Between two stools

Scatology and its representations in English literature, Chaucer to Swift

Peter J. Smith

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719097614
• eBook ISBN: 9780719098789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Now available in paperback, Between two stools investigates the representation of scatology – humorous, carnivalesque, satirical, damning and otherwise – in English literature from the middle ages to the eighteenth century. Smith contends that the 'two stools' stand for two broadly distinctive attitudes towards scatology. The first is a carnivalesque, merry, even hearty disposition, typified by the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The second is self-disgust, an attitude characterised by withering misanthropy and hypochondria. Smith demonstrates how the combination of high and low cultures manifests the capacity to run canonical and carnivalesque together so that sanctioned and civilised artefacts and scatological humour frequently co-exist in the works under discussion, evidence of an earlier culture's aptitude (now lost) to occupy a position between two stools. Of interest to cultural and literary historians, this ground-breaking study testifies to the arrival of scatology as an academic subject, at the same time recognising that it remains if not outside, then at least at the margins of conventional scholarship.

1

Turning the other cheek: scatology and its discontents in The Miller’s Tale and The Summoner’s Tale

I

And those especially who have a dislike to some particular kind of food, sometimes take it under compulsion, and then promptly bring it up; or, if they force themselves to keep it down, they are nauseated and feel their stomach turned up, and endeavouring to relieve itself of its discomfort.¹

[T]he crucial element in the collapse of feudalism is peasant resistance to the seigneurial extraction of surplus profit from the agrarian economy. [Evident is the expression of] a powerful, selfconfident peasant economy – a self-confidence visible throughout the latter medieval period and nowhere more dramatically than in the rising of 1381.²

[The fart may be read politically.] But then again, it may not. The safest position, as long as you are not in the direct line of fire, is to hear the noise for what it most materially and literally is: nothing more nor less than a very loud fart.³

These quotations typify the three (e)states of critical opinion on Chaucer’s fart. The first: Galen (writing not of course specifically about Chaucer, nor even literature) offers a lively account of the retching response of an intolerant body. If forced to digest something inimical to it, the stomach will be queasy, eager to excrete that which induces revulsion – for ‘body’, we might also read social body, political ideology or religious system. In literary terms, read school or university syllabus, critical reputation or prevailing arbiter of wider cultural tastes (the sensory metaphor is, as we will see, unavoidable) such as the media, the church (see below) or other ideological state apparatuses. The ingested emetic thus stands for those works deemed by the body politic to be offensive and requiring to be purged one way or the other, most usually by the mechanisms of expurgation or censorship.

The second: for the Marxist literary historian, Lee Patterson, the ebullient low-life of Chaucer’s literary world represents the rebellious agrarian peasantry whose revolutionary ardour precipitates the decline of feudalism. Scatology and obscenity function to destabilise the prevailing feudal norms and problematise class relations or, if that is too anachronistic, the hierarchy of seigneur and peasant.

The third: for Peter W. Travis, if we light the blue touch-paper, we should be prepared to retire very quickly. The fart may be ‘an extremely complex political sign’; the splitting, in The Summoner’s Tale, of Thomas’s fart into twelve equal pieces may symbolise the redistribution of earthly pelf demanded by the increasingly vociferous peasantry (cf. Patterson); but equally, it may be . . . a fart.⁴

In summary then, the three positions are as follows: the depiction of medieval flatulence may be offensive – something to be expelled or, at any rate, eschewed; it may symbolise, in the manner of Bakhtinian carnival, a democratising impulse, a radical politic; or it may do nothing more than express the concrete materiality of a digesting body, the physical realities of eating and defecating. As Travis insists so eloquently, ‘the fart is a fart is a fart’.⁵

Why such a fuss? It should be clear at the beginning of the twenty-first century that what Greg Walker calls the ‘bowdlerisation of human experience’ is something that no longer pertains.⁶ Surely, while the second of these three positions may strike us as symbolically over-ingenious not to mention historically imprecise, and the third over-obvious, the squeamishness of the first position is no longer tenable – look what happened to Absolon! Yet the very paucity of scatologically explicit studies of Chaucer, the continued omission of a number of the fabliaux from modern editions, the frequent condemnation of the poet’s scatological jokes are indicative of a sensibility which remains under the thumb of a censorial Victorianism, as a recent example will demonstrate.

