Ouyang Yu compared with Patrick White: piss and shit and flatulence

By Ouyang Yu

 

Ouyang Yu and Patrick White both use "low" bodily functions to challenge high-culture pretension and explore the "unlovely" reality of Australian life. While Yu uses these images as a form of 

post-colonial resistance, White uses them to emphasize human frailty and the groundedness of spiritual experience.

Ouyang Yu: Poetry as Excretion

Ouyang Yu famously compares poetry to bodily functions—specifically urination and defecation—as a way to strip art of its "sacred" or overly-refined status. 

  • A Statement of Resistance: For Yu, poetry is a natural, irrepressible urge that should not be "revised to whiteness" or sterilized by academic standards.
  • The "Ugly Poem": He embraces what critics call "deliberate unloveliness". By linking creativity to bodily fluids, he suggests that literature is as essential, raw, and sometimes offensive as the body itself.
  • Philosophy: He rejects the idea that a writer should be a "precision machine" and argues that true art, like a rainstorm or a biological function, must be allowed its "tantrums" and imperfections. 
Patrick White: The "Spiritual" Fart
Patrick White, particularly in novels like The Vivisector (1970) and Voss (1957), uses flatulence and bodily smells to anchor his characters in a visceral, "earthy" reality. 
  • Humanizing the Visionary: White often depicts characters experiencing profound spiritual or artistic epiphanies while simultaneously being confronted by their own physical grossness (e.g., the "farting" of a dying character or the smell of sweat).
  • The "Great Australian Emptiness": White used these descriptions to mock the middle-class "steak and cake" culture of Australia, which he found intellectually hollow but physically over-present.
  • Philosophy: For White, the body’s functions are a reminder of the "flaws in the glass"—the inherent imperfections that make humans whole. He believed that true divinity or art could only be found by moving through the physical, not by ignoring it. 
Key Comparison
Feature Ouyang YuPatrick White
Primary IntentPolitical/Cultural: To resist linguistic assimilation and "white" standards of beauty.Spiritual/Satirical: To contrast human visionary potential with physical decay and absurdity.
MetaphorPoetry is like pissing or shitting; it is an irrepressible, natural release.Farting/smells represent the "humility of a whole humanity"; you cannot have the soul without the body.
TargetThe "Prison" of Correctness:Academics and the literary establishment who demand "refined" English.The "Great Australian Emptiness": The materialistic, conformist society that fears the visceral.

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