendas, which allows itself to entertain unspeakable, outlandish or prohibited ideas, and which has the freedom to be "cruel" in the special sense of that term which is usually implied by the phrase "literature of cruelty."(14) Of course, Swift had a satirical and moral agenda, and Breton must have known it. He presumably meant that the cannibal fantasy spills over the discursive implications into a free sphere of cruel play. In that sphere, the cannibalism is "for real." But it is only "for real" as long as, in another phrase we like to use, "it's only in the mind." Its cruel frissons are entertainable because we know that the proposal offers no suggestion of literal enactment. Readers of this poker-faced piece of advocacy have seldom been taken in by it in the way, for example, that many readers, at the time and in our time, have been taken in by the "final solution" aspects of another early eighteenth-century mock-proposal, Defoe's Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), whose chilling mimicry of covert murderous intentions looks forward with uncanny prescience to some stylistic features of Hitler's Mein Kampf. Defoe hints at killing, not cannibalism, and killing (like Freud's third great taboo, incest, and unlike cannibalism), is an act which, though prohibited, we don't find too outlandish to contemplate in, or ascribe to, ourselves.

This is a large story, involving "denial" on a cultural scale. For now, the fact to insist on is that the official import of Swift's cannibal proposal is metaphorical, in the way that his remark that England "would be glad to eat up our whole Nation" is metaphorical, except that his main target, as I said, is Irish self-destruction. However, it is not as simple as that. Contemporaries would have recognized as part of the joke that cannibalism in the literal sense was routinely ascribed to the Irish by English writers, from the sixteenth-century onwards. The idea had several sources, the oldest being a reference in the Greek geographer Strabo to the incidence of anthropophagy in Ierne, or Ireland, reinforced by a more recent false etymology that associated the Irish or Scoti with the Scythians.(15)