#6 A Hybrid Study: Jonathan Swift, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Brussels
“Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!“
Oh, dear readers. After spending three-ish weeks in the chaotic parts of southern Romania with the sweetest hosts, I am back in Brussels, Belgium. Initially, I was planning a special feature on a contemporary Romanian artist (pushed back for the next week), but I smelled a topic that I couldn’t help but dive into. Yes, that’s right. This week, I’ll be talking about the symbols of human excrement in literature, culture, and urban cities. For the faint of heart, prepare to pinch your noses and sniff some roses.
I’ve been intrigued, academically, by the topic of poop (I hear it’s called scatology) while reading Jonathan Swift’s eighteenth century potty satire. Today, poop’s gotten more cultural capital through Ottessa Moshfegh’s indulgent interludes about shit-eating characters in her latest novel Lapvona. And poop (or lack thereof) is one of the culprits behind the bewildering way Elvis’s death became sensationalized.
More recently and more frequently, I’ve come across the topic of excrement and waste in the new urban environment I’m living in. Shit and its cousins are even less escapable when you live in a city whose most famous icon is a bronze statue of a young boy pissing into a fountain. I live in an apartment in northern Brussels where I have to pass by a regularly trafficked public urinal some hundred meters away. (Its Google review rating is 1.3 stars by the way.) And there are street signs plastered all over the city announcing the “Hold your pee & poo when it rains” campaign because the canal and waterways are estimated to be polluted with 10 million cubic metres of sewerage exacerbated by rainy days. It’s rained all week. You can say that my mind’s been full of shit, in the sewer, one way or another.
So what is it about excrement that writers, people, love? What is it about disgust—an affect of both repulsion and fascination—that is just so irresistible? We’re all animals at the end of the day so let’s disgust (Freudian slip, discuss) the human things of filth and necessity.
Jonathan Swift, the famed Anglo-Irish author of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), was also a prolific poet who was playfully liberal with human excrement. He was a satirist, so potty humor was definitely in his toolkit, but poop offered functions beyond a low-punch laugh in his writing. Shit was social commentary, disenfranchising the majority franchised, while making the audience unable to turn their eyes away from the spectacle of filth. And none is better exemplified than my favorite Swift poem, “The Lady’s Dressing Room.”
In the poem, a male suitor Strephon peers into his lover Celia’s dressing room. He is APPALLED to find the woman’s room so dirty despite her being so presentable and “haughty.” He finds sweat stains in so-called “goddess” Celia’s old smock, combs full of lice, the stench of body odor; in which the shock factor comes from the unimaginable possibility of a woman being filthy. (Keep in mind, this poem was written in 1732. I’m not sure if this observation on hetero courtship expectations have changed.)
Swift composes an ode to the grotesque; and the poem transforms the “civilized” feminine into a monstrous beast. Inside Celia’s wash basin, Strephon finds, “The scrapings of her teeth and gums, / A nasty compound of all hues, / For here she spits, and here she spews.” Nonetheless, Strephon keeps on staring, poring over the stenches and dirt, unable to look away, precisely for the same reasons he’s repulsed. Sianne Ngai in her project Ugly Feelings, captures the multiplicity of disgust, underlining the paradoxical necessity of desire that accompanies disgust. After all, isn’t that the phenomenon happening in the plot of Swift’s poem—a lover’s attraction being the requisite for repulsion?
What Swift also wants readers to recognize, though, is this theme of performance, the gaping difference between image and reality. Strephon catches a glimpse of a disguised, but not good-enough-to-be-fully-disguised chest: “With rings and hinges counterfeit / To make it seem in this disguise / A cabinet to vulgar eyes.” Featuring fake furnishings, the chest fails to look like the cabinet it’s clearly approximating. While Strephon is quick to pick up on this discrepancy, the failed mimicry of an object of another, the poem laughs at his inability to pick up on the discrepancies of the human. Perhaps humans are “better” disguised in civility, or perhaps it’s the story we tell ourselves about our essentialized difference from beastliness to make our disguises appear believable. Or it’s also possibly how stubbornly reluctant we are to expect our romantic pursuits to be as human as we are, especially when women are compared to the chaste divine.
