Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture

American Sh*t

Mary C. Foltz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030465308
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture: American Sh*t analyzes post-1960 scatological novels that utilize representations of humanwaste to address pressing issues, including pollution of waterways, environmentalracism, and militarism. Primarily examining postmodern parody, the book showsthe value of aesthetic renderings of sanitary engineering for compostingideologies that fuel a ruinous impact on the world. Drawing on late twentieth-centurypsychoanalytic thinkers Norman O. Brown, Frantz Fanon, and LeoBersani, American Sh*t shows the continued relevance of psychoanalyticinterpretations of contemporary fiction for understanding post-45 authors'engagement with waste. Ultimately, the monograph reveals how novelistsIshmael Reed, Jonathan Franzen, Gloria Naylor, Don DeLillo, and Samuel R.Delany critique subjects who abnegate their status as waste-producing beingsand bring readers back to embrace

Winner of the 2019 Northeast Modern Language Association Book Awardfor Literary Criticism of English Language Literature

© The Author(s) 2020

M. C. FoltzContemporary American Literature and Excremental CultureAmerican Literature Readings in the 21st Centuryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46530-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: On the American Standard: Post-1960 Scatological Fiction

Mary C. Foltz¹

(1)

Lehigh University, English Deptartment, Bethlehem, PA, USA

Mary C. Foltz

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In his 1987 special titled Raw, Eddie Murphy reflects upon his early days in comedy clubs where his adolescent routines consisted mainly of material discovered while contemplating his bodily movements and straining on the household toilet.¹ He states,

My whole act back then was about taking a shit because that was all I had done at fifteen. That was my life experience. But it sounded like Richard Pryor. I’d be going, “Sometimes you get on that toilet and the water splashes up on your ass. Don’t that make you mad?… You know what really make me mad, though, is afterwards, right?… You done all the shitting you gonna do for the whole day, right? You finish shitting and you flush the toilet and wait a second and one chunk come back. What does that chunk want?”²

The audience’s resounding laughter to Murphy’s recollections results from titillation at encountering the abject self that won’t simply go down the drain. While daily engagements with excreta may be distasteful for some, worthy of only a clinical and diagnostic gaze for others, or generally unworthy of serious attention, Murphy gives us room to acknowledge shame, discomfort, and adolescent pleasure by exploring the wastes of the self. By separating his adult identity from the youthful comic of days gone by, Murphy acknowledges the distance that he has traveled from adolescence and gives audience members permission therefore to indulge—if only momentarily—in a return to the youthful thrill and repulsion of the body. Beyond focusing on a maturation process whereby adolescent humor is transcended, Murphy’s comic bit presents a subject who sees excrement as enemy to the ideal self. Reflecting upon a common shame surrounding the human connection to waste, Murphy’s joke, like Julia Kristeva’s work, depends upon the knowledge that few “would agree to call himself abject, subject of or subject to abjection.”³

Entering the space of the bathroom, Murphy erects his identity in opposition to the excremental self even as he is haunted by the bodily waste that serves as reminder of his status as organic matter. The shocking splash of water displaced by excreta leaps in aggression within Murphy’s humor as if to mark the enthroned subject with that which he decisively longs to suppress. Further, the cleansing waters of the bowl betray the excreter, for rather than placidly consuming and diluting the loathsome gift of the body, they roil forth in revolt, perhaps confirming the subject’s fear that his waste is too heinous even for the waters designated for disposal. The final joke in his recollections of adolescent comedy focuses on the threatening agency of excreta; the loamy eye of the returned “chunk” seems to “want” something. Although the comic does not know its desires, he suggests in the concluding open-ended question that the “chunk” wants something from him, lingers cagily for him as if to claim the body from which it came. The comic moves quickly from the adolescent vignettes and thus flushes away the encounter with the re-pressed excreta as surely as the push of the toilet handle on the second attempt. Like most who live in the United States,⁴ Murphy decides not to follow the excremental self further. As Gay Hawkins notes,

water flows in, shit flows out [of our toilets], where from and where to we hardly care. The thing is that the flows are maintained, that our bathroom works to protect us from encountering our waste, so that certain ethical and aesthetic sensibilities that are fundamental to the making of the purified private self will not be threatened.⁵

Marking a momentary disruption of the flow of waste away from the subject and into sewers, Murphy’s bathroom humor highlights the desire for the purified self and the threat to this erection of identity by peristaltic movements of the body as well as the inevitable glitches in systems of sanitary engineering. Despite inviting audience members to contemplate encounters with waste, Murphy ultimately confirms cultural beliefs in the ethical import of negating the excremental self in a humorous performance that celebrates an aesthetic sensibility in which “our particularity as a waste-making organism” is disavowed.⁶

