SOURCE: Kilgour, Maggie. “Cannibals and Critics: An Exploration of James de Mille's Strange Manuscript.” Mosaic 30, no. 1 (March 1997): 19-37.

[In the following essay, Kilgour asserts that De Mille utilized the figure of the cannibal in A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder as an instrument for commenting on mid-nineteenth-century imperialism and materialism.]

In 1972, René Girard noted that although incest and cannibalism are equally important to the foundational myths of the West, “we are perhaps more distracted” by the former than the latter. He speculated, however, that incest may have claimed greater attention “only because cannibalism has not yet found its Freud and been promoted to the status of a major contemporary myth” (276-77). While Girard's observation may have been true in 1972, it seems less so in 1997, when we are in the midst of a veritable boom of cannibal literature, films, and criticism. Since the 1960s the cannibal has become a major modern mythical figure—especially in films ranging from George Romero's Living Dead series, through other cult hits such as Soylent Green, The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, Eating Raoul, Parents, Eat the Rich, Big Meat Eater, CHUD, to more recent art films: The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover and Delicatessen. Even more tellingly, perhaps, cannibalism has moved into the Hollywood mainstream, through the film adaptations of two novels, Fried Green Tomatoes and, most famously, Silence of the Lambs which sent a cannibal to the academy awards.

In many of these works, cannibalism clearly provides a delicious, if rather reductive, image for the nightmare of a “consumer” society, uneasy about its own material appetites, including its own increasing hunger for such lurid tales. So, for example, in Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the refugees from the cannibal zombies hide in a shopping mall, whose walls separate two mirror-forms of conspicuous consumption. The image of the cannibal thus serves the satiric function of revealing the heart of darkness within contemporary society, reminding us that civilization conceals its own forms of savagery.

The satiric potential of the cannibal as a form of cultural critique may in turn suggest the reasons why this figure also seems to be playing an increasingly important role in recent anthropological, New Historicist, post-colonial, and feminist analyses of literature and society. I recently participated in a “Symposium” at the University of Essex, on “Consuming Others: Cannibalism in the 1990s,” which featured presentations by a number of critics who have been exploring the implications of what William Arens first controversially called the “man-eating myth,” including Arens, Gananath Obeyesekere, Peter Hulme, Francis Barker, and Marina Warner. The fact that there exists such an interdisciplinary group concerned with this unsavory subject is significant. It is indicative of a current critical concern with our cannibal past—by which I mean not our savage prehistory, but rather the history of Western imperialism and its subsumption of so-called “cannibal societies” through “colonial discourse” which defines the “other” as primitive and barbaric. It is symptomatic too of recent interest in the legacy of imperialism: our cannibal present, in the form of the modern capitalist world of isolated consumers driven by rapacious egos. Connected to our thinking about the past that has produced our present, cannibalism has emerged as a topic of interest as part of contemporary criticism's desire to redefine differences, sexual, textual, racial—to deconstruct the boundaries that in the Western tradition have too often been formed along the line of binary oppositions.

Traditionally, of course, cannibalism has served as the image of absolute difference—the strict boundary that divides the civilized from the savage, the human from the monstrous. In this, it is an extension of how food and eating in general are used to define personal, national, and sexual identities. In accordance with the saying “you are what you eat,” cultural identity is constructed by dietary taboos that define what is and is not edible. Foreigners are frequently defined in terms of how and, especially, what they eat, and denounced on the grounds that they either have bad table manners or eat disgusting things—the French, for example, are called “frogs” for eating the frogs legs that no dainty Brit, nourished on nice blood pudding and other assorted organs, would deign to touch. Eating thus becomes a means of creating cultural differences. As an even more charged kind of consumption, cannibalism provides an image for the construction of clear boundaries between groups: “we” are civilized and eat nicely, “they” are barbaric and eat savagely; “we” eat normally, “they,” perversely. As Arens has argued, the charge of cannibalism can thus be used as an ideological device to justify racial, religious, political, and sexual attacks against any group seen as different from and therefore threatening to a body politic. Defined as consuming threats to social order, such forces can then themselves be, if not literally subsumed, at least assimilated, and at times annihilated.

The figure of the cannibal has always served a function of constructing the identity of one group through opposition to an “other.” Stories of anthropophagy go back to prehistory, occurring for example in the myth of the Golden Age, whose gilt may have been tarnished somewhat by the presence of the indiscriminately appetitive Cyclops. In these early myths, the cannibals tended to be remote figures, distant either in time or space. In the ancient classical world there were always rumors of others who lived on the fringes of civilization, and whose half-human status was signified by the fact that they were said to eat each other. Such myths suggest little about the people they described, and more about the cultures who spread them, and their fears of what lurked at the edges of an expanding empire. While each culture creates its own peculiar demons, the anthropophage typically provides a mythic image for the elements that threaten civilization: the wild untamed nature that resists the advances of culture. Such forces can be projected also onto the society's own past, as a state of savagery out of which it has just emerged and into which it fears it may regress; the figure of the man-eater can thus support narratives of evolution and progress, proving the superiority of the civilized over the natural (Arens 14-16).

