The new book ‘Cacaphonies’ takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view 20th- and 21st-century French literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim argues for feces as a figure of radical equality. ‘Cacaphonies’ reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life. Here, Kim is joined in conversation by Merve Emre, Rachele Dini, and Laure Murat.
Annabel L. Kim is the Roy G. Clouse associate professor of Romance Literatures and Languages at Harvard University. A specialist in 20th- and 21st-century French literature, Kim is author of ‘Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions’ and ‘Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature.’
Merve Emre is an associate professor of literature at the University of Oxford and a contributing writer at The New Yorker.
Rachele Dini is senior lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Roehampton, London.
Laure Murat is professor of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA’s Department of European Languages & Transcultural Studies and author of several books.
Episode references:
Louis-Ferdinand Céline; Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night)
Caca communism
Jean Genet
Kristin Ross (Fast Cars, Clean Bodies)
Susan Signe Morrison
Philip Roth (Patrimony)
Anne Garréta
Samuel Beckett (Molloy)
Rey Chow
James Joyce (Ulysses/Leopold Bloom)
Alain Resnais (Providence)
Chapters
The new book ‘Cacaphonies’ takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view 20th- and 21st-century French literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim argues for feces as a figure of radical equality. ‘Cacaphonies’ reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life. Here, Kim is joined in conversation by Merve Emre, Rachele Dini, and Laure Murat.
Annabel L. Kim is the Roy G. Clouse associate professor of Romance Literatures and Languages at Harvard University. A specialist in 20th- and 21st-century French literature, Kim is author of ‘Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions’ and ‘Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature.’
Merve Emre is an associate professor of literature at the University of Oxford and a contributing writer at The New Yorker.
Rachele Dini is senior lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Roehampton, London.
Laure Murat is professor of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA’s Department of European Languages & Transcultural Studies and author of several books.
Episode references:
Louis-Ferdinand Céline; Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night)
Caca communism
Jean Genet
Kristin Ross (Fast Cars, Clean Bodies)
Susan Signe Morrison
Philip Roth (Patrimony)
Anne Garréta
Samuel Beckett (Molloy)
Rey Chow
James Joyce (Ulysses/Leopold Bloom)
Alain Resnais (Providence)
What is University of Minnesota Press?
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Laure Murat:
French universalism has specificities. How does that apply to the concrete universalism you're offering with fiscality?
Merve Emre:
Ideally, we would all be both producers and consumers of shit. And if we democratize the sphere of production and consumption, then we would live in a world in which we could make judgments about the canon that were purely symbolic.
Rachele Dini:
One could either say, okay, all literature deals with this, or one can go into the particularities.
Annabel L. Kim:
Shit is like language in that regard. It is concrete. It is abstract. It is workable. It can be worked with.
Annabel L. Kim:
Hello, everybody. I'm Annabel Kim. I'm the Vyjie Klaus associate professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard. It is my distinct pleasure to be here today with L'hommeura, Raquel Adini, Merve Emre, who so generously come to discuss my new book, Caca Fonie, the experimental canon of French literature, which, as you might tell from the title, is a book about shit in the literature that French people think is the shit, but forget is full of shit. And, it's a book that I didn't expect to write.
Annabel L. Kim:
I, kind of fell into it through teaching, which I imagine is how we often stumble across projects, germs that turn into something much bigger. But really has to do with having taught Celine, who was the start of my fecal, constellation, And teaching the the text voyage of boulain me during to the end of the night twice, and having both sets of students who were very, very different, totally incapable of remembering without my prodding them and giving them the exact page number and discussion, is a kind of spectacular joys cock a communism scene, which features lots of big, spectacular joyous caca communism scene, which features lots of big, burly, red faced men, grunting and defecating communally in the New York City in these, toilet stalls that have the doors, torn off. This is a huge book. There's a lot of stuff going on, but I think it's one of the most memorable scenes. And I was struck that across the board, all the students would just pass over and look at me with complete blank stares as if I were some sort of raging poo maniac when I wanted to talk about this passage.
Annabel L. Kim:
I was just like, Interesting. You know, maybe these kids are just super repressed. Twice, I thought, what is going on? And then I taught the book as part of a survey course on on a twentieth century kind of coming of age narrative. And just by happenstance, about a third of my corpus, many of which are in kakafune, was also full of shit.
Annabel L. Kim:
And me being me and not subject to the fecal taboo because I'm Korean American, I grew up with fricality, just a normal part of everyday life. I'm like, let's talk about all this shit. And for every single work, students would just look at me blankly. And I'm like, we all know that students often don't do all the reading. But for so many students to not do this reading for so many of the texts, I thought, this is weird.
Annabel L. Kim:
There there is a fecal blindness. I feel crazy. Why am I the only one seeing this? So the desire for people to kinda pass on to more polite subject to conversation like, I don't know, like sexuality, I don't know why that's considered more polite than fucality. If anything, I think it's much more obscene and to be passed over.
Annabel L. Kim:
I thought, okay. I think there's something there. I seem to be equipped with a singular fecal sensibility, So I might as well take advantage of that because if I don't, then I don't think anybody will. So that was the birth of Cacafone, and, Merve had the fantastic idea of talking about kind of singular fecal encounters that we've had in our lifetimes. And I have one that I allude to in a note.
Annabel L. Kim:
So I I guess I'll leave that as a as a as a little Easter egg, but I'll talk about one striking encounter that I've had, which entails this is this is not one of those, oh, a friend. This is me. Where I was sitting on the toilet, I was straining and straining and making a really effortful bowel movement. And then when I got up after wiping and to flush, there was nothing in the toilet bowl. So I don't know if this counts as a as a fecal encounter, Merve, but I'm just like, how is it that I could feel it come out of me and there is nothing?
