{"id":6547,"date":"2012-06-07T17:15:26","date_gmt":"2012-06-07T16:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/?p=6547"},"modified":"2012-06-07T17:15:26","modified_gmt":"2012-06-07T16:15:26","slug":"varlam-shalamov-and-the-art-of-defecation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/2012\/06\/07\/varlam-shalamov-and-the-art-of-defecation\/","title":{"rendered":"Varlam Shalamov and the art of defecation"},"content":{"rendered":"

With apologies to any readers of a sensitive disposition, this is an important subject. Pretty much every Gulag narrative makes mention of the primitive toilet facilities and prison cells and camps – the ubiquitous and foul-smelling parasha<\/em> (slop bucket) and arrangements for its emptying – and there are plenty of references to feelings of shame at the lack of privacy they afforded, but most narratives draw the line there. This is hardly a surprise – a taboo surrounding bodily functions means that we frequently receive a strangely sanitized view of camp life which, for all the filth it depicts and disgust it may evoke, seldom in fact challenges the boundaries of taste.<\/p>\n

Not so in the stories of Shalamov, where we read unflinching descriptions of the bowel movements and meagre fecal productions of the dokhodiaga<\/em> (goner). But Shalamov’s matter-of-fact reflections on defecation are neither gratuitous nor random; they are connected specifically with the theme of writing. In his article ‘Les corps de la m\u00e9moire,’ Eric Lozowy notes that in the story ‘Perchatka<\/a>‘ (Glove), the description of the medical assistant recording on a table the consistency and frequency of the author’s stools, in order to produce a diagnosis of dysentery or pellagra, are connected to the wider themes in the story of writing the illness and, in receiving a diagnosis, recovering identity as a writer. The documenting of the stools is also linked to Shalamov’s fundamental idea of the prose of the document, as expressed in his letters<\/a> and essays<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the little-known tale ‘Afinskie nochi<\/a>‘ (Athenian Nights) – like ‘Perchatka’ from the final collection, and one of the last stories Shalamov wrote – this connection gains an additional dimension. At the start of the story, returning to life after the medical courses have given him a future, the author begins to think about camp existence:<\/p>\n

In Utopia<\/em> Thomas More defines four basic human feelings, the satisfaction of which leads to the highest bliss in More’s terms. In first place More puts hunger \u2014 the satisfaction of having eaten food; the second most powerful feeling is sexual; the third is urination, the fourth defecation.
\nIt was precisely of these four feelings that we were deprived in the camp. (Shalamov, 2:410)<\/p>\n

Thereby positing a grotesque body in Rabelaisian mode, Shalamov’s subsequent treatment of the breakdown of these feelings denies any carnivalesque interpretation that might suggest a celebration of life and the human. On the subject of defecation, to which he devotes most space, he writes:<\/p>\n

Emptying your bowels is no easy task for a goner. Doing up your trousers in fifty degrees of frost is beyond your strength, and in any case a goner empties his bowels once every five days, refuting physiology, and even pathophysiology textbooks. The expulsion of dry pellets of faeces \u2014 the organism had wrung out everything that might maintain life.
\nNo goner obtains any enjoyment, any pleasant feeling, from defecation. […] The cunning half-beast detainee uses defecation to gain a rest, a breather on the via dolorosa<\/em> to the gold mine. The only ruse detainees have in the battle with the might of the state, with its million-strong army of soldier-escorts, social organizations and state institutions. The goner opposes this great power with the instinct of his own arse. […]
\nAttempts to have a rest, take down one\u2019s trousers and squat for a second, for a moment, less than a second, to distract oneself from the torment of work, are worthy of respect. […] [N]ovices sometimes take this illegal form of rest, steal minutes of the working day from the state.
\nAnd then the escort intervenes, bayonet in hand, to expose the dangerous criminal malingerer. In the spring 1938 at the gold face of the \u2018Partizan\u2019 mine I myself was witness to a guard brandishing his bayonet at my comrade:
\n\u2013 Show your shit! It\u2019s the third time you\u2019ve sat down. Where\u2019s your shit? \u2013 accusing a half-dead goner of malingering.
\nThey didn\u2019t find any shit.
\nThe goner Serezha Klivansky, my university comrade, second violinist at the Stanislavski Theatre, was accused of sabotage, illegal rest during defecation in a sixty-degree frost, accused of holding up the work of the section, the brigade, the zone, the mine, the region, the state […].
\nThere really was no shit in Serezha\u2019s bowels; but there were urges \u2018down below\u2019. But you would have to have been a medic, and not a Kolyma medic, but someone from the capital, from the mainland, someone pre-revolutionary, to understand all that and explain it to someone else. Here was Serezha, waiting to be shot for the simple reason that there turned out to be no shit in his bowels. […]
\nMy argument with Thomas More dragged on, but it was coming to an end. All these four feelings that had been trampled, demolished, crushed \u2014 their destruction wasn\u2019t the end of life. They were all resurrected. After resurrection \u2014 only a distorted, ugly resurrection of each of these four feelings \u2014 a camp inmate sits above the \u2018hole\u2019, feeling with interest something soft crawling along his ulcerated bowel, painlessly, but gently, warmly, as if his faeces are somehow sorry to part with his gut. The faeces fall into the pit with a spatter, a splash \u2014 faeces float for a long time on the surface\u00a0in the cesspit, unable to find their place: it\u2019s a start, a miracle. (2:411-2)<\/p>\n

