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The Telltale Teeth: Psychodontia to Sociodontia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Theodore Ziolkowski
Theodore Ziolkowski*
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
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Abstract

The prevalence of dentists in recent novels by Grass, Bellow, Updike, Pynchon, and Vonnegut suggests a shift in cultural attitudes toward teeth. Teeth have conventionally represented potency, beauty, or pain. The first attribute is most common in myth, folklore, and psychoanalysis. The topos of beautiful teeth, familiar in literature from the Old Testament to Poe, was inverted parodistically by fin-de-siècle writers like Mann and Benn. The attribute of pain assumed particular significance for Dostoevsky, H. C. Andersen, and Mann—heirs of the romantic association of disease and art—as a clue to the psychic state of the individual. Following the revival of the organismic theory of society, decaying teeth were seen to provide a more general symbol: in the novels of Koestler and Greene dental health consistently reflects social health. Hence the dentist enters contemporary fiction as psychic healer and social analyst.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 1 , January 1976 , pp. 9 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1976

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References

Notes

∗ This paper was originally delivered, in abbreviated form, as a Dancy Lecture at the Univ. of Montevallo (Ala.) in March 1973.

1 örtlich hetäubt (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1969); hereafter cited in text from the English trans, by Ralph Manheim : Local Anaesthetic (1970; rpt. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1971). The pathological philosophy of history is not original with Grass, of course. In War and Peace Tolstoy implies that the French suffered such heavy losses in the battle of Borodino because Napoleon had a cold. And Voltaire once quipped that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day occurred because Charles ix had an upset stomach.

2 Grass has used tooth images in many of his works to represent professional incompetence, artistic sterility, suppressed aggressiveness, and sexual impotence. See Carl O. Enderstein, “Zahnsymbolik und ihre Bedeutung in Günter Grass' Werken,” Monatshefte, 66 (1974), 5–18. But in no other work is the image developed with such consistency and so centrally as in this novel.

3 This confident assessment of dentistry is not quite so parodistic as Grass might have intended it. In 1936 Lewis Mumford wrote the following statement to be enclosed in a time capsule: “The best you can do to represent our age of concrete, subway-excavating, scientific skill, fine measurements and physiological knowledge is to enclose a human tooth with the root canal filled and the crown anatomically restored with a gold inlay.” Quoted by Israel Shenker in “Words Intended for Next Millenium [sic] on View,” New York Times, 2 March 1973, p. 33, col. 6.

4 Thomas W. Ross, Chaucer's Bawdy (New York : Dutton, 1972), pp. 60–61.

5 The New Golden Bough, a new abridgment of the classic work by Sir James George Frazer, ed. Theodor H. Gaster (1959; rpt. New York: NAL, 1964), pp. 278–79; Pt. m. Par. 190: “Death and Resurrection.”

6 Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Franz Deuticke, 1919), pp. 263–64: “Zahnreiztrâume.”

7 See Leo Kanner, Folklore of the Teeth (1928; rpt. Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1968).

8 Charles I. Stoloff, “The Fashionable Tooth,” Natural History, 81 (1972), 12–21.

9 Vincenzo Guerini, A History of Dentistry (Philadelphia: Lea& Febiger, 1909), p. 33.

10 The Portrait in the Renaissance, The A. W. Mellon Lecture in the Fine Arts, 1963 (New York: Pantheon, 1966). This observation is borne out by Lavater, who states in the introd. to his Physiognomic Fragments (1775-78) that the focal point of all physiognomy is “the closed mouth at the moment of perfect tranquillity.” See J. C. Lavater, Physiognomik : Zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliehe, rev. ed. (Vienna: Sollinger, 1829), i, 10. Lavater concedes that an entire volume could be written on teeth alone; but he restricts himself to a single page since he finds so little evidence in the visual arts (in. 83–84).

11 “Notes,” in The Sense of the Past (New York: Scribners, 1922), p. 296.

12 The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, ed. F. J. E. Raby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), p. 110.

13 Kaufringer, Werke, ed. Paul Sappier (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1972), No. 5 (“Derzurückgebliebene Minnelohn”).

14 “Berenice,” in The Selected Poetry and Prose of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. T. O. Mabbott (New York: Random, 1951), pp. 83–90.

15 See Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, trans. John Rodker (London: Imago, 1949), p. 218; and Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City : Doubleday, 1972), p. 240.

16 Phyllis McGinley, “Reflections Dental,” in The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley (New York: Viking, 1954), p. 98.

17 Teeth, Dying, and Other Matters (New York: Harper, 1964), pp. 13–30.

18 See J. J. Pindborg and L. Marvitz, The Dentist in Art, trans. Gillian Hartz (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1960); and Sydney Garfield, Teeth, Teeth, Teeth: A Treatise on Teeth and Related Parts of Man, Land and Water Animals from Earth's Beginning to the Future of Time (New York: Simon, 1969).

19 “Der hohle Zahn,” in Wilhelm Busch, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Otto Nöldeke (Munich: Braun & Schneider, 1943), i, 314–26.

20 “Tante Tandpine”; I have translated from the German ed. of Andersen's Marchen und Geschichten (Weimar: Kiepen-heuer, n.d.), iii, 560–71.

21 Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (New York: Random, n.d.).

22 The Power and the Glory, Compass ed. (New York: Viking, 1958).

23 “This Is Going to Hurt Just a Little Bit,” in Bed Riddance: A Posy for the Indisposed (Boston: Little, 1969), pp. 86–87.

24 Preface to The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, in The Complete Prefaces of Bernard Shaw (London: Hamlyn, 1965), p. 436. Shaw continues: “Prevent dentists and dramatists from giving pain, and not only will our morals become as carious as our teeth, but toothache and the plagues that follow neglected morality will presently cause more agony than all the dentists and dramatists at their worst have caused since the world began.”

25 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley ( 1920), Pt. i, No. v.

26 Brunold Springer, Die genialen Syphililiker, 2nd-4th enl. ed. (Berlin-Nicolassee: Verlag der Neuen Generation, 1926), p. 2.

27 Lewis J. Moorman, Tuberculosis and Genius (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1940); Saul Nathaniel Brody, The Disease oj the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974); Peter L. Hays, The Limping Hero: Grotesques in Literature (New York : New York Univ. Press, 1971); Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random, 1965); Patrick Trevor-Roper, The World through Blunted Sight: An Inquiry into the Influence of Defective Vision on Art and Character (Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill, 1970).

28 See Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (1946; rpt. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), esp. pp. 163–86.

29 Francis W. Coker, Organismic Theories of the State, Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, 38 ( 1910 ; rpt. New York: AMS, 1967), esp. pp. 11–22.

30 Edgar B. Schick, Metaphorical Organicism in Herder's Early Works: A Study of the Relation of Herder's Literary Idiom to His Worldview (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).

31 G. P, Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913; rpt. Boston: Beacon, 1959), pp. 39–49.

32 Richard P. Appelbaum. Theories of Social Change (Chicago: Markham, 1970). pp. 18–23. 30–35.

33 Entartung (Berlin: Carl Duncker, n.d.), i, vii.

34 Coker, Organismic Theories, pp. 191–204; see also D. C. Phillips, “Organicism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (1970), 413–32.

35 Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Ûmrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (1918-22; rpt. Munich: Beck, 1963), p. 35: introd.. Par. 9.