Let Me 'Splain Something to You, Lucy....

Whenever I poop (once or twice a day usually--but even if I have the squirts and it's oftener) I always wash my butthole with soap and water immediately afterward. If I have a bidet, I'll use it; if I don't, I'll either run a short bath or step into the shower. And then, of course, I wash my hands. I never, ever,

don't wash my anus the instant after defecating. On occasion, when the only accessible source of water for washing my butthole directly after pooping has been a a nearby creek, and it has been winter, and the creek has been frozen over, I have knocked a hole in the ice and washed my nether orifice in the running ice-water, using snow for soap.

Imagine then my (own, special, particular) dismay, horror and disgust at reading a protracted account of defecation, replete with olfactory images, which occupies the first several pages of James Joyce's Ulysses; at the end of which, fulfilled (or satisfyingly evacuated), our hero wipes his ass with a newspaper, flushes (No, I guess, on second thought, you don't flush a privy), and walks out into the fine, broad Irish morning--not without evincing a certain fatuous, galumphing Irish whumsy, but--without so much as for a moment even thinking about washing his poop-smeared Judaeo-Hibernian hands. And thus, Lucy, I consider myself, blessedly, henceforth and forever, quits with James Joyce's nauseous, all-imbuing coprophilia, and will not read a jot nor a tittle more about it; neither of the odious onanism of Leopold Bloom, nor of the revolting lewd reveries of Molly Bloom, his wife.

And So I Trust You See, Lucy,

that in matters of Taste and its opposite, Disgust, I count my private rule of life, which keeps me always sweet-smelling, and prevents my ever leaving skid-marks in my shorts, as the measure by which, proudly, and, as may be, disdainfully, I judge all persons and all things whatsoever; wholly to agree with, or totally, and with prejudice, to dismiss. De gustibus, necque disgustibus, non disputandem est. The whole world, I think, may be divided between those who know what a bidet is for, and use it (or whatever bidet-substitute is available) religiously--and those who don't. The former are human; the latter are much less than human. The singular thing is, that bidet-users (or bottom-washers, whichever you prefer) are seldom as distinctly aware of their own natural, civilized superiority (being clean, and not stinking, is, to those who are so and don't, a matter of simple normality, rather than of superiority); while cheesy poop-bottoms, who never wash themselves just when they need to, are, consequently, always self-consciously preoccupied with an obsessive, social constructionist identification of themselves with the class they think themselves born into, and with the end product of their own digestion. When, however, a normally civilized bottom-washer is forced to realize that there are people for whom "fecal play" has a literal meaning and real significance--as when attempting to read Ulysses--in the horrified disbelief of his revulsion, he is likely not to perceive, or to dismiss as unworthy of his notice, the fact that such scurrility is both philosophy and pleasure, enjoyment and sense, to wallowers in the Freudian sty. Only think of the palpable delight and fascination that dogs find in every new pile of excrement, and you may understand the embodied principle and the example-in-nature of what pleases and interests cheese-butts in the works of James Joyce. And, dog-like, they just don't get it when others are not so well-pleased or as fascinated by fecal matter as they are--or are even revolted by it. Disgust itself, which marks the human from the sub-human, is not something that they can understand, and they are at pains--sometimes great pains--to explain it away, or to explain how it can be "gotten over," and, presumably, thereby to grant themselves, in their touching dog-like way, fully human status. Thus we have The Hydra's Tale: Imagining Disgust by Robert Rawdon Wilson:

As you might expect, that such a book, with such a title, in the Modern Age, would be--The Hydra's Tale is, from what I can tell by (hastily, one eye closed) skimming through it, a very disgusting book, full of contemptible indecency and appallingly inadvertent revelations of the author about himself; but what interests us here is Wilson's reflections on defecation in Ulysses:

"Joyce's Ulysses contains a number of descriptions of human excretion, but it is not, I suppose, scatological in any marked way. [Does scatology have another definition than 'containing a number of descriptions of...excretion'?] It is difficult today to imagine anyone reading Ulysses for pornography [What?], although this is, it seems, how it was once read both by those seeking thrills [We may conclude from this, I think, that Wilson finds it thrilling.] and by those finding only the 'disgust of the original philistines.' [I'm at a loss as to the meaning of this. I'd have thought that the 'original Philistines' would have a capital 'P.']...Bloom begins his day by defecating in a privy in the garden of his house [which] indicates how complex the act of defecation may be once it has been transformed into a textual representation...[Ah, Postmodernism!]

