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That's Disgusting!

© Paula E. Kirman

The Hydra's Tale: Imagining Disgust Robert Rawdon Wilson
University of Alberta Press
464 pp.; $34.95; paperback
ISBN 0-88864-368-3

It grosses us out, and yet we cannot look away. That feeling of disgust can be triggered by a variety of things: insects, automobile accident scenes, horror movies, just to name a few. Everyone has his or her own disgust trigger for different things, and what might turn one person's stomach might be another's favourite entertainment.

Robert Rawdon Wilson looks at how disgust is expressed and experienced through different subject areas and cultures in The Hydra's Tale. "I felt that the subject, which had long been a major study in behavioural psychology, needed an interdisciplinary approach," explains Wilson, a Professor Emeritus from the Department of English at the University of Alberta.

"It would be, I thought, interesting to see what a study of art, film and fiction could add to what the psychologists had been saying. I also felt that disgust was a topic, like many others (hate or love, say) that people accept as natural, even a relatively simple phenomenon, but which is actually highly complex, culturally determined and subject to constant change."

To research the book, Wilson took a close look in several disciplines of the Humanities, such as anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. He also delved into popular culture. "I read and viewed as widely as I could in film and literature. I read accounts of performance artists and viewed videos, when I could find them of artists, such as G. G. Allen," he says.

Writing a book about disgust was not easy, especially when Wilson himself felt uncomfortable with some of the topics that he dealt with. "I found the study of descriptions of death by execution particularly difficult to bear. I also find, as a personal matter, all phenomenon in swarms, whether insects or aliens, deeply disgusting. And so writing about (and recalling experiences with) swarms was very disturbing. Even in films where swarms play a part, such as Starship Troopers, I would find myself more disturbed by these vast rushing masses than by anything else. People who write about horror refer to the representation of swarms (and hoards) as the 'principle of massification.' I guess that I dislike massification."

However, not all people view the same scenario as equally disturbing, and such differences can have cultural boundaries. In fact, Wilson himself was surprised by just how differently cultures can perceive disgust. "I knew that disgust, like love or hate, varied widely from culture to culture, and from historical period to historical period, but I had not understood how widely this is so, nor how shocking the variations can be. Disgust is exceptionally metamorphic."