Scatology

Ennui may be unpleasant, but it is mild enough as a subject and usually bearable. The fecal matter of bowels and bowls, however, is more unsavory and offensive, and in polite society it is treated as forbidden knowledge. For that reason, the satirist cheerfully opens the privy door and herds us in. And of course we do not wish in the slightest to wet our feet. Therefore, satire’s business has ever been, where angels fear to tread, to inaugurate the unwary human reader’s total immersion. Further, in the twentieth century, satire goes to even greater lengths to see that such unsavory matter is nicely compacted and heavily compounded. What is satirically grotesque about such a subject is obvious: proud, self-delusional man ever aspires to elevate himself and his dignity, whereas the satirist destroys such upward mobility by reducing man to defecating animal before our eyes.

Aldous Huxley once contemptuously remarked that characters in Henry James’s novels appeared so genteel that one doubted whether they were capable of going to the bathroom.¹ But in most genres—epic, romance, tragedy, even comedy—no one ever does. Knights and private eyes, underdogs and overlords, kings and counselors rarely find time in fiction to eat, let alone secrete. The heroic and the middling modes endorse gentility; traditional decorum requires a moratorium upon topics intestinal or matters anal.

Indeed, the etiquette of polite society has always demanded restraint on a broad number of topics, particularly religion, politics, and sex. Alice and Kenneth Hamilton speak rather priggishly of sex, religion, and art as “the Three Great Secret Things,” and Francis Bacon cautions against a too-great levity in conversation: “As for jest, there be certain things which ought to be privileged from it; namely, religion, matters of state, great persons, any man’s present business of importance, and any case that deserveth pity.”²

We must concede, however, that the erstwhile heroes of satire are not only slain, like St. George, by their dragons, but they are also afflicted by questionable smells and very bad taste.³ Every satirist moves at once to break up furniture and to break in upon mores and conventions. Accordingly, religion, politics, and sexuality are the primary stuff of literary satire. Among these sacred targets, matters costive and defecatory play an important part. For what society normally considers low and sordid, as rhyparographic, are more frequently excretory than sexual. Many a man is willing to boast of his sexual prowess and caprice, but he is distinctly unwilling to tender public pronouncements about the size of his feces, the shape of his intestinal disorders, or the stature of his last bout with diarrhea. A man might be willing to look into another man’s sex life, but not into his stool. To be sure, the “odors” of sweat, urine, and manure coalesce to confer upon the evacuatory portion of our privy lives the more objectional flavor. One critic conjectures that the word smell implies “bad smell,” and society unites to repudiate stinks, owing to polite civilization’s “cultural repudiation of decaying substances.” Ladies and gentlemen do not discourse upon dung, just as the Christian Science Monitor does not mention death. In any event, satirists have ever been prompted to lure the unwary reader into the latrine, to force him to contemplate what one author fetchingly designates “the alvine dejections” of society. Augustan satirists, for instance, repeatedly invoked these unpleasant realities, as several recent studies have shown.⁴

Yet the satirist has had to pay a certain price for his lavatory strategies and manipulations. Swift’s Celia poems have earned him the slander of literary critics and the almost prurient interest (and condescension) of psychoanalysts. And Swift has been dubbed as suffering from “the excremental vision,” and even supposedly intelligent fellow satirists (who should know better), like Thackeray and Huxley, have openly rebuked him.⁵ So seriously does society guard the portals of its private throne room that it will call the satirist sick, perverted, or even mad, for his spying at the keyhole or prying at the lock. One comic volume hardly misrepresents the “niceties” of advertising “tastes” on television.

Toilet cleansers: Demonstrations of toilet cleansers must not show a shot of a lavatory pan, but a toilet cleanser may be shown on a bathroom window ledge or being held above the actual toilet. This should not reveal any part of the toilet itself.

