As strange as it is, I keep thinking about the relationship between shit and waste. I keep coming back to the ever worsening shit that came from going deeper into the USSR. For whatever reason this reminded me so much of the best description of why communism didn’t work that I’ve ever heard –
my friend Dan from home asked his father during the fall of the Berlin Wall (so he was like 5) what communism was. His dad responded that “communism is when you go to the store to buy toilet paper but you can’t because they only have TVs”.
Now this might have absolutely no relation to the novel but I know Delillo does touch on the ways in which the communist government was out of touch with the people’s needs. I was also thinking about the ways in which shit is really the one type of waste that can’t really tell us much about a civilization, so I wonder why all waste would aspire to be shit. But yeah, while that might be the least constructive blog post ever, I thought we all might need some lightheartedness during mid-terms. Besides, I got to write shit like 20 times, which still makes me giggle.
I also wonder and liked that part about the shit and USSR...and yeah, it's pretty easy to giggle about the word. But I wasa bit interested in the different ways that DeLillo and Pynchon use human excrement to make a point...personally, I find DeLillo's more bearable, and amusing more so than Pynchon's...
I'm talking about this in my paper, so yeah, I find the waste topic interesting... I feel like human garbage and trash is talked about more in Underworld, while shit was discussed more at length in Pynchon. I think Delillo is very focused on trash and the waste human beings create outside of our own bodies. He talks a lot about consumer culture in Underworld, and how people want the option of creating products (and they don't just want one option, but a "range of choices"(785) ), and then we want to discard these used products as waste. It's like a distorted version of what we do with food (take something concentrated and new, then consume it, and excrete it as waste). Human beings (and all other creatures) have always consumed and excreted food, because shit can be re-used and put back into the earth as fertilizer. It contributes to a natural cycle of creation and destruction. The unnatrual cycle of consumer culture involves creating things, using/consuming them, and then attempting to bury them or hide them away. Any attempt to destroy only leads to more waste (aka nuclear waste). We have broken the cycle of creation/destruction, and created a bigger heap of problems (and waste).
I was thinking about a quote from an earlier section where Delillo writes that we make waste and then and only then do we come up with a way to deal with it. On page 791 the text reads, "All those decades, he says, when we though about weapons all the time and never thought about the dark multiplying byproduct." But later, while with Viktor in Russia, Nick says that they get rid of nuclear waste by blowing it up in a nuclear explosion. It's weird how waste and weapons become the same thing. Waste is used as weaponry and weaponry becomes waste. I wonder if he's trying to say that the byproducts of humans are dangerous?