Windbags and Skinsongs 6: Blithering Idiots

Windbags and Skinsongs

6. Blithering Idiots

The low status of wind instruments accounts in part for the association which grew in medieval Europe between fools - whose dress emphasised their skinny nature - and bagpipes. The bauble, or bladder on a stick with which jesters were traditionally provided, seems to be linked to their function as emitters of nonsensical vacancy, or hot air. The 1509 English translation of Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff shows a fool in a horned cap playing bagpipes, with a lute and harp spurned on the ground beside him. The accompanying poem instructs us:

Of impacient Folys that wyll nat abyde correccioun
Unto our Folys Shyp let hym come hastely
Whiche in his Bagpype hath more game and sport
Than in a Harpe or Lute most swete of melody
I fynde unnumerable Folys of this sorte
Which in theyr Bable have all they hole confort
For it is oft sayd of men both yonge and olde
A fole wyll nat gyve his Babyll for any golde (Brant 1509, sig. cviir)

The ‘bauble’ or ‘bayble’ carried by the fool was sometimes a head on a stick, sometimes a bladder full of air. The word ‘bladder’ derives from Old Teutonic blaê-drôn, from a verb stem blaê, to blow and drôn, contrivance or instrument. This word spawns a number of words for noisy, vacuous speech, of the kind that one might imagine would issue from a bladder, like, blether and blither. Etymology thus attests to a strong association between air, skin and idiocy. Perhaps the Pied Piper in his airy motley is a descendant of the flapping, uppity Marsyas. King Lear’s fool plays constantly on the idea that he is the embodiment of this substantial kind of ‘nothing’. Kent remarks of one of the Fool’s speeches ‘This is nothing’, to which he replies ‘Then 'tis like the breath of an unfee'd lawyer, you gave me nothing for't’ (Shakespeare 1998; King Lear 1.iv, 126-8, p. 639). The Fool’s repeated references to paring away shells and rinds - ‘Thou hast pared thy wit o' both sides, and left nothing i' the middle’ – (Shakespeare 1998; King Lear I.iv, 178-9, p. 639) seem to make reference to his bauble, establishing airy nothingness as that which is enclosed in skin. Much of the play is concerned with what happens when people are exposed to ‘the enmity o’ the air’ (Shakespeare 1998; King Lear II.ii, 401, p. 647), the blasts of the ‘to and fro conflicting wind’ (Shakespeare 1998; King Lear III.i, 11, p. 648), or who, like Edgar, voluntarily embrace the ‘unsubstantial air’ (Shakespeare 1998; King Lear IV.i, 7, p. 655). Air is heavy, pestilential and powerful in the play: but it is also associated with the lightness of being associated with ‘tattered clothes’ (Shakespeare 1998; King Lear IV.vi, 160, p. 660) and other skinlike integuments. Pretending to Gloucester that he has fallen over Dover cliff, Edgar tells him ‘Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air,/So many fathom down precipitating,/Thou'dst shivered like an egg’ (Shakespeare 1998; King Lear IV.vi, 49-51, p. 659). There is no music in this play, but plenty of crying and wailing. As Lear himself notes, ‘the first time that we smell the air/We wawl and cry’ (Shakespeare 1998; King Lear IV.vi, 175-6, p. 660).

The sound of a bagpipe suggests simple and involuntary venting, the noise made by the friction of air and skin and that escapes from one during the performance of animal functions, such as eating, sleeping, excreting, copulating and dying: the kind of vocal noises, of howling, sighing, coughing, grunting, sneezing, snoring or roaring, that Aristotle said were ‘unensouled’ voice (2.8; Aristotle 1993, 32-3). The bagpipe is the perfect image of the profane ‘bellyspeaking’ of which the history of ventriloquism is so full. According to the Christian mythographer Fulgentius, writing in the late fifth century, the ‘swollen cheeks’ [tumentes buccas] or ‘inflamed cheeks’ [buccarum inflamina] which the flute causes in Athena go along with the dirtiness of the flute’s sound:

It was according to the art of music that Minerva discovered her double flute, which anyone skilled in music despises for the poverty of its sounds. They are said to have laughed at her puffed out cheeks because the flute has a windy sound in the music it makes [ventose in musicis sonet] and no particular character in the tones specific to it (idiomatum). It hisses [sibilet] rather than clearly enunciates its matter Thus anyone at all skilled laughs at her harsh blowing (Fulgentius 1971, 94-5; translation adjusted).

