From Communion to Cannibalism

by Maggie Kilgour

Focusing on such metaphors as communion and cannibalism in a wide range of Western literary works, Maggie Kilgour examines the opposition between outside and inside and the strategies of incorporation by which it is transcended. This opposition is basic to literature in that it underlies other polarities such as those between form and content, the literal and metaphorical, source and model. Kilgour demonstrates the usefulness of incorporation as a subsuming metaphor that describes the construction and then the dissolution of opposites or separate identities in a the distinction between outside and inside, essentially that of eater and eaten, is both absolute and unreciprocal and yet fades in the process of ingestion--as suggested in the saying "you are what you eat.".

Kilgour explores here a fable of identity central to Western thought that represents duality as the result of a fall from a primal symbiotic unity to which men have longed to return. However, while incorporation can be desired as the end of alienation, it can also be feared as a form of regression through which individual identity is lost. Beginning with the works of Homer, Ovid, Augustine, and Dante, Kilgour traces the ambivalent attitude toward incorporation throughout Western literature. She examines the Eucharist as a model for internalization in Renaissance texts, addresses the incorporation of past material in the nineteenth century, and concludes with a discussion of the role of incorporation in cultural theory today.

Originally published in 1990.

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Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Michael W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Modern subjectivity, with its anxious policing of the boundaries between inside and out, is born at the failure of the feast. Montaigne can wonder who the real cannibals are, and first Shakespeare, Milton, and Hobbes, and later Von Baader, Melville, and Levi-Strauss can declare that it is us. We are what we eat, and we tend to eat others before they can eat us. Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth can say that misrecognition (disregard/disrespect for the other) constitutes a kind of epistemological violence, not because it is an act of expulsion or denial, but because it is a morbid incorporation of weaker citizens according to our political appetites.

Found this book extremely helpful for my chapter on the Winter's Tale. Sometimes even a fun, if queasy read. The insights are carried along at a depth of close reading, the required sensitivity for which I very much envy (now self-analyzing...). Kilgour passes over most opportunities for a direct analysis of Shakespeare (she all but says that his poetic cannibalism is present throughout but implicitly), but I guess David Hillman's Cavellian-psychoanalytic readings are there if I need them. Worth it for the sections on Ovid alone. Timely follow-up for me after my recent intro to Melville.

[Yelixaveta]

I wonder what Maggie Kilgour thinks about Hannibal and Yellowjackets

[K✨]

yeah i was way too dumb for this one

[George Knighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I believe Kilgour achieved her wish to ‘do for cannibalism what Freud did for incest’ with this book

[Mills College Library]

801 K483 2014