The Art of Disgust: Civility and the Social Body in Hesperides

Abstract

The Art of Disgust: Civility and the Social Body in Hesperides by Michael C. Schoenfeldt Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man: but that which commeth out of the mouth, this defileth a man. — Matthew 15:11 (AV) Even as it pleads to be comprehended as a whole, Herrick's Hesperides contains a truly baffling range of generic types and poetic subjects. Throughout the collection lyrics of great delicacy rest uncomfortably next to poems of coarse vulgarity. Such variety can be explained generically, as a manifestation of the epigram book tradition recently analyzed by Ann Baynes Coirò.1 Yet even Coirò's admirable wish to avoid "the typical modernist gestures — repressing the scurrilous epigrams and isolating lyrics and epigrams and reading them alone without their contextual ironies and qualifications" results only in a deployment of the vulgar poems to qualify the elegant lyrics that in practice sustains the privileged status traditionally accorded those lyrics. I want to argue that the vulgar poems function not just, in Coiro's appropriately violent phrase, "to puncture and destroy lyric elegance" but also to depict the implicit social violence on which the very criterion of elegance depends.2 Despite the diversity of the volume, Herrick is not, as Alastair Fowler has argued, "a poet of reconciliations"; he is, in every sense of the phrase, a poet of distinction, continually delineating the disparate behaviors among different social and geographical classes and between genders.3 By attending to those poems that resist the evaluative machinery of traditional critical vocabularies and modern social conventions, we can begin to comprehend the peculiar inclusiveness of Hesperides as a principle for generating and sustaining difference. The wildly different lyrics that make up Hesperides frequently share a fascination with the body, either as the source of delightful smells and gossamer visions or as the producer and consumer of repulsive substances. By representing the body at once as the source of feces, phlegm, urine, and corns, and as the site of great elegance 128Michael C. Schoenfeldt and beauty, Hesperides maps the body into various social quadrants that correlate with the experience of desire and disgust. "There can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension," argues Mary Douglas. "Interest in its apertures depends on the preoccupation with social exits and entrances, escape routes and invasions . . . bodily control is an expression of social control."4 Herrick's poems on the grotesque body explore this social dimension. They are part of the Renaissance civilizing process — a process which entailed both the cultivation of bodily control and the production of social distinction. As Norbert Elias has demonstrated, the "threshold of shame and embarrassment" altered in the course of the Renaissance, as the nobility responded to economic and political dislocation by rendering formerly acceptable conduct as the behavior of louts, foreigners, uncivilized others.5 Particularly susceptible to such proscription are activities related to bodily fluids: spitting, urinating, farting, eating, and blowing one's nose. Herrick's work is deeply inflected by this process, displaying a refinement of bodily behaviors that he continually endows with class as well as aestheticvalue. Stephen Greenblatt has recently argued that "the behavior manuals of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries return again and again to codes elaborated for the management of the body's products: urine, feces, mucus, saliva, and wind. Proper control of each of these products . . . mark[s] the entrance into civility, an entrance that distinguishes not only the child from the adult, but the members of a privileged group from the vulgar, the upper classes from the lower, the courtly from the rustic, the civilized from the savage."6 The lack of bodily control in the figures whom Herrick foregrounds functions to justify their abjection, and to sustain the fiction of his own superiority. He sublimates any possibility of social mobility among these figures into an obsessive concern with the substances that enter and exit their bodies. By devoting so much attention to the bodies that delight and disgust him, Herrick generates throughout Hesperides a narrative which delineates the characteristics of the exalted and the base. In "To his Worthy Kinsman, Master Stephen Soame" (H...

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