‘Our Hands are Dirty:’ Using Waste to Respond to Environmental Apocalypse in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad
This essay considers the relationship between the ‘hygienic imagination,’ waste, and climate change in Jennifer Egan’s 2010 novel A Visit From the Goon Squad. I argue that Egan’s variety of wastelands – from the September 11th attacks, to punk rock metaphors of filth, to a future environmental dystopia – offer a critique of a hygienic imagination which transforms homogeneity, utility, and ethnocentric understandings of personal cleanliness into ethical goods indicative of personal worth. In such a definition of hygiene, the fear of interacting with waste leads to the neglect of people and places identified as waste. Egan’s novel, conversely, invites readers to think about waste, to look at waste, and to get their hands dirty, instead of ignoring and excluding waste as matter that threatens our existence.