There is such a fine Montaignesque scope to On Garbage. From the title’s plain chant, unfashionably and refreshingly void of sub-titular adornments, to the free range, richly sentenced text, one gets a sense of an endlessly curious intellect rummaging among his references and ponderables like the great French master, retired to the library, scavenging in the low shelves and high ones, the lens of his inquiry widening and sharpening to consider, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase “not only the idea of the thing but the thing itself”. Essaying is a bit like mining or flea marketing: testing for what’s precious among the detritus, the jewels flashing under mounds of junk.
John Scanlan spent several months in the late 1980s, we are told, as a refuse collector. Since then he has spent a lot of time in school. He holds multiple graduate degrees from the University of Glasgow — in sociology, philosophy and social sciences — and is a project officer with the Arts and Humanities Research Board research centre for environmental history at the University of St Andrews. His scholarly publications focus on the philosophical and sociological aspects of modernity and could, like so much in the way of doctoral theses, be counted on to put most ordinary citizens to sleep among the annotations — except for the fact that, on the evidence presented in On Garbage, this thinker writes.
“Garbage is the formlessness from which form takes flight, the ghost that haunts presence. Garbage is the entrails, the bits or scraps, the mountain of indistinguishable stuff that is in its own way affirmed by a resolute dismissal: it is refuse-d (not accepted, denied, banished). Garbage is the tat, the lowly that has sunk to the depth of a value system . . . the mucky handprint of a being that carries on regardless, a dirty trace, the wreck of beauty, and in the most recognisably banal sense, the excrement of a body.”
This last matter — the excrement of a body — Scanlan examines in detail in the fourth chapter of this little masterpiece, advancing several of the themes first articulated by the counterculture sociologist Philip Slater, who put forth, in his 1970 study of American culture, The Pursuit of Loneliness, the notion of “the Toilet Assumption”. The invention of the flush lavatory, Slater and Scanlan agree, freed the species from face-to-faeces confrontations, and can be credited with postmodern man’s increasing inability to deal with, well, shit in all its incarnations — corporeal, psychosocial, geo-political and otherwise.
“Our ideas about institutionalising the aged, psychotic, retarded, and infirm are based on a pattern of thought that we might call the Toilet Assumption — the notion that unwanted matter, unwanted difficulties, unwanted complexities and obstacles will disappear if they are removed from our immediate field of vision,” Slater wrote. “We do not connect the trash we throw from the car window with the trash in our streets, and we assume that replacing old buildings with new, expensive ones will alleviate poverty in the slums. We throw the aged and psychotic into institutional holes where they cannot be seen. Our approach to social problems is to decrease their visibility: out of sight, out of mind.”
On Garbage shares the broad stroke and the full range that marked Slater’s ruminations, citing texts with titles such as The History of Shit, Anatomy of Disgust and Merde in its effort to connect the roots of privatisation and individualisation as well as art, literature, theatre and a host of other human pursuits to the way we handle or refuse to handle waste.
“In modern society our removal from human waste, in particular, takes the form of a gradual progression that has accelerated in contemporary experience to the point where examples of the latest technology in public toilets appear to the user as if totally untouched, in the sort of pristine condition that seems to have the dual purpose of allowing one to feel free of the malign sensory effects of the disgusting and alien, while at the same time rather bizarrely calling into question the regular function of the equipment. Is it a toilet, or an information booth? This all points to the uneasiness with being reminded that other people defecate, and more specifically, to the fact that they may even do so in the same place as we do.”
A page later, Scanlan makes the leap from the scatological to the sublime: “We remain blind to the reality of waste because modern society has almost perfected the means to forget — not only because we are largely ignorant of the productive tasks undertaken by others, but because within this individuated existence we may easily resort to any of a bewildering array of alternatives to ‘reality’: mind-altering drugs, tourism, cinema, literature, and so on. Under these historical conditions memory becomes an easy source for subjective doubt, the imaginary graveyard of progress that buries the past as if it was simply useless rubbish.”
Both the first chapter and the afterword of this remarkable book begin with a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer from the office for The Burial of the Dead, to wit: “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.”
This reverence for and fascination with humankind marks Scanlan as an essayist of the first order. Like Montaigne, he is willing to search among the oddments of language and logic, to follow a vein of thought wherever it leads, to test the sound and sense of writers before him, and assay his own experience and memory for what rings true about the species and the planet we occupy; about the things we create and dispose of, treasure and reject, prize and piss away.
For readers who wonder why we will pay to see Mel Gibson’s faux-Christ crucified in lovely, bloody big-screen Technicolor but can’t abide or aren’t allowed to witness executions on TV or dead soldiers brought back in flag-draped boxes from Iraq; for those who wonder how the species that rises to the horrendous occasions of September 11, 2001, or the recent tsunami, searching for body parts at Fresh Kills Landfill or sorting through corpses for signs of life; how the same human kind could look away from famine and holocaust, Rwanda and Darfur, Scanlan’s inquiries cast some light among the shadows in the dark. Like a wide-eyed miner up from the underworld, what he tenders in On Garbage looks like gold.
Thomas Lynch is the author of three collections of poems and three nonfiction collections: The Undertaking, Bodies in Motion and at Rest and the forthcoming Booking Passage: We Irish & Americans
Read on
- The Garbage King by Elizabeth Laird (Macmillan Children’s): children living in poverty in Ethiopia
- The Dominion of the Dead by Robert Pogue Harrison (University of Chicago): how the living consider the dead
