THE POETICS OF SPICE

Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic

TIMOTHY MORTON
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# Timothy Morton 2000

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First published 2000

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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Morton, Timothy, 1968±
The poetics of spice: romantic consumerism and the exotic / Timothy Morton.
p. cm. (Cambridge studies in Romanticism: 42)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0 521 77146 3 (hardback)
1. English literature ± History and criticism.
2. Spice trade in literature.
3. Capitalism and literature ± Great Britain ± History.
4. English literature ± Oriental in¯uences.
5. Consumption (Economics) in literature.
6. Romanticism ± Great Britain.
7. East and West in literature. 8. Exoticism in literature.
9. Orient ± In literature. i. Title. ii. Series
pr408.s665 m67 2000
820.9'355 ± dc21 99 ±087472

isbn 0 521 77146 3 hardback

 Contents

List of illustrations page x

Acknowledgements xii

Introduction 1
1 The confection of spice: historical and theoretical
considerations 8
2 Trade winds 39
3 Place settings 109
4 Blood sugar 171
5 Sound and scents: further investigations of space 207

Notes 236
Bibliography 252
Index 273

ix
 Illustrations

1 Signs and matter: `Of the Dragon', from NicolaÂs page 24

Monardes, Ioyfull Newes out of the New-found Worlde (tr.
1596), fo. 71
2 The spice trade as poetic discourse: Maximilianus 37
Transylvanus, De Moluccis insulis (1523), title page.
3 `Indiae orientalis, insularumque adiacientium typus': 52
Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antwerp: E.
C. Diesth, 1570), between pp. 48 and 49
4 `The Beast which Yeilds [sic] Musk': from Jean Baptiste 56
Tavernier, The Six Voyages (1678), ii. between 152 and
153
5 `Isphahanum': from Engelbert Kñmpfer (1651±1716), 60
Amúnitarum exoticarum politico-physico-medicarum fasciculi v
(1712), before A2
6 Asian Money i: from Jean Baptiste Tavernier, The Six 66
Voyages (1678), ii. between 4 and 5
7 Asian money ii: from Jean Baptiste Tavernier, The Six 67
Voyages (1678), ii. between 6 and 7
8 `The Persian Golphe': from Jean Baptiste Tavernier, 69
The Six Voyages (1678), i. between 256 and 257
9 The seal of the VOC (Dutch East India Company), 76
from Jean Baptiste Tavernier, The Six Voyages (1678), ii.
201
10 Ekphrasis: Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum 137
(1570), frontispiece
11 Pipe and censer: from Engelbert Kñmpfer, 147
(1651±1716), Amúnitarum exoticarum politico-physico-medi-
carum fasciculi v (1712), p. 641
12 James Gillray, `Barbarities in the West Indias' 181
(London: H. Humphrey, 1791)
x
 List of illustrations xi
13 William Blake, `Europe Supported by Africa & 183
America': from J. G. Stedman, Narrative (1796),
between pp. 394 and 395
14 Venice: from Thomaso Porcacchi, L'isole piu famose del 184
mondo (1576), p. 65
15 Jamaica: from Thomaso Porcacchi, L'isole piu famose del 186
mondo (1576), p. 175
16 William Blake, `The Skinning of the Aboma Snake, 187
Shot by Cap. Stedman': from J. G. Stedman, Narrative
(1796), between pp. 174 and 175
17 William Blake, `Family of Negro Slaves from Loango': 188
from J. G. Stedman, Narrative (1796), between pp. 280
and 281

All illustrations are reproduced by permission of the James Ford Bell

Library, University of Minnesota, except for ®gure 12, which is
reproduced by permission of the British Museum.
 chapter 1

The confection of spice: historical and theoretical

considerations

. . . cinnamon, and odours and ointments, and frankincense,

and wine, and oil, and ®ne ¯our, and wheat, and beasts, and
sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and the souls of
men.
(From the description of Babylon (`the merchants of the earth
shall weep and mourn over her' . . . , 11), Revelation 18:13

