Privy matters (2)

Cette distinction est trop obscure, nostre chouse vaut mieux, & puis j’ay mis dehors tous ceux qui n’aiment point raillerie,(*) soyez les bien ventrus,(†) la panse (‡) fait l’homme : je vous prie ça en liberté, y a-il personne de vous qui ait le ventre tendu, qui veuille aller en Purgatoire ? (§) tout est libre & bon en son temps, lieu & endroit ; ce fut un Moyne de S. Denys, disciple de Genebrard,(‖) qui m’aprit à nommer ainsi le privé, pource qu’on s’y purge.

[Béroalde de Verville], Le Moyen de parvenir. Oevure contenant la raison de tout ce qui a esté, est, & sera. Avec demonstrations certaines & necessaires, selon la rencontre des effets de VERTU. Et adviendra que ceux qui auront nez à porter Lunettes s’en serviront, ainsi qu’il est escrit au dictionnaire à dormir en toutes langues, S. Recensuit Sapiens ab A, ad Z. Imprimé cette année [1616] 

* ceux qui n’aiment point raillerie — i.e., the agelasts, whose inability to laugh is a mark of their inhumanity. In the Letter to Lord Odet, Cardinal de Châtillon, Rabelais names the agelasts alongside the cannibals and misanthropes as men that are desraisonnés, devoid of reason, like irrational beasts—solus homo ridet.

† ventrus — portmanteau of ventre and the past participle venu. The ventre/γαστήρ, or material corporeal substratum (материально-телесный низ — Bakhtin), which breaks down food in order for the body to put on new flesh, in an endless cycle of digestion and regeneration, particularly lends itself to jesting, to puns and word play, themselves a process of breaking down language to generate new meanings.

‡ la panse — the gut, bowels, paunch, from the Latin pantex, which was a vulgar term for venter (whence the French ventre), meaning both belly and womb, and, in the plural (pantices), tripe, sausages. The pantex/venter is the seat of the appetite, the material corporeal substratum, which defines and generates man's material nature: la panse fait l'homme.

§ Purgatoire — in Middle French the word could equally refer to spiritual and to physical purgation.

‖ Genebrard — Gilbert Génebrard (1535-1597). Benedictine theologian, Archbishop of Aix, ardent supporter of the anti-Huguenot Holy League in the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598).

This distinction is too subtle, our plan is the better, and I have heedfully expelled all who loathe laughter. I give you all a gut (good) welcome, ’tis the paunch that makes the man; here all is free. If any have tight bellies let them go to purgatory; there is a time for everything and a place too. (It was a monk of St. Denis, a disciple of Genebrard's, who taught me to call the privy purgatory, because it is there that a man purges him.)

Fantastic Tales or the Way to Attain—A Book Full of Pantagruelism Now for the First Time Done into English, trans. Arthur Machen. Privately Printed, Carbonnek, 1923

 

la panse fait l'homme

 

The Land of Papagosse

Ils sont prins s'ils ne s'envolent,(*) ces pourceaux qui vestus à la Turque,(†) le Turban sur la teste, le halebarde sur l'espaule, vont s'embarquer dans un panier percé, pour faire une grande guerre navalle(‡) sur l'aisle d'un moulin à vent, aux pays de Papagosse,(§) où les chiens chient la poix, les chats gosillent(‖) le diamerdis,¶ les femmes enceintes pissent un pucelage gros comme le bras, & les grenoüilles crachent les oysons touts cuits & farcis.

Bruscambille, "En Faveur du Galimathias", Les Plaisants paradoxes de Bruscambille, & autres discours Comiques, 1617

They're snared if they don't fly away, these swine dressed up Turkish-style, with turbans on their bonces, halberds over their shoulders, who are off to board a holey basket so that they can wage a big naval war, on the windmill isle in the lands of Papagosse, where the dogs shit pitch, the cats disgorge pulvilio of turds, the pregnant women piss virginity as thick as your arm, and the frogs spit out goslings ready stuffed and roasted.

* Ils sont prins s'ils ne s'envolent - Antoine Oudin, who in his Curiositez françoises, pour supplement aux Dictionnaires, ou Recueil de plusieurs belles proprietez, avec une infinité de Proverbes & Quolibets, pour l'explication de toutes sortes de Livres (1640) draws heavily on the works of Bruscambille, defines this expression as "une façon de parler, pour desapprouver ce qu'un autre dit."

† pourceaux - possibly an allusion to the Pugna Porcorum per Publium Porcium Poëtam (1530), a comic epyllion whose every word begins with the letter p, which for more than two centuries was widely reprinted in Latin collections of facetiae.