But throughout the grossness of his lover’s dressing room, the poet bemoans further. Stanzas on poor hygiene and fleshly worms and warts proliferate in the room’s ugliness to the point where we ask ourselves, why do we need more of this shit? But it’s our very compulsion and demand of the audience to keep staring at a woman’s filth that defines her as disgusting in the first place. Strephon must keep discovering more; there must be more reason for disgust is the mindset, to the point of feigning knowledge—as if disgust is amplified by a performance of novelty.
When Strephon lifts the lid of the chest, the narrator admits, “He smelled it all the time before.” In its most denotative form, there is no surprise. But that doesn’t mean surprise and shock isn’t experienced regardless. Swift writes:
As from within Pandora’s box, / When Epimetheus op’d the locks, / A sudden universal crew / Of human evils upwards flew; / He still was comforted to find / That Hope at last remained behind;
This poem is still able to make me laugh because it balances innocence with an almost maliciously dirty humor. And humor, to be funny, has to carry a grain of truth. Swift compares Celia’s toilet, her chamber pot to be historically correct, to a Pandora’s box. Isn’t that, euphemistically speaking, what a toilet is? Something that holds and contains “human evils” and waste?
Swift effusively continues with a slapsticky image of Strephon digging through shit in faith he’ll find hope, the smallest bit of human goodness alive and intact: “The vapors flew from out the vent, / But Strephon cautious never meant / The bottom of the pan to grope, / And foul his hands in search of Hope.”
Swift is a master of high-and-low-brow juxtapositions in his poems, another sophisticated, well-tried technique for humor. After this nasty image of Strephon, the poet’s narrator invokes of Celia a line from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “O may she better learn to keep / Those ‘secrets of the hoary deep!’” Paradise Lost is a stretched-out interpretation of the story of Genesis that predicates the war in Heaven and man’s fall. The line “secrets of the hoary deep” comes from Milton’s description of Chaos, the liminal space between Heaven and Hell full of “dark materials” used by God to create the earth, where God made order out of chaos. Twenty-first century poop jokes can’t help but disappoint when Swift makes Celia’s shit analogous to the abyss of Chaos.
In this spectre of the distractingly dirty, unclean, filthy dressing room, readers may get lost in the descriptions, but Swift reminds us of what the action is about. A male suitor caught in the game of love. The punchline, or climax, of the poem lands with: “Disgusted Strephon stole away / Repeating in his amorous fits, / Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”
Celia shits! And oh, does this knowledge taint the woman as unlovable. And maybe it’s not just the gendered dynamic that Swift points to, even though that’s the most obvious to see. But it’s also love’s failure (it’s blind spots) to see the beloved as human and not as the exalted. And that precisely, is when the disgusted’s rejection of the perceived disgust-ing occurs.
The aerial view narrator’s voice comes out a bit more towards the end of the poem because, of course, a Swiftian narrative is not complete without a lesson. The goddess of Vengeance punishes Strephon by linking each woman he sees with the smell of shit, effectively destroying his desire. Celia and her material body parts are so engulfing in this poem, so much more than Strephon’s imagination of the “haughty” Celia he (wants to) see. I won’t go into this too much, but I find the poem’s imbalanced relationship between the material and the idealized another source of major tension.
If Swift does intend for this poem to conjure the story of man’s fall in repeated allusions to Milton, it’s fair to read the woman’s original sin arising from the fact that she seduces men with the convincing lie that she is above shitting. The poem offers a faux sympathetic view of Strephon at the end where he has been seduced by feminine charms: “I pity wretched Strephon blind / To all the charms of female kind; / Should I the queen of love refuse, / Because she rose from stinking ooze?” The temptress Eve, the birth of Venus, anyone? Swift loves undoing human mythologies of women, and yes, has been accused of misogyny very wittily by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. So please do sound off your critiques in the comments. But for now, I’m going to dive deeper into why human shit, filth on all biological levels, has been a reservoir of humor, disgust, and fascination.
