Consumerism, Waste, and Re-Use in Twentieth-Century Fiction

Legacies of the Avant-Garde

Rachele Dini

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137590619
• eBook ISBN: 9781137581655
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines manufactured waste and remaindered humans in literary critiques of capitalism by twentieth-century writers associated with the historical avant-garde and their descendants. Building on recent work in new materialism and waste studies, Rachele Dini reads waste as a process or phase amenable to interruption. From an initial exploration of waste and re-use in three Surrealist texts by Giorgio de Chirico, André Breton, and Mina Loy, Dini traces the conceptualization of waste in the writing of Samuel Beckett, Donald Barthelme, J.G. Ballard, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo. In exploring the relationship between waste, capitalism, and literary experimentation, this book shows that the legacy of the historical avant-garde is bound up with an enduring faith in the radical potential of waste. The first study to focus specifically on waste in the twentieth-century imagination, this is a valuable contribution to the expanding field of waste studies.

© The Author(s) 2016

Rachele DiniConsumerism, Waste, and Re-Use in Twentieth-Century Fiction10.1057/978-1-137-58165-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Rachele Dini¹

(1)

Wandsworth, UK

End Abstract

“There is nothing like a good rummage through someone’s rubbish before nightfall,” asserts the anonymous narrator of Ellis Sharp’s novella, The Dump (1998). ¹ Sharp’s narrator claims to have woken up one morning in an immense landfill on the fringes of his native Walthamstow, North London, joining a “rickety population” of several thousand scavengers (TD, 15). The Dump, as the landfill is called, is a vast and inexplicable “place of the rejected, the worthless” (TD, 19), whose incoherence is reflected in the narrator’s own disjointed speech. But in among the asynchronous babble there appear brief moments of insight during which the narrator cogently distils The Dump’s broader meaning: this is a place for “all that is superfluous. […] Built-in obsolescence, the very marrow of every gleaming product” (TD, 51). Describing himself as “the mundane distilled into human form,” Sharp’s narrator recognises that these surroundings agree with him: “untroubled (bliss!) by capitalism or troublesome sex,” he can instead learn from the “bits and pieces” in which he is immersed (TD, 29; 58; 57). Indeed,

The only other place where you learn about the truth of things is down in the city sewers, in among the shit and the gin bottles and the thousand-and-one things that guilty shamefaced folk flush down the loo when no one else is about. (TD, 57)

The Dump offers a unique perspective on the world: “You get a real sense of life’s rich variety and mystery. […] In fact you probably end up knowing more about life [in the real world] than [its inhabitants] do themselves” (TD, 57). Further, in its inchoate, disordered state, The Dump raises questions about the logic underpinning the workings of mainstream society: “one of the intriguing and interesting things about life on The Dump is the strange things that get thrown away for no apparent reason, not to mention the strange juxtaposition of things which don’t belong together at all” (TD, 57). Our discards not only reveal the irrationality underlying our attributions of value: re-contextualised in The Dump, they take on new and absurd meanings.

Sharp’s narrator is not alone in his fascination with what he calls “the tease of enigmatic scraps” (TD, 60). Rather, his ideas are but an extension of a centuries-long enquiry into the narrative and philosophical value of our domestic and industrial discards, and, relatedly, into the value of human beings themselves. Since the Industrial Revolution and the rise of commodity culture, writers have condemned the things we throw out for their hygienic, moral, and ecological toll, and they have seen in the disposal of such items a metaphor for capitalism’s marginalisation of the poor or unemployed. At the same time, others have acknowledged the aesthetic, ontological, and even historiographical value of our discards. Like Sharp’s narrator, they have identified in the world of waste the means to echo and parody mainstream society and throw its peculiarities into relief.

