Waste in Twentieth-Century American Fiction Navid Ebrahimzadeh A

The Lowly Remains: Waste in Twentieth-Century American Fiction Navid Ebrahimzadeh A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2020 Reading Committee: Jessica Burstein, Chair Brian Reed Sonnet Retman Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English Ebrahimzadeh 2 © Copyright 2020 Navid Ebrahimzadeh Ebrahimzadeh 3 University of Washington Abstract The Lowly Remains: Waste in Twentieth-Century American Fiction Navid Ebrahimzadeh Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. Jessica Burstein At what point does a thing become waste, and why? What happens to waste when it is discarded? How can an aesthetics of waste retrieve its modes of production and circulation, revealing submerged histories of the commodities, bodies, and spaces of a nation? These research questions unify my line of inquiry, which enables “The Lowly Remains” to scrutinize literary representations of waste in postwar America, a period paradoxically known both for its unprecedented mass production and streamlined technological concealment of garbage. Examining four distinct yet interrelated categories of waste—corporate, bodily, spatial, and social—this dissertation elucidates the material, economic and psychological systems of waste- aversion which assign and rescind the value of the waste object, emphasizing literary excavation as an effective means of accessing a fuller range of the material world and uncovering historiographical elisions in master narratives of the development of the United States over the last century. The dissertation examines the symbolic substitutions, cross-pollinations, and ideological relays between different categories of waste—how one economy of value will utilize the rhetoric and associations from another to form a multi-discursive culture of waste aversion. Through this dissertation, I aim to contribute to a growing body of interdisciplinary work on waste in recent years, the broadest goal of which is to grant serious academic attention and value to valuelessness. Most contemporary studies of literary waste speak of trash as ahistorical abstract category and do not detail the development of various disposable and synthetic materials responsible for its current volumes. To avoid this pitfall, I employ a diverse array of theoretical positions integrated with historical precision and attention to specific materials—each chapter scrutinizes a specific moment in twentieth-century American history, the role of waste in that moment, the formal techniques through which it is aestheticized, and what it discloses about shifting values in the cultural imaginary. Ebrahimzadeh 4 Contents 0. Introduction: Containing the Category 0.0. Situating Waste Scholarship and Methods … 6 0.1. Talking Trash: Waste Terminology in Literature … 32 0.2. Chapter Summaries ... 45 1. Chapter One: Tracing Trash 1.0. Beginnings Without Ends ... 57 1.1. From Safeguarding to Replacing: Towards Disposability and Single-Use ... 61 1.2. “Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry”: Prepackaging and Plastic in Underworld ... 68 1.3. “No One Saw It or Thought About It”: The Sanitary Landfill and Waste Concealment ... 78 1.4. “It Is All Part of the Same Thing”: Free-Floating Ephemera and the Flattening of History ... 84 1.5. The Role of Narrative and Structure in Waste Historiography ... 91 1.6. Nonlinear Histories, Matter in Motion ... 99 2. Chapter Two: Excretory Histories, Wasting Words 2.0. The “Other Tradition” ... 111 2.1. The Nature(s) of Disgust ... 118 2.2. Gravity’s Rainbow, the Body Politic, and the Semi-Transparency of Disgust ... 127 2.3. “Human Parts Shaken Around and Poured Out Any Way They Fell”: Anti-Individualism, Synecdoche, and Waste-Anarchy in Naked Lunch ... 141 2.4. “They Separate in Meaningless Mosaic”: Cut-Ups, Collage and Textual Inefficiency ... 156 Ebrahimzadeh 5 2.5. Revising Femininity as Waste-Receptacle in Acker ... 173 3. Chapter Three: Underbellies and Urban Spatial Logic 3.0. Space, Race, and Waste ... 184 3.1. From Hades to Harlem: An Underworld History ... 189 3.2. The Rise of Urban Planning: Harlem and Real Estate, 1909—1956 ... 199 3.3. Infiltration Theory, Surplus Populations, and the Lowly ... 209 3.4. Submersion, Inversion, and Waste-Ambience in Wright’s Underground ... 219 3.5. “Not All Sickness is Unto Death”: Survival in Ellison’s Underground ... 229 3.6. Historiographical Elisions and the View from Below ... 234 4. Chapter Four: Disposable Bodies 4.0. Invisibility and the Setting/Character Boundary ... 245 4.1. Homelessness as “Rot and Filth,” or, Social Waste ... 251 4.2. A Condensed History of American Homelessness ... 261 4.3. “Lifestyles of the Poor and Forgotten”: Highways and Homelessness in Tropic of Orange ... 273 4.4. Literary Tombstone for the Nameless: Liminality, Precarity, Camaraderie in Ironweed ... 