Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments What “reputation” H.M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a “man who lived among the cannibals”! Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1851 In writing this book I often felt cursed like Melville, forever associated with the transgressive, the taboo. I started this book as a graduate student at Jeffrey Dahmer’s alma mater, in the state of his birth; in fact, Dahmer attended Ohio State University only briefly, but it made for interesting gossip in my seminar on the theory of transgression, a course that I credit with originating this project. A year into my research and writing, Dahmer had been murdered in prison in what was portrayed as an act of retributive justice, which further spectacularized the cannibal serial murderer. Hardly a fiction—the grisly facts prove indeed that Dahmer cruelly tortured his victims—the popular accounts of Dahmer nonetheless fed pernicious stereotypes and renewed certain fictions. And now I find myself, having spent a good portion of the last decade researching cannibals, wrapping up this project in my current position at Northern Arizona University, in a region that figures prominently in the controversies regarding prehistoric cannibalism among the ancient Anasazi. xi
Despite my sometimes commiseration with Melville, this time spent immersed with accounts of cannibalism—in Ohio and in Arizona—has not been a curse. I have spent this time tracing one mutable subject— cannibal fictions—over the course of a century, exploring the complicated means by which cannibalism in popular culture, literature, and academic discussions informs Americans about sexuality, gender, race, and nation. Early in the research process, my awareness of the range of American literary and cultural texts that represented or strategically made use of the subject of cannibalism kept broadening. I read Melville, of course, Poe, and Twain’s darkly comic “Cannibalism in the Cars.” My primarily literary focus drew me to Faulkner’s lesser known short story, “Red Leaves,” and Tennessee Williams’ “Desire and the Black Masseuse” and Suddenly Last Summer—which is given major coverage in a remarkable chapter on cannibalism and homosexuality in David Bergman’s Gaiety Transfigured (1991). In order to understand how cannibalism operated within the complexities of literary forms, I would need to understand, I thought, how it worked within the so-called popular or non-literary realm as well. I began reading Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon (the sequel Hannibal has by now been published and adapted for film), Fannie Flagg’s mid-brow literary novel, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes. I rented movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Soylent Green, Motel Hell, and even Flesh-Eating Mothers.In essence, I was compiling an encyclopedic list of cannibal productions, moments in our national cultural history when author/producers and readers were actively and/or passively considering the meaning of cannibalism. Once I had formed the basic parameters of my project, everyone I knew had something to contribute, from magazine articles, news clippings , greeting cards, and movie reviews to titles of novels including references to the Grimm fairy tale “The Juniper Tree,” Perrault’s original “Sleeping Beauty,” Doris Betts’ The Sharp Teeth of Love, and Dennis Cooper’s Frisk. I was given Jeffrey Dahmer’s father’s memoir, A Father’s Story, marketed in a non-tabloid, literary mode, its cover in soft, muted tones with a black-and-white photograph of the serial murderer as a young boy. Many students who hear about my research have leant me gruesome books by “death-metal” authors, tourist-journalism on Alfred (“Alferd”) Packer, the famous Colorado Cannibal, and even a massmailed letter with cannibal references from Focus on the Family (which I discuss in the epilogue). My own father even got into the act. One day, xii Preface and Acknowledgments • after several mentions of an article he had saved for me, I received in the mail a gruesome AP report, a detailed account of a psychopath who murdered his elderly aunt and performed deviant sexual acts with her, all before cannibalizing her. My experience of responding to people’s interest in the topic could form a chapter in its own right. If nothing else, people’s fascination with the topic was palpable. I became a lightning rod for cannibal jokes, for cannibal...