No Shit, Sherlock

Why do writers still avoid the most intimate of solitary acts?

A Truth Universally Unacknowledged

Years ago I took to a trip to England to promote the UK edition of my second novel. One of my stops was a literary festival in Bath. Much of the eighteenth-century city is preserved, and reminders of Jane Austen are everywhere—she lived in Bath for several years and her upper-class characters often visit the city to take the curative waters.

In Bath I was invited to be on a panel for a television program about books. I reluctantly agreed. It was a great opportunity to promote my work, but being in front of a camera has always made me nervous, and I was already worn out from travel, which tends to play havoc with my gastrointestinal health.

The taping was done at the august Jane Austen Centre. When the show began, two other authors and I were seated on a dais in front of cameras and an unnervingly large audience. Just as I sat down my already-roiling insides let me know in no uncertain terms that an attack of the trots was coming on. And not just trots—this was threatening to be a mad gallop on the thundering steed of inescapable release.

For the next 45 minutes or so I squirmed and crossed and recrossed my legs, giving clipped, feeble answers to the questions directed at me, while within churned what Nabokov in Pale Fire referred to as “liquid hell.” Somehow, I don’t know how, I held on. All I knew was that there was no way I was going down in Austen history as the Canadian author who crapped his pants on British television. (The producers kindly sent me a video of the show after I got home to Canada -- mercifully it wouldn’t play in my VCR).

The instant the show wrapped I was off the dais and hurtling desperately in the direction of the nearest bathroom, rudely brushing off a woman who tried to halt my progress to tell me she really liked my book and would I sign it please—not now sorry can’t. It was not my best day as a writer.

I remember thinking afterward: I wonder if something like this ever happened to Jane?

Of course it must have. If you’re alive you’ve got a digestive system, a highly sensitive mechanism for taking in what the body needs and expelling what it doesn’t. I’m reasonably confident Jane Austen had one of these, and that it must have gone haywire on her from time to time, as it does for all of us, perhaps even in the midst of polite social gatherings where it would have been difficult to extricate oneself swiftly and gracefully.

One can’t assume the same complete physical equipment in Austen’s fictional characters, however. Her characters eat, but that’s as far as it goes. Whether their digestive tract runs all the way from intake to outflow is left unspoken.

No Shit, Sherlock

The same is true for most of the classics and the famous fictional people in them. For this essay I made a list of as many memorable literary characters as I could bring to mind, and asked myself a simple question: do they poop? In just about every case, they don’t. Meaning, of course, the writer doesn’t mention it.

Sherlock Holmes and Watson, Scheherazade, Emma Bovary, Jay Gatsby, Lady Macbeth, King Lear, Captain Ahab and Queequeg, Milton’s Satan, Anne of Green Gables, Odysseus, Mrs Dalloway, Jean Valjean, Anna Karenina, Victor Frankenstein, Robinson Crusoe and Friday, Frodo Baggins, Winnie-the-Pooh.

They all eat, and some of them get into pretty rough circumstances, without the usual genteel trappings that cloak our embarrassing animal necessities from ourselves and others. And yet none of them ever needs to relieve themselves (James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom was a scandalous exception in this regard). With most of these unforgettable and so very real fictional beings, imagining them doing that is almost unthinkable.

It’s been suggested, I can’t remember where, that The Great Stink of London in 1858 supposedly contributed to the “cleaning up” of English literature. Victorian prudishness about bodily functions emerged partly as a response to this terrible urban sewage crisis.

But it’s not just the classics that carefully omit this aspect of our lives. The same avoidance can be found in a lot of contemporary fiction. Which is odd, because we’re not squeamish about much else anymore. The stories we devour nowadays are so often replete with unabashed sexual encounters and brutal violence. As readers, television viewers and moviegoers, we’re just fine, it seems, with sweat, tears, blood, foul language, nakedness, and graphic depictions of depraved and revolting behaviour.

And yet this one utterly natural, quotidian act is still largely absent from certain kinds of stories, or so it seems to me. Am I wrong about this? Maybe I just haven’t read the right books, or I’m missing obvious examples I’ve simply forgotten (Japanese culture has a completely different relationship with bodily functions; in Tokyo you can buy toilet paper with poems on it).

Anyhow, I’m curious: what are the unwritten rules that tend to govern how and when fecal matters are allowed to appear in fiction?

What, one might ask, is the story ecology of shit?

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Both social and literary conventions clearly have a lot to do with which bodily functions are mentionable and which are still beyond the pale, or need to be rendered harmless by remaining the stuff of jokes and uneasy laughter. We tend to be guided by genre norms in life just as in books. The two realms are mutually reinforcing. Stories can convince us, for example, that our personal growth should follow a clear three-act hero’s journey structure rather than devolve into a messy, confusing muddle of false starts, stagnation, and fruitless detours.

It seems nearly impossible to imagine feces getting a mention in some fiction genres. A writer of romance novels wouldn’t dream of spoiling the reader’s erotic fantasy by having the love interest stride manfully to the toilet right after he and the heroine have just grown tantalizingly closer over a shared morning coffee. If that happened in a Harlequin, you’d immediately suspect you’d picked up the wrong book and what you were reading was actually satire or farce.

In genres that permit greater creativity and freedom the rules appear to be changing. Becoming a grandfather who reads to his grandchild I’ve noticed the brown stuff showing up more and more in books for kids. Any two-year-old can assure you there’s nothing funnier than poop. Even the word provokes giggles. But it’s also just there in some stories for children, an unremarkable fact of life. Thankfully we no longer believe kids should be ashamed of what their bodies naturally do.

Side note: there supposedly exists an unwritten rule in children’s publishing called “the diaper line”: picture books can show babies in diapers but can’t show them being changed. I have no idea if this is true—can anyone familiar with the children’s book world confirm or deny it?

And now of course there’s an emoji for the unmentionable, abstracted into the realm of cartoon cuteness. Shit has been given a face. A smiling, acceptably sanitized face to let defecation into the stories we share with each other.

For a writer deciding whether to let their characters have a colon or not, there’s plotting and pacing to think about, too, not just genre conventions. Why have a character visit the bathroom at all unless there’s some narrative justification, something that ups the stakes and has consequences down the line. And that particular room is rarely where such vital story developments occur, or are likely to occur. One reason being is that when we poop we tend to do it alone. In a story you usually need other characters around to make something interesting and meaningful happen. In real life the last thing most of us want during this most intimate of solo acts is an audience.

In one early chapter of Don Quixote, Cervantes describes Sancho Panza’s urgent nighttime attempt to void his bowels right next to his master without the worthy gentleman of La Mancha noticing. If course the Don does notice, and that’s what makes the scene so funny and also meaningful: the awkward smelly moment reveals these characters not as they want others to see them but as they really are. It’s an illusion of depth, sure, but a powerful one that serves the novel’s preoccupations with fiction vs reality.

Self-censorship by writers with an eye to their market is probably at work too in keeping feces out of the pages of fiction, at least commercial fiction that looks only to entertain or prop up the carefully curated reality of a particular social class. In fiction like this the most basic human experiences tend to get viewed through an Instagram filter. Characters whose lives we’re meant to see as elevated above the ordinary in some way—through tragedy, heroism, or a great love that crosses oceans—rarely drop trou. The books simply sell better that way.

Planet Poop

One fascinating recent exception is Andy Weir’s The Martian, a rare popular bestseller that makes fecal matter central to the plot. Stranded astronaut Mark Watney’s survival literally depends on using human waste as fertilizer to grow potatoes on Mars.

The Martian treats feces matter-of-factly, leavening the gross-out factor with Watney's characteristic humor but without any juvenile giggling or deliberate crudeness. It’s just another engineering problem Watney needs to solve: how to create a sustainable food source when you're stuck on a planet with no living soil.

In Weir’s novel defecation thus serves an important narrative purpose that has nothing to do with shock value, comedy, or satire (satirists from Jonathan Swift on have employed excrement as an effective way to bring pretension down off its pedestal). This unpleasant waste product we hurry to dispose of gets redeemed and shown for what it really is: the stuff of life.

As Doggy Do, So Do I

I’ve just finished writing a novel about dogs. It’s a fable—by which I mean my canine main character can speak, much of the time. Writing about these marvelous beings, I realized pretty quickly that I couldn’t ignore the gross and sometimes shocking things that doggies do. They love to roll in whatever rotting crap they come across. They lick their own nether regions. They eat feces with gusto, sometimes their own. They’re enthusiastic investigators of other dogs’ butt-holes. When great-aunt Tillie drops by for tea, good old Scamp will insist on sticking his exploratory snout right in her crotch. We housetrain dogs and put them in shows as if they’re art objects we’ve crafted, but the wolf is still there, under the surface.

Dogs are not respectable, and that’s the most wonderful thing about them. There’s no shame for them in defecation and its products—though there may be plenty of embarrassment for their human owners when nature calls at the wrong moment or in the wrong place.

For me there was no getting around any of this in my story without being false to what a dog is and what a dog loves. And dogs clearly love shit. Facing that was oddly liberating. It let me off my own leash, so to speak, to mention bodily functions I likely would have avoided or not even thought of mentioning with a more human-centered story.

The novel begins in the Ice Age, with a wolf kicked out of his pack who starts hanging around a human encampment, where there are bones to scavenge and plenty of rich, greasy turds to eat. According to some anthropologists, our poop played a crucial role in tempting wolves to get cozy with us in the first place. In my story I take up that idea, from the wolves’ perspective.

It was writing this dogcentric novel that brought the question of defecation in fiction into the light for me, and led to this essay. It would be good, I think, for us to be less self-housebroken as writers. As readers, too, what does our reaction to encountering feces in fiction say about who or what we think we are? I’ve written elsewhere about the fairy tale of so-called realism and how literature needs to let the rest of nature in. A good place to start would be with our own basic biology. If we’d rather not write honestly about something we all do every day, what else might we be forgetting, or avoiding? We owe our readers—and ourselves—the whole messy truth.

Endnote: This essay went through many drafts before I figured out just what I wanted to say on this topic; a testament to how squeamish this topic still makes me. If you found my writing worth your time, please give it a like and/or leave me a note. We writers thrive on hearing from readers.

[Image ID: Dalmation pooping, pen and ink sketch by Jeff Bird, from Pinterest]