Fecal Matters

In Carson McCullers' novel Clock Without Hands, the racist Southern judge and bourgeois gentilhomme Fox Clane is depicted in one scene sitting upon his toilet as if it were a throne. McCullers indelibly describes his feelings upon the successful completion of an afternoon's evacuation of the bowels: "When the odor in the bathroom rose, he was not annoyed by this; on the contrary, since he was pleased by anything that belonged to him, and his feces were no exception, the smell rather soothed him. So he sat there, relaxed and meditative, pleased with himself."

In the context of the novel, the judge's feelings of self-satisfaction upon the successful voiding of his colon, and the resulting smell, serves as a wonderfully apt symbol of his entire approach to life: the patronizing assumption of superiority with which he lords it over his household, his society, and all who belong to both. Stripped of what we know about this character's individuality, however, Fox Clane's reaction to the aroma of his own dung has a more universal element than that. It is a fact that none of us minds the stench of our own droppings to quite the same extent we mind the smell of others'.

My sister the biologist once informed me this trait has a basis in human chemistry. The feces we extrude carry traces of our own pheromones, or whatever they are, and therefore do not offend us; and something of the same effect applies to the feces of our offspring. This accounts for the otherwise seemingly inconceivable fact that the parents of newborn infants are able to face up every day to the ungodly task of disposing of and replacing their child's soiled diapers. The imperative to see our genetic material survive and thrive in the world overrides our sense of revulsion; and thus, here as elsewhere, natural selection has done us a good turn.

There is an evident adaptive advantage, that is to say, both in tolerating the smell of one's own feces (since they are—however temporarily—unavoidable for all of us) and recoiling from that of others', with all the unknown health risks it carries. This no doubt accounts for the profound ambivalence with which the human species treats the subject of poop.  Another reason for this ambivalence, however, is one that has long been recognized and pointed out by the disciples of Freud: the way in which defecation functions as an analogy for sex.

Intercourse is, like pooping or changing a child's diaper, a domain of life in which the ordinary disgust humans feel at the prospect of coming into contact with the bodily fluids of oneself or others is overcome by a heady dose of hormones, which override these feelings in order to serve a more pressing evolutionary imperative. (My sister the biologist again tells me that human biochemistry works to suppress the sensation of disgust in the brain when in a state of sexual arousal.) The two acts also, as children learning about sex for the first time are always appalled to discover, involve many of the same organs, or at least ones situated close by.

It is well established in the annals of the Freudians (no verbal slip intended)—and really in anyone's own experience—that most children pass through a phase growing up in which feces, urine, and flatulence occupy the same place of delight, disgust, fascination, and hilarity that sex later does in the early teenage years. Poop is gross, ubiquitous, endlessly interesting, and extremely amusing. At least if you are five or so. The same can be said of sex; at least if you are fourteen.

The fact that the generative and digestive organs are so close together forges an analogy in kids' minds that also perfectly encapsulates in the visible realm their mingled feelings of disgust and interest. I recall an episode of the Moth Radio Hour on NPR in which the storyteller described her experience trying to explain the facts of life to her daughter. "Eww... you mean the same place where you go to the bathroom?" was the kid's first response to this information. Well, yes, the mother confessed, it does seem kind of gross when you put it that way. "It seems like a poor zoning decision," she remarked.

Some, such as the writer Jonathan Swift, carry this feeling with them well into adulthood. His ambivalent scatological and coprophobic/-phillic obsessions are notorious, leaving him more than exposed to the investigations of the psychoanalysts. And of all the many filthy passages from his works and letters cited in Victoria Glendinning's portrait of the man, one stands out:

Swift repeats a bawdy joke to a correspondent, in one letter, about a woman who tells a romantic rival that she ought to stuff their mutual love interest up her arse, metaphorically speaking. The rival replies that she can't do that, but she will stuff him somewhere close by. Swift must have found this anecdote sufficiently amusing to report it to friends. The child is father to the man, as Wordsworth said, and Swift apparently took with him into maturity the keen fascination and amusement with the proximity of the organs of reproduction and defecation that one normally finds among children.