introduction
Capitalism arose not only from concrete economic and social
relations, but also from desire ± it was in itself a kind of poetry.
Fantasies about an ideal substance, of extraordinary wealth and
beauty and located in distant imaginary realms, percolated into
poetic language. This language persisted even after the economic
and social relations within which it had emerged passed away.
Romantic writers inherited this long literary tradition, and their
evocation of the ideal substance encapsulated it. Moreover, they
modi®ed the tradition to depict the developing consumer culture of
their age. Even when they were reacting against capitalism, their
poetic language was shaped by the fantasy substance.
The fantasy substance was spice. Long after the demise of Roman
cuisine, Europeans heard about spices from reports brought back
from the Crusades. Literary fantasies about spice ¯ourished ±
legends of the Land of Cockaygne and descriptions of Paradisal
gardens as in Le Roman de la Rose, fantastic medical discourses, and so
forth. The search for the Terrestrial Paradise, a land of inexhaustible
plenty, became a realisable objective. The spice race resembled the
space race, as John Keay has noted: like the moon, which was visible
but could not at ®rst be reached, the spice islands had swum into
Western Europeans' ken before they were accessible. Renaissance
8
 The confection of spice 9
commemorations of the discovery of `actual' spice islands in the East
Indies celebrated the incarnation of a legend. The East Indies, bent
to serve the realisation of desire, became spice monocultures.
European consumers of spice grew more sophisticated, re®ning their
tastes for spice, developing non-Christian discourses on luxury and
leaving behind the civic humanist distaste for luxurious consump-
tion. Consumer society was born.
The apex of this history ± the point at which consumer society
began to know itself as such ± was the Romantic period. Forms of
self-re¯exive consumerism developed, producing a bohemian culture
that gradually permeated almost all levels of civil society. It even
became possible to criticise luxury in new ways. Writers parodied
the advertising language of luxury culture, blowing it up hyperboli-
cally rather than simply opposing it. This is where John Keats's
poetry achieves its brilliant, camp reworking of a language under-
pinning capitalist ideology ± the language I have chosen to call the
poetics of spice.
Spice participates in discourses of spectrality, sacred presence,
liminality, wealth, exoticism, commerce and imperialism. It is caught
up in, but not limited to, forms of capitalist ideology. A literary-
critical approach to this topic is apposite principally because spice
itself is such a ®gurative substance. It could even be considered a
sign made ¯esh, a hypostasised signi®er. It served as money in the
absence of an exchange rate on trade routes to the Far East; and it
has become a metaphor about metaphor, as in the case of analogies
between the Eucharist and spice. Spice is a complex and contra-
dictory marker: of ®gure and ground, sign and referent, species and
genus; of love and death, epithalamium and epitaph, sacred and
profane, medicine and poison, Orient and Occident; and of the traf®c
between these terms. The Poetics of Spice, the ®rst long literary critical
study of its topic, principally explores the persistence of tropes,
®gures, emblems and so forth involving spice. Moreover, these
readings offer something to cultural historians of capitalism. Literary
criticism, aware of the complexities of ®gurative language, is able to
demonstrate aspects of this topic which have not been pursued in
cultural anthropology and histories of the commodity. It is able to
treat issues of rhetoric, representation, aesthetics and ideology,
including notions of race and gender, in ways that make us sensitive
to the power and ambiguity of sign systems.
This book investigates how, principally in the English literature
10 The poetics of spice
and culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the
representation of spice operated within ideologies of consumption,
including notions of trade, abstinence and luxury. The Romantic
period was the acme of developing, overlapping discourses of spice.
This is the point at which a new, re¯exive kind of consumerism
became possible, following the growth of a consumer society (as
investigated by McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb). Campbell has
made some useful observations about this kind of consumerism, and
the title of this book is partly an echo of his The Romantic Ethic and the
Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987). Re¯exive consumerism encapsu-
lated ideologies of consumption latent in bourgeois values of ef®ci-
ency, productivity, work and rei®ed market forces: fantasies of
cornucopian consumption. These fantasies had been prepared for by
the poetics of spice.
The Romantic period came at the end of a century during which
the actual economic value of spice had been declining, but also during
which its ideological value, because of the debate on luxury, had been
rising. It was also the period that witnessed the birth of imperialism,
the global institutionalisation of those forces that had been inspired
by and caught up in the poetics of spice since the later Middle Ages.
The haunting trace of spice was left, a perfume that had opened up
global space. For Keats and Percy Shelley, to talk about spice was to
talk about capitalism, and most notably, consumerism and luxury.
These poets mounted a critique of capitalism through a poetics that
could register the new kinds of consumerist desire that had gradually
deconstructed the civic humanist self throughout the eighteenth
century.
This does not mean that the Romantic period is in all respects
different from the other periods under discussion ± a formalist
proposition Romantic studies is commonly in danger of making. Our
criteria for distinguishing among the medieval, early modern and
modern periods in general, and between the Romantic period and
the long eighteenth century in particular, need to be reconsidered.
The Romantic rhetoric of spice draws on a long history of representa-
tion, economics and politics, and the period is not hermetically
sealed. A diachronic approach to studying the poetics of spice is
therefore required. For instance, a study of the long eighteenth
century indicates political, economic and poetic reasons for Keats's
representation of spice in such poems as The Eve of St Agnes. This is
why I prefer to use `the Romantic period' rather than `Romanti-
 The confection of spice 11
cism'. To think of an author who wrote between, roughly, 1776 and
1830, is not necessarily to think of a `Romantic' author in the old-
fashioned sense.
Besides being a way of making my American colleagues pro-
nounce Gaston Bachelard's phenomenological study, The Poetics of
Space, with a cockney accent, The Poetics of Spice is, to use the well-
worn phrase, about the `politics and poetics' of spice. I still believe in
the usefulness of `ideology', despite ubiquitous postmodern Father
Christmases bearing gifts for humanities departments in the guise of
literary approaches to non-literary disciplines. This book is a study
of ideology, broadly conceived to include ideas about poetry and
poetics. Unlike some historicist works, however, it does not shun
close reading: after all, it analyses a style of consuming.
Ideology is externalised in food. As ZÏizÏek jokes in The Plague of
Fantasies, imitating the catchphrase of the TV series The X-Files, `The
Truth is Out There'.1 Consider Little Derwent's Breakfast (1839), a
collection of poems addressed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's seven-
year-old grandson. Written by Emily Trevenen, an acquaintance of
William Wordsworth and friend of Charles and Mary Lamb, it is an
educational poem in the sense that education is an externalised form
of ideology, embodied in what Louis Althusser called Ideological
State Apparatuses. Trevenen does not merely exhort Derwent
Coleridge to behave like a little gentleman at the breakfast table,
though it is an ideal scene of instruction in manners. She also
provides lessons on the commercial origins of sugar, exotically
illustrated by the idyllic fantasy realms of the West Indies, China and
Arabia. She furnishes a homily on class relations entitled `The
Rivals; or, Sugar and Salt'. The presence at table of both condiments
provides an opportunity for a quarrel and reconciliation (by
`Nature') between the bourgeoisie (in the form of sugar) and the
working class (in the form of salt). The poem `Coffee' begins with an
indecorously surreal depiction of the coffee blossom petals falling
`Like the ¯akes of a fresh-fallen shower of snow'.2 But perhaps this
exposition is not indecorous, if it is a celebration of the arti®ciality of
commodities, a tribute to how the world has been turned into an
aesthetic object. The last two stanzas depict Arabia Felix:
The land where the choicest of coffee is grown,
Is a country for costly productions well known;
For jewels and spices ± fruits richest and best ±
And hence they have named it, `Arabia the blest'.
12 The poetics of spice
Again, in our West India islands 'tis found
That coffee plantations now richly abound:
But none can with coffee from Mocha compare,
Which the Turks with their hookas luxuriously share.3
The close is signi®cantly orientalist. The slippage of `fruits . . .'
indicates either actual fruits, or the jewels and spices in a metaphor-
ical register: the fruits of trade and empire. The naturalising depic-
tion of trade as the plucking of fruit is strongly ideological. Little
Derwent's Breakfast resembles David Harvey's opening question to his
geography students at Johns Hopkins: where did your breakfast
come from?4 To think about this is to uncover global networks of
power. The difference is that Little Derwent's Breakfast is a didactic
work designed to produce ideology rather than unmask it:
How many different hands 'twill take
A single loaf of bread to make! ±
That tea and sugar must be sought
In distant lands, whence they are brought:
In short, what time it will employ
Only to feed one little boy!5