This book examines the representation of manufactured waste and remaindered humans—humans cast out of the job market, or who actively resist being put to use—in literary critiques of capitalism by twentieth-century writers associated with the historical avant-garde and their descendants. From an initial exploration of waste and re-use in three Surrealist texts—Giorgio de Chirico’s Hebdomeros (1929), André Breton’s Nadja (1928), and Mina Loy’s unfinished novel Insel (1930–1961)—I trace the conceptualisation of waste in the prose Samuel Beckett published between 1950 and 1964, Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967), J.G. Ballard’s 1970s urban disaster trilogy (High-Rise, Concrete Island, Crash), William Gaddis’ J.R. (1975), and a selection of novels by Don DeLillo written between 1971 and 1997, before considering waste’s role in three post-millennial novels. All of the texts discussed stand out in their use of waste to interrogate capitalist ascriptions of value and test the novel form in ways that echo and extend the practices of the historical avant-garde. In examining the relationship between waste, capitalism, and literary experimentation, this book looks to demonstrate the extent to which the legacy of the historical avant-garde is bound up with an enduring faith in the radical potential of waste—its potential, in other words, to represent active resistance to commodification.

The Commodity

This project takes waste to be intimately tied with commodities. But what is a commodity? From a strictly historical materialist perspective, a commodity is an object characterised by its use-value and reducible to being considered a “congelation of homogeneous human labour.” ² In the last few decades, however, new ways of thinking about the value of objects have complicated Marx’s definition. This development is partly attributable to a broader shift in the humanities and social sciences from a language- and linguistics-based theoretic approach to literature and culture, to one grounded in materiality—often referred to as the “thingly turn.” ³ The emergence of “Thing Theory” and the fields of material culture studies, New Materialism, and discard studies have opened the entire lifespan of objects to scrutiny. Scholars in these fields recognise commodities to be more than the end result of a manufacturing process and to exceed strict dichotomies such as useful/useless. In their foundational essays on the subject, Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff argue that Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism misses the non-economic dimension of commodities—that is, the cultural value they are ascribed after they are produced and which fundamentally shapes their inclusion or preclusion from exchange. ⁴ Appadurai calls for a modification of two of Marx’s assumptions: that “commodities either exist or do not exist, and [that] they are products of a particular sort” (Appadurai, 9). Instead, he posits that commodities are:

things in a certain situation, a situation that can characterize many different kinds of thing, at different points in their social lives. This means looking at the commodity potential of all things rather than searching fruitlessly for the magic distinction between commodities and other sorts of things. It also means breaking significantly with the production-dominated Marxian view of the commodity and focusing on its total trajectory from production, through exchange/distribution, to consumption. (Appadurai, 13)

Appadurai proposes we abstain from defining objects as commodities or not-commodities and consider them instead as moving in and out of the commodity stage, as their marketability, utility, and status as “innovative” or démodé changes (Appadurai, 13). Likewise, Kopytoff argues that commodification itself “is best looked at as a process of becoming than as an all-or-none state of being” (Kopytoff, 73). More recently, New Materialists such as Jane Bennett, Maurizia Boscagli, and Susan Signe Morrison have sought to attend to what Bennett terms matter’s “vitality” and what Boscagli terms its “unruly” potential—to recognise the “plasticity possible at the moment of subject-object interaction.” ⁵ Matter exists in the culture of commodities, but its status as a commodity should not be presupposed.

These different articulations call attention to the malleability of the commodity as a concept and in turn suggest the fruitfulness of conceptualising waste, too, as a phase in an object’s life. Expanding Marx’s original definition allows us to consider not only the processes by which products appear on the shelf but also their complex trajectories from shop to home, from home to garbage bin or landfill, and from garbage bin/landfill to someone else’s home. Relatedly, we might consider how such ascriptions of value extend to human beings (of which I will have more to say in the sections below).

Waste and Recuperation

Based on the ideas just discussed, I propose that in the texts examined in this study, commodities and waste exist on a Möbius strip; that they are shown to be dialectically inseparable from one another; and that under capitalist exchange relations, each is revealed capable of being alchemised into the other. This definition—to which I return later in this section—departs from the vast majority of waste scholarship, which in the last few decades has largely taken its cue from Mary Douglas’ structural analysis of dirt and cleanliness in tribal law, Purity and Danger. ⁶ Douglas’ work conceptualises dirt, after William James, as “matter out of place,” arguing that social groups use the concept of dirt to maintain social order. ⁷ The dichotomies of purity/impurity, cleanliness/dirt, and use/useless are a means of upholding hierarchical structures and re-instating moral values. They also reflect spatially contingent social boundaries, such as body/world, self/other, and private/public. Dirt’s presence thus suggests both uncleanliness and a challenge to the system that has accorded things their specific place and has mandated that things be clean. Ambiguity and otherness amplify dirt’s fear-inducing qualities: as well as matter out of place, dirt is matter without place, matter that crosses boundaries indiscriminately, hovering without agreeing to “settle.”

