CENTURY LITERATURE by Garth Jerome Sabo A
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GUT FEELINGS: HUMAN WASTE AND SIGNS OF HEALTH IN 20TH- AND 21ST- CENTURY LITERATURE By Garth Jerome Sabo A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English – Doctor of Philosophy 2019 PUBLIC ABSTRACT GUT FEELINGS: HUMAN WASTE AND SIGNS OF HEALTH IN 20TH- AND 21ST- CENTURY LITERATURE By Garth Jerome Sabo This dissertation responds to new knowledge about human excrement emerging throughout the 20th and 21st centuries that changes our relationship to waste. As we have come to know more about the community of microbes that live in our bowels, it becomes increasingly clear that many of the traits that we think of as “classically human,” like thinking and feeling, originate in the guts. Here I offer a framework for thinking about our bodies and our lives in response to these new theories of the human microbiome, and I use a blend of literary and scientific texts to do so. I insist that neither novel nor clinic can account for bodily wastes without relying in some way on the other, and so I argue for a new scatological approach that brings literature and medical science together in order to consider what the two can do together. In my first chapter, I explore the long history and deep roots these changes have. I focus on a hundred-year span between 1908 and 2008, which I call the long century of shit. At the beginning of this century, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Èlie Metchnikoff declared that the main cause of human mortality was poisoning by intestinal microbes; in 2008, Alexander Khoruts successfully treated a patient’s antibiotic-resistant infection by transplanting a stool sample from her husband into her intestines. In the century between these two milestones, I look to several novels and clinical texts to explain how this transformation in thinking about excrement and its effect on our health could happen. My second chapter returns to the beginning of this long century of shit to focus on several novels that take place inside the human body. Here I argue that the combination of anatomy and ecology that sees the body as a setting rather than a character creates a new formation I dub the “fecological body,” which I present as integral to thinking through the experience of living as a singular individual as well as the host to millions. Chapter Three is set near the halfway point of the century and takes up three novels in which people travel through sewers as a form of escape. I emphasize the historical changes in American infrastructure that coincide with the writing of these novels, particularly the widespread construction of new waste treatment plants throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. I show how escaping to the underworld of the sewer adopts the microbial ability to travel through bodies while assigning negative associations with excrement to communities that are consciously excluded from the new world these infrastructure projects connect. In my final chapter, I present a new model of kinship that emerges from this analysis. Excremental kinship, as I call it, emphasizes ways of living with others that sees all bodies as socially constructed through both physical material and cultural practice. By focusing on scenes of excremental closeness in several novels as well as a number of critical texts on kinship and bodily matter, I attempt to show how the new scatological perspective I develop throughout this dissertation can make possible new ways of understanding our relationship to others as well as ourselves as a type of kin. ABSTRACT GUT FEELINGS: HUMAN WASTE AND SIGNS OF HEALTH IN 20TH- AND 21ST- CENTURY LITERATURE By Garth Jerome Sabo Gut Feelings: Human Waste and Signs of Health in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature reads narrative and scientific descriptions of the human intestinal tract alongside contemporary ecological interest in interdependent and vulnerable ecosystems. Situated between the advent of germ theory coming out of the Pasteur Institute at the end of the 19th century and the rethinking of gut flora as a source of health rather than disease at the beginning of the 21st, I argue for the gut’s increasing importance as a site of symbiotic community. By pairing literary representations of excrement with contemporary gastroenterological and microbiological knowledge of the human microbiome, I present a symbiotic scatology attentive to the vibrancy of human waste. Chapter 1 begins in 1908 with the publication of The Prolongation of Life: Optimistic Studies by Èlie Metchnikoff, an early microbiologist and sub-director of the Pasteur Institute. Metchnikoff presents his “just inference that the duration of life of mammals has been notably shortened as the result of chronic poisoning from an abundant intestinal flora” (72). I track how cultural narratives of human waste and the boundary-crossing promises of gut flora evolve out of and beyond