Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction

Modern Language Review, The, Oct, 2002 by Philip Shaw

Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction. By DAVID TROTTER. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. x 3400 pp. 35 [pounds sterling].

In W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (London: Harvill, 1999), a homage of sorts to the melancholic clutter of everyday life, we are shown into the office of Janine Dakyns, former lecturer in Romance languages at the University of East Anglia. Nothing remarkable here, one might think, except for the ever-increasing masses of paper that cover desks, tables, shelves, and floor, reaching in disorderly profusion as high as the top of the door. A colossal mess, in short. But messes, as David Trotter points out in his gloriously entitled book, can be deceptive, and indeed for Dakyns chaos is merely apparent, for 'the fact was that whatever she might be looking for amongst her papers or her books, or in her head, she was generally able to find right away' (p. 9). The scholar's triumph over mess is also her triumph over method and, one might add, over life itself, for here the desired object is found, instantly, with no irritable reaching after fact or reason. The messes in Cooking with Mud yield rarely to such angelic comprehension. Undesired and unlooked for, the objects revealed by mess seem at times actively to resist the primacy of human endeavour: in Wilkie Collins's Armadale, for example, a letter crucial to the development of the story appears by chance, the outcome of purposeless rummaging rather than symbolic determination. The difference between this scene of instruction and the one that is presented in Poe's Purloined Letter, the locus classicus of Lacanian theory, is the respect Collins shows for contingency: the letter, as it were, might just as well have not arrived at its destination.

Elsewhere, over the course of nine artfully conceived chapters, Trotter introduces us to messes, wrecks, and spillages of a less fortuitous kind: to rotten figs and gutted fish in Ruskin and Turner; bloodstains and spit in Maupassant and Melville; varnish and slops in Dickens and Chekhov; sausages and cadavers in Gissing and Cezanne. Quirky and exacting, the book oozes with objects and experiences that post-Saussurian criticism, with its dedication to the disembodied word, would find difficult to swallow. Avowedly on the side of Proust not Freud, Bataille not Saussure, and Sartre not Derrida, Trotter sets out to reclaim the jerky, experiential side of literature; his interest is accordingly in those moments when significance ebbs away to be replaced by blind, purposeless materiality, as seen in the inability of Dostoevskii's Raskolnikov, Dickens's Pip, and Zola's Florent to 'wipe away the stain of accident which soils the purity of their fiercely wrought ambition'. For such characters, mess is something that abuts on their life, frustrating transcendence, displacing metaphor and symbol with gruesome reminders of contingency. I use the word 'gruesome' here, though it may be more appropriate to speak of a kind of nausea. Sartre's thoughts on this subject are invoked in a number of relevant contexts, again reminding the reader that mess is what the world is like when we stop thinking about it. As one might expect, the trope that Trotter values above all others for its singular ability to prioritize objects over subjects is the trope of metonymy. Discarded dresses, dirty hands, and orange peel are thus presented as functional rather than significant objects; their value, such as it is (Trotter is attentive to the variability of messes, both good and bad), is derived from what they do and not what they mean. We should not, in other words, be too ready to convert substance into sign. Pity, then, the young man with egg on his trousers. When witnessed by Freud, in a scene from the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the vividly contingent nature of the stain, its largeness, 'its peculiar stiff edges', is rapidly converted into a 'confession' of 'troubles arising from masturbation'. It is the ease with which metonymy is converted into metaphor that gives Trotter cause for concern. Unable, in this case, to 'believe in external (real) chance', Freud abandons the 'in-itself' of the pure mess to the 'for-itself' of reason. In this account we learn everything about the explanatory powers of human consciousness and nothing of the world on which it abuts. But why should this matter? And indeed, what is the point of registering that which falls beyond the limits of signification? D. H. Lawrence's comment on the 'hurt' precipitated by a viewing of Cezanne's later work goes some way, I think, to conveying the moving instance of Trotter's argument. The point is not that still life acknowledges the priority of matter, an apple and a jug, but that such acknowledgement falls short of existence as a thing in-itself: the apple hurts because it will never be quite apple enough. The ebbing of symbolization in literature and art is as close as most of us will come to the disclosure of the inert, physical presence of things. I have one minor quibble. For a book that lays so much store in significant detail it is a shame that Oxford University Press did not see fit to invest greater care and attention in the reproduction of images. The space devoted to plates is miserly and fails to do justice to Trotter's delicate renderings of the unexpected and often barely perceptible messes in painting.