Susan Signe Morrison has written a book that delights
in being full of shit. However, the burden rests on her to prove the
significance of excrement in medieval culture and its viability as a
subject of scholarly enquiry.
Although beginning humbly with her son's potty training exercises,
the author aspires to offer a 'manifesto' for waste studies. Morrison
has promoted her new field, both as a theme and methodology for medieval
scholarship, as well as a modern political ideology –
fecalpolitik – through the medievalist blogosphere and several
conference appearances. While broader theoretical work has appeared on the
subject of waste and excrement and a few studies examine the topic in
other periods, the only obvious medievalist companion work is Valerie
Allen's recent book On Farting. Both books are products of
Palgrave Macmillan's provocative New Middle Ages series, and both Allen
and Morrison have becomes something like proselytizers for waste studies.
At an online Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference in October of
2009, Morrison presented a paper that applied her concept of 'waste
studies' to Anglo-Saxon and Early Modern texts, and Valerie Allen
offered a virtual response.
The two scholars have been remarkably successful at generating support
for, or at least, interest, in their new 'discipline'. Allen was
interviewed in the Chronicle of Higher
Education, Morrison's work was reviewed in the Times
Higher Education Supplement, and a derisory article
in the conservative Weekly Standard heralded 'a dark age
for medievalists' on account of all the trash talk at Kalamazoo. These
combine to constitute a fairly high impact rating in the world of medieval
studies.
So, what exactly is 'waste studies'? Having read both books and
quite a few related articles discussing the 'need to develop waste
studies', I gather that waste studies concerns the study of man's
relationship to his own waste, including but not limited to physical
excesses, such as excrement and vomit, as well as social excesses, such
monetary interest and alchemical by-products, as represented in
literature.
As such, it is necessarily political. Morrison's subtitlular
neologism – fecopoetics – takes root in ecopoetics and ecocriticism,
'a term that applies to an interdisciplinary approach to ecology,
poetics, ethics, and the environment' (p. 2). For ecocritics, the study
of literary representations of man and nature is inherently ethical, and
so, too, is the study of waste for Morrison: 'rather than imaging our
body boundaries as threatening and the waste emerging from them as abject
material to be hidden and destroyed, we need to cultivate a new sense of
our bodies, modelled on a sense of embodiment that allows for an ethical
relationship between self and waste. Unlike sin or moral corruption,
excrement can be felt, touched, smelt, and tasted. Excrement, once it is
voided from the body, cannot be avoided' (p. 154). I am not sure that it
follows that because of a metaphorical sin of our medieval forbears -
the analogizing of bodily and moral filth - that we have to revel in our
own shit.
Both studies rely, of course, upon cultural studies, and its
examination of dominant class ideologies and practices. Morrison
especially writes of societies structured 'around the control and
regulation of excrement' per Bataille (p. 5). Drawing upon Norbert
Elias's understanding of the history of refinement, certain late
medieval religious and wealthy are mocked for their abhorrence of filth as
'unnatural'. However, gestures to what is 'natural' and what is
'conditioned' are problematic. Biological anthropologists, for example,
would have some qualms about the avoidance of excrement as unnatural, but
rather the 'result of culturally contingent socialization'. (p. 6)
However, this may represent a more general problem within some
interdisciplinary scholarship: the lurking danger of the nondisciplinary.
Cultural studies at its inception was interdisciplinary, involving a
variety of sources and methodological approaches to a given subject.
Traditional literary studies has not had the same onus of evidence. For
something to be important and worthy of study, it need only be aesthetic
rather than pervasive or significant. The disconnect is somewhat present
in waste studies. For example, Morrison presents an intriguing suggestion
that excrement is more prominent as a theme in later medieval texts, e.g.
'the increase in excremental discourse in the late Middle Ages,
especially the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, could be linked to the
establishment of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the subsequent
popularity of Corpus Christi festivals, and anxiety concerning the Word
made Flesh' (p. 79). However, no statistical evidence supports the
claim. We know excrement is a concern in the quaestiones
quodlibetales of the High Middle Ages, but does it take longer to
filter into the popular imagination? If, for example, one thinks of
publications of the Annales school, dry yet satisfying charts and
statistics contribute to explanations of the most vivid and imaginative of
texts and ideas.
