There is a detailed account of the interaction between the power of sensibility and the brain in Chapter VIII of d‘Holbach‘s The System of Nature, ‗Of the Intellectual
24
In An Essay on Man, the correct word is not ‗tremendous,‘ but ‗stupendous.‘ See also Morton,
Faculties; they are all derived from the Faculty of Feeling‘ (1: 53-59 [1: 88-101]), which shares an affinity with Shelley‘s depiction of the ‗human brain‘ and ‗nerve[s]‘ as an essential transmitter of ‗the faintest thought‘ in Queen Mab (II 105-07). D‘Holbach identifies the human ‗feeling‘ with ‗gravity, magnetism, elasticity, electricity‘ (1: 53 [1: 88-89]). This ‗feeling‘ spreads throughout the body as one ‗great nerve,‘ in which ‗the nerves unite and loose themselves in the brain‘ (1: 54 [1: 89]).25
So the brain is literally the headquarters of the human body and nervous system: ‗man ceases to feel in those parts of his body of which the communication with the brain is intercepted; he feels very little, or not at all, whenever this organ is itself deranged or affected in too lively a manner‘ (1: 54 [1: 89]).
D‘Holbach focuses on physical sensitivity in order strictly to define the concept of sensibility as a psychological action, which is, for d‘Holbach, connected tightly with the concepts of ‗Sensation, perception, [and] idea‘ (1: 56 [1: 94]). These concepts are necessarily at work in the operation of the senses under the control of the brain, producing those complex concepts such as ‗wit, sensibility, imagination, [and] taste‘:
It is the extreme mobility of which man is capable, owing to his peculiar organization, which distinguishes him from other beings that are called insensible or inanimate: and the different degrees of this mobility of which the individuals of his species are susceptible, discriminate them from each other, making that incredible variety and that infinity of difference which is to be found, as well in their corporeal faculties as in those which are mental or intellectual. From this mobility, more or less remarkable in each human being, results, wit, sensibility, imagination, taste, &c. […].
25
(1: 56 [1: 94])26 In this materialistic view, everything present in the human mind is caused by ‗the shock given to the organs‘ by virtue of physical stimuli. The mind cannot work at all without the physical stimuli to the ‗corporeal faculties,‘ which underlines the importance of ‗mobility‘ in the human mind and body. In short, emotion is identical to motion, as discussed in Shelley‘s A Treatise on Morals (Speculations on Metaphysics, c. 1815), written a couple of years after Queen Mab.27 Thus the human ‗sensibility‘ is distinct from mere physical sensations or perceptions, as it has the capacity to develop a more culturally and aesthetically sophisticated experience and judgement as embodied by the term ‗taste.‘
Both in d‘Holbach‘s The System of Nature and Shelley‘s Queen Mab, moral philosophy and natural philosophy are entwined with each other and operate within the same realm, through the dynamics of attraction and repulsion, ruled by necessity. The concept of taste is a manifestation of this cosmological structure. For example, d‘Holbach introduces two kinds of taste, physical and moral. The former is taste as a physical sensation:
The mouth, filled with nervous, sensible, moveable, and irritable glands, saturated with juices suitable to the dissolution of saline substances, is affected in a very lively manner by the aliments which pass through it; these glands transmit to the brain the impressions received: it is from this mechanism that results taste. (1: 56-57 [1: 95-96])
26
Shelley may import this argument into A Refutation of Deism (1814) in Eusebes‘s speech to Theosophus. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Refutation of Deism, PWPBS 1: 116.
