Paper about Cannibalism

When Lu Xun and Jonathan Swift wrote about cannibalism in their respective cultures, both did it for political reasons. Xun was expressing his view that the old ways were eating away at the modern man and at a friend’s suggestion, altered the final line of the story to support the Fourth of May Movement and the effort to bring about Chinese Communism even though he himself never joined the Communist Party. Xun was writing within the context of Chinese culture as cannibalism was practiced in parts of China until the 1800s (Yu 1995).There is also some evidence that the practice may be continuing in limited forms in some parts of the country, with a 1995 newspaper article in Hong Kong reporting that the practice continued. Swift, on the other hand, was writing the most atrocious thing that he could imagine, completely ironically. It is then easy to point to motivation as the one unifying theme behind Xun’s and Swift’s works and any number of contradictions in the writing, including historical background and style.

Xun’s deliberate effort to tie his first published short story, “A Madman’s Diary” to the May Fourth Movement may have been suggested by another supporter of the “new China”, but even without the final line, the story is a tribute to his belief that a modern China, stepping away from feudalism and the previous era was a better thing (Craig 1990). “Luxun saw China’s old society as rotten and corrupt. Only after a radical reform, he felt, would the Chinese be able to realize their human potential”. (Craig 1990).This theory of Xun’s writing is evident from the beginning in “A Madman’s Diary” In the opening to the story; Xun (or the narrator) claims that the diary is excerpts from the actual diary of a rural friend who had recently suffered an illness.

The man is the younger of two brothers whom the narrator had known for 20 years and attended school with (Xun 1918). Intriguingly, after this initial introduction we do not hear from the narrator again and the remainder of the story is in the narrator’s claim, exactly excerpted from the diary. (1918). Xun himself was 26 when the story was written.Indeed, it seems likely the Xun may then have taken over the role of the madman himself, referring to his teachings by his older brother about the ways of country, including a propensity for cannibalism.

He writes of those who oppress the madman, one whom he even identifies by a name which literally translated means “Ancient Ways” in Chinese. As we will discuss later, this is typical of the metaphoric language that Xun uses throughout the work. Whether we identify the madman as Xun himself or not, it is clear that the brother teaching him the traditional ways of China.Xun specifically mentions that the madman’s brother taught him the practice of a child cutting off a piece of their own flesh and boiling it in soup for an ill, elderly parent as a cure (1918).

That practice was widely held through at least three Chinese Dynasties (Yu 1995). Throughout the story, Xun uses the metaphor of others eating him to question the old ways, asking in the eighth diary entry, “Is it right? ” (1918) Swift’s political commentary is also evident throughout his “A Modest Proposal”, but where Xun uses metaphor, Swift employs the absurd and ironic.He argues as early as the first page of text that the Kingdom is in a deplorable state and then begins his earnest proposal to right the state of affairs through a deliberate cultivation of children as a delicacy (Swift 1729). Unlike the Chinese, the Irish did not have a lengthy history of cannibalism and likely to the educated Swift, the proposal of eating the children was as absurd as it gets. Like Xun, he was calling for a major reform in the country’s politics, though he was not actively supporting a revolution. Instead, Swift’s purpose was to draw attention to the problem in a manner that a politician could not.

And, unlike Xun, who is ultimately commenting on the need to move away from the existing societal regime, Swift uses the capitalist society of the British Empire to promote his proposal, explaining in great detail how the proposal would improve Ireland’s economic situation and thus that of the empire (1729). The desire for extreme societal change may however be the only thing the two “cannibalism” works have in common. As noted earlier, the Irish did not have a cultural history of cannibalism, and so to them the entire proposal was absurd.It was shockingly so and therefore noteworthy, but absurd nonetheless. China had a lengthy history of cannibalism so his metaphor that the adman feared he would be eaten was not shocking for its surface thoughts but for its underlying meaning.