Annabel L. Kim:
So it's the story of the magic disappearing poo. Hopefully, with Cacafone, it's the opposite where I can prove to you that it's not invisible, that there really is a bear there.
Merve Emre:
I think I should introduce myself next since you named me in that comment. I'm Merve Emre. I'm an associate professor of literature at the University of Oxford, and I'm a contributing writer at the New Yorker. And, Annabelle, I love so much what you say about the disappearing poo. And I wonder if I can tell two stories, one about me and one about a friend that I think get at the different ways in which we do or do not register the materiality of what you brilliantly call fecal universalism in the book.
Merve Emre:
The first is that the most surprising and the most absent shit I can remember taking was when I gave birth. So most people do not tell you when you give birth that you will involuntarily shit yourself. And in fact, this is what I did, but I could not feel it because there was so much other pain. And so the sensation of being suddenly enveloped or having your bottom enveloped as as you say in that one in your wonderful reading of Celine. Right?
Merve Emre:
Of suddenly having your bottom enveloped in shit, and that being as it were a kind of preexisting condition that suddenly it it's there and you don't know when it arrived and when it will be taken away is a fascinating encounter with a kind of materiality that makes itself known without you knowing where it originates from. And I I love that as a kind of illustration of fecal universalism. The other story did not happen to me, I swear. I heard this at a bachelorette party. A friend hooked up with a guy, went to his apartment.
Merve Emre:
The next morning, he said, I have to go to work. The door locks behind you. Take your time. Leave whenever. And she took a shit in his toilet, but it was so big that it clogged the toilet.
Merve Emre:
And she went and she found a plastic bag, put her hand in it, pulled it out, tied it up the way that you might a dog shit, and put it on the kitchen counter to take with her when she left. She got dressed. She got her things. She walked out of the door. The door clicked behind her, and she realized that she had left her gigantic
Annabel L. Kim:
Oh my god.
Merve Emre:
On his kitchen counter. And this seems to me a kind of opposite materiality of shit, of cacophonie, which is that it is clearly bounded. It is bagged. You know to whom it belongs. It has a very distinct temporality, and there is no way for you to retrieve it or to redeem yourself from that sign of your fecal universalism.
Merve Emre:
So I offer those to you as my two readings of memorable encounters with shit.
Annabel L. Kim:
That's brilliant. And I think that is about as strong an argument against identitarianism and proprietariness and possession as as we can get.
Laure Murat:
So, my name is Laura Murat. I'm a professor at UCLA in the department of European languages and cultural studies, where I teach French literature from the nineteenth to the twenty first century. I've also been the director of the Center for European Studies at UCLA. I wrote a few books, the last one being a short essay on cancel culture entitled, or who cancels what, published in 02/2022 at the edition du seu in France. And I'm currently working with the same publisher on several projects.
Laure Murat:
One of them being a biography of Monique Wittig, which is related, of course, to Annabelle, interest. I'm extremely sorry, but I wanna have a superb, you know, story about shit like this. I mean, I'm way behind. But I can say that I have a an emotional response, daily response to shit since I grab the poop of my dog every day, three times a day. So that's my experience of shit every day, and that's okay.
Laure Murat:
That's enough for me.
Rachele Dini:
My name is Raquel Edini. I am senior lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Roehampton in London. And, Anabelle and I know each other through the International Literary Waste Studies Network, which I set up a few years ago to bring people together who people who work on waste in its various forms. I'm very excited about this particular subset of waste or adjacent category to waste. So and my first book was on waste, on consumerism, waste, and reuse in twentieth century fiction.
Rachele Dini:
And my second book is on appliances in American literature, which is also about kind of cleanliness and and hygiene. And I'm just starting a project about, the influence of social political crises on cleaning product ads since 1963, which is essentially a project about the way in which, feces and and dirt and waste don't get talked about or only get brought up in order to otherwise. Yeah. So lots of really interesting connections, and I'm so excited to be here with you. In terms I've got a couple of of anecdotes.
Rachele Dini:
They're not really funny. I have had IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, since as long as I can remember. Apparently, when changing my diaper, my mom used to put a little Q tip up my bottom to release the air because I have such bad gas. So I feel like I've spent an inordinate time in my life in toilets and have come to understand different kinds of toilets and different nations toilets and also, you know, the different kinds of poos one makes depending on what country one is in. So I've grown up between Italy and The States And also the attitudes of those different countries to poo.
Rachele Dini:
And also kind of the familial relationship to them. So I grew up with my grandfather on my mom's side who would take every fairy tale and subvert it so that somebody would shit themselves by the end. So my favorite was Little Red Riding Hood. The big bad wolf was rehabilitated. He was actually a very nice guy, and he was just a cross dresser.
Rachele Dini:
He dressed in his the grandmother's clothes, and they just swapped clothes. But he saves Little Red Riding Hood and her mom from some robbers who shot themselves the moment that they saw him. Whereas my paternal granddad basically died of starvation because he had cancer, and he didn't want the nurse to wipe his bottom and and change his diaper. And his wife, with whom he was very unhappily married, refused to do it. And so he'd always had you know, he'd been in a ricksick for decades and decades.
Rachele Dini:
And so he stopped drinking and stopped eating, and that's how he died. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is that it was what I was thinking about when reading Annabelle's chapter about the ethics of care and the instinct that we have to care for others. And I can't think of a better example than my grandmother's refusal of, you know, the fact that sometimes there's a different instinct, which is I want you to die. That's less humorous, but I think that there's, you know, really, really interesting, serious, painful, both physical in terms of straining and, you know, existential questions to be had here that I'm willing to stop about.
Merve Emre:
I wonder if I could use that to segue to a question that I had for Annabelle, and that's a very moving and in various ways, actually, it's an anecdote that resonates with me quite a bit. I had two grandparents die from colon cancer, and so I think a lot about this as as well. And and, Annabelle, I guess the question that I had for you as I was reading about fecal universalism was one of the things you say in the introduction is that fecality is what might unite us and so too does mortality. We all die. And some psychoanalysts might say that sexuality is the third thing that unites us.
