The Excremental Ethics of Samuel R.

Delany
Mary Catherine Foltz

SubStance, Issue 116 (Volume 37, Number 2), 2008, pp. 41-55 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press DOI: 10.1353/sub.0.0012

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sub/summary/v037/37.2.foltz.html

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The Excremental Ethics of Samuel R. Delany

Mary Catherine Foltz
Through me many long dumb voices . . . And of the rights of them the others are down upon, Of the deformd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised, For in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung. Through me forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veild and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigurd. I do not press my fingers across my mouth, I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I. Bathrooms speak to me now. This thrice daily flushing, this thrice daily forgetting, is a modern mantra. This song of stream, this drum of dung, and then the whirlpool whip that marks the moment before evacuation from the (water) closet. It is here that we leave our proof of disintegration and return cleansed to labor, to the main rooms of the home, or to the street. Underneath us, as we walk purely forth, our excrement travels, too. Through pipes, it becomes the rivers of an underworld rushing to collection centers for treatment for its filth. Yet, this process fails; no matter how many chemicals we use to destroy this stink from our bodies, something remains. It is not possible to rid ourselves of our excess. As environmentalist and architect Sim Van der Ryn writes,
Mix one part excreta with one hundred parts clean water. Send the mixture through the pipes to a central station where billions are spent in futile attempts to separate the two. Then dump the effluent, now poisoned with chemicals but still rich in nutrients, into the nearest body of water. The nutrients feed algae which soon use up all the oxygen in the water, eventually destroying all aquatic life that may have survived the chemical residues. Our excretanot waste but misplaced resourcesend up destroying food chains, food supply and water quality in rivers and oceans. (11-12)

But we wont plumb, we wont sink. We pay for this pleasurable fantasy of freedom from the waste of ourselves. The push of the handle makes
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the sound of metal on metal, coin in slot. We pay to be relieved of this burden, these reminders of the porous flesh. We pay to forget and to believe in our wholeness, our cleanliness. We pay to avoid the mess. Yet, these capitalist crappers only provide a myth of burial; the rejectamenta of our bodies rushes away only to be returned to us through the rivers from which we drink. Wendell Berry describes this process in the introduction to The Toilet Papers:
If I invented an expensive technology to put my urine and feces into my drinking water, and then invented another expensive (and undependable) technology to make the same water fit to drink, I might be thought even crazier . . . . The sane solution, very likely, would be to have me urinate and defecate into a flush toilet, from which the waste would be carried through an expensive sewerage works, which would supposedly treat it and pour it into the riverfrom which the town downstream would pump it, further purify it, and use it for drinking water. Private madness, by the ratification of a lot of expense and engineering, thus becomes public sanity. (1)

All of our technologies for the cleanliness of bathrooms such as paper seat covers, plastic seat covers that revolve with the wave of a hand (so popular in airports), automatic flushing, and space-age self-showering toilets that flush themselves with water after the occupant has left the cubicle (popular in European tourist cities) deny the fact that most of our drinking water maintains remnants of the urine and feces that we daily seek to avoid. These water sports are laughable; our disgust at the excess of our bodies and the excess of the bodies of others causes us to create spaces where contact is limited, and yet the excrement that we adamantly flush returns to the rivers, complete with chemical alteration, and floats into our homes chlorinated and ready for ingestion. This might only be a comic, harmless cultural phenomenon to explore, but we have known for some time that this processing is ruining our freshwater systems and depleting the fertility of the earth.
Within the last several years, research and various surveys have shown [. . .] that chlorine, the major disinfectant used in sewage treatment, combines with other chemical compounds commonly found in wastewater to produce cancer causing agents and chloroform in drinking water; that chlorine in effluent dumped into the ocean combines with salts to form toxic acids; that the chloroform created by chlorine is released into the atmosphere and is destroying the earths protective ozone layer; and that, currently, the discharge of secondarily treated sewage into fresh waters is estimated to use up all available oxygen in the water, turning the fresh water into anaerobic sewers in spite of cosmetic treatment. (Van der Ryn, 113-114)

