Below is possibly the best literary description of a bowel movement that I’ve ever read. Okay, it’s perhaps the only literary description of a bowel movement that I’ve ever read. It comes from Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise of the Step Mother.

Don Rigoberto half closed his eyes and strained, just a little. That was all it took: he immediately felt the beneficent tickle in his rectum and the sensation that, there inside, in the hollows of his lower belly, something obedient to his will was about to depart and was already wriggling its way down that passage which, in order to make its exit easier, was widening. His anus, in turn, had begun to dilate in anticipation, preparing itself to complete the expulsion of the expelled, whereupon it would shut itself up tight and pout, with its thousand little puckers, as though mocking: “You’re gone, you rascal you, and can’t ever return.”

Llosa goes on to give a vivid illustration of Freud’s theory of anal retention:

Don Rigoberto gave a satisfied smile. Shitting, defecating, excreting: synonyms for sexual pleasure? he thought. Of course. Why not? Provided it was done slowly, savoring the task, without the least hurry, taking one’s time, imparting to the muscles of the colon a gentle, sustained quivering. It was a matter not of pushing but of guiding, of accompanying, of graciously escorting the gliding of the offerings toward the exit. Don Rigoberto sighed once again, his five senses absorbed in what was happening inside his body. He could almost see the spectacle: those expansions and retractions, those juices and masses in action, all of them in warm corporeal shadow and in silence interrupted every so often by muffled gargles or the joyful breeze of a mighty fart. He heard, finally, the discreet splash with which the first offering invited to leave his bowels plopped—was it floating, was it sinking?–into the water of the toilet bowl. Three or four more would fall. Eight was his Olympic record, the consequence of an extravagant lunch, with murderous mixtures of fats, sugars, and starches washed down with wines and spirits. As a general rule he evacuated five offerings; once the fifth was gone, after a few seconds’ pause to give muscles, intestines, anus, rectum, due time to assume their orthodox positions once again, there invaded him that intimate rejoicing at a duty fulfilled and a goal attained, that same feeling of spiritual cleanliness that had once upon a time possessed him as a schoolboy at La Recoleta, after he had confessed his sins and done the penance assigned him by the father confessor.

Llosa then sums up this wonderful exposition with a poignant maxim:

But cleaning out one’s belly is a much less dubious proposition than cleaning out one’s soul, he thought.

Short of King Eglon’s disastrous time of “covering his feet,” Llosa’s is the only account of defecation I have come across, and this presents a Reader’s Challenge. Yes, I’m challenging you, dear reader, to send me chapter and verse of any other literary accounts of shitting. Never mind that, including myself, I have approximately one reader. Send ‘em along as comments. Do it now before the rush overwhelms my inbox.

More on Llosa literary corpus to come…