Stephen Griffiths, the self-styled 'crossbow cannibal' who was sentenced to life for the murder of three women. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
At the trial of Stephen Griffiths – the self-named "crossbow cannibal" – the judge is reported to have said: "It is one thing to terrorise and kill, but to dismember and eat parts of the victims takes it to another level of the exertion of power and sexual gratification." As if killing another human being isn't extreme enough, eating them afterwards apparently compounds the seriousness of the crime; it's unforgivable. But given that the real tragedy – the loss of life – has already occurred, what is it that makes cannibalism so disturbing and unacceptable for us?
As children, most of us will have come across the idea of cannibalism through books and films. The most common scenario – at least while I was growing up – showed a group of black people in body paint and grass skirts boiling a couple of white people in safari clothing. Cannibalism was supposedly something that "uncivilised" people used to do before the Christians came along and taught them better. It only happened in another kind of world, at another time, to other people. It certainly wasn't what went on next door. But perhaps this way of distancing the subject, coupled with the fact that scary cannibals are a staple of childish entertainment, shows us that the subject is actually less alien and more captivating than we might like to think.
When we are in love it's perfectly normal to put bits of the beloved person into our mouths and even to say that we'd like to eat them. This is hardly surprising given that this was precisely the sort of thing so many of us did with our first love object, our mother. As well as sucking her we learned how to affect her – how to summon her and make her do things for us, like feed us, clean us or just pick us up.
Growing up involves stopping all of that. The thought of having once sucked on our mothers' breasts becomes disgusting to us. We separate from her, and start trying to get other people to respond to us and love us instead. The idea that we were ever so thoroughly merged with another person – that we were once literally a part of her body – is uncanny and disturbing, although absolutely undeniable. We act as though this was never the case.
The other famous contemporary cannibal, Issei Sagawa, explained how he chose his victim – a Dutch woman called Renée Hartevelt – because he wanted to absorb her beauty and energy. He wished to make her a part of himself, and to do so he felt he had to kill and ingest her. After spending some time in a French hospital he was extradited back to Japan, where the authorities declared him "evil" but not actually mad. He was released and is now, famously, a food critic. More recently, the German cannibal Armin Meiwes ate his willing victim after years of developing a strange romantic fantasy around the idea of eating a well-built young man. For both people, it seems, the other person's company wasn't enough.
This combination of controlling presences and absences, and of consuming a desired object, points to an infantile mode of relating. Most of us go on to make do with much less extreme interactions. We let our partners go out without us and satisfy ourselves with kissing them or sucking parts of their bodies. To put it mildly, none of these cannibals seem to have been able to cope with the necessary levels of separation involved in a consensual relationship. We can only wonder what set these people off on such an extreme path. Maybe details about Griffiths will emerge that will throw some light on his actions, but it's surely never possible to explain what makes a person capable of such hateful crimes.
In Stephen Griffiths's case, he at least appears to have been very upfront about his inclinations. He told psychiatrists almost 20 years ago that he fantasised about killing. He described himself in police interviews as misanthropic. But his contact with prostitutes suggests that he was interested in having other people there for something. Still, paying people to be there, rather than spending time with people who like you and therefore want to be there, are very different things.
The tragedy of people like Sagawa, Meiwes and Griffiths is that they appear unable to manage the delicate balancing act between proximity and distance that make up intimate human exchange. They display some of the problems we all grapple with. While these criminals commit acts that may be described as inhuman, like the grass-skirted "natives" they might also reveal something to us about ourselves.
Source:
No comments:
Post a Comment