The most famous classical cannibals appear in Homer's Odyssey, as obstacles to Odysseus's quest. In Horkheimer and Adorno's influential reading of the epic, Odysseus's journey becomes a central myth of enlightenment, which represents the struggle between the forces of progress and regression (43-80). Odysseus's meetings with the Cyclops and Laistrygonians influences later epics and tales of conquest, which use the devouring cannibal to symbolize savage elements hostile to the spread of culture and empire. Yet Odysseus's story is more ambiguous than it appears, for his journey home suggests another type of regression, while the cannibals are literalizations of his own powerful appetite (See Kilgour 23-24).

With the discovery of the New World in the Renaissance, moreover, the ambivalent resonances of anthropophagy become even more complex, as the encounter with the foreign native reinforced by opposition an emerging sense of the modern Cartesian subject (Kilgour 147-50). In contrast to the European who increasingly defined himself as an autonomous independent entity, clearly differentiated from others, the cannibal became the embodiment of an “other” who destroys individual boundaries. As the modern Western ego increasingly came to be founded upon faith in production, progress, and individual autonomy, the cannibal inversely came to represent consumption, regress, and the annihilation of discrete identity. In the figure of the cannibal, the West found the epitome of the loss of personal or cultural identity involved in “going native”: the image of the self completely subsumed and assimilated by the “other.” The New World cannibal thus helped construct the modern European identity by contrast, serving as a mirror image of modern Western values; at the same time, however, the cannibal represents the annihilation of the modern self. The horror of cannibalism thus lies in the fact that it both gives us a sense of who we are, and yet is a threat to that identity, representing most graphically the dissolution of the individual.

The discovery of the New World and the expansion of Western empires marks one significant renaissance in cannibalism literature, when the perennial myth of the man-eating “other” took on new symbolic force as a projection of modern dreams and nightmares. The cannibal is the perfect demon for a culture based on geographic and scientific expansion and progress, which yet fears its own consuming appetites and so displaces them onto others. The doubling of the cannibal and the consuming explorer—or exploring consumer—is illustrated further in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Defoe's text set a new model for realistic tales of shipwreck and cannibalism which are typical of the second renaissance of cannibalism literature in the 19th century. In the writing of authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Herman Melville, and, most famously, Joseph Conrad, the figure of the cannibal also begins to reflect a growing awareness of the consequences of the imperial project that the Renaissance began. In their works, imperialism is represented as self-destructive, for it undermines the very differences upon which it depends. Whereas supporters of imperialism feared that, by bringing together the civilized and the savage, imperialism could be seen as leading to the erosion of stable cultural differences, its critics could argue that, in its savage treatment of others, imperialism merely revealed the deeper barbarism of civilization (Brantlinger 227-74).

To indicate some of the complexities of the figure of the cannibal during this period and the implications for late 20th-century critical interests, I want to look closely now at a less well-known 19th-century text: A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, published anonymously in 1888. Its author, who died before the text's publication and may not have finished the work, was James de Mille, a Canadian professor of rhetoric and classics who also published over thirty popular novels in his short life. The theme of cannibalism enters de Mille's novel through a story that is found inside the titular cylinder—making de Mille's text an example of “CanLit” not only in the usual sense of “Canadian literature,” but also as “Cannibal lit,” and even “Canned lit.” Moreover, the text as a whole seems a lusty cannibalizing of many literary genres; it is a satire in its original meaning of “hotch-potch,” which stews together utopian and dystopian writings, the anatomy and the “symposium,” as well as adventure tales, travel narratives, and pure Swiftian satire (see Woodcock 175; Parks 64-65; La Bossière 43; Kime 280-302; Kilian 61-63; Guth 42).

Until recently, de Mille's heterogenous novel was seen as both formally and thematically incoherent and either ignored or mentioned only as a kind of curiosity in early Canadian writing. Since its 1969 reprint, however, it has received more attention and is being slowly assimilated into the CanLit canon. This is partly because, as Linda Lamont-Stewart has argued (21, 35), shifts in trends in literary criticism have made it seem of greater value and relevance. Its formal and moral contradictions can now be appreciated by a postmodern esthetics which privileges openness, parody, self-reflexivity (Lamont-Stewart 128-30; Wilson 139-40), and by a postcolonial politics which seeks out works that expose the crackings of monolithic ideology (Milnes 89). The critical developments which have encouraged recent interest in de Mille's novel are thus similar to those behind our current concern with the cannibal: a focus on “otherness,” heterogeneity and difference, rather than on esthetic and cultural unity. As I will argue further, the text itself suggests an even deeper affinity between criticism and cannibalism. (I should begin by confessing, however, that Canadian literature is foreign territory for me, which I do not mean to claim for my own imperial theory. But de Mille's novel reminds us that criticism too cannot help familiarizing the strange, that is, understanding literature in terms of its own obsessions.)

