White Flag: the ode to a solid stool
Gately and the other White Flaggers fall about, laugh from the gut, a turd that practically had a pulse, an ode to a solid dump; but the lightless eyes of certain palsied back-row newcomers widen with a very private Identification and possible hope, hardly daring to imagine…. A certain Message has been Carried.
Context
The Irishman's rapturous testimony to his first adult solid bowel movement is the scene's proof-of-concept for sincerity-through-vulgarity: the most ridiculous, gross, un-hip speech possible — a fifty-year-old immigrant "wax[ing] lyrical" about a stool that "practically had a poolse," delivered in near-impenetrable dialect — carries the Message that the polished ironist never could. The room laughs from the gut AND a back-row newcomer's dead eyes widen with hope, both at once; the corniness isn't in tension with the truth, it's the delivery vehicle. This is the register the anthology keeps insisting on: the vapider and more embarrassing the surface, the sharper the real thing under it, and here the surface is a literal turd. (Diction/dialect substance is language-grammar's; the landed point is the vulgarity-as-sincerity register.)