Rumbles, page 18
Though no one is advocating for the surgical removal of large parts of the digestive system today, the stomach continues to be imagined along remarkably similar lines. From warnings that modern life ‘depletes our gut microbes’ to the purported health benefits of the slow food movement, the gut remains somewhat at odds with the rhythms of present.232 Like Eden after the Fall, the modern stomach has become, for many alternative health practitioners, a source of corruption in the body, responsible for causing everything from migraines to asthma, eczema, chronic fatigue syndrome and rheumatoid arthritis. According to proponents of the so-called ‘leaky gut syndrome’, for instance, the organ can wreak havoc around the body because its walls, under certain circumstances, can become permeable. The interior of the bowel is lined by a single layer of cells, known as the mucosal barrier, a border wall erected to prevent potentially harmful germs from passing into the bloodstream. Gastroenterologists have found that, in some cases, disorders like Crohn’s or coeliac disease can threaten the integrity of this structure, inflaming the bowel in ways that might exacerbate digestive discomfort. However, advocates of ‘leaky gut syndrome’ go further than science currently permits to claim that undigested food particles and bacterial toxins can move through the wall, triggering the immune system, causing persistent inflammation around the body, and even contributing to the onset of autism. This pathological permeability can seemingly be resolved through dietary change, usually the elimination of sugar, gluten and lactose, accompanied by nutritional supplements and herbal remedies. For those who refute its existence, ‘leaky gut syndrome’ is little more than a marketing ploy, a way to sell books and expensive probiotics to gullible consumers, but for those living with bad gastric health it offers the comfort of diagnosis and the hope of finding relief from debilitating symptoms.
What this controversy reveals, beyond questions of empirical proof and medical ethics, is that the rudiments of autointoxication remain with us in some form or another. The image of the bowel as a storehouse of rotting matter or a cesspool of toxic waste speaks to a deep disquietude with the act of eating, an uneasiness with the boundary crossing of exterior to interior that it involves. The gut has become the locus for a host of present-day concerns ranging from the increasing incidence of chronic illness to worries about processed foods, from rising levels of depression to concerns over the West’s growing ‘sleep deficit’, in a way that echoes the early twentieth century’s over-fixation on constipation as a source of disease. This has, as we have seen, a distinctly temporal dimension: by identifying the modern world as the source of poor digestive health it became possible to imagine the gut as an organ that was better served in the past. Reformers like Lane and Kellogg went as far as to characterise the intestines as vestigial, as the remnants of a period of human evolution long since gone, but it is possible to observe time at work in the body in subtler ways. Part of what the present, past and future of the gut has revealed is how interwoven our bodies are with the world around us. For Michel Foucault, a French historian of ideas known for his theorisation of the way bodies are shaped by societal forces, time is a ‘technology of power’ that has been wielded to discipline and control populations. Think of the strictly timetabled school day or the tyranny of the office time card, ways of structuring time that – according to Foucault – also force the functions of the body into patterns or rhythms.233 This symbolic exchange has, as the closing chapters of this book will explore, profound implications for the politics of class, race and gender.
POLITICS
On 6 January 2021 a mob of over two thousand Donald Trump supporters invaded the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., in an attempt to prevent a joint session of Congress from formalising the presidency of the Democratic nominee Joe Biden. The rolling news coverage captured acts of vandalism and looting as rioters, many of them armed, stormed offices and eventually invaded the Senate chamber. There were reports of assaults on journalists and police officers, pipe bombs were later found at locations around the Capitol, many people were injured and five were killed. The aftermath of these shocking events saw Trump impeached for a second time, criminal charges levelled against roughly half of those involved in the riot, a special committee convened and public hearings on the incursion broadcast on national television. Widely held to represent an attack on democracy itself, this attempt to overturn the results of a fairly held election through a combination of conspiracy theory and direct violence prompted a reckoning with the state of an increasingly divided nation. Among the hundreds of stories that circulated in the months that followed the insurrection, one concerning dietary requirements was reported on with surprising frequency. A man known as the ‘QAnon Shaman’, whose flamboyant appearance at the Capitol riot – shirtless, face painted, wearing a large horned headdress – had already garnered substantial media attention, was refusing to eat in jail. Asked in court to explain himself, the ‘Shaman’, otherwise known as Jacob Chansley, told the judge that he followed a diet that restricted him to only organic meat and vegetables. Consuming anything that was not organic would, he claimed, not only make him profoundly ill, but also be in direct violation of his shamanic religious beliefs. The judge duly granted his request for organic meat and vegetables. In the outcry that followed many commentators argued that an organic menu served to one white conservative man, while the rest of the prison population is not granted the privilege of choosing what to eat, perfectly exemplified the double standard that had emboldened a rabble of mainly white conservative men to run amok in the first place.
