Sexual intercourse is something people do (as do birds, bees, and educated fleas), and clichés are
something people say. And yet it is the things that people do or say that are the only material from
which each of us, each individual, attempts to build a life of his or her own. To build a life of my own
I have memory and imagination, but I cannot confidently claim either for myself for three reasons:
First, without reference to the world and to the recollections of others I cannot distinguish between
what I remember and what I imagine, since there are no subjective marks of veridical memories.
Second, what I remember is what I perceive, and what I perceive reflects what people regard as
significant. Third, what I imagine is not just the spontaneous product of my own individual
imagination, but is shaped by the verbal images available to every speaker of my language and to the
visible images available to all human beings through our now globalized visual culture.
Wright Morris's Love Among the Cannibals (1957) is perhaps the most powerful study of the
obstacles to the individual's claiming ownership of his language, his loves, and the stories he tells or
projects about these loves. Yet while Love Among the Cannibals still speaks compellingly to any
contemporary reader who might chance upon it in a second-hand bookstore or in the stacks of a
university library, the novel is complex, subtle, and ironic, and its author Wright Morris has vanished
so completely from our collective cultural memory that he and his aspirations from literature must be
recalled explicitly if those complexities are to be explored.
1. Who was Wright Morris? That I have to answer this question might indicate something about
the transience of literary fame, except that Morris was never quite famous, though he published thirty-
three books and won two National Book Awards for fiction, for the 1956 Field of Vision, and for his
last novel, the 1980 Plain Song. Wright Morris was born in 1910 in Central City, Nebraska, a tiny
town in the Platte Valley on the Great Plains that was at the time erroneously believed to be the exact
center of the United States. Morris's mother died six days after his birth, and Morris's father, a
railroad clerk and premature pioneer in industrial-scale egg production, brought him up in a series of
2
Convention