27
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Treatise on Morals (A Fragment), Shelley’s Prose; or The Trumpet
of A Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (1954; New York: New Amsterdam, 1988) 184 (hereafter
These workings of physical taste through the brain and nerves are concomitant with aesthetic taste in moral philosophy, especially as d‘Holbach explains another function of taste and its relation to the faculty of judgement in his discussion of human judgement. D‘Holbach goes even further by telling us that ‗taste in fine art‘ is not an intrinsic power, but an entirely empirical one acquired through the force of perception and sensation. Moreover, even the feeling of dislike and hatred is learnt through experience:
What is called taste in the fine arts, is to be attributed, in the same manner, only to the acuteness of man‘s organs practised by the habit of seeing, of comparing, and of judging certain objects: from whence results, to some of his species, the faculty of judging with great rapidity, or in the twinkling of an eye, the whole with its various relations. It is by the force of seeing, of feeling, of experiencing objects, that he attains to a knowledge of them; it is in consequence of reiterating this experience, that he acquires the power and the habit of judging with celerity. But this experience is by no means
innate, for he did not possess it before he was born; he is neither able to
think, to judge, nor to have ideas, before he has feeling; he is neither in a capacity to love nor to hate; to approve nor to blame, before he has been moved either agreeably or disagreeably. (1: 83 [1:149-50])
To delve more deeply into the idea of Shelley‘s concept of taste (liking) and disgust (dislike) in their relation to the politics of Queen Mab, let us briefly examine the British empirical tradition of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, in which the concept of taste is particularly associated with morality and politics. As seen in the case of d‘Holbach, since the beginning of the eighteenth century around Europe, the term taste has been considered a concept which harbours both a material and immaterial
meaning—namely, the physical act of tasting, which is metaphysical when it has to do with abstract beauty.28 According to the OED, one of the earliest examples of the usage of the term taste as a metaphorical appreciation of someone‘s aesthetic ability to discern the beautiful in an object, is found in Milton‘s Paradise Regained, where ‗Sion‘s songs, to all true tastes excelling / Where God is praised aright‘ (IV 347-48).29
Adam‘s tasting of the fruit of knowledge suggests how taste and knowledge are inseparable from each other.30
Taste was often used by eighteenth-century men of letters to signify an aesthetic
judgement. As one of the earliest examples of this usage of taste, Joseph Addison employs the metaphor of taste for good writing style in The Spectator.31 To describe the concept of aesthetic judgement operated by the ‗intellectual faculty,‘ Addison uses the word ‗taste,‘ in its original meaning to refer to the physical function of the tongue and the palate, by employing the figure of a tea connoisseur who, ‗after having tasted ten different kinds of tea, […] would distinguish, without seeing the colour of it, the
28
Jocelyne Kolb offers a brief description and discussion of the literal and figurative meaning of what she calls ‗ambiguous taste‘ in British, German and French Romanticism. Jocelyne Kolb,
The Ambiguity of Taste: Freedom and Food in European Romanticism (Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P, 1995). For the tradition of taste in eighteenth century British aesthetics and philosophy, see R. L. Brett, ‗The Aesthetic Sense and Taste in the Literary Criticism of the Early Eighteenth Century,‘ The Review of English Studies 20.79 (1944): 199-213. Peter Kivy deftly summarises this trend at the time. Peter Kivy, ‗Recent Scholarship and the British Tradition: A Logic of Taste—The First Fifty Years,‘ Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie and R. J. Sclafani (New York: St Martin‘s, 1977) 626-42. For a good summary of such associationists as Hume, Hartley, Lord Kames Alexander Gerard, and their theories of imagination (including the theory of taste) in the eighteenth century, see Martin Kallich,
Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth Century England: A History of a Psychological Mind in English Criticism (Hague: Mouton, 1970) 133-216.
29
John Milton, Paradise Regained, The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Cary, 2nd ed. (1997; Harlow: Pearson, 2007) 499.
30
For a full account of Milton as an early aesthetic theorist, see Gigante, Taste 22-46.
31
Joseph Addison, ‗Taste and the Pleasures of the Imagination: 409 Thursday June 19 1712,‘
particular sort which was offered him‘ (172). To articulate ‗the great resemblance between mental and bodily taste,‘ David Hume, like Addison, uses Sancho Panza‘s speech on his two kinsmen, who were capable of discerning the subtle taste of old vintage wine.32 Although Hume uses the gustatory metaphor for describing taste as judgement, he appreciates this ‗delicacy of sentiment‘ as more than just a mere appetite: ‗When a man is possessed of that talent, he is more happy by what pleases his taste, than by what gratifies his appetites, and receives more enjoyment from a poem, or a piece of reasoning, than the most expensive luxury can afford.‘33
The faculty of taste as judgement is, therefore, valuable in that the person who possesses it can enjoy his or her life more. However, this ability is not exclusive to the discerning connoisseur. As d‘Holbach states earlier (1:83), Hume, too, believes that the faculty of taste is empirically acquired, rather than purely innate, so the delicacy of taste can be educated and cultivated through ‗practice‘ to discern ‗beauties‘ and ‗defects‘ in the object they perceive (‗Of the Standard of Taste‘ 143-44). Aesthetic taste is acquired through education.
In a similar vein to Hume‘s ideas, Edmund Burke‘s A Philosophical Inquiry into
the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) discusses on acquired taste
or ‗relish‘ (such as the enjoyment of smoking or opium taking) and yet in the case of Burke, aesthetic taste always entails political or ideological elements.34 Hazlitt, who, in
32
David Hume, ‗Of the Standard of Taste,‘ Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (1993; Oxford; Oxford UP, 1998) 140.
