The Literature of Waste

Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter

S. Morrison

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137394446
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Tracing material and metaphoric waste through the Western canon, ranging from Beowulf to Samuel Beckett, Susan Signe Morrison disrupts traditional perceptions of waste to better understand how we theorize, manage, and are implicated in what is discarded and seen as garbage. Engaging a wide range of disciplines, Morrison addresses how the materiality of waste has been sedimented into a variety of toxic metaphors. If scholars can read waste as possessing dynamic agency, how might that change the ethics of refuse-ing and ostracizing wasted humans? A major contribution to the growing field of Waste Studies, this comparative and theoretically innovative book confronts the reader with the ethical urgency present in waste literature itself.

PART I

Treatment and Disposal: Approaches to Disciplining Waste

CHAPTER 1

Codification: The Anxiety of Ambiguity

Before our son was born, I told close friends and family not to bother buying newborn clothing for him. “We already have perfectly good infant clothes, some of which have never even been used.” They belonged to my daughter, born several years earlier. Now, the thought that our son would be clad in a pink, female-identified wardrobe was too much for older relatives who sent boy clothes, so that my son, not even cognizant of the battle of wills taking place, would be properly identified and identifiable in the public arena. While it mattered little to my husband and me that the little lad would be in pink or even (god forbid!) flowered clothes, so long as he was happy, healthy, and warm, it was essential to others that he be marked from the moment of his entry into this world as a male. The compulsion existed to codify my son even before his birth. Such orderly divisions percolate through human cultures, including distinctions related to class, wealth, and—as in my as yet-unborn son’s case—gender.

The Compulsion to Codify and Order

Codification underlies Mary Douglas’s anthropological analysis of perceptions of dirt in her seminal work Purity and Danger. Something may be designated as dirt in one location, yet an alternate space makes it acceptable.¹ For example, a dung heap on a farm connotes fertility, safety for future crops, and even material well-being, while a dung heap in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City would not be welcomed by high-society matrons. To fail at the attempt to codify pure versus dirty or to establish them as binary opposites threatens. According to Douglas:

When we honestly reflect on our busy scrubbings and cleanings in this light we know that we are not mainly trying to avoid disease. We are separating, placing boundaries, making visible statements about the home that we are intending to create out of the material house. Both we and the Bushmen justify our pollution avoidance by fear of danger.²

This “danger” infects the sense of dread hanging over the inability to divide and differentiate. The nameless, the undifferentiated, the hybrid, the ambiguous—all exist in the realm of metaphor, the result of futile codification.

Codification facilitates the establishment of culture and civilization. The Pentateuch firmly articulates stipulations for Judaic culture with distinctions between clean and filthy. Obsessed with divisions between what constitutes proper and improper sacrifice and consumption, Leviticus contains many food prohibitions: “It shall be a perpetual statute for your generations throughout all your dwellings, that ye eat neither fat nor blood” (Lev. 3: 17). The seventh-century CE Visigothic Code (Forum Judicum), insidiously aware of the importance of food prohibitions, specifically stipulates that Jews are not allowed to divide food into dirty and clean unless Christians approve (Book XII, Title II, Law VIII, also XVI).

Separation of clean and dirty appears literally and figuratively in the case of the ceremony of animal sacrifice for a priest’s sin:³

And the skin of the bullock, and all his flesh, with his head, and with his legs, and his inwards, and his dung, Even the whole bullock shall he carry forth without the camp unto a clean place, where the ashes are poured out, and burn him on the wood with fire: where the ashes are poured out shall he be burnt. (Lev. 4: 11–12)

Proper sacrifices to Yahweh must be conducted with unblemished animals. A ram without a blemish atones for the body’s and soul’s blemishes:

And the LORD spake unto Aaron, saying, Do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou, nor thy sons with thee, when ye go into the tabernacle of the congregation, lest ye die: it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations: And that ye may put difference between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean; And that ye may teach the children of Israel all the statutes which the LORD hath spoken unto them by the hand of Moses. (Lev. 10: 8–11)

Angry with Aaron’s sons for not obeying proper stipulations, God prescribes order through codification. The dutiful fulfilment of God’s ordained divisions reflects His power and might. If the Jews behave according to the Lord’s will, they will be clean and be rewarded by living in a land of milk and honey (Lev. 20).

Medieval rabbinical discussions frequently deal with issues of cleanliness. The Babylonian Talmud (completed around 700 CE) comments on the conflict between sacred duty and bodily filth.