Toilet paper: Care should be taken when showing toilet rolls. They should not be shown installed.⁶

Precisely because of this continual fastidiousness, society is vulnerable to the satirist, who, more often than not, will plunge us up to our nostrils in curiously questionable and unpleasant fecal matter. He may have to pay for his aggressiveness by being slandered and misunderstood, but he nonetheless achieves several of his purposes—to rivet the attention, to shock, and to move his audience. The satirist may offend, but it is worth it. He frequently obtains a degree of power in his writing, and at his best, he will continue to be read. Hundreds have maligned Swift, but millions have read him. Camus once observed that “art can never be so well served as by a negative thought.” Indeed, the ugly and the negative are, according to the satirist’s prescription, mysteriously transmogrified into the affirmative. In Pope’s words, “There is a real beauty in an easy, pure, perspicuous description even of a low action.”⁷

As a matter of fact, from the earliest times, satirists have utilized scatological and bathroom humor. Aristophanes, always livid and nearly scandalous in his religious, political, and sexual references, is especially overt in The Clouds, which teems with imagery of sexual perversion and the “bum.” Catullus debunks the vapid writings of Volusius as cacata charta, “shit paper.”⁸ Horace concludes Satire 1.8 with a “victory” of the god Priapus over the witch Canidia, as his wooden statue “cracks,” emitting a wonderful wooden fart that frightens the witches away. Petronius portrays that virtual Hercules of the uncouth nouveau riche, Trimalchio, as one who, when playing volleyball, has slaves ostentatiously bearing a silver chamber pot for him to piss in. Later, at his protracted and almost sickening cena, he himself disappears in the midst of the courses, only to return, giving intimate details to the guests while they are eating concerning the status of his bowels and their particular disorders. The satirist Martial informs Ligurra that he is beneath Martial’s satire or even notice. Instead, some basement and sottish poet is more suitable to scroll Ligurra’s infamy—on the walls of a cacantes, or latrine.⁹ In the age-old tradition of the paradoxical encomium, Francesco Berni (1497?–1535) writes a “chapter” of verses celebrating the urinal.¹⁰ Sir John Harrington’s well-known work A Discourse on a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) is half-way between a learned treatise proposing a new species of flush toilet and a vindictive Menippean satire. John Dryden’s satire of Tom Shadwell in “MacFlecknoe” slowly reduces his corpulent victim to a vast pile of manure:

No Persian Carpets spread th’ Imperial way,

But scatter’d Limbs of mangled Poets lay:

From dusty shops neglected Authors come,

Martyrs of Pies, and Reliques of the Bum.

Much Heywood, Shirly, Ogleby there lay,

But loads of Sh——almost choakt the way.¹¹

Major satirists have never, in fact, permitted us to forget the workings of the emunctories. Rabelais records how the youthful Gargantua, aged five, demonstrates his “genius” by his thorough research in the appropriate “means of wiping his bum.” Like a good experimental scientist run slightly amok, he has tried everything—rose leaves, dill, beets, sheets, nettles, curtains, cushions, rugs, rags, cabbage, straw, oakum, wool, pillow, basket, slipper, hen, rooster, legal briefcase, coif-and-feathers. He concludes, learnedly, that nothing excels the neck of a plump and downy goose. Later, in one of the great urinary scenes of fiction, the gigantic Gargantua, arriving in Paris and surrounded by stupid, gaping Parisians, urinates so furiously and plenteously that he drowns 260,418 citizens, not counting women and children.

With Rabelais doubtless in mind, Swift permits his Lemuel Gulliver, in the land of the Lilliputians, to roll upon his side and make water that to the tiny natives appears to be a “torrent which fell with such noise and violence” about them. Subsequently, in the land of Brobdingnagian giants, the now insignificant Gulliver punctiliously insists upon removing himself “about two hundred yards” from his gigantic owners, hiding himself between two sorrel leaves to move his bowels. Surely such excessive care is unnecessary, for he is not bigger than an insect and perfectly obscure. But, true to form, Gulliver continues to overestimate his own importance and commences, like the typical voyager, to give a minute account of the proceedings and to defend his circumstantial details—even to the point of recording bowel movements: “I hope the gentle reader will excuse me for dwelling on these and the like particulars, which, however insignificant they may appear to grovelling vulgar minds, yet will certainly help a philosopher to enlarge his thoughts and imagination, and apply them to the benefit of public as well as private life, which was my sole design in presenting this and other accounts of my travels to the world; wherein I have been chiefly studious of truth.” It was Swift’s later account of Yahoos as vicious and savage beasts (in human figure) who discharge their excrements from trees upon passers-by that earned him the enmity of so many immaculate Victorian minds. Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, wherein Edmund Curll fishes Cloacina’s “nether realms for Wit,” is similarly remarkable for the urination contest. Curll sends upward the highest stream, winning a hero’s victory.¹³

Nor are the novelists in the least immune from what might be appropriately termed “chamberpottery.” Fielding and Smollett represent innumerable instances of flying jordans and overturning piss pots in Joseph Andrews and Roderick Random. And in Humphry Clinker, a novel in which backsides are exposed as frequently as possible in reason, when people at Hot Well complained of the mud and slime beneath the pump room caused by the river at low ebb, Dr. Deitrich Linden steps forth, conducting “a learned [and tasteful] investigation of the nature of stink.” Ultimately, the sage doctor concludes by praising stench: “Stercoraceous flavour, condemned by prejudice as a stink, was, in fact, most agreeable to the organs of smelling; for, that every person who pretended to nauseate the smell of another’s excretions, snuffed up his own with particular complacency; for the truth of which he appealed to all the ladies and gentlemen then present.” He himself, “when he happened to be low-spirited, or fatigued with business, found immediate relief and uncommon satisfaction from hanging over the stale contents of a close-stool, while his servant stirred it about under his nose.”¹⁴

James Joyce is likewise interested in the secrets of pungent effluvia. In addition to his Chamber Music, verses obviously intended to be heard with a decided tinkle, he provides one of the more memorable outhouse scenes in literature when his Leopold Bloom spends a chapter meditating in the privy. As a matter of fact, Joyce had the annoying habit in pubs of leaping up and dashing into the lavatory himself—to record “epiphanies” that his friends’ conversation randomly provided: “He recorded under ‘Epiphany’ any showing forth of the mind by which he considered one gave oneself away.”¹⁵

If the bathroom and the outhouse have borne a portion of vital satiric tradition over the centuries, does it survive into the twentieth? Despite some prognostications that ours is an age too vicious or effete to produce satire, we are bound to discover that it is not so.¹⁶ In 1957 Kingsley Amis predicted that “we are in for a golden age of satire.”¹⁷ But our century has ever been a fine one for satire, and I suspect that it will be considered in future as having been a great satiric era. A brief survey of selected instances of modern satirists’ uses of the toilet might help to make this more clear.

With a kind of placid, humorous inevitability, indecorum infiltrates most modern satires. Evelyn Waugh’s Mrs. Algernon Stitch, in her black minicar, suavely observes a man she believes she knows who ducks into a London building. With her car she promptly follows, bounding tidily down a flight of stairs until she comes to rest in a gentlemen’s public lavatory. Quite a crowd begins to gather. “ ‘can’t think what you’re all making such a fuss about,’ she said. ‘It’s simply a case of mistaken identity.’ ” Accidents will happen, especially in satire. In Ionesco’s Bald Soprano, in the same accidental fashion, chamber pots commence appearing. Mary, the maid, returns to the Smith home after an afternoon off. Casual and slightly rude upon any occasion, she announces to her employers, for no reason, “I bought me a new chamberpot.”¹⁸

Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita is tortured by the same fortuitous infringements of the unexpected. Having, he had hoped, effectually drugged his Lolita at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel, he now awaits his chance to fondle and make free with her insensitive body. She appears not drugged in the least, however, and Humbert must toss all night, a vampire without a prize. During his vigil, the noises of gracious American living become markedly noticeable. Elevators clap and rattle; cheerful partners in the corridors chatter. “When that stopped, a toilet immediately north of my cerebellum took over. It was a manly, energetic, deep-throated toilet, and it was used many times. Its gurgle and gush and long afterflow shook the wall behind me. Then someone in a southern direction was extravagantly sick, almost coughing out his life with his liquor, and his toilet descended like a veritable Niagara, immediately beyond our bathroom.”¹⁹ Here, at the long-awaited climax of his sexual intriguing, the sensitive-souled rapist is appalled by the teeming machinery of vulgar, materialist America. We, the taut readers, are coerced into quivering and flushing with him, all the way.

Most blatant and overt, of course, as might be expected, is Samuel Beckett. Bound not at all by the Jamesian ethic that Huxley rebuked, Beckett pointedly interrupts his famous Waiting for Godot, assaulting dramatic continuity after the manner of Aristophanes, by having Vladimir suddenly bolt from the stage to relieve himself.²⁰ Toiletries in modern literature, in short, are everywhere. In Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the young intellectual, Piggie, is beset by weakness: he is fat, wears glasses, and has asthma—and diarrhea. But in this last, he is not unique; in the tropical climate, all the boys, subsisting upon fruits, are diarrhetic. And the sure sign that “things are breaking up” and “going rotten” in their pitiful demicivilization is evidenced by the collapse of toilet training. Ralph tries to warn them.

“We chose those rocks right along beyond the bathing-pool as a lavatory. That was sensible too. The tide cleans the place up. You littluns know about that. . . . Now people seem to use anywhere. Even near the shelters and the platform. . . . That’s dirty.”

Laughter rose again.²¹

Shortly, the whole fabric of this tenuous pseudosociety will come toppling down. Cleanliness may not be next to godliness, but its reverse, in Lord of the Flies, is virtually infernal.

Indeed, the pressing requirements of the bowel and the bowl, the satirist is quick to note, emerge as a lowest common denominator. In George Stewart’s Doctor’s Oral, Joe Grantland, after a grueling hour in his English Ph.D. examination, finds himself given a five-minute recess. Joe dashes to the john. All the professors, despite their hauteur and even malice, follow galvanically after. As they all stand like cattle in a row before the urinary trough, Joe suddenly reflects: “In spite of everything, these professors weren’t so different from him after all. In fact at one moment Joe and four of them were standing up side by side, separated only by inch-and-a-half slabs of marble. Here was democracy for you! ‘Each in his separate stall.’ ”²² Here is a particularly complacent kind of urinalysis that envisions the stool as the great leveler of mankind. Lenny Bruce, for one, was tired of the pretense that it wasn’t.

I know intellectually there’s nothing wrong with going to the toilet, but I can’t go to the toilet in front of you. The worst sound in the world is when the toilet-flush noise finishes before I do.

If I’m at your house, I can never say to you, “Excuse me, where’s the toilet?” I have to get hung up with that corrupt facade of “Excuse me, where’s the little boys’ room?”

“Oh, you mean the tinkle-dinkle ha-ha room, where they have sachets and cough drops and pastels?”

“That’s right, I wanna shit in the cough-drop box.”²³

Of course, much twentieth-century literature continues earlier chamberpottery—comedy and games and spilt milk in the bathroom. Such is the case with Portnoy’s poor father, Jack. Like Smollett’s Matt Bramble before him, Jack is comedy’s costive man: he’s constipated, but good. He has not moved his bowels in a week. Incessantly he sits forlornly, upon the can, while Mamma shouts encouragement in to him from the sidelines. “ ‘Look, I’m trying to move my bowels,’ he replies. ‘Don’t I have enough trouble as it is without people screaming at me when I’m trying to move my bowels?’ “²⁴ As he repeatedly emerges from his duty, Sophie ever inquires:

“You, did you move your bowels?”

“Of course I didn’t move my bowels.”

“Jack, what is it going to be with you, with those bowels?”

“They’re turning into concrete, that’s what it’s going to be.”²⁵

Withholding man is ever the same, this constricted father—ever sleeping nights, while sitting (and waiting) on the can.

The chamberpottery is more overflowing in Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, in which the comedy resides in discharging fecal matter upon others. Sebastian Dangerfield’s second-floor toilet pipe collapses as he is contributing his morning oblation. Alas, his wife Marion is on the first floor, directly beneath. She screams, and he hastens to descend.

“You idiot, Sebastian, look at me, look at the baby’s things.”

Marion trembling in the middle of the kitchen floor covered with strands of wet toilet paper and fecal matter. From a gaping patch in the ceiling poured water, plaster and excrement.

“God’s miserable teeth.”²⁶

Similar mishaps befall Ebenezer Cooke in Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, which is about a naïf who illustrates the comical man who befouls himself. In Plymouth, Eben, the innocent would-be poet, is beset by two coarse, gruff men, Captain Scurry and Captain Slye. Threatened with destruction, with no one at hand to save him, Eben’s “legs and sphincters both betrayed him; unble to say on, he sank with wondrous odor to his knees and buried his face in the seat of his chair.” In a trice, the noble laureate of Maryland besmirches himself and becomes a “stinkard.” Later in the novel, cowardice and malaise serve Captain John Cook ill in his “Secret History.” His men having drunk foul water, all, aboard ship in the Nanticoke River, “grewe wondrous grip’d of there bowells, and loose of there bladders, & took a weakness of there reins,” so that they are soon all beshat. They toss their pants overboard and expose “there bummes” over the gunwales, that they might discharge themselves into the sea.²⁷ Their disorder lasts for days. Only the stupendous and corpulent Sir Henry Burlingame restrains himself. Then, as they are about to step ashore one day, with the men farting and Burlingame trembling with his need for relief, they are attacked by Indians. Burlingame was first upon the bow-sprit, ready to step ashore, but the sight of the natives attacking terminates his days of resolve and constraint.

