“Flesh settles against bone […] but Mexican is sloppier”: Reversing Disgust Ethics and Aesthetics in Eugene Marten’s Waste
(2015) Disgust — Location: University of Kent, Canterbury (UK) (29.May.2015)
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- Abstract
- Eugene Marten’s Waste tells the story of Sloper, a socially maladapted janitor in a high-rise office building of some unnamed American city. Awkward and isolated, probably even mentally deranged, he rummages through people’s trash when they leave at night, scavenging the leftovers of their food and occasionally masturbating over their pictures and personal affairs. At one point, he finds a woman’s corpse (presumably murdered) backing up one of the garbage chutes in the basement. He brings the cadaver home and embarks in a necrophiliac relationship with her for as long as her decomposition permits. Having previously worked in a morgue, Sloper has some idea of how to slow down this process as much as possible: storing her in a fridge, draining her blood, disinfecting her insides by pouring Listerine down her throat. While this disturbing and puzzling novel depicts various themes generally deemed disgusting and which therefore tend to be absent or marginal in literature (such as food scavenging, masturbation and necrophilia), the title most strongly alludes to the asceptic quality of the building itself, which appears to eradicate all potential for (inter)subjectivity within its walls. With its integrated network of garbage disposal chutes, the streamlined structure immediately expels any traces of otherness which it might contain. Sloper himself uses his cleaning products as weapons for covering up his transgressions, thus overturning the traditional association between cleanliness and moral rectitude, showing how extreme hygiene and the commodification of waste can actually lead to moral breakdown. This presentation will aim to show that, by reactivating visceral responses to classical tropes of disgust such as the corpse and the vetula, while at the same time allowing his readers to establish a certain degree of empathy for a protagonist who seems to be disgusted by neither of the two, Marten challenges our notions of ethical outrage in direct relation to physical disgust. It is my contention that Marten’s goal in doing this is, precisely and conversely, to underline the eco-ethical issues behind our contemporary tendency to aestheticize our waste.
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Citations
Temko, C. (2015). “Flesh settles against bone […] but Mexican is sloppier”: Reversing Disgust Ethics and Aesthetics in Eugene Marten’s Waste. Disgust, University of Kent, Canterbury (UK). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/191005