33
David Hume, ‗Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,‘ Selected Essays, 11.
34
Edmund Burke, ‗Introduction on Taste,‘ A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our
spite of admitting his literary talent, opposed Burke‘s conservatism, established his own aesthetics.35 Hazlitt‘s concept of gusto is, strictly speaking, limited to ‗power and passion‘ expressed in artistic objects rather than taste, a delicacy or sensitivity in evaluating all kinds of arts (Hazlitt 77).36 David Bromwich defines Hazlitt‘s gusto as ‗a quality belonging to a picture, as much as to its creator and appreciator.‘37
Despite the fact that gusto and taste (as well as the word delicacy) are metaphorical terms derived from the physical experience of the palate, there is still a subtle difference between
taste and gusto. In Romantic Gastronomy, Gigante elucidates the difference between
the eighteenth-century ‗Man of Taste‘ and the Romantic:
Addison had compared the art connoisseur to a consumer of tea with a superbly refined palate, able to discern among several different blends, but Hazlitt takes the analogy further. Far from the disinterested attitude of the Enlightenment critic, who would strive to discern particular ‗beauties‘ or ‗defects‘ in the aesthetic object of contemplation in order to pronounce definitive taste judgments, the Romantic ‗Man of Taste‘ calls the full range of his faculties and senses into play. In the experience of gusto, ‗the
the ideological aspect of Burke‘s aesthetic education, see Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics 12. With regard to aesthetic education in the Enlightenment, Eagleton, similarly, argues that Kant‘s ‗sensus communis is ideology purified, universalised and rendered reflective, ideology raised to the second power, idealized beyond all mere sectarian prejudice or customary reflex to resemble the very ghostly shape of rationality itself.‘ Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the
Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) 96.
35
See also William Hazlitt, ‗Character of Mr Burke (1807),‘ 7:301-13. For the relationship between Hazlitt‘s aesthetics and his notion of sympathetic imagination as political power, especially found in his response to Burke and Coleridge as political conservatives, see John Whale, Imagination under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics and Utility (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 110-39.
36
Queen Mab was, of course, written before Hazlitt‘s essay. Yet even before Hazlitt, the word
gusto was used interchangeably with the word taste by Dryden, Pope, Shaftesbury, and Sterne.
The OED instructs that the word gusto in the sense of ‗keen relish or enjoyment displayed in speech or action; zest‘ became common at the beginning of the nineteenth century (‗gusto‘ 2). For this reason, Shelley‘s aesthetic notion of the palate, despite the fact that he never employs the exact word gusto, anticipates Hazlitt‘s ‗On Gusto,‘ sharing the same idea in his insistence on the importance of passion in art.
37
impression made on one sense excites by affinity those of another‘ (4:78). (Para. 2) Gigante astutely indicates that in making an aesthetic judgement to discern particular ‗beauties‘ or ‗defects‘ in the aesthetic object, ‗the Romantic ―Man of Taste‖ calls the full range of his faculties and senses into play.‘ The concept of taste or gusto in the age of Romanticism entails physical sensations of pleasure and displeasure to a higher extent than ‗the disinterested attitude of the Enlightenment critic.‘ The Romantic man of taste is, therefore, sensitive not only to pleasant beauties, but also to unpleasant defects, so that the difference between taste and gusto depends on the extent to which pleasure and displeasure of sensation is entailed.
Yet, what Gigante calls ‗the disinterested attitude of the Enlightenment critic‘ does not entirely deny any kind of pleasure in its aesthetic judgement. Carolyn Korsmeyer, another contributor to Gigante‘s Romantic Gastronomy, succinctly captures this kind of pleasure and displeasure in the empirical aesthetics of the eighteenth century:
taste is a sense that nearly always has a value valence—that is, one either likes or dislikes what is tasted […]. Because modern philosophy widely associates beauty with pleasure—indeed according to the most influential theories, such as the empiricism of Hume and Kant‘s analysis of feeling, beauty is actually identical with a certain type of pleasure—the likes and dislikes that eating typically occasions are parallel to the pleasure-displeasure responses that characterize aesthetic evaluations.38 In Shelley‘s Queen Mab, the opposition between ‗likes‘ and ‗dislikes‘ functions as an obvious variation on the dynamics of attraction and repulsion derived from d‘Holbach‘s
38
Carolyn Korsmeyer, ‗Tastes and Pleasures,‘ Romantic Gastronomies. ed. Denise Gigante,
Romantic Circles, January 2007, Para. 12. 01 March 2011
The System of Nature. The pairing of love and hate (or ‗the pleasure-displeasure‘
functions) for Shelley, are the overriding principles of this universe. As seen in d‘Holbach‘s and Hume‘s argument, this interaction between attraction and repulsion operates both through mental and physical sensibility.
