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The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Michael Parrish Lee

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture General Editor: Joseph Bristow

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

Series Editor

Joseph Bristow Department of English

University of California – Los Angeles Los Angeles, California, USA

Aim of the series

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siécle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14607

Michael Parrish Lee

The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Michael Parrish Lee

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

ISBN 978-1-137-49937-0 ISBN 978-1-137-49938-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-49938-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959992

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

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A cknowledgments

My first thanks go to Tabitha Sparks and Ned Schantz for their insightful and loyal guidance during and beyond this book’s origins as a PhD dissertation at McGill University. Tabitha was the first person to see this project’s potential, and she has nurtured it over the years, helping me to discover focus, clarity, and a sense of what is at stake in my work and, most important, to learn that these things do not dilute the surprise and strangeness of one’s engagement with a topic, but make it sharper. Ned has been that rarest combination of remarkable teacher and remarkable friend. In the boundless generosity of his time and intellect, I have found much inspiration; he has always pushed me to make my work better than I realized it could be, and his brilliance informs every page of this book. I am also deeply grateful to Monique Morgan, Hilary Schor, Brian Cowan, and Allan Hepburn for their careful reading of and invaluable feedback on this project in its earlier incarnation and for providing advice and encouragement that was crucial to shaping it into a book.

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to those friends and colleagues who have read and responded to sections of this manuscript at various stages and given me the gift of their time and intelligence in the many discussions and debates that have helped shape my thinking about this work; it is my pleasure to thank Tara Macdonald, Joel Deshaye, Dana Broadbent, Robin Feenstra, Lindsay Holmgren, Ross Bullen, Gregory Phipps, Chad Burt, Nasser Hussain, and Caroline Herbert. Thank you to Jeff for keeping my food plots rooted in the prairie soil and to Gregory Brophy for being my glorious time-traveling companion through a nineteenth century that didn’t always want us, for making this voyage feel vital and exciting,

and for providing most of the soundtrack. I am also grateful to Robert Burroughs, Ruth Robbins, and Josephine Guy, as well as Ned, Tabitha, Joel, and Caroline for reading book proposal drafts. Further thanks go to Caroline Krzakowski and Joel for help with translation, and to Lynda Pratt for her continued support and for helping me to not lose sight of this work amid other professional commitments.

This project was supported at various stages by McGill University, which provided research funding and travel grants, a Gloriana Martineau Fellowship, and Leeds Beckett University, which provided travel funding. I am grateful to Monique Morgan and to Miranda Hickman for helping support my PhD studies by employing me as a research assistant as well as for being wonderful teachers. Thank you to Willoughby the bulldog and his mum, Mrs. Ivory; my role as Willoughby’s tutor provided me with a home for the majority of my time at McGill and a place to make loud music. I want to thank Dana Baran and Stewart Gottfried for taking me in and providing me with a home during a crucial final month of writing my dissertation; I am grateful to Martin Shapiro for putting me in touch with them and for always being an intellectual supporter and guiding light.

Portions of Chapters 5 and 6 first appeared in an earlier form as the article “Reading Meat in H. G. Wells,” first published in Studies in the Novel 42.3 (2010), pp. 249–268. Copyright © 2010 Johns Hopkins University Press and University of North Texas. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Portions of the Introduction and Chapter 1 first appeared in an earlier form as “The Nothing in the Novel: Jane Austen and the Food Plot,” originally published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45.3 (2012), pp. 368–388. Copyright © 2012, Novel, Inc. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder and the present publisher, Duke University Press. www.dukeupress.edu. My thanks to the readers for these journals for responses that sharpened this material and to audiences at various conferences and seminars who listened to and engaged with work in progress. I would also like to thank Ben Doyle, Tomas Rene, and Eva Hodgkin at Palgrave, and I am grateful to the series editor Joseph Bristow and the anonymous readers for Palgrave for providing feedback that has helped make this a better, clearer book.

To my family I owe much more than I can say. Mom, Dad, Amy, Matt, and Grandma, without your endless love and support I would not have been able to write this. To the Herberts and Lovedays—Clifford, Wendy, Georgia, Daniel, Edward, and Elliot—thank you for being my family and for helping me make a home on this side of the Atlantic. Caroline,

my love, how can I begin? You are my best reader and my best friend. Throughout this long process you have given me your love and support and made the days sparkle. This book is dedicated to you and to Jude, who has already taught me more about the love of language than any writer I have ever read.

Introduction: Reading for the Food Plot

Eating and thE novEl

This book stems from a deceptively simple question: what is eating doing in novels? E. M. Forster suggests that “[f]ood in fiction is mainly social. It draws characters together, but they seldom require it physiologically, seldom enjoy it […]. They hunger for each other, as we do in life, but our equally constant longing for breakfast and lunch does not get reflected” (61). Yet think, for instance, of the antisocial Dr. Grant eating himself to death at the end of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) or Jos Sedley’s distraction from Becky Sharp by sandwiches and jellies in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–1848). Imagine trying to hold a dinner conversation with the narcoleptic “fat boy” in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836–1837) as he “leer[s] horribly” at your food (57) or with Magwitch in Great Expectations (1860–1861) as he gobbles a stolen pork pie, “staring distrustfully” as if afraid “of somebody’s coming to take the pie away” (19). By paying attention to how and which characters do in fact long for, enjoy, and worry about their meals, we see fiction gesturing beyond a narrow version of the “social” that would define itself against the materiality of eating—against hunger, appetite, and the sensuous pleasure of food. Oriented most vividly toward objects of the alimentary, rather than the sexual or matrimonial, variety, such characters do not fit comfortably within the marriage plot that constitutes the nineteenthcentury British novel’s seemingly central narrative structure, the would-be

© The Author(s) 2016 M.P. Lee, The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-49938-7_1

ultimate destination of fictive togetherness. Eating, I contend, has the potential to steer the novel away from sexuality altogether, challenging the power of desire to consolidate identity, motivate action, and drive narrative toward a resolution.

This book argues that food, eating, and appetite are central to the form of the nineteenth-century British novel. My core claim is that what is generally understood to be this novel’s predominant narrative structure, the marriage plot, works in tandem and in tension with another structure that I call “the food plot.” With the emergence of Malthusian population theory and its unsettling links between sexuality and the food supply, the British novel became animated by the interplay between these two plots and, through them, the friction between desire and appetite. The food plot is at once the narrative structure against which the marriage plot and psychological depth take shape and the thing that threatens to undo them. Sometimes fragmentary and elusive, sometimes sustained and overt, the food plot constitutes those moments and sequences where the materiality of food, eating, and appetite garner narrative attention. Such moments—for example, sustained focus on a character’s hunger, dietary worries, or culinary pleasure; on the scarcity of food, its strangeness, poor preparation, or bad service; or, in the extreme cases of cannibalism and vampirism, on food and character becoming one and the same—challenge the cohesion of marriage plots and the psychological structures they generate. The more material novelistic eating becomes, the more it disrupts the movement of narrative toward wedlock and the depiction of personhood as centrally composed of a deep interior, an inside to be filled with yearnings and sympathies instead of with bread and cheese.

Since Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel, critics have aligned the novel as a form with companionate marriage and psychological depth, or what Georg Lukács calls “interiority” (89). And despite some significant revisions to this alignment, it still makes up a key part of understandings of the nineteenth-century novel, where, even when marriages fail to occur, fail altogether, or appear facilitated by nonheterosexual desires, it generally seems to be the path toward marriage on which protagonists discover themselves and enrich their understandings of other people.1 While ingeniously queering Jane Austen’s style as resisting the confines of gender and personality, D. A. Miller still sees her novels as finally making their heroines realize the flawed “particularity” (Style 53) of being a “Person fit for coupling” (54). Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) famously wants to achieve extraordinary things, but even in

Catherine Gallagher’s reading, unusually attuned as it is to the complexities of embodiment, Dorothea becomes fully animated only with the “eruption of erotic sensation,” the experience of “an utterly individual longing, a yearning toward some one man” that reshapes her “around a sexual and reproductive core” (“Immanent Victorian” 71). Dorothea’s transformation shouldn’t feel too surprising in present-day Anglo-American culture, where the marriage plot still informs so many of our narratives, from bank ads to romantic comedies, that endlessly remind us that what we want, and what our story is, is to end up with another person. But is it really through our romantic longings rather than our gurgling stomachs that our insides reveal themselves most vividly? Is Peter Brooks right to propose in Reading for the Plot that narrative is fundamentally mobilized by erotic desire? I’m not so sure.

What if behind the familiar story of people defined and driven by the longing for companionship and love there were another story, a story of people driven by material appetite—by the need to eat and keep on eating, the need to survive and sustain themselves at the most basic bodily level? It is not necessarily the most flattering picture of humanity, especially if we are invested in distinguishing ourselves by the depth of our feelings rather than the rumble in our bellies. What then if a lot of nineteenth-century novelists were invested in the more flattering story of people with deep feelings caring about and desiring other people with deep feelings while also knowing, or fearing, the other story: worrying that behind or beside love and desire lurked the ever-present need to eat, and that this might be the real human story? I propose that, through these concerns, the nineteenth-century British novel took on a double form, with the marriage plot usually in the foreground, but the food plot haunting it from the shadows.