historicising spice
My principal sources for the history of spice are Wolfgang Schivel-
busch's Tastes of Paradise, Fernand Braudel's three-volume history of
capitalism, and the works of Piero Camporesi (The Incorruptible Flesh,
Exotic Brew and so forth). Also ®guring in this study are the many
histories of Levantine trade and the European East India Com-
panies, treatises on the relation betweeen sugar and slavery, and
material and textual microhistories of spice.
Literature on spice is divided into the history and theory of
consumption and the history of commerce. Sidney Mintz's monu-
mental work on sugar, Sweetness and Power, and Massimo Montanari's
discussion of medieval and early modern diet, The Culture of Food,
have been strong in¯uences. John Brewer and Roy Porter's Consump-
tion and the World of Goods has been invaluable. I have also drawn
inspiration from The Machiavellian Moment and Virtue, Commerce, and
History, J. G. A. Pocock's studies of the interaction between civic
humanism and capitalist ideology.
Schivelbusch's history is phenomenological. Some may disagree
with his idealist, teleological and anthropocentric model of spice
 The confection of spice 13
bootstrapping the Middle Ages into modernity.6 He claims that
`With the help of spices the Middle Ages were, so to speak, outwitted.
Spices played a sort of catalytic role in the transition from the
Middle Ages to modern times.'7 This catalyst image is rei®ed,
omitting a sense of the actual ¯ows of labour and capital. Tastes of
Paradise lacks the story of spice's changing mediation through history.
In its inclusion of chapters on such items as chocolate and opium,
Tastes of Paradise belongs to a group of popular studies of the history
of food and eating. Henry Hobhouse's Seeds of Change, for instance,
discusses sugar, quinine, tea, cotton and potatoes. The Poetics of Spice
is not as inclusive, in that it does not study coffee, chocolate, tobacco
and opium per se.8 While it does refer to commodities such as coffee
and opium, it would be misguided for it to approach commodities as
phenomenologically discrete entities. To write a chapter on spice
which concluded with the end of the Middle Ages would be easy, but
how would one account for spice's persistence in cookery, poetry and
other discourses, and how would one explore attributes such as
`spicy' which apply to substances other than cinnamon, pepper and
so forth?
Histories of food often restrict spice to the Middle Ages. Refer-
ences to spices in the literatures and cultures of Britain are not
con®ned to the medieval period, however, but are found in eras
beyond the time when the spice trade was a signi®cant factor in the
development of long-distance trade. References to trade with the
Spice Islands appear in the poetry of Sir Richard Blackmore and
mid-eighteenth-century mercantile panegyrics, such as James Thom-
son's Summer, as well as in Romantic period works. Robert Southey,
Mary and Percy Shelley, Landon and Keats provide some of the most
interesting references, though there are some in Wordsworth,
William Blake and Coleridge. The writers of novels and other
narratives of the period, such as William Beckford and Jane Austen,
also take an interest in spice. Moreover, the signi®cance of items such
as sugar, coffee, tea and tobacco cannot be underestimated. The
chapter `Blood Sugar', which considers the relationship between the
representation of sugar and anti-slavery poetry, barely broaches the
huge number of literary texts waiting to be studied in this light.
In addition to the literary representation of spice and other kinds
of products that we now think of as `food supplements', there is an
extensive medical and dietary discourse in the period. The vege-
tarian literature of the long eighteenth century contains invectives
14 The poetics of spice
against the adoption of highly seasoned cooking amongst the middle
and upper classes, who were often inspired by French culinary
fashions. These invectives, far from being merely locally signi®cant,
were caught up in emergent ways of talking about the body,
economics and the nation that ¯ourished between 1790 and 1820. A
new kind of consumer and producer, ef®cient, hard-working and yet
capable of consuming vast surpluses when required, was being
created. The role of what Christian discourse called temperance
became freshly signi®cant, not as self-abnegation but as what Michel
Foucault would have called a technique of the self.
This book is not just a book about history, but it does have certain
historicising features. The Poetics of Spice takes a non-biographical
approach to literature. In contrast with Shelley and the Revolution in
Taste, it focuses less on individuals and their milieux. With this in
mind, we could re¯ect on two issues of historical analysis and
methodology:
(1) what a long narrative can tell us about the history of the
representation of trade and capitalism
(2) what such a narrative can tell us about methodological ap-
proaches to the study of the commodity.
Braudel has usefully opened the ®eld of speculation on both these
points. Civilization and Capitalism deals with ways in which the spice
trade was crucial to the establishment of capitalism in Europe. A
renewed interest emerges in what counts as a `luxury' commodity.
Most sociological approaches to spice, such as that of Arjun
Appadurai in the introduction to The Social Life of Things, consider it
purely as a luxury product, thereby establishing a simple binary
distinction between spice and a `necessity' such as wheat. Braudel
reveals how useful and `necessary' to the development of capitalism
spice was as a commodity, and how the Annales School overlooked
the spice trade in its eagerness to study what appeared to be ordinary
and essential about daily life.
Unlike Schivelbusch's phenomenology, Braudel's approach more
thoroughly historicises spice. Civilization and Capitalism was written
with an eye for labour and capital which might unbalance its
sublime project of total history. But perhaps not: the details Braudel
relates are signi®cant as local information and as part of the larger
history of capital ¯ow. Braudel is appealing for his gathering together
of a mass of primary evidence and deploying it in a long narrative
that questions distinctions between the medieval and modern
 The confection of spice 15
periods. His trilogy on capitalism surpasses previous research, both
empirical and Marxist. Christopher Berry's The Idea of Luxury (1994),
an exemplary long history, has also been a signi®cant in¯uence, as it
demonstrates how `luxury' has shifted through the rise and fall of
Christian, civic humanist and capitalist discourses. Berry is sensitive
to the changes that could take place in the meaning and value of
luxury as capitalism developed a culture of surplus.
Shelley and the Revolution in Taste discussed how food played many
different roles in literature. It also showed how food itself was an
object permeated with ambiguous and shifting ®gurative meanings
and values. I am continuing this approach in The Poetics of Spice,
trying to move beyond a naive `economism' that relates all signs and
meanings to an economic base. There is no easy economic way of
assessing the role of spices in, for example, the poetry of Richard
Crashaw and Henry Vaughan, two so-called metaphysical poets of
the seventeenth century. They often describe God's providence as a
¯ow of spices from heaven. Concepts such as Marcel Mauss's
potlatch and contract sacri®ce could be used to illuminate this.
