The Hydra's Tale: Imagining Disgust (review)

The Hydra's Tale: Imagining Disgust is a richly interdisciplinary book that draws upon research from anthropology, cultural studies, literary theory, philosophy, psychology, and sociology in order to analyze, more fully than in prior studies, the metamorphic properties of a single affect, namely, disgust. Each chapter is geared to a rubric taken from a specific part of the Hydra's body (for example, the initial chapter, establishing the scope of the problem, is called "Its Spoor"; the second, examining the available theoretical models, is "Its Stench"), an organization which seems to underscore the diversity of the issues contained within the single term disgust.

In The Hydra's Tale, Robert Wilson investigates a wide range of disgust phenomena, examining the ways in which these phenomena shift and vary from one culture, or historical period, to another. He also considers the failure of separate theoretical models to account for the variety and the constantly changing conceptual categories of disgust. Analyzing five theoretical models, he argues that they all bear significantly upon disgust's psychosocial origins, psychological functions, and cultural purposes but fall short of an adequate account. In this respect, Wilson differs from every other commentator on disgust phenomena, including William Miller in his 1997 study, all of whom claim that disgust can be exemplified in a universal disgust object (feces, say) or reduced to a single cause or purpose (moral or protolegal restraint in Miller's case). Disgust has usually been seen as a consequence of social formation or else the submerged memory of an early trauma and as having, as Miller argues, primarily a social purpose in maintaining public order and supporting, if not actually underlying, legal systems. Wilson argues that disgust has multiple origins, including some (hidden among the conflicting layers of early experience or diffused through cultural models) too complex for easy analysis, a shifting sociocultural expression, and a multitude of psychological and cultural functions, including self-expression and personal growth.

This analysis of various forms of interpretation of disgust phenomena leads Wilson into a discussion of "compound" affects. A compound affect incorporates intellectual and imaginative elements, and his use of the term "compound" calls to mind other recent attempts to model the intellectual component of emotion, such as Martha Nussbaum's (2001) use of "archeology" to indicate the layers of past experience (however many recensions it has undergone in the imagination) that inform particular emotional expressions. A number of multilayered affects, such as love, outrage, and nostalgia as well as contempt, build upon root psychovisceral affects (as nostalgia builds upon homesickness, say, or outrage upon anger) but add imaginative elaborations. The result is the construction of psychointellectual affects. With its extreme and well-marked physical behavior and its nearly formulaic facework (Wilson borrows Erving Goffman's [1967] term), disgust constitutes the root psychovisceral affect underlying contempt. Contempt builds upon disgust, a psychovisceral affect, but it does completely different social work.

The work of the imagination enters into all psychointellectual affects. They are, Wilson argues, compounds of an immediate response and memory plus the imagination. Thus, The Hydra's Tale contains both an analysis of disgust and a wide-ranging investigation of how imagination plays into "simple" visceral affects, transforming them into key narrative components of small, even fleeting, fictional worlds. Wilson distinguishes, as other writers upon disgust have not, between in-the-world disgust and representations of disgust in art, film, and literature. He argues that representations of disgust are attenuated or wan even when they are most accurate in depicting an emotion. Thus, they do not provide good evidence, as both lawyers and philosophers have often taken them to do, for an analysis of in-the-world disgust nor for an identikit for the disgust-producing author. Nonetheless, the analysis of compound affects and the role of imagination in their construction indicates how complex representations arise. There is considerable coherence in Wilson's argument: imagination plays a fundamental role in both the construction of fleeting micronarrative worlds (in compound affects) and in large-scale...