From Man-Eaters to Spam-Eaters: Literary Tourism and the Discourse of Cannibalism from Herman Melville to Paul Theroux

PAUL LYONS From Man-Eaters to Spam-Eaters: Literary Tourism and the Discourse of Cannibalism from Herman Melville to Paul Theroux The Oceania found in this literature is . . . more revealing ofpapalagi fantasies and hang-ups, dreams and nightmares, prejudices . . . than of our actual islands. I am not saying that . . . the papalagi should not write about us, or vice versa. But the imagination must explore with love, honesty, wisdom and compassion . . . writers must [respect] the people they are writing about. Albert Wendt, "Towards a New Oceania" I. THE HAND THAT FEEDS ONCLUDiNG his section on the Marquesas, where his mind has been "quickened by . . . cannibal surroundings" (91), Robert Louis Stevenson describes an "incurable cannibal grandee with two incongrous traits": His favourite morsel was the human hand, of which he speaks today with an ill-favoured lustfullness. And when he said good-bye to Mrs. Stevenson, holding her hand, viewing her with tearful eyes, and chanting his farewell improvisation in the falsetto of Marquesan high society, he wrote upon her mind a sentimental impression which 1 try in vain to share. (139) Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 2, Summer 1995 Copyright © 1995 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1610 34Paul Lyons This passage from in the South Seas contains several staples of EuroAmerican writing about Pacific islanders, which cannot, for reasons that can only be suggested here, seem to resist the presence, specter, or legacy of cannibalism. As usual, the native is described through ludicrously mismatched bourgeois categories: "Grandee" and "high society" are applied to someone "incurably" undeserving of them. The writer's divided attitude toward this presumed cannibal is attributed to the cannibal 's own "incongrous traits," which "write" upon the viewer's mind. Stevenson wavers between appreciation for the picturesque, emotional goodbye and the impulse to mock the old cannibal's drooling over its "favorite morsel." The passage both sensationalizes and underplays the thrilling ambiguity of island ways: maybe the cannibal is sad because he cannot eat Mts. Stevenson's appetizing white hand. Stevenson remains blind to the possibility of native parodie discourses , which may well hold his hand as he writes. In an often overlooked sense, the stories visitors tell about Pacific islanders are written or rewritten by the islanders themselves, who may be buttering-up western literary appetites for any number of reasons. It is well to remember that what seems a novel experience for the observer is generally quite a familiar one for the observed, who quickly learn what Euro-American visitors want and expect to hear.1 Stevenson seems to recognize at points that the ex-cannibal natives have the capacity for designs of their own: "I know one old chief Koo-amua, a great cannibal in his day, who ate his enemies raw as he walked home from killing 'em, and he is a perfect gentleman and exceedingly amiable and simple minded: no fool, though" (qtd. in Menikoff 145). Before such presumed "actual" cannibals, however, Stevenson confesses, "my historic attitude entirely failed, and I was sensible of some repugnance for the natives" (102). Even the most sympathetic literary observers in the South Pacific seem to share ambivalences like Stevenson's when it comes to the cannibalism they seemingly need to find.2 Well-cared for by his Marquesan hosts in Melville's Typee, Toby cries out to his companion Tommo: "Why, for what do you suppose the devils have been feeding us up in this kind of style during the last three days, unless it were for something that you are too much frightened at to talk about?" (94). On first meeting Princess Vaitua in Noa Noa, Gauguin, who sought "divinely animal " humans (34), admits: "I saw in her only the jaws of a cannibal, the From Man-Eaters to Spam-Eaters35 teeth ready to rend" (14). Watching Tei Tetua, the "former practicing cannibal" (205) who assists them in their "return to nature" in FatuHiva , Thor Heyerdahl's companion Liv remarks that even when he eats sugar cane "it look[s] as if he [is] gnawing a human leg bone" (206). When Tei seems "disgusted at [the] barbaric waste" of burying someone rather than eating them, and asks: "Did nobody come and dig it...