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Sewage treatment has been a successful in the short term due to its ability to limit the spread of diseases, but will ultimately destroy the water ways on which we depend for food and hydration. These environmentalist thinkers show how this public sanity or this obsession with sanitation proves murderous.1

II. Samuel Delany writes The Mad Man (1994) as an intervention into these standard practices of waste management, and jars the reader from her understanding of this crisis of waste. Instead of calling for greater cleanliness or further vigilant innovation in the war against contamination and filth, he gives us a radical, scatological imperative that forces us to think about our interactions with waste. Refusing the standard liberal discourse that bemoans the litter of consumer culture, bleeds sympathy and longs for the re-incorporation of the wounded city scavenger, and sterilizes and disembodies the extreme ethics of deceased philosophers (like Foucault), Delany reveals the pleasure of reveling in the flotsam of late capitalism. For him, ethics is not prohibition, nor does it revolve around the normalizing impulse (hygienic cleansing) of the sciencia sexualis outlined in Foucaults The History of Sexuality. Instead, Delanys ethic of waste calls for the late capitalist consumer to turn to the landfill, to eat of the leftovers, to enter the anus, and to do something different with shit. Following Diogenes, he has indeed changed the currency from the exchange of money for the new product, to the pleasure of living closely with excess and finding sustenance in what many consider to be filth. As the disposal of waste may be the largest problem facing life on earth today, any discussion of subject formation that challenges the continued burial of excess and the manic consumption of the new, packaged, clean product has much to offer our consumer culture. How we change our interactions with waste or not will assuredly determine if we will be able to continue to subsist on Earth. In light of our current historical moment, Delany offers a type of ethics that is not modular; we cannot repeat certain given steps in order to achieve a normalized vision of morality or right action. Yet, he invites us to dip our hands into the material waste of our society and to come up with our own stories of the pleasurable rupture of subjectivity. This invitation is clear as the narrative of The Mad Man ushers us into the real mens room, a womens bathroom located in the back of a gay mens bar in New York City that has been reassigned to men interested

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in drinking the urine of other patrons. John Marr, the narrator, describes the room as a
space with three commodes in it. Two were occupied. On one sat a small, muscular blond guy. He was just in a jockstrap, which was down around the ankles of his basketball sneakers. In front of him stood a black guy. . . . From his stubby, uncut dick, protruding from dark fingers like a still-darker sausage, a full stream of yellow glittered, like a golden staple between it and the little white guys open mouth. (116)

Here, the American Standard practice of ridding the self of excreta and paying for the privilege of chemical alteration and purification of waste is avoided by placing the main character on top of the commode. Our narrator states, I decided Id sit down myself, though, and take up the one free commode. Moments after I did, I realized there werent any urinals in here. Wethe ones of us who were sittingwere it (116). This contact with the urine of other men is the desired function of the bathroom and this beloved stream is that which connects the narrator to others. Instead of shielding himself from that which others consider to be abject, he swings his face into the arc and swallows, with the obsession not to spill any (117). The narrator is pierced by the golden staple and the two, urinator and urinal, find value and meaning in that which is flushed by others. Without chemical additives of the middle man and without the fees associated with waste treatment, the real men delight in the decomposition of the self and the other. When discussing The Mad Man, other critics often list the various ways in which the novel can be read. It is a classic mystery in which the reader follows John Marr through New York City in order to unearth the facts of famed fictional philosopher Timothy Haslers death. Second, this pornographic novel is a critique of the sterile and controlled philosophy of the academy and a call to engage Foucaults bios philosophicus with jubilation and innovation, as Marr abandons his dissertation and devotes his life to a band of homeless men. Third, the novel explores same-sex desire and activity through the body of a gay man as AIDS begins to impact the bathhouses, movie theatres and sexual culture of the city. Fourth, if our narrator Marr is haunted by the impact of disease, he is also pushed forward by the aforementioned cross-class yearning; thus, we may read this tome as a narrative about the movement of desire in spite of a fear of death. Finally, following critics like Jeffery Allen Tucker, this story can be read as a reflection on race and racism. By addressing contemporary philosophy and the academy, tackling the impact of AIDS on New York City, exploring various pleasurable sexual acts, and contemplating the legacy of racism in the United States, the novel is a