The genre generally associated with a formal telos and unity that is used to transmit a unified vision of society is the epic, the celebration of conquest and empire. De Mille was a professor of classics (among other things), and his text draws upon the classical epic paradigms he knew well. As they are thrown into the generic melting pot, however, they lose their unifying and containing power, and simply become one set of available literary conventions and traditions. Within the text, elements from the linear and closed epic blur with its generic “other”: the mode of romance, which is circular, open, and according to David Quint, therefore the genre not of the imperial conqueror but of the conquered (9). From the beginning, the text provides us with a divided vision, a bifurcation between cannibals and Christians, them and us, which draws on the epic conflict between conqueror and conquered. The novel falls into two parts, or rather two concentric circles: an outer frame narrative and an inner one. This division makes it structurally similar to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; both narratives also follow two parallel quests, one of which is to a world of ice and snow, which are set up as polar images of each other.

The exploration of a frozen world in both these works recalls other Romantic versions of the epic quest and conquest—e.g., “Alastor” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which themselves look back to the infernal expeditions by the diabolical imperialists to the “frozen Continent” that marks the boundary of Hell in Paradise Lost (Book II, 587-628). Like these models, de Mille gives us a narrative in which an epic journey or quest has turned into an attempt to transgress human boundaries. Traditionally, this kind of Promethean quest, which recalls also the voyage of Melville's Ahab with his own desire for whiteness, is used to convey warnings against the evils of transgression: the violation of the limitations assigned to human beings leads to self-destruction.

Aside from such literary antecedents, however, literal polar exploration was in itself big news in the mid-19th century. The exploration of frozen lands of whiteness required a different form of representation from the penetrations of the tropical hearts of darkness, though one in which the rhetoric of color played an equally powerful role. In the explorations of the dark continent, an easily recognizable opposition was set up between the darkness of the landscape and its peoples and the whiteness of the mission. At the frozen poles, however, the whiteness of the landscape seemed to reflect the noble enterprise itself, and could be used as its very image. As one writer of the 1850s enthusiastically explained:

For three hundred years the Arctic seas have now been visited by European sailors; their narratives supply some of the finest modern instances of human energy and daring, bent on a noble undertaking, and associated constantly with kindness, generosity and simple piety. The history of Arctic enterprise is stainless as the Arctic snows, clean to the core as an ice mountain.

(qtd. in Stone 9)

Whereas Africa is the place where differences meet, the arctic poles bring about a union of the same. So too in Frankenstein, Walton sets out for the frozen north, longing for “the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine” (19), a desire that is satisfied when he meets his double, Victor Frankenstein.

The journey into a world of pure white likeness, however, introduces a new danger. If in Africa, the difference between the civilized and barbaric was clearly marked in the opposition between black and white—even though the black territory threatened to destroy that difference by engulfing the white center—in the expeditions to the poles there is already an identification between inside and outside that suggests both a pure and harmonious point of origin and also a potential threat. In writers like Poe and Melville, white itself becomes an ambiguous color, suggesting a transcendence that really means a destructive loss of all differences. In Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which de Mille's strange manuscript is clearly copying in certain respects, the story breaks off as it moves abruptly from an all-black world to an all-white one. While whiteness strikes horror into the natives' dark hearts, it brings numbness to the white men, a total apathy and loss of sensation, which seems to mirror the dissolution of the narrative. If meaning, like imperialism, depends on the construction of absolute differences, it is consumed in Poe's story by the total harmony of inside and outside, and the story breaks off through the fiction of the death of the author. The disappearance of differences in the snowstorm leads to the elimination of a point of origin outside of the text and to the abrupt conclusion of the narrative in blinding blank whiteness.

On the surface, however, and in the public eye, whiteness was seen to symbolize the purity of polar exploration. It seemed scandalous, therefore, when in 1854 John Rae discovered evidence which implied that, under the pressure of starvation, the members of the Franklin expedition might have eaten each other. Rae's discovery became a minor cause célèbre, taken up by Dickens, one of the most oral and cannibalistic of writers, who found the very idea that British naval officers would sink to the level of savages unimaginable. Dickens insisted upon the total opposition between the Esquimaux, denounced as untrustworthy liars and treacherous hosts, and British gentlemen. He admitted that members of the English lower classes might possibly stoop to cannibalism as they had not been brought up properly—but officers? Never! Cannibalism is a question of up-bringing: “the better educated the man, the better disciplined the habits, the more reflective and religious the tone of thought, and the more gigantically improbable the ‘last resource’ becomes” (qtd. in Stone 11).