Merve Emre:
So I was wondering if you might be able to talk a little bit about what fecality offers us that sexuality or mortality don't. How is fecal universalism a different kind of universalism than the universalism that we get from either dying or from or, you know, those two things are obviously intimately interlocked with one another anyway. So I was just very curious to hear you speak about that.
Annabel L. Kim:
Oh, gosh. Yeah. I'll start with what seems to me the easier term to account for mortality, which is that, well, obviously, we can't experience our own deaths. I've never had a near death experience. All I did almost drown when I was a a child, but I don't really have a memory of what it was like to to feel like I was going to die.
Annabel L. Kim:
And I've never really encountered anybody who has a near death experience. I've only really ever read about it. But to me, that doesn't seem to be an experience of mortality. I think when people come close to experiencing mortality, it's very much firmly, obviously, from the perspective of someone who's come back to life. The fact that we can never experience it, that it's always a horizon, it's the piano that's kind of hovering over our heads and about to fall on us.
Annabel L. Kim:
It's it's always out of reach in a way that fecality is one of the most accessible accessible things. If anything, it is, you know, you you stick a baby in a room that was nothing, and they will have access to this material, and they can do things with this material. So I think that there is an immediacy and there is an undeniability, an inevitability about that you don't get with mortality, which people are really good at forestalling, at ignoring, at denying. I think that the pandemic has shown that with people acting like they're invincible when clearly they are not. And in terms of what distinguishes fecality from from sexuality, from jouissance, I mean, I think that there are certain important similarities, Internet type jokes where people talk about how they would rather, you know, take a shit than than have an orgasm, about the pleasure of defecation certainly, the release of defecation, and, you know, a good shit.
Annabel L. Kim:
There's there are very few things that are satisfying or is kind of releasing, I think, as as a good shit. But I think the thing about sexuality as opposed to to fecality is that for being such an embodied thing, it doesn't really leave you, I would say, with the same kind of material reminder of that experience. Sure, there's like ejaculate both female and male and sure, you know, for certain sexual practices you can, like, shit can get involved as well, But it doesn't have the same kind of form. Fecality is something where we're creating a form and it's something where the relation is not with somebody else's body, not with somebody else's desire, but with this thing that is of you and not of you. It gets closer, I think, at what we try to get with sexuality, which I think in some sense is an experience of something that is you but also not you.
Laure Murat:
Actually, you you put ficality with sexuality, with homosexuality. I mean, objection too. And even though you're demonstrating that ficality works like a pharmacon, the problem, and it's solvent. And in your book, ficality is linked to conflict, to death, to, I mean, to many, many things. I was wondering if you can elaborate on what makes shit queer or straight because and especially in the work of Jean Genet because you're explaining something very interesting there about the social and the sexual related to fecality.
Laure Murat:
Or perhaps since shit is concretely universal, as you put it, how it concretely transcends sexuality and sexual identity.
Annabel L. Kim:
Yeah. Yeah. No. That that that's a terrific question. Thank you.
Annabel L. Kim:
So, you know, with with Janae, I was trying to kind of untie, homosexuality from from fecality because of the way Janae's kind of fecality is always taken under the sign of queerness. And certainly it is queer. I think that nobody could say that Janet's shit is straight or in the service of some kind of straight ideology that is patently untrue, but that there is something else like you were intimating, Dar. There is a beyond of shit that goes beyond is this straight shit or is this queer shit, and it is just the shit. But I do think that there is a difference between, quote, unquote, straight shit and queer shit.
Annabel L. Kim:
And I think it kind of points to the bivalent nature of shit, the way it represents a polarity. It's the shit as a positive valence. It's the shit as a signifier of of baseness. And I would say that straight shit is in the service of what our intellectual touchstone, Manik Vittig, would call the straight mind. Right?
Annabel L. Kim:
The ideology of difference, the ideology of oppression, of hierarchy, of imposing naturalized difference onto humankind in order to divide them up ontologically and assign more or less value or sometimes no value. That kind of shit is the shit that, as I argue throughout Kakafumi, refuses to deal with the materiality of shit. I think that queer shit resists the kind of project of power of straightness, because I do think that straightness is, at its core, a project of domination, it is a system of power. So queer shit is is shit that tries to resist that. But I think that beyond the horizon of queer is where you have the fecal universal, which is this kind of, I would say, presocial state.
Annabel L. Kim:
Materially, regardless of our position in life, regardless of our socioeconomic position, our our sex, our particular kind of whatever kind of body we are born into, we come into it, born between piss and shit to to Saint Augustine. If we are delivered vaginally, we are covered in our mother's shit as we come out into the world. Even if we are not born vaginally, once we are in the world, we shit ourselves, and there's nothing we can do about it. So I would say that that kind of first state of infant shit, which has nothing to do with the infant's desire or any kind of sentience or anything that we could map on onto what we identify as being the human, that's the fecal universal. In some sense, I guess you could say that the kind of fecal universalism is the return to a pre kind
Laure Murat:
of
Annabel L. Kim:
socialized state of being in the world, but with the understanding and the perspectives that we can get after having passed through all the trials and kind of the pressures that socialization and whatever formative experiences we have give to us.
Rachele Dini:
Thank you. That was really useful distillation of one of the things one of the concepts I was gonna ask you about. So I have three they're not provocations, but as I was reading, I was kept on putting question marks. And the three questions I have are interrelated, and they essentially have to do with universalism, particularity, and abstraction. Particularity, I am not convinced by your claims about French literature and instrumentality.