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masterpiece that does not come undone easily in the hands of critics. For me, Delany encourages a sojourn into the wastelands of our cities and outlines an excremental ethics that proves a pertinent intervention into contemporary practices of waste management, which prove so destructive to our environment and to our communities. All critics who tackle Delanys The Mad Man are concerned with the ways that readers might respond to the explicit sexuality and filth of the text. Ray Davis writes, Im not asking that you change what you find sexually attractive; only that you experimentally discard the requirement for compatible fantasy when reading about sex [in Delanys novel]. Remember, its just a book. And if you do occasionally find yourself respondingwell, thats educational, too (165). While Davis celebrates the fulfillment found in experiences with the homeless, Phillip Brian Harper uses The Mad Man as a text through which to understand his own denial of a homeless mans sexual proposition while on an academic trip to Toronto (185). Thus, the novel provokes Harper to explore cross-class desire and interracial desire in the academic sphere, and yet he recognizes his inability to reenact the narrators close encounters with the human waste of the city without a sense of fear. Harper writes, My experience in the encounter [with a white homeless man] . . . very likely renders wholly self-explanatory the sense of recognition I felt when reading certain choice sections of Samuel Delanys 1994 novel, The Mad Man (141). Harper does not worry that he responded to the homeless mans presence by handing over a few dollars and returning to his hotel, but instead he allows how he is awestruck by Delanys characters movements through the city (145). Delanys novel is used as counterpoint to Harpers own refusal to explore sexual interaction with the homeless and his insistence on removing the injurious human presence from his side through the gift of money. If Harper recognizes his own limitations through the text, Reed Woodhouse finds himself titillated by depictions of gay life in New York City. He writes,
When I first read this passage [about the aforementioned mens room], my heart lurched. Was he really going to talk about that? With what degree of irony? (The answers were: Yes; A lot; and None.) Mine was a self-protective question as well as a thrilled one. I, after all, had also gone to GSA Nights at the Mineshaft. I felt as though my own life, my own gamble, was being exposed. . . . [F]or most readers (even most gay readers), even to imagine what Delany has so lusciously described is to damn yourself as a pervert. (217)

For Woodhouse, Delanys text reminds the reader of the goodness of bodily fluids and of sex itself: the good news of Delanys gospel went

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largely ignored, even in the gay press. I can only imagine that its questioning of white-bread safer-sex clichs was too dangerous for many reader to acceptnot to mention its refusal to conform to good gay conventions, whether in literature or life (221). Woodhouse imagines horrified readers who can only focus on the danger inherent in certain sexual activities. Jeffrey Allen Tucker, although a sympathetic reader in his comprehensive work on The Mad Man, does fall into the position of the apologist and ultimately calls for safer sexual practices. Tucker writes, The Mad Man represents Marr as a gay man who is candidwith himself and othersabout his desires, figures out the risks associated with those desires, and makes decisions according . . . . [The novel] contributes to making necessary demands for monitored studies on HIV transmission via oral sex and other sex acts (275). Tuckers argument is persuasive, and yet it fails to characterize the persistent desire of characters or to allow that the novel is not only a call for safer sex, but instead a discussion of a longing for sexual practices that are patently unsafe. Interestingly, all of these critics discuss their personal responses to the novel and imagine readers responses (horror or titillation); I believe that these concerns stem from Delanys continuous scatological ethic that asks the readers to engage with a variety of different types of waste. Moving past imagined responses to the novel, I argue that within the novel waste (or the excess of a system) is multiple: the homeless or the human trash of the city, the dead, the diseased and dying, the excrement of the body as well as the excess of academic discourses like philosophy. Each of these signifiers into which material is deposited and ordered share a common problem; they are the chaotic material through which hegemonic discourses of physical health, sanity, normalcy, and cleanliness are constructed. In other words, they are the unruly mess that threatens the fantasy of a stable subject. Rather than look to homeless communities for a different way to move in the cityscape, we view them as those bodies that need to be brought back to the labor-force, to be cured of the madness that makes them unfit for civil society, and to be made ready to consume products and space with the garnered dollar. If they are ignored and forgotten, instead of treated and prosecuted, they are speedily flushed free from the minds of citizen-subjects bent on participating in the daily hustle. The dead, too, become the material buried beneath the movement of labor for the consumption of land, product and health. Still, they can be resurrected in the service of supporting national, medical or other narratives, which allow the subject to confirm an articulation of self. In terms of excrement, the subject

