From the Gut

For Virginia Quarterly Review, Will Boast follows his own gastrointestinal disorder into the archives, where he finds some morsel of relief among the bellyaches of famous writers. “From the Gut” is a history of writers’ efforts “to make meaning, any meaning, from even our most unglamorous suffering.” Walt Whitman warned that “too much brain action” caused indigestion. Franz Kafka’s father detested his son’s excessive chewing. Despite the heartburn, Boast seems to enjoy himself as he ruminates. “Those of us with sour guts could well be attuned to a more generalized aching and thus be incapable—physically, intellectually, emotionally—of stomaching this tainted world,” he writes. “All of this said, indigestion is still a fucking drag.”

Some months ago, I began to wonder, Where has this crisis come from? And why, given all of this alimentary advocacy, and all of my own dietary austerity, is my stomach, at forty-five, still rioting? Doctors and the internet provided only partial answers, so I went looking in books, where I found a sprawling body of medical history and, surprisingly, literary history on these indelicate matters. The gastrointestinal agonies of writers, it turns out, forms practically its own canon, one that dates back almost to the beginning of Western science’s attempts to understand the digestive tract. For more than two hundred years, countless bizarre theories and treatments were adopted and feverishly promoted by men of letters, including such esteemed figures as Voltaire, Coleridge, Twain, Henry James, Kafka, and Beckett.

While the root causes of our collective dyspepsia eluded me, never mind a cure, I did find strange comfort in such company. And I got some context and understanding. The literary history of indigestion, I came to see, has much to tell us about why we seem to be living, once again, in an age of the stomach.