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The Problem of Digestive Interpretation in Pope, Swift, And Wits, Shits, and Crits: The Problem of Digestive Interpretation in Pope, Swift, and Fielding A dissertation submitted for a Ph.D. in English literature Cornell University Christina Susanna Black August 2018 C.S. Black Wits, Shits, Crits 1 © 2018 Christina Susanna Black C.S. Black Wits, Shits, Crits 2 WITS, SHITS, AND CRITS: THE PROBLEM OF DIGESTIVE INTERPRETATION IN POPE, SWIFT, AND FIELDING Christina Susanna Black, Ph.D. Cornell University 2018 My readings of the abundant ingestion and excretion themes in literary works by Fielding, Swift, Montagu, and Pope propose that we can understand these topics as sustained metaphors for the bipartite issues of readers' consumption and writers' incorporation of a literary heritage into these texts. These issues were particularly salient in early eighteenth-century Britain, as printed texts become more broadly available and affordable, and readers could no longer be relied upon to have a top education and sophisticated tools of analysis. Authors like Fielding and Swift also were experimenting in new forms like the novel that had no standards for analysis. These authors were interested in and concerned about how their work and that of their contemporaries would stand up to future scrutiny. How did the changing economic incentives for writing, from courting wealthy patrons to selling in mass volume to unknown readers, affect literature’s claim to everlasting value? Pope was the first English author to earn a sustainable living from his writings, but that new economic viability also spawned Grub Street hack writing, not to mention unsavory publishing practices. In this historical context, sustained metaphors of eating and digesting were a playfully denigrating way for these writers to investigate what it meant to write for consumers, even as the metaphors also revivified older literary traditions and genres by incorporating them into modern contexts. The coda includes interpretations of contemporary fecal art pieces Cloaca by Wim Delvoye and Vorm-Fellows-Attitude by artist collective Gelatin. C.S. Black Wits, Shits, Crits 3 For my husband, Evan Bruno, who loves all puns, and who gamely visited and photographed Wim Delvoye’s very stinky Cloaca with me on the first day of our married life. C.S. Black Wits, Shits, Crits 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I realize it is a dubious honor to be recognized as being fundamental to the production of an excremental work. However, this is a distinction my delightful and tolerant teachers of all stripes must bear. What is good in this dissertation I owe to them. To my extraordinary committee: Rick Bogel, who taught me how to close read by prodding me into doing ever more. Neil Saccamano, and how he models such thoughtful interdisciplinary readings. Amanda Jo Goldstein, a wonderful mentor and the most generous reader. And to many others in the Cornell English department, including but not limited to: Philip Lorenz, Paul Sawyer, Gregory Londe, Andrew Galloway, Cynthia Chase, Jeremy Braddock, Laura Brown, Harry Shaw, Jenny Mann, Ellis Hanson, and Debra Fried. Thank you also to the Graduate School for a research travel grant, which enabled a visit to Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Australia. To my teachers at other schools: Ros Ballaster, who taught me a love of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Diane Purkiss, who perhaps is even more excited about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cookbooks than even I am. Nicholas Halmi, who seems to have not only read everything but also incorporated it into his being. Achsah Guibbory, who performed an extraordinary semester-long close reading of Milton for our class and got me thinking about the metaphorical import of eating in literature. Ross Hamilton, who taught me to love the eighteenth century in the first place. Doc Shilts, in gratitude for his teaching and making me memorize some of Doctor Faustus. To so many friendships instrumental to this dissertation, in particular: C.S. Black Wits, Shits, Crits 5 Mary Kuhn, whose kind and thoughtful comments on my Fielding chapter I only wish I had implemented better. David Singerman, who assured me that I was already done at all the right times. Laura Martin, whose close readings are delightful, unexpected, and important. Ezra Feldman, for poker, edits, and wonderful companionship during this degree. Abigail Marcus, who shared her love of John Donne. Sara Schlemm, the best writing partner there is. David Leon, if only he had illustrated this dissertation. Emily Miner, and her constant generosity and scheming. Lise Butler, for all the early-morning coffees and late-night edits. Emma Silverman and Yardenne Greenspan, my workday and everyday dream team. Most especially to my parents: David Black, the first generation English PhD and my first professor of literature, who warned me and then thoroughly encouraged me in this endeavor, even (especially?) when it devolved into poop jokes. Marti Black, who tirelessly cheered us both on, sent me reams of scatological cartoons and articles, and sought to always correct every split infinitive she ever found. And my beloved siblings (and niece!) C.S. Black Wits, Shits, Crits 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 8 Pope 24 Fielding 88 Swift 173 Coda 218 Bibliography 235 C.S. Black Wits, Shits, Crits 7 Introduction Portrait of Samuel Johnson reading by Joshua Reynolds (1775) Source: Wikipedia Commons C.S. Black Wits, Shits, Crits 8 Scatological humor and themes in literature are nothing new. Reuters has reported that the oldest recorded joke in the world, from Sumeria in 1900 B.C., is toilet humor.1 When explaining my dissertation subject to other literary scholars, I usually get the most nods of understanding from medievalists and early modernists. Scatology and bodily subjects were more commonplace in these earlier centuries, treated as established tropes for thinking about language and rhetoric. Important examples were the body politic, the ingestion of the word of God, and digestion as the rhetorical practice of imitation. As Maggie Kilgour explains the connection between food and word, which she dates back to Plato’s Symposium, “Food is the matter that goes in the mouth, words the more refined substance that afterward comes out: the two are differentiated and yet somehow analogous, media exchanged among men.”2 Today, however, scatology tends to stick out like a sore thumb rather than to refer back to instantly recognized analogies, and so this dissertation elucidates how these eighteenth-century authors were reusing established scatological tropes, although usually with a difference that reflects the rapidly shifting literary scene of the eighteenth-century. My readings of the abundant ingestion and excretion themes in Fielding, Swift, Montagu, and Pope, among others, propose that we can understand these topics as sustained metaphors for the bipartite issues of readers' consumption and writers' incorporation of a literary heritage into these texts. These issues were particularly salient at the time, as printed texts become more broadly available and affordable, and readers could no longer be relied upon to have a top education and sophisticated tools of analysis. Authors like Fielding and Swift also were experimenting in new forms like the novel that had no standards for analysis. The authors I study 1 Here’s the joke: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” “World’s Oldest Joke Traced Back to 1900 BC.” 2 Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 8. C.S. Black Wits, Shits, Crits 9 were interested in and concerned about how their work and that of their contemporaries would stand up to future scrutiny. How did the changing economic incentives for writing, from courting wealthy patrons to selling in mass volume to unknown readers, affect literature’s claim to everlasting value? Pope was the first English author to earn a sustainable living from his writings, but that new economic viability also spawned Grub Street hack writing, not to mention unsavory publishing practices. In this historical context, sustained metaphors of eating and digesting were a playfully denigrating way for these writers to investigate what it meant to write for consumers, even as the metaphors also revivified older literary traditions and genres by incorporating them into modern contexts. This dissertation tells the story of one of the first instances of anxiety about industrialized consumption and waste – in this case, of newly affordable printed material. While Fielding, Swift, Montagu, and Pope all worry about literary waste, their texts also contain lessons in how an aesthetic eye can still redeem value in remainders. It becomes clear that at times the only reason an excremental object stands up to scrutiny is because of the type of critical attention paid to it. Each chapter thus examines an interplay between themes of appetite, digestion, and waste, and the roles of – and relationship between – writers and their critics. While there is a danger to taking a satirical object like excrement too seriously, there is an even greater danger of not taking it seriously enough – and that is too much the status quo. Martha Nussbaum cautions that anything that arouses our disgust is “always suspect or problematic, in need of special scrutiny,” and very few literary scholars to date have had the guts (or stomach) to commit to a serious, book-length, and systematic study of gross particulars.3 Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1965), Sophie Gee’s Making Waste (2005), and Peter Smith’s
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