ABSTRACT
Dennis Hollier, in his book Against Architecture, sketches out the history of the shambles’ architectural conversion from shambling figure to upstanding figure. Yet what makes Upton Sinclair’s case particularly compelling is that even as he participates in naturalism’s campaign to put both the sham and the shambles to “shame,” he produces a literary slaughterhouse that haunts the joints of his famous novel in such a way as to unsettle his purist intentions. To begin tracing how naturalist discourse turns its back on virtual waste, the chapter focuses on naturalism’s legacy, a strategy that involves doubling back to a postmodern future where, due largely to a trouble with doubles, the time seems out of joint. Equally suggestive of a link between naturalism and fascism is Klaus Theweleit’s description of how members of the Freikorps reinforce the masculinist model of national health by repeatedly recruiting into their writings the trope of whiteness in order to spread what he calls “the white terror.”
