With Thanksgiving coming up it might be a good time to
revisit a news story that appeared in the New
York Times a while back under the title, “Officer Plotted to Abduct, Cook and Eat Women, Authorities Say" (NYT, 10/25/12). Not to make light of the
actual investigation which revealed that the officer, one Gilberto Valle, wrote to an accomplice, according to the Times, about his “game” plan as follows, “I was thinking of tying her body onto
some kind of apparatus. Cook her over a low hear and keep her alive as long as
possible.” Could Officer Valle have been a fan of Jonathan Swift whose A
Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden
on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick written in l729 offered up the
idea of cooking children as an ingenious solution to the problem of famine in
Ireland? Could the offending communications have been some sort of literary
product (the Times quotes from “a dating profile” where Officer Valle describes himself as a budding comedian, who “can find the humor in any situation”)? And if so what is the object of the satire? And satirical or not can
we conclude that the manifest content is such that Officer Valle doesn’t hold
women in very high esteem? Still cannibalism of which this incident partakes has
a long and venerable history. As only one of many historical examples, the
doomed members of the Donner Party ended up eating each other to survive. And
then there are all the examples in nature. The praying mantis bites off the
male’s head during sexual intercourse and there are many male homo sapiens who
will testify to the fact that they have their heads taken off by the female
members of their species without any sexual act taking place at all. But the
real fascination and horror of cannibalism is not how foreign it is, but how
familiar. Behind the veneer of civilization, lies a universe of cannibalistic
fantasies (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street presents cannibalism in Broadway musical form) and
inclinations. What about Darwin’s fittest? What enables him to survive and
isn’t this what Joseph Conrad was getting at in Heart of Darkness with its famous line, “Mistah Kurtz--he
dead”—which Eliot used at the epigraph for The
Hollow Men?