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builds the self through the proper elimination of bodily detritus. The porous nature of the body, then, is dammed by the fantasy of subjective wholeness, which is made possible through the payment of monies to waste disposal corporations. Each of these types of excess are the materials that must be brought continually into submission in the dual processes of elimination and construction of singular, whole narratives of identity through a willful forgetting of this perpetual shedding. In The Mad Man, Delany creates Marr, a character who refuses to participate in this type of subject formation. Instead, he submerges himself in these various types of waste and allows them to mar his previous understanding of self. Thus he creates an ethos of selfshattering that revels in the consumption of the waste of the cityscape and the physical body.2 By eating the crusty formations of salt at the corner of homeless mens eyes, slurping at the mucus from their noses, lavishing his tongue along their penises, and dining on their urine and the nutty substance of their asses (all offered willingly), Marr finds value in those bodies that many find abhorrent. As he pleasures them and allows himself to be pleasured, he avers the goodness or tastiness of the sweat, semen, mucus, and shit that most of us wipe clean from our bodies in haste; he shows that there is pleasure in the holes of the body in opposition to the wholeness. Rather than eliminate and bury the proof of the porous nature of the subject, Marr celebrates the process of elimination by savoring the material substance that has been evacuated from the body. Detritus does not move to the fringe, but becomes the center of the subject ever reminded of his rupture. Whether Marr engages in researching biography or sexual activity, he finds pleasure in the chaos that shatters the illusion of narrative wholeness; this postmodern ethic suggests that we cannot alter our movements in the world unless we first enter a transformative moment through which identity is sacrificed in favor of pleasurable decomposition of the self or in a marring of the subject. III. John Marrs ethics of waste, his commitment to the consumption of worthless material without monetary compensation, begins when he leaves his Ph.D. program for New York City. On the advice of his advisor Mossman, John decides that his dissertation will focus on the works of murdered philosopher Timothy Hasler. The young researcher feels that living in the city where Hasler moved and died will inspire his written work. However, the more that he reads Haslers journals and notes, the