The eating of other people was already an established practice in parts of China and had only recently been abandoned. “When all normal medical resources failed to cure a dying parent, the daughter or daughter-in-law (sometimes also son) would at times slice off a piece of flesh from her/his thigh and cook it in broth to offer it as medicine/food.A miraculous recovery was always the result. Although this practice was reported to begin in the T'ang, it was only after the Sung and especially during the Ming and the Ch'ing that it became increasingly a commonplace occurrence. ” (Yu 1995) Even now, almost a century later, the Chinese tradition of using human flesh as a medicinal aid has not completely disappeared.

Though it is not state sanctioned, in 1995 the “Eastern Express” newspaper in Hong Kong reported that some people were eating aborted fetuses as a manner to improve their overall health and skin (1995).One man told the reporter that he made a soup of ginger, pork, and carrot and combined it with the fetus received from his doctor to form an asthma treatment (“Eastern Express” 1995). This completely different historical background with regard to cannibalism places the two writings in completely different lights. The other huge difference between the Xun work and the Swift work comes in the literary style they employ. Xun uses a traditional parable type story to make his point, while Swift relies on the use of the absurd and irony to make his point.

Xun’s use of metaphor is evident to the end, including his final sentences. The madman hopes that there are still innocents who have not been corrupted by the Chinese tradition and he expresses it like this “Perhaps there are still children who have not eaten men…” (Xun 1918). Since we know that Xun has employed the use of the ancient practice of eating people as metaphor for the ties to the traditional ways, it is somewhat fitting that he describes one with revolutionary ideas as a madman.Labeling him as such, he argues will make it easier for society to destroy him, or eat him, without feeling any guilt. “In the future when I was eaten, not only would there be no trouble, but people would probably be grateful to them,” the madman astutely observes (Xun 1918). His point here is that the old ways would label someone as mad or as criminal as a way to suppress new ideas.

He assumes minor sophistication in his readers that they can understand the metaphors he is using, but in choosing such a metaphor also makes it clear to the less astute that the madman deplores the concept of eating people.And, that he believes people should question why they do things, instead of just blindly accepting them as the way it is (1918). Swift assumes a higher level of sophistication in his readers, expecting them, or at least the great majority of them, to understand that it is purely absurd to even consider that a parent would give birth to a child, nurses it for a year and then sells it to the slaughtering house to be several meals for the wealthy (1729).By identifying everything about his proposal, including assumed price scale for the yearlings and a recommendation on how they might be served for a dinner with visitors, Swift meant to make the absurdity of the proposal perfectly clear. It is with extreme irony that he talks about the need for certain portions of the population to be retained as breeding stock and others to be assumed to be lost due to death via natural causes. The very point that Swift was putting a price tag on the head of a child was meant to offend and draw gasps.

It is a wonder then how many issues of the day Swift actually meant to be commenting on in his “Modest Proposal”. Clearly, he was commenting on the humanitarian crisis in Ireland, with overcrowding, begging and the lack of economic opportunity. But he also comments on the religious conflict of Ireland, distinguishing between Protestant and Catholic children in their availability and even his reduction of the value of human life to a specific dollars and cents (or halfpence as the case may be) may have been a commentary on rampant human slavery around the world.Whatever his complete agenda, Swift relied on a proposal he thought no one would take seriously to say things that might have been considered seditious if he had said them directly. What is most remarkable about these two pieces, separated by geography and nearly two centuries, is that they both relied on cannibalism to make a completely unrelated point about the need for social change. Some sixty years after Xun, George Romero would likewise use cannibalism, this time in the form of flesh-eating zombies, to critique the society in which he lived.

Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” was a commentary on consumerism and the idea that even when they were brain-dead Americans would seek out shopping malls. (Romero 1978). The fact that artists across this time frame would resort to similar themes to make a point about man’s need for change speaks loudly. What is it about the call for revolution that requires that it be done with tongue-in-cheek or via metaphor? Whatever the cause, Xun and Swift had very different background and styles when employing the use of cannibalism to call for social reform, but they did it and did it well.