The outer frame of de Mille's novel depicts a symposium of such well-educated, upper-class gentlemen, on a kind of leisure cruise in the south seas, a voyage with no identifiable goal beyond the conspicuous consumption of time, money, and food. Their boat is becalmed, giving us a nice image, as Stephen Milnes has noted, for a 19th-century loss of faith in progress (90). One of the major occupations on board the ship is eating, which figures prominently in both the inside and outside of the text, thus setting up two contrasting forms of consumption. As befits men of leisure, moreover, the travelers talk and play; one of them invents a thrilling game of betting on paper boats, which they race, in a kind of bathetic parody of the traditional epic games. In the course of one race they discover a floating black object, which one character is convinced is a tin of meat. The contents of the copper cylinder, however, are not edible, though they can be consumed, and the gentlemen admit that what they have found is even better than meat. What the cylinder contains is a manuscript (the “Canned lit”) which becomes the center of the text, as they take turns reading it to pass the time. The novel consists of this (fictitiously) oral presentation of the story, with an occasional pause for meals and commentary on what they have read. The trip thus turns into a symposium of eating and interpretation, in which the inside and outside of the story are further placed in a balance of production and consumption, since the story is produced by being consumed.

The narrative contained in the manuscript reflects the outer narrative and also looks back to the common literary antecedents of both, especially the Odyssey. It is the story of a sailor, Adam More, whose return home is impeded by an encounter with cannibals. While he hopes that his text will make it home, and convey his story to his father (in which it is of course only partially successful, for it reaches civilization but not necessarily its intended paternal source and destination), it seems extremely likely that he, unlike Odysseus, will not get home.

The manuscript explains how, on a journey back to England from Van Dieman's land, More's ship, like that in the frame narrative, is becalmed, in his case near the south pole in a land of ice and snow. He and another sailor, Agnew, go ashore, partly simply to kill time by killing things, but also for the thrill of exploring new territory, “a place never before trodden by the foot of man” (28).

As in the case of other epic questers before them, curiosity concerning strange lands proves dangerous. The desire to explore new worlds sidetracks them from their larger goal, the journey home, for, while they are out exploring, the two men are cut off from their ship by a snowstorm. The whiteness which ends Poe's narrative begins this one. The two humans find themselves in a position of complete helplessness, when their small boat is swept up by a powerful current. Agnew's encouraging speech (which echoes speeches of earlier voyagers: the imperialist Aeneas; Dante's damned Ulysses, who sets off on a transgressive voyage also towards a pole; the final speeches of Victor Frankenstein) is ironic and indicates the confusion of activity and passivity: “It is better to die while struggling like a man, full of hope and energy than to perish in inaction and despair. It is better to die in the storm and furious waters than to waste away in this awful place. So come along. Let's drift as before” (39-40). Human striving is simply drifting with the current. The sailors' situation thus again mirrors that of the leisure-cruisers in the frame. Both inside and outside scenes recall further the epic topos of the unsteered or uncontrolled ship, which symbolizes human impotence (Quint 83-96, 248-68). In Romantic writing, too, the image of the “drunken boat” (Frye 200-17) suggests the Romantic individual who heroically surrenders himself to higher powers beyond his control.

In de Mille's world, too, humans cannot control their own fate. They can, however, interpret it. For the voyagers on the outside cruise, literary criticism is a form of compensation for enforced passivity, an illusory attempt at mastery. Similarly, the helpless More and Agnew now argue over the direction they are taking and debate their destiny. As characters, the two men are set up as polar opposites: Agnew the happy optimist who believes that they are heading north; More the gloomy pessimist who is certain that they are being sucked south into an abysmal maelstrom.

The polarity of their mental attitudes increases when they reach a land and are met by its inhabitants. More sees the people as less than prepossessing, harpyish creatures like “animated mummies” (43): “the emaciation of their horny frames; their toes and fingers were like birds' claws; their eyes were small and dull and weak, and sunken in cavernous hollows, from which they looked at us like corpses—a horrible sight” (45). The image of the harpies (which becomes explicit later, 237) recalls the epic voyages of Odysseus and Aeneas, other heroes whose quests are impeded by hostile half-human forces. The differing responses of More and Agnew are telling. More is repulsed by and suspicious of the natives, and thinks that “our only plan was to rule by terror—to seize, to slay, to conquer” (50)—a statement which has caused Stephen Milnes recently to identify him with colonialist discourse and practice (95-96). Agnew, in contrast, accepts the natives and their albeit rather primitive hospitality quite happily, telling More not to hurt them and assuring him: “they're not a bad lot. They mean well. They can't help their looks. You're too suspicious and reserved. Let's make friends with them, and get them to help us” (46).