By reading for the food plot, we encounter places in novels where marriage plots break down, where subjectivity seems less deep and secure, and where the drives and drifts of desire can no longer carry the story. Exploring fiction by Austen, Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells, I chart the evolving relationship between the marriage plot and the food plot over the course of the nineteenth century as marriage plots become less stable and eating gains material and narrative force. This study is primarily a theory of the novel, and while I read novelistic form as historically engaged, I am equally interested in the ways in which novels do not always behave as mere outlets for other cultural or historical forces, often actively responding to, coming into tension with, or influencing them. In other

words, I treat novels as culturally specific forms that interact with but are not entirely reducible to other forms of culture. This is not a cultural history of either eating or marriage, although it is informed by work in both of these fields. It is, rather, a book about how fiction represents eating and appetite, the functions that such representations serve, and their centrality to the workings of the novel as a form.

Until relatively recently, literary criticism has tended either to ignore food and eating or to dismiss them as unimportant. For instance, as Peter Brooks begins to discuss the “textual erotics” that he sees as organizing narrative (37), he contrasts the “socially defined” desires of nineteenthcentury protagonists (39) to the efforts at avoiding “starvation” (38) found in earlier texts—efforts that for Brooks constitute a “rock-bottom paradigm of the dynamic of desire.” Appetite in this account appears primitive, almost subsocial, not sophisticated enough for further analysis. Similarly, while arguing that “great novelists reveal the imitative nature of desire” (14), René Girard dismissively notes Sancho Panza’s apparently unmediated appetite in Don Quixote (1605, 1615): “Some of Sancho’s desires are not imitated, for example, those aroused by the sight of a piece of cheese or a goatskin of wine. But Sancho has other ambitions besides filling his stomach” (3). Like Brooks, Girard fastens on appetite as a lower threshold to the model of literary desire that he puts forward. He brushes aside Sancho’s desire to eat as too simple, too much a unilateral relationship between person and object, to be worth serious discussion in an analysis that theorizes desire in novels as complex, “triangular,” and socially mediated (3). Or consider Franco Moretti’s more recent offhand designation of novelistic eating as the “perfect filler” (Bourgeois 77), as though of all the things that might occur in fiction, eating were particularly well suited to creating the sense that nothing is happening.

The Food Plot joins efforts in nineteenth-century studies to bring food and eating into view and demonstrate their importance to fiction. Books such as Gwen Hyman’s Making a Man and Annette Cozzi’s Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction participate in a growing cross-disciplinary interest in food and eating in the social sciences and humanities known as food studies that is helping draw attention to an understudied topic. A corrective to the assumption that eating is not worthy of serious thought, food studies and the literary criticism that shares its focus generally aligns with Roland Barthes’s insistence that “food signifies” (“Food Consumption” 21). Yet, in this way, such criticism also tends to share E. M. Forster’s view of food in fiction as “mainly social”—often

treating it more as an index of cultural concerns than as something tied to appetite and bodily necessity.2 For instance, Cozzi’s primary claim is that “food is one of the most fundamental signifiers of national identity, and literary representations of food […] reveal how that identity is culturally constructed” (5), and Hyman argues that “[a]nxieties about status and place” are “made strongly manifest when the gentleman sits down to eat” (13). These are productive approaches that importantly highlight instances in novels when food and eating function as revelatory windows into key issues such as gender and national identity. But must concerns over food and eating primarily reflect some preexisting social? Do we not also assemble the social, in part, so that we might eat, so that we might create and maintain a food supply?3

The Food Plot is in dialogue with such work when relevant, but my book takes a different approach. As this project developed, I became increasingly curious about those instances in fiction when food, eating, and appetite resist acting as a social mirror or perform work that exceeds this function. And I discovered some striking similarities between those sequences in which fiction foregrounds the materiality of food and eating over and above their symbolic or indexical roles, similarities that made me think harder especially about the significance of appetite in the novel. Appetite in nineteenth-century fiction is neither equivalent to desire nor a low-end or primitive form of desire. Instead, the interaction between the marriage plot and the food plot plays out an ongoing tension between desire and appetite influenced by Malthusian concerns over population and the fraught relationship between sexuality and the food supply. This crucial role of appetite and the bodily necessity it often indicates is one of the reasons why, although I look at some examples of food production, the characters that enter into food plots are usually eaters or would-be eaters. This is also part of why the primary focus of this book is food and eating and not some other order of materiality, whether objects or money.4

The friction between appetite and desire means that nineteenth-century fiction does more than deploy an “anorexic logic that validated the slim body as a symbol of woman’s lack of corporeality, her sexual purity, and her respectable middle-class social status,” as Anna Krugovoy Silver puts it in Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (14), drawing on the earlier arguments of Helena Michie, Sandra M. Gilbert, and Susan Gubar. While remnants of what Carolyn Korsmeyer identifies as an earlier association of alimentary taste with “the feminine” and of appetite with both food and sex (5) might have lingered in the period, the nineteenth-century novel

from Jane Austen forward does not simply fashion a genteel, desexualized anorexic femininity but rather develops a general model of heterosexual interiority that is defined against appetite. Of course, as my readings should make clear, the stakes of being associated with eating or reduced to appetite are often very different for men and women in fiction due largely to deep asymmetries of social and economic power. If a bachelor like Jos Sedley in Vanity Fair can command marital prospects even as he gushes about curry, women’s food plots more often involve higher levels of shame, risk, and danger, from the unmarried Miss Matty’s reluctance to give herself over to the enjoyment of eating oranges in front of other people in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–1853) to Virginia and Alice Madden’s scant meals and calculations of the minimum amount of food that “could support life” (44) in George Gissing’s Odd Women (1893). Such gendered differences in characters’ experiences of the food plot are significant and inform my analyses, but they will not be my central focus since readings of eating along gender lines—whether Hyman’s gentlemen or Silver’s anorexic women—have, for all their valuable insights, tended to obscure key similarities across gender divisions that contribute to the novel’s construction of deep heterosexual selfhood against appetite.

Rather than seeing the food plot as mainly a woman’s story or a man’s story, my understanding of novelistic eating comes closer to that of Joseph Litvak, whose Strange Gourmets adopts a queer theoretical framework to explore the perversity of eating and appetite in nineteenth-century fiction. Like Litvak, I follow Pierre Bourdieu in seeking to put pressure on the hierarchy “between aesthetic taste” and “‘merely’ culinary taste” (8), but while Litvak often collapses together “the culinary” and “the erotic,” I am more interested in delineating the interplay between appetite and desire. Although my book has a different method from Litvak’s and isn’t primarily a study of queer desire, the food plot often does resemble a queer force in that it pulls against the heterosexual gravity of the marriage plot, much as Lee Edelman’s take on the “death drive” resists what he calls the “reproductive futurism” that he sees as the “limit and horizon” of the “political field” (27). However, the food plot presents a perhaps even greater challenge to this field, since it marks not only the point where heterosexuality collapses but also a limit point of sexuality itself. And where Edelman sees children as the primary embodiments of futurism, the food plot, in so frequently associating them with appetite, instead puts children in the position of being potential Malthusian devourers of the future.

The food plot marks the possibility of appetite overtaking desire as the driving force of narrative and selfhood. And all the better if the enddriven connotations of the word “plot” seem misleading when describing something so frequently fragmentary or abandoned, since it is precisely the nature of the food plot to resist the narrative closure and promise of futurity offered by the marriage plot. The food plot is a sort of shadow plot, shifting and fleeting. In this sense it is closer to several of the less maplike meanings of the word “plot”: “a small portion of a surface differing in character or aspect from the remainder; a mark, patch, spot,” “a stain,” or indeed a “burial plot” (OED)—which is appropriate since novels sometimes represent eating-oriented characters as positioned between life and death. At its most incipient—in the novels of Jane Austen—the food plot appears discontinuous, like many scattered plots that don’t really go anywhere. At its strongest—say, in Great Expectations or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)—it shapes the plot as a whole and often finds embodiment in figures like Magwitch or the vampiric Count.

