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Scatology, Chopped Liver, and the Last Supper: Daniel Zimmermann’s Holocaust Novel L’Anus du monde

Intellectual trends in the study of scatology have all tended to agree on the subversive character of scatological rhetoric and representation for social, political, institutional, religious, literary, and artistic discourses. This article offers a brief overview of these trends in order to situate an aspect of Holocaust narrative that has attracted far less attention than other polemical subjects such as the relationship between fiction, history, and memory, or sexuality and violence. The study takes as its focal point the critically neglected novel L’Anus du monde (1996) by the French writer Daniel Zimmermann, in which the scatological, though constituting an excremental assault on the reader’s literary and moral sensibilities, functions against its usually subversive intent. By tracing the novel’s anti-hero on his journey from Drancy to Auschwitz and Treblinka, Zimmermann links the scatological to the themes of gastronomy and anthropophagy, leading ineluctably to the novel’s deeply unsettling conclusion, which in fact has less to do with the scatological than with the Christological overtones of sacrifice and redemption.