Morrison's monograph is a study of a motif in literature. She is most
convincing when she is monodisciplinary, but that is no reason for
apology. Scatology is obvious and present in medieval literature, and
there is no reason why it should not be studied. Morrison's Chaucerian
abdication - 'if you find my book unpleasant, it can only mean your
mind is corrupt' (p. 17) - seems therefore unnecessary. As does
comparison to queer studies and disability studies, e.g., 'fecal theory
can help us to stop being so reticent about a topic that may offend or
discomfort' and that 'fecal and waste studies attempt to make visible
what we prefer to ignore, to articulate what we have silenced, to
acknowledge what we have hidden' (p. 4). Surely, the equalizing quality
of excrement that Morrison champions elsewhere in the book contradicts
this comparison. To cite one of Morrison's more unusual sources,
Everyone Poops.
Furthermore, how marginalized and silenced has the study of the abject
and bodily been? Studies have been written about obscenity, nocturnal
emissions, vomit and so on. Is the study of the motif of excrement or
waste particularly outrageous? Certainly, the body and its products have
been given more sophisticated theoretical frameworks in the past several
decades by the pioneering work of such scholars as Peter Brown, Miri Rubin
and Caroline Walker Bynum.
However, that is not to say there is not more work to be done. Morrison
presents excrement as a valid theme to investigate in medieval literary
texts. She is particularly strong on pilgrimage narratives, and she
presents a case for further study. 'The possibility of conversion or
change is analogous to the process food goes through as it transforms into
excrement' (p. 125) Hence, she argues that Chaucer's choice of
Southwark as a starting point in the Canterbury Tales relies
on it being 'a metaphor for excrement, the dung-heap of the city,
where the excrement gets transformed into compost, a process of
transformation and change, just as pilgrimage entails amendment and
self-transformation' (p. 72).
Some of Morrison's argument about the value of excrement in medieval
culture relies upon the distinction between the transformative, valuable
and social dung and the discarded, wasteful, private shit.
As in Piers Plowman, 'spreading dung becomes an action for
the common profit, an activity that stands in opposition to sloth' (p.
119). However, I am not sure these semantic limitations are fixed in nor
are they unique to the later Middle Ages. Again, some more detailed
linguistic analysis and statistical information is useful.
Other minor frustrations include the lack of boundaries imposed on the
subject matter. For example, other bodily emissions are sometimes
discussed indiscriminately. For example. 'the saints eat filth from
putrid water to pus to overcome the naturally repulsed instincts of
their bodies, prove their sanctity, and show they cannot be reduced to
their bodies. The ingested filth sacralized their act' (p. 75). Infected
water and pus, certainly, but has a saint ever consumed excrement?
The political agenda jars with and confuses the scholarly content of
the book. For example, 'Thinking, even living, medievally may in some
ways be healthier for our culture today. If we live post-ecologically,
even fecologically, we might make the world a cleaner place' (p. 125).
While it may be true that the average medieval person had more approximate
awareness of manure, we still use manure today.
Allen's political application is less overt. Maybe this has something
to do with the difference between farts and excrement. As Morrison
commented on the medievalist blog In the Middle, 'I
think a fart is something other than shit. It isn't material for
one…It is…only a simile of something material but it is not material
in itself'. As such, the argument of Allen's book is less reducible,
taking a cue from the nature of the fart itself for her style. As she
explains herself in the introduction, 'It farts around, its progress
nonteleological, visiting topics as the wind blows, spending too long on
some ideas, returning to spend even longer on them, allowing disparate
texts to rub alongside each other without respect for historical system,
and undoubtedly omitting more than it digresses upon' (p. 1). Rather
there are a multitude of fascinating theses, in keeping with Allen's
interest in mereology, or the study of the relationship of the part to the
whole. If a book on farting may be called so, it is elegant and erudite.
Both books present investigations in 'silent history' or not so
silent history as the case may be. However, whether the two carve out a
new discipline is dubious. After Morrison's splash at the 2008 Kalamazoo
Conference and subsequent appearances, there was a little backlash.
Writing in the popular press, one academic admonished the subject as a
cheap ploy to attract students and funding, waste studies allegedly
marking an end to rigorous and worthwhile scholarship. Despite the hype,
the scholarly conversation about 'waste studies' seems so far limited
to a rather small group of producers and detractors, 'wynneres' and
'wastoures'.
Virginia Langum