To be sure, the food plot does not encapsulate all instances of food and eating appearing in fiction, many of which are, as Forster argues, involved in drawing characters together. Such social cohesion occurs most evidently by way of structure and metaphor, with a given eating scene providing a time, space, and occasion for a social exchange and with eating metaphors showing that certain characters “hunger for each other” (Forster 61), as in the case of Jane’s “devour[ing]” love for Rochester (161) in Charlotte Brontё’s Jane Eyre (1847). But what is at stake in the use of fictional eating as a form of social togetherness? Turning again to Jane Eyre, we find Jane revealing her hurt feelings to Rochester:

Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?—You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart! […]. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh:—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit[.] (Brontё 253; my emphasis)

Jane’s speech is a call for Rochester to recognize that (1) she has feelings of romantic love for him; (2) these feelings are proof that she, no soulless automaton, has a deep and plentiful interiority; and (3) such an interiority makes her worthy of his recognition and interest, makes her his “equal”

and means that she deserves more than to “become nothing” to him (253). In addition to making interiority contingent on romantic desire, this passage defines such desire—and, by extension, such interiority—as transcending and replacing bodily need, the eating metaphors displacing the necessity of eating onto love. As Jane’s feelings for Rochester take on the urgency of physical survival (Rochester becoming her “morsel” of bread and “drop” of water), her subjectivity asserts itself as ungrounded in the very necessity to which she alludes. Her metaphoric hunger for Rochester allows her to become a “spirit” unbound by “mortal flesh” and thus marks her transcendence through love of the kind of literal hunger that she experiences as a child at Lowood where the “scanty supply of food” results in “deficiency of nourishment” (60). Jane’s speech therefore announces an exchange of hunger for love, desire, and interiority and asserts that this exchange entails trading the status of being “nothing” for the value of being interesting and loveable. Moreover, the fact that this speech is what spurs Rochester to propose suggests that the marriage plot itself depends on the subordination of hunger as a motivating force. Jane’s statement thus speaks not only for her but also for the nineteenth-century novel as a form and for the kind of subjects it formulates, asking us to be primarily interested in a type of heterosexually structured interiority that measures its depth, in part, through its distance from appetite. And as far as the novel might also produce such interiority for its readers to inhabit and imagine as their own, it is in large part through the sublimation of appetite that the novel invites readers to see themselves as “equal” and “free” along the lines that Jane insists that she is (253).5 This is not to say that novels attempt a simple dichotomy between body and mind. After all, the path that Jane Eyre and Dorothea Brooke ultimately choose is one toward physical love as well as a meeting of minds, and, as Aaron Matz notes, the marriage plot usually also implies a “procreation plot” (“Procreation” 23). The freedom promised by the marriage plot and the generation of interiority is not a freedom from the body wholesale but rather from bodily necessity. As studies such as William A. Cohen’s Embodied and Gallagher’s Body Economic have shown, embodiment was crucial to Victorian authors’ explorations of consciousness. But, as we will see, for many nineteenth-century novelists, the need to eat often represented a confining or overwhelming mode of materiality that threatened to efface individual subjectivity and choice.6

When it breaks out of a symbolic, metaphorical, or indexical role, novelistic appetite frequently compromises a character’s interior depth by

constituting a kind of competing interiority that threatens to reduce or replace complex inwardness or to render selfhood and the story of that selfhood in terms of material need and vulnerability rather than desire or psychological choice. After the discovery of Rochester’s imprisoned first wife, Bertha, halts Jane Eyre and Rochester’s wedding, Jane leaves Thornfield and finds herself penniless and hungry in a Yorkshire village. Experiencing “Want” (324), she reports that upon seeing a “shop with some cakes of bread in the window” (325), “I coveted a cake of bread. With that refreshment I could perhaps regain a degree of energy; without it, it would be difficult to proceed.” Outside of the marriage plot, where the desire for another person unfolds interiority and motivates action, Jane enters into a food plot where edible matter becomes her primary object and where the very capacity of narrative and character to “proceed” depends on physical energy obtained from food. As she comes “face to face with Necessity” (326), hunger rather than love drives the story.

But Jane’s food plot does not proceed in a way that resembles progress. Her narrative instead becomes restless and repetitive, seeming to go nowhere instead of moving in a direction that offers the prospect of resolution:

I was so sick, so weak, so gnawed with nature’s cravings, instinct kept me roaming round abodes where there was a chance of food. Solitude would be no solitude—rest no rest—while the vulture, hunger, thus sank beak and talons in my side.

I drew near houses; I left them, and came back again, and again I wandered away: always repelled by the consciousness of having no claim to ask—no right to expect interest in my isolated lot. Meantime, the afternoon advanced, while I thus wandered about like a lost and starving dog. (327)

With its emphasis on circular wandering, this passage foregrounds appetite’s resistance to narrative closure while also bringing into view potential alternate forms of closure outside the marriage plot: either the temporary appeasement of hunger with food (Jane achieves this prior to entering the village with her last piece of bread before “Want” visits her again [323–324]) or the permanent closure of the death that would come when eating cannot continue. The food plot here poses a narrative counter model where the need to eat and keep on eating is what drives a plot that can only find its final resolution in death. Narrative and character thus become one, both requiring food as fuel in order to keep going, and so becoming reducible—if not fully reduced—to biological life, to a bare plot of physical survival.

In her hungry exodus from the marriage plot, Jane seems stranded both outside the possibility of conventional narrative closure and outside the key categories of “culture” and “the human” that we might take for granted as integral to the novelistic social. The passage emphasizes “instinct,” “nature’s cravings,” and the animalism of both the sufferer of hunger and hunger itself. Yet rather than depicting pure nature or animal life, the food plot gives us nature lodged painfully in culture, the animal trapped in the human. Jane cannot become a bee “busy among the sweet bilberries” as she wishes she could before entering the village (324). She is, she understands, “a human being,” and she must dwell within and in relation to the world of people that is the dominant space of the novel. A human sufferer of animal appetite, Jane occupies the blurry margins of the social, wandering through and around the village, on the verge of begging for food but feeling that she has “no claim to ask” (327), simultaneously within and outside of human civilization as an internal exile. Jane’s situation thus demonstrates how the appetite of the food plot exists in the nineteenth-century novel as an “inclusive exclusion” in a way that resembles the relationship Giorgio Agamben describes “bare life” having to Western politics (Sacer 7) as life that is at once excluded from and captured “within the political order” (9): “not a piece of animal nature without any relation to law and the city” (105) but rather life made to occupy a zone of “indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture” (109), “exclusion and inclusion” (105). Nineteenth-century fiction does not work to lock out the materiality of eating and appetite entirely (and its appearance thus is not reducible to repressed content surfacing) but includes it in ways that render it not at home in the novel. Jane Eyre encourages interest in and sympathy for the life of the hungry protagonist—life stripped, or nearly stripped, to physical necessity—yet the narrative includes appetite and the life that bears it partly as a means of asserting that this will not maintain interest for long and must be expelled.

This positioning of life absorbed in appetite as bereft of lasting value helps define the life that, through contrast, does have value: namely life organized by and oriented toward romantic desire. Jane asks: “Why do I struggle to retain a valueless life?” (329–330) and answers, “Because I know, or believe Mr. Rochester is still living” (330). And so the narrative worthlessness of the food plot shores up the ultimate value of the marriage plot. Nineteenth-century fiction captures bodily necessity in the form of a food plot that must be avoided, negated, or dismissed in order to create and maintain the worthwhile life generated by what D. A. Miller calls the novel’s “conjugal imperative” (Style 28).

narrativE, PoPulation, BioPolitics

If the work of this book is to make visible a plot that has gone largely unseen, then such work in some senses continues (if critically) the efforts of many Victorian novelists to find ways to narrate something that seemed to hover at the edge of what Gerald Prince and Robyn R. Warhol call “the unnarratable” (Prince 1; Warhol 221). While novelists prior to the nineteenth century were interested in eating and appetite, the food plot first emerges when these things become particular problems for novelistic representation with the intersection of fiction and concerns about population. Michel Foucault connects “that great awakening of sexual concern since the eighteenth century” (Sexuality 151) with the “emergence of ‘population’ as an economic and political problem” (25) and the related establishment of what he calls “bio-politics” (139) or “bio-power” (143): the incorporation of biological “life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit” political and economic “calculations.” In Britain, the biopolitical concern with population came front and center at the turn of the nineteenth century with the rise of Malthusian thought, which tied together sexuality and the food supply and influenced the 1800 Population Act that established the introduction of regular censuses. Thomas Robert Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population posits two “fixed laws of our nature” (13): “First, That food is necessary to the existence of man” (12), and “Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state.” Because of these laws, Malthus claims, “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man” (13). Malthus thus establishes a narrative of population that sets up appetite and sexual desire as the two main drives of human life while putting them in tension with one another in a way that anticipates the friction between the food plot and the marriage plot in the nineteenth-century novel that this book maps.

The relationship between the food plot and marriage plot is a key site at which biopolitics meet novelistic form, and understanding this relationship helps bring into focus the role of Malthusian population theory in the British novel’s development.7 In The Body Economic, Gallagher argues for the pervasive influence of Malthusian thought on nineteenth-century literature, political economy, and conceptions of desire. As she points out, “Malthus argued that sexual desire is as constant a feature of human nature as the need for food, and he is one of the first modern thinkers to insist that sexual intercourse is both ineradicable and essential to human happiness” (10).

In particular, I would add, Malthus naturalizes and vitalizes the kind of sexual desire privileged by the companionate marriage plot. “Passion” for Malthus is a reproductive, heterosexual “passion between the sexes” (Malthus 12) that is also a monogamous “attachment to one woman” (18). Gallagher notes that Malthus describes “sexual passion” as “rational” and “pleasurable” (42); he also makes it synonymous with sympathy and companionship. Malthus could almost be taken as an early theorist of the marriage plot when he writes: “Virtuous love, exalted by friendship, seems to be the sort of mixture of sensual and intellectual enjoyment particularly suited to the nature of man, and most powerfully calculated to awaken the sympathies of the soul, and produce the most exquisite gratifications” (89). In other words, Malthus both theorized sexual desire as an essential drive and connected it to deep interiority, viewing it as simultaneously physical, intellectual, emotional, and social.

