‘Eating Sex’ and the Unlovely Song of Songs: Reading Consumption, Excretion and D.H. Lawrence

Recent trends in Song of Songs scholarship have questioned the obviousness of the so-called literal readings of the poem. This article contributes to that debate by returning to the poem's foodstuffs. Exploiting the idea of critical excrementality (Probyn, Chatelet, Kristeva), this study explores the way the ‘romantic’ Song of Songs tacitly relies on a politics of atrophy and excrementa. It argues that D.H. Lawrence anticipates the idea of an abject Song of Songs in his collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers. There, Lawrence exposes the unsettling preconditions of so-called romantic reading itself and sends us back to the Song with a sense that the poetic and the romantic are inherently excremental transactions