Anthropophagy, a "neglected branch of anthropology,"⁵ is practised, Jarry suggests, in two ways: eating human beings, or being eaten by them. A recent "anthropophagic mission" to New Guinea was wholly successful, Jarry writes, according to the report in Patrie for 17 February 1902, in that not one of its members returned. Before the anthropophagic missions, the science of anthropophagy was in its infancy, because savages don’t eat each other. But it would also be a mistake to see the new practice as of purely culinary interest; it relates to one of the oldest and noblest tendencies of the human spirit—assimilating what it finds good. (So, a heart would give courage, an eye, perspicacity, etc.) The Papuans in eating the white explorers entered into a "sort of communion with their civilisation." The only other way of not returning, for an anthropophagic mission, would be not to go in the first place.

In a similar iconoclastic and antimissionary spirit, Leopoldo Chariarse described in an article in the postwar surrealist review Le surréalisme, même, "Les mélanges inadmissible," the theological difficulties of a Catholic priest in the Amazon, when he was faced with the problem of burying human remains which had been made into sausages mixed with pig meat. As with Jarry, "cannibalism" is the ironic fruit of "civilisation"—as it was in Swift’s famous satire, The modest proposal, which offered cannibalism as the solution to the problem of famine and overpopulation.

"Eat your brains," Tzara rudely invited Breton and his faction at the mock trial of Maurice Barres in 1923, as dada in Paris collapsed.⁶ If "cannibalism" colours the subversive, self-devouring and inevitably short-lived dada movement in various ways, in surrealism it was aligned above all with sexuality and desire. Freud, mythology and natural history (above all in the figure of the praying mantis) provided substantial ground among the surrealists for the metaphorical exploration of sexual and bodily hunger, and it was in Dalí’s work above all that these two urges were most intensively investigated.

However, Dalí’s most prominent figuration of cannibalism occurs in a specific historical context. As Jarry said, anthropophagy can be practised in two ways: either eating or being eaten. Dalí’s Autumnal cannibalism allegorises the civil war in Spain as two figures simultaneously devouring each other; the rending of a single body in his Soft construction with boiled beans: premonition of civil war becomes in Autumnal cannibalism an even more terrifying scene of the mutual destruction of two figures symbiotically linked. The fact that one wears a red shirt, the other a white, might symbolise the opposing left and right factions in the Spanish Civil War. Dalí’s notorious refusal to align himself with the Republican government, and his dogged apoliticism was accompanied by a passionate sense of the tragedy, which he saw as " the whole carnal desire of the civil war of that land of Spain."⁷ However, he also incorporates these two figures into the cannibalistic drama of father and son which he had already explored through the myth of William Tell. Deeply rooted in Dalí’s personal history, the William Tell myth, in which the Swiss patriot had been forced by the Austrian invaders to shoot an apple on his son’s head, was re-interpreted by Dalí in terms of parental threat and rivalry, in the full knowledge of Freud’s construction of the Oedipal myth. Here, he places an apple on the head of the right-hand figure, although this seems to be the dominant, "paternal" one. This complex painting, in which the flesh of the "son" softens and is squeezed like a maternal breast expresses the unnatural confusion of the civil war in terms that recall, as does Soft construction, the engravings of Goya.