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<Nineteenth Century French Studies 30.1&2 (2001) 179-182



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Book Review

Cooking with Mud:
The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction.


Trotter, David. Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2000. Pp. 340. ISBN 0-19-818503-0

The only strange feature of this admirable book is its title. Baudelaire, the writer who pre-eminently characterized the creation of art in terms of the culinary and the cos-metic, described the metamorphosis of raw reality into crafted artefact, as the transformation of mud into gold, in a way which the anecdote from the childhood of Mary Butts, cited by David Trotter, barely encompasses. The sub-title of the book gives a far clearer picture of its range and content: the poetics and politics of "mess-theory" in Western fiction and painting, from approximately 1860 to 1900. "Mess" is to be understood in Samuel Beckett's use of the term, in his 1961 interview with Tom Driver, when he spoke of seeking in art "a form that accommodates the mess." Beckett, however, equated this activity with "chaos," whereas Trotter, in his book, [End Page 179] differentiates between the two. More precisely, Trotter makes a distinction between a theory of "waste" and a theory of "mess" (17). "Waste" is an effect which can be traced back to its cause and, ultimately, to human agency: it can be recycled and can be linked to renewal. Philosophically, in terms of order and disorder, it is related to determinism. By contrast, "mess" is governed by chance. It can be "good," in that it may mark the beginning of an illusion (as in desire), or "bad," in that it may mark the shattering of an illusion. It may be creative, as in the clutter of the studios of Edgar Degas or Francis Bacon, who each, in their different ways, produced some of their finest works in an environment of extreme "messiness." Philosophically, it is linked to the concept of contingency and is, aesthetically, the harbinger of modernism.

However, Trotter is not very explicit in his definition of "chaos," by contrast with his characterisations of both "waste" and "mess," despite the existence of innu-merable analogies with the chaos theory of mathematics. As far back as the ancient Greeks, mankind has believed in a predictable universe. Although unpredictable behavior could be seen in nature (as in the weather), the unpredictability was always attributed to a lack of knowledge of the underlying combination of predictable forces. In 1687, Isaac Newton published his famous Principia, in which he attributed all movement to three laws of motion, picturing a mechanical universe dominated entirely by cause and effect, in a set of principles which furnished the foundations of physics for over a hundred and fifty years. Nevertheless, Newton's scheme could not account for all observed movements. Brownian motion (1827), as explained about a hundred years later by Einstein, gave a key to understanding how determinism and unpredictability can coexist in the same system. In the 1960s, Edward Lorenz famously described how we shall never be able to predict the weather more than a few days in advance, because of the impossibility of knowing all the predetermining conditions: the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. To say this is not to digress, but rather to emphasise the complementarity of Trotter's definitions of "waste" (as determinism) and "mess" (as random contingency), in terms which make of his book a fascinating possible companion to The Essence of Chaos, by Lorenz (1993).

All the ingredients are there. Take, for example, Turner's Sun Rising Through Vapour (London: National Gallery, before 1807). The left half of the painting focuses on the partially occluded sun and, below it, on its effects: the glow of light in the water and the fall of shadows. By contrast, the right half of the painting is a genre-type crowd scene, reminiscent of the Dutch School: men and women are seated...

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