Similarly, eighteenth-century panegyrics to trade, which modi®ed
this mystical language into a form of economic mysticism, cannot be
discussed solely in terms of a one-to-one reference to a `base', as the
spice trade was now less an economic reality than a literary code.
Moreover, works such as Lord Tennyson's Maud, Frank Herbert's
Dune novels or Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon have more recently
developed the literary language of spice in English.
The resistance of ®gurative language to naive economism is
especially true of the Romantic period. It is impossible to do a vulgar
Marxist reading, concocting a one-to-one relationship between
culture and the economy. In fact, what really becomes necessary is to
account for the gap between the economic and poetic value of spice
in the Romantic period. For despite Wordsworth's and Coleridge's
attempts to write non-ornamented, non-`luxurious' poetry, the value
of spice was high, due to the development of self-re¯exive consu-
merism. The culture of surplus had made it possible to re¯ect on
one's acts of consumption. One way in which this was achieved was
that the very `age' of spice, the aura of antiquity surrounding both
spice and the rhetoric of spice, made it a valuable aesthetic
commodity.
Recent literary study has described relationships between texts
and their historical contexts. Even more recently, scholars have read
16 The poetics of spice
literature closely again, informed by new thinking about contexts.
Romantic-period studies has left the intellectually rare®ed realm of
abstract philosophical speculation to become more devoted to the
play of culture and history. Apart from my work, some attention has
been directed towards the representation of food, and more par-
ticularly spice. Marjorie Levinson's discussion of Keats's The Eve of St
Agnes in Keats's Life of Allegory shows an awareness of the signi®cance
of the image of a spiced meal of sweetmeats. In addition, fresh work
on the rediscovered women poets of the Romantic period has
renewed the signi®cance of close reading. There is no necessary
contradiction between `contextual' and `close' approaches.
There have also been notable contributions to a growing ®eld of
research into relationships between economics, literature and
culture, such as in the work of Kurt Heinzelman, Marc Shell and the
conference `New Economic Criticism' at Case Western Reserve
University in October 1994. Lisa Jardine's Worldly Goods (1996) is a
history of the Renaissance which links cultural to economic changes.
Studying Florentine ideology in the ®fteenth century, Jardine shows
how money and an abundance of purchases were related to the
metaphorical rebirth of culture. In so doing, however, Worldly Goods
distinguishes too rigidly between medieval and modern worlds. The
study of themes associated with orientalism and colonialism has
grown in importance since the publication of Edward Said's Orient-
alism, and any work on the economic ®guration of spice must
account for Western mappings of the Orient.
In addition, social science disciplines such as anthropology and
sociology have bene®ted from the study of ®gurative language and a
heightened sensitivity to the ways in which meaning is produced, as
in the work of Michael Taussig. The historian Sidney Mintz, whose
work on sugar is of great signi®cance, has moved into areas of
cultural history. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste owed much to Keith
Thomas, whose Man and the Natural World pioneered the study of
cultural formations through time and challenged the idealism of the
`history of ideas'. Moreover, there is a growing interest in the history
of international trade.
Within the growing critical genre which one could call `literature
and . . .', studies of relationships between food and ®gurative
language have grown in number and scope. Michel Jeanneret's A
Feast of Words (1991) is a study of eating and rhetoric in the
Renaissance, and Emily Gowers's The Loaded Table discusses food in
 The confection of spice 17
Latin literature. Maggie Kilgour has written about Coleridge's
addictive personality in her wide-ranging From Communion to Canni-
balism (1990). To write about food and literature is to encompass a
broad range of approaches, from cultural and literary history to
Marxism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction.
The cultural study of scent has been increasing in recent years.
Annick Le GueÂrer's Les pouvoirs de l'odeur (1988), which contains a
section on spice, was translated into English as Scent in 1994.
Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott published
Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell in 1994. The recent work of Hans
J. Rindisbacher on smell in literature and culture, The Smell of Books
(1992), has been an inspiration for my study of aromatic spices.
Rindisbacher's work, however, reproduces hegemonic literary-histor-
ical teleologies. Thus the distinction between ancient and modern
depends upon an opposition between the smells of primal sexuality
and perfume, which The Smell of Books equates with an opposition
between nature and technology. Older Europe, he declares, used
scent to cover the stench of thanatos; later, perfume was created as a
supplement that simultaneously brought out and dissimulated a
natural sexuality. The real opposition here is between a ruse with
one twist and a ruse with two twists, two layers of disguise. Moreover,
it is unclear whether disguise was ever a primary motive in the
medieval use of spice.
Furthermore, perfume was used medically in the Middle Ages, as
a means towards positive thinking: not smelling or not feeling bad
could keep the plague at bay. In William Bullein's A Dialogue Against
the Fever Pestilence (1564), the doctor, Medicus, tells the protagonist
Antonius to avoid all but the most sanguine (hot and moist) foods.
Spices and rotten fruit are both out, spice being choleric, but
Medicus does recommend saffron, cloves and mace in his medicine:
for example, pills of saffron, myrrh and aloes. Medicus prescribes a
pomander of storax, calamite, cinnamon, sandalwood, aloes, lilies,
violets, mastic, poppy seed, camphor, amber, musk and spikenard to
defend against the plague. Bullein's play also prescribes perfume as
medicine against corrupt air and urges the avoidance of anger and
the cultivation of mirth (Bullein, Dialogue, fo. 83ff ). Certain features
of the AIDS panic are remarkably similar: the avoidance of negative
thinking about HIV in counselling and advertising as a precaution
against full-blown AIDS. The ruse with one twist is still with us.
The Poetics of Spice is thus informed by historical and cultural
18 The poetics of spice
approaches to the study of food in literature and culture. It is not
preoccupied with empirical distinctions between one kind of sub-
stance and another (pepper and coffee, for example). It deals
principally with spice as a cultural marker rather than as a solid
substance. Moreover, The Poetics of Spice is interested in the way in
which spice as substance is never divorced from notions of language,
including the languages of economics and money. This book does
not assume a teleological narrative or a rigid division between
modern and pre-modern. It tries to be sensitive to questions
concerning ®gurative language while remaining interested in histor-
ical context. Finally, it shows why the Romantic period was a
formative moment in the development of the poetics of spice.

