Cannibals and Kitchen Sinks

Abstract

rom serial killers to disease narratives to organ transplants to the spread of mad cow disease, flesh-eating (in one form or another) pervades twentiethand twenty-first-century existence," Priscilla Walton asserts in her book Our Cannibals, Ourselves (152). As this disparate list suggests, Walton's focus is less on literal cannibalistic acts and practices than it is on "diffuse and metaphoric" (28) deployments of anthropophagous imagery throughout contemporary popular culture. In seven brief yet wide-ranging chapters, Walton surveys cannibal symbolism in classic literary and travel narratives, in coverage of modern pandemics such as Ebola fever, in popular alien-invasion and vampire stories, in panics over mad cow disease, in representations of eating disorders, in serial killers narratives, and in contemporary consumer culture generally, dominated as it is by "various media frenzies and the compulsion to devour" (7). Many of the connections Walton makes, and a number of her readings of what is admittedly an impressively broad range of materials, are quite arresting, but her tendency to treat cannibalism in such a flexible way, to find the metaphor in such a scattered assortment of sites, ultimately fatally attenuates the concept. Walton herself seems at times concerned that her focus is too vague and wandering. "Although it might seem a stretch to move from flesh-eating to self-starvation," she comments in a section on anorexia nervosa, "it is imperative to remember that when the body