Mystique de la Merde

"Have you read Fitch?" is a question now heard at cocktail parties and other gatherings of writers, critics and just plain readers. The question refers to a remarkable article in the New Republic by Congregationalist Robert Elliot Fitch, 54, professor of Christian ethics and dean of Berkeley's respected Pacific School of Religion. "In view of the current revival of interest in religion," Fitch starts out, "perhaps we should take note of a brand of piety which may best be characterised as the mystique de la merde. This might be rendered in English as the deification of dirt, or the apotheosis of ordure, or just plain mud mysticism. At any rate it provides a label for a sectarian cult which appears to have attracted some of the best talent in contemporary literature."

One of the founding fathers of the cult, according to Fitch, is Ernest Hemingway, whose colonel in Across the River and Into the Trees revisits the spot in Italy where he was wounded in World War I, relieves himself and buries a 10,000 lira note. Then the colonel reflects: "It's a wonderful moment. It has everything. Fertility, money, blood and iron." Add sex to that, says Fitch, and you have all "the basic ingredients of ultimate reality" as seen by the merde mystics.

God the Devil. In coping with this literary phenomenon, the critic is at a grave disadvantage, for while the writers function on the "four letter level," the critic must stick to three-syllable words. But whatever the number of syllables, anyone trying to share in the cult must begin with a passion for "honesty" and for "truth"--preferably the kind of truth characterized by the ancient proverb, in vino veritas. As prophets of such truth, Fitch cites 1) Marion the pimp in Norman Mailer's Deer Park, who muses: "No one ever loved anyone except for the rare bird, and the rare bird loved an idea or an idiot child"; 2) Warden, in James Jones's From Here to Eternity, who, as he plans to go to bed with his commanding officer's wife, holds forth on the evils of "all conscious dishonesty, such as religion, politics and the real estate business . . . I believe the only sin is a conscious waste of energy."

Says Fitch: "When we have become honest, we discover that the reigning God is only a devil in disguise," and the real reason for this is that God "has made us unhappy." Witness Mrs. Evans in O'Neill's Strange Interlude, who affirms that the only good thing is being happy: "I used to be a great one for worrying about what's God and what's devil, but I got richly over it . . . being punished for no sin but loving much."

God the Womb. The deity that is substituted for God the Devil, says Fitch, "may be known as God the Womb. In his primary form he is the Womb of Undifferentiated Being . . . Doubtless one can pray to such a God as Jake does in church in The Sun Also Rises, with his pious meditations an inarticulate miscellany of self, girl friend, bullfight, need of money--a kind of visceral communion with reality . . . All the devotees of this cult make free use of the several symbols, and insist finally on an identification with reality in which all distinctions of the self and its standards must vanish. In brief their baptism is not just a lustration, a sprinkling or a spattering. It is a baptism of total immersion."

The high priest of the cult at the moment is neither Ernest Hemingway (who has often risen far above it) nor Norman Mailer. It is really Playwright Tennessee Williams, whose Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has one final merit, "to describe the town dump so that we smell the garbage"--except that "at least over the dump, as not over this rooftop, we can look up and see the stars."

Concludes Fitch: "If we say that sex is the prime symbol of this cult, then we may say that merde is the terminal symbol. Because the outcome is obscenity pure and simple--a mystique of obscenity, to be sure, but an obscenity which has nothing in common with the satirical use of it in a Swift or a Rabelais . . . When it becomes a cult, with a special ethic of honesty, with inspired and intolerant evangelists, with sacred symbols and a sacred literature, with a particular technique of religious exaltation--the mystique de la merde--then we are entitled to call on Shakespeare for a judgment of it. It is King Lear who describes that part of man or of woman which is all the fiends'--'There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.' "

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