Our Rabbis taught: If a man needs to consult nature he should not say the Tefillah, and if he does, his prayer is an abomination . . . [One Rabbi] said: Guard thy orifices at the time when thou art standing in prayer before Me.

Our Rabbis taught: One who is about to enter a privy should take off his tefillin at a distance of four cubits and then enter . . . The question was asked, What is the rule about a man going in to a regular privy with his tefillin to make water? . . . It is forbidden, since we are afraid that he may ease himself in them, or, as some report, lest he may break wind in them.⁴

The thirteenth-century Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg was asked about issues concerning blessings and hygiene. The washing of hands accompanies both dirty physical activities, like defecation, and moments of spiritual reverence, like blessings or the holy act of prayer.⁵ How a latrine should be constructed is graphically described:

Q. On the Sabbath, may a Jew use latrines which are built in the city wall and open into a ditch surrounding the wall, so that the feces falling into the ditch are removed (by his force) from one Sabbath domain into another. A. He should fasten a board beneath the seat (within not more than three tefahim below the latrine walls) so that the feces first fall on the board and then into the ditch. Should the board break on the Sabbath, he would still be permitted to use the latrine that day.⁶

The blessing listed in the Talmud to utter upon entering and leaving the privy or outhouse can vary. Upon entering, the speaker asks the angel to protect him:

Praised be You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe, who fashioned the human body in wisdom and created in him many openings and orifices. It is well known before Your glorious throne that if one of them were to be opened (wrongly) or be stopped up (wrongly), it would be impossible to stand before You.⁷

Intense discussion about proper and improper ways to construct or use privies reflects the deeply embedded code dividing clean from dirty in Judaic culture.⁸ Discomfited by lack of order when divisions break down, one enters “waste space,” a liminal site of ambiguity that vibrates threateningly.

Levitican food prohibitions regarding cleanliness underlie early Christian precepts, as in the Penitential of Theodore (late seventh century). Penitentials of the Anglo-Saxon church codify punishments, with special emphasis on sexual, dietary, behavioral, and religious transgressions.

If anyone accidentally touches food with unwashed hands, or [if] a dog, a cat, a mouse, or an unclean animal that has eaten blood [touches it] there is no offense . . . If a mouse falls into a liquid it shall be removed and sprinkled with holy water, and if it is alive it may be taken [for food]; but if it is dead, all the liquid shall be poured out and not given to man, and the vessel shall be cleansed . . . If birds drop dung into any liquid, the dung shall be removed from it, and it shall be sanctified with [holy] water, and it shall be clean food.⁹

Fornication that occurs while violating incest taboos and heterosexual precepts is likewise punished. “Sodomites shall do penance for seven years, and the effeminate man as an adulteress.”¹⁰ Sexual transgressions are fundamentally contrary to Christian medieval proscriptions. “If one commits fornication with his mother, he shall do penance for fifteen years and never change except on Sundays. But this so impious incest is likewise spoken of by him in another way—that he shall do penance for seven years, with perpetual pilgrimage.”¹¹ Food transgressions condemn the ingestion of blood: “A wife who tastes tastes her husband’s blood as a remedy shall fast for forty days, more or less.”¹² Non-believers are seen as filth, out of order, emanating the power of desecration within the Anglo-Saxon church.

In a church in which the bodies of dead unbelievers are buried, an altar may not be sanctified; but if it seems suitable for consecration, when the bodies have been removed and the woodwork of it has been scraped or washed, it shall be reerected. But if it was previously consecrated, masses may be celebrated in it if religious men are buried there; but if there is a pagan [buried there], it is better to cleanse it and cast [the corpse] out.¹³

The tainted pagan must be expelled from the sanctified space that it symbolically sullied, a space requiring purification.

Intention is key in the Christian variations on Levitican precepts, clearly affecting the extent to which one must undergo penance: “If without knowing it, one eats what is polluted by blood or any unclean thing, it is nothing; but if he knows, he shall do penance according to the degree of the pollution.”¹⁴ Disorder compels condemnation for the acting out of accordance with established rules. Order can only be reestablished through a counteracting punishment, a kind of spiritual homeopathy, that washes clean the guilt of the transgressor. The stipulations laid out in Leviticus and Christian penitentials function to instill a fear of social rejection.¹⁵ The many instances cited of transgression suggest the impossibility of ma...