MDDM23: A Digestionary Process

[Dave Monroe]

"'The Man Voltaire call'd a Prometheus,-- to be
remember'd only for having trespass'd so ingeniously
outside the borders of Taste, as to have provided his
Automaton a Digestionary Process, whose end result
could not be distinguish'd from that found in Nature.'
   "'A mechnaickal Duck that shits?  To whom can it
matter,' Mr. Whitpot, having remov'd his Wig, is
irritably kneading it like a small Loaf, '-- who
besides a farmer would even recognize Duck Waste,
however compulsively accurate?'" (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 372)

See ...

http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/images/MAZLISH1.GIF

>From Hillel Schwartz, "A Happening Thing," Dimensions
No. 71 ...

"In 1742 a thirty-three-year-old French inventor,
Jacques de Vaucanson, produced a life-size mechanical
duck that shat. [...] he set in motion his automaton
duck, which drank, quacked, spread its tail, opened
and flapped its wings, stretched out its neck to the
ground to eat some grain and, a few moments later,
excreted a wet greenish mass. 

"Highly popular and profitable, the mechanical duck
was taken on tour from court to royal court around the
Continent. What young Vaucanson was most proud of and
what most excited his 18thcentury audiences was not
the vigorous flapping of wings, not the quacking, not
even the gobbling of the grain. It was the shitting.
'The food is digested as in the real animal, by
dissolution,' wrote Vaucanson with the double pride of
an engineer and a godfather. '[T]he material digested
in the stomach is conducted by tubes, as in the animal
by the bowels, to the anus where there is a sphincter
which allows for its voiding.' 

"The interior of the duck, unlike the interiors of
those audioanimatronic figures found at Disneyworld,
was left open to view, so that everyone could see the
gears and pulleys, stomachbox and coiled tubes that
stood in for the muscles, tissue, organs, and
intestines of a real duck. Every spectator could thus
be witness to the amazing process by which,
schematically, food became excrement. Shit did not
just happen; it was manufactured. The drama lay in the
climactic turnabout, where the fragrant suddenly
became the foul. 

"Vaucanson was exhibiting his duck at just that time
when French scientists, engineers, physicians,
philosophers, and public servants were beginning to
catalogue, classify, and worry over industrial
effluvia, odors, human waste, and offal. As historian
Alain Corbin has shown in The Foul and the Fragrant,
it would take sixty years and more for the French
effectively to clean up some of the muck in which
city-dwellers had been living for centuries.[...]
Vaucanson's unrelenting duck revealed (to some extent)
the secret of the transformation of healthy grain into
shit. 

"It almost had to be a Frenchman who produced such a
duck. After all, it was the French who stuffed geese
(and ducks) to produce oversize livers for their paté
de foie gras. And it was the French gourmet,
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who would write in The
Physiology of Taste (1825), after a chapter on
'shooting luncheons' where guests munched on paté and
bagged duck, that 'Of all corporeal operations,
digestion is the one which has the most powerful
influence on the mental state of the individual.'
Brillat-Savarin went on, 'In this respect it would be
possible to separate the civilized portion of mankind
into three great divisions, namely, the regular, the
constipated, and the lax.' He elaborated: 'According
to my theory, comic poets will be found among the
regular, tragic poets among the constipated, and
pastoral and elegiac poets among the lax.' 

"I know of no other philosophy which puts such weight
upon the final stage of digestion....

[...]

"I know of no recent automata, and certainly none on
public view, that proceed through each of the
digestive motions and offer up, at the end, a wet
turd....

[...]

"What does any of this have to do with shit happening?
First off, it has to do with predictability: if all
went well inside the duck, shit would happen.
Secondly, it has to do with those paradoxes which
modern philosophy now associates with being natural:
it is 'only natural' for a duck who has eaten (even a
mechanical duck who has gone through the motions of
eating) eventually to shit; shit happening validates
the mechanical duck as an imitation of Nature and,
paradoxically, as a lively, nearorganic system.
Thirdly, it has to do with the mystery of reducing
things to their essences: during digestion, bad
substance is removed from good substance by some
complex chemistry which Vaucanson neither understood
nor attempted to reproduce; what was crucial for
audiences to observe, at last, was that shit did
happen."

http://www.dimensionsmagazine.com/dimtext/Schwartz/Happening_thing.html

Corbin, Alain.  The Foul and the Fragrant:
   Odor and the French Social Imagination.
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986.

And see also ...

Schwartz, Hillel.  The Culture of the Copy:
   Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles.
   New York: Zone Books, 1996.

But do note that ...

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