Rachele Dini:
I absolutely think that there must be something there, and I'm just going off of Kristen Ross's, Fast Car Clean Bodies, and there must be something that one can draw that's the longer standing than the post war era. But the reasons that you bring up, I think, are very easily debunked or countered by any look at other Roman languages. So I'm Italian, and all of the expressions that you bring up also have Italian counterparts. Vai caccare, fa no caccare, you know, all of these expressions that are more or less gross. I I don't like using somehow.
Rachele Dini:
Saying the shit, I find, is doesn't bother me. But saying mi fa cacare, I just think is so vulgar. Right? So there's a kind of different valence in the different languages. And, you know, I was just listing off Italian writers that deal with the same things, Janicello Calvino, Chisara Creveza, Dante, obviously.
Rachele Dini:
And so one could either say, okay, all literature deals with this, which is basically what Susan Sydney Morrison says, or one can go into the particularities. But I wanna see you just tell me what they are because I'm sure that that there are ones that go back to the kind of imperialist ideas that you talk about that might have to do with kind of Western And Southern Europe and the particular hierarchies of belonging and exclusion and something about Old Europe and wanting to make ideas about purity and, and police test that perhaps, The United States in particular does away with or Australia, for instance. So maybe something that's kind of distance between the colonies. So, yes, I was gonna ask you about that. And then relatedly though is the question of universalism.
Rachele Dini:
Your some of it now, that is fascinating to me because the whole time I was reading, I was thinking, okay. But there is the original way in which shit happens. Right? But then everything after that is particularized, you know, in terms of class, hormones, time of the month, country, but also in the eras. I mean, I kept on wondering what kind of shit would have been done?
Rachele Dini:
What is the difference between the shit in the nineteen thirties and the nineteen sixties and today? Like dietary differences in chemicals and, like, climate and environment and stuff. And the infrastructure of that kind of map onto, you know, this literature, which I realize is a completely different project to what you're doing. But I'd be really interested to know, you know, your your opinion about it.
Annabel L. Kim:
Okay. Wow. So you've given me a lot to to chew on. I I really appreciate your expanding the framework of literature beyond the French context, which is the only context that I really have any sort of confidence speaking about. Again, I wasn't trying to say that French literature was exceptionally schetiological.
Annabel L. Kim:
I think that, you know, clearly every literature will have schetological texts. I I can't think of a single literary tradition where you cannot find some sort of appearance of excrement experimentality at some point or another. And it's really interesting to me that the romance languages would also share the kind of embeddedness of of the fecal in terms of, you know, daily speech and idioms. But what does seem to me and, again, pardon me if this is just my ignorance of all things beyond beyond France, but it does seem to me that what would distinguish the French case, so French literature from, say, Italian literature, is the particular relation that France has with the idea of the universal. So France has very successfully branded itself as like, hey.
Annabel L. Kim:
We're the creators of this idea of universalism. We're the only we're the ones to have done a true universal revolution. You know, those Americans, oh, so venal. But we helped them out anyway because that's the extent of our revolutionary, you know, brotherhood. And so I think it is the convergence of not just the percolating permeation of fecality into everyday speech, but the way that the backdrop for that is this idea of the universal because the two, I think, severed from each other in the French case, which is interesting.
Annabel L. Kim:
There is a kind of disavowal happening there that perhaps is not the case in in the other contexts. And then to the second part of your question, which I forgot. Sorry. I I I find it hard to hold on to multipronged questions. Sure.
Annabel L. Kim:
Sure. It was
Rachele Dini:
it was about as you speak, I'm kind of understanding better. So I I'm not sure it's it's as urgent. I don't know if I'm just being difficult here. But how do you reconcile that notion of the commonality of shit? The fact that we all shit.
Annabel L. Kim:
Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.
Annabel L. Kim:
Right. Yeah. So to me, all other stuff that happens after the kind of fact of fiscality, that is in the realm of the bad shit, the realm of shit that serves bad ideology. Going back to what Laurence was mentioning earlier about shit as a formicon, I think it points to how difficult it is for us to hold on to shit as something that can be generative, transformative, egalitarian. Because the moment it's out there, you know, the way we respond to shit in our world is to kind of dig our heels deeper into inequity.
Annabel L. Kim:
We've done nothing or close to nothing to improve sanitary conditions in the poorer parts of of the world. Even though we know it leads to tens of thousands of deaths each year because people suffer from cholera and diarrhea that they wouldn't have otherwise if they had access to cleaner, sanitation conditions. We know that we're depriving workers of access to, humane bathroom breaks, and yet we don't do anything to improve their labor conditions. But, I mean, all of that is a refusal, I think, to allow shit to be what it could be. So I guess for me, the project has a very utopian component, but I think it's not quite so utopian, you know, or edenic because it was, this kind of lapsarian, idea of of the Garden of Eden as, like, a paradisiacal perfect state from which we can never return.
Annabel L. Kim:
Every day well, not every day because there are lots of constipated people. So but every day, virtually everybody has a bowel movement that produces this material that if they were willing to accept it, to deal with it, to understand it, could have a a potentially revolutionary sort of effect on the way we relate to ourselves and with others. We fail every day, and we seem to be feeling worse and worse every day. But to me, that materiality is every day a new moment of potential. In some sense, you're seeing the the glass half empty, and I'm seeing it half full of of shit shit.
Merve Emre:
So that takes me to your conclusion. I'm just going to read from it because I really love these lines, and I found them quite stirring of the heart, not of the bowels. This, I submit, is why we find shit from the beginning of French literature to its current manifestation because literature against the ceaseless attempts made to master it needs to and desires to be continually reminded of its untamable, uncontainable potential. The canon's fecality is the presence of that potential. And then you go on to make an argument about how rather than ending the canon and redistributing prestige, we redistribute the canon so that a concrete fecal universalism would be a communal luxury, the canon for all.
