Chapter 1 - Bad Taste

Summary

Chapter 1 discusses a constellation of texts that use satire to challenge the system of taste: Richard Bruce Nugent’s novel Gentleman Jigger; Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Bliss”; and Virginia Woolf’s essays “On Being Ill,” “Middlebrow,” and A Room of One’s Own. Though they precede Bourdieu’s Distinction by decades, these texts demonstrate their authors’ awareness of the ways aesthetic and gustatory taste are both acculturated and intertwined, and they use the slippage between these two forms of taste to denaturalize both. The systems of gustatory and aesthetic taste are challenged by the events narrated within each of these texts, and they challenge, too, the system of genres that defines satire as a mode that works against its objects. In these texts, satire is not just a way of maneuvering within or distancing oneself from a social system but a perversely reparative mode that reveals the pleasure that can inhere in resisting, failing, or working against one: the pleasure of liking “bad” foods, the pleasure of feeling too much, the pleasure of satire that embraces the sensation of being wrong.