Recognizing the strength of this analogy, parents and educators trying to inculcate a more enlightened  and naturalistic attitude to sex have therefore decided to start earlier in the developmental process by inspiring children to love and accept the inevitability of their own poop. There is, of course, the book Everybody Poops, but this merely put into print an attitude that existed elsewhere avant la lettre. David Sedaris, for one, recalls his own mother's efforts to teach him as a child that there is not a single human being anywhere in the world who does not poop, just as he does. He notes he found this hard to believe, and that he had to draw the line at Ladybird Johnson.

Earlier in our cultural history, a more accepting attitude toward defecation also came to symbolize the growing appreciation of the dignity of the human body associated with Renaissance Humanist and Reformation thought. Thomas More, for one, lists a calm enjoyment of the voiding of the bowels as one of various moderate epicurean pleasures to which the inhabitants of Utopia can allow themselves to submit, without harm or loss of morals. His narrator makes the sex analogy explicit, grouping defecation alongside intercourse ("when we purge our intestines of excrement, or go about generating children" (Miller trans.)) in a family of kindred pleasures related to bodily discharge.

Luther, meanwhile, characteristically and notoriously took up the same idea, and carried it too far. He insisted upon his own participation in the universal production of shit with a fury and intensity that suggests the overcoming of enormous inner resistance to the idea. He analogized the healthy passing of a bowel movement to the explosion of previously chained-up heretical ideas, bodily desires, the longing for marriage and sex—all of which he allowed himself to express after his conversion to Protestant dissent and his departure from the monastery.

As Erikson remarked in his great psychobiography of the man, Luther took the same horrified delight —the same mixed pride and shame—in his later heretical writings—the places in which he finally got to say what he really thought—that one feels in the evacuation of a long-stalled bowel movement. Nor is he unique among writers in this trait, many of whom, it has been theorized, reflect the lessons of their early toilet-training in their later relationship to words and ideas.

Luther's early instruction on the po must have leaned heavily toward the side of shame and self-reproach, since his later writing was so full of a half-guilty sense of rebellion. Defiance is an attitude only struck by one who still in some ways feels the press of the yoke on their shoulders, and Luther's evident need to insist that it was okay after all for him to write, to shit, to have sex, and to be saved are clearly indicative of an intense inner self-doubt on all four scores.

By contrast, for other writers the words as well as the bowel movements seem to have come more easily. Jonathan Franzen remarked somewhere on John Updike's reported daily production of smooth, agreeable words—his legendary and oft-remarked effortless volubility in both prose and interviews. This was, thought Franzen, sufficient evidence of an earlier childhood habit on Updike's part of showing one's daily leavings to an admiring parent—something Freud remarks is not uncommon in a certain developmental stage.

The child is embarrassed by poop, but also inwardly pleased at the size of their production. They are filled with mixed emotions—on the one hand wanting to show it off to those in authority, on the other inwardly fearing they will be punished and shamed for it.

Is this not much the same potent cocktail of emotions humans experience with regard to sex? Or to success, ambition, hard work, winning? Do we not want to triumph in life, at the same we are afraid others will hate and resent us for it? Do we not want to establish that we are as sexually desirable and vigorous as other people, at the same time as we feel the need to check displays of sexuality from manifesting in public? Do we not want fame and self-importance, even as we dread the envy and distrust from others that these might bring on? Do, as children, we not like to show sparkling report cards to our parents, even as we would never let the same fall into the hands of schoolmates, among whom it might cost us any claim to popularity?

Schopenhauer argued that sex is seen as shameful and private in most societies because the will to life itself is shameful —the root of all human evil and injustice. If this is so, however, it is also the same reason that sex is necessary and desirable. The will to life may be the source of all human evil. But it is also, rather by definition, the source of anything in our experience that could be described as good. Without life there is no us, and therefore no meaning and no value.

Perhaps much the same can be said of pooping. Which is not to say we can or should ever resolve our ambivalence on the subject, any more than we can resolve our ambivalence as to sex. But surely part of what we find both fearsome and fascinating in feces is what we find inescapable and engaging about sex: it is a reminder of our biological existence, the natural basis of our lives, the fact that we each have a will to survive and pass on our genes, at the same time as we live in society with other so-motivated people and must negotiate rules of collective existence with them that often require the regulation of our own inward and innate drives.

We can neither hate nor embrace pooping in all forms, therefore, any more than we can hate or embrace life, in all its dimensions. Both are, now as always, a mixed bag.