Resumen de Traumatic Incontinence of Old Age in Contemporary Fiction
Ageing incontinence accounts for a great part of the characters’ trauma of getting old in contemporary literature. This chapter intends to, by focusing on the literary depiction of the scatology of old age, investigate how the aged characters choose to react to their own incontinence, or to that of people around them. Literary writings include David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence, Philip Roth’s Patrimony, and Doris Lessing’s The Diaries of Jane Somers. The aged characters normally suffer from their dread of the inconvenience caused by the offensive smell from their incontinent excretion, and therefore they would choose to avoid any possible contact and communication, developing agoraphobia in seclusion. Aging incontinence, the unwilling and inevitable violation of rules of hygiene the aged characters have been taught and have practiced for all their life, causes psychic pain. In addition to the humiliation of the relying fourth age, incontinence also triggers intergenerational strains. Desmond in Deaf Sentence reflects on the reversal of the infant-parent relationship, before the almost ritualized scene of changing a nappy on his 89-year-old father. Philip Roth in Patrimony, after giving a detailed account of the faecal scene from his father’s incontinence, accepts his father’s crap as a ‘patrimony’. Jane Somers, the narrator character in Lessing’s The Diaries of Jane Somers directs her attention to the smell of the toilet and commode of the aged Maudie, relating it to the smells of old age, to the general human condition.