Problems arise, however, when we attempt to apply Douglas’ analysis of dirt to the category of waste. Yes, there are affinities between dirt’s profane associations among primitive cultures and our repulsion at the sight or smell of certain typologies of waste such as bodily emissions. There are likewise affinities in dirt and waste’s respective disruption of our sense of aesthetic order and the efforts we make to circumscribe them within particular boundaries (the garden, the trash bin). But beyond this the analogy fails, and applying it meaningfully becomes difficult. For waste’s existence in the world, contrary to dirt, is distinguished by narrative, origin, and time. Douglas ascribes dirt’s discomfiting qualities to its dislocation: not the process by which it became dislocated, but the very fact of its being dislocated. By contrast, I argue that the strong feelings aroused by organic waste matter (faeces, urine, semen) and inorganic waste matter (the consumer and industrial remnants that form the topic of this book) are ascribable to the fact that they are material remnants of an event. Put differently, waste is the product of a process: it signals the aftermath of an occurrence, be that occurrence a dog defecating, the explosion at a nuclear plant, or the end of a fashion trend. This temporal dimension endows waste with narrative qualities: with its very presence a waste object signals that something has come before. Where dirt is matter out of place, waste is matter out of time.

An earlier theorist, Michael Thompson, can help shed light on this temporal and narrative dimension of waste. ⁸ For Thompson, all objects can be classified as “transient,” “durable,” or “rubbish,” depending on whether they depreciate in value over time (Thompson, 7). Transient objects “decrease in value over time and have finite life-spans”; durable objects such as antique furniture “increase in value over time and have (ideally) infinite life-spans”; and, finally, objects “of zero and unchanging value [that] do not fall into either of these two categories” are defined as “rubbish” (Thompson, 7). Crucially, all three categories are understood to be fluid—an object might start out as “transient,” fall into disuse and lose all value (becoming “rubbish”), and then be re-discovered at a later moment and given new meaning, thus moving into the category of “durable” (Thompson, 9). The shift from “rubbish” to “durable” entails an attribution of value: for the object to be no longer considered waste, it must be of use. Like Appadurai and Kopytoff’s elaborations of Marx’s definition of the commodity, Thompson’s conceptualisation hinges on the recognition that new meanings can be assigned to old things. The sawdust off a carpenter’s table is waste insofar as it evidences a process and has no use; but the moment it is sold for re-use, it becomes a commodity once more. Where Douglas would see waste as illegitimate matter, a temporal reading sees waste as matter that has served its purpose—for the time being.

This study thus defines waste as a stage in the lifecycle of a thing, which is also to say, a stage that can pass. In contrast to Thompson’s assertion that certain objects remain impervious to decay or obsolescence, I argue that any object has the potential to become waste. Following Appadurai, I read the depictions of waste objects in the texts under review as snapshots of one phase of these objects’ lives. The full story of these lives encompasses far more than their sojourn in a tip or landfill—which each of the novels discussed makes clear. I extend this definition to consider how the waste-potential of commodities under capitalism relates to the waste-potential of people.

The implications of the w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. In Search of an Epiphany: Waste and the Historical Avant-Garde
• 3. Samuel Beckett’s personnes perdues: Human Waste in The Trilogy, Texts for Nothing, and How It Is
• 4. Waste in Donald Barthelme, J.G. Ballard, and William Gaddis
• 5. “Most of Our Longings Go Unfulfilled”: DeLillo’s Historiographical Readings of Landfill Waste and Nuclear Fallout
• 6. Conclusion
• Backmatter