It is to the muddle of questions raised by the health-conscious conspiracy theorist that the next three chapters of this book turn. Firstly, there is something in the way that amid a major national conversation regarding the future of democracy attention kept being drawn back to what one man would and would not eat which points to the unexpected presence of dietary preferences and by extension the gut in the nation state. Secondly, that much of the ensuing media outrage centred on organic food as a marker of social and economic entitlement reveals how politically loaded the question of diet is. And thirdly, the image of a bare-chested man dressed somewhere between Viking and cowboy eating only pesticide-free produce invites us to consider how gender ideologies might be tangled up with the work of digestion. Rumbles has already made the case for the body and its functions as social and cultural concerns, but its closing chapters will demonstrate that the gut is also a profoundly political organ. One that has played an outsized role in the public sphere, whose functions have shaped world events in unexpected ways and dramatically impacted conceptions of race, gender and nationhood.
10 Body Politic
Automatons were all the rage in eighteenth-century France. Mechanical contrivances, usually modelling humans or animals, that were constructed and programmed in such a way so as to appear to move independently, enthralled the national imagination. Elegant mechanical figures danced at society balls, the ‘Lady Musician’ played for audiences around the country and La Charmante Catin, the ‘charming doll’, even made it to the royal court. Most famous of all was the Canard Digérateur, built by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1738. Vaucanson was among the most famous inventors in Europe and the Canard Digérateur – the Digesting Duck – was his crowning achievement. An intricate clockwork assemblage of over four hundred moving parts, including a smooth brass beak, webbed feet and fully boned wings that could flap, the machine was modelled on the close observation of the anatomy and movement of ducks in the wild. Rendered in gold-plated copper, it could quack, muddle water with its beak and rise up on its legs. Most remarkable of all, this metal mallard also appeared to eat, digest and defecate like a living animal. Promoting his marvellous creation, Vaucanson described how it was possible to observe ‘all the Actions of a Duck that swallows greedily, and doubles the Swiftness in this Motion of its Neck and Throat or Gullet to drive the Food into its Stomach’, before ‘discharging it digested by the usual Passage’.234 More than simply a demonstration of technical ingenuity, the defecating robot was built to settle a long-running scientific argument, touched on in Chapter Four, over whether digestion was a mechanical or a chemical process. Throughout the early decades of the eighteenth century, iatromechanists – for whom the grinding motion of the stomach was key – went head-to-head with iatrochemists, who claimed that food was assimilated with the help of acid and alkaline ferments within the bodily fluids. As we will see, this debate over our inner workings was closely linked to some of the period’s key religious, scholarly and political controversies. A prominent member of the Académie des Sciences, Vaucanson was well placed to intervene in this dispute and set out to explore the nature of digestion. According to historian of science Jessica Riskin, he viewed his automatons not merely as entertainments but as ‘philosophical experiments, attempts to discern which aspects of living creatures could be reproduced in machinery’ and ‘what such reproductions might reveal about their natural subjects’.235 Peering through the duck’s metal feathers, it was possible to glimpse the working stomach housed within and glean some knowledge of the animal’s physiology in its simulacra.