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more Marr finds that the philosophers academic articles become secondary to the dead mans radical movement through the city. Marr discovers that Haslers attraction to men and their feet, especially when soiled and pungent, drives him from his apartment and brings him into contact with homeless men. Haslers account of these encounters causes Marr to abandon his original dissertation project, the ordering and outlining of the philosophers academic arguments and biography. Instead, Marr leaves his desk and enters a process of material philosophy where the movement of the body, the use of pleasure and the care of the self take precedence over an academic philosophy centered on the organization and cleansing of ideas and bodies. Further, he refuses to capture the movements of the dead man in narrative form, but instead allows these actions to alter his own movement. Thus, he offers his own body to the streets in an effort to be physically impacted by interactions with the citys filth. Recognizing that he cannot understand the pleasures of the dead without first exploring their movements, Marr decides to approach homeless men with the goal of sharing sexual stimulus. Still, Hasler has left no manual and Marr finds that cruising the homeless differs from the bathroom sex that he has previously enjoyed with men. As he approaches a group of homeless men, he is surprised that his invitation to give oral sex is accepted by one man, who asks to be called Piece o Shit. This moniker denotes this homeless mans understanding of the way his body is interpreted by society: as a type of excrement that should be discarded. Marr, however, chooses not to thrust aside this wasted body, but instead asks Piece o Shit how he might pleasure him. The response shocks him: Come over here, next to me. Slide on up and lemme see you make your mouth into a cunt. . . Come on, now. Lets see that pussy-hole (32). Marr discovers that his own body must be re-organized in order to stimulate the body of the other. His previous understanding of self as a gay man or even as a masculine speaking subject must be transformed in light of this request; he becomes feminized. The speaking orifice refuses the construction of the narrative, the disciplined sentence, and instead opens for the insertion of the filthy fingers of societys Shit. His companion coaches him:
Okay now; just hang them big suckers wet and loose he turned out his own mouth, and I tried to imitate himThere you goyou got it. Then you take your tongue and screw it bout as small as you can, up over your front teeth and press it against your upper lip. (32)

In this scene, Marr refuses to see himself as the subject that will penetrate the object of study or to discover the secrets of the Other. Instead, he
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allows the other to make his body into a hole, an orifice to be penetrated by the spear of Shit. The tongue and lips, used in academia to formulate coherent narratives of expertise and knowledge, twist into a grotesque formation and prepare to be moved by anothers thrust. Finally, the biographer finds that his own body is written into a new position as he invites the human trash of the city to instruct him in the creation of a new movement of self. All of the homeless characters, and eventually John Marr, embrace these openings in the body and the waste pushed through these holes as evidence of a permeable nature. Rather than celebrating the circumcised penis, this homeless man has made his member into a Yoni dick, or a penis named to refer to the vagina. Piece o Shit describes the creation of his Yoni in a vivid passage: But these guys was into pulling their foreskins down and stickin these rings inside em. And I started out with a pretty healthy yoni of my own, even to begin with. Course it wasnt nowheres as long as it is now (36-37). Although this scene can be read as the erection of an exaggerated penis, Piece o Shit makes it clear that it is what the penis houses that makes the Yoni so important and desired. The rings, which are hidden beneath the foreskin, collect the drippings from the penis and other excretions from the body; therefore, a cheesy substance can be found by the lover willing to venture into the walls of the penis. Marr asks his Piece o Shit about the stuff all over the rings. He responds, you got you a good, grade-A quality goat here. And thats grade-A quality goat cheese . . . real Gorgonzola (36). As Marr refuses to bury the turd of society in the appropriate fashion by ignoring the bodies and desires of the homeless, Piece o Shit builds a penis that becomes both a vagina to be explored and a breast (a goats breast!) that produces the substance that becomes cheese; both men, then, offer their vaginas to each other, re-imagining their bodies as active female orifices that engulf while they are simultaneously penetrated. John Marr, of course, is ready to penetrate this penis/vagina: Working my tongue inside his immense, rumpled, cheese-filled folds, when my tongue tip finally worked in far enough to touch the head of his cock directly, he sighed (38). Here, the point of pleasure must be discovered beneath folds reminiscent of labia; and yet this hole also penetrates Marrs mouth. Both participants, then, open themselves to the pleasure of worldly stimulus through a rupturing other. As Marr partakes of the crusty cheese within the foreskins folds, he pushes his fingers into Shits anus: I slid my hand back between his cheeks, pressing a finger toward his holeand, surprised, slid two right inside him. . . . He shot. . . . Which was when I realized that the flavor had changed: my mouth heated, salt

