Second, the relationship can be examined in terms of the extraordinary zone of
putrescence. Here the monumentalist attitude treats the zone as if closed but is compelled to return again and again and reopen it.
While Baudelaire suggests a poem's moral, "C'est l'affaire du lecteur," Swinburne's praise of Baudelaire moves from "
putrescence and decay" to "meaning and secret" and beauty only to return to "actual carrion." Swinburne divulges an interest in the tension and compatibility between extreme responses as well as a desire to produce an outraged reaction.
she spreads herself wide open to let the insects in she leaves a trail of honey to show me where she's been she had the blood of reptile just underneath her skin seeds from a thousand others drip down from within (64) Morris indicates that this is "repellent imagery that evokes contamination, hybridity, decay, and
putrescence, all in the service of vicious misogyny directed toward an ex-lover," and he describes the music of this text as "harsh" and "distasteful" (64-65).
Afterward, they go to the adjacent market to buy oil and herbs to prepare a balm to anoint a body in
putrescence. But Shabbat comes, and they leave all chores for a day of rest, lament, prayers, and remembrance.
It originates precisely in what eludes the victim himself, in what exists without him and allows him to elude the institution that takes him as its adopted son only through reducing him to that [ca],
putrescence. Resistance such as this rests on nothing that could belong to him.
Having exposed as fraudulent one artist's use of the "Sickness of America" as an excuse for the "disintegration of his artistic powers," he reverses the causal connection in order to diagnose national disease as the product of poetic degradation: "There is no body of work in literature that, conceived of as some kind of diversion from the stringencies of art, will not rot and its
putrescence affect the population" (159).
Disgust, according to this S-R model, would occur in reaction to a visual or olfactory stimulus (
putrescence, say, or a foul odour of rot) which prompts a visceral response of gagging, accompanied by a wrinkling of the mouth and pursing of the lips--Wilson calls this the "disgust face"--after which vomiting quickly follows.
In an odd way, eighteenth-century court
putrescence finds a reflection in the delusions and conceits of cosmopolitan early twenty-first-century culture.
The killer, played with creepy elan by Malcolm Moorman, is the perfect sociopath, in whom the intriguing mixture of masculine swagger, unrelenting self-confidence, and physical beauty devolves into a delightful
putrescence, eliciting more gasps of pleasure than moans of disgust.
(3)
Putrescence, excreta and secreta, dissolution and decomposition of organic matter form a classic area of predilection for disgust.
