Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference (MassURC)

While scatological imagery (broadly defined as bodily waste including feces, urine, flatulence, phlegm, and vomit) has been present in European literature since the early modern era, its appearance in American literature is almost entirely a contemporary phenomenon. Scholarship on the scatological has been largely concentrated around the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and Georges Bataille. For both writers, the scatological facilitates the collapse of boundaries: traversing lines between the individual and the community, between the material and the ideal, and between life and death. Using a theoretical framework drawn primarily from these two writers, this paper will attempt to chart a through-line between the writing of three American novelists: William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, and Samuel Delany, exploring how their use of the scatological engages with the erection and potential collapse of the American identity. For Burroughs, the grotesque is linked to the body's potential for transformation and domination by systems of control such as the drug trade, government bureaucracies, and language, all of which seek to reshape identities and snuff out human potentials. Pynchon's writing explores a cultural association between waste, death, and colonized peoples, demonstrating the ways in which this association has been used to construct the white American identity as well as broader systems such as the military industrial complex. Finally, this paper will examine two novels by Samuel Delany which use the scatological to lay out an ethic celebrating the porousness of identity and which rediscovers the value in what society has otherwise deemed waste.

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