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flooded over my tongue, filled my throat (40). Here, the climatic moment is not the eruption of semen from the penis, but instead the stream of urine. The cum shot, the money shot of pornography, is replaced by that which is thought to be valueless. Rather than charging a fee for the collection of this waste, like waste treatment centers and hustlers, Marr relishes the heat and the salt. Freud, perhaps, would recognize this cocksucker and yoni creator as uncivilized subjects who enjoy the shattering of an ego identity, like the child, rather than the adult who believes in the monetary worth of self in society. Although Delany specifically mentions Beyond the Pleasure Principle in this novel, the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality also illuminates this fictional biographers insights into waste. Briefly, in Freuds description of child development in the Three Essays, he argues that every individual must sublimate an original pleasure in the porous nature of the body and their delight in worldly stimulus that overpowers the burgeoning subjectivity. His development of the concept of polymorphous perversity points to this assertion that every infant begins life with an overwhelming sensitivity to earthly stimulus where any touch from the outside or any movement on the inside of the body, such as the bowel movement, may come to be felt as erotic. He writes,
The character of erotogenicity can be attached to some parts of the body in a particularly marked way. There are predestined erotogenic zones, as is shown by the example of sucking. The same example, however, also shows us that any other part of the skin or mucous membrane can take over the function of an erotogenic zone, and must therefore have some aptitude in that direction. (50)

Although the child clearly experiences pleasure from the movement of waste through the body, the caretakers impulse is to condition the child to forget a polymorphous perversity and to focus instead on the cultivation of pleasure in the experience of corporeal wholeness. Freud writes of anal eroticism, The retention of the fecal mass . . . is thus carried out intentionally by the child to begin with, in order to serve, as it were, as a masturbatory stimulus upon the anal zone or to be employed in his relation to the people looking after him (52). Here, the childs first experiences with loss from the body involve a pleasure in the sensation of the body that falls apart or the body that reveals the stink of its own excess. By playing with this waste, holding it in, and delighting in the pressure before release, the child refuses entrance into the imaginary, or the fiction of corporeal wholeness. Still, in the process of giving up excrement to the desiring parent and witnessing the caretakers joy and repulsion in receipt of this gift, the child enters the process that Freud calls the damming up of an original pleasure in the porous nature of

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the flesh. This then, for Freud, and others, is the childs first sublimation: the gift of a perverse enjoyment in the body that reveals rot (entropy) for the pleasure of the fiction of a body without a hole, maintained through the caretakers quick disposal of excrement and regulatory applause or reprimand. Piece O Shit, by playing with the secretions of the penis, denies societys erections of masculine subjectivity. In other words, he does not shoot ejaculate into the appropriate receptacle nor does he understand the phallus as a hard edifice, a weapon of insemination, or a spear for penetration. Instead, the yoni dick holds ejaculate and must be penetrated by the admirer. Piece O Shit has turned societys understanding of male bodies inside out, for he is pleasured by the penetration of that which we imagine can only be used to penetrate another. After losing contact with his piece o shit, Marr encounters a motley crew of homeless men that includes Haslers lover from ten years before, Mad Man Mike, tattooed Tony who wears the graffiti shit and piss on his hands, a perpetual masturbator named Joey, and a beast of a man named Leaky. This final orgy from the fourth section of the novel entitled The Place of Excrement begins with John Marrs confusion at the exchange of a penny for access to a new lovers, Leakys, body.3 At first, Marr is rattled by both his relief at Leakys return to his apartment and a new game that he identifies with some type of low-grade prostitution. As he previously opposed the trade of money for sex, Marr asks Tony, Why am I doing this . . .? Leaky said youd paid a penny for him . . . and I have to give you a penny back? (415). Juggling the beer that will fuel the later waterworks, Tony tries to explain the game to Marr:
Mad Man Mike, he explained it to us, a long time ago. Just a penny you cant sell a person for no more than that . . . . He said that the thing you buy and sell, when you buy some scumbag this way, it dont got nothin to do with what someone can doI mean, how much hes worth out there. It just has to do with . . . . I dont know. Owning. (415-416)

Here, this sale of the body contradicts the market into which we usually offer up the flesh. Tony recognizes that the movement of the penny is not a type of payment for a promised labor or an actualized service. If it does not indicate the worth of that flesh on the job market, it points to the worthlessness or the uselessness of that body. In the end, John Marr owns a leaking body that will not produce anything more than semen, urine and feces. Further, Marr and the other men claim shit, both the bodies of the homeless and the excrement of the body, which most of society prefer to leave to treatment centers.

