Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology

by Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim, Editors
Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington VT, 2004
214 pp., illus. 16 b/w. Trade, $89.95
ISBN: 0-7546-4116-3.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, USA

ballast@netins.net

In the 1990s, Random House produced a book by marine biologist Ralph Lewin called Merde: Excursions in Scientific, Cultural, and Socio-Historical Coprology, which was followed shortly by an MIT Press edition of the History of Shit by Dominique Laporte. This related current book (the title is a double entendre, of course) is comprised of a series of essays about societal apprehensions about human waste products. ("Scat" is an age-old synonym for excrement, which explains why bathroom jokes are called "scatological humor.")

The specific focus of this book is the prevalence of open talk about excremental "filth" in early modern Europe (1500-1700), when scatological art and literature were both "copious and ubiquitous"–a fact that is often unmentioned today in scholarly studies of the same time period. As foul-mouthed as we ourselves may be, our predecessors were even less civilized, if, as this book's editors claim, to be civilized is "synonymous with the marginalization of human waste and its production, restricting it to discrete corners of our lives and minds, banishing it from our educated, polite discourse." Some people find delight in jokes about "fecal matters," while others are displeased at best. Either way, scatology as a subject can be fascinating, especially in light of the notions of "dirt" that were formulated by structural anthropologists in the 1970s. "Dirt is matter out of place," wrote Mary Douglas (1966); it is an inevitable byproduct of any "systematic ordering and classification of matter." That said, the most basic distinction we make is between "self" and "not-self." In searching for the boundary where each of us begins and ends, there becomes an unsettling emphasis on things that fall between the two categories. In virtually every cultural group, the structural anthropologists said (read especially Edmund Leach in Culture and Communication), it is this ambiguous, borderline stuff–feces, urine, intestinal gas, phlegm, pus, sweat, mucus, teeth, semen, menstrual blood, hair, finger nails, and so on–that is forbidden and/or powerfully prized, in which case it becomes taboo (in polite settings, such matters can only be mentioned by their Latin names, e.g., feces, urine and mucus) or is set aside for sacred rites (for example, as sources of influence in the practice of voodoo)

This book is prefaced by a quote from Douglas about her definition of dirt, but beyond that she is mentioned twice. Claude Levi-Strauss is also cited, but only briefly, and the writings of Leach do not even appear in the bibliography. Perhaps we should forgive such strange omissions; after all, the subject of this book is not structural anthropology, and there is much of interest to enjoy in a welcome collection of essays about our squeamishness toward what we are–and what we are not.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, Autumn 2004.)