When it was displayed at the Hotel de Longueville in Paris, the Canard Digérateur caused such a sensation that the philosopher Voltaire quipped, ‘without Vaucanson’s duck, you would have nothing to remind you of the glory of France’. Even though it was exhibited alongside two equally impressive automatons, a flautist, and a pipe player whose musical virtuosity might have made a more fitting tribute to national ‘glory’, it was the defecating bird that came to be hailed as a symbol of modern, enlightened France. Even when it was later discovered to be a hoax – actual digestion did not occur, Vaucanson had simply secreted breadcrumbs, dyed green, to simulate bird poo – the duck remained bound up with the nation’s sense of itself as scientific, rational and inventive. The popularity of the Canard Digérateur reflects the broader investments of a culture that, as historian Emma Spary has it, ‘regarded the stomach as a somatic locus where digestive, moral, and even political upsets manifested themselves and through which appetite was expressed’.236 From table manners in the home to the cultivation of civility in the royal court, from famous culinary writers who shaped ‘good’ taste to physicians who instructed eaters on the immorality of overindulgence, digestive matters consistently mediated between individual bodies and the public sphere. Investigating how, in eighteenth-century France and elsewhere, the gut came to play such an outsized role in defining the character of civic life, this chapter is interested in where the language of the stomach meets that of governance, politics and power.
The connection between bellies and the nation state has sometimes proved more than metaphorical. Fifty years after the Canard Digérateur made its debut among the aristocracy, revolution swept across the country, bringing with it social upheaval, the dissolution of the monarchy and violent political turmoil. Food lay at the heart of the revolution. Marie Antoinette may or may not have said ‘Let them eat cake’, but it was undeniable that during the reign of her husband, Louis XVI, many ordinary people went hungry. The Women’s March on Versailles, one of the earliest events in the French Revolution, was organised to protest against the high price and scarcity of bread in Paris. In the years leading up to the Storming of the Bastille a combination of crop failures and government mismanagement brought the country to the brink of famine. There were rumours of a plot to starve the population and the king’s attempt at solidarity by eating mixed-grain maslin rather than the all-white manchet did little to quell rising public anger. Lack of bread, Thomas Carlyle reflected in his three-volume History of the French Revolution (1837), had not only engendered ‘agitation, contention, disarrangement’ among the people, it had also imbued them with a ‘Strength grounded on Hunger’ that fuelled the uprising.237 Tracing the links between empty bellies and political turmoil, this chapter also considers where the demands of the stomach have influenced the events of world history. Taking up the idea of the ‘body politic’ as both a metaphor that represents the body as the government in miniature and as a way of describing a collective of citizens, it is interested in the place of the gut in the national body.
As aristocrats lost their elegantly coiffed heads across the Channel, members of the British ruling class fretted at the violent potential of their own disenfranchised and underfed population. Coming in the wake of the American Revolution and fuelled by the controversial ideals of liberté, égalité and fraternité, the popular revolt in France threatened to undermine the political stability of its closest neighbours. In this climate of paranoia, theatres around England quietly dropped one of William Shakespeare’s more incendiary plays from their programmes. Throughout the closing decade of the eighteenth century, Coriolanus – a tragedy based on the life of the Roman leader Caius Marcius Coriolanus – was staged on barely a handful of occasions. As it told the story of a deadly famine and the citizen uprisings that follow, the play was considered too inflammatory to be performed in such tumultuous times. Its opening scene, in which an angry crowd protests against the price of grain and accuses its leaders of hoarding crops while the people starve, bore a striking resemblance to recent events in France. In the play, the mob are intercepted by an ally of Coriolanus, Menenius Agrippa, who tries to calm their anger by reciting one of Aesop’s fables. ‘The Belly and Its Members’ describes an inter-bodily conflict between the extremities and the stomach. As Agrippa tells it, the belly is accused by the other body parts of lazing around – ‘only like a gulf it did remain/ I’ th’ midst o’ th’ body, idle and unactive/ Still cupboarding the viand, never bearing/ Like labor with the rest’ – while the limbs worked to feed it.238 In an act of rebellion they decide to starve the greedy gut, but soon find that the whole body suffers when the stomach is not nourished. Wielded as a piece of political propaganda, Agrippa casts Rome’s rulers as the belly and its protesting citizens as the ‘mutinous members’ who have failed to appreciate the wisdom of centralised leadership. Instead, ordinary people ought to ‘digest things rightly’ and realise that every ‘public benefit’ proceeds from the distributive work of the stomach.239 In a climate of unrest and uprising, it was deemed unnecessarily incendiary to stage a speech in which a political leader chided ordinary citizens for questioning the rule of their superiors.
