Illness as a Fight. Valérie Dayre and Wolf Erlbruch’s Die Menschenfresserin (1996)

Abstract

Based on Valérie Dayre and Wolf Erlbruch’s 1996 picture book Die Menschenfresserin [Man Eater], this paper indicates blurred boundaries between illness and health, between self and the other, between nature and culture. It focuses on the culturally engaging topic of anthropophagy, which is usually attributed to the “Other” through the primitive or as embodied by witches. Such narratives merge with the findings of psychoanalysis, interpreting cannibalistic urges as an expression of the early oral phase of human development. By using the character of a mentally and physically ill woman who wants to eat a child, the story discusses key questions of the illness narratives: What is illness? A physical or mental phenomenon? Should a manic-depressive cannibal be sympathized with or feared? The ambivalent answers to these questions triggered the scandal that erupted after the publication of the book. As the paper will show, these questions do not allow for a linear interpretation, while the content and aesthetics of the book violate the usual aesthetics of simplicity and naivety in picture books. In particular, the collage technique allows the illness motif to challenge the expectations of security in interpersonal relationships. The “ill” cannibal appears as a “wild fighter” who resists any kind of developmental and interpretive logic, pointing thus to the inexhaustible primordial interpersonal conflict: the one between mother and child, between self and the other.