Blame It on the Muse

Uh oh. I'm in for it now. One post on the subject of the excretory function—in the course of a nearly-decade-long (and counting) blogging career—might have been pardoned and overlooked as a single aberration. But to follow it up now with a sequel on the same topic is asking for trouble. I am practically inviting the Freudians by this point to come prowling around asking questions about my upbringing. 

All I can say in my defense is that I am not the first writer to sense an analogy between the voiding of the bowels and the plopping of words onto the page. The famously scatological Martin Luther seemed to equate the release of his long-pent heretical views, after a period of self-repression, to the relief that comes with the evacuation of a retained stool. Jonathan Franzen in an interview somewhere compared the enviable prolixity and productivity of the mature John Updike to a toddler who has just dropped his first full turd unassisted and wishes to show it off to his parents. 

And tell me honestly if you do not sense something excretory in the description T.S. Eliot provides of the creative process in a passage from his critical work, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: the "moments" of an author's creative inspiration, he writes, "[...] are characterized by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of it[....] Some obstruction is momentarily whisked away. The accompanying feeling is less like what we know as positive pleasure, than like a sudden relief from an intolerable burden." (emphasis added)

Even now, speaking for myself, I cannot say that I am enjoying the discharge of this particular post. But I had the idea for it; it suddenly built up inside me; and now I am dropping it onto the page because I look forward to the relief I will feel when it has been thoroughly evacuated. The analogy to the baser intestinal functions is unavoidable. It can't help but come to mind, regardless of what one chooses to believe about our psychological development. The fact remains that the act of writing is somewhat akin to the act of shitting; and more than one writer has therefore been obsessed with shit. 

Enough has been written by this point on the scatological obsessions of Jonathan Swift, to take a famous example. Ezra Pound has more than a few colorful images comparing money to feces in his paranoid fulminations against the financial system in the Cantos. I also just finished reading Samuel Beckett's Molloy for the first time this weekend (which then became the source of the particular idea mentioned above that started building up inside me and had to be released), and one finds that—among the many astonishing things about this surreal masterpiece—one is that it is a veritable feast for the psychoanalysts: in matters fecal and otherwise.

To be sure, Beckett's obsession with feces and "arse-holes" in the novel is just one aspect of a broader theme of disgust and fascination with bodily functions. The author's robust comic genius—present throughout the work—exercises itself most delightfully upon the subjects of flatulence, masturbation, the size and discomfort and inconvenience (while riding on bicycle seats, for instance) of dangling scrota and testes, urination, enemas, and lastly—and least—sex. 

None of the humor of these passages would be so effective if it were not combined with a genuine sense of the ghastly and appalling. As one of Beckett's characters remarks of his educational intentions toward his teenage son: "I inclined his young mind towards that most fruitful of dispositions, horror of the body and its functions." The line could serve as a watchword for the whole work, which is often excruciatingly vivid, if mercifully succinct, in its depictions of repellant bodily functions (and malfunctions). This is body horror at its most grotesque; and I swear, there is a David Cronenberg adaptation of this novel out there somewhere in the Platonic ether, just waiting to be filmed and made manifest in our sublunary plane. 

Even beyond inducing these psychoanalytically-inclined shivers about the nether reaches of the human form, moreover, the work in its whole structure could supply many a term paper to aspiring Freudian literary theorists (and no doubt has). Section one of the novel describes a man—the titular Molloy—as he drags himself through a mysterious unnamed "region" in search of his mother, who has a habit among other things of intruding at dreadfully ill-timed moments into his sexual daydreams. The second section of the novel replaces the Oedipal son figure with an Oedipal father—an "agent" serving a quasi-police function, charged with tracking down and investigating Molloy for never-disclosed reasons, who terrorizes and humiliates his teenage son with overtones of psychosexual emasculation.

By the end of their respective narratives, Molloy has been literally reduced to crawling on his hands and knees—a retrogression to early childhood. The agent, Moran, is likewise left prone and immobilized by his rebellious son (who has grown weary of his tyranny), and he is thereby reduced to an even earlier stage of infantile helplessness. In a late passage of the book, Moran begins to wonder if Molloy, whom he was originally sent out to track, might not end by finding him instead. He then imagines Molloy in this daydream as an idealized father-figure. The son and the father figures have switched roles, putting a final twist on Beckett's absurdist and darkly-comical rendition of the classic Oedipal triangle. 

If this all sounds more repulsive than funny, I say try it first; the book may surprise you. Plus, as I say, it wouldn't be as funny as it is were it not also repulsive, and laced through with a rich and unbridled capacity for provoking disgust. 

But if, after all this, Molloy still just grosses you out too much to be enjoyed, then Beckett has already made his own excuses for this in the text of the novel itself. I would like to hide behind the same exoneration as well, should anyone inquire too closely into why I have now written a second blog post on the topic of defecation. In short, Beckett says, blame it on the muse. "I apologize for having to refer to this lewd orifice," Beckett says, at the outset of a virtuoso passage praising the mysterious and unsung spiritual qualities of the "arse-hole": "'tis my muse will have it so."

Okay, one may still protest, but why must the muse have it so? What is the source of the writers' fixation on the excretory function? I maintain we don't actually need to look to the Freudians and their unfalsifiable theorizing to explain it: the answer lies closer to home, and has already been gestured at above. It is the act of writing itself that resembles defecation; and so writers have always (or at least, for a long time) been drawn to the imagery of the nether-orifice. It is because the writing of a poem, a novel, and treatise never appears for the first time on the page. It forms, to the contrary, inside one. It accumulates through an unseen internal process and exerts increasing inward pressure until it must finally be released. 

And what the writer delights in and seeks from doing so, therefore, is never the act of writing itself. It is rather the "ah" of triumph and relief that comes after, when one knows the thought has finally gotten outside of oneself—one knows that it is no longer trapped within—and that it is now ready to go out and fertilize the world.