Divine Cannibalism: A reading according to Slavenka Drakulic

‘You must sit down, ‘says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’ So I did sit and eat – George Herbert, Love (III)

In the World to Come there is no eating or drinking…but the righteous sit with crowns on their heads, feasting on the brightness of the divine presence, as it says, “And they beheld God, and did eat and drink” (Exodus 24:11)

Slavenka Drakulic opens her novel The Taste of a Man with the lines, “There is nothing I hate more than house-cleaning.” This quotidian line gives us no forewarning into the nature of the novel. The novel uses cleanliness as an abstract concept in the sense that cleanliness is closely related to the main themes of the novel which are the ideas of expiation of sins, atonement, but also divinity (cleanliness is next to godliness), and of course cannibalism. By looking at the mystical theology of Saint Teresa of Avila and reading through the novel as a theological tract we need to ask in the end the difference between madness and the divine, or even love as an act of what is deemed an insanity (psychopathology).

A brief synopsis of the story line is two academics, the female Tereza is a doctorate student in poetry from Poland, and the male Jose is a Brazilian anthropologist. They meet at a library, fall in love, and continue to become secluded from the outside. Tereza has a lover in Poland and Jose has a wife and child in Sao Paulo Brazil. The affair quickly ignites and the two become disillusioned with other responsibilities.

Jose the Brazilian anthropologist is studying cannibalism which of course is one of the main themes of the story. Brazil is closely associated with cannibalism in many interesting ways. The first of course is related to the Tupinambá indigenous people who settled in Brazil around 2900 years ago. The English called them the Tupi people. Hans Staden a German soldier was captured by the Tupi and in 1557, wrote a book explaining that he was to be devoured or eaten by the people in a war ritual. The war ritual after that was known to be a cannibalistic ritual where the defeated soldier was eaten in order to gain the soldiers power. The second interesting thing to note regarding Brazil is the poem Manifesto Antropófago by Oswald de Andrade. This poem asks the question, “Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question.” This question of course is the “cannibalizing” of Shakespeare (To be or not to be) by Brazil. Oswald explained that Brazil was a country that ‘cannibalized’ other countries in order to take what was powerful but to leave what was worthless such as European colonialism. Andrade even goes as far as stating that the revolutions (American and French) were Brazilian (Tupi) ideas that were written from Rousseau and other primitivist revolutionaries. Lastly the importance of Brazil in the story is that this is a country very devoted to Catholicism which is directly correlated with the sensuality of the country. Carnival (carnaval) is actually a religious event that has roots in prior pagan festivals, but interestingly the name comes from carnelevare, “to remove meat.”ⁱ

Tereza is the narrator and protagonist of the novel. She writes upon meeting Jose, “Just when I had learned that life was predictable, just when I had finally given up waiting for something to change, yearning for a true encounter (she meets Jose)” (Drakulic, 1997). Tereza is a Polish immigrant visiting New York City in order to study poetry. Poland much like Brazil is steeped in Catholicism as well; the overall majority of citizens in Poland are Roman Catholics. This is important because the name Tereza is chosen for many reasons the least of them is that in Greek it points to the harvest. Also, Tereza in written Portuguese is often a variant for Teresa, and the character is actually from Poland. In written Polish Teresa would often be translated as Renia. So why exactly does Drakulic decide to write Tereza in Jose’s native language and not in Tereza’s?

Who is Tereza or in a sense who are we as autonomous subjects? This is the idea that comes into prominence in Drakulic’s novel. Christine Battersby writes, “The human self is an individual which, under certain conditions, is able to create within itself space for a new life, a new individual (Battersby 1998:1-14). This idea of course is related to the Hegelian master and slave dialectic which accounts for intersubjectivity, or the need for self-assertion interposed with the same need for recognition. The human is unable to be considered human unless recognized by another human. To have intersubjectivity is to understand that some-thing is conscious of you, this you is branded with a particular name (signifier) within a particular spatial historicity. This is the reason that in the novel Tereza’s name is used so very little because she is losing her subjectivity. Here she relates this feeling by stating, “Skin and flesh were melting” and “bodies becoming extraneous”. “Self-Consciousness exists in and for itself in and by the fact that it exists (in and for itself) for another self-consciousness (Kojeve, 1969). This need for assertion and recognition often ends up in subjugation and dependence which is related to sado-masochistic relations. In this novel this “destructive energy” which isolated the two within a “closed system” no longer functioned according to this dialectic. The obvious reason for this is the third participant in the dialectic: God (divinity).