The polarization of the two men is further dramatized as Agnew cheerfully goes outside with his hosts, while More is left brooding in a cave. There he witnesses an appalling spectacle that confirms his worst fears: his hosts bring in and nonchalantly begin to cook a human body. He reads this as a sign of his own fate: “The horrible repast showed plainly all that was in store for us. They received us kindly and fed us well only to devote us to the most abhorrent of deaths.” At that moment a gun goes off and: “At once I understood it. My fears had proved true” (50). He hears Agnew screaming to him to flee for his life, and does so, making it back to his boat. Agnew, however, is lost, presumably killed and eaten. A kind of imperialist poetic justice seems at work: the stranger who identifies and sympathizes with the indigenous people, the guest who willingly shares his hosts' food, “goes native” in an extremely graphic way. Agnew's fate is a literalization of his own inability to see the differences between himself and the natives; in contrast, More is the imperialist who turns the world into a “manichean allegory” (Milnes 89). This opening episode establishes the pattern of oppositions which de Mille drives home rather relentlessly in the central part of the text, partly through imagery of darkness and light, black and white.

After losing Agnew, More is again carried on by his boat, like the Romantic solitary of Shelley's “Alastor.” He finally passes through an outer world of infernal darkness, and emerges into an inner world of light, “not a world of ice and frost, but one of beauty and light” (63), “light so lately lost, and supposed to be lost forever” (60). He celebrates this transformation of darkness into light, outside into inside: “I had passed from that outer world to this inner one, and the passage was from death unto life, from agony and despair to sunlight and splendor and joy” (63). There is obviously a kind of rebirth occurring here, in which poor Agnew has served as a ritual scapegoat.

The passage from inner to outer marks More's entrance into a brave New World that turns out to be his own turned upside down: a world not of lightness, as he expects, but of total darkness. At first he misreads its nature, and sees its inhabitants, a people called the Kosekin, as the antitheses of the odious cannibals he has just left. Whereas the cannibals were described as emaciated and mummified, with sly faces expressing semi-human savagery, these people are merely “small in stature and slender in frame” with facial expressions of “great gentleness” (64). Whereas the cannibals lived in primitive caves, he finds in this new world signs of what he can recognize as culture: the land has been worked, there are roads and “manifest signs of cultivation and civilization” (63). In his initial response to these people he sees them as very different from the cannibals, and similar to himself.

Only gradually does More recognize that in fact these Kosekin are the same as the cannibals and thus again a polar image of his own society. From first seeing this world as similar to his own, More comes quickly to read it antithetically as an inversion of it. At first he is taken very much by their intense kindness and hospitality to him, a stranger, which he would never expect from his own people. He soon learns, however, that this is the practice of a society whose goal is self-denial and self-sacrifice, whose “ruling passion is the hatred of self” (116), and whose ultimate aim, therefore, is to achieve total self-annihilation by being eaten. In contrast to Western egotism and materialism, they suggest a social model based on an extravagant ideal of altruism, which leads them to crave being consumed. For the Kosekin, self-destruction is in fact natural to all humans; as one of them explains to More:

“we are all so, for we are so made. It is our nature. Who is there who is not self-denying? No one can help that. … Of course I love death—all men do; who does not? Is it not human nature? Do we not instinctively fly to meet it whenever we can? … Who does not feel within him this intense looking after death as the strongest passion of his heart.”

(128-29)

More tries to explain to them the view of human “nature” that prevails in his old world:

“The love of life must necessarily be the strongest passion of man. We are so made. We give up everything for life. … Riches also are desired by all, for poverty is the direst curse that can embitter life; and as to requited love, surely that is the sweetest, purest and most divine joy that the human heart may know.”

(131)

This horrifies his cannibal friend, who calls such feelings “unnatural” (132), exclaiming: “Oh, sacred cavern gloom! Oh, divine darkness! Oh, impenetrable abysses of night! What, oh, what is this? … You call good evil, and evil good; our light is your darkness, and our darkness your light” (131). The Kosekin see More's values as against human nature, which according to them strives to transcend the merely natural; as one Kosekin tells More: “This is human nature. We cannot help it; and it is this that distinguishes us from the animals. Why, if men were to feel as you say you feel, they would be mere animals” (132).

The text thus seems to set up an opposition between Western self-assertion and materialism (represented by the leisure-crew and their continual consumption) and Kosekin self-abnegation and spirituality. The contrast enables a critique of Western consumerism. Yet there is obviously a deeper irony here which undoes the polarity and complicates the satire, for the Kosekin quest for transcendence returns them to sheer materialism. This dream of escaping the flesh ultimately reduces the human to its most material form, food, which identifies it with, rather than freeing it from, the lower physical world. More's naive reading of the Kosekin as the antithesis of our society is used as a foil, which enables “us” more sophisticated critics to see an identity between the two worlds.

Rather than representing an alternative, the Kosekin are then clearly a nightmare version of modern capitalist society. A “work ethic” underlies and determines their systems of relations. Their society is as competitive as ours, only here the competition is to give rather than receive, be consumed rather than consume. Their quest for transcendence of self takes to an extreme one ideal within Western culture. As one of the readers in the outside frame suggests, the Kosekin have in fact only put into practice what much of humanity holds in theory to be true:

“the Kosekin may be nearer to the truth than we are. We have by nature a strong love of life—it is our dominant feeling—but yet there is in the minds of all men a deep underlying conviction of the vanity of life, and its worthlessness. In all ages and among all races the best, the purest, and the wisest have taught this truth, that human life is not a blessing; that the evil predominates over the good; and that our best hope is to gain a spirit of acquiescence with its inevitable evils. All philosophy and all religions teach us this one solemn truth, that in this life the evil surpasses the good. It has always been so.”