Malthus’s theory emerged at a time when, as Ruth Perry notes, the accelerating enclosure of common lands for commercial use produced a greater “dependence on wages” that, “together with the new scarcity of land and cottages,” “pushed young people into earlier marriages,” resulting in “an unprecedented growth in population” (324). “[R]oot[ing] people more firmly in their conjugal rather than their consanguineal families” (334), this trend contributed to a cultural shift wherein “the biologically given family into which one was born was gradually becoming secondary to the chosen family constructed by marriage” (2). As agricultural developments facilitated both population growth and the increasing importance of the conjugal bond, Malthusian thought helped forge a narrative of universal reproductive sexuality but tied this narrative to the problem of appetite multiplying beyond the food supply. At a time when the marriage plot was becoming central to the novel form, population theory thus offered a narrative that helped establish this plot as the human story while also introducing a narrative impasse where the flip side of sexuality is a never-ending need to eat and where the reproductive future threatens to devour itself.

In nineteenth-century Britain, then, eating becomes a narrative problem as well as a biopolitical one; just as sexuality takes center stage as a grand narrative, appetite begins to destabilize it. As novelists writing in the wake of Malthusian population theory imagined social worlds where narrative closure was synonymous with the procreative futurity of the marriage plot, the shadow of appetite threatened to undermine this closure and this future. The food plot as a distinct form emerged in the first quarter of the nineteenth century when Jane Austen approached this problem

and seemed almost to negate it, her fiction working to sever the connection between sexuality and eating by defining the former against the latter. As we will see in Chapter 1, Austen’s published fiction includes food, eating, and appetite in ways that subordinate them to the marriage plot, working to diminish their power and make them uninteresting, incorporating them into narratives only to make them seem not worth narrating. As Austen helped make the marriage plot central to the novel form, eating came to look insignificant—not quite that species of the unnarratable that Warhol calls the “subnarratable,” or that which is “too insignificant or banal to warrant representation” (222), but rather just barely narratable: the stuff of backgrounds, margins, minor characters, and dull musings. In this way Austen sets up the novelistic framework that relies on an opposition between the food plot and the marriage plot.

But while the food plot begins as subordinate, it remains structurally crucial as that which the marriage plot defines itself against. And as novelists in the Victorian period worked with Austen’s framework, they also began responding to and participating in a growing social impetus to sympathize with the hungry by actively experimenting with modifying and subverting Austen’s model, figuring out ways to bring eating and appetite more visibly and centrally into their narratives. Food plots in Austen might look barely narratable, but by midcentury they gather force and cohesion while still fluctuating around different levels of the unnarratable without quite merging with them—often conjuring dullness but frequently veering more powerfully toward the “supranarratable” that Warhol describes as “what can’t be told because it’s ‘ineffable’” (223). And, as we shall see in later chapters, by the 1890s, when Darwinian ideas helped generate new avenues for exploring the “animalistic” aspects of the humanity, food plots took on undeniable narrative centrality, spawning starving artists, cannibals, and vampires.

By exploring the dynamics of the food plot, this book offers a corrective to understandings of narrative that privilege sexuality and offers a new lens through which to see how the nineteenth-century novel constructs its most culturally reproduced figure: the (often middle-class) individual of heterosexually structured interiority. Such a figure is delineated through a capacity to escape reduction to appetite that distinguishes it from the many others that the novel marginalizes partly through their association with food and appetite. These marginalized subjects include members of the working classes, criminals, gypsies, servants, and animals as well as figures

that do not quite fit with marriage plots—figures of pre-, post-, refused, or failed reproductive sexuality, such as children, unmarried adults, and those who have married but not borne children. Through such association with eating and appetite, the novel thus connects those who fall outside the marriage plot and those who fall outside the category of the upper- and middle-class British human, and such figures become variously disposable.

In formal terms, these figures often serve as the flat characters that help round out central characters in a process that works along similar lines to the “asymmetric structure of characterization” that Alex Woloch argues organizes nineteenth-century fiction (30). And when food-associated characters such as Magwitch, Jos Sedley, and Count Dracula aren’t exactly rendered flat or minor, they are often killed off or otherwise expelled from the text. Despite Woloch’s attunement to the manifold characters “who jostle for limited space within the same fictive universe” (13), he does not link this structure of characterization to concerns surrounding population and thus misses the biopolitical implications of the asymmetries he explores. Nineteenth-century fiction responds to the narrative conundrum posed by Malthus’s connection of reproduction to the unsustainable multiplication of hungry mouths by flattening or ejecting characters associated with appetite, as though the lives and stories of lovers can remain central and valuable only if appetite and its bearers become disposable. Characters in food plots often occupy a position that resembles the “bare life” that Agamben describes as being simultaneously included within and excluded from the political order (Sacer 7) and being, moreover, “life exposed to death” (88), life that it appears acceptable to kill (or, in the case of fictional characters, kill off).

Central characters and protagonists can also enter into food plots, but they must escape appetite if they are to get their marriage plots on track and find harmonious resolutions to their stories. Characters such as Jane Eyre, Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, and Mina Murray in Dracula enter food plots that threaten to reduce them to bare life. They manage to escape, even if others do not. Jane survives hunger and enters a marriage that is made possible by the death of the flesh-biting, “animal”-like Bertha (293). Mina is exposed to appetite in the form of a vampiric infection that must be cured though the killing of Dracula before her marriage plot with Jonathan Harker can find its happy (and reproductive) resolution. It is as if the hungry body itself must be killed off or displaced onto other disposable characters for the marriage plot and the deep subjectivity it produces to carry on and find their culmination. In this and other respects,

the novelistic subordination of eating to the marriage plot anticipates Sigmund Freud’s theorization in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) of the oral stage as the most primitive stage of psychic development, something that must be outgrown in order for a person to achieve full individuation and healthy adult sexuality; it also informs later critical approaches that privilege sexuality while ignoring food and appetite. To understand the relationship between the food plot and the marriage plot is to begin to come to terms with the extent to which such a subordination continues to shape our reading practices and conceptions of selfhood.

a tastE for charactEr

The food plot is where biopolitical concerns intersect with aesthetic ones, in particular with shifting understandings of literary character. In contrast to the eighteenth-century focus on the legibility of character, Deidre Shauna Lynch shows that, “at the turn of the nineteenth century characters became the imaginative resources on which readers drew to make themselves into individuals, to expand their own interior resources of sensibility” through a new mode of “sensitive reading that plumbs the depths of a character in a novel” (126). This new emphasis on psychological depth—on “‘appreciating’ the inner lives of beings who cannot possibly be taken at face value”—was part of a “new form of self-culture” and “the mechanism of a new mode of class awareness” (126). The newly deep, or round, character “supplied readers with the means with which to implement the work of cultural classification and stratification that Pierre Bourdieu calls distinction,” allowing readers “to distinguish their own deep-feeling reception of texts from other readers’ mindless consumption” (19).

This reconceptualization of literary character meant that the nineteenthcentury British novel was from the onset bound up not only with projects of aesthetic “taste” but also with the devaluation of the alimentary that, ironically, such projects usually entailed. According to Bourdieu, an opposition between the “taste of sense” and the “taste of reflection” has “been the basis of high aesthetics since Kant” (6), and the intellectual “detachment of the pure gaze” is linked to “an ethos of elective distance” from material “necessity” (5). Korsmeyer explains that a Platonic “hierarchy of the senses” (5) that privileges vision and hearing while denigrating gustatory taste (3–4) was further entrenched by eighteenth-century thinkers who developed “philosophies of taste,” theories “of the perception and appreciation of beauty that form the foundation for contemporary

philosophies of art and aesthetic value” (5). Such theories “concentrat[e] on two senses: vision and hearing,” and “[d]espite the parallels between literal and aesthetic taste that prompted the choice of this sense as a metaphor for the perception of beauty, gustatory taste is expelled from formative theories of aesthetic taste such as Kant’s” (5).8 Since the eighteenth-century mechanics of “taste” are established partly through an abjection or sublimation of alimentary taste and appetite, it is perhaps not surprising that such appetite would serve as a limit point to both the aesthetically oriented model of deep character and the nineteenth-century novel that houses and depends on it.

The new model of novelistic character also emerged amid shifting views of hunger brought on by modern political economy. James Vernon notes that while Adam Smith and Malthus debated the nature of hunger, “the two agreed that the market should be left to produce plenty or want freely, without intervention from the state” (4). Due to the influence of the new political economy—and particularly Malthusian thought—in the early nineteenth century, “hunger was thought to provide a natural basis for the moral order, in forcing the indigent to work and preventing unsustainable overpopulation” (17). The hungry “were objects of opprobrium,” and “any attempt to alleviate their suffering was thought to make them more, not less, dependent” (17). By the 1780s, Vernon notes, “the growing ranks of the poor fuelled the pessimism of those like Malthus who believed that only hunger could teach people industry” (11). “In the new ethic,” he argues, hunger “had become a key disciplinary tool,” and “[i]n early nineteenth-century Britain the calculated administration of poverty and hunger became critical to devising forms of statecraft to ensure that the market could operate free of the entanglements of an earlier moral economy and morality” (12).

