Eating people

Claude Rawson

• Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the ‘Mignonette’ by A.W.B. Simpson
  Chicago, 353 pp, £21.25, July 1984, ISBN 0 226 75942 3

Cannibalism haunts our fictions from Homer to Ovid, from Euripides to Shakespeare, from Defoe to Sade, Flaubert, Melville, Conrad and Genet. It has been a theme in the vocabulary of political and racial imputation, long before and long after Montaigne’s classic essay, and in this sense among others has been a staple of satire in Juvenal, Swift and elsewhere. From Antiquity to the present, historians and ethnographers have written of anthropophagy among distant tribes, or in battle, siege or famine. Survival-cannibalism has a whole literature to itself, in ‘true accounts’, ballads and novels, including a sub-genre on plane-crashes. There are even beginning to be books about the literature of cannibalism. One theme remains largely unexplored, however: that of the ways in which, in a culture which does not on the whole practise cannibalism, we talk and write about those who do, and the reticences and stylisations which this topic has imposed.