I begin this book with Murphy’s reflections upon adolescent scatological jokes as multiple works of the post-1960 period exhibit this kind of juvenile bathroom humor. As their characters converse with personified feces, tumble into toilets, and slip into rivers of effluent, many prominent contemporary authors indulge in parodic play with subjects that abnegate their status as bodily and excremental beings. Like Murphy’s humor, their works utilize crass comedy to point out the disgust and fear of contamination that encounters with excremental inspire. For example, Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 National Book Award-winning The Corrections comically and painfully presents one character’s battles with the excremental self as he confronts Parkinson’s disease and becomes incontinent.⁷ In stunning rendering of struggles with an unruly body, the novel’s Alfred Lambert faces off with the excrement of his own body as his “turdish rebel” comes to life in the form of a hallucinatory scatological philosopher in order to critique the construction of white masculinity that denies its excremental nature and projects bodily exuberance and filth onto the bodies of people of color within the nation.⁸ Alfred’s debates with the turd about systems of sanitary engineering prompt consideration of the project of the suburban enclave and white flight from the bodies of those demarcated as threatening waste. This work shares a similar pitch with the opening pages of David Foster Wallace’s celebrated novel of “waste displacement,” Infinite Jest, in which tennis star Hal Incandenza is dragged out of a college interview to the restroom when he exhibits inarticulate sounds and noises like “a goat, drowning in something viscous,” “a strangled series of bleats.”⁹ Pinned beneath administrative heavyweights, Hal asks “why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to regain control.”¹⁰ This question from the beginning section sets the tone for Hal’s movement in the novel in which he struggles to become an exceptional athlete who flushes away excessive desires and controls bodily comportment in order to achieve a perfected form free from bodily and subjective waste. When he claims that he is “not just a boy who plays tennis … not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function,”¹¹ his administrative audience cannot understand him for they seek to admit a body manufactured for perfection that will bring prestige to the university as well as a mind that won’t leak nonsense about excessive feelings, unrelated experiences or histories that don’t conform to the functions required. Using the setting of the bathroom and “rickety alphabets of exposed plumbing” as the backdrop for contemplation of elite educational systems and the engineering or rearing of exceptional children, Wallace highlights the pressure placed on the white masculine child to overcome his excremental nature and to project instead a perfected hologram lacking bodily excess and shining in his extraordinary difference from the base humanity of others.¹² The child may begin as the excrement of the mother, but he can be “conditioned” to “function” as a white light beneath which the base body seems to disappear.

Both of these novels are influenced by Thomas Pynchon’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated Gravity’s Rainbow , which takes readers beyond the floor of the restroom and into the toilet with Tyrone Slothrop as he hallucinates a journey through American sewerage.¹³ Terrified as he encounters waters polluted in effluent and struggles to keep excreta from clinging to his flesh, Slothrop also discovers bodies wasted by the historical westward movement of the nation. His vision of systems of sanitary engineering that contaminate waterways are connected to the erection of purified national identity through the eradication of or removal of indigenous populations viewed as human waste. Beyond his journey through sewerage, Slothrop’s primary aim in the novel is to understand his connection to weapons systems as well as the excremental nature of bombs that are equated with “droppings of the Beast.”¹⁴ As in his visions of American sewerage that makes precious waterways into rivers of excrement and of indigenous populations treated like refuse, Slothrop comes to see the deployment of fecal bombs in WWII that turn humans into “shit … just zero, just nothing” as the product of a national anal sadism.¹⁵ Linking sanitary engineering to militaristic movements, Gravity’s Rainbow invites readers to reflect upon war as another system of disposal in which those demarcated as excessive human matter are wasted.

Lacking the extensive exaggerated bodily comedy of Pynchon’s work, Don DeLillo’s National Book Award-nominated Underworld¹⁶ also explores the fecal nature of bombs when the adolescent Nick Shay defecates in front of a group of neighborhood kids while reading comic books about the triumph o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: On the American Standard: Post-1960 Scatological Fiction
• 2. Soiling the Black Body: Ishmael Reed Engages White Shit
• 3. Battling the Excremental Self: Western Civilization and Its Decomposition in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections
• 4. Fleeing the Excremental Stain Through Acquisition: Getting to the Bottom of Black Suburban Splendor in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills
• 5. Waste as Weapon: Fecal Bombing in Don DeLillo’s Underworld
• 6. Shit and Other Forms of Dynamite Refuse: Samuel R. Delany’s Provocative Excremental Eros
• 7. Conclusion: Decay as Gift: Composting American Shit
• Back Matter