Hi
Is there any evidence that a mentally declining Jonathan Swift engaged in coprophagia?
I had seen this written in articles in the past. I have searched online but could only find references to it in Gulliver’s Travels. I look forward to your feedback.
There are references to coprophagia in Gulliver’s Travels? Where? I do not remember any such parts.
There does seem to be a body of opinion which suggest that Swift had an ‘unnatural’ interest in such things, especially after Stella’s death.
Here is an essay on the subject that I cannot copy a quote from, but which, in any case, needs to be read in full.
Doubt it. Though lunatics are known for strange tastes ( and he was certainly depressively unsound in his last years — perhaps because of his latent whiggery ). He did include references to excreta in his poetry, but then it was the 18th century.
The British, including Victorian commentators — which influence lasted well into the 1930s — are still squeamish about that stuff; even when the American people became as obsessed with scatology as they are now ( British slang tends more to the sexual — something else that was a theme for the Dean ), so it wouldn’t have been taught in Eng. Lit. departments until the 1960s. And he doesn’t strike me as popular a subject as Shakespeare or Ben Jonson in academe since then.
Prolly half of British teenagers couldn’t tell you where Swift lived most of his life.
Swift’s fellow Scriblerian Alexander Pope also often indulged in such humor, as in The Dunciad: Cloacina attending Jove as he takes a dump and wipes his arse with the prayers of mortals and the memorable pissing contest between rival booksellers.
Both authors were influenced by their love for Rabelais in whose marvelous Gargantua and Pantagruel scatological humor was well to the fore. And indeed it’s an undercurrent, to a greater or lesser extent, in many of the English satirists. (Swift, though born in Ireland, did not consider himself Irish).
It’s often the case to consider, that later critics and fans of weirdness in artists, will search out tiny things to blow out of proportion about someone from the past.
There’s a whole strain of human nature, that likes to put other people down in order to make themselves feel superior to famous people. or to sell books, or to complete a Master’s Thesis or some such.