Merve Emre:
And I wanted to hear you say a little bit about how at the risk of getting us all in trouble, that is a different vision from how people think about ending the canon, decolonizing the canon, all of these contemporary institutional discourses of canonicity that caca communism is pushing back on, I think, or trying to expel from from the sacred anal space of literary study. And I think that links up to your sense that you are seeing the glass half full of shit, and it's a glass that, in fact, you would want to pass around for everyone to imbibe from.
Annabel L. Kim:
Yes. I like that kind of almost sort of Eucharistic image, but not so much the bread and the wine, but what the bread and the wine turn into. The conclusion was one that was not one that I wrote at first because I think I was so informed by and kind of absorbing the very anti canon sort of attitude that permeates, the humanities in this moment. I was like, we must decolonize or, you know, we must cancel. We must stop reading these these atrocious men, these abusers, these sex pests.
Annabel L. Kim:
And, you know, I think I think that there is certainly an argument to be made for that, especially when it comes to living persons. But I do feel like I mean, this might be a cop out, but I feel like in the case of a a very dead person like Celine, that it doesn't make sense to cancel them anymore, right, or to, like, to rebuke them or to hold them accountable. Because I feel like these attempts at at holding cultural figures accountable is a kind of optimism really about getting them to reform, to change their ways, to no longer be these horrible people. And with texts that exist and with an that's shut, you know, because the author is no longer alive, I don't think that that kind of function really makes sense anymore. But in the first iteration of the conclusion that I wrote, it was a very kind of, we must end the canon, break things open, shit wants to come out, etcetera.
Annabel L. Kim:
And one of my readers for the press who reviewed the manuscript I will name names because I'm so grateful to this person for for having pushed back on me. But Lynn Hofer read this and was like, this conclusion doesn't work. Because she was able to pick up on the fact that what I was writing did not at all resonate as truth and was so kind of disconnected from what this essentially love letter to the canon I had been writing in, you know, the all the pages that led up to it And was like, this is not you. This is not what you actually feel, and that comes across. And I was like, oh god.
Annabel L. Kim:
You're right. I actually do love the canon. And so, you know, I went back to the drawing board, and I was like, okay. Here I have framed shit as being able to do all of these things, as being able to be universal, as being able to, like, democratize, as being able to rectify inequality and inequity in so many different ways, and yet the canon is stands for the exact opposite of what technicality seems to stand for. So the conclusion as as it currently stands is the conclusion I came to as being the honest one of, you know, maybe we don't have to give up these pleasures, especially the canon as something that exists already that cannot be changed.
Annabel L. Kim:
The that their authors cannot be reformed, but the texts have a life beyond that of the author. And clearly, people will continue to be attached to the canon. The canon is, despite all our attempts at decolonizing or reforming our curricula, it's not gonna go away. But what do we do with it? And I think that in some sense, the kind of stop teaching it, replace it attitude is an impoverishing one because it assumes that minoritarian subjects can only be oppressed by these texts.
Annabel L. Kim:
What I found from my own personal experience and that of a lot of my students actually is that they find reading these texts to be quite emancipatory, eye opening, able to make them think in ways that I think reading something that would be more closely aligned with the or more visibly kind of read as a minoritarian literature would never allow them to be because precisely of that interval between their own sort of identitarian position and that of the text that they inhabit. And so I think because of having experienced that for myself and seeing that in my students, I thought, yeah, the canon can be redeemed, but the canon can only be redeemed if we treat it as shit is, I think, the kind of paradox that I've come to.
Rachele Dini:
I feel like I'm translating a lot of what you're saying. Despite having grown up between The US and Italy, I feel very distant from from all of this by virtue of not being in US academia. I don't know if intentionally or not given that you're you're interested in the language of sanitization, but a lot of the words that you used, Annabelle, to talk about this, you have to do you know, not apart from canceling, which is itself a very draconian term, but eliminate and, and erase and forget it, blah blah blah, seems to suggest that there's either we keep the canon and read it across, you know, through different lenses, which is extremely productive as your book attest, or we throw them all of these writers away. And I guess both of those approaches assume that one has to have a canon and that one has to kind of think in terms of those critical traditions in the first place. And apart from the fact that I think there's a certain utopia to dismantling the canon and saying, you know, I love, Cezar.
Rachele Dini:
I love Celine. And I want to keep on reading them, but I don't want to, you know, read them in relation to the way that they have been historically used as as you mentioned. But also, you know, read these other writers. And I suppose that what I guess, I think that you're getting at this, but I can't quite tell because again of this this language that seems very polarized, is that there seems to me to be something that's that we're not getting away from the institutional and the kind of professional aspect of the way we we talk about these subjects. As in the question of cancellation or of, you know, decolonizing or whatever seems to always going back to the syllabus and the institutions themselves seeming, you know, removing themselves from from colonialism, etcetera.
Rachele Dini:
On the one hand, we talk about these things as academics who are hired by universities and who have to keep on pumping out publications that stand us out as excellent, etcetera, within an academic discourse that is inherently capitalistic. And on the other hand, there's actual capacity for, you know, utopian rethinking of literature. And I'm wondering if those two things can be decoupled, you know, and if that's inherently what you're suggesting, Adele.
Annabel L. Kim:
I love that. I definitely have have thoughts on that. But, Laura, I I'd be interested to to hear your question as well.
Laure Murat:
I just wanted to go back just very quickly to French universalism because, actually, I had the same questions as you. It basically, I I was wondering to what extent French specificities are French. French universalism has specificities, namely secularism and color blindness. How does that apply to the concrete universalism you're offering with fecality? That can be a question.
Laure Murat:
But also, would it be possible to apply this concrete universalism that I'm understanding as a materialist critique of literature in general? Could we apply it to American literature certainly? And while I was reading, Cacophony, I couldn't help thinking about Patrimony by Philip Roth, where the author explains that the only legacy of his father was shit, the one the son has to clean when the father was sick. So that, you know, brings us back to Raquel's story at the beginning.
