Laudator Temporis Acti

Robert Hughes, Barcelona (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), pp. 26-27:

The pleasures of a good crap are considered in Catalunya on a level with those of a good meal; "Menjar be i cagar fort / I no tingues por de la mort," goes the folk saying: "Eat well, shit strongly, and you will have no fear of death."

The image of shit has a festive quality unknown in the rest of Europe. On the Feast of the Kings, January 6, children who have been good the previous year are given pretty sweetmeats; the bad ones get caca i carbo, "shit and coal," emblems of the hell that awaits them if they do not mend their childish ways. These days the coal is left out and the gift consists of brown-marzipan turds made by confectioners, some elaborately embellished with spun-sugar flies. Then there is the tio, or "uncle," a cross between the French bûche de Noël and the Mexican piñata. This artificial log, filled with candy and trinkets, is produced amid great excitement at Christmas; the children whack it with sticks, exclaiming, "Caga, tiet, caga!" ("Shit, Uncle, shit!") until it breaks and disgorges its treasures.

If you find yourself in Barcelona just before Christmas, go to the Cathedral and browse the stalls that have been set up in front of its facade, where figures for the crèche are sold. They are what you expect: the shepherds, the Magi, Mary, Baby Jesus, the sheep, the oxen. But there is one who is a complete anomaly, met with nowhere else in the iconography of Christendom. A red Catalan cap, or barretina, flopping over his head, the fellow squats, breeches down, with a small brown cone of excrement connecting his bare buttocks to the earth. He is the immemorial fecundator, whom nature calls even as the Messiah arrives. Nothing can distract him from the archetypal task of giving back to the soil the nourishment that it supplied to him. He is known as the caganer, the "shitter," and he exists in scores of versions: some pop-eyed with effort, others rapt in calm meditation, but most with no expression at all; big papier-mâché ones three feet tall, minuscule terra-cotta ones with caca pyramids no bigger than mouse turds, and all sizes in between. During Christmas 1989, the Museum of Figueras held an exhibition of some five hundred caganers, borrowed from private collections all over Catalunya. (There are, of course, collectors who specialize in them.) It was solemnly and equably reviewed in the Barcelona papers, with close-up photos of one or two of the figures, just as one might wish to reproduce a David Smith totem or a nude by Josep Llimona. The origins of the caganer are veiled in antiquity and await the attentions of scholarship. Sixteenth-century sculptures of him exist, but he seems to be curiously absent from medieval painting. He is, essentially, a folk-art personage rather than a high-art one. His place is outside the manger, not inside the altarpiece. Yet he makes an unmistakable entrance into twentieth-century art in the work of that great and shit-obsessed son of Catalunya, Joan Miró. If you look closely at The Farm, Montroig, you will see a pale infant squatting in front of the cistern where his mother is doing the washing. This boy is none other than the caganer of Miró's childhood Christmases; it may also be Miró himself, the future painter of Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement (1935).

In my house right now there is a manger scene with a caganer, which provides great amusement to a frequent four year-old visitor.

Related posts:

• Caganer, Mistletoe, and Sancho Panza
• A Children's Song
• The Great and the Good, Doing What No One Else Can Do for Them
• 'Tis the Season

Labels: noctes scatologicae