‘The Belly and Its Members’ is among one of the earliest examples of the body politic, a metaphorical strategy that maps social orders, political structures and economic models onto the human body. In the oldest sacred book of Hinduism, the Rigveda, the caste system is delineated through the body: the priesthood is the mouth, soldiers the arms, shepherds the legs and peasants the feet; in Ancient Greece Plato equated the state with the human body and stressed the need for each part to perform its function in service of the whole; early theologians like St Paul Christianised the metaphor by imagining Christ as the head of the body and the Church, until reformers in the late medieval period reclaimed it for the monarchy. Across time and in wildly different contexts, the metaphorical body has helped to shape political discourse. In Coriolanus the physiological importance of the stomach to the overall health of the body is called upon to naturalise the hierarchical make-up of the Roman world, but the fable of the belly has been put to other uses. In the Middle Ages texts by philosophers like John of Salisbury and Nicole Oresme ordered the organs of the body in terms of their physiological and symbolic nature.240 The head sits at the top, associated with the ruling monarch and the site of reason, intelligence and the soul; next the eyes that see and the ears that hear are associated with lawmakers; the functions of the heart correspond to wise men; the stomach to the farmers who feed the nation; the hands that defend the body are alike to warriors or knights; journeying merchants are the legs; and finally, the labourers who support the body are its feet. By the late eighteenth century, the political organisation of the body tended to associate the lower classes with digestion and the guts and the monarchy with thinking and the head, so that it became possible to shift the original meaning of ‘The Belly and Its Members’. Where Aesop’s fable had used the gut to symbolise the social value of centralised authority, in post-revolutionary France the parable was reconfigured so that it came to represent the power of ordinary citizens. As medical historian Bertrand Marquer has uncovered, by recasting the stomach as a ‘major actor of the social body’ reformist thinkers placed the labour of the working classes at the centre of civic life.241
Whether marshalled to maintain the status quo or realise social change, metaphors of the body have long shaped the rhetoric of state and nationhood. Not only have political and economic structures been imagined in corporeal terms, but the body has also been read as a miniature polity itself. Most clearly expressed in the ordering of the organs, from the virtuous head down to the base intestines, the politics of the body are perhaps most obvious in the frequent characterisation of the gut as something of a troublemaker. In the natural hierarchy established by early medical authorities, the stomach was expected to labour, obediently and without complaint, to sustain the higher functions. Good health required the stomach to know its place, but it was widely held that the organ had something of an attitude problem. In his Medicinal Dictionary (1745), Robert James – physician and close friend of the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson – warned that even minor ‘Spasms of the Lower Belly’ could impair ‘Force of the Memory and Brightness of the Genius’. Despite its lowly position in the corporeal pecking order, the gut needed to be treated with the upmost sensitivity lest it throws the ‘whole of the nervous System into irregular Motions’.242 Reflecting on this need for deference in The Stomach and Its Difficulties (1852), the English physician James Eyre noted that while it ought to be ‘invaluable, as a Slave’ more often the organ becomes ‘a dangerous, because too powerful Despot!’243 Later in the nineteenth century the food reformer N. Henessey described it as causing ‘headache, toothache, sickness, biliousness, nausea, indisposition, and innumerable other aches and sensations’ and concluded that the gut was ‘implacably opposed to man’s progress and comfort’.244 Held responsible for an astonishingly wide range of disorders, from polluting the blood and infecting the other organs with acidic gastric juices to bringing on dangerous heart palpitations and precipitating nervous derangement, the stomach was often imagined as an agent of disorder and disruption in the body, either an unappeasable tyrant or an uppity servant who has forgotten their place. While previous chapters of this book have lighted upon the gut’s vulnerability to demonic possession and its sensitivity to excessive passions, here we have it imagined as a kind of political agitator that threatens the harmonious organisation of the rest of the body.