Saint Teresa of Avila’s mystical writings are similar to the way Drakulic portrays her own character Tereza. The same language permeates both text, and at times we are unable to determine if we are reading Drakulic’s novel or Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle. The mystic theology of Saint Teresa is related to a union with God or the divine. Once in the novel Jose states that Tereza and he are betrothed to each other, but Tereza realizes betrothal is not a permanent act of union with her earthly beloved. Similar in Saint Teresa she distinguishes between a spiritual marriage and spiritual betrothal. The marriage is a complete union with God:

For he has been pleased to unite himself with his creature in such a way that they have become like two who can’t be separated from one another (Avila, 1989)

Saint Teresa quotes Saint Paul’s Corinthians, “He who is joined to God becomes one spirit with him”. Tereza writes “Never again will I be my own master”. A betrothal is only partial union with God, and Tereza realizes this will never work because Jose is unable to act or think for himself and she feels she must act in his place. Tereza believes her act of cannibalism is a sacred act because it is full union with her replacement for God, an earthly possession related to desire, but we would be remiss to not understand the phallic resonance to this as well. Tereza writes, “Not for a single moment could I allow myself to think that I had committed a sin. That would be tantamount to suicide. There was no difference, there could be no difference, between the survivors in the Andes and me” (Drakulic, 1997). This question is important because Tereza here is relating her act of cannibalism to an act of divinity. She is speaking here of the Uruguayan ruby team that in 1972 their plane crashed in the Andes. With little food left the survivors of the plane crash began to eat the dead passengers. All the rugby players were Roman Catholic and began to equate this act of cannibalism with the act of Holy Communion. Tereza herself believed her act was an act of love or even the act of love, and equated this also with Holy Communion. Is the act of communion an act of cannibalism?

The act of communion has a very ancient past that we can only touch on, but it is important to understand some basic understanding of this act since it is related to divine ‘cannibalism’. Jesus said:

Amen, amen I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink (John 6:53-54)

Tereza believed her act of cannibalism was closely related to the act of transubstantiation. By consuming and ingesting her lover he would be within her, much like Christ here states during the act of communion he will be with us, and we shall live forever. Jesus never recanted to his followers that this act was a symbolic act, even after the Jewish people that followed him questioned this idea. Jesus simply said if you don’t believe then retreat from me. Communion is related to the Jewish Passover, and Jesus was first and foremost a Jew. He was speaking to Jewish people who expected a messiah, a warrior king, but the messiah is directly related to Moses or a second Moses. Passover for Jews comes from the original sacrifice of a year-old baby lamb without broken bones or other deviations. Later when Jesus sat his disciples down on Passover he told them basically he was the new lamb, or the “new everlasting covenant” and this meal “Set his passion and death in motion, a sign that was not totally complete until his life had come to an end” (Pitre, 2011). Tereza’s idea was that she was consuming her lover in order to start a new life, a life born out of the flesh of her lover. She believed in a materialist understanding of transubstantiation in which she was creating a new being since the old being was no longer left because of the kenotic passion she had for her lover, in which “(she) entered a dark chamber where nothing but the senses exist” (Drakulic, 1997).

Finally we have come to ask the question regarding sanity and trauma. Drakulic describes in a scattered way memories of Tereza getting molested by her uncle. This of course starts to explain the dissociation Tereza has throughout the entire novel. Even the Eucharist itself can be related to trauma. The Eucharist or Holy Communion makes present an event of a murder, a bloody murder in which a man is pinned to a cross and we that receive this bread are called to identify in this madness (Pound, 2007). However, once the bread is received we take part in a ritual that has roots as far back as the Levites in which they kept the Bread of the Face in a tabernacle (Pitre, 2011) and as Marcus Pound explains a space opens up that allows us to open up for the possibility of healing because we understand that the impossible is made possible as the bread becomes the spirit of Jesus (love). Love is so related to death that we must ask if this closeness to death is not the thing itself that is to blame. In one of the few quotes in Drakulic’s novel from Jose, he says, “Passion can’t be explained”.

Works Cited

Avila, T. o. (1989). Interior Castle. New York: Doubleday.

Battersby, C. (1998). The Phenomenal Woman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Drakulic, S. (1997). The Taste of a Man. Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Kojeve, A. (1969). Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Ithaca: Cornell University.

Pitre, B. (2011). Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist. New York: DoubleDay.

Pound, M. (2007). Theolgy, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma. London: SCM Press.