‡ grande guerre navale - possibly an allusion to the Battle of Lepanto (1571), thitherto the largest naval battle since Antiquity, in which the Holy League defeated the Ottoman fleet.

§ Papagosse - imaginary region whose origin lies in mediaeval Provençal folklore, also called Pampérigouste, by which name it can be found in Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon Moulin (1869), and Papeligosse, which Randle Cotgrave, in his A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611) defines as the "countrey of the Butterflyes".

‖ gosillent - the verb gosiller derives from gosillier, gosier 'gullet, gorge', and means 'to vomit', figuratively 'to talk, speak' (see: Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française). Bruscambille's series of images encompasses all the possible bodily evacuations: defecation, vomition/regurgitation, urination, sputation.

¶ Diamerdis - Cotgrave defines this as a "confection of turds, pilgrims salve". Desiccated and blanched faeces (album graecum)  were widely used as medicinal preparations up until the eighteenth century. See, for example, Christian Franz Paullini, Heilsame Dreck-Apotheke: Wie nemlich mit Koth und Urin Fast alle ja auch die schwerste gifftige Kranckheiten und bezauberte Schaden vom Haupt biß zun Füssen inn- und äusserlich glücklich curirt worden (1696), a textbook on the pharmaceutics and curative properties of human and animal faeces and urine. In Rabelais, Pantagruel, Chapter 30, Panurge revives the decapitated Epistemon using diamerdis.

 

Like another Sisyphus

... and giving to one of his old acquaintances his wallet, books, and opistographs, away went he out of town towards a little hill or promontory of Corinth called Craneum: and there on the strand, a pretty level place, did he roll his jolly tub, which served him for an house to shelter him from injuries of the weather; there, I say, in a great vehemency of spirit, did he turn it, veer it, wheel it, whirl it, frisk it, jumble it, shuffle it, huddle it, tumble it, hurry it, justle it, jumble it, joult it, evert it, overthrow it, subvert it, beat it, thwack it, bump it, knock it, thrust it, push it, batter it, shock it, shake it, throw it, toss it, jerk it, overthrow it upside-down, topsy-turvy, arsiversy, tread it, trample it, stamp it, slamp it, tap it, ting it, ring it, tingle it, towl it, sound it, resound it, shut it, unbung it, stop it, close it, unstopple it. He hurled it, slid it down the hill, precipitated it from the very height of the Craneum; heaved it, transfigured it, bespattered it, garnished it, furnished it, bored it, bewrayed it, parched it, bedashed, tottered it, adorned, staggered it, transformed it, brangled it, heaved it, carried it, bedashed it, hacked it; then from the foot to the top, like another Sisyphus with his stone, bore it up again, slid it down the hill, and every way so banged it and belaboured it that it was ten thousand to one he had not struck the bottom of it out.

François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart (1653, 1693)

Note toward the "Malbrough theme" (тема Мальбрука)

Johannes Ravisius, in his Officinae epitome (Seb. Gryphius: Lyon, 1560), gives an extensive catalogue of famous cases of unnatural death recorded in classical antiquity. These include those who met their ends by fever (Febre mortui); by apoplexy (Apoplexia mortui); by bleeding to death (Sanguinis fluxu mortui); by the gout (Podagra [mortui]); by dysentery (Dysenteria [mortui]); by drowning (Aquis submersi); by falling off horses (Equorum lapsu mortui); killed by snakes (A serpentibus occisi), lions (A leonibus occisi), or dogs (A canibus occisi); suffocated by smoke or steam (Fumo aut vaporibus suffocati); dying of merriment and laughter (Gaudio et risu mortui); engaged in a sexual act (In venereo actu mortui); by excessive eating and drinking (Cibo et potu nimio mortui); by hunger and thirst (Siti et fame mortui); struck by lightning (Fulminati seu fulmine percussi); swallowed up by the earth (Terra absorpti); etc. etc.

Ravisius also dedicates a short section (vol. 1, p. 93) to those who died or were slain in the privy (In latrinis mortui aut occisi). In fact, the cases cited all involve murder: Heliogabalus and Cneius Carbo were assassinated while in the jakes at stool; Foelicula, Valerianus, Ireneus, and Abundius were Christian martyrs whose torments culminated in them being thrust down a latrine (in cloacam detrudi).