(223-24)

In this respect, the object of satire seems to be, as George Woodcock has argued (174, 178) the self-destructive tendency of Romanticism and Victorian society: its antimaterialism and loathing for the body. Extreme materialism and extreme idealism seem equally attacked. But de Mille also suggests that the two poles are identical in a way which troubles social and individual coherence and stability. Social order in general involves a constant struggle between the appetites of the individual and the needs of society as a whole. While capitalism especially feeds on egotism, it depends on an ideal of altruism to check individual rapaciousness. The poles of the novel reflect a split within modern Western society and also the individual psyche itself: the tension between what Freud will call eros and thanatos, between egotism and altruism, the desire to consume and to be consumed. Yet de Mille creates further a strange symbiotic relationship between these conflicting drives. Kosekin society shows that altruism can be a form of egotism. The tension between the two impulses is in fact an illusion, for the quest for transcendence of the material is itself merely another form of materialism.

While the clash between More's Western values and Kosekin beliefs is central to the text, the opposition seems ultimately a product of his bifurcating mind. Part of the satiric humor of the text lies in More's inability to see likeness: his sense of his own complete alienation from the Kosekin. He is the prototypical “accidental tourist,” the colonialist transformed into a rather comical commercial traveler who divides his experiences into tidy piles. Refusing to “go native,” he rejects the advances of a female Kosekin, Layelah, although she, as a member of a philosophical radical group, stands against Kosekin values, and offers to help him escape. Although he feels attracted to her, he falls in love with Almah, another outsider, with whom he feels he has more in common, since both are “aliens here, in a nation of kind-hearted and amiable miscreants” (113). Ironically, however, through his love for her he becomes more like the Kosekin. For a Western culture fed on egotism, the horror of cannibalism lies in its obliteration of the individual ego. Yet, this is also what love traditionally achieves: an, albeit less literal, breakdown of individual boundaries and merging of selves—which is one reason why the languages of love and consumption are often intertwined (Kilgour 7-8). The Kosekin point out that More has been transformed by love:

“You are growing like one of us. … When you are with Almah you act like one of the Kosekin. … Oh, almighty and wondrous power of Love! … how thou hast transformed this foreigner! … you will soon be one of us altogether. … Almah has awakened within you your true human nature. Thus far it has lain dormant; it has been concealed under a thousand false and unnatural habits, arising from your strange native customs. You have been brought up under some frightful system, where nature is violated. Here among us your true humanity is unfolded, and with Almah you are like the Kosekin.”

(155-56)

More's love is self-sacrificing; he is ready to die to save Almah. For the Kosekin, such ideal love can be fulfilled only in cannibalism: they decide to honor the couple's consuming passion by separating them, sacrificing them, and, as the greatest privilege of all, eating them, and thus fully, and literally, integrating them into the Kosekin community.

More and Almah are to be sacrificed at the most important holiday of the year. The Kosekin year is divided into two seasons: one long day and one long night, so that light and darkness are physically polarized. Time therefore has to be organized during these periods by purely artificial units, which mark one more victory of human artifice over the natural order. The ends of both seasons are times of great celebration. More and Almah are to be sacrificed at the end of the period of darkness, at which time “the dawn of that long day … was now approaching. The sight of that dawning day gave me new life. It was like a sight of home—the blessed dawn, the sunlight of a bright day, the glorious daybreak lost for so long a time, but now at last returning” (242). His own return home having been broken off forever by this prolonged interlude with cannibals, More sees this moment as itself a different kind of return. At this point, moreover, the story seems to come full circle: in the most honored paupers whom he now meets, the obtuse More finally recognizes the hideous cannibals who ate Agnew at the beginning of his polar expedition.

In this revolution, however, the tables turn. Bold sailor that he is, More decides that he will not submit without a struggle, although he realizes that fighting people who are eager for death puts him in an peculiar position. Drawing his rifle, he shoots those about to kill Almah. Total chaos ensues, as the crowd of spectators, eager to be killed, yet also desirous of giving others that great honor, simultaneously rush toward him and draw back. Suddenly they hail him as “Father of Thunder! Ruler of Cloud and Darkness! Judge of Death!” He realizes that “these people no longer regarded me as a victim, but rather as some mighty being—some superior, perhaps supernatural power, who was to be almost worshipped” (246). Like the stereotypical explorer encountering natives, he decides “to take advantage of the popular superstition to the utmost” (247), as does Almah who now, assuming the proper Kosekin female role of subordination by speaking first, proclaims them the new rulers of the people. She promises that they will sacrifice themselves for the people by living in luxury and light, and giving them a “new era” of laissez-faire poverty, “in which every man may be as poor as he likes, and riches shall be unknown in the land” (250). She and More will take on the burdens of wealth and light: “Can any rulers do more than this for the good of their people?” (249). At this moment the dawn breaks, “and the bright light of a day began to illuminate the world,” as More cries apocalyptically: “The long, long night at last was over; the darkness had passed away like some hideous dream; the day was here—the long day that was to know no shadow and no decline” (251).

