The Golden Legend is one of many medieval works that lavish attention on the enormities of Titus’s siege of Jerusalem. In it, a rich woman despairs after robbers empty her house; she “strangled her son, had him cooked, ate the half of his body, and hid the other half. But when robbers smelled the odor of the cooked meat, they burst in and threatened the woman with death if she did not give up her store of meat.” She shows them the half-eaten body, and the robbers shrink in horror: both at the infanticide and at their realization that their appetite had betrayed them by making no distinction whatsoever between animal and human flesh.
Human flesh smells like—because it is—meat. More than that: in a number of medieval texts, it’s the best of meats, the healthiest and most delicious. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Brian, unable to find venison for his ailing uncle Cadwallo, feeds him a roasted piece of his own thigh; Cadwallo, enjoying the flesh very much, regains his health and goes on to reign as the last of the British kings. In a now-infamous Middle English romance, Richard Coer de Lyon, Richard’s men trick an ailing Richard, who yearns for pork, into eating the heavily spiced body of a “ჳonge and ffat” Saracen. While “hys ffolk hem tournyd away and lowჳ,” Richard enthusiastically consumes his meal and regains his health. Edward of York’s hunting manual observes that a wolf, having once tasted human flesh, will prefer this to all others because “mannys flesh is so savery and so plesaunt.” No doubt: in a crusade narrative by Richard the Pilgrim (will need to check my sources on this), the Tafurs delight in feasting on the corpses of Turks because human flesh “molt est cis savourés, / mius vaut que cars de porc ne que bacons ullés’” (is very flavorful. It is better than any pork flesh or bacon), and in one of Poggio Bracciolini’s tales, a teenaged serial killer, when caught, “fassus est se plures alios comedisse, idque se agere, quoniam sapidiores reliquis carnibus viderentur” (confessed that he had eaten many other [children], and that he had done this because they seemed tastier to him than any other flesh).
It’s usual to read anthropophagy as a political metaphor. While Geraldine Heng is probably best known for this, the approach has a long pedigree: for example, see a thirteenth-century estates satire, “De diversus ordinibus hominibus” (in Thomas Wright, The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes. Camden Society, 1841), where “Comites et milites quos gentes honorant, / pauperum substantiam subito devorant” (the counts and knights whom men honor devour the substance of the poor in no time at all) and for many further examples, see Nicola McDonald, “Eating People and the alimentary logic of Richard Coeur de Lion,” in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England, 126, and 221-31 in Philippe Buc, “Manducation et domination: Analyse du Métaphore” in his Ambiguité du livre, where he argues that “le cannibalisme des ‘princes et tyrans’ est une perversion du sacrifice eucharistique” (nb: I rather think it’s the other way around, with the Eucharist as a secondary formation on the fundamental horror of anthropophagy).
In Ecstatic Transformations, Uebel suggests a new route for reading anthropophagy:
The enjoyment of roast Saracen and the appetite for more of it are not simply reducible to metaphors for Richard's desire to wipe out the Saracen swine in his project to secure English enjoyment of the Holy Land. Nor is enjoying roast Saracen a parodic inversion of the Muslim pork taboo. Rather, there is ‘something more’ (Žižek) here, a meaningful surplus present in these desires, that appears through them. This ‘something more’ is the foundation of a community and the notion of enjoyment as communifying process.
I’m going to argue for the enjoyment of roast Saracen and, indeed, the imagined enjoyment of human flesh in general, as a communifying process centered around not an ethnic, religious, or colonial identity but around human identity itself. Rather than understanding anthropophagy in relation to activities between humans or between humans and their divinities, I want to understand it through meat-eating and flesh in general, which means understanding it in terms of the human relation to animals and to their own appetite. In brief, I want to get past anthropophagy as metaphor, inasmuch such a thing is possible.
Here’s what I intend to do: the purported deliciousness of human flesh likely derives from a desire to reinstate the superiority of humans to animals despite their shared meatiness. Since humans are superior to animals, their flesh must be superior too. But a separation along these lines can only be a failure, because if it succeeds in preserving human specialness, it does nothing to prevent anthropophagy: it in fact encourages it. It’s not been so easy to nail this project down, and not only because I’m easily distracted. Hunts for interesting exegesis on a verse in one of Paul expositions of resurrection doctrine, 1 Corinthians 15:39, “All flesh is not the same flesh: but one is the flesh of men, another of beasts, another of birds, another of fishes,” have so far returned very little for thinking about edibility and savor (granted, I’ve looked only in the PL, and not yet deeply). The exegetes seem to have failed me here, but Aquinas, may he be praised, has come to my rescue in his explanation for why Lent forbids humans the flesh of quadrupeds:
For, since such like animals are more like man in body, they afford greater pleasure as food, and greater nourishment to the human body, so that from their consumption there results a greater surplus available for seminal matter, which when abundant becomes a great incentive to lust.
If the consumption of animal red meat incites lust because of the flesh’s resemblance to human flesh, anthropophagy must be a very great pleasure indeed.
Following Žižek via Uebel, I suppose, I want to track this certainty of the pleasure of human flesh as a “belief in belief,” as a way to imagine oneself—at least the fleshy self—as special by imagining one’s flesh as desired by others. I think of the story of Nicholas and the Three Clerks, a hagiographic horror story in which Nicholas asks a butcher for “better” flesh: the better flesh is the flesh of three murdered clerks, transformed by the butcher into pork pies. Nicholas’s desire for better flesh is what rescues the clerks from mere porcine animality, but, in the process, the story gives up a secret of human flesh and human identity.
This is what I want to do, and wherever I’m going, I hope to arrive there in two weeks, so I can get back to moving to new apartment, prepping for next year, rewriting an old conference paper on Des Grantz Geanz, and finally putting the diss to bed. Here comes the blegging portion, or, if you like, the part where I invite your participation. Dear readers,
- how might you exploit these texts and their depiction of desire?
- Is it possible to do this without mixing myself up in the Eucharist?
- What about the sexual material on anthropophagy? I’m thinking Decameron 4.9 (lover’s heart served up as boar: see Milad Doueihi, A Perverse History of the Human Heart), Jerome on the Attacoti, British people who account the cooked buttocks of shepherds and breasts of women great delicacies, and the homoerotic anthropophagy of William Rufus in Walter Map’s Courtier’s Trifles, whose intensity utterly eclipses the whole Brian/Cadwallo episode. Do I need only gesture at this material, if at all?
- Where am I going wrong?
* In re: Masciandaro as colleague: I’ve accepted a TT position at Brooklyn College. How lovely for me!