![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gogmagogOkay, today I got the best academic book EVER through Interlibrary Loan. It is entitled On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages. (I decided to do one of my five questions for my comps exam on good and bad medieval smells, and my historical list commitee member recommended that I look at this book to help answer that question.)
Why is it so awesome? Let me count the ways:
1) The chapter titles. I will include a few of them here:
- "For the Edification of Copious Shitters and Costive Maidens Whose Hours at Siege Should Be Profitable Employed"
- "Butts and Instruments: Nature versus Art"
- "Farting at the Devil"
- "Shitting Ducats"
- "The Silver-Tongued Butt"
- "The Grammar of Farts"
- "Fartprints of Roland" (part of the intriguingly-named section Die Afterwissenschaft [End-Knowledge, Pseudo-Science, Butthole-Scholarship])
2) The text itself. Again, a couple of choice excerpts from the introduction...
(from her section on the double meaning of the word "bum")
Synchronous with the present yet not, the vagrant moves between past, present, and future, never quite belonging to any. It is the way we might speak of the Middle Ages, the age median between classicism and renaissance, different from modernity and yet its origin. This is how we also speak of a fart, which does not exist qua fart until it passes the anal threshold. A fart in futuro is just trapped wind. A fart long past no longer exists. A fart comes into being in the moment of transition, in between inside and outside, in between cheeks.
(and from her section on the sensory nature of the fart)
A fart is something one may hear, smell, feel, or, God forbid, taste, but it is never visible (lit farts notwithstanding). Refusing the shapes and colors with which we cut letters, the fart is unclaimable for the empire of the eye, which has dominated Western epistemology since Plato. The eye allows us to theorize (Gr. theoreo, "I look at"), to be voyeurs at a safe distance, to read dead words, and snoop uninvited; but the nose requires immediate participation and proximity, and the transient fart can only be performed, never archived. Invisible but audible and smellable, the fart draws us away from the economy of the eye to explore knowledge that one cannot apprehend at a safe distance. Where the eye theorizes, and by claim to objectivity styles its knowledge as critique, sound and smell require closer involvement. Hearing, it is true, occurs also at a distance, yet the noise of a fart violates the distance between subject and object. Medieval sound is an ethical mode, a principle of internal balance and being. Even more so does smell involve intimacy for it alone among the five senses requires both distance and direct contact with its object. Smell makes an impossibility of the punctual subject, for it breaches that critical space between subject and object upon which subjectivity depends; in doing so, it calls into question the very grounds of medieval selfhood.
That second passage occurs on page 3, and I had to put it away because I was on the bus home and I was laughing so hard I was starting to cry. (I think it was the "God forbid, taste" that got me.) But I totally could barely wait until I got home to crack it open again (heh, "crack") and start reading it, because it seems ridiculously fun. I haven't actually looked forward to reading an academic book in years, and I used to be the kind of person who would read ahead in my textbooks for fun when I started undergrad, so here's hoping this is a return to the love of literature which I seem to have been missing for a while now.
Why is it so awesome? Let me count the ways:
1) The chapter titles. I will include a few of them here:
- "For the Edification of Copious Shitters and Costive Maidens Whose Hours at Siege Should Be Profitable Employed"
- "Butts and Instruments: Nature versus Art"
- "Farting at the Devil"
- "Shitting Ducats"
- "The Silver-Tongued Butt"
- "The Grammar of Farts"
- "Fartprints of Roland" (part of the intriguingly-named section Die Afterwissenschaft [End-Knowledge, Pseudo-Science, Butthole-Scholarship])
2) The text itself. Again, a couple of choice excerpts from the introduction...
(from her section on the double meaning of the word "bum")
Synchronous with the present yet not, the vagrant moves between past, present, and future, never quite belonging to any. It is the way we might speak of the Middle Ages, the age median between classicism and renaissance, different from modernity and yet its origin. This is how we also speak of a fart, which does not exist qua fart until it passes the anal threshold. A fart in futuro is just trapped wind. A fart long past no longer exists. A fart comes into being in the moment of transition, in between inside and outside, in between cheeks.
(and from her section on the sensory nature of the fart)
A fart is something one may hear, smell, feel, or, God forbid, taste, but it is never visible (lit farts notwithstanding). Refusing the shapes and colors with which we cut letters, the fart is unclaimable for the empire of the eye, which has dominated Western epistemology since Plato. The eye allows us to theorize (Gr. theoreo, "I look at"), to be voyeurs at a safe distance, to read dead words, and snoop uninvited; but the nose requires immediate participation and proximity, and the transient fart can only be performed, never archived. Invisible but audible and smellable, the fart draws us away from the economy of the eye to explore knowledge that one cannot apprehend at a safe distance. Where the eye theorizes, and by claim to objectivity styles its knowledge as critique, sound and smell require closer involvement. Hearing, it is true, occurs also at a distance, yet the noise of a fart violates the distance between subject and object. Medieval sound is an ethical mode, a principle of internal balance and being. Even more so does smell involve intimacy for it alone among the five senses requires both distance and direct contact with its object. Smell makes an impossibility of the punctual subject, for it breaches that critical space between subject and object upon which subjectivity depends; in doing so, it calls into question the very grounds of medieval selfhood.
That second passage occurs on page 3, and I had to put it away because I was on the bus home and I was laughing so hard I was starting to cry. (I think it was the "God forbid, taste" that got me.) But I totally could barely wait until I got home to crack it open again (heh, "crack") and start reading it, because it seems ridiculously fun. I haven't actually looked forward to reading an academic book in years, and I used to be the kind of person who would read ahead in my textbooks for fun when I started undergrad, so here's hoping this is a return to the love of literature which I seem to have been missing for a while now.
