Abstract
Free from borders and limits, languageless places are imagined in the Western tradition either as sub-human, nightmarish spaces of chaos or divine points of origin and destination. A good example of this phenomenon appears in the works of Hesiod, who will allow me to set up the relationship between cannibalism and poetic language. Recall that, in Hesiod’s Theogony, poetic language is itself presented as the medium through which the languageless past and future may be represented and ordered. Before they grant the gift of making poetry to shepherds, the muses call them “mere bellies”.1 But Hesiod tells what happened when the muses “breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things that were aforetime.”2 It is through his transformation from a mere belly to a mortal with a divine voice that Hesiod captures the essence of the relationship between poetic language and the languageless place, whether it be the nearly divine Golden Age of the Works and Days or the hollow caves of the Theogony in which monstrous, hyper-animal creatures eat raw flesh. My paper explores the elemental passion for the languageless place in two distinct ways: 1) In the realm of representation, as an inherent feature of poetic language; and 2) Beyond the realm of representation, as an attribute of the psychopathological cannibal. By looking at the differences between represented and enacted desires for languagelessness, I hope to show how the figurative word, or what we might call poetic language, becomes the fragile marker of humanness. Poetic language in this sense comes to condense and reflect upon the central role that language in general plays in the psychical and intellectual fulfillment, as well as the social concord, of human beings.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1914), p. 81.
Ibid.
These are Augustine’s terms. See De Doctrina Christiana, I.2.
See Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto Antropéfago”, in A Utopia Antropofâgica,ed. Benedito Nunes (San Paulo: Globo, 1990), pp. 47–52.
My reading of Zamyatin’s We owes a great deal to the compelling essay by Jurij Striedter: “Journeys Through Utopia: Introductory Remarks to the Post-Revolutionary Russian Utopian Novel”, Poetics Today 3 (1982): 33–60.
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Avon Books, 1972), p. 2.
Jakobson describes in similar terms the poetic function or poeticity of language: “[B]esides the direct awareness of the identity between sign and object (A is Al), there is a necessity for the direct awareness of the inadequacy of that identity (A is not Al)” (Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature [Cambridge, Mass.; London: Belknap Press, 1987], p. 378). Combining direct awareness with an awareness of indirection, the poetic function of language appears to be fundamentally associated with self-consciousness, wherein the observing “I” detects at once an “I” and a “not I”.
Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 39.
Martin Heidegger, “... Poetically Man Dwells...” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 216.
Ibid., p. 218.
See, for example, Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology”, New Literary History 6 (1974): 5–74; and the essays in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Introjecter-incorporer: Deuil ou mélancolie”, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 6 (1972): p. 112.
Richard L. Vanden Burgh and John F. Kelly, “Vampirism”, Archives of General Psychiatry 11 (1964): p. 546. Cf. Robert S. McCully, “Vampirism: Historical Perspective and Underlying Process in Relation to a Case of Auto-Vampirism”, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 139 (1964s): 440–452; A. Bourguignon, “Situation du vampirisme et de l’autovampirisme”, Annales Médico-Psychologiques 1 (1977): 181–196.
See the discussion of subjectivity and language by Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 199.
One report on this case was published by the medical-legal team treating the patient: M. Bénézech, M. Bourgeois, J. Villeger and B. Etchegaray, “Cannibalisme et vampirisme chez un schizophrène multimeurtrier”, Bourdeaux Médical, 1980, XIII, pp. 1261–1265. A more complete report was prepared by a larger group of experts: G. Fellion et al., “Du fantasme à l’acte criminel et cannibalique”, Annales Médico-Psychologiques 138 (1980): 596–608.
Fellion, op. cit., p. 598.
Bénézech, op. cit., p. 1263.
Fellion, op. cit., p. 599.
Ibid.
Compare the case of a Papua New Guinea man who similarly takes in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, sacrificing his son and eating his heart. “He misinterpreted the intent of those teachings but correctly assessed their content and literal meaning” (B. G. Burton-Bradley, “Cannibalism for Cargo”, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 143 [1976]: p. 430).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dunton-Downer, L. (1995). Languageless Places and Poetic Language: The Boundless Desire of Cannibal Clément X. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Elemental Passion for Place in the Ontopoiesis of Life. Analecta Husserliana, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3298-7_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3298-7_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4376-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-3298-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive