Making Waste: Leftovers in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (review)

The book jacket announces the subject with a glorious, full-colour reproduction of a scene from William Hogarth's The Election: Chairing the Member. Cropped to omit a complicated human scene, this framing features some agitated swine who are about to plunge off a footbridge. The pigs, then, appear to carry the semiotic weight for "waste" and to proclaim the book's subject. Sadly, the pigs never reappear within the book. In this way, Making Waste does not quite live up to anticipation. Where the jacket sets up the expectation for a wide-scale cultural analy sis or perhaps for a historical exploration of actual material waste-stuff such as rubbish, excrement (pig feces?) and so on-Sophie Gee's real focus is more abstract, namely the philosophical nature of waste in the long eighteenth century. Though actual waste is some times referenced-the ruins of the Great Fire of London, for instance-the overall trajectory of the book is, according to its author, to track the motion of waste as it changes from being "the literal" to "the notional," or from being "residue created by historical events" to "being the leftovers created by literary narratives" (5).

To be sure, the book has its virtues. It works especially well when it explores the deeply paradoxical nature of waste, as succinctly and elegantly summarized in a late chapter: "[Waste] is empty but full. Abject but life-intended. It putrefies, and it proliferates ... We want to dispose of it, and we long to hold on to it. Waste is a sign that our lives are beset by loss ... our instinct is to banish waste from sight, but our deeper desire is to memorialize it, to forestall loss ... Waste, a sight of decay, disaffection, disgust, dismay, refusal, is the physical manifestation of the human experience of loss, the closest we get to death on a daily basis" (108). Working off these paradoxes, the chapters on Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe have their special strengths. In the chapter "The Man on the Dump," Gee maintains that Swift prized waste "because, in its abjection, it told a story of Englishness that he particularly wanted to have told" (91). Unlike Joseph Addison, Swift ridiculed the idea that waste could be made to look like plenitude (97), and for him madness absolutely lies in the inability to tell the difference between waste and plenitude. Gee locates this concern in Swift's rejection of Roman Catholic doctrine, and in particular in the idea that base matter can be made divine (99). Swift's insistence on the "reality" of waste serves to rebuke his political adversaries (107). None of these arguments are entirely new, yet framed within the wider context of the book, they have a special coherence. Gee's reading of the much-discussed "A Lady's Dressing Room" adds poignancy to the poem by perceiving the paradoxical nature of Strephon's condition, the ways in which "desire and disgust are usually directed toward the same object," and the fact that "the things we most love threaten to decay into the putrefaction of which we are most afraid" (111).

The Defoe chapter, "Holding on to the Corpse: Fleshly Remains in A Journal of the Plague Year," is arguably the strongest and most original, as Gee focuses on the human remnants and leftovers that fill the narrative. She argues that the corpses crowding the landscape as a result of the plague are waste, yet they are waste that is loved: Defoe's narrative captures the tension between desire to retain and desire to dispose of the corpse. His narrative also emphasizes proximity of vitality to waste and taps more broadly into a deeply paradoxical human response to waste.

Earlier chapters serve to explore the linguistic nature of "waste," and, though they cannot be faulted for their erudition, they can appear to be long to a somewhat different project, one that sounds like the dissertation from which they...