theorising spice
Spice is a linguistic and ideological operator rather than an essentia-
lised object. It has only quasi-objective status: almonds and dried
fruits in the Middle Ages were classi®ed as spice, along with the
expected pepper, cinnamon and nutmeg. The foods listed alongside
spice in Bullein's Bulwarke of Defence (1562), a medical treatise, include
crushed gems and stones and animal ¯esh, notably oxen, weasel, fox
and earthworm, powdered hedgehog (good for baldness), and
mandrake, unicorn's horn and medicinal dung.9 According to
Christopher Dyer, the medieval category of spice `included dried
fruits or rice as well as condiments such as pepper and ginger'.10
Consider the ®rst lines of Speke Parott (1521) by John Skelton
(1460?±1529), a lampoon of Cardinal Wolsey:
My name is Parot, a byrd of paradyse,
By nature deuysed of a wonderous kynde,
Dyentely dyeted with dyuers delycate spyce,
Tyl Euphrates, that ¯ode, dryueth me into Inde;
Where men of that contrey by fortune me fynd,
And send me to greate ladyes of estate:
Then Parot must haue an almon or a date.11
The almonds and dates are part of the parrot's luxurious diet of
spices.
Examining closely poetic representations of spice, we ®nd that one
of their strangest aspects is the way in which spice is used as a general
term. Spices may be separately named: the members of the genus
spice are occasionally listed. For example, there is Milton's `¯owering
 The confection of spice 19
odours, cassia, nard, and balm' (Paradise Lost v.293), but spice is only
occasionally directly named in the particular. More signi®cantly, it is
hardly ever given an extensive ®gurative description. Not a single
device is used, whether it be metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche . . .
Even if there is a list of spices, as in Milton's line, the generalisation
of `¯owering odours' takes priority over its speci®c instantiations.
The use of spice as a term denoting a general quality or kind of
object, moreover, occurs outside English literature and outside the
early modern period. For instance, there is the Spice (and More Spice,
and Even More Spice) show on New York's Time Warner Cable
channel 35, the sex channel. And there is the notion that certain
kinds of perfume contain `spice notes'.
This is part of what I have chosen to call `the spice effect'. In
®gurative language, spice appears as a species, or appearance, which
has the qualities of a genus, or larger set of which the species is a
part. The other aspect of the spice effect, however, seems to
contradict the apparently blank, empty, generic set-like quality of the
use of the word spice. Paradoxically, there is a potent concreteness
about the empty signi®er spice. Less an external substance than a
cultural coef®cient, spice behaves like a computer program, simu-
lating value. To paraphrase Shakespeare, some commodities are
born spicy, some achieve spiciness, and some have spiciness thrust
upon them.12 Spice is a confection.
Two theoretical issues inform this book. The ®rst derives from the
cultural signi®cances of spice, the second from the etymological
signi®cance of spice. Among the most fascinating attributes of spice is
its status as a cultural marker, and a strange one at that, halfway
between object and sign, goods and money. Spice can become a sign
of signs, and in poetry it serves as a ®gure for poetic language itself, a
special kind of ®gure that Harold Bloom has called `transumptive'.13
In this role it approximates one of the economic values of spice in the
early modern period, its capacity to be used as a sign of other goods,
as a form of money. Moreover, spice in its consumption becomes an
index of social value. It is a highly self-re¯exive kind of substance-sign:
`about'-ness is what it is `about'. However much spice is brought into
the realm of intellectus, it also still remains within the realm of the res as
a hard kernel of the Real, a ¯ow of desire.14 The poetics of spice is not
only about materiality, however ± it is also about poetics. Thus there
are two aspects to the poetics of spice, which are in a rather
asymmetrical relationship: materiality and transumption.
20 The poetics of spice
Lord Byron's poetry shows how transumption is found in the
representation of spice. The poetic uses of spice in the Romantic
period were partially caught up in orientalism, as is evident in
images of spice as a metaphor about poetry itself. The luxurious,
highly spiced dinner in Byron's Don Juan iii (1818±20) includes wall
hangings that feature delicate embroidery and `Soft Persian sen-
tences, in lilac letters, / From poets, or the moralists their betters'
(iii.lxiv.511±12).15 The moralisms are ironised in their juxtaposition
with the scene of luxury, of which the narrator wittily remarks:
These oriental writings on the wall,
Quite common in those countries, are a kind
Of monitors adapted to recall,
Like skulls at Memphian banquets, to the mind
The words which shook Belshazzar in his hall,
And took his kingdom from him: You will ®nd,
Though sages may pour out their wisdom's treasure,
There is no sterner moralist than Pleasure. (iii.lxv.513±20)