Just when you wonder where the story is taking such contemplations – like several other tales in the final collection, it is quite loosely constructed in comparison with his earlier works – it changes direction completely:<\/p>\n

More acute than thoughts about eating, about food, a new feeling appears, a new demand, completely forgotten by Thomas More in his crude classification of the four feelings.
\nThe fifth feeling is the demand for poetry. (2:413)<\/p>\n

With poetry thus defined as a physical need, Shalamov then discusses poetry evenings he organized with two other convicts at the hospital in Debin where he was working as a medical assistant in the late 1940s. And while the description of the three men reciting poetry to each other in the dressing station is both fascinating and charming, its relationship to the preceding matter, in a story whose title alludes to classical notions\u00a0of art and culture, sticks most firmly in the mind.<\/p>\n

What is significant here, first of all, is the common movement from the internal to the external, which gives both memory and writing physical dimensions – as we also see in the letter from 1971 that was published as the essay ‘O moei proze’ (On my Prose), where everything must forced out (vytalkivaetsia<\/em>) from the brain like a contraction of the heart muscle (6:497). It emphasizes the writing of his ‘new prose’ as a purely internal process – this is not a subject for the muses – and designates the memory and the narration of the labour camp experience as excrement, precious as affirmations of both the life and the disease, but nevertheless\u00a0the waste product of that existence. Placing the source of literature within physical being renders the former ambivalent, all the more so as the status of the body from which it emerges is equally uncertain. The image in ‘Perchatka’ of the skin being shed ‘like a snake’ (2:284) – a symptom of pellagrous dermatitis – relates evacuation to the outer rather than the inner body, to suggest that the body is turned inside out by the physical hardship of the camps, and that the\u00a0skin is ridding itself of the destroyed person, rather than the person of the damaged skin.<\/p>\n

Moreover, ‘Afinskie nochi’ posits a connection between the sublime and the farcical, \u00a0as the poetry evenings that focus on the lyric poets of the early twentieth century are parodied in\u00a0Klivansky’s abject ‘performance’ before the guards. The reference to his former job at the Stanislavski Theatre implies that the unsuccessful act of defecation is his emotional memory, which again suggests the loss of inner being, in both the physical and emotional senses. Shalamov here brings together the most rarefied with most material aspects of humanity to affirm the co-existence of both extremes of experience – an unusual moment in the stories, which more often deny the possibility of anything positive arising out of the camps. But that is not to imply an entirely rosy view.\u00a0Just before sketching the scene with Klivansky, Shalamov asserts that there can be no comedy in the camp theme (2:411), so the black humour of the anecdote reinforces the humiliation of the private becoming the public – another way in which the inner is turned outwards – by subverting the reader’s sense of empathy with the victim, reduced to his physical (mal)functions and further victimized because of these.<\/p>\n

I would suggest that defecation for Shalamov becomes not only\u00a0emblematic of the physical condition of prisoners, but also, because of the expulsive movement, central to the problem of literature produced as a result of the camp experience. Such writing comes\u00a0not from without, through the descent of poetic inspiration (it is notable in the story that although they are all writing poetry,\u00a0the three convicts read others’ works rather than their own, creating a separation from their present situation), but solely from within. But can the corrupted and broken body from which it is expelled produce other than a deformed literature? It probably depends what one means by that, but for me one of the reasons Shalamov is such an extraordinary writer is the bravery with which he faces and incorporates both the deformation, and his own reflections upon it, in his stories.<\/p>\n

Sources<\/h4>\n

Eric Lozowy<\/strong>, ‘Les corps de la m\u00e9moire. \u00c9criture et corporalit\u00e9 dans l\u2019oeuvre de Chalamov’,\u00a0Zagadnienia rodzaj\u00f3w literackich\/Les Probl\u00e8mes des genres litt\u00e9raires<\/em>, 43.1-2 (2000), 99-113<\/p>\n

Varlam Shalamov<\/strong>, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh<\/em> (Moscow: Terra, 2004)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With apologies to any readers of a sensitive disposition, this is an important subject. Pretty much every Gulag narrative makes mention of the primitive toilet facilities and prison cells and camps – the ubiquitous and foul-smelling parasha (slop bucket) and arrangements for its emptying – and there are plenty of references to feelings of shame […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[529,7],"class_list":["post-6547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gulag","tag-gulag","tag-shalamov"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2MwXo-1HB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6547"}],"version-history":[{"count":65,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6617,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6547\/revisions\/6617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}