In June 2006 The Guardian newspaper reported the difficulties faced by an adaptation of The Canterbury Tales.⁷ That conspicuous envoy of cultural values, The Royal Shakespeare Company, had taken its dramatic version of Chaucer’s poem on international tour. Unfortunately its spirited adaptation, by Mike Poulton, and its unabashed direction, by Greg Doran, Rebecca Gatward and Jonathan Munby, were to come face to face with the full disapproval of the Spanish Catholic Church.⁸ In spite of the fact that the Dominican monastery of Almagro contained only two friars, the RSC’s performance, scheduled to take place there, was forbidden. The Washington Post’s description of the production offers some sense of the emphasis it placed on scatological humour: ‘It is nothing short of astonishing how much flatulence a major classical theatre company has to muster in the noble cause of bringing six hours of Chaucer to the stage.’⁹ The production was thought to be ‘inappropriate’ to its holy environs and, as the RSC’s Jeremy Adams explained, ‘We were aware that the church had some concern about the content of the tales. Obviously we did not want to cause offence but, at the same time, we did not want to present a production that was overly compromised.’ The farts must stand, that is, in the name of freedom of expression and artistic integrity. While this rumble of discontent was eventually assuaged by having the unedited production relocate to a theatre which, ironically, happened to be situated inside a former church, the recentness and intensity of its articulation make the controversy worth noting here. For it is not the case that the values of the Catholic authorities enact a stilted and repressive conservatism over which our progressive and permissive mores have triumphed, nor, contrariwise, that they embody an antiquated standard of decency from which our degenerative times have fallen off; indeed, if Chaucer’s poetry is indicative of the acceptability of flatulent humour, the medieval period may have been a good deal less nervous about calling a fart a fart than we are at the present time. While the ways ‘in which we excrete today are enswathed in feelings of secrecy, disgust, guilt and complex ploys of euphemism’, this, argues David Inglis, is ‘a relatively recent historical development’.¹⁰ With the kind of delicious irony that Chaucer himself would have loved, the Catholic Church is acting here with a modern sensibility, for as Inglis carefully shows, and as The Canterbury Tales explicitly illustrates, ‘The society of medieval Europe was generally more lax about defecatory matters than our own age.’¹¹ To employ Michel Foucault’s damning verdict, it is we who are the ‘Other Victorians’.¹²

The first significant censor of Chaucerian scatology was his translator John Dryden, for whom the poet was ‘a rough diamond [who] must be polished, ere he shines’.¹³ For all his enthusiastic approval of the variety of social classes and professions represented by Chaucer’s pilgrims – ‘Here is God’s plenty!’ – Dryden omitted The Miller’s Tale and the The Summoner’s Tale, among others: ‘I have confined my choice to such tales of Chaucer as savour nothing of immodesty.’¹⁴ As David Matthews has shown, this tendency for translators either to expurgate the fabliaux or bowdlerise them beyond recognition is firmly entrenched during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹⁵ He instances Mary Haweis’s 1887 prose version of The Miller’s Tale in which the misplaced kiss is so diluted that Absolon is met by a broom ‘of no great purity, which he received on his face with considerable force’. The subsequent burning of Nicholas results in the rather vague loss of ‘whole patches of skin’.¹⁶

Dorothy Wordsworth’s exceptional approval of one of Chaucer’s most flatulent stories may be inspired by seasonal goodwill. On Boxing Day 1801 she records, ‘After tea we sate by the fire comfortably. I read aloud The Miller’s Tale.’¹⁷ This enthusiasm was clearly shared by her ostensibly sombre brother who recorded, in typically arch detail, his response to Chaucer: ‘Beside the pleasant Mill of Trompington / I laughed with Chaucer, in the hawthorn shade / Heard him, while birds were warbling, tell his tales / Of amorous passion.’¹⁸ (He is probably reading The Reeve’s Tale which is set in Trumpington but perhaps the place name itself suggests to Wordsworth a pun on ‘trumping’ or ‘trumpeting’ and flatulence.¹⁹)