The subsection "In latrinis mortui aut occisi" is cited by the anonymous authors of Bibliotheca Scatologica (Scatopolis [Paris]: Chez les marchands d'aniterges, l'année scatogène, 5850 [1849], p. 17), who approve "avec plaisir" the mention of debauched third-century Roman emperor Heliogabalus (Elagabalus), but are surprised at the omission of fourth-century heresiarch Arius (perhaps the most notorious case of death in the latrine recorded in history). Moreover, they regret the fact that Ravisius did not also provide a list of famous figures born in a privy: "Ravisius aurait dû donner la liste des hommes célébres qui sont nés là où les précédents sont morts, et il est à regretter qu'il ne l'ait pas fait"

In Histoire de la merde (Paris, 1978), Dominique Laporte, evidently without having consulted Ravisius, and relying on a cursory reading of the entry in Bibliotheca Scatologica, unwittingly creates an apocryphal tome dedicated to the subject of death (and birth) in the privy:

The stercus could be as much a principle of life as death. The literal resonance of this belief is illustrated by Gryphius's work [Gryphius is, in fact, the publisher, not the author -- my note], In latrinis mortui et occisi, from 1593, in which the author proposes nothing less than a comprehensive census of eminent men and women who were born or died in infamous places -- namely, in latrines.

History of Shit, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury, MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2002, pp. 36-7

The concept of stercus as a principle of life and death of course derives from Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of the carnivalesque, in which death and defecation are fundamentally ambivalent, implying not corruption and destruction, as in the moralising view of life, but rather regeneration and rebirth. For Bakhtin, carnivalesque representation of the evacuations of the “material-corporeal substratum” (material'no-telesnyj niz) is a liberating debasement (sniženie) of fear and death. The ‘Malbrough theme’ (tema Mal'bruka) is the term he uses to denote those instances in literature or folklore where the moment of death coincides with the act of defecation (ispražnenie) or breaking wind (ispuskanie vetrov). The throes of death, childbirth and defecation are interwoven in the carnivalesque continuum. As an important variant of the theme Bakhtin also mentions involuntary defecation provoked by terror, by the throes of fear (Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaja kul'tura srednevekovaja i Renessanca, Xudožestvennaja literatura: Moscow, 1965; 2nd edition, 1990, p. 167-8).

For Bakhtin the Malbrough theme in particular and scatological images more generally are intrinsically linked with the image of the underworld (s obrazom preispodnej). Within the order of the carnivalesque cosmos, the material-corporeal substratum is contiguous with the bowels of hell. However, again, in this context Bakhtin, like Ravisius, omits to mention what was probably the most famous instance of the "Malbrough theme" in the ancient and mediaeval world after that of the Emperor Claudius, namely the death of Arius, the originator of the heresy that the Son of God was a created being subordinate to the Father, condemned by the Ecumenical Council at Nicea in the year 325. Indeed, "the strange and horrid circumstances of [Arius's] death", as Edward Gibbon puts it in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (cap. 21), were decisive in the defeat of Arianism, and seen as divine intervention. The sceptical Gibbon concludes that "those who press the literal narrative of the death of Arius (his bowels suddenly burst out in a privy) must make their option between poison and miracle."

Arius

Fifth-century Constantinopolitan church historian Socrates Scholasticus describes Arius's demise as follows:

On approaching the place called Constantine's Forum, where the column of porphyry is erected, a terror arising from the consciousness of his wickedness seized him, accompanied by violent relaxation of the bowels: he therefore inquired whether there was a convenient place near, and being directed to the back of Constantine's Forum, he hastened thither. Soon after a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations of his bowels protruded, followed by a copious haemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died. The scene of this catastrophe still exists at Constantinople, behind the shambles in the piazza: and by persons going by pointing the finger at the place, there is a perpetual remembrance preserved of this extraordinary kind of death. So disastrous an occurrence filled with dread and alarm the party of Eusebius bishop of Nicomedia; and the report of it quickly spread itself over the city and throughout the whole world. The verity of the Nicene faith being thus miraculously confirmed by the testimony of God himself, the emperor adhered still more zealously to Christianity.

The Ecclesiastical History of Socrates, anonymous translator, London 1853, p. 78

The death of Arius combines the main elements of the Malbrough theme: death during defecation; defecation caused by terror. However, its eschatological import could not be farther removed from Bakhtin's concept of the Rabelaisian grotesque. The hellish eruption of Arius's bowels is an image and consequence of the infernal origin of his heretical doctrine. It is ambivalent in that is a divine epiphany, but one of the intestinal, infernal underbelly, devoid (voided) of the fertilising, regenerative virtue and merry carnivalesque ambivalence that characterises the "Malbrough theme".

(c) Alistair Ian Blyth, Bucharest, 2009