Cannibal Joyce

Notes

Notes Preface: From Cannibalism to Cannibalization 1. Here and throughout this study I abbreviate my citations from the standard editions of Joyce’s five principal works of fiction—fully identified in the bibliography—as follows : D = Dubliners, FW = Finnegans Wake, P = A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, SH = Stephen Hero, and U = Ulysses. References to Joyce’s early fiction provide the page numbers in the Viking Critical Editions of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the New Directions edition of Stephen Hero; references to Ulysses are to the episode and line number(s) in the Gabler edition; references to Finnegans Wake are to the page(s) and line number(s) in the Viking edition. 2. Personal correspondence between Prof. Dr. Ewald Mengel and the author. I am also indebted to Professor Mengel for the translation of Lüsebrink and Reichardt, quoted below. 3. Personal correspondence between Prof. Dr. Ewald Mengel and the author. Chapter 1. “Consumption, was it?”: Joyce and Cannibalism 1. Anthropophagy specifically denotes the consumption of humans, whereas cannibalism means like-eating-like within a species, human or nonhuman. Hitchcock’s “The Specialty of the House” was an adaptation of a short story with the same title, by Stanley Ellin, that first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine no. 54 (May 1948). Fortunately , Sbirro’s seems to have no connection to the international pizza chain Sbarro’s. 2. For a review of several uses (and abuses) of the idea of cannibalism in contemporary cultural critique, see King 106–23. 3. H. L. Malchow devotes two extended chapters, half the content, of his Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1996) to the century’s popular fixation on anthropophagy: “Cannibalism and Popular Culture” (41–123) and “Vampire Gothic and Late-Victorian Identity” (124–66). 4. The “Great Hunger,” the potato famine in Ireland (1846–47) that caused 1 to 1.5 million deaths (estimates vary), was only the most recent in a series of famines to strike Ireland during the centuries of English colonial occupation; an estimated 737,000 Irish also perished during an earlier nineteenth-century famine in 1816–17 (Askenasy 62). Kevin Whelan notes the ironic coincidence that the “worst season” of the Irish Famine and the misfortunes of the Donner party both occurred in the winter of 1846–47; rather than pursuing the additional implication that both these events drove their victims to cannibalism, Whelan simply argues that this parallel accounts for Joyce’s insistent emphasis on “food and hospitality” in “The Dead” (71–72), an emphasis that the Famine alone would sufficiently explain. 5. The deep connection between Western imperialism and cannibalism is a major theme of Arens’s The Man-Eating Myth; also see Barker, Hulme, and Iversen’s collection of essays, Cannibalism and the Colonial World. 6. I. M. Lewis, for example, describes the widespread conviction throughout Africa “that Europeans were cannibalistic witches” (94), often held among the very tribes that were themselves portrayed as cannibals by the European colonizers (89–98). Also see King 110–11. 7. Swift also associates the American with a taste for cannibalism in “A Modest Proposal ”: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London , that a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout” (493–94). 8. Although not as directly concerned with imperialism as The War of the Worlds, in his The Time Machine Wells nonetheless models his Time Traveler on the imperial explorer, seating him early in his story on a kind of golden throne from which he “survey[s] the broad view of our old world” and imposes his naïve construction of a future society upon the world he seems to command (42); toward the end of his narrative , he returns “to the same seat of yellow metal” and laughs “bitterly” at his mistaken “confidence” (89). 9. Another conceivable response of the colonized is direct resistance and reprojection of those behaviors projected upon them, back upon the colonizer—in the manner of the charges and counter-charges of cannibalism between Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation—but the power differential at play in imperialism will usually frustrate or silence such resistance. The common lore about the role of disease in the history of Western imperialism offers...