The vultures gorged themselves at the tortoise, he said, then went to drink at the waterhole and shat such a
putrescence that the cows wouldn't go near enough to drink.
Entrapped, ensnared within the labyrinthine conforms of her own disarticulations; narcissistically, self-laceratingly iterating the disintegrative mechanisms that are her cast, the protagonist is at once an intimate, inveterate center of textuality, the object of the
putrescence she poeticizes; and still, a distanced by-stander of sorts, extradited to the margins and commenting therefrom upon the matter she observes.
Among his English friends, the art of Ingres was held in high esteem, while the work of the realists Courbet and Edouard Manet was lumped together indiscriminately and considered, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's words, "Simple
putrescence."
Like these blossoms, bright sores burst upon earth's ignorant flesh, at first sight everything is innocence--then it's itch, scratch,
putrescence.
To his mother he was more concise: "The new French school is simple
putrescence and decomposition" (November 12).
(14) For instance, the first tenement investigated in December 1869 is described as "damp and discolored from leakage" (MBSL I 1870, 165), and its privy as "a fetid abyss of stercoraceous
putrescence" (165).
During the course of the novel, Vost muses on how the "interior life of the man" is both "a bed of stars" and a "pit of
putrescence" (31), and his release at the end seeks to combine one into the other by transforming him into a passion artist.
A city that by the 1850s drained 260 tons of sewage into the river each day was alarmed to find waste piling up on exposed mud banks in ribbons of black
putrescence. The water around the ribbons was yellow and gave off what was described as a urinous smell.
But here the classic profiles of water- and calla-lilies, decaying roots and all, are made eerily fragile and translucent: the organic is frozen into delicate, calligraphic messages of a sublimity that always threatens to slip into the horrible, into rot and
putrescence.
This waxy mass, arising from
putrescence, became its hated parent's most potent anodyne" (34).
