If you’ve followed my blog for any time at all, you may have noticed that I have a scatological fetish. Or, to be more prosaic about it, I have a fascination with shit. You can smell traces of it in poems I’ve squeezed out. In stories. In parables. In essays. In criticism. And in literary reflections. I find it heartening, then, to discover others who share my proclivities. In this instance, I direct your attention to Andrew Altschul, who has an essay in The Quarterly Conversation titled “Who Was David Foster Wallace?—The Management of Insignificance: Thoughts on “The Suffering Channel,” Reality, and Shit”. Until I read this essay, I was unaware that DFW had written a story in which shit figured so prominently. His story concerns a Roto Rooter technician who has the “ability to defecate in the form of exquisite works of art”. What I find curious about the essay is that it assumes shit is hostile to art; shit is art’s opposite. I have acclimatized myself to a more European view of shit, adopting Milan Kundera’s position that shit is essential to art; without shit, all that remains is kitsch. Is it possible, I wondered, to reconcile these differing views? Or at least to account for the difference?
My Dog’s Ass:
I should mention that this puzzle first wormed its way into my brain as I was shaving my dog down almost to the skin. You see, my dog has a nasty rash on her ass. The night before last, she kept us up half the night with her ass-licking routine. To relieve the itch, she would bend around and lick herself on the ass and, in a variation of the dog-chasing-its-own-tail routine, she’d circle around and around, clicking her nails on the hardwood flood, then lose her balance and fall over with a whump where she continued to lick her ass while sprawled on the floor.
Yesterday morning, I woke up exhausted and knew I would have to do something decisive. I spent nearly three hours in the afternoon snipping away tufts of hair, brushing out the dog’s coat, then shaving her with the electric clippers. I started at the head, afraid of what I’d find as I moved towards the posterior. My fears were well-founded. Beneath her tail, all the hair had matted. Pulling tufts away from the skin, I snipped and snipped and tried my best to keep the dog in place. The more hair I snipped away, the easier it was to see the source of the problem. A nugget of shit had gotten trapped in the matted hair. Who knows how long it has festered there before it started to irritate the skin? I shuddered to think on it. Instead, I thought on the above-mentioned puzzle, trying to reconcile competing views of shit.
Here’s what I worked out: Kundera and Altschul use different definitions of shit. For Kundera, it’s a case of shit as subject. When he talks about shit, he talks about shit as an integral feature of life, and because all art is a representation of life, shit finds its way into that representation. For Altschul, it’s a case of shit as object. Looking at works of art as objects, he asks the evaluative question: “Is this art? Or is it shit?” As I snipped more tufts of shit-encrusted hair from my dog’s ass, I realized that Kundera and Altschul don’t present competing views of shit. They’re complementary. Using DFW’s “The Suffering Channel” as an example, DFW incorporates shit in his story, satisfying Kundera’s view of shit; but his work is not, in itself, shit, satisfying Altschul’s view of shit.
A parable:
Once there was a man who had a dog. He loved his dog very much, but preferred not to think about the dog’s more fundamental requirements. Whenever the dog shat, he looked the other way, pretending that such things don’t really happen. However, by looking away, he failed to notice the accumulation of shit in the dog’s ass hair. The accumulation of shit irritated that dog’s skin and became so intolerable that the man had no choice but to spend hours with his hands in the dog’s ass to clean things up and give the dog the relief she deserved. The moral of the parable is that when shit happens, you should face it squarely, otherwise karma will find you spending hours with your hands in a dog’s ass.