The opprobrium toward the hungry by the new political economy, then, intersected with the Enlightenment aesthetics that denigrated appetite for being too close to animal necessity. Where the capitalist ethos elevated the free individual above the dependent hungry, aesthetics privileged those modes of perception and appreciation that were not tethered to appetite. And while there would be significant challenges to Malthusian attitudes toward hunger and the hungry throughout the nineteenth century, it is at the convergence of political economy, population theory, and aesthetics that the food plot first emerges in the work of Jane Austen. This convergence marks the point when the novel as a form begins to define itself against food, eating, and appetite as a key part of its aesthetic project.

rEading, Writing, Eating

Prior to the confluence of fiction with population theory and the aesthetics of interiority, novels were more comfortable associating themselves and human nature with food and appetite. For instance, in contrast to the nineteenth-century tension between appetite and the social, Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe not only makes securing and maintaining a food supply one of the narrator’s central concerns but also associates other people with the competition for edible resources. After the narrating Crusoe discovers the famous footprint, he worries that the island’s inhabitants will return “and devour me; that if it should happen so that they should not find me, yet they would find my enclosure, destroy all my corn, carry away all my flock of tame goats, and I should perish at last for mere want” (154). To Crusoe, the possibility of other people means the possibility of both cannibalization and the seizure of his goods. Crusoe’s fear of cannibalism seems to blur into identification with his food supply; the prospect of others eating his agriculture becomes equivalent to the idea of others eating his flesh (which makes sense since both acts would potentially lead to his death). And while Defoe makes food and eating central to his narrative, Henry Fielding’s 1749 Tom Jones jovially compares itself to food in an opening chapter titled “The Introduction to the Work, or Bill of Fare to the Feast” (51) that argues that an author should think of himself “as one who keeps a public ordinary” and advertises, “The provision then which we have here made is no other than HUMAN NATURE” (51–52), before offering this feast “to the keen appetite of our reader” (53). Here both fiction and the very “human nature” that it seeks to represent become edible products in a way that is squarely at odds with the nineteenth-century aesthetic model that defines novels and the deep characters within them against appetite and imagines readers as interested in people but not in their bellies.

Despite the tendency of nineteenth-century writers and reviewers to sometimes make metaphorical comparisons of novels to food that Patrick Brantlinger and Pamela K. Gilbert have noted, such comparisons, Gilbert observes, cluster especially around popular works viewed as aesthetically suspect, such as sensation novels. Leah Price suggests that in nineteenthcentury literary culture, “It’s as insulting to imagine the book resembling food” as “it’s flattering to imagine the book replacing food”—as “when a literary character starves himself to buy a much-loved text” or when a narrator’s “high-mindedness is established by a preference for books

over food” (30). Because of the shifting aesthetic priorities for fiction, nineteenth-century novels often align themselves with psychological depth and conjugal love9 against food and appetite by defining reading and writing against eating, further delineating the deep interior as one that fills itself with words in contrast to the shallow maw stuffed with food. This opposition constitutes an important dimension of the workings of the food plot, and it is one that I visit with increasing frequency in the second half of this book. Over the course of this study I trace a roughly chronological arc throughout the nineteenth century in which the dominance of the marriage plot wanes as the food plot becomes more central to novelistic narrative; as this occurs, authors become more and more interested in the potential slippages between food, eating, and appetite on one side and books, narration, reading, writing, and the social or sympathetic interest in people on the other—ultimately embracing a model closer to Fielding’s equation of “human nature” with food. If in the work of Austen or Dickens, reading and writing sometimes enable characters to escape being defined in terms of appetite while also connecting or reconnecting them to a love object, such escapes are rarely available in the relentless fictions of Hardy, Gissing, and Wells, which unmask the impulses behind reading, writing, narrative, social interest, and romantic desire as entangled with appetite and hunger.

tracking thE food Plot

I begin my analysis in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, with Chapter 1 exploring how Jane Austen establishes the novelistic dichotomy between the marriage plot and the food plot. Chapter 2 then goes on to trace the increasing prevalence of food plots in the Victorian period, when the Malthusian attitude that the plight of the hungry was a necessary evil increasingly was challenged by the view that hunger was a collective social problem. I explore how food- oriented figures take on more focal and problematic roles in Victorian novels, often disrupting or redirecting the marriage plot. In this light, I look at two mid-nineteenth-century novels that focus on figures outside of or troubling to the marriage plot: the hungry bachelor in W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and the women without husbands in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford .

Chapter 3 turns to Charles Dickens, arguing that his ongoing interest in appetite marks a resistance to the narrative paradigm crystallized by Austen that makes heterosexual desire the privileged center of psychological motivation and narrative resolution. Opposing the Malthusian idea that the desire for sex is at least as powerful as the need for food, Dickens’s fictions portray the need to eat as the driving force of human nature. In David Copperfield (1849–1850) and Great Expectations, Dickens represents the marriage plot as fundamentally rooted in an economy of appetite, where the goal of securing a stable food source underlies the protagonist’s desire for his romantic love object.

While Dickens’s Great Expectations , in particular, anticipates the surprising coherence of the food plot at the fin de siècle , George Eliot’s work between 1859 and 1876 is more ambivalent, vacillating between embracing this plot and rejecting it. Eliot’s art of fiction, I argue in Chapter 4, is caught between a desire to bear witness to eating and appetite and a version of the Austenian impulse to marginalize them. I focus on Eliot’s increasing engagement with the food plot across two of her early works, Adam Bede (1859) and the story “Brother Jacob” (1864), before looking at how she simultaneously works at making this plot disappear while resisting and mourning its disappearance in Middlemarch .

If Eliot finally draws back from the food plot, by late century the Darwinian erosion of the absolute division between the categories of human and animal made writers more ready to work through the idea that the driving force behind human behavior might in fact be the “animalistic” need to eat. Chapter 5 explores the increasing entanglement of food plots and marriage plots in late-century fiction by Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), entwining appetite and sexuality to the point where the two terms often cannot be told apart. This chapter also focuses on the relationship of food and eating to reading and writing that appears occasionally in previous chapters. Where novels such as Mansfield Park and David Copperfield align reading and writing with love and interiority against appetite, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) break down the distinction between food and book, showing reading and writing as inseparable from appetite.

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N e u n z e h n t e s K a p i t e l .

Die Tapieteindianer.

Zu diesen Indianern.

Hier habe ich zwei verschiedene indianische Kulturen geschildert, teils eine, die wir bei den noch ursprünglichen Chorotis und Ashluslays kennen gelernt haben, teils eine, die wir am Fuße der Anden bei den halbzivilisierten Chanés und Chiriguanos angetroffen haben. Die Indianer, über die ich hier berichten will, sind dadurch bemerkenswert, daß sie die materielle Kultur der ersteren und die Sprache der letzteren (Guarani) haben.

Ende Juli 1908 verweilte ich über eine Woche bei dem Tapietehäuptling Yaré am Rio Pilcomayo, und im August desselben Jahres besuchte ich ihre wilden, unzuverlässigen Stammfreunde am Rio Parapiti, welche dort Yanayguas genannt werden.

Dieser letztere Besuch war recht abenteuerlich.

Mit Isiporenda am Rio Parapiti als Ausgangspunkt, hatte ich mit einem Chiriguanoindianer als Dolmetscher ein kleines Yanayguadorf besucht, aus dem die Indianer zu kommen pflegten, um bei den Chanés und manchmal auch bei den Weißen Arbeit zu suchen. Dort hörte ich von einem großen Yanayguadorf, das verborgen im Walde liegen sollte. Ein Yanaygua wurde zu diesen Indianern mit einer Einladung geschickt, mich zu besuchen. Am folgenden Tage kam er mit der Antwort. Sie lautete: „Haben die weißen Männer uns etwas

zu sagen, so mögen sie zu uns kommen.“ Sie selbst wollten nicht zu dem weißen Mann kommen, der sie möglicherweise fangen und nach den Gummigegenden verkaufen wollte.

Ich entschloß mich sofort für die Visite. Meine schwedischen Begleiter waren natürlich sofort zu dem Abenteuer bereit, und der Dolmetscher, der die Segnungen der Zivilisation durch die Mission kennen gelernt hatte, wurde durch eine Geldsumme mutig gemacht.

Mit einem Yanaygua als Wegweiser machten wir uns auf. Über die blendend weißen Sandfelder des ausgetrockneten Rio Parapiti und auf Indianerpfaden reitend, die uns über große Dünen und durch trockene Gebüsche und Wälder führten, kamen wir nach dem Dorf.

Es lag auf einem Hügel in einem Kesseltal. Der Platz war gut gewählt, da das Dorf schwerlich von den Feinden der Yanayguaindianer, den Tsirakuaindianern, überfallen werden konnte, ohne daß die Einwohner Zeit hatten, sich auf die Verteidigung vorzubereiten. Als wir uns dem Dorfe näherten, tauchten überall bewaffnete Leute, wie aus dem Boden hervorgezaubert, auf. Seine Gäste mit Waffen in der Hand empfangen, hielt ich für etwas unhöflich, ich entschuldige aber das Mißtrauen dieser Indianer gegen die Weißen. Vor einigen Jahren waren andere Weiße, wie ich, mit Geschenken gekommen und hatten mehrere Männer in einen Hinterhalt gelockt. Diese wurden gebunden nach Santa Cruz de la Sierra gebracht, um nach den Gummigegenden verkauft zu werden, aber schließlich durch die Vermittlung einiger humaner Leute freigelassen.

