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Contents : Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On Steven Connor An expanded version of an essay published as 'The Right Stuff' in Modern Painters (March 2009) 58-63. Farcical It is hard to imagine a worse degradation for a human being than to be reduced to be reduced to the condition of skin the vital contents scoured and sluiced from the container which thereby becomes no more than a sack sock or pocket. But there is in fact a worse. For it was not enough for Guy Fawkes to have his entrails drawn out from his body and burnt before his eyes after being half-hanged and before being quartered like a chicken. He must also undergo in perpetuity the indignity of being seasonally reupholstered and publicly exhibited as no more than his sad scarecrow self at once exorbitantly plumped-out and pathetically slumping that he might be there always anew for the guying and the frying. T.S. Eliot took Fawkes s condition as a defining one for modern people emptied of life and will: We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! (Eliot 1969 83) The word stuff has undergone a singular droop in its fortunes. German Stoff signifies material in general and medieval and Renaissance English regularly referred to costly fabrics as stuffs . But for us stuff is indeterminate mashedpotato kind of matter matter in which it doesn t matter at all what kind of matter it is matter that is just there to be there to take up space. Something constituted merely of matter that takes up space is farcical a word which derives from Latin farcire to stuff (a memory of which survives in the term forcemeat). It becomes our modern farce via an unexpectedly circuitous route. In the Middle Ages the plainsong chants for the Kyrie Eleison often involved neums passages of musical elaboration which extended and ramified single syllables (possibly from Greek pneuma breath or breathing). These passages prompted paddings-out of the litany to fill the gaps such as this from the Sarum Missal: Kyrie rex genitor ingenite vera essentia eleyson./Kyrie luminis fons rerumque conditor eleyson - Lord King and Uncreated Creator True Essence have mercy/Lord source of light and originator of all things have mercy . Just as hoaxes and hocus pocus are said to derive from the parodies of the 2 Mass (hoc est corpus) muttered by tricksters and charlatans so passages of comic business improvised by clowns as well as comic interludes in general came also to be known as farcings and thence any comic business that was ridiculous or empty of meaning or merit as farcical. The annual debasement of the Catholic Guy Fawkes therefore joins with a Protestant contempt for Papist pomposity and bombastic phrasemaking (from bombast the cotton used to pad out breeches therefore sometimes bum-bast) for both signify mere outward show with no authentic interior. Stuffed things may seem to countermand the bathetic condition of the slack or the flaccid evacuated but their erectile tension is factitious for it is not their own striving life that imparts to them their tone and uprightness but rather the unnatural compression of some matter the tendency of which is ordinarily merely to disperse. Stuffed animals are also commonly said to be mounted ( upholstering means up-holding ). The tautness of a stuffed animal is therefore not the sign of inner principle straining for expression but a merely mechanical resiling of some externally-imposed compression. Stuffed animals are in fact in most cases no such thing and often in fact involve the construction of complex forms of internal armature. As early as 1820 in the first book in English devoted to the art of taxidermy Sarah Bowdich felt called upon to explain that it was an earlier practice of packing larger animals like crocodiles with straw that encourages the term stuffed (empaill ) for which we have substituted that of mounted it does not perfectly express the idea we would convey but it is always more correct than the former (Bowdich 1820 4). But the fantasy of the creature filled with negligible matter continues at work within contemporary usage. All this makes the word stuffing the disreputable and derisive accomplice to the more well-heeled and up-register taxidermy which derives from taxis ordering or arrangement and derma skin and appears not to have been used in English until Sara Bowdich s Taxidermy: or The Art of Collecting Preparing and Mounting Objects of Natural History (Bowdich 1820). Where taxidermy draws attention to the surface or visible outline of an object stuffing alludes only to an indeterminate interior an inessential essence. Taxidermy limns the singularity of the objects it offers for display: stuffing suggests seriality and substitution. Stuffed animals are indefinite articles that come in job-lots lions rhinos donkeys finches. Recent years have

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