Pleasure acts as both poison and cure, a phenomenon closely

associated with the representation of spice in Milton. The stern
message is inscribed into the fabric of the arabesqued wall, the
`Oriental' writing functioning as in De Quincey both as the promise
and as the threat of Otherness, as meaning but also as exquisitely
embodied signi®ers, `Embroider'd delicately o'er with blue'
(iii.lxiv.510). The `sentences' are `Soft' and `Persian', evoking luxury
in their literal, tongue-in-cheek materiality. They also evoke the
Asiatic, dangerously copious style desired and feared by masculine
Renaissance rhetoricians ¯exing their Arabic-inspired intellectual
muscles.
The writing is the culmination of a ®gurative series in which spice
plays a dominant role:
The dinner made about a hundred dishes;
Lamb and pistachio nuts ± in short, all meats,
And saffron soups, and sweetbreads; and the ®shes
Were of the ®nest that e'er ¯ounced in nets,
Drest to a Sybarite's most pamper'd wishes;
The beverage was various sherbets
Of raisin, orange, and pomegranate juice,
Squeezed through the rind, which makes it best for use.
These were ranged round, each in its crystal ewer,
And fruits, and date-bread loaves closed the repast,
 The confection of spice 21
And Mocha's berry, from Arabia pure,
In small ®ne China cups, came in at last;
Gold cups of ®ligree made to secure
The hand from burning underneath them placed,
Cloves, cinnamon, and saffron too were boil'd
Up with the coffee, which (I think) they spoil'd.
(iii.lxii±lxiii.489±504)