Annabel L. Kim:
I do think that this kind of fecal universalism that is derived from the French literary tradition can be applied to to any kind of literary text, because the experience that Ficality maps onto or that, you know, the reference for Ficality is something that we all have access to regardless of our historical national, social position. And I think that the kind of significance that I'm trying to attribute to fecality is one that is, you know, trans historical, transcultural, that is truly universal in that regard. And yes, you know, the French universalism with its very particular elaboration as something that is secular, as something that is that is colorblind, the abstract universalism has its origins in the French enlightenment, in the French revolution. I think that's a unambitious conceptualization of universalism. So I think one of the arguments that I'm trying to make in the book is that in fact, the French thinkers, the philosophers, the state makers, they were so much more constrained in their thought than writers.
Annabel L. Kim:
That because French writers were able to, I think, conceive of shit as a material thing, akin to language as a material sort of universal thing, that they were able to go much further with pushing the idea of a real universal than the French thinkers.
Laure Murat:
Thank you, Annabelle. I just want to add something also that that struck me is that if I'm not getting wrong, almost none of the authors are could be considered as universalist in the French way. That's interesting too. And that could be an argument for you, of course.
Annabel L. Kim:
Yes. Absolutely. Thank you. This is a gift. Yeah, because, you know, once the shit is out there, like, it's no longer out of you can't put it back inside the body, like, despite, you know, the pooping back and forth fantasy of of of Robbie and you me, you, and everyone we know.
Annabel L. Kim:
And once it's out there, it's out there, and it kinda belongs to the world.
Laure Murat:
That would be interesting to ask to Angahita, for instance. Where is she, you know, positioned herself regarding French universalism?
Annabel L. Kim:
Oh, like, completely, like, against it. Anti anti French universe. And so I am, you know, kind of doing a perverse reading of of of Garita by I've always done kind of perverse reading of Garita by recuperating her anti universal work for the universal. I did have, like, two cents about Raquel's question about the institutional because I think you're absolutely right that there is, subtending the book and the conclusion, especially, this desire to decouple the institution from the way we can encounter literature. Part of my conviction of this comes from the fact that we are all seeing across the world the material conditions for the kind of work we do in higher education being gutted every day, right?
Annabel L. Kim:
Faced with increasing kinds of austerity measures, redundancy measures, you know, make more bricks without straw, attract all the students, do all the work without the support that we need. I'm always surprised by how few, American students go to college because I think that there's a way, culturally speaking, that it seems like a kind of the default American experience. You graduate from high school, you go on to college, and that's what people do. And actually, that's not what most people do. I'm a little bit of an I'm attached to elite things, but not in order to be elitist.
Annabel L. Kim:
And perhaps this makes me elitist to be as attracted to an anecdote that Natalie Salut once told of, you know, who knows if it's true, of going to Moscow and seeing on the Moscow metro these, you know, proletarians, these workers reading Balzac. But I for me, that's the dream. Why have we come to disrespect poor people, uneducated people so much to think that they don't have the intellectual acumen to be able to read difficult texts. I think that's insulting. The site in which we must cultivate a love of literature is increasingly not inside the institution.
Annabel L. Kim:
I think we see that as we see students kind of, like, enrollments bleeding, especially in foreign literature like French. Students no longer take these classes. They're driven by material concerns, market concerns, pragmatic concerns. So given how little we're doing in terms of the classroom in terms of forming readers, and I think the work we're doing is important, don't get me wrong, and I think there should be more support for it, not less. But, you know, if we're going to be forming a generation of readers, it's really not going to happen in the classroom.
Annabel L. Kim:
As to how we do that outside, you know, the institution, I don't know. I really don't know. But I think that it can be done because of, you know, shit exceeds, and we see that. And I think it must be done, and I will let people who were much more equipped to know how to do that Tell me how how to do that. But I think that's the imperative that we're facing.
Annabel L. Kim:
Absolutely.
Rachele Dini:
So I take your point about it being insulting to to suggest that certain demographics, can't read. I think that what's what's very interesting this I mean, I'll call it interesting. It's devastating. What's interesting about this devastating moment in which, departments are being closed, I was telling you guys earlier, my I've been put on notice of risk of redundancy as have all my colleagues, in English creative writing, philosophy, world classics have been removed, linguistics is gone, is that on the one hand, you have these decolonizing efforts, okay, however we wanna call them, the institutional ones. You have the creation of these new courses.
Rachele Dini:
This isn't UK. The US is is far ahead, in that respect, that are, you know, rediscovering writers, that have been marginalized or forgotten. You have these new approaches to reading canonical texts the way that you have done at many others, you know, in order to excavate other, you know, feminist and critical race meanings. And it is as that work is being done, it has exactly coincided with the assault on universities, particularly the ones where that work is being done. So in The UK, Oxford is fine.
Rachele Dini:
The Russell Group is fine. They have their own funds. It's the post 92 universities, which for those of you who aren't in The UK, are the universities that essentially cater to the disadvantaged, generally immigrant and people of color. Those are the ones that are under assault with the implication that the students in these demographics cannot read those texts. And so in a way, we come back to you know, so what Annabelle is saying about it being insulting to suggest that the these people in quotation marks can only read these other texts and cannot read these ones is actually also being leveled by by the right.
Rachele Dini:
You know? And in amongst that, there is that notion that that you are, you know, constantly trying to push against, Annabelle, of the the notion that shit is something to which we are reduced as opposed to something in which we might swim and bask and, you know, be rebirthed in. There's an interesting connection between those polarities, and I find it fascinating and devastating that they're actually collapsing into each other.