Ohne auf die Waffen zu blicken und tuend, als würden wir auf die liebenswürdigste Weise empfangen, ritten wir mitten in das Dorf hinein und fragten nach dem Häuptling. Ein Herr in mittleren Jahren, mit einem Schurkengesicht und einem Streitkolben in der Hand, kam zu uns hin und erhielt sofort ein Waldmesser zum Geschenk. Andere Geschenke wurden ausgeteilt, und das Ganze schien sich auf die freundschaftlichste Weise zu entwickeln. Man bot uns Holzklötze zum Sitzen an, und ich packte bunte Halstücher, Messer, rote und grüne Bänder, Nähnadeln, Mundharmonikas und vieles andere aus den Satteltaschen aus und begann einen lebhaften Tauschhandel.

An einem der Lagerfeuer saß eine einsame, verschüchterte Frau. Sie war eine Kriegsgefangene von dem letzten Kriege der Yanayguas mit den Tsirakuas.

Diese letzteren hatten eine Yanayguafrau und deren Kind getötet, welchen Mord die Yanayguas bei der ersten Gelegenheit zu rächen beschlossen. Eines Tages befanden sie sich auf einer Wanderung in der Wildnis, um wilde Früchte zu suchen, als sie Spuren von Menschen sahen. Infolge der eigentümlichen Abdrücke der großen viereckigen Sandalen (Abb. 138) verstanden sie, daß die Spuren von den Tsirakuaindianern herrührten. Sie folgten ihnen und kamen in deren Dörfer. Die Tsirakuas wurden sie jedoch gewahr und konnten fliehen. Die Yanayguas folgten den Spuren und spürten am Abend ihr Lager auf. Sie zogen sich jedoch zurück und fielen sie in der allerfrühesten Morgendämmerung an. Der Überfall kam dem Feinde unvermutet, und er suchte seine Rettung in wilder Flucht. Ein Tsirakuamann wurde getötet und zwei verwundet. Zwei Frauen und sechs Kinder, sowie alles, was sie von der Habe der Indianer mitschleppen konnten, wurden die Beute der Sieger.

Mit Ausnahme der Gefangenen übernahm ich die Kriegsbeute. Es war eine bemerkenswerte Sammlung von Grabkeulen, Wurfkeulen, primitiven Werkzeugen, Mänteln aus Bast usw. Eine der gefangenen Frauen (Abb. 134) verkauften die Yanayguas für vierzehn (14) Pesos in schlechtem Branntwein, ungereinigtem Zucker und Sirup an die Weißen.

Diese arme Frau hat mir in einer Sprache, von der ich nicht die Worte, aber doch beinahe alles verstand, ihre Leiden erzählt. Sie erzählte von ihren Kindern, die nun mutterlos in der Wildnis waren. Sie lehrte mich auch etwas von ihrer Sprache.

Mit der Sammlung beladen, verließen wir die Yanayguas mit dem gegenseitigen Versprechen, uns wieder zu treffen. Ich glaubte, die Freundschaft sei fest gegründet. Am Abend desselben Tages, an dem wir bei ihnen waren, zündeten die Yanayguas gleichwohl ihr Dorf an und zogen sich in die Wildnisse des Chacos zurück, da sie von vielleicht dem einzigen Indianerfreund, den sie unter den Weißen kennen gelernt hatten, Verrat fürchteten.

Ein Jahr darauf besuchte ich, wie erwähnt, wieder den Rio Parapiti. Von dem ganzen Yanayguastamm war keine Spur vorhanden. Sie waren nach Gegenden verschwunden, in die der Weiße niemals dringt, aus Furcht, vor Durst umzukommen, da er die wenigen Wasserstellen nicht kennt.

Die Tsirakuafrau traf ich dagegen bei dem Priester in Charagua, einem Dorfe der Weißen, wohin sie nebst einem kleinen beinahe einjährigen Knaben, den sie während der Gefangenschaft geboren hatte, verkauft worden war. Wir waren richtig gute Freunde, die

Abb 134 Tsirakuafrau Rio Parapiti

häßliche Alte und ich. Ich kam zu ihr mit Zucker und Kuchen, und sie zeigte mir mit Stolz und Freude ihren kleinen Jungen, ihren Trost in der Einsamkeit unter den Weißen.

So zog ich weiter.

Der letzte, der sie sah, war Moberg. Eines Tages, als er auf der Dorfstraße ging, traf er eine in Lumpen gehüllte, verzweifelte, verweinte Frau, die ihn am Arm packte und von Haus zu Haus zog, damit er ihr helfe, ihren kleinen Knaben zu finden. Die „Wildin“ aus den Urwäldern des Chacos verstand instinktmäßig, daß dieser blonde Mann mehr Herz hatte, als die anderen Weißen.

Den Knaben hatte der Priester verschenkt oder verkauft, diese arme Frau von allem, dem einzigen, was sie in der Welt besaß, trennend.

Da sie ihr Kind nicht fand, entfloh sie in die Wälder Ich hoffe, wage es aber nicht zu glauben, daß es ihr gelungen ist, die Ihrigen zu finden, und nicht von den Todfeinden ihres Stammes, den Yanayguaindianern, wieder eingefangen worden ist.

Der Besuch beim Tapietehäuptling Yaré in Yuquirenda am Rio Pilcomayo, verlief dagegen ganz friedlich. Wir wurden richtig gute Freunde, ja so gute Freunde, daß Yaré, nachdem ich das Dorf verlassen hatte, über 100 km ging, um mich zu treffen und mir die Übergriffe der Weißen zu berichten. Yaré bildete sich nämlich ein, ich sei ein mächtiger Mann unter den Weißen.

Was konnte ich für ihn tun? Ich schrieb einen Brief an den Gouverneur im Chaco, Dr. L. Trigo, der den Indianern helfen wollte und auch konnte. Der Brief kam niemals an.

Als ich in Yarés Dorf war, kam eines Tages ein alter, schwacher Tapiete und seine blinde Frau, beide gehegt und gepflegt von einer keineswegs schönen oder jungen Tochter, aus dem Innern des Chacos. Der Greis war krank und die Frauen waren um ihn beschäftigt.

Man holte auch den weißen Mann, der auch den Ärzten ins Handwerk zu pfuschen pflegte, aber schwere Fälle nicht liebte. Wenn ein gebrechlicher Greis am Rande des Grabes steht, ist für

einen Arzt nicht viel zu tun, und noch weniger für einen Mann, der von der Heilkunde nichts versteht. Trotz meiner und der Frauen Anstrengung starb der Alte.

Grenzenlos war die Trauer der Frauen, und auch die Männer weinten. Klageschreie ertönten im ganzen Dorfe. „Mein Freund ist tot, mein Freund ist tot“, schrie und sang die blinde Frau. Ihre Trauer, wenn auch affektiert maßlos in ihren wilden Ausbrüchen, machte auf mich den Eindruck der Echtheit.

Die Frauen kleideten den Alten ein. Er wurde in seine besten Lumpen gehüllt und erhielt Sandalen an die Füße. Die Knie wurden ihm bis ans Kinn hinaufgezogen, die Arme kreuzweise über die Brust gelegt und der Kopf abwärts gebogen. So zusammengebogen, wurde er in ein großes Tragnetz gesteckt, das fest um seinen Körper gezogen wurde.

Nun sollte der Alte begraben werden. Seine Frau und Tochter wollten ihn in der Hütte begraben, Yaré sagte aber, er solle in den Wald getragen werden. Weinend versuchte die blinde Witwe ihrem Manne mit den Händen eine Grube in der Hütte zu graben, der Häuptling war aber unbeweglich. Er und noch ein Mann hängten das Bündel mit dem Mann an eine lange Stange, die sie zwischen sich trugen, um ihn in den Wald zu bringen. Außer diesen beiden bestand der Leichenzug nur aus der Tochter, die ihre blinde Mutter nach dem Grabe des Alten führte.

Erst wollte ich mitgehen, dann aber zauderte ich. Der Mensch in mir gewann die Oberhand über den neugierigen Forscher. Ich fühlte, daß ich diese Frauen nicht in ihrer Trauer stören dürfe, daß ich nicht das Recht hatte, mit dem Photographieapparat angelaufen zu kommen.

Von Yaré hörte ich später, daß der Alte mit einer Kalebasse Wasser im Schoß in eine runde Grube gelegt worden war. Kein Grabzeichen zeigt, wo er liegt.

Sobald der Alte gestorben war, schnitten Tochter und Frau die Haare ab und verbrannten sie zum Zeichen ihrer Trauer.

Nach dem Tode des Alten herrschte Trübseligkeit im Tapietedorf. Beständig, besonders des Morgens, hörte man die laute Klage der Frauen, an der auch die Männer teilnahmen.

Wir können sicher sein, daß es auch unter diesen Menschen Männer und Frauen gibt, die Hand in Hand durchs Leben gewandert sind, die sich geliebt haben.

Dies war das einzige Mal, daß ich einen Indianer habe sterben sehen.

Kultur und Sprache der Tapieteindianer.

Die Tapietes sprechen dieselbe Sprache wie die Chiriguanos, nämlich Guarani. Im vorhergehenden habe ich berichtet, wie auch die Chanés, obschon anderen Ursprungs als die Chiriguanos, deren Sprache angenommen haben.

