A Return to Culture: Literature as Ecology

Abstract

Literature is an important part of French national identity and cultural patrimony, as seen in the hype around the literary rentrée each year and the prestige economy that continues to mark French literature with its prize system. However, French literature, particularly those works that are canonical or on track to being canonized, is full of excrement. I examine this literature's excrementality to argue that the shit in this valued literature allows us to think literature not in canonical terms but in ecological ones. Shit serves as the ground for conceptualizing what kind of material literature is; it is the material by which canonical texts break down the very idea of the canon that would contain them, thereby returning culture to its early, non-industrial, agricultural roots, where culture and cultivation converge as a material, human encounter with the environment marked by a cycle of exchange and reciprocity. Despite the seeming health of an elitist and canon-driven model of literary production, these works’ scatological quality acts at cross purposes with the canon to allow the shit-culture it contains to circulate and return to an environment where it can be mobilized to enrich and produce new forms of culture.

Keywords:

• Shit
• culture
• literature
• circulation
• ecology
• universalism

Notes

1 See Bruno Latour, Nous n'avons jamais été modernes: Essai d'anthropologie symétrique, Paris, La Découverte, 1991.

2 See Georges Vigarello, Le Propre et le sale: l’hygiène du corps depuis le Moyen Âge, Paris, Seuil, 1985.

3 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky, Indiana UP, 1984 and François Rabelais, “Gargantua,” Les Cinq Livres, edited by Jean Céard et al., Librairie générale française, 1994, pp. 1–287.

4 See Susan Signe Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 and Will Stockton, Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy, U of Minnesota P, 2011.

5 See Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (MIT, 1994) and Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris, Seuil, 1957; particularly “Saponides et detergents” and “Publicité de la profondeur”) for readings of what this drive toward cleanliness signify.

6 While technically not a French writer, Beckett has been fully integrated into the French canon. See Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Mort à crédit. Paris, Denoël, 1936; Jean Genet, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Paris, Gallimard, 1976; and Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Paris, Minuit, 1951.

7 At the 2020 MLA convention in Seattle, a session entitled “The Beginning of the Twenty-First Century” was dedicated to taking up the question of when the twenty-first century began in contemporary French literature. One of the panelists, Jordan Stump, posited that we couldn’t really claim a twenty-first-century French novel as there was nothing that we could do in the twenty-first century that would distinguish it from what the twentieth century had produced and enabled.

8 I realize that I am casting fiction, in its novel form, as standing in for literature tout court. If I do so, it is because of the way the novel, in comparison to poetry, theater, and nonfictional productions such as the essay, is able to absorb and accommodate all those other forms without losing its novel status. The novel, more so than any other form of literature, possesses a capaciousness that allows it to function as a metonym for literature writ large.

9 With all due respect to the anthropomorphization of feces, seen in the ubiquitous smiling poop emoji and in such infamous characters as South Park’s Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo, such anthropomorphization only serves to underline the difference between the human and such waste. We might think of humans as waste, as executed by the genocidal machine of the Third Reich, which turned humans into corps-déchets, but we do not think of waste as human.

10 While some might be inclined to see this kind of boundary trouble as accounted for in Julia Kristeva’s classic theory of abjection as laid out in Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection (Paris, Seuil, 1980), I want to distance myself from the Kristevan perspective because of its inherent negativity. Far from treating the fecal as abject, I see it as an inherently positive site, to be wrested away from the horreur and repulsion that have been imputed to it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annabel L. Kim

Annabel L. Kim is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and the author of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (Ohio State UP, 2018). Kim's second book, Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon (U of Minnesota P, 2022), examines the deeply excremental nature of the modern and contemporary French canon and works to combat the sanitization of the French literary imaginary.