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The New Middle Ages
On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages
This book presents waste as an aesthetic category that introduces an arsy-versy world where detritus is precious. This aesthetic is applied in the second part to etymology, poking through the "paternal dungheaps" of words, and tracing their origins not to Eden but to Babel, puns, and word play. Finally, in the case of Roland the Farter, who performed annually a jump, whistle, and fart before the king of England, we encounter the resistance of the past to historical rationalization. Roland moons at us across the centuries, deflating our attempts to become one flesh with the past, and placing laughter at the heart of knowing.
239 pages, Hardcover
First published December 26, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 21, 2019
I know, right? Two stars for a book on farts?!
I will tell you why. The closest equivalent to this work is probably Derrida's "The Postcard", probably one of the worst, most pretentious things ever created on Earth. Instead of a postcard, it's about farts. The author would likely scream with childish glee at the comparison, for this work is unabashedly about really nothing at all. Moving at random from topic to topic with fleeting, meaty sections of coherent goodness (the etymology section; the analysis of some extant fartwork; the section on Roland the Farter), this book is way too messy and chaotic to be of any worth except for the more meticulous, cathartine reader. I don't know if Allen did this on purpose just to be funny, because the book is screamingly funny, that's it's big plus--fart and ass and shit jokes abound!--but academically wanting. I thought I'd get a nice history of flatulence, what it meant, and all that, you know, history kind of stuff, not bizarre, random tangents trying to link this or that. I mean, let's face it, you can connect anything if you have half an imagination, the real challenge is to make it worth the slog.
I will tell you why. The closest equivalent to this work is probably Derrida's "The Postcard", probably one of the worst, most pretentious things ever created on Earth. Instead of a postcard, it's about farts. The author would likely scream with childish glee at the comparison, for this work is unabashedly about really nothing at all. Moving at random from topic to topic with fleeting, meaty sections of coherent goodness (the etymology section; the analysis of some extant fartwork; the section on Roland the Farter), this book is way too messy and chaotic to be of any worth except for the more meticulous, cathartine reader. I don't know if Allen did this on purpose just to be funny, because the book is screamingly funny, that's it's big plus--fart and ass and shit jokes abound!--but academically wanting. I thought I'd get a nice history of flatulence, what it meant, and all that, you know, history kind of stuff, not bizarre, random tangents trying to link this or that. I mean, let's face it, you can connect anything if you have half an imagination, the real challenge is to make it worth the slog.
August 6, 2008
"So encompassing an animate presence has air that we find ourselves never alone, even though no one else is around. In a world where we guard jealously our personal space from invasions by other bodies, pongs, and sneezed microbes, this companionable air attends us continually, sustains us in breath, and makes a community of one. Creaturely in itself, the air rearranges subject/object relations as a continuum, and causes our selfhood to expand and contract with the elements" (37).
"Galen's description of bodily waste as an 'alien load' demonstrates how even before one's shit and farts put into question the relation between self and one's neighbor, they have already rendered one's own bodily product a stranger, already changed identity into difference and made an object out of a subject" (46).
"Continuous and without boundary, odor throws into disarray the lines of space and decorum between selfhood and otherness, lines that seem self-evident and indisputable to eyes that can see only two separate bodies" (43)
A rebuke to Charlotte Allen's infamous scorn for the interest in scatology at the 2008 Kzoo, a rebuke to the refusal of laughter (which Allen "reinscribe[s] ... at the center of an epistemological relationship with the world that allows neither any safe distance between subject and object nor the collapse of distances between them" (5)), Valerie Allen's expansive, capacious, frequently hilarious study shows what we can do with a fart. The quotations above should at least hint at what V. Allen offers phenomenologically minded thinkers. Touching (like Mr Hanky: begin at 8m please) on everything, Allen concentrates, naturally, on the Miller's, Summoner's, and Canon Yeoman's Tale, on Malaconda's butttrumpet, on Rabelais, but she also works through land tenure records, fabliaux and farces (of course), chronicle, political treatises, doctrinal anthologies, and the sound transformation rules by which we realize the link between the French pet and the English fart, which perhaps even takes us back to the Latin patior, whose deponent status reminds us, at least in this context, of nothing so much as the English "to smell," which is at once active (I smell something) and passive (I smell of something).
I would have liked to have seen more attention to medieval sensory science, where seeing is a form of touching and of being touched, and I would have liked to have seen more attention to the erotics of the anus, but, with such loving attention to La Farce du Pet, to Roland, who paid for his land tenure with a simultaneous whistle, jump, and fart, and to teasing out farts in so many places--earthquakes, erections, and tragic recognition (which is a kind of explosion of the self)--to complain strikes me as asking to be overfed.
"Galen's description of bodily waste as an 'alien load' demonstrates how even before one's shit and farts put into question the relation between self and one's neighbor, they have already rendered one's own bodily product a stranger, already changed identity into difference and made an object out of a subject" (46).
"Continuous and without boundary, odor throws into disarray the lines of space and decorum between selfhood and otherness, lines that seem self-evident and indisputable to eyes that can see only two separate bodies" (43)
A rebuke to Charlotte Allen's infamous scorn for the interest in scatology at the 2008 Kzoo, a rebuke to the refusal of laughter (which Allen "reinscribe[s] ... at the center of an epistemological relationship with the world that allows neither any safe distance between subject and object nor the collapse of distances between them" (5)), Valerie Allen's expansive, capacious, frequently hilarious study shows what we can do with a fart. The quotations