Merve Emre:
I take Annabelle to be saying something similar to what Marx says in the German ideology, which is that, ideally, we would all be both producers and consumers of shit. And if we democratize the sphere of production and consumption for shit, then we would live in a world in which we could make judgments about the canon that were purely symbolic judgments as opposed to judgments in which our economic livelihoods were tied up in. So I take that to be the kind of utopian horizon to which you aspire that if we think of literature as shit, as encoding shit that is the other of the useful, that is waste, that is excess, then what we want to imagine is a world in which we can all produce and consume that waste, that excess, that shit, and that we can discriminate, in fact, among different forms and varieties of shit. You might like a stringy shit. I might like a solid shit.
Merve Emre:
And that signify other than anything other than the symbolic form itself. Right? It doesn't have to indite something about our diet, our class status, etcetera, etcetera. Can I switch the conversation? Of course.
Merve Emre:
I I just really wanna talk about farts. I really want to talk about your chapter on Beckett, on Malloy and flatulence and the mimetic impulse. I felt like the quibble that I had as I was reading, and this is on page 89. The quibble that I had came when you wrote, the flatulent cloud that surrounds Malloy is thus a sign pointing toward the silence as the space for the real stuff. And you go on to talk about the immateriality of the fart.
Merve Emre:
And I started wondering about whether the fart is really immaterial or not. And I was thinking about that kind of comedy sketch where two people are standing in an elevator, and one person farts, and the other person sniffs it. And the person who farted turns to the person who sniffed it and says, it was you. And I was thinking about the materiality of odor and the sociality of odor, which is if I think back to the story that I told about the woman who left her constipated shit on that man's kitchen counter. That obviously is not the same as the materiality or the sociality of the fart, but that's not to say that the fart is immaterial or that it does not instantiate a kind of relationality.
Merve Emre:
And so I wanted to ask you about that, but but really to bring that question of the immateriality versus the materiality of the fart to this question of the immateriality versus the materiality of language. Is language more of a shit? Is it more of a fart? Is it more of a shart, I e something in between? Where do we locate language along this material immaterial axis if part of what you want to do is push back against Bart's claim that when we write shit, it doesn't have an odor.
Annabel L. Kim:
Oh, gosh. Yeah. I think you're pointing to the way I kinda conflate materiality with form because I think it's so much easier to you know, you see a turd. You know, even with, diarrhea, if you didn't do diarrhea into the toilet bowl until, like, which where it just kind of combines with whatever water. But if you did diarrhea and onto, like, the ground, you would be able to see an end to the pot like, to the puddle of of liquid.
Annabel L. Kim:
It would still have a form. Contours, the fart just doesn't have because the fart, it's not, like, completely immaterial. Obviously, you know, there are these odor molecules whether or not we want them to, other people can smell and then, you know, blame us for. But it doesn't have a form in the same way because the fart just kinda keeps on expanding. It is endless expansion, whereas the turd or any kind of variation of the turd is finite, and you can see where it begins and ends.
Annabel L. Kim:
And I think that's the key difference. I do have some thoughts in the relational, but to me, that seems a way of kind of getting at your really interesting question about, like, okay, what's the relation between language and the fart or the shart and shit? And I think I think it's the spectrum. I think that there are authors who write in this kind of expansive, way that strive toward the the infinite in some in some sense. You have the authors who I think, you know, like Angarita and and and Janae, I would say, who are very much dealing with language as being this physical viscous shit.
Annabel L. Kim:
And I think that with Beckett Beckett, I think, is is closer to the shark, kind of not wanting to choose one or the other and sort of just wanting to just kind of stay in the portal of being that is the anus where you don't have to differentiate between the two. But the relationality of and the sociality of the fart now that is so interesting because I do think there is something so much more embarrassing about farting in public than if you were to shit yourself in public. I don't know. I mean, this is just me. Like, what would you choose?
Annabel L. Kim:
I think some people might choose to shit themselves because of being able to pass incognito, unperceived, and then you just kind of, like, rush off to, like, the nearest bathroom and try to take to deal with it. But it's the way the fort, I think, makes you into an object of attention that gets, I think, at, like, the violence of sociality. With ficality, you know, unless you're a kind of exhibitionist who likes to defecate in public, you're not participating in that kind of attention economy in the same way. You know, there's a in Ray Chow's latest book, she has a very interesting chapter on Foucault and an in confession and, like, what she calls the smart self, which is the self in the age of social media and this contemporary attention economy. But she, I think, describes our moment as one of, like, self affirmation run amok.
Annabel L. Kim:
As much as we're in an epoch of, like, self affirmation run amok where we all want to be seen, I think that there is just a stronger desire to not be seen, and that's what the fart doesn't allow us
Rachele Dini:
to have. I think that there's so much now that people want to be seen as part of the whole economy of self improvement that, you know, videos about how to sit on the toilet and how best to, you know, and what to consume before that and what kind of apparatus and, of course, the technology. Right? You know, these incredibly expensive toilets with all the the massage thing on them. You know, all all of this, you know, the the way that that shitting itself has been commodified, in a way that I think Beckett in particular would have found extraordinarily funny, but also utterly predictable.
Rachele Dini:
I'm I'm getting so carried away by these ideas. And then I go back to the points that Anibal makes in the introduction about not wanting to go into abstraction and wanting to stay on the material. And I think about my own students when they kind of get lost in whatever I'm saying, and they're like, how does this relate to anything real? What are you talking about? And I'm thinking about the way in which, the academy is seen from the outside as being fully in abstractions.
Rachele Dini:
Right? And so the tension between the fascinating ways in which we're philosophizing and then how that almost that essentially becomes also a a form of abstraction. Right? Because we're not actually talking about real shit. We don't have our hands in shit.
Rachele Dini:
We are talking metaphorically in the end. So aren't we in the end doing what the critics that you've kind of put yourself in opposition to are doing in the first place? How do you get away from that?
