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The following pages are concerned with ways in which the functions of bodily excretion attain expression (sometimes direct, more often indirect) in works of the imagination. They were written in connection with a book I am writing on the subject of Poetics which, since the days of Aristotle's famous treatise, has variously concerned itself with processes of “catharsis” in art.
Catharsis is usually considered in the grand style (in terms of such sacrifices and victimage as attain their fulfillment in the ritualistic use of the “scapegoat” for poetic purposes). But there are humbler modes of “mortification” available to imaginative writing. And I have here illustrated the point by close inspection of certain famous texts: Alice in Wonderland, Wagner's Ring, Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony, the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, the poetry of Mallarmé', and certain poems and stories of my own. Persons who insist on keeping the subject of the poetic imagination salonfähig (or, as the dictionary might put it, “suitable for discussion in the drawing room”) will resent such analysis. So let us offer these pages simply as a contribution to what I elsewhere call the “Beauty Clinic.”
Since the idea of purgation readily includes connotations of