13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

PORTER, Gerald

The Tender Cabin Boy: cannibalism and the subject

Cannibalism is a narrative of the self and of the ‘other’. Dramatising as it does the fear that the body's boundaries are unstable and can be breached, it remains the representative barbarism, yet it also lies at the centre of Western culture, in the form of the Catholic Mass, for example. From Othello's 'anthropophagi' to the racist jokes of the 1950s, the theme of cannibalism in popular discourse has coincided with periods of high colonialism when relations with the ‘other’ are at their most sharp. As The Silence of the Lambs showed, it is also a popular contemporary narrative of alienation.

This paper examines representations of cannibalism in nineteenth-century popular songs relating to the sea. Given the horror with which the practice was condemned in the nineteenth century, particularly by the proselytising churches, it is paradoxical that it became central to representations of contemporary capitalism. Appropriating a body that had degraded into matter, and breathing a living present into a dead past became metaphors of the colonial project. Bloodsucking and dismembering became regular features of popular legend. In these songs the victims are not the colonial other but usually disempowered members of the ship's crew such as cabin boys. They exist against a background of several documented cases of actual cannibalism. The song representations became so widely known that they attracted parody and burlesque in light opera and the music hall