The Salvages giving out with terrible whoops & hollowings, did so smite with fear this Burlingame, that at last he forewent entire the hold of his reins, and standing yet in our prowe like unto an uglie figure-head, he did let flie the treasure he had been those severall daies a-hoarding. It was my ill fortune to be hard behind him, and moreover, crowch’d down beneath his mightie bumme. . . . I was in a trice beshitt, so much so, that I cd by no meanes see out of my eyes, or speake out of my mouth.²⁸

Poor Smith, in the aftermath, slipping in the sewage, topples ashore, and the Indians successfully capture the entire crew. No better debunking of “true history” is more grossly portrayed, beset, and bemired than that perpetrated here.

And lastly, satire of the chamber pot is equally well employed to interrupt the determined lover. In Hawkes’s The Cannibal, Ernst Snow, the deformed, half-crazed duelist and coward, falls frenetically in love with Stella, the general’s daughter. Although she is riding home with another gentleman on the first evening Ernst meets her, he is puffed up with ideals of Germanic heroism, love-lust, and the state and commences to race madly after her carriage. The romantic quest is wonderfully undercut, for Ernst must pause to piss. “He felt that his belt would burst, and so, just before reaching the line of Heroes, he stopped in the park. He thought that his mother would see, would stand looking at him in the dark, so he pushed behind the foliage, behind a bush that scratched at his fumbling hands. The rain became stronger and stronger and still he was rooted behind the bush.”²⁹ Never was romantic lover so cruelly retarded and disrupted.

Not merely ancient heroes and romantic suitors are driven to seek necessary relief. The same fate befalls modern Wall Street bankers and investors. In Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, the ace bond trader Sherman McCoy is expected to be so busy on the trading floor that he barely can find the time to excrete. And indeed, when McCoy (a self-styled master of the universe) wishes to glance at the newspaper (containing news of a growing scandal about himself), his only recourse is repeatedly to smuggle the paper (folded inside a manilla business envelope) covertly into one of the bathroom stalls: the only place in modern industry and business where one can be alone, to take a—peek.³⁰

Yet the satirist utilizes bathhouse and scatological humor to serve purposes that go beyond chamberpottery, beyond the merely comic, debunking, and anticlimactic. Toilet humor at this higher level becomes more bizarre, more far-fetched, more fantastic. An element of the grotesque is added, and the bathroom parodies and exposes many facets of human folly and vice, well beyond simple constipation, cowardice, mischance, and melodramatic passion. Here bodily function, the daily necessities of nature, and the toilet itself become symbols and analogs, like the Roman cena or massive dining room feast, for the broader concerns and larger failings of men.³¹ It is almost suitable, in this more comprehensive context, that the bathroom becomes colored and distorted by features of lunacy and nightmare.

Alan Sillitoe perfectly illustrates the commencement of the bathroom scene’s transformation to the comic unknown. Michael Callen is a nondescript Nottingham bastard, now in London and utterly devoted to the British concept of “getting on.” At length, he is recruited by a smuggling ring, and his job, in an overcoat superhumanly overladen with gold bricks, is to stroll past the inspectors at the airport and to fly gold out of the country.

My legs and shoulders were aching from too much weight . . . and . . . I had to go to the lavatory. . . . all was not well, because when I had finished, I couldn’t get up. The coat hung around me like a cloak of rock. In one way I didn’t want to get up, but to sit there and muse in my own stink till someone found me, or [until I got caught].