this “just inference” over the course of the 20th century. I read Aldous Huxley’s 1939 novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan against Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964) and Greg Egan’s Permutation City (1994) to show how Metchnikoff’s early theories of excrement as a source of bodily intimacy and infinity transform in cultural narratives of waste. My second chapter continues these fecal narratives to propose how the “fantastic voyage” genre of literature, particularly those that tout adventure on the alimentary canal, rewrite the human body as an ecosystem, a mode of embodiment that I dub the “fecological body.” The texts under consideration for this chapter – Mark Twain’s 3,000 Years Among the Microbes (1905), George Chappell’s Through the Alimentary Canal With Gun and Camera (1930), Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), and Joe Orton’s Head to Toe (1971) – use ecological terms and imagery to depict the body as a varied plane cohabited by human and non- human multitudes that are best revealed in waste. Chapter 3 considers how this excremental topology affects the way human bodies inhabit other spaces by joining the alimentary canal of individuals to the sewers of the body politic. I bridge eco- and anatomic materialism with public infrastructure analysis by close reading literary scenes where bodies escape through toilets. In particular, I read Slothrop’s exodus through the toilet to save his harmonica in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the dictator Sam flushing himself to elude the revolution against him in Ishmael Reed’s The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), and Andy Dufresne’s toilet-assisted escape from the titular prison in Stephen King’s “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” (1982). I historicize these texts within a brief window in which ecological protests rendered the technologies of waste management hyper- visible in order to parse the cultural importance of travels through excremental spaces. In my final chapter, I develop these communal materialities of waste into a model of excremental kinship. I situate contemporary family narratives from A.M. Homes’s May We Be Forgiven (2012), Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989) and Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature (1984) alongside new concepts of kinship and ecology emerging from the work of Donna Haraway, Eve Sedgwick, and Sarah Ensor. Focusing on the “common intestine” of Dunn’s conjoined twins Iphy and Elly Binewski, I present shit in this final chapter as a kinship object grounded in a form of mutual relation that resembles and resists genealogical heredity. Copyright by GARTH JEROME SABO 2019 For Michelle, like everything else. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In what follows, I discuss at length the various ways that human experience emerges from the unseen workings of a vast multitude of other entities that together compose the fiction of the singular. It is fitting, then, that I begin by expressing my gratitude for the many others who left their mark on the guts of this document and who have helped to shape it into its present form. Thanks are first due to the members of my dissertation committee, who shepherded this project through its many windings. My committee co-chairs Scott Michaelsen and Pat O’Donnell accepted the challenge of mentoring a project on shit with grace, openness, critical rigor, and a dose of humor that I deeply appreciate and hope to emulate. Drs. Justus Nieland and Ellen McCallum provided additional feedback and support that I relied on throughout this process, and I am grateful for their guidance as well. I received several insightful comments and suggestions from the editors and anonymous readers at Arizona Quarterly, who reviewed and published portions of Chapter Two. The feedback they offered was helpful not only in refining that section of the dissertation, but also in finessing the scholarly voice I adopted throughout the project. I have also been lucky to have several friends who have helped me to see this project to completion. Hanan Aly, Soohyun Cho, Lance Conley, Amrutha Kunapulli, June Oh, and Emily Yates discussed ideas and read drafts of many things from which this dissertation took its shape. Special thanks and heartfelt gratitude are due to Jessica Kane and Sarah Panuska, without whom none of this would exist. I am forever in their debt for the suggestions and support they offered throughout this process of writing our dissertations together, and I am endlessly thankful for our friendship. vi I have received a lifetime of support from my mother Lisa Brown and father Steven Sabo, who encouraged me from a young age to love reading and pursue learning. My mother- and father-in-law Sandy and Joe Rigsby have likewise supported my dream of a scholarly career, and they have provided emotional and material support that were and continue to be invaluable.