Cannibal Connections: A Buddhist Reading of "The Encantadas"

Cannibal Connections: A Buddhist Reading of “The Encantadas” TOMOYUKI ZETTSU Rikkyo University I In the first sketch of “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles,” Melville’s narrator refers to a superstition among the sailors that “all wicked sea-officers, more especially commodores and captains, are at death . . . transformed into tortoises.”1 Melville is clearly taken up with the idea of transmigration or reincarnation, an idea that informs Buddhist thought. The prose section of Melville’s later piece “Rammon and ‘The Enviable Isles’” also considers Buddhism by highlighting “the doctrine of the successive transmigration of souls,” according to which one must follow “an unescapable life indefinitely continuous after death.”2 Also pertinent here is Melville’s “On the Chinese Junk,” in which the name of Hannah Adams is mentioned as the author of “History of Religious Sects” (NN PT 441). In fact, this is not the exact title of a book; it is presumably a reference to Adams’s twin dictionaries: An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects Which Have Appeared in the World (1784), revised as A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations (1817). Adams’s Dictionary gives a religious account of the “CHINESE,” whose belief teaches that “the souls of their ancestors transmigrate into irrational creatures; either into such as they liked best, or resembled most, in their behaviour.” In much the same frame of reference, Adams explains the “JAPANESE,” focusing on a Buddhist notion that anticipates the fate of Melville’s sailors in “The Encantadas”: “When vicious souls have expiated their crimes, they are sent back to animate such vile animals as resembled them in their former state of existence .”3 Moreover, vital here is the fact that the narrator of “The Encantadas,” C
2006 The Authors Journal compilation C
2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc 1 Herman Melville, “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles,” in The Piazza Tales, and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987), 128; hereafter cited as NN PT. 2 Herman Melville, Tales, Poems, and Other Writings, ed. John Bryant (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 437. 3 Hannah Adams, A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations: Jewish, Heathen, Mahometan and Christian, Ancient and Modern (New York: James Eastburn and Company; Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1817), 56, 123. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 43 T O M O Y U K I Z E T T S U who acknowledges the myth of transmigration, enjoys “tortoise steaks and tortoise stews” (NN PT 132-33), a repast from a supposedly transformed human being, thereby enacting—at least subliminally—a symbolic ritual of cannibalism. Although the cannibal relation between men in Melville’s work has received much critical attention, little has been said about the writer’s treatment of cannibal exchanges—outrageous transactions of the body—between man and animal in general, and between man and dog in particular. For instance, “On the Chinese Junk” calls attention to those men who eat “the little dog without hair” (NN PT 441). Such an exchange includes the vision of human beings consumed by the lower animals. Melville’s special interest in this vision finds its most tangible expression in his account of the biblical Ahab: “When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?”4 Significantly, the Lord in the Bible correctly predicts the same fate that awaits Ahab’s wife: “The dogs shall eat Jezebel” (I King 21: 23). In addition , Queequeg, the cannibal par excellence in Moby-Dick, is more than once compared to a dog (see NN MD 27, 61). Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word “cannibal”—whose first letters suggest the “canine” species in the Romance languages—had its folk-etymological associations with “dog.” Traditionally, representations of cannibalism have been taken as an ultimate expression of fear, pain, or brutality. Central to my discussion, however, is the notion of cannibalism as an ambivalent trope of breaking boundaries...