Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 26 Mar 2016

Coprophilia or A Peck of Dirt by Terence McLaughlin

Spend an evening watching commercial television and the advertisements will most certainly convince you that we’re in a war, a life and death battle, with germs, dirt, grime and bodily excretion. The modern Western household can tolerate no hint of dirt invading our private spaces or the odium of being thought careless of cleanliness. Eradicating dirt is not just a pragmatic objective but a moral necessity in our 21st century culture – and if it can’t be eradicated it must be controlled or conquered. Always remember we have the technology to kill 99% of all known germs (although that missing 1% might just be the one that gets us!).

Terence McLaughlin’s 1971 classic, Coprophilia, or A Peck of Dirt reminds us just how culturally central the issue of dirt has been over the past 700 years. Importantly, he starts off by asking the question, ‘What is dirt’? and, inevitably the answer is not as simple as the question seems. Ultimately, he concludes what we consider ‘dirty’ is bound up with our own sense of contamination, both physical and spiritual. Dirt is about degradation and soiling of the spirit and the words we use to talk about our experience of dirt, underpin that sense of being defiled. While we grow accustomed and tolerant of our own dirt we become increasingly intolerant of other people’s.

It is the human traces that we object to because we fear the contamination, a kind of magical power that these traces might exert on us if we happen to touch them or even to smell them.(p5)

McLaughlin then launches into a cultural history of dirt as it appears in our literature and letters and there are plenty of stomach turning examples he casually draws from a range of sources. I guess we’ve all played the game of choosing a period of time we’d like to go back to live in but, in future, before we play that game again it should be mandatory to read this book – and we’d all think again. The author takes us on a  tour of worlds in which the Black Death runs rampant, where lice cover the bodies of people who never undress, where cholera is a constant threat and where drawing water from any source is fraught with danger; where vanity and fashion creates impossibly filthy hair and clothing and simple steps forward in basic hygiene are only slowly realised.

What overwhelms the reader however is the ever present reek of the past – a constant miasma that assaults the nostrils even as you’re reading the book. Even the rich stink abominably and the poor are beyond the pale – so filthy that notions of cleanliness really have very little meaning. What stays with this reader most vividly is McLaughlin’s analysis of the works of Jonathan Swift who was to all intents and purposes a man with late 20th century sensibility trapped in the early 18th century. It really must have been a torture and adds another dimension to the Yahoo/ Houyhnhnms episode in Gulliver’s Travels. Swift’s disgust of the Yahoos was not, it seems, just a satire on the brutishness of humanity but a heartfelt scream of sheer revulsion at the slime and stink of those he had to live amongst.

I have very little doubt that we’ve gone absurdly towards the opposite end of the dirt spectrum and now are so intolerant of any hint of what might be considered contamination that it borders on the obsessive. However, truthfully, if I was given the choice between any point in the past and now, I’d select now – if only to protect my rather sensitive nose.

McLaughlin’s book has sadly been out of print for many years and is quite hard to find. Copies can be obtained on the second hand market but they don’t tend to come cheap. It is, however, well worth the effort of tracking it down.

Terry Potter

March 2016