As we have already seen, the nobility of the lyre comes largely from the fact that it allows simultaneous speech or song. This seems to be in accordance with the principle of the coordinated parallelism of bodies with which stringed instruments are associated. But wind instruments do not simply monopolise the organs of speech, for they can also suggest the mimicry or mongrelising of speech by musical sound, in accordance with the principle of copulative commixture that animates them. Certainly the bagpipe has often been thought of as a sort of dissociated voice, either prophetic or profane. Aristotle does not mention farting as among those sounds produced by ensouled creatures which do not have soul in them but he might well have, for the fart is the concentrated image of the body’s profane, involuntary utterance, a little death which darkly anticipates and perhaps also comically defends against the final grating passage of the spirit through its collapsing walls of flesh in the death-rattle – the ‘crack’ (a common term in English for the sound of a fart until the nineteenth century) matching the croak. Playing the preposterous pipes turns you arsy-versy.

There is a long tradition associating the bagpipe and the fart. The lust and gluttony of Chaucer’s Miller are roundly suggested by the fact that he is an accomplished bagpiper, as well as a monumental farter ('General Prologue' ll. 566-7; Chaucer 1988, 32; Block 1954, 239-43). A sixteenth century German engraving shows a devil playing a bagpipe the bag of which is constituted by a monk’s head, while a second, leering face bulges out of the devil’s belly, its nose a penis and the navel furnishing its single eye. The suggestion is that devils speak from the lower portions of the body rather than from the upper.

The bagpipe is the substantial embodiment of a more general tradition associating farting with musical performance. It is a mild, but pleasant shock to find in St. Augustine's City of God the report that there are those 'who can at will, and without any odour, produce such a variety of sounds from their anus that they seem to be singing in that part' (Augustine 1998, 626-7). And, buried in William Camden’s vast geographical and historical survey of Britain of 1586 is the following record of the unusual form of land lease held by one Baldwin in Suffolk:

Baldwin le Pettour (marke his name well) held certaine lands, by Serjeanty, (the words I have out of an old booke) for which on Christmasse day, every yeere before our soveraigne Lord the King of England he should perform one Saltius, one Sufflatus, and one Bumbulus …as we read elsewhere, his tenour was, per salsum, sufflum and pettum , that is, if I understand these tearmes aright, That hee should daunce, puff up his cheekes making therewith a sound, and besides let a cracke downeward. Such was the plaine and jolly mirth of those times. (Camden 1637, 464)

The most famous example in modern times of this kind of performance is Joseph Puyol, the famous Petomane of the French music-hall (Nohain and Caradec 1967).

Those afflicted with what the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries called hysterical ‘vapours’ were also subject to being turned into windbags (hysteria would become a stringed instrument in the next century when it came to be thought of as a condition of the nerves). Along with all the other effects attributed to hysteria, hypochondria and spleen, those afflicted with the vapours became involuntarily sonorous bodies, full of grumblings and growlings, and subject to intemperate eruptions either from the anus or the mouth. John Purcell described the onset of an attack of the vapours in his Treatise of Vapours of 1702:

Those who are troubled with Vapours generally perceive them approach in the following manner; first, they feel a Heaviness upon their Breast; a Grumbling in their Belly; they Belch up, and sometimes Vomit, Sowr, Sharp, Insipid, or Bitter Humours; They have a Difficulty in breathing; they think they feel something that comes up into their Throat, which is ready to Choak them; they struggle; cry out; make odd and inarticulate sounds, or mutterings… Some moreover have their Bellies swell’d and stretch’d like a Drum; their Hypochondria’s distended; and they fancy they feel some part within them rowl from place to place. (Purcell 1702, 3-4)

The sufferers’ loss of self-possession is signalled by the fact that they do not speak from their mouths or vocal apparatus, but through the noisy reverberations of their skins, either tightly-stretched like a booming tympanum, or borborygmically churning. It should not be a complete surprise therefore that a condition conceived in such sonorous terms should have suggested musical cures such as those proposed by Richard Browne in his Medicina Musica of 1729.