Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The eighteenth century did its best to appear polite. Its literature, art, and music announce their commitment to good manners, good taste, careful judgment, and steady reason. Samuel Johnson, the greatest prose-stylist of the period, summed it all up beautifully when he described the poet Dryden: “What was said of Rome, adorned by Augustus, may be applied by an easy metaphor to English poetry embellished by Dry-den: lateritiam invenit, marmoream reliquit; he found it brick and he left it marble” (1781/1905). Johnson's epigram seems to capture the feeling of the early century - classical, grand, enduring. But there is an underside to the grandeur of the Augustan age in England, a contrary literary mode that relied on the expressive possibilities of filth, decay, and unregulated waste. This chapter is about texts that resist the good taste and good manners of the eighteenth century - depending instead for their literary effects on the symbolic resonance of filthy remainders. In 1678, Dryden himself established an “excremental vision,” in Norman O. Brown's sense, in his satirical poem MacFlecknoe - a text that attempts to convert a literary enemy into disgusting human effluent. Dryden's trick sneaks up on the reader; when we read the opening line of MacFlecknoe: “All human things are subject to decay,” we brace ourselves for a somber neo-Augustan historical narrative. But the ... log in or subscribe to read full text