6. Jordan Castro's The Novelist, Georges Bataille, and the Triumph of Fecality

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

Episode 6: Jordan Castro's The Novelist, Georges Bataille, and the Triumph of Fecality

Today we discuss Jordan Castro’s divisive prose debut, paying particular attention to its unprecedented 22-page exposition of a single bowel movement: how it gives form to Bataille’s symbol of the ‘Solar Anus,’ and how this development perturbs and reshapes the contemporary canon.

We then draw parallels between the excretion of the fecal stick and the breech emergence of a newborn, and propose the genesis of certain novels, Castro’s in particular, as a form of male childbirth – an act transitioning from oxymoronic to quotidian, metaphorically and in alleged biological fact, in progressive online spaces like those both Castro and his fictional avatar harangue against. Castro’s work, we go on, is both an antidote to and affirmation of Bataille’s “purely parodic” conception of the world, exemplified by such incursions of the fringe and fantastical into the hermeneutical Commons.

The universe may indeed be a litterbox, the aperture beneath its occupant’s arched and quavering tail ever-widening. But with Castro’s refined sensibility, we argue, comes hope: an abundant release of rich, fertile coagulum awaits, portended here by a stream of meows – at first, strained and hesitant; at last, buoyant, choiring, resolute.

MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

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