by CHRISTINA BLACK
Between Two Stools: Scatology and its Representations in English Literature, Chaucer to Swift by Peter Smith Manchester University Press, 304pp, £17.99
‘Celia, Celia, Celia, Shits!’ So goes Jonathan Swift in one of the most infamous lines in all of English poetry – the last word often blotted out with a demure dash to preserve the reader’s sensibilities. Happily, however, there exists another type of reader who remains just as interested in ‘shiterature’ as Swift and his literary predecessors were. Peter Smith is this reader, and his book, Between Two Stools: Scatology and its Representations in English Literature, Chaucer to Swift, is dedicated to removing these types of elisions.
Not everyone is aware just yet how necessary and audacious a task this is. For, as evidenced in the preface, Smith is self-consciously aware that the subject of his book makes good fodder for a joke about the value of research in the humanities. But the truth of the matter is that his book represents a genuine contribution on an important but neglected aspect of English literature. 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. Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1965) and Sophie Gee’s Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (2009), notwithstanding the interregnum, are notable exceptions (and a few wonderful, scatologically-minded essays cover that gap, it should be noted). Smith, though, takes the subject to a new literal and material extreme, and charmingly sheds any remaining inhibitions in the name of scholarship.
Smith’s overall argument is simple: English literature from the 18th century or earlier cannot be properly and fully interpreted without understanding that scatological references at that time were even more prevalent than they are today, and that contemporary reactions to the scatological were less “Puritanical” than ours. In his view the 20th and 21st centuries are neo-Victorian in their prudishness, which he proves by convincingly reinterpreting many scatological references modern scholars have missed in canonical literature. His discoveries are all the more surprising in academic fields as long-standing and crowded as Shakespeare’s.
But that’s not to say that this book’s audience is strictly academic. Between Two Stools is a lively read, fascinating for anyone who loves English literature. Smith resuscitates old, dirty vocabulary to explain jokes and references lost on modern readers and can’t resist throwing in puns of his own, comparing Gulliver’s Travels to ‘the Fart of Darkness.’ The authors he writes about are mostly familiar and when they’re not, they’re compelling. He explains and defends every last, lewd detail in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; demystifies Shakespeare by showing how plays as varied as Hamlet and Twelfth Night are better understood through a multitude of suggestive nicknames and digestive detail; but also keeps as his lodestar a less-known but fascinating Renaissance how-to manual and celebration of the flushing toilet, written by a renegade English courtier who invented it (the aptly named John Harington). Smith corrects prior readings of these medieval and Renaissance texts and transports the reader back to what Bakhtin called the ‘carnivalesque’ mode of scatology of Early Modern literature. The subsequent shift to Rochester’s poems’ ‘bleak anality’ comes as a jolt.
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