Scatology and Civility in the English-Canadian Novel

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Western Ontario.

This recent volume of postmodern literary theory represents the depths
to which literary scholarship has descended: the study of scatological
language in the text. Reinhold Kramer’s eccentric study of the
increasing incidence of literary references to bodily functions in
postwar English-Canadian novels covers a wide range of authors and texts
as he pursues his assertion that “scatology functions as a trope for
the ‘world’ in a narrative text which abstracts itself, mimetically,
from the world.” Kramer argues that “we cannot ignore the vast
growth in scatological discourse that the Canadian novel is symptomatic
of,” but at the same time he acknowledges, “It will appear that I am
addressing what is marginal in a text.”

Kramer bases his work on Norbert Elias’s sociological revision of
Freudian psychoanalysis (in which Elias concluded, from a study of six
centuries of manners books, that manners and civility have been imposed
on society by cultural authorities that sought to repress animality in
an effort to define and contain social interaction) as well as on Michel
Foucault’s writings about prohibition, marginalization, and
transgression. Taking Elias’s primary thesis of the “growth in
Western civilized repression” as the model for the literary
construction of the self in a narrative, Kramer examines the “creation
of the civilized self” in the Canadian novel, with a particular focus
on the role of the body, both implicit and explicit, and the means by
which filth is employed ideologically “as a trope for the marginal in
gender, class, and race.” The role of the body in the text is
approached not only from a literary perspective, in which scatological
language, repressed and marginal in the text, signifies the self’s
historicity as well as the body’s present materiality in the world,
but also from a sociological perspective, in which the text becomes
representative of social systems, and bodily repression becomes the
means of social differentiation and ideological containment.

Unquestionably, Kramer opens for discussion a subject that has long
been squeamishly avoided, or approached with snickering slyness, and
reveals the depths of significance in the dirty and sordid.
Unfortunately, the unremitting earnestness of the text does not help to
allay the reader’s natural discomfort with the subject. Surely this is
a topic that would best be addressed with some reflection of the same
humor and irony with which scatological references are usually employed.