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

Abstract

This chapter discusses the prominence of metaphorical systems of sewerage within the pages of some of the most well-known novels of the post-war period by situating such works within critical accounts of postmodern parody and contemporary concerns about the impact of national movements on marginalized populations as well as on the environment. Acknowledging the comic power of the literary loo, the chapter shows how scatological texts move readers through laughter or disgust toward deep engagement with the underworld movement of sewerage systems; thus, the chapter argues that distasteful and titillating adolescent bodily comedy opens up a space for readers to re-evaluate a willful forgetting of their abject selves so that they might think through the ways that systems of disposal impact the world around us. Because scatological satire plumbs the depths of a contemporary subjectivity that denies association with effluent, excremental fiction does much more than offer studies of impact offered by earth and environmental scientists; it gives readers insight into why communities bombard rivers and other bodies of water with sewage and why nations support industrial production of toxins that are known to harm human and other life. Excremental fiction seduces readers through comic scatological play to come face to face with the inner workings of a violent contemporary subjectivity that wars against the ecosystems upon which communities depend and those deemed Other. Novelists like Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Jonathan Franzen, Gloria Naylor, and Don DeLillo also use sanitary engineering as metaphor to describe the processes by which specific communities are seen as disposable. Additionally, this chapter argues that excremental fiction matters because it helps readers imagine the kinds of subjective transformations necessary in order to undermine violence toward those deemed Other and to fold ourselves back into the ecosystems with which communities have been at war. Connecting research to second-wave ecocritics like Lawrence Buell and contemporary studies of parody by Linda Hutcheon and Henry Louis Gates Jr., this chapter claims that excremental fiction offers unique insight into the kinds of subjects who pollute the environment and the kinds of subjects who we need to become in order to create sustainable and less violent communities.