Cannibal Manifesto & The Folk Festive

Hello class! I hope everyone is enjoying their MLK holiday despite the rain. I wanted to post some thoughts on the readings for this week:

Oswaldo de Andrade’s “Cannibal Manifesto” seemed to be very manic and scatterbrained poetry, but also an urgent and emotional critique of contemporary consumerism expressed through the metaphor of cannibalism.

I noticed that the short, fragmented sentences made a particularly strong anti-structuralist statement, especially when de Andrade refers to a “tearing up” of various institutions. A few times, he mockingly referred to “grammatical structures” and “grammatical forms.” To me, the frantic nature of his prose echoed the idea that the deep structures of language only give the illusion of control over an otherwise chaotic existence. I also liked his few references to Freud- as cannibalism does bring to mind Freud’s oral phase of childhood development, whereby an infant brings the frightening excesses of the world into the “prison of the body” as a form of establishing control.

His essay also made me reconsider what constituted an “act of cannibalism,” as he seems to incorporate almost all elements of human existence into this metaphor. He condemns politics as nothing more than “the science of distribution,” chastises the screenplay for making the signs of consumption visible, and even alludes that love itself is an act of cannibalism. Despite wanting to believe in the more romantic notion that all love is selfless, I can see how there is an inherent cannibalistic desire to literally “possess” someone else’s love, and use them to fulfill your own deep void of loneliness. All in all, I found Oswaldo de Andrade’s “Cannibal Manifesto” extremely evocative.

As for Michael Nottingham’s “Downing the Folk Festive,” this essay made me reflect on my own experience studying abroad in the Czech Republic this past spring. I was lucky enough to be in Prague during their Easter festivities, and learned about some of the non-traditional ways that the Czech people celebrate this holiday. One custom, for example, involves the young boys of the town making whips out of reeds, and then slapping the young girls on Easter morning as a way of wishing them fertility. Then, the girls pour buckets of cold water on the boys to literally cool down their raging hormones. I learned that this is more of a provincial ritual in small towns outside of Prague, but it really fits with Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of the folk festival as a way to promote the unrestrained spontaneity of the masses by inverting social norms.

Jan Svankmajer’s bleaker and more modern approach to this idea of festivity truly seems to reflect the disillusioned history that the Czech people have endured throughout Communism. For me, “Little Otik” captured the dark humor that is typical of many other Czech films that I have seen. I’m eager to hear what the rest of you thought about the movie and the readings. Enjoy the rest of the holiday!

--Allison