Annabel L. Kim:
Well, I would say, you know, a turning point for when I wrote this book involved Venice carnival, the weekend, no plumbers around, a septic tank system that was at capacity and the water pressure didn't work, and a toilet fold with the feces of three different people that I ended up having to manually unclog. And I really didn't want to, but I was the only person in that space who worked on shit. And so I was elected to be the person to deal with it. That was the moment where I realized, you know, to distinguish between my shit and anyone else's shit is so completely useless. And then to actually confront, like, the kind of weird slipperiness of shit, like, it is super slippery.
Annabel L. Kim:
Like, I don't think anything prepares you for that. And I know that, you know, parents changing diapers have to deal with their children's shit all the time, but it's not like they're receiving their children's turd, like, fully formed in their hand and the way the diaper smooshes it up against the skin. That destroys, I think, the experience of what it is to handle, like, shit. Or not destroys, but it distorts it, in an important way. So for me, one once I had that experience, like, something kind of clicked in my head, and I was like, This is what Celine is writing about.
Annabel L. Kim:
This is what Celine's grandmother was doing, and all of a sudden I understood. So for me, it was not an abstract thing. And this is not a prescription that I make explicitly in the book at all, but I will make it now is I think that everyone should handle a human turd because there is something about the confrontation and experience of that that I think is is transformative. So, you know, maybe people will read Cacafone and be like, okay. This is abstract.
Annabel L. Kim:
But, hopefully, it will encourage a handful of readers to go out and handle shit. I would love that. I think we all need to handle shit. And, you know, love, the fact that Phoebe defecates three times a day, wow, that's that's that's that's astounding.
Laure Murat:
I know. I know. I can I can go on and describe the the poop, but, you know, I just want make to to to make two comments, very, very quick comments? First, I think, Beckett took the the fork because Joyce took the shit. Remember remember, Leopold Bloom on his toilet.
Laure Murat:
I mean, that's just unsurpassable. The second thing, just a reference, you probably know it. But between the concrete and the abstract and the toilets and the sheet, there is a a movie by Alain Rene called Providance. And Providence is about a writer who's writing a book on his toilet. Do you know that in French in French, the toilet, we call it the throne.
Laure Murat:
Okay? So he was the king was on on on on the throne, and he is imagining his next book. The whole movie is about I think it's John Gielgud, the the famous British actor, that is on the toilet imagining his, you know, novel, and he sees in front of him everything he imagines on the throne. So I think you have the resolution here.
Annabel L. Kim:
That's perfect. Isn't that the
Rachele Dini:
the Martin Amis novel that starts with adulthood and then goes all the way back to shit? Do you know what I'm talking about? Am I
Merve Emre:
No. I was thinking I was thinking about Ulysses also and about the scene of Bloom wiping his ass on the newspaper that he has been reading and how on that newspaper is a kind of sentimental story that a man has written and how he's thinking, I could do better as he's wiping his ass with that piece of newspaper and how he farts throughout the novel. But I think the most memorable fart in that novel belongs to Molly Bloom and how I like that Beckett is latching on to both of them in a sense by farting because Joyce Shatt, but also Molly Bloom becomes the epicenter of the flatulence in Ulysses.
Annabel L. Kim:
I think the association between newspapers and wiping is so interesting because the newspaper is at its core also the daily. It's repetition. It's the paper that makes the most sense.
Merve Emre:
Annabelle, I had another question for you. On this point about the abstract and the concrete, surely that's one reason why you use the word shit. Because there's something about the word shit that seems to mediate or that seems to be dialectically involved in the negotiation between the abstract and the concrete. And I just wonder if you could talk more about your insistence on shit and how it perhaps answers that concern or answers that question of how is it that we can bring academic theorization back to the level of what it is that we sit and do on our toilets once a day if you're eating your vegetables properly.
Annabel L. Kim:
Yeah. You know, you're absolutely right. If I insist on shit, it's because my writers insist on shit when they write their shit. They're not choosing pure abstraction by, you know, talking about loss or elimination, and they're not insisting on the purely concrete by talking about their feces or their fecal matter. But they're talking about merde, which is shit and is the convergence, I think, of the concrete with the abstract.
Annabel L. Kim:
One of the chapters, my pinac chapter was originally published as a article in a in a British journal, French studies. And I had a hell of a time with the the editing process because the editors who were wonderful, they were really wonderful to work with. You know, they're very British and, really, we're, like, we're counting how often I use the word shit, and we went back and forth. I went through multiple rounds of having to clean up my language because they're like, there's still, like, one shit for every 500 words that's still too frequent. You don't need this for your argument.
Annabel L. Kim:
And I tried to, you know, protest, but I I do need it for my argument, but they would have none of it. Thankfully, I was able to put it all back in the book version because I do think shit is what reminds us that shit is a bivalent thing. It is concrete. It is abstract. It is like light in that matter.
Annabel L. Kim:
And, you know, going back to Wittig and Wittig's Ars Poetica de Chantilly d'Hitteraire, the literary worksite, where Wittig basically, you know, theorizes literature as labor and language as being dual natured, like light. So shit is like language in that regard. It is concrete. It is abstract. It is workable.
Annabel L. Kim:
It can be worked with. And, you know, to go back to what you were saying, Murbe, about this kind of Marxist dream of being a producer and a consumer, Like, I think the shit is also an invitation for us all to become workers of shit, producers of shit, consumers of shit, to work with it, to enjoy the fruits which shit can produce, the fruits of our literary labors, of our bodily labors too. Thank you again so much. Like, my brain is so happy. I feel so replete and satisfied.
Annabel L. Kim:
Thank you for being such wonderful readers and such smart readers. I've expanded my archives. I've I've expanded my brain thanks to you. So thank you so much, everybody.