286 5. Coda: Unproductive Inquiries and Ephemera 5.0. Non-Instrumental Analyses ... 309 5.1. Ecocriticism ... 312 5.2. Trash Tropes … 313 6. Bibliography ... 322 Ebrahimzadeh 6 0. Introduction: Containing the Category 0.0. Situating Waste Scholarship and Methods A paradoxical and porous category, waste presents a series of cultural conundrums: simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible, trivial and significant, valueless yet utterly necessary. While productivity is frequently deemed valuable, the byproducts of productivity, the remnants of once-useful commodities bled of their productive capacities, are not. Whether in the form of material waste or trash, bodily waste or excretions, social waste (sometimes wasted, and often deemed wastes of space) and the places they inhabit, these subjects, objects, and spaces are by definition extraneous and inessential, a waste of time to ponder when considered at all. Yet waste starts to turn up everywhere the moment we look for it, the everyday castoffs of the various economies and systems that structure modern human existence. There is, in fact, a long-standing history of literature fixating on waste as the thematic, formal, or social centerpiece, the subject matter, the aesthetic principle, or in some other capacity, the very ethos of the work. What purpose or purposes could an artwork centered on waste, an aesthetics of trashiness, possibly serve? How does art respond to and work towards the production of paradigm shifts in the history of trashmaking? How might these castoffs signal back, tellingly, to the economies which birthed them, and where else might they signal? This dissertation seeks to examine literary depictions of waste in mid-to-late-twentieth- century (1943-1997) American prose as related to the development of modern waste management, consumer culture, embodiment, urban ecology, and social hierarchy. This introductory section summarizes the existing body of pertinent scholarship on waste before proceeding to the arguments, terms, methodologies, and contributions the dissertation provides to Ebrahimzadeh 7 the discourse. First popularized in literary modernism and cultural studies in Charles Baudelaire’s mid- nineteenth century poetry volume Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), and later excavated in Walter Benjamin’s 1930s writings on Baudelaire, the interrelated topics of waste and trash, waste’s most omnipresent manifestation, have since grown exponentially, becoming a discourse unto themselves. From 2014 to 2016, a series of critical works across the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, philosophy, environmental studies, urban planning, and sociology focalized waste as an increasingly pressing and dynamically flexible rubric for excavating the discarded elements of modern literature and culture (Viney 2014, Bozcagli 2015, Morrison 2015, Rania and Jazairy 2015, Alworth 2016, Dini 2016). In this way, the study of waste often serves as recovery work: trash gets swept aside, trashy literature recuperates it, and literary, social, and urban garbologists extend or complement the process of recuperation. While the dissertation focuses on twentieth-century U.S. prose, these texts cannot be fully understood without some recourse to foundational texts produced in nineteenth-century European literature. Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde, two important apologists for trash and uselessness respectively, establish a contrarian ethos and aesthetics which the next century of waste-oriented literature, by scrutinizing the lowly and abhorrent, generally retains. Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire’s decadent scrutiny of urban and erotic experience, opens by announcing to its appalled audience that its principle aim is to “find charms” in the “most repugnant objects” (14). His poem “The Little Old Women” maliciously addresses the newly developed archetype of the urbanite, who “trudge[s] on, stoic … / through the chaotic city’s teeming waste” (Baudelaire, IV, 1-2). In marked defiance to this apathetic figure, Baudelaire suggests that the urban poet must immerse himself completely in this ignored refuse material, directly and with a Ebrahimzadeh 8 morbid tenderness. In poems such as “To a Red Haired Beggar Girl,” he extends this poetic attention and sympathy to the socially discarded, though no poem encapsulates this ethos as thoroughly as “The Ragpicker’s Wine,” wherein the ragpicker moves through the slums of Paris, here termed a “muddy labyrinth” collecting “the dregs, the vomit of this teeming town,” in direct relation to what Baudelaire considered the poet’s task: to engage wholecloth the city’s discards in lieu of myopically or hypocritically denying their existence (4, 16). Walter Benjamin drives

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