Final Final Rachele Thesis 30 July 2015

The Redemption of Rubbish: Representations of waste in selected 20th-century fiction English Department, University College London August 2015 1 To Nonno Sergio, who brought things home off the street and to Nonna Nina, who made him throw them away 2 Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….………………….5 The commodity……………........................................................................................................7 Waste…………….....................................................................................................................10 Human waste…………….........................................................................................................15 The recuperation of waste ……………....................................................................................19 Symbols of transience and change......................................................................................24 The case for literature.........................................................................................................27 From scavenging to window shopping.…............................................................................34 Chapter overviews……………………………………………………........................................................37 The case for pursuing ‘this unattractive occupation’ .........................................................41 Chapter Two In search of an epiphany: Redeeming waste and irrupting into the everyday.……………….43 ‘The enigmatic side of beings and things’: de Chirico’s Hebdomeros………………………………49 ‘Quite unexpected, quite improbable’: André Breton’s Nadja……..…………………………………59 Human waste and the aesthetics of the ‘economically nude’: Mina Loy’s Insel...…..………68 Chapter Three Samuel Beckett’s personnes perdues: Human waste in The Trilogy, Texts for Nothing, and How it Is………………………………………………………………….79 ‘I gave rein to my pains, my impotence’: On futility and the (failing) body........................85 ‘[A]ll these questions of worth and value’: Partial inventories, worthless collections……..91 ‘[I]n the rubbish dump’: Figurations of human waste………………………………..……………………97 ‘[S]omewhere someone is uttering’: Dwelling and speaking in waste……………..…………….105 Chapter Four ‘Most of our longings go unfulfilled’: DeLillo’s historiographic readings of landfills and nuclear fallout………………………………..112 ‘Garbage for 20 years’…………………………………………………………………………………………………..122 ‘Waste is the secret history’: Reading the past ……………….……………………………………………130 ‘Longing on a large scale’: Nostalgia, collecting and waste…………………….……………………..135 ‘The biggest secrets’: Fresh Kills, Consumerism and the Cold War……….……………………….140 ‘[A] form of counterhistory’: Waste and language ..……………..………………………………………150 Chapter Five: Conclusion…………………………….…………………………………………………………………….154 ‘There lies a darker narrative’: Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge……………..……………………………….164 ‘The only truthful thing civilisation produced’: Jonathan Miles’ Want Not ……………………172 ‘There’s always [an oil spill] happening’: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island…..………..……........176 The future of waste ………..……………………………………………………………………………………………184 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….188 3 ‘The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind’ —Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes-Tropiques ‘Who’s to say what is, or might turn out to be, related to what else?’ —Tom McCarthy, Satin Island ‘Garbage in, art out’ —Donald Barthelme 4 Chapter One: Introduction ‘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 the middle of an immense landfill on the fringes of his native Walthamstow, joining a ‘rickety population’ of several thousand scavengers who wander, day after day, through its ‘waste, desolation and smouldering rubbish’ (TD, 15; 19). The Dump, as the landfill is called, is a vast and inexplicable ‘place of the rejected, the worthless’ (TD, 19). Its inhabitants have no knowledge of how they got there, and no hope of ever getting out, spending their days ‘feeding on the scraps of others, devouring their leavings’ (TD, 70). The space’s incoherence is reflected in the narrator’s own disjointed, a-chronological speech, which layers anecdote upon anecdote with no attempt to distinguish between actual events and imagined ones. But in amongst the asynchronous babble there appear brief moments of insight, during which the narrator cogently distils The Dump’s broader meaning. This is a place, he tells us, for ‘all that is superfluous, expendable, unneeded, unwanted. Things and people once fit as a fiddle, now fit for nothing. Built- in obsolescence, the very marrow of every gleaming product’ (TD, 51). And for all its discomfiting qualities, Sharp’s narrator is at home in The Dump. Describing himself as ‘the mundane distilled into human form’ (TD, 29), he finds his surroundings agree with him, and provide an apt basis for a patched-up hodgepodge of a narrative, where he can be ‘untroubled (bliss!) by capitalism or troublesome sex’ (TD, 58). Yes, in a place such as this, ‘all you can hope for is an epic of bits and pieces, of odds and ends, of ended odds and odd ends’ (TD, 57), but there is much to learn from those bits. 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). Thus, while bemoaning his destitute state, the narrator also recognises that 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 the real world: ‘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). Thus the male inhabitants of The Dump queue up to lie on top of a 500LB bomb, which has been repurposed to 1 Ellis Sharp. The Dump (London: Zoilus Press, 1998), 60. Henceforth TD. 5 function as a sex implement (TD, 77). Our discards not only reveal the irrationality underlying our attributions of value; re-contextualised in The Dump, they take on new and absurd meanings. Ellis 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 century-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, financial and ecological toll. At the same time, however, a number of them have either implicitly or explicitly acknowledged the aesthetic, ontological and even historiographic value of our discards, and they have frequently seen, in the disposal of these items, a metaphor for capitalism’s marginalisation of the poor and the unemployed. For Sharp’s narrator, the multifarious and absurd ways in which waste might be repurposed, and his fellow scavengers’ capacity to survive in this landfill, provide alternative narratives to the lives that humans and objects lead in mainstream society. Where capitalism sees the absence of commercial value, The Dump sees the presence of historical, aesthetic, sentimental, or anthropological value. Where capitalism sees a population of superfluous entities ‘once fit as a fiddle, now fit for nothing’ (TD, 51), The Dump sees human beings with an ingenious capacity to make do with what they find. Here, the events of the civilised world are experienced in hindsight as a ‘repeat performance’ by shadowy scavengers who appear to be grotesque imitations of ‘normal’ citizens (TD, 75). The world of The Dump echoes and parodies mainstream society, thus throwing into relief its own peculiarities. This thesis examines the literary representation of manufactured waste and remaindered humans – humans cast out of the job market, or who actively resist being put to use – at specific moments in the evolution of 20th-century capitalism, with particular attention to the role these different forms of waste play in its critique. My project’s scope is historical insofar as it views each of the literary instantiations of superfluous humans and manufactured waste under review as reflective of a broader shift in capitalism’s progression, and its effects on culture at large. However, the concern is not to trace a history of literary movements, or a history of labour and consumption – rather, it is to examine what the depiction of waste in each of these texts tells us about the stage of capitalism in which it was written, and to explore the very different ways in which waste is deployed to critique specific aspects of capitalist ideology. The texts themselves have thus been chosen as unique depictions of waste and interrogations of capitalist ascriptions of value, rather than for their exemplification of a particular aesthetic credo or movement, although in some instances these two criteria do merge (for instance,

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