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Hasler comes to this conclusion as well. In some old note cards sent to Marr by a friend of the deceased author, Hasler recalls a conversation with his black homeless lover, Mad Man Mike.
[Mike] says that owning someone isnt bad. He wishes somebody owned him. I pointed out to him in a country as historically entailed with slavery as the United States, that was rather a dangerous position for a Negro to adhere to. He says, rather insightfully, that his whole life hes been treated like one form of pervert or another. And, (to use his . . . words), there aint a whole lot of difference for most people between a pervert like me and a nigger pervert like me. Then, he went on to explain . . . thatthough hes once set the price as high as a dimenobody should ever pay more than a penny for another human being. He said that knowing somebody wanted you enough to even pay a penny for you meant that you were not in the unenviable position of most people he knew living in the parks and the streets: i.e., no one . . . wanted them at allto most people they were worth nothing! (456)

Of course, as the Mad Man goes on to explain, he is wanted by the police and medical staff of the local mental hospital, for his public behavior disturbs the appropriate physical demeanor for city life. These figures committed to either the healing of the insane and preparing them for a return to the work force or to the disciplining and punishing of those who will not comply with the prohibitions of the law do not truly seek an interaction with the homeless which pleasures their (the homeless) bodies. This is the type of longing that Mad Man Mike, Leaky and the others seek to avoid. In contrast to the desirous gaze of social workers and medical providers, the ownership implied in the exchange of the penny demarcates a commitment to the uselessness of the others body and pursuits. If Marr does not seek to institutionalize or to alter those with whom he makes contact, he does express a willingness to learn the ways in which he might pleasure the bodies of members and be pleasured. The madness that ensues proves this point with greater force, for Marr abandons himself to sexual acts based on the consumption of the excrement of the homeless men. Mad Man Mike explains the reason for the visit to Marrs apartment,
See, you gotta understand about me. . . . I got these kind of rules, you know what I mean? Its kind of funny like, but you see I aint never pissed in a fuckin urinal for more than ten years. Or shit in a fuckin shitter, either. I just cant do it, you know what I mean? . . . Tony, now, see, hes real good for me. Every fuckin day . . . he, you know, he eats it for me. Hes beautiful. So, you see, if I had two of you fuckin scumbags, one to eat my fuckin shit, one to drink my fuckin piss, Id be okay, you know what I mean . . . ? (417)

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Here, in order to be okay, Mad Man Mike identifies a movement in the world that refuses to waste, to bury or to flush the proof of the falling apart of the flesh. Instead, he calls for a witness to the act of elimination and for a willing participant to own and to eat his rot. And Marr offers himself up for the position. After drinking Mikes urine while Tony eats Mikes excrement, Marr recounts,
I thrust my tongue out into the hole in [Tonys] beard, while his lips drew back and his teeth opened under mine, so that I went deep into his mouth. . . . The sweetish, walnutty taste surged under mine, lumping other parts, a taste Id known before from him . . . teeth grating teeth, tongue wrestling tongue, till, locked, he thrust into mine his spit, his tongue, and Mikes shitand I thrust them back. (425)

