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In 1972, Rene Girard noted that although incest and cannibalism are equally important to the foundational myths of the West, "we are perhaps more distracted" by the former than the latter. He speculated, however, that incest may have claimed greater attention "only because cannibalism has not yet found its Freud and been promoted to the status of a major contemporary myth" (276-77). While Girard's observation may have been true in 1972, it seems less so in 1997, when we are in the midst of a veritable boom of cannibal literature, films, and criticism. Since the 1960s the cannibal has become a major modern mythical figure-especially in films ranging from George Romero's Living Dead series, through other cult hits such as Soylent Green, The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, Eating Raoul, Parents, Eat the Rich, Big Meat Eater, CHUD, to more recent art films: The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover and Delicatessen. Even more tellingly, perhaps, cannibalism has moved into the Hollywood mainstream, through the film adaptations of two novels, Fried Green Tomatoes and, most famously, Silence of the Lambs which sent a cannibal to the academy awards.
In many of these works, cannibalism clearly provides a delicious, if rather reductive, image for the nightmare of a "consumer" society, uneasy about its own material appetites, including its own increasing hunger for such lurid tales. So, for example, in Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the refugees from the cannibal zombies hide in a shopping mall, whose walls separate two mirrorforms of conspicuous consumption. The image of the cannibal thus serves the satiric function of revealing the heart of darkness within contemporary society, reminding us that civilization conceals its own forms of savagery. The satiric potential of the cannibal as a form of cultural critique may in turn suggest the reasons why this figure also seems to be playing an increasingly important role in recent anthropological, New Historicist, post-colonial, and feminist analyses of literature and society. I recently participated in a "Symposium" at the University of Essex, on "Consuming Others: Cannibalism in the 1990s," which featured presentations by a number of critics who have been exploring the implications of what William Arens first controversially called the "man-eating myth," including Arens, Gananath Obeyesekere, Peter Hulme, Francis Barker, and...