Eighteenth Century Cockroach Poetry and the Maggot Literary Tradition

Whine. I want to discover a new genre. A 2005 article by Michael McKeon says that Harold Love just discovered a new eighteenth-century genre called "Clandestine satire." I want to discover a new genre! Now! And in scholarly retrospect it will be seen to be just as important as the pastoral!After I spent some time looking at texts and failing to discover a genre, it struck me it would be easier just to invent the genre and then look for works to fit it. In Labyrinths, Borges comments that "every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future"--that is, we wouldn't see similarities between the precursors if not for the existence of the later writer who united them (in this case, Kafka). It seems that a natural implication is that every genre creates its practicioners, since you wouldn't know how to group these texts together together without already having a genre for grouping them. That means, if I am the person inventing the genre, I am also inventing all the people who wrote in it! Cool! The narcissism is wholly dizzying!

You might remember an earlier blog entry I did on the theological significance of eating dirt, which I was able to compose through the searchable database ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online). Well, I figured I'd do a search on the word "cockroach" and see what came up. Surprisingly, my search pulled up a blank-verse poem called "The Sugar Cane." The poet says in his preface that he was struck with the belief that the wonders of the West Indies, "however rude, could not fail to enrich poetry with many picturesque images." That is, he was intentionally trying to invent a new kind of imagery in poetry, and (let us not miss the significance of this) it involved picturesque images such as cockroaches! Of course, the poet's next words are, "I cannot, indeed, say I have satisfied my own ideas in this particular." Nevertheless, he insists, "I must be permitted to recommend the precepts contained in this poem."

Spanning across the ages, his clarion call to think about cockroaches challenges us to think of them not as pests, but as precepts, the very substance of poetic fancy.Here is his four-line poetic description of the cockroaches: "from their retreats/Cockroaches crawl displeasingly abroad:/These, without pity, let your slaves destroy;/(Like Harpies, they defile whate'er they touch)" (26). We have here a displacement of the epic: the harpies of myth have been replaced by the cockroaches of not myth. Rather than a danger of filthiness swooping down from above, the poem suggests that danger is really crawling slowly from below. "They defile whate'er they touch" has startling implications: the merest touch of the cockroach is full of transformative bug-indued power, forever changing whatever it touches, be it nature, be it poetry itself. Simply by being included in four lines of this poem, the cockroach has touched all of poetry and "defiled" it, permeating it and leaving a mark that not even all the perfumes of Arabia could sweeten. The cockroach, far from being a marginal figure in the history of poetry, has become central to all poetic thought.

Given this centrality of the cockroach, we might expect that the cockroach, or at least other bugs, would make similarly important interventions into literary history. Well, I made an important discovery in this regard by reading the literary critic J. Paul Hunter's Before Novels. Hunter notes that Samuel Wesley (the father of Charles and John Wesley) wrote a collection of poems under the title Maggots: titles included "A Tame Snake left in a Box of Bran," "A Pindaricque, On the Grunting of a Hog," "An Anacreontique on a Pair of Breeches," "On a Supper of Stinking Ducks," etc. Wesley's work was comical, and the work was so influential that in the early eighteenth century, there were frequent references to "maggoty" writing. It even transformed the language: if you look at Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, you'll see that "maggotty" can mean "full of maggots" or mean "capricious; whimsical." Clearly, this Maggot tradition and The Sugar-Cane were compatriots in the creation of a new genre to which all other genres must be subordinate!

I then started thinking ... "maggoty" ... "whimsical" ... my blog ... my blog that is often whimsical ... unawares, had I been participating in the whimsical maggot cockroach tradition without realizing it? All this time I thought I was inventing a genre ... had the genre really been inventing me? The cockroach-hunter had become the cockroach-hunted. It's like in the novel Sophie's World, when the main character discovers she is only a character in someone else's book. I sometimes wonder if Wibbity Wubbity feels that way.