In the concluding scene of this particular orgy, these two bottom-feeders share in a meal that most of the rest of New York would simply like to abolish to sewers. If both the bodies of homeless men and the material waste of the body are the excess on which civilization erects its narrative of wholeness, Marr defies the burial of the abject in favor of a corporal joining with detritus. As the two men enjoy the seeping turd, Mike states, Now how are you gonna pay more than a penny for each of them. . . . Look at em, Joey. I mean, eatin shit . . . ? Drinkin piss . . . ? Theyre stupider than fuckin Leaky here. And theyre crazier than you an me together! (427). Ultimately, Marr escapes the societal mandate to forget excrement and to build his identity or worth through monetary exchange for duties performed. IV. If Delanys Marr, Piece o Shit, Leaky and the Mad Man come to be the undammed adult subjects who refuse to waste, to murder, or to sell the excess of the body in favor of the polymorphous pleasure of egoshattering, they also come to be the ethical contemporary subjects denied by critics like Fredric Jameson. The debate about ethics and postmodern literature has raged as critics argue about the efficacy of postmodern art. For the oft-cited Jameson, postmodern art lacks the resistant stance of an earlier modernism due to its total reliance on the market. He writes,
Meanwhile, there is very little in either the form or the content of contemporary art that contemporary society finds intolerable and scandalous. The most offensive forms of this artpunk rock, say, or what is called sexually explicit materialare all taken in its stride by society, and they are commercially successful. (19)

Although I am intrigued by his powerful academic argument, I find it difficult to believe that all artists of our own time period abandoned a

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Mary Catherine Foltz

critical engagement with economics in favor of a pleasurable wordplay. Further, there is much that our contemporary society finds intolerable, such as the waste of our cities, those who cannot or do not labor, and the waste of our own bodies. Thus, Delanys intervention through the articulation of a pleasure in interactions with excrement offers the contemporary reader a way to contemplate a different movement of the body in late capitalism: one that ultimately requires her to sniff around the dump, to put her hands into the steaming pile of our excess and to enjoy the consumption of that which is deemed useless or abhorrent. Further, rubbish or excrement in Delanys account does not re-enter a market nor is it re-cycled through waterways and treatment centers; he enjoys what is freely disposed of by others and becomes exemplary of a contemporary subject, a gleaner, who lives off the excess of others. Delanys work in The Mad Man, also counters Linda Hutcheon, who finds that Postmodernism has not theorized agency; it has no strategies of resistance that would correspond to the feminist ones. Postmodernism manipulates, but does not transform signification; it disperses but does not (re)construct the structures of subjectivity. Feminisms must (38). If The Mad Man does not offer us the liberation that Hutcheon seeks, it does offer a type of subjectivity concerned with its own rupture or a subject in late capitalism who refuses the market in favor of a play with excess. Even if we fantastically were able to develop new structures of subjectivity, we would still be left with the wreckage of contemporary consumer subjects: landfills, rivers and lakes contaminated by the nutrients of our excrement, and oceans damaged by flows of refuse. Thus, we desperately need corrupted subjects like Marr who show us through their desire for waste a pleasurable way to interact with that which we may previously have deemed abject. University at Buffalo

Notes
1. For other discussions of the environmental impact of human sewage, see Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present and Elizabeth Royte, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. 2. Leo Bersani. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York, Columbia University Press, 1986, 51). 3. The title The Place of Excrement comes from Yeats poem, Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.

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Works Cited
Berry, Wendell. Introduction from The Toilet Papers: Designs to Recycle Human Waste and Water: Dry Toilets, Greywater, and Urban Sewage by Sim Van der Ryn. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1978, 1-4. Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Davis, Ray. Delanys Dirt from Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany. Ed. James Sallis (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1996). 162-188. Delany, Samuel. The Mad Man. New York, NY: Masquerade Books, 1994. Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Ed. James Strachey. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000 (1962). Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume One. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1990. Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume Two. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1990. Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality Volume Three. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1988. Harper, Philip Brian. Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York, NY: Routledge, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. New York, NY: Verso, 1998. Melosi, Martin. The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure form Colonial Times to the Present. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Royte, Elizabeth. Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. Sallis, James, Ed. Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Tucker, Jeffery Allen. A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity and Difference. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Van der Ryn, Sim. The Toilet Papers: Designs to Recycle Human Waste and Water: Dry Toilets, Greywater, and Urban Sewage . 1978. Santa Barbara: Ecological Design Press, 1999. Woodhouse, Reed. Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945-1995. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

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