MLN

Take Tacitus, for example. In Book XVI of the Annals, he is on to the subject of purges in the time of Nero. He relates two cases in which the suspects commit suicide to avoid persecution, except that the poison and slashed veins do not bring on death quickly enough, and so they recommit suicide by other means just to be sure. It is grim, nasty stuff, and prompts Tacitus to interrupt the narrative: [End Page 1199]

Even if I were describing foreign wars and patriotic deaths, this monotony of incident would have become tedious both for me and for my readers. For I should expect them to feel as surfeited as myself by the tragic sequence of citizen deaths—even if they had been honourable deaths. But this slavish passivity, this torrent of wasted bloodshed far from active service, wearies, depresses and paralyses the mind. The only indulgence I would ask the reader for the inglorious victims is that he should forbear to censure them. For it was not their fault; the cause was heaven’s anger with Rome—and not an isolated burst of anger such as could be passed over with a single mention . . . ¹

Very ably, the translator of the Penguin edition preserves Tacitus’ characteristic tone, flat and barbed, by refusing to use the word “disgust.” A Latin word for it is there, however, in “tedious” (taedium) and William Ian Miller’s account could easily find its premises in this lexical problem and in the further references to blood, surfeit, passivity and mental paralysis. Tacitus is lucky though, for a reason which Miller (who also begs the indulgence of his readers) never fully develops. What for us is the sickening “monotony” of horrible incidents shown on television and recounted in the newspapers was for Tacitus a pollution he could blame on and justify via the gods. The victims should not be “censure[d]” or, as the Latin text goes, hated (oderim). Disgust not only had a place in history writing and reading, but a profound seriousness and a transcendental relation.

Miller refers to himself as a “social historian” (16), but The Anatomy of Disgust is not recognizably a work of history. In many respects it is closer to a treatise, though the latter has become a rare genre in literary production. Modern authors may have deeply logical minds, and the gift required for thorough exposition, but very generally we lack the capacity to believe in systematic accounts. Instead of general argument, theoreticians in many fields proceed by stepping-stones, non-inductive fragments. What Empson did by complex words, Northrop Frye attained with cases in point, Angus Fletcher with footnotes, Foucault with a framing idea of the epistemè, and Derrida by plugging the theory of language into Rousseau. The examples are of course random—though Miller reminds me, to varying degrees, of all of them—just as there are possible exceptions to the idea that treatises have become obsolete.

To put it another way, Miller’s serious pretension seems to be to write an entertaining treatise. Although the novel begins to spoof the life out of systematic works as early as the eighteenth-century, one may also understand his ambition as something quintessentially contemporary and American. Our culture has wheeled into realms from which, stylistically and morally, it is possible and even enticing to talk about St Catherine’s great act of mortification, drinking pus. We like to flirt with transgressions. A student of Icelandic sagas, a knowledgeable reader of David Hume and Adam Smith, Miller is also a professor of law. He has written extensively about the Icelandic world and produced a study of what he calls the “distinctly moral sentiments” (198), shame and humiliation, the heroic predecessors to modern guilt cultures. [End Page 1200] The present work on disgust, portrayed with more eighteenth-century language as a “generalizing moral sentiment” (35), seems likely to be followed by further delving into the basement and groundworks of civil society. Indeed, the material that he brings to his investigation is so vast and varied that...