Ein Chiriguano, der lange bei den Tapietes gewesen ist, behauptete mit Bestimmtheit, daß sie unter sich eine andere Sprache sprechen, die er nicht verstand. Diese Spuren habe ich auf mehrfache Weise zu verfolgen gesucht. Der Tapietehäuptling Yaré beteuerte jedoch, daß dies nicht wahr sei.

Am Rio Parapiti suchte ich in Batirayus Gesellschaft einen Chané, Batcha, auf, der ungefähr ein Jahr mit den Tapietes gelebt hat. Er sagte ebenfalls, er habe sie niemals eine eigene Sprache sprechen hören. Was die Weißen für eine Geheimsprache hielten, sei Choroti, das einige von ihnen sprechen könnten. In der Zeit, die ich bei den Tapietes verlebt habe, habe ich sie nie etwas anderes als Guarani sprechen hören.

Wir kennen somit von ihnen keine andere Sprache, als diese.

Kulturell gehören die Tapietes eher zu den Matacos, Chorotis und Tobas, als zu den Chiriguanos. Dies ist besonders für die wilden Tapietes (Yanayguas) der Fall.

Die Tapietes scheinen mir deshalb ein zur Mataco-Chorotigruppe gehöriger Stamm zu sein, der die Chiriguanosprache angenommen

hat, obschon sie ihre eigene Kultur bewahrt haben.

Das Land der Tapietes ist ein gewaltiges Gebiet, das sich vom Rio Pilcomayo bis zum Rio Parapiti und tief in den großen, unbekannten nördlichen Chaco hinein erstreckt. Es ist ein Land, das zeitweise so trocken ist, daß die dort Lebenden kein anderes Wasser haben, als das, das sie aus der Wurzel des „sipoy“ bekommen können. Den Weißen ist es deshalb nicht gelungen, das Land der Tapietes zu erforschen. Diese haben das Glück, ein Gebiet zu besitzen, das den Eroberer nicht hat locken können. Die Schwierigkeit, Nahrung zu finden, und das Eisen der Weißen hat sie jedoch aus ihren Wildnissen herausgelockt und zur Abhängigkeit geführt.

Zuweilen sind sie auch gekommen, um bei den Chiriguanos und Chanés zu dienen. Der Hunger hat sie getrieben. Es ist somit nichts Ungewöhnliches, daß die Tapietes mit Kindern, Hab und Gut, Hunden und Schmutz angewandert kommen und sich in der Nähe eines Chiriguano- oder Chanédorfes niederlassen. Sie müssen dort alle mögliche Arbeit verrichten und werden in Mais bezahlt. Diese Art des Wanderns ist ganz verschieden von der der Chiriguanos und Chanés, stimmt aber mit den Sitten und Gebräuchen der Matacos, Chorotis und Tobas überein.

In dem indianischen Gemeinwesen gibt es keine Diener, habe ich gesagt. Der Häuptling arbeitet ebenso wie die anderen des Stammes. Wir sehen jedoch hier wieder, daß Indianer des einen Stammes bei Indianern eines anderen Stammes dienen können. Die verschiedene Entwicklungsart der Stämme ist hier der Grund eines sehr scharfen Klassenunterschiedes. Daß ein Chiriguano einem Tapiete dienen könnte, wäre unsinnig, lächerlich, ebenso unmöglich, als wenn ein Chiriguanomädchen die Geliebte eines schmutzigen Choroti sein würde. Dies hindert jedoch nicht, daß, wie ich gesagt habe, ein Chiriguano sich mit einem hübschen Chorotimädchen amüsiert. Zur Frau nimmt er sie nicht, das wäre allzu idiotisch.

Innerhalb der Stämme herrscht somit kein Klassenunterschied, zwischen den einzelnen Stämmen kann er dagegen äußerst scharf sein.

Die Kultur der Tapietes kann ich hier nicht schildern. Das wäre ungefähr eine Wiederholung des über die Chorotis und Ashluslays Gesagten.[129] Von den Chiriguanos haben ihre Männer den Gebrauch des Lippenknopfes, der Tembeta, angenommen. Ihre Weiber sind beinahe wie die Chorotis tätowiert.

Bevor ich diese Indianer verlasse, will ich jedoch einige ihrer Sagen sowie einige Zeichen ihrer Taubstummensprache wiedergeben.

Tapietesagen.

Es war einmal eine Frau, die hatte „huirakuio“ gegessen. Es wird erzählt, daß sie zwei kleine Klöße aufgespart hatte. Am nächsten Tage, als sie essen wollte und hinging, um sie zu holen, hatten sie sich in kleine Papageien verwandelt. Nach zwei Tagen hatten diese Flügel. Nach fünf Tagen konnten sie fliegen und waren gegangen, um Nahrung zu suchen. Sie hatten Mais gefunden und vier Körner geholt, die sie ihrer Frau gaben. Sie sagten, sie solle dieselben säen. Am folgenden Tage waren sie wieder gegangen, um von diesem Mais zu fressen und waren mit schmutzigem Schnabel zurückgekehrt. Am folgenden Tage hatten sie von dem Mais gegessen, den die Alte gesäet hatte. Sie kamen und sagten zu ihrer Frau, sie solle den Mais holen. Sie waren mit vier Maiskolben zurückgekehrt und hatten jedem von der Familie einen gegeben. Darauf waren sie einen Augenblick ausgegangen und wieder hineingekommen. Es war dort viel Mais, ein ganzer Haufe.

Seitdem haben die Tapietes Mais.

W i e d i e Ta p i e t e s d a s S c h a f b e k a m e n .

Es war einmal eine alte Tapietefrau, die hatte zwei ganz kleine junge Hunde. Alles hatte sie gegessen. Sie hatte nichts. Sie hatte einen Poncho aus Gras.

Es wird erzählt, Tunpa sei zur Alten gekommen und habe gesagt: „Ich will deine jungen Hunde mitnehmen, und ich komme zurück.“

Nach drei Tagen kam er mit den Hunden, die trächtig waren, zurück. Er sagte zur Frau, sie solle zehn Stöcke in eine Reihe stellen und die Hunde anbinden. In der Nacht verwandelten sich diese in zehn Schafe, die an die Stöcke gebunden waren. Tunpa sagte, sie solle Ponchos machen, und die Alte machte eine Spindel.

Es wird auch erzählt, daß Tunpa gegangen sei, um für die Frau Gesellschaft zu suchen. Er kam mit einem Mädchen und einem Knaben. Als diese groß waren, verheirateten sie sich. Die Frau gebar einen Knaben und danach ein Mädchen. Diese verheirateten sich wieder und bekamen Kinder, die sich wieder miteinander verheirateten.

Von diesen stammen alle Tapietes.

D e r R a u b d e s F e u e r s

Der schwarze Geier hatte Feuer, das er durch den Blitz vom Himmel (ára) bekommen hatte. Die Tapietes hatten kein Feuer. Ein kleiner Vogel, „cáca“, stahl ihnen Feuer, es erlosch aber. Sie hatten kein Feuer, um das Fleisch des Wildschweines, des Rehbocks und anderer Tiere zu braten. Sie froren sehr

Der Frosch empfand Mitleid mit ihnen. Er ging zu dem Feuer des schwarzen Geiers und setzte sich dorthin. Als der schwarze Geier sich gerade wärmte, nahm der Frosch zwei Funken und verbarg sie im Munde. Darauf hüpfte er davon und machte dann den Tapietes ein Feuer an. Seit dieser Zeit haben die Tapietes Feuer.

Das Feuer des schwarzen Geiers erlosch. Der Frosch hatte alles gestohlen. Die Hände über den Kopf setzte sich der schwarze Geier

hin und weinte. Alle Vögel sammelten sich nun, um zu verhindern, daß jemand dem schwarzen Geier Feuer gab.

D a s E n t s t e h e n d e r Z a h n s c h m e r z e n .

Die Alten hatten Zähne aus Silber. Wenn sie aßen, verschluckten sie Knochen, Fleisch und alles. Sie gaben ihren Hunden nichts zu fressen. Dies machte, daß Tunpa Mitleid mit den Hunden empfand. Er gab deshalb den Menschen Samen von Zapallo (Kürbis). Sie aßen Kürbisse und ihre Zähne verwandelten sich in Knochen.

Von dieser Zeit an bekamen die Hunde Essen und die Menschen Zahnschmerzen.

Diese Sagen von den Tapietes sind Kulturmythen. Wir erfahren hier, wie diese Indianer das Feuer, ihre zwei wichtigsten Kulturpflanzen, den Mais und den Kürbis, sowie ihr nunmehr unentbehrliches Haustier, das Schaf, erhalten haben.

Die letztere Sage ist natürlich ganz modern, da die Tapietes die Schafe erst durch die Weißen erhalten haben. Es erscheint mir nicht unmöglich, daß mehrere der Kulturmythen viel moderner sein können, als man im allgemeinen glaubt. Denken wir uns z. B., daß ein Stamm keinen Mais gehabt hat, weil sie Mißernte gehabt hatten und vielleicht aus Hunger gezwungen gewesen waren, aufzuessen, was sie zur nächsten Saat aufbewahrt hatten. Sie müssen da versuchen, neue Saat zu bekommen und werden vielleicht gezwungen, sie einem anderen feindlichen Stamm zu stehlen. Dieses wahrscheinlich gefährliche Abenteuer gibt Veranlassung zu einer Kulturmythe, in welcher, wie immer in der Phantasie der Indianer, die Tiere eine große Rolle spielen.