This second passage from darkness to light brings a new revolution in fortune. From being on the margins of the society, More and Almah have now been symbolically, rather than cannibalistically, absorbed by it, and so become its representatives. The outsiders are now the ultimate insiders, rulers of the people through the establishment of a system of mutual exploitation, a kind of reciprocal cannibalism, in which Almah and More's desire for wealth and life will perfectly complement the Kosekin's desires for poverty and death. For both More and the Kosekin, selfishness is satisfied under the cover of complete self-sacrifice. While More suggests that they try to flee, the now dominant Almah recognizes the possibilities in their new situation. Although she has constantly expressed longing for her home, Almah has also always told More that escape was impossible. Her actions now defer their exit, and return us to the opening preface to the manuscript in which More had written that “escape is as impossible as from the grave” (25). At the end, they remain within Kosekin society, and Almah calms him: “we need not hurry. We are all-powerful now, and there is no more danger. … Let us go to the nearest of our palaces and obtain rest and food” (252).

The story breaks off abruptly at this point, not because the manuscript is incomplete but because one of the readers is hungry. Featherstone, the owner of the boat and winner of the 1850 Upper Class Twit of the Year Award, yawns and says: “That's enough for today … I'm tired and can't read any more. It's time for supper” (252). This is the last word in the text, which significantly picks up and echoes Almah's interest in “rest and food.”

Critics have speculated as to whether the posthumously published text was finished or not (Monk 243-45; La Bossière 41-54; Wilson 137-38; Milnes 101). In light of the text's recognized resemblance to Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, one might suspect that de Mille was experimenting with the form of the fragmented story, and trying it for a certain effect. If so, then the way that the Strange Manuscript breaks off does seem appropriate. Rather than end with Poe's fiction of the death of the author (which was, however, uncannily realized through de Mille's early demise), de Mille's concludes with the hunger of the reader, which ensures that both suspended quests are brought to hasty and inconclusive ends.

If the conclusion is open in one sense, however, it seems closed in another, for inside and outside come together. At the end of the text, Almah and More are left inside the society from which they were originally alienated, and whose ways of eating they rejected and projected. The outside has become the inside. The closing frame works towards a further assimilation. If Poe's abrupt ending manages to subsume the fictional author, de Mille's allows him to incorporate his fictitious readers. Through the framing construction of the interpreters, de Mille manages to introject interpretation. To avoid being eaten alive by critics he eats them first. The text thus offers us, as Gwendolyn Guth has argued, a “satire of exegesis” (42) which we are encouraged to add to, and finally try to connect with, the other satirical targets of the text.

In de Mille's Strange Manuscript, there are four questers turned critics—readers who read because their journey is arrested—two university professors, plus an esthete named Melick, and the boat's aristocratic owner, Lord Featherstone. The four argue over the meaning of the story, differing especially in their interpretation of the relation of the inner narrative to any external reality, including their own. Each has a different interpretation appropriate to his character and social position. The two professors offer scientific readings, which treat the text as literal truth, “a plain narrative of facts” (216). For the first, an anthropologist, the story provides proof of the survival of prehistoric races into modern times. As he sees it, the huge monsters that More encounters on his travels are clearly evolutionary throwbacks, species of dinosaurs that survived without developing, just as the Kosekin are an ancient race of people, who, cut off from contact with other races, have developed uniquely. They are thus a completely different people, “an aboriginal and autochthonous race” (148), who have nothing in common with any other human race. On this last point, the other professor, a philologist, disagrees. Applying Grimm's Law with appropriately grim determination, he argues at length that the Kosekin are a Semitic race, whose language is very close to Hebrew. Thus the race is not completely alien. Moreover, although he believes the tale to be true, he also notes how it is told in a way that reveals something about Western culture as well as the Kosekin: “the facts are themselves such that they give a new coloring to the facts of our life. They are in such a profound antithesis to European ways that we consider them as being written merely to indicate that difference” (216). For him, this “other” is a reality in its own right, but is also similar to the self, about whom it reveals further truths.