The Middle-Eastern banquet is sensually overwhelming despite the

exquisite individual components, marked in the judiciously placed `I
think' in the ®nal line. The writing gluts the eye and ear as much as
its content. There is an effeminate tone: `¯ounced' (a ®gure not of
death but of erotic display), the ®gure of the Sybarite, the `Drest'
®sh. Don Juan's meal employs ®gures of the Middle East as self-
re¯exive emblems of the power of poetic fancy. Figures are explicitly
overcoded as writing ± arabesqued pleasure becomes its own
warning.
The second theoretical issue stems from the etymology of spice.
Spice derives from the Latin species, from which we obtain notions of
appearance and particularity, and also of money, specie.16 The most
signi®cant detail of the Song of Songs, a work much reproduced by
early modern writers, is the use of double entendre, a practice7 recalling
Sumerian love songs.17 The bride is addressed as Æsemen turaq ÆsÆemekaÅ
(`¯owing perfume, your name' (line 3)), a phrase playing on the
synonymy between `perfume' and `name' in Hebrew. Christian
commentaries on the Song of Songs often interpreted this to mean
Christ, since `Thy name is an ointment' suggests the Greek for the
anointed one.18 The notion of perfume as name is most signi®cant
for the poetics of spice. These two notions of appearance and
particularity are features of poetry that employs spice, for two modes
are generally in play. One uses spice as a sign caught up in
connotations of aesthetic detail; another uses spice to suggest wealth.
In pursuing the association of spice with money and appearance,
The Poetics of Spice is informed by Shell's analysis of relationships
between money, language and thought, though it also departs from
this analysis. If, as Shell observes, coined money is as metaphorical
as paper money,19 how does it appear so? Is this only a feature of
money visible to us, retrospectively, in the wake of the move towards
paper money? Speculation about coinage was already out of date by
the late eighteenth century. The furore over paper money, in which
Percy Shelley became involved, was simply a moment when people
22 The poetics of spice
saw that the historical process of capitalism was `really happening'.
But the bill of exchange, crucial in the spice trade, had already
erased the difference between money and sign.
In its derivation from species, both in the sense of money and in the
sense of sheer appearance, and with value and wealth, spice requires
us to explore the paradoxes inherent in the dialectics of substance
and subject, appearance and reality. Since a naive interpretative
mimeticism is untenable, I have avoided solidi®ed dichotomies
between poetics and politics, poesis and praxis. If the discourses of
spice constitute various ideologies, then it is necessary to develop
ways of reading texts which reveal the transformation of prescriptive
into descriptive statements. This inevitably involves not reading the
text as a transparent mimesis of political reality. Unlike Roland
Barthes' Empire of Signs, which orientalises Japan by reading it like a
text, inside out, with the signi®ers betraying no depth, The Poetics of
Spice sees the orientalism inherent in its topic's emphasis on the play
of surfaces as part of the ideologies which that topic sustains. In this
I have been in¯uenced by Marxist theories of ideology and culture.
Since writers such as Georg LukaÂcs, commodity fetishism has been
on the agenda for cultural theory. The Poetics of Spice is meant to be a
study of the cultural forms of commodity fetishism.
A form of Romantic Marxist analysis, often confused with Hege-
lianism, encourages the thought that ideology is an alienated
expression of some original consciousness or labour. The arguments
presented here have tried to avoid this by not assuming that there is
anything `behind' or `beyond' cultural fantasies about spice. Rather,
those fantasies contain a kernel of reality in their very form.
Historians and theorists of consumption such as Mintz and Camp-
bell have shown that `dreams of satisfaction' are just as important as
satisfaction itself.20 The engaging fusion of ideas about desire and
the study of ideology in ZÏizÏek has proved invaluable for sharpening
this approach.
I return now to the ®rst theoretical issue, the cultural signi®cance
of spice. How has spice been described in previous works on the
rhetoric of commodities? Spice is usually denoted as a luxury good.
In The Social Life of Things, Appadurai de®nes luxury goods `not so
much in contrast to necessities . . . but as goods whose principal use
is rhetorical and social, goods that are simply incarnated signs' rather
than simply sustaining life. For example, he lists `pepper in cuisine,
silk in dress, jewels in adornment, and relics in worship'. Acknowl-
 The confection of spice 23
edging Campbell, Appadurai declares that these signs exhibit `a high
degree of linkage of their consumption to body, person, and
personality', and `can accrue to any and all commodities to some
extent'.21
It is made clear that goods other than those Appadurai names can
be incarnated signs, although he states this rather cautiously, adding
the phrase `to some extent', which threatens to cancel the previous
phrase if read too emphatically. But what happens when a necessity,
so called, is used as an incarnated sign? What if asceticism in
vegetarian discourse became attached to an image of personality or
subjecthood? In other words, is semiotic incarnation, or what
Appadurai calls `semiotic virtuosity', a suf®cient condition of
`luxury'?22
As Timothy Murphy's work on William Burroughs and the heroin
trade suggests, a substance that seems epiphenomenal in a necessity/
luxury model may actually turn out to be the Thing in itself.23 All
binary models of consumption, such as necessity/luxury models, if
they only attach signi®cation to one term, such as luxury, tend to be
metaphysical, however much leeway or `virtuosity' they allow for the
attachment of the signi®er of luxury (objective and subjective
genitive) to the substance in question.
This argument about binary models resembles Hegel's critique of
Kant. Kant failed to ®nd the Thing in itself in the noumenal realm
because the noumenal is really the re¯ection into the phenomenal of
the phenomenal itself. The Thing does not lie behind the surface of
some veil, but is itself that veil: hence `the spirit is a bone', `wealth is
the self ' and all the other Hegelian paradoxes. Spice, then, is not a
special kind of commodity distinguished by its unusual capability for
becoming an incarnated sign. Spice is the very form of the idea of the
commodity itself, a form of what ZÏizÏek calls ` ``spiritual substance'' '.24
We can see this in the way poetry uses general forms such as `spicy'
instead of particular ones such as `smelling of saffron'. Figure 1
illustrates the con¯uence of sign and matter in the foods discovered
in the New World.
Spices, then, cannot simply be an example of how `luxury' is
culturally commodi®ed. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste proposed
that vegetarianism deconstructed Appadurai's implicit opposition
between commodities that are invested with the `incarnated' sign of
luxury and those that are not. Not that all products could not
hypothetically be designated luxurious, but that `luxury' was the
24 The poetics of spice

