The legibility of the bowels: Lichtenberg’s excretory vision of Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress

Abstract

This essay lays bare the rampant but thinly veiled scatology in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s renowned commentaries of William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress. It shows that Lichtenberg finds all kinds of scatological objects – chamber pots, enemas, anal swabs – in Hogarth’s prints by applying what he calls the hermeneutics of hypochondria. Such a hermeneutics follows digressions, metaphorical associations, and metonymical connections to identify scatological objects in the images even where there are none. The resulting excremental vision of A Harlot’s Progress evidences, in Lichtenberg’s view, his own hypochondria and threatens the validity of his interpretations. But he also turns the scatological motif against the interpretive excess that produced it: excrement confronts the hypochondriacal interpreter with his own corporeal mortality and thus with the limits of his interpretive capacities as a human. Scatological satire therefore serves, in Lichtenberg’s conception, as something like a cynic self-therapy for interpretive hubris.