But the critical reputation of Chaucer’s fabliaux has fared consistently less well from the nineteenth century. In a metaphor which, like Galen’s with which we began, calls to mind the very bodily processes of digestion and evacuation which he is so eager to euphemise, Charles Cowden Clarke, in 1833, condemns what he considered to be the perverse obscenity of the fabliaux: ‘as a distaste for vice will assuredly keep pace with love of virtue, so a well regulated and delicately instructed mind will no more crave after and feed upon impure writings, than a healthy and natural stomach will desire and select carrion or dirt’.²⁰ For Thomas R. Lounsbury, writing in 1892, the fabliaux were, similarly, a source of pollution, ‘great stains upon the poet’s writings’.²¹ In 1906 Robert Kilburn Root averred that the scatology of The Miller’s Tale made it an anomaly amid an otherwise perfectly respectable canon: ‘It is certainly a pity that such excellent skill was expended on a story which many of Chaucer’s readers will prefer to skip.’²² In 1928 John Matthews Manley implicitly admonished Dorothy Wordsworth for her unladylike audacity, pronouncing that The Miller’s Tale should remain in the boys’ locker room: it is ‘not fit to be read in mixed company’ and Mary Haweis’s description of her target audience is explicit in its exclusion of women: her translation is directed to ‘grooms, valets, coachmen, and cabmen’.²³

Alisoun’s own thrilled laughter at Absolon’s humiliation – ‘“Tehee!” quod she, and clapte the wyndow to’ (I, 3740) – might be seen as a feminist rebuttal of this patriarchal disapproval.²⁴ However, even in the year of Les Evénements, when the feminist movement was finding its feet as part of a larger student rebellion in continental Europe, Edward Wagenknecht also judged female sensitivities too delicate to cope with Chaucer’s scatological fabliaux, censoriously berating the ‘perversions that are now spoken of openly in college classrooms and in mixed company’.²⁵ The following year Haldeen Braddy sought to palliate our outraged sensibilities by assuring us that ‘this discreditable sort of filth [which is] Chaucer at his worst, figures small in the total’.²⁶ In 1971 James Winny, writing of the detail paid to Alisoun’s rough pubic hair, proposed that this is ‘Another remark for which Chaucer might well apologise.’²⁷ So by 1977, Peter G. Beidler can reasonably assert that ‘very few [commentators on Chaucer’s fabliaux] make any direct comment on the kiss and the fart. Most scholars have not yet faced up [to them].’²⁸ For John Cook, writing in 1986, the texts do not appear to deserve serious critical treatment; they are little more than a giggle. He associates them with a genre of comic films renowned for their ribaldry rather than any claim to the status of cinematic art:

Teachers of sixth-form students will know the ‘problem’ of teaching Chaucer if the ‘A’ level set text is the Miller’s Tale. The story is about illicit sex, about farting and pissing, about an arse branded with a hot iron. The atmosphere seems closer to a Carry On film than to the high seriousness we expect of great literature.²⁹

The Carry On films with their cheap double entendres, their ribnudging knowingness, their winking, risqué reliance on a panoply of smutty jokes and heaving low-cut cleavages, belong to a species of late twentieth-century English comedies distinguished by a heavy dependence on camp (one thinks also of The Benny Hill Show, Are You Being Served? and, primus inter pares, Up Pompeii). They are part of a cultural moment and they have their place but, as Cook suggests, it would be absurd to attribute to them ‘the high seriousness we expect of great literature’.

In an essay published as recently as 2006, Tiffany Beechy reiterates the critical quandary raised by Chaucer’s scatology: ‘The bawdiest of The Canterbury Tales have always been problematic for the critics.’³⁰ However, she then tantalisingly claims that ‘the door to this aspect of Chaucerian satire has begun to open’. Her evidence for this includes the existence of Beidler’s article (cited above) and the publication, in 2004, of Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology. In their introduction to this collection of essay...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Turning the other cheek: scatology and its discontents in The Miller’s Tale and The Summoner’s Tale
• 2 Ajax by any other name would smell as sweet: Shakespeare, Harington and onomastic scatology
• 3 M.O.A.I. ‘What should that alphabetical position portend?’: Shakespeare, Harington, Reynolds and the metamorphosis of scatology
• 4 Cavalier scatology between two stools: Rochester, Mennes, Pepys, Urquhart and the sense of dis-ordure
• 5 Swift’s shit: poetic traditions and satiric effects
• 6 A palpable shit: topology, religion and science
• Bibliography
• Index