Ironically, considering de Mille's own form of employment, the academic mind in his text seems a literalist one, which reads with reductive referentiality. It is the esthete, Melick, who interprets the tale figuratively. Melick's insistence that we read fiction as fiction, and not in terms of its correspondence to an external referent, has made him popular with recent readers. For Guth, Melick's mockery of the others' scientific theories is a wonderful “exposure of academic elitism” (46; see also Wilson 142), which enables de Mille to satirize his own profession. A confirmed skeptic, Melick judges the text solely by esthetic standards, by which he finds it lamentably inadequate—for many of the same reasons that readers have criticized de Mille's work. He argues that More's story is badly written, completely conventional, predictable, and altogether “Sinbadish” (75). It reveals no truth about real natives, but is merely “a satirical romance,” “directed against the restlessness of humanity.” As Melick sees it:

“[More's story] mocks us by exhibiting a new race of men, animated by passions and impulses which are directly the opposite of ours, and yet no nearer happiness than we are. … The writer thus mocks at all our dearest passions and strongest desires; and his general aim is to show that the mere search for happiness per se is a vulgar thing, and must always result in utter nothingness.”

(215)

The “other” for Melick is an utter fiction used to teach a moral about universal human nature: that “the happiness of man consists not in external surroundings, but in the internal feelings” (215-16). For this esthete, the text not only resists reference to any outside world, but also reveals the superiority of the inside over the outside. While Melick's more sophisticated reading may have some appeal to us, in its imposition of strict antithetical categories (fiction/reality, inside/outside), it seems to echo both Kosekin dualism and More's mode of perception. As all three readers try to use their own values and criteria to make sense of the strange tale, their understanding of the story mirrors More's own attempt to grasp events.

More's stupidity and lack of comprehension seem most clearly reflected in the last reader, Lord Featherstone, who offers no interpretation at all, nor any remarks beyond a few tasteless anti-Semitic jokes and a comment on the Kosekin aversion to wealth: “Not a bad idea, though, that of theirs about money. Too much money's a howwid baw, by Jove!” (151). Whereas Melick asserts the power of mind over matter, Featherstone seems to epitomize the victory of matter over mind. He is a brainless member of a purely consumer class, whose need for physical feeding puts an end to the figurative consumption, which is also the production, of the text.

Featherstone's ending of the story at the moment in which Almah and More become Kosekin rulers drives home the identification that de Mille has set up between inside and outside narratives and worlds. The text gives us not only two mirror worlds, but also two antithetical forms of closure, which also reflect each other. The inner tale follows the closed pattern of epic conquest, although the story concludes on a more positive note than is usual in the traditional epic: the conflict between colonist and indigenous peoples ends when their values, apparently irreconcilable, turn out to be felicitously compatible. At the same time, the image of the serendipitous reconciliation of differences, undercut already by the satire, is further undermined as a form of resolution by the frame, which turns closure into openness. The tale is left open, however, not because differences cannot be reconciled, but because, as at the end of Poe's “unfinished” story, there are really no differences at all.

The Kosekin's cannibalism, the sign of cultural difference, anticipates the final eradication of difference. As I mentioned earlier, cannibalism is an image that traditionally has been used to construct boundaries and binarisms, to affirm the opposition between the civilized and the savage. Yet the act itself suggests the dissolution of oppositions: it is the place where desire and dread, love and aggression meet, where the body is made symbolic and where the literal becomes the figurative. For the Kosekin, whose thinking is as deeply dualistic as More's, cannibalism represents the ultimate attempt on the part of human nature to transcend the material world of the flesh, yet paradoxically it does so by making the human mere meat. Cannibalism always involves a complementary establishment and conflation of differences: it depends upon the setting up of a clear antithesis between eater and eaten, which then, by the logic that “you are what and who you eat,” disappears. The horror of cannibalism lies not in its figuration of radical otherness and difference but in its embodiment of undifferentiation and the disappearance of the principle of alterity.

Perhaps this is why the cannibal is appearing so frequently in criticism today which, even after the fragmentation of the empire of deconstruction, is concerned with investigating the instability of the binary thinking that has influenced Western thought and literature. Whereas cannibalism was used by the colonial discourse of the past to construct boundaries, today it is invoked in attempts to deconstruct them. If differences are artificial—in the same way that, according to Arens, cannibalism is a fiction—if differences are just myths that we tell about “others” in order to create the category of “otherness,” then they also may be rewritten and reconstructed.

Yet, the possibility of the dissolution of all differences, the abolition of alterity, raises other fears. The deconstruction of oppositions is occurring at a time that is characterized also by a new territorialism, when racial and sexual differences especially are frequently celebrated, and warnings are made about the danger of appropriating others' voices and identities. If to some critics, breaking down boundaries appears to constitute an attack upon an old imperialist ideology, to others it simply reproduces it, as a form of subsumption which denies alterity by assimilating the “other.” With its satire of all hungers, including the reader's hunger for meaning, de Mille's Strange Manuscript implies that there may be no real distinction between the cannibal, the colonialist, and the critic. Certainly, the suspicion today that all ideals of altruism or dreams of transcendence cloak material motives makes such distinctions difficult to define. Perhaps that is why cannibalism is such an illuminating figure for criticism today, which questions boundaries, including those that delimit the world of criticism itself, as it marches—imperialistically?—into new territories, colonizing other disciplines to help it remap the world and replace the poles.

Works Cited

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