I stayed a minute on my knees, hands resting on the rim of the toilet. It was had to move from this position, but at least I was mobile, because even if I got no more upright than this I’d be able to shuffle across the departure hall and up the plane steps on my knees, giving out that I was on a pilgrimage to my favourite saint’s shrine. . . . No, that wouldn’t do, so I crawled around the wall and back again. This hadn’t been part of the training. . . . I was on top of the toilet now, and by a quick but risky flip backwards my feet hit the ground in the right place, and I was shaken but standing, just as the number of my plane was announced as departing from Gate Number Thirteen. I fastened my trousers, then the coat, picked up my briefcase, and was on my way to the pressurized unknown.³²

Beyond such such criminal comedy lies the pathological. Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts discovers homosexuality in the toilet. He is perfectly capable of an eerie ambivalence, suffering (Christ-like) for the sorrows of the world and yet vituperative (Shrike-like) with violence and revenge. He has been drinking whiskey at a speakeasy with Ned Gates. Together in the late snowy winter night, they stagger through a park and into its lonely “comfort station.”

An old man was sitting on one of the toilets. The door of this booth was propped open and he was sitting on the turned-down toilet cover.

Gates hailed him. “Well, well, smug as a bug in a rug, eh?”

The old man jumped with fright, but finally managed to speak. “What do you want? Please let me alone.” His voice was like a flute; it did not vibrate.

“If you can’t get a woman, get a clean old man,” Gates sang.

The old man looked as if he were going to cry, but suddenly laughed instead. A terrible cough started under his laugh, and catching at the bottom of his lungs, it ripped into his throat. He turned away to wipe his mouth.³³

Ruthlessly, Gates and Miss Lonelyhearts pull the old man out of his stall and drag him, giggling with terror, to an Italian bar. Increasingly they bully him, professing to be noted psychiatrists determined to expose his “homosexualistic tendencies.” Ultimately, the old man, stiff with effeminate propriety, rebukes them, and they become violent: in a rage, the men determine to beat their aged victim.

Monomaniacal, too, is Alexander Portnoy. From the age of thirteen onward, he uses the bathroom, not futilely as his father had, but as the setting for orgies of masturbation. “Then came adolescence—half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl, or into the soiled clothes in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine-chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers so I could see how it looked coming out.’³⁴ He abuses himself with sock, brassiere, apple, milk bottle.

If only I could cut down to one hand-job a day, or hold the line at two, or even three! But . . . I actually began to set new records for myself. Before meals. After meals. During meals. Jumping up from the dinner table, I tragically clutch at my belly—diarrhea! I cry, I have been stricken with diarrhea!—and once behind the locked bathroom door, slip [out] a pair of underpants that I have stolen from my sister’s dresser. . . . So galvanic is the effect of cotton panties . . . that the trajectory of my ejaculation reaches startling new heights: leaving my joint like a rocket it makes right for the light bulb overhead, where to my wonderment and horror, it hits and it hangs. Wildly in the first moment I cover my head, expecting an explosion of glass, a burst of flames—disaster, you see, is never far from my mind. . . . I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off—the sticky evidence is everywhere!³⁵

Yet newer, dizzying heights are still to be attained.

Well, [one] afternoon I came home from school to find my mother out of the house, and our refrigerator stocked with a big purplish piece of raw liver. . . . I believe that I have already confessed to the piece of liver that I bought in a butcher shop and banged behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. Well, I wish to make a clean breast of it, Your Holiness. That—she—it—wasn’t my first piece. My first piece I had in the privacy of my own home, rolled round my cock in the bathroom at three-thirty—and then had again on the end of a fork, at five-thirty, along with the other members of that poor innocent family of mine.

So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family’s dinner.³⁶

The roué Piet Hanema, in Updike’s Couples, who has slept with nearly every eligible woman in Tarbox, advances to newer goals at one of the group parties. He steals into the bathroom behind the newly delivered mother Foxy Whitman, with whom he has been having an affair. She finishes using the toilet, and then he pees. They have been wanting to see one another for weeks. “You’re mad to be in here.” she exclaims, but Piet is heedless, resolute.

“Wait. Please. Let me see your breasts.

“They’re all milky.”

“I know. Just for a moment. Please. I do need it.” They listened for steps on the stairs; there were none. . . . Her mouth opened and her tongue, red as sturgeon, touched her upper lip as she reached behind her to undo snaps. Her gown and bra peeled down in a piece. Fruit.

“Oh. God.”

She blushed. . . . “I feel so gross.”

“So veiny and full. So hard at the tops, here.”

“Don’t get them started. I must go home in an hour.”

“And nurse . . . nurse me.”

“Oh darling. No.”

