Abstract
‘The Constabiliad’ (1769) and a revision entitled ‘The Consuliad’ (1770) are superb narratives of forgery. They enact Chatterton’s entry into political life, the move from Rowley to Chatterton the satirist, from Bristol to London, from Aldermen to the Grafton ministry, which he invokes coyly by using coded proper names without specific referents like ‘Twitcher’, ‘Madoc’, Thrimso’, ‘Bumbulkins’, ‘D-s-n’. Both works are, however, much more than psychologically titillating stories about how an impostor enters the symbolic order. Moreover, they do not merely present ‘a tediously brutal picture’.1 They describe how consumption plays with figuration in a highly politicized way. Their status as food fights, and the representations of food and eating, or non-eating, which they employ, are both poetically and politically significant.
Excuse me sir, some of the food is going in your mouth.
(Unidentified extra talking to Burt Lancaster, Vera Cruz, 1953)
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Notes
Taylor, Donald S., Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History (Princeton, 1978), 208.
See Thomas, Nicholas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 14–15, 24.
Thompson, E. P., Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1991), 297.
See Erdman, David, Blake; Prophet against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times (Princeton, 1954; repr. 1977; reissued 1991), 8.
Kaplan, L. J., The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton (New York, 1988), 133.
Ackroyd, Peter, Chatterton: A Novel (London, 1987), 145.
Baudrillard, Jean, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, 1988), 6, 7 (introduction).
See Deleuze, Gilles, Différence et répétition (Paris, 1968), 92.
Baudrillard, Jean, The Mirror of Production, tr. Mark Poster (St Louis, 1975), 127.
Haywood, Ian, The Making of History (London, 1986), 15–45.
Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London & New York, 1989), 153–99. Žižek may be satisfied by this Hegelian custard-pie, which was thrown by Chatterton, an unlikely master of dialectic.
Mintz, Sidney W., Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985), 89.
See Morton, Timothy, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 1, for an overview and a description of macellogia.
Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford & New York, 1985), 243; see also 38–45, 239–40.
Elias, Norbert, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process, tr. E. Jephcott, vol. i (New York, 1978), 118.
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, 1986), 108.
Bertelsen, Lance, The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture, 1749–1764 (Oxford, 1986), 16.
For further classification of ekphrasis, see Mitchell, W. J. T., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, 1994), 151–81.
See Magli, P., ‘The Face and the Soul,’ in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. M. Feher, R. Nadaff, and N. Tazi (New York, 1989), ii. 86–127.
Dunciad Variorum (The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope), v, ed. James R. Sutherland (London, 1963), 171.
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© 1999 Timothy Morton
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Morton, T. (1999). In Your Face. In: Groom, N. (eds) Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390225_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390225_6
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