Waste Aesthetics: Form as Restitution

The special cluster focused on Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism in ISLE 19.3 asks us to think about “our storied bodies” and “the agentic capacities of matter” (Phillips and Sullivan 447). Serenella Iovino points out that “[m]aterial ecocriticism is not committed to a specific literary genre,” moving beyond nature writing (459). My focus on what I have dubbed “waste studies” fits broadly under the rubric of dirt theory by applying work on the ethics of waste to literature, film, theater, and the arts (Morrison 153–58). The humanities disciplines, with specific focus on the study of waste in literature, speak with sustainable development (or SD) discourse. Situated in an English Department, I focus on story and language. SD discourse is, at base, a rhetoric, one whose controversial and vexed history is evolving. A focus on story and metaphor can illustrate the affinity the study of literature has with SD discourse. Core works on the ethics of waste influencing my project are Zygmunt Bauman's Wasted Lives, Gay Hawkins's The Ethics of Waste, and John Scanlan's On Garbage, which varyingly interrogate the history and philosophy behind waste in Western culture. Despite the inevitable necessity of eliminating waste for organisms as small as a protozoan to conglomerations as large as a city, Western culture has long marked waste as “Other.” Literature enables culture to acknowledge what it has to deny, such as, I would argue, bodily, cultural, and societal waste—material and metaphorical aspects of our world. Rubble, rubbish, trash, garbage, litter, filth, and excrement all suggest the category of “waste.” Literary examples abound that demonstrate the ways waste has caused societal division, alienation, and disgust. Waste has haunted the European canon, from Grendel's arm in Beowulf to Yorick's skull in Hamlet to the “dust” in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. Various tropes linked to waste appear repeatedly over the centuries: for example, the linkage of waste and humor, from Rabelaisian scatology to Till Eulenspiegel's vicious use of excrement to humiliate. While Bruno Latour points out that “transparent, unmediated, undisputable facts” are rare, the anomaly of waste is its very materiality, as in landfills, trashcans, garbage dumps, and compost piles, which inevitably become metaphoric (“Realpolitik” 9).