“Nurse me.”³⁷

Although Foxy hesitates, Piet drops suddenly to his knees on the toilet tile and, clasping her behind, commences to suck upon a breast whose milk is “sickeningly sweet.” Closing his eyes in a delirium of heedless feasting, he wildly, blindly, strokingly sucks. Then, suddenly, the spell is broken: “Knocks struck rocklike at the unlocked door inches behind them. Harsh light flooded him. He saw Foxy’s free hand, ringed, grope and cup the sympathetic lactation of the breast jutting un-mouthed. She called out, as musically as before. ‘One moment, please.’ “³⁸ It is none other than Angela, Piet’s wife. Awkwardly, while Foxy flushes the toilet to cover his retreat, he clambers out of the tiny bathroom window and drops one story onto the hard winter ground. Several party people out on the lawn curiously observe his rather handsome but furtive plummet, but he is successful in his narrow escape. Another pleasant little bathroom caper rushes to a close.

Doubtless the most flamboyant and insane comic scene in the toilet occurs in Terry Southern’s Candy. While having a casual drink in Greenwich Village’s Riviera Bar, the naive Candy encounters a stranger who claims to be a gynecologist and insists that she needs a “periodic checkup”—now. He dashes out and returns to the bar with his bag, eager to commence the “inspection.”

Candy was amazed. “Here? In the Riviera? Good grief, I don’t. . . .”

“Oh yes,” said Dr. Johns. “Just here . . . this will do nicely.” He had led the girl to the door of the men’s toilet, and quickly inside. It was extremely small, a simple cabinet with a stool, nothing more. He locked the door.

“Good Grief,” said Candy, “I really don’t think. . . .”

“Oh yes,” Dr. Johns assured her. “Perfectly all right.” He put his little bag down and started taking off her skirt. “Now we’ll just slip out of these things,” he said.

“Well, are you sure that . . .” Candy was quite confused.

“Now, the little panties,” he said, pulling them down. “Lovely things you wear,” he added and lifted her up onto the stool.

“Now you just stand with one foot on each side of the stool, limbs spread, that’s right and . . . oh yes, you can brace yourself with your hands against the walls . . . yes, just so . . . Fine!

He bent quickly to his kit and took out a small clamp and inserted it between the girl’s darling little labias, so that they were held apart.

“Good!” he said. “Now I just want to test these clitorial reflexes—often enough, that’s where the trouble strikes first.” And he began to gently massage her sweet pink clit. “Can you feel that?”

“Good Grief yes!” said Candy, squirming about, “are you sure that this. . . .”

“Hmmm,” said Dr. Johns. “Normal response there all right. Now I just want to test these clitorial reflexes to tactile surfaces.” And he began sucking it wildly, clutching the precious girl to him with such sudden force and abandon that her feet slipped off the stool and into the well of it. During the tumult the flushing mechanism was set in motion and water now surged out over the two of them, flooding the tiny cabinet and sweeping out of it and into the bar.

There was a violent pounding at the door.

“What in God’s name is going on in there?” demanded the manager, who had just arrived. He and the bartender were throwing their weight against the door of the cabinet which by now was two feet deep in water as the doctor and Candy thrashed about inside.

“Good Grief!” she kept saying. They had both fallen to the floor. The doctor was snorting and spouting water, trying desperately to keep sucking and yet not to drown.

Finally with a great lunge the two men outside broke open the door. They were appalled by the scene. “Good God! Good God!” they shouted. “What in the name of God is going on here!”

A police officer arrived at that moment and was beside himself with rage at the spectacle.³⁹

Such lunacy and speed are reminiscent of Voltaire, and both Candide and Candy (titles deliberately alike) are lunatic parodies—Candide of the philosophical adventure story, Candy of the pornographic novel. Here, the harried pace and bizarre events lead us toward incredible mayhem and, what is more, to distinct sexual anticlimax.

Günter Grass carries us one step further, toward the religious, the visionary. The German narrator, Pilenz, is in “quest” of his childhood hero, “The Great Mahlke,” after World War II. Of course, Mahlke is gone entirely, and the novel traces the memories Pilenz reviews of Mahlke, which amount to an almost religious adoration (satirically complicated by the fact that Mahlke, like Hitler, is virtually without adorable qualities). At one point during the war, Pilenz is called up into the military labor service. Mahlke had passed through the training camp the previous year, leaving behind his name—carved in the barracks latrine.