[Follows then Joyce's long, horrifyingly detailed description of same]

Wilson resumes, "I first read Ulysses when I was eighteen. The scatological interests of adolescence [Just a goddamned minute. Whose "adolescence" is that? I goddamnit hate it when slimeasses like Wilson gratuitously impute "scatological interests" like their own only, that we know of, to "adolescence"!] still alive in my mind, I was struck by this passage, and by the startlingly graphic description of a man playing with his st**l....I read the passage out loud to a friend, a young man perhaps a year or two older than I, and it made him sick. He gagged and was barely able to control his vomit. 'Well,' you will say [actually, not], 'that is mild stuff, not in the same league of scatology as, say, the Marquis de Sade, Thomas Pynchon or even David Foster Wallace....' And, of course, I...agree [with myself]. It is mild....If Joyce was intrigued [?!] by defecation...then I can only say, so what? [Well, so, for one thing, knowing that a writer is 'intrigued by (say, "has an anxious, prurient, dog-like seriousness about, or 'scatological interest' in") defecation' entirely absolves us from having to read about it. It doesn't mean that fart jokes can't be funny--I can't think of any off-hand, but I concede the possibility. And I think I've never read anything so hilarious as the poop-stories of Rabelais and Don Basile. But seriously to be "intrigued by defecation" is to be reduced and deliberately confined to a nasty, unreflecting, sub-human condition of the sort imputed to us by Viennese "depth" psychologists: fraudulent, profitless and unspeakably dull.]

"What interests me is the way Joyce writes this simple passage...as a way to originate his character, Leopold Bloom. It introduces a trait, anality [That is a trait?], that will emerge during the novel's development as a significant characteristic [Did you notice, Lucy, that somehow I already knew that? Can you guess how I knew it?]....Bloom...eats...mutton kidneys which gave his palate a tang of...urine. Bloom...stinks, with unwashed underwear [What'd I say?], with decay and dissolution. He is the image of a human person [as I've already said, I challenge that] trying not wholly successfully [indeed] to transcend excrement....Eventually, the reader learns that he sleeps head-to-bum with Molly [Oh my God!--I did not know when I started typing this that it was leading up to a rapturous description of Molly Bloom's nasty ass]....Joyce's...description of Bloom's [b.m.] is a[n] act of characterization.

"Now," says Wilson, reverting to a truly disgusting, evidently formative episode in his own life, described in the first part of this book, which I am not even going to summarize, "I want to return to Georgie once more....Even to read Joyce's description of Bloom's morning b.m. has been, and might still be, overwhelmingly aversive [Tell me!] for many readers....However...fictional accounts of disgust work on the mind differently [from] in-the-world encounters with disgusting things [as I examine the bizarre delicacy and impersonality of Wilson's phraseology, I am convinced that what he means by 'in-the-world encounters with disgusting things' is his own personal practice of coprophagy--which, I think he means to assert, is different from his literary philosophy of 'scatological interest,' and not detectable behind it. Of course, he's wrong on both counts: Eating shit and waxing philosophical about it are conceptually identical--and nothing is easier to detect, once you know where to look, or to point your nose.]....[And now the Coup de Snob]....Ordinary North Americans who hate the NEH or the Brooklynn Museum of Art for having mounted the Sensation exhibition, often seem to loathe representations even more than their in-the-world...."[Your choice. The text breaks off at this point.]

Sweetie, it all depends on how graphic those purely fictional accounts are. And I'd like to bring back that friend of yours who nearly puked on you when you read the nauseous description of Bloom's b.m. to him--who didn't find it at all "mild." When he started retching, begging you not to continue, did you desist? Apparently not. Did you say to him, non-plussed, "But this is mild, mild!"--You really can't help talking about the quality of shit itself, can you? Did he say to you, "Oh, shut up, you swine!"? But you did not shut up--Did he cease therewith to be your friend? Is his sudden, appalled dislike of you and your "scatological interests"--sharp rap on the snout as it must have been for you then--now more easily and complacently borne, that you (almost explicitly dare to) dismiss it as "ignorant philistinism"? That something is not so pungent as the excremental "Divine Marquis," of course, is no very positive recommendation of it. Thomas Pynchon I've read a little about in Wikipedia, and in Harold Bloom's demented puffery of him; and I've determined never, ever, to read anything by him, even if I'm trapped overnight in airport with his collected works at hand. I'll read the labels on shampoo bottles instead. Do you dare to imply that I'm missing something?--Eat it. And David Foster Wallace? Well, frankly--apart from your long excerpts from whatever that book was about some adolescent boy playing with his own jism--(I think that's what it was) I've never heard of him. But--I don't think you noticed--the kid was not playing with his own shit. Did you get that? With his own ejaculate, which is described, as I recall, as "smelling sweet." Not with his own stinky shit, like your Mr. Bloom. And that's a whole lesser level of gross-out, if indeed it's a gross-out at all. Maybe it's not so for you, Dog-man Wilson, with your (ahem) "scatological interests," but those more fully human, I assure you, will find it so.