To highlight the physical impressions of aesthetic sensibility as taste, it is essential to take a look—as Korsmeyer suggests—at Kant‘s theory of taste and disgust in
Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilkraft, 1790), which underscores Shelley‘s own
ideas of gusto and disgust. As a matter of fact, Shelley refers to Kant‘s books in his letters and, around the time when he was composing Queen Mab, the name Kant appears twice in Shelley‘s correspondence.39
When juxtaposing Shelley‘s and Kant‘s notion of taste, it is particularly pertinent to consider Kant‘s remark on displeasure or disgust, in section 48 of his Critique of Judgement. Kant expounds to what extent fine art is capable of beautifully depicting such ugly and displeasing elements as the ‗Furies, diseases, devastations of war and the like.‘40
According to Kant, disgust cannot be represented as a natural object ‗without destroying all aesthetic delight, and consequently artistic beauty, namely, that which excites disgust [Ekel]‘ (141 [199]). Kant elucidates this mechanism of disgust:
For, as in this strange sensation [disgust], which depends purely on the imagination, the object is represented as insisting, as it were, upon our
39
Shelley comments in a letter to Thomas Hookham (on 26 Januarry 1813) that: ‗I certainly wish to have all Kants [sic] works‘ (LPBS 1: 350).
40
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, rev. and ed. Nicholas Walker, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007) 141, trans. of Kritik der Urteilskraft. When I quote the original text alongside the translation (including page numbers in square brackets), all quotations are from the following text. Imanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft ed. Heiner F. Klemmer (Humbug: Felix Meiner, 2001) 199.
enjoying it, while we violently resist it, the artificial representation of the object is no longer distinguishable from the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and so it cannot possibly be regarded as beautiful.
(141 [199-200]) Although this passage‘s complex argument requires explanation, at least it is clear that the concept of disgust is inextricable from the imagination of the onlooker who experiences this sensation. Such a reaction to an object of this kind forces the viewer to enjoy the disgust no matter how much he or she ‗resist[s] it‘ even ‗violently.‘ In this moment, the art object that conveys disgust becomes identified with the disgust itself, at which point the art object as representation cannot be ‗distinguishable from the object itself in our sensation.‘ In other words, such an object cannot be ‗beautifully described,‘ even with the aid of the aestheticising power of imagination and art (141 [199-200]).41
Disgust as a repulsive reaction is, at the same time, a sign of a vivid sensibility in both a physical and moral sense. In his essay on ‗Economimesis,‘ Derrida writes that Kant‘s concept of disgust [‗dégoût‘] is a key term not only for its negative way of representing the unrepresentable, but also it registers a ‗desire to vomit [envie de vomir]‘ in the economy of art.42 Derrida‘s understanding of disgust as a moment of emitting something formless which cannot be articulated—but which we still desire to
41
For general discussions on the concept of disgust in itself, see Aurél Kolnai, On Disgust, ed. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Chicago: Court, 2004); Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust:
The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation (Albany: SUNY, 2003); William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) 85-88; and John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (London: Routledge, 2007).
42
Jacques Derrida, ‗Economimesis,‘ trans. R. Klein, Diacritics 11 (1981): 23, Trans. of ‗Economimesis,‘ Mimesis des articulations, Sylviane Agacinski et al. ([Paris]: Flammarion, 1975) 91.
voice—bears a close affinity with Shelley‘s disgust at injustice represented in Queen
Mab. Shelley‘s desire to voice his anger in verse form is driven by disgust, aversion,
and repulsion in his stomach, heart, and palate.43 Put differently, in such a moment of disgust, the acute sensibility and delicate imagination more clearly reveal themselves. Kant‘s definition and Derrida‘s extensive exploration of disgust thus illustrate that aesthetic taste is not always generated from pleasure, but also from displeasure as disgust, from the strong sensations of the body, which demonstrates an intense power of reaction to the beauty and ugliness in the world. In the case of Shelley, his dis-gusto becomes the motive for his poetic recreation of society and this very dis-gusto is deeply connected with, what might be understood as, his anti-gastronomy and anti-gourmet concerns in Queen Mab. In this attitude lies the basis of his vegetarianism and differentiates Shelley from other Romantic attitudes towards taste.44
Dis-Gusto and the Disease of Meat-Eating
The concept of taste or gusto as well as dis-gusto, underpinned by the forces of attraction and repulsion, permeates the world view of Shelley‘s Queen Mab, and his