My only justification for telling you even this much is that a year before me . . . the Great Mahlke had worn denims and clodhoppers in the same compound, and literally left his name behind him: in the latrine, a roofless wooden box planked down amid the broom and the overhead murmuring of the scrub pines. Here the two syllables—no first name—were carved, or rather chipped, into a pine board across from the throne, and below the name, in flawless Latin, but in an unrounded, runic sort of script, the beginning of his favorite sequence: Stabat Mater dolorosa. . . . The Franciscan monk Jacopone da Todi would have been ever so pleased, but all it meant to me was that even in the Labor Service I couldn’t get rid of Mahlke. For while I relieved myself, while the maggot-ridden dross of my age group accumulated behind me and under me, you gave me and my eyes no peace: loudly and in breathless repetition, a painstakingly incised text called attention to Mahlke, whatever I might decide to whistle in opposition . . . everything he did, touched, or said became solemn, significant, monumental; so also his runic inscription in the pine wood of a Reich Labor Service latrine named Tachel-North, between Osche and Reetz. Digestive aphorism, lines from lewd songs, crude or stylized anatomy—nothing helped. Mahlke’s text drowned out all the more or less wittily formulated obscenities which, carved or scribbled from top to bottom of the latrine wall, gave tongues to wooden boards.

What with the accuracy of the quotation and the awesome secrecy of the place, I might almost have got religion in the course of time.⁴⁰

Grass’s irony is effective because it is subdued. Pilenz’s “devotions” in the outhouse are utterly ludicrous, but his tone remains solemn, sacral, portentous. Still, a bathroom is a bathroom and refuses quite stubbornly to become a church.

A similar technique is employed in Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Nightingales”; the juxtaposing of the commonplace-sounding “Sweeney” with nightingales is ironic and absurd. So it proves to be in the poem as well: we meet there the modern “apeneck Sweeney,” carousing with prostitutes at an inn. His modern life is, despite all the ceremonious and threatening imagery of foreboding, utterly tasteless and uneventful. Then, suddenly, Eliot abandons the account of these boorish people and turns to images of nightingales (suggesting, of course, the legend of King Tereus), of the Sacred Heart (suggesting Christ), and of Agamemnon dead (with suggestions as well of Oedipus at Colonus). All these later figures connote lives tragically lost and yet purveying significant values and meaning, whereas, in contrst, Sweeney and his rabblement connote valuelessness. Irony is fostered by the bringing of two such groups together, as if there were some analogy, some correlation. And the final touch is given to the irony in the concluding lines, as even the stately Agamemnon is meanly befouled. For the nightingales

sang within the bloody wood

When Agamemnon cried aloud,

And let their liquid siftings fall

To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.⁴¹

Nothing and no one are safe from the satirist’s excrement and frequently subtle execration. Here, the high diction and the religious imagery carry us far from the ordinary jakes.

A final step toward unreality would be for the satirist to cultivate insanity and nightmare. This is precisely what Slawomir Mrozek, the Polish satirist, does in his short story “From the Darkness.” Supposedly a “report” to city comrades from a fellow Communist in a remote village, the story increasingly becomes a hive of lunacy and dementia. Reporting upon other people’s being in “the grip of terrible ignorance and superstition,” the putative author of the “report” turns out to be the most ignorant and superstitious of them all. It is night, and he dares not go outside “to relieve himself” because of ghosts, skeletons, murderers, and unknown forces. And yet, as his “need” to relieve himself enlarges (together with the pace and fury of his imaginings and his fears), all socialist order and planning tumble down, and the narrator is plunged into a mystical and feverish world of paranoia and nightmare. Outside his door, bats are ominously, comically, flitting.

How those bats flap their wings. Christ! how they fly and squeak “pee pee” and again “pee pee.” There is nothing like those big houses where everything must be inside and there is no need to go into the bushes.

But there are even worse things than that. As I am writing this, the door has opened and a pig’s snout has appeared. It is looking at me very queerly, it is staring at me. . . .

Have I not told you that things are different here?⁴²

With this last Kafkesque touch—bats brazenly squeaking out a joyful urinary hymn, we come to the close of our survey of scatological rites, satiric fun, and grotesque games in the toilet. The unmentionable is still being spoken out—loudly—and the traditions of satiric singing are very much alive.