Die Taubstummen der Tapietes.

Wenn ein Indianer erzählt, so verdeutlicht er die Rede mit Händen und Füßen. Maße und fast immer Zahlen werden durch Zeichen ausgedrückt. Soll er z. B. acht sagen, so tut er dies, indem

er acht Finger zeigt. Er hat keine Worte, die Maße bezeichnen, er mißt das Maß mit der Hand oder mit dem Arm. Erzählt er von Tieren, so schildert er die Bewegungen des Tieres äußerst lebhaft durch Gebärden. Er ahmt sie mit der scharfen Beobachtungsgabe des Naturmenschen nach.

Oftmals ist es mir, wenn ich keinen Dolmetscher hatte, mit wenigen Worten und zahlreichen Zeichen, gelungen, mit meinen Freunden, den Indianern, eine recht lebhafte Unterhaltung zu führen.

Unter den Indianern gibt es jedoch, wie bei uns, Personen, die, da sie taub geboren sind, sich nur durch Zeichen verständigen können. Vollständig Taubstumme habe ich bei zwei Stämmen, den Tapietes am Rio Pilcomayo und den Yuracáre am Rio Chimoré, kennen gelernt. Unter den zivilisierten Indianern habe ich ebenfalls einige Taubstumme getroffen.

Bei den Tapietes lernte ich einen taubstummen Greis kennen, der intelligent war und gut behandelt wurde. Alle verstanden die Zeichensprache, die er sprach. Unter den Yuracáres sah ich drei taubstumme Frauen, eine Mutter mit ihren beiden Töchtern. Bei dem letzteren Stamme sollen mehrere Taubstumme vorkommen.

Sämtliche Tapietes konnten mit dem Tauben sprechen. Die für Mitteilungen an ihn angewendete Zeichensprache, benutzen auch diejenigen, die normales Sprechvermögen haben, unter sich, wenn sie sich in der Entfernung stillschweigend etwas mitteilen wollen.

Abb. 135. Taubstummenzeichen. Tapiete.

Im Vergleich zu den der ärmeren Klasse angehörenden taubstummen Weißen in Ostbolivia scheinen mir ihre indianischen Unglücksbrüder entwickelter und, infolge des Interesses und der Freundlichkeit, die ihnen von der Umgebung gezeigt wurde, glücklicher.

Bei den Tapietes (Yanaygua) am Rio Parapiti war ein Knabe, der vom Rio Pilcomayo war. Ich fragte ihn, ob er Yaré kenne, er tat aber, als kenne er ihn nicht. Da machte ich ihm Zeichen, wie ich sie von dem Taubstummen im Dorfe Yarés gelernt hatte. Der Junge begann

zu lachen und wurde ganz mitteilsam. Das mußte ein komischer Weißer sein, der die Zeichensprache wie ein Tapiete konnte.

Die meisten Zeichen der Taubstummen sind rein beschreibend. Einige sind gleichwohl konventionell und von Außenstehenden schwer zu verstehen. Die Lehrer des Taubstummen sind seine Umgebung, seine Mutter, sein Vater, seine Spielkameraden.

Hier unten sind einige von mir bei den Tapietes gesammelte Taubstummenzeichen wiedergegeben.

Pferd — man streicht sich mit der rechten Hand, dem Daumen und dem Zeigefinger von der Oberlippe über die Mundwinkel und macht den Mund auf (Abb. 135 A).

Katze — man zieht sich am Schnurrbart (die Tapietes haben in der Regel einen kleinen Schnurrbart), d. h. den Schnurrhaaren, und macht eine krallenförmige Bewegung mit der Hand in Katzenhöhe über dem Fußboden.

Jaguar — man streckt beide Hände krallenförmig nach vorn und zieht sie geschwind zurück (Abb. 135 B).

Puma man macht wie im Vorhergegangenen und streicht sich außerdem mit der rechten flachen Hand hin und her über den Mund.

Fisch — die rechte Hand macht eine den schwimmenden Fisch imitierende Bewegung (Abb. 135 C).

Feuer — man führt den Zeigefinger an den Mund und bläst (Abb. 135 D).

Sonne — man macht dieselbe Bewegung wie bei Feuer und zeigt nach oben.

Mond — man macht eine schmatzende Bewegung mit dem Mund und zeigt nach dem Himmelsgewölbe.

Stern — man macht mit Daumen und Zeigefinger ein Loch (Abb. 135 E) und zeigt kreuz und quer am Himmelsgewölbe.

Wasser — man streicht sich mit der flachen Hand über das Gesicht und macht eine trinkende Bewegung.

Abb 136 Taubstummenzeichen Tapiete

Gut, schön — man streicht die rechte flache Hand über die linke flache Hand (Abb. 135 F).

Schlecht — man schlägt mit der rechten Faust auf die linke flache Hand (Abb. 135 G). Die Bewegung wird in gleicher Höhe mit dem Gesicht gemacht.

Kalebaßschale — man bildet mit den Händen eine Kalebaßschale.

Tragtasche die Hände werden über den Kopf erhoben und über die Seiten des Kopfes gestrichen (Abb. 135 H).

Krug — man bildet mit der Hand eine Krugmündung über dem Boden (Krughöhe) und macht dann eine trinkende Bewegung.

Poncho — man streicht sich mit beiden Händen über die Schultern am Körper herunter.

Abb. 137. Taubstummenzeichen. Tapiete.

Weg man streckt die Arme und Hände gerade aus und führt sie parallel aufwärts.

Weit — man streckt den Arm aus und knipst schnell mit Daumen und Zeigefinger (Abb. 136 I).

Nahe — man zeigt mit dem Zeigefinger nach vorn und unten.

Er ist gegangen — man streckt den Zeigefinger aufwärts und führt den Arm weg und nach oben (Abb. 136 J).

Komm her — man hält die Hand ganz offen und führt den gekrümmten Arm zu sich hin (Abb. 136 K).

Fischnetz — man bildet mit beiden Armen das ovale Netz (Abb. 137 L).

Mais man macht dieselbe Bewegung, als ob man den Mais abgriest (Abb. 137 M).

Auge — man zeigt auf das Auge. Auf dieselbe Weise werden alle anderen Körperteile ausgedrückt.

Freund — man klopft sich auf die Brust und zeigt auf den Freund hin.

Mataco — man schlägt mit dem rechten Zeigefinger in die linke flache Hand (Abb. 137 N). Die Ursache, warum die Matacos auf diese Weise bezeichnet werden, ist die, daß die Tongefäßtrommel für sie so außerordentlich charakteristisch ist. Der Zeigefinger ist der Trommelstock und die Hand die Trommel.

Choroti — man zeigt auf die Ohrläppchen. In diesen tragen die Chorotis, wie erwähnt, Holzklötze.

Weißer Mann — man formt mit den Händen einen Hut und einen Bart.

Tanzen — man führt die Arme kreuzweise vor den unteren Teil des Magens.

Tod — man wendet die flache Hand schnell nach oben.

Frau man zeigt auf die Brust, alle Finger auf die Brust stellend (Abb. 137 O).

Missionar — man macht mit der Hand eine Tonsur auf dem Kopf.

Mutter — man klopft sich auf die Brust und macht dabei dieselbe Bewegung, als wenn man eine Frau bezeichnet.

Caraguatá — man dreht die eine Hand über die andere (Abb. 137 P).

Algarrobo — man legt die Hand auf den Mund und saugt (Abb. 137 R).

Messer — man führt die Hände vorwärts (Abb. 137 S) und sticht nach dem Gürtel.

Tunpa (großer Geist) — man hält die Arme in die Seiten und zittert.

Hübsches Mädchen — man macht das Zeichen für Frau und für hübsch.

Seele, Geist (aña) — man öffnet den Mund und macht eine speiende Bewegung nach vorn.

Wenn ich die Quichuaindianer auf dem Calileguaberge, bei denen wir einen flüchtigen Besuch abgelegt haben, ausnehme, haben wir in diesem Buche zwei Indianerkulturen kennen gelernt, eine ursprünglichere bei den Chorotis und Ashluslays, eine entwickeltere bei den Chiriguanos und Chanés. Zu den ersteren gehören auch die Matacos und Tobas, welche hier nur flüchtig erwähnt sind. Wo diese beiden Indianerkulturen sich treffen, haben wir eine Mischung beider, ein Kontaktvolk. So müssen wir, meiner Ansicht nach, die Tapietes auffassen. Sie sind diejenigen von den Chacostämmen, die den Chiriguanos am nächsten gewohnt und deshalb den meisten Einfluß von ihnen erfahren haben.

Bevor ich mein Buch abschließe, will ich auch über das wenige, das ich von den Tsirakuaindianern weiß, die wir als Gefangene der Tapietes kennen gelernt haben, berichten. Es ist ein Blick in das

Abb. 138. Sandale aus Tapirhaut. Tsirakua.

große Unbekannte, in den nördlichen Chaco, wo noch ein großer, weißer Fleck auf der Karte Südamerikas ist.

[129] Vgl auch: Erland Nordenskiöld Globus 1910 Bd 98 S 181.