During modernity, “a critical mass of doctors, psychiatrists, novelists, artists, ethnographers, politicians, and religious leaders all began to consider that digestive function principally influenced both emotion and cognition,” write Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore in Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture (2018).

In 1971, in his essay Canadian and Colonial Painting, critic Northrop Frye introduces the work of landscape painter Tom Thomson with a striking metaphor: “The countries men live in feed their minds as much as their bodies: the bodily food they provide is absorbed in farms and cities; the mental, in religion and arts. In all communities, this process of material and imaginative digestion goes on. Thus, a large tract of vacant land may well affect the people living near it as too much cake does a small boy: an unknown but quite possibly horrible something stares at them in the dark; they hide under the bedclothes as long as they will, sooner or later they must stare back. Explorers, tormented by a sense of the unreality of the unseen, are first; pioneers and traders follow. But the land is still not imaginatively absorbed, and the incubus moves on to haunt the artists.”

This is closely related to the metaphor employed by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project (1927–1940): “The superstructure is the expression of the infrastructure. The economic conditions under which society exists are expressed in the superstructure—precisely as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection but its expression in the contents of dreams, which, from a causal point of view, it may be said to ‘condition.’ The collective, from the first, expresses the conditions of its life. These find their expression in the dream and their interpretation in the awakening.”

In both cases, the superstructure is rendered as the confused dream of an individual—Frye’s small boy—whose stomach, the infrastructure, is busy digesting a heavy meal.