Bien Manger, Bien Mangé: Edible Reciprocity in Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil

Abstract

In his Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil [History of a voyage to the land of Brazil] , the French Protestant Jean de Lery gives an ambivalent account of his journey: he recalls with loathing the violent strangeness of the New World, but he also pines for Brazil and the indigenous Tupinamba hosts that he left behind. Drawing on a framework of critical animal studies, this essay reads Lery’s early modern travel narrative as an exploratory alternative to human exceptionalism, particularly to the complex of colonial, masculine, and carnivorous forces of domination that bolster humanist subjectivity (what Derrida calls carno-phallogocentrism). In Lery’s narration, existing alimentary categories constantly threaten to collapse; the categories of eating subject and eaten object are perpetually unfixed. This essay traces the fears and desires that accompany the radical interchangeability of eater and eaten. Lery’s text proposes an unsettled, unsettling subjectivity that is fascinated by its own vulnerability to consumption and attentive to the horror and pleasure of all manner of eating practices. This alternative subjectivity suggests the basis of an ethical project akin to Derrida’s rule of “eating well”—a practice of openness to reciprocal encounter with both human and animal others.