"Under The Jaguar Sun", Food Epiphanies, and The Frame

Today I started reading Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino. The book isn't really one continual text but three shorter narratives focused on a similar theme. The theme that threads the book is discussions on the senses. Unfortunately, Calvino died before he was able to incorporate all 5 senses with both sight and touch missing but taste explored taste in "Under the Jaguar Sun", hearing in "A King Listens", and smell in "The Name, the Nose".

So far I have only finished "Under the Jaguar Sun" and am most of the way through "A King Listens" but I can already see how epiphanies and moments of supreme sensitivity are revealed. In "Under the Jaguar Sun" the main character, denoted in the first person "I", contemplates the nature of taste and how human beings (and everything else for that matter) are in a constant pull of devouring each other and being eventually devoured themselves. Much of the story involves some cannibalistic themes but it must be noted that these are more metaphorical than literal acts of cannibalism. Even the story explores the deepening of the understanding of cannibalism from the literal level projected on the ancient altars of Mexico to the more metaphorical levels of consuming another human. In one epiphany the narrator states "the most appetizingly flavored of human flesh belongs to the eater of human flesh". However, the final epiphany comes in the closing paragraph: "Under the thatched arbor of a restaurant on a riverbank, where Olivia had waited for me, our teeth began to move slowly, with equal rhythym, and our eyes stared into each other's with the intesity of serpents'-- serpents concentrated in the ecstasy of swallowing each other in turn, as we were aware, in our turn, of being swallowed by the serpent that digests us all, assimilated ceaselessly in the process of ingestion and digestion, in the universal cannibalism that leaves its imprint on every amorous relationship and erases the lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, huachinango a la vera cruzana, and enchiladas." Obviously these statements entail a divine revelation about the nature of eating and being eaten contained in the phrase the narrator calls "universal cannibalism". The meanings and metaphors of hunger, food, eating all are at play and really provide a complex look at cannibalism. How's that for a food epiphany!

On another note Esther Calvino makes the point that she believes that Italo was going to eventually compose a "frame" to set these stories in. The resulting product would have had a similar look to If on a Winter's Night a Traveler where the internal stories were surrounded and linked by a larger story. For the frame Calvino said "both in art and in literature, the functin of the frame is fundamental. It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but at the same time, it recalls-- and somehow stands for-- everything that remains out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it contiains a kind of glint of that unlimited vastness". Obviously then, this story should give us writers some inspiration (and perhaps anxiety) to provide the "glint of that unlimited vastness" that surrounds our papers!