Figure 1 Signs and matter: `Of the Dragon', from NicolaÂs Monardes, Ioyfull Newes
out of the New-found Worlde (tr. 1596), fo. 71. Monardes describes `Dragon's Blood' as a
mythical substance written about by the Greeks, Arabs and Romans. No one really
knows what it is but a tiny dragon likeness was found in this West Indian fruit (fos.
70±1). Symbols are found engraved in living matter, like the likeness of a monarch
stamped on a coin. Like money, spice resides half-way between sign and matter.
 The confection of spice 25
exclusive outcome of such acts of designation. This issue is repeated
in discussions of different modes of consumption amongst different
social classes. Bourdieu's opposition between bourgeois and pro-
letarian modes of distinction also becomes problematic when we
consider the case of vegetarian diet. Braudel rearticulates these
patterns when he describes luxury as the only `culture' there is: the
European upper classes amuse themselves with their riches, in-
cluding spice, while the rest of us are left with the dregs. Yesterday's
banquet ingredient becomes today's Dunkin Donuts apple cinnamon
item. Campbell and I resist this notion of `emulation'.
Thought about consumption often sets up too rigid oppositions
between structure and superstructure, signi®er and signi®ed,
material and immaterial culture. The history of the representation of
spice, however, shows that the description of the commodity needs
to become more complex. For example, the eighteenth century
witnessed the growth of the concept of `comfort': where is the space
for comfort in a model that pits `luxury' against `necessity'? If the
two terms are functional de®nitions within contemporary ideologies
of capitalist trade, then that is all the more reason to analyse them
critically.
The problem lies in the notion of incarnation. For Appadurai
luxury is the sign of a sign's incarnation in a commodity. The notion
of incarnation is mystifying, not really solving the ways in which we
`get from' use value to exchange value, from substance to trans-
substance. Modern concepts such as `comfort' deconstruct the
oppositions luxury constructs between surface and essence, between
supplement and deep structure. Comfort or GemuÈtlichkeit tends to
belong to the discourses of the bourgeoisie rather than the aristoc-
racy, which claims luxury as its own.25 For that matter, why does
Romantic poetry on bourgeois commerce employ potentially aristo-
cratic images of spice?
Moreover, studies of spice need to take the ¯uidity of time and
space into account. Appadurai leaves room for accounts of histori-
city. Because of its phenomenological tendency, Schivelbusch's Tastes
of Paradise makes spice seem eternally invariant. For example, he
generalises in asking `Why did the Middle Ages have such a
pronounced taste for dishes seasoned with oriental spices, and why
did this craving disappear so suddenly in the seventeenth century?'26
While it is in a limited way possible to draw such lines in the sand, it
is not as interesting as considering the persistence of spice in literature
26 The poetics of spice
and culture. What about the spiced confectionery discussed in
chapter 3, or the kedgeree and mulligatawny soup popularised in
Victorian Britain? One might even suggest that premodernity only
appears to be different from modernity in terms of the poetics of
spice. However, there are changes and developments which this book
sets out to chart.
The mobility of spice over great distances surely contributed to its
premodern status as medicine, a status that is now reappearing in
other guises in the cults of homeopathic medicine, herbal remedies,
and vitamin and other dietary `supplements' of all kinds. The notion
of spice as medicine tends to collapse the distinction between luxury
and necessity, if necessity is viewed as that which is essential to the
health of the body. Indeed, this distinction smacks too much of the
tendency in Britain and America to regard food as pure nutrition, a
kind of `magic bullet' approach to food which has given us vitamin
pills, certain forms of vegetarianism and BSE or `mad cow disease'.
BSE could only arise when eating had become capital-intensive at
the level of production and as abstract as Piet Mondrian at the level
of consumption. The US Health and Education Act (1993) contained
clauses that might have given the FDA far greater control over
dietary supplements, and a `save our supplements' campaign was
launched. Modernity is anxious about supplements.
Moreover, spice itself is more a ¯ow than a solid object: as
pulverised substance, it has already been lique®ed. In the psycho-
analytic language of Melanie Klein, it is a partial object. As a sign of
wealth, spice is often ®gured as a ¯ow, as in the poetry of Crashaw
and Percy Shelley. Spices themselves are crossroads of spatiotem-
poral processes. This is obvious, since they have undergone nu-
merous processes in their production which have rendered them
hardly objects at all: pulverised, ¯uid, capable of being substituted
for currency at a pinch.
We need to ®nd a way of thinking about commodities which takes
process rather than product as its main point of reference. The
Kantian notion of absolute space regards space and time as a
container unaffected by its contents. The Leibnizian notion of
relative space conceives of space and time as processes. When things
dominate processes in studies of society, Kantian space predomi-
nates. For example, the city is often construed as a container in
social theory. But if the spice trade was involved with spatiotemporal
processes, then a city such as Venice, one of the most active in the
 The confection of spice 27
spice trade in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, could
not be thought of as a thing but as a ¯uid mixture of processes. The
process-oriented approach requires a longer view of history and a
more nuanced sense of the representational strategies involved in
that history.27
Marx understood that political economy had been trying to
understand money in itself without considering VerhaÈltnisse, his
notion of `relatedness', similar to the notion of `process' which I have
been suggesting here. `Things' derive from certain conditions of
spatiotemporality, which in turn derive from processes. This is not,
however, to claim that poems about spice are on the same ontolo-
gical plane as toothbrushes. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins
has recognised, it is important to stress the relative autonomy of
cultural symbolism.28 Nevertheless, the symbols under discussion in
The Poetics of Spice evoke materiality. It is not so easy to dismiss
historical materialism in a book about cultural materialism.
The study of `imagery' alone is a highly limited way of under-
standing ®gurality. It is rather ®xed and scopic. The same applies to
the cultural history of the commodity. In both cases, attending to
¯ow and circulation is appropriate. The cultural representation of
spice as ¯ow is bound up with its representation as supplement or as
luxury. For the discourse of the supplement becomes signi®cant in
the case of spice when its ¯ow becomes suspect, needing to be
controlled. This involves distinctions between centre and border,
essence and decoration.
`Luxury' and `necessity' have suffered from the substantialism
with which cultural concepts are frequently imbued. If consumption
involves a dialectic of desire, then the difference between luxury and
necessity is only the semantic difference between the position of the
subject in the following phrases: `You need two litres of water a day
to stay healthy'; `you need a good spanking.' `Need' in the latter, if
not in the former, is the want of the Other (a form of demand),
demonstrating the disjunction between the subject of enunciation
and the subject of the enunciated. If there is such a disjunction, then
there is certainly no clear way of distinguishing between luxury and
necessity. This part of the theoretical framework of The Poetics of Spice
is informed by ZÏizÏek's fusion of psychoanalysis and ideological
analysis.
These features of the social symbolic order are what is left out of
Berry's The Idea of Luxury. While Berry sees objects as capable of