Ever since I decided to write on shit this week, I couldn’t help but be reminded of this strange yet relevant reference that stuck in my head. Shirley Li’s defense of the new Minions movie in The Atlantic on its irresistibly juvenile humor: “It’s about allowing your id to have its moment.” Just as shitting is an involuntary, necessary part of being human, chuckling at poop satire is a temporary allowance of immaturity, of control and rational reason. My id, our cultural id, Brussel’s id, is definitely having its moment.
There’s another text I want to bring in too. Andrea Long Chu’s controversial, viral, saucy take on Moshfegh’s latest novel Lapvona analyses the author’s open obsession with excrement, the anus, and miserable, ugly people. Not only is shit used as a certain shock factor for the characters’ depravity in the medieval era, but Chu points out:
Moshfegh also has a philosophical interest in human waste. She finds in it not just pleasure and shock but a serious analogy for the literary act, which she has described as a cycle of defecation and coprophagia. “In writing, I think a lot about how to shit,” she once advised her fellow fiction writers. “What kind of stink do I want to make in the world? My new shit becomes the shit I eat.”
Moshfegh justifies her thoughts on shit as a metaphor for writing by constructing a zero-waste conceptual understanding of a writer who produces their shit, shit’s circulation in the world, and returning to the writer’s consumption of that waste. It’s cyclical, this poop business, which is very conducive to being analogous to the fluidity and transmutative quality of affects from the individual to the social economy.
Chu cites French philosopher Georges Bataille whose written influential texts on eroticism (“The sacred world depends on limited acts of transgression”) to trace back and criticize Moshfegh’s undercurrent of aligning shit to moral sacrament in her novel. The sacred world, the so-called “godliness” depends on depravity through the most disgusting, filthy, acts precluding rejection. (Chu mentions how Moshfegh liberally doles out descriptions of fat and exceptionally ugly people.) Similarly, Jonathan Swift’s poem harkens to the great canonical texts and mythologies cherished in the eighteenth century where shit and filth is a means to gain access to all that greatness (albeit being punished once accessed). If we switch the vantage point a bit, perhaps aspiring humans repel and disgust godly beings.
Speaking of shit and human waste of the good old medieval days, things that are nasty because they are outside instead of kept in, I’m also reminded of French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. In her book Powers of Horror (1980), Kristeva derives the “abject” as an excluded primal repression where meaning breaks down that is excluded from Lacan's objet petit a (“object - cause of desire”). Referenced frequently in horror films (think ghosts haunting houses, possession), the abject is what teeters between the human and dangerous animalism. Shit and the filthiest filth are also contingent on the abject as they become the “Other,” the thing that is not part of me. And in turn, strengthens the relation of what is.
This is stating quite the obvious, but perhaps shit’s empty, void, excess-waste-humility is why writers and we as humans, cannot help but return to it. Shit is a reminder of our shared humanity, regardless of its sacramental, spiritual qualities we impose upon and expect from it. Maybe it’s a strength that we laugh at it. Shit and many other things disgust us, and even as much as we try to rationalize it, life can be much truer when we accept that it’s an agnostic and amoral feeling.
Additional readings xoxo:
“A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” by Jonathan Swift (1731)
“Brom” by Ottessa Moshfegh (2017)
“Ottessa Moshfegh Is Praying for Us” by Andrea Long Chu (2022)
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection by Julia Kristeva (1980)
“The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to write a Poem called ‘The Lady's Dressing Room’” by Lady Mary Worley Montagu (1734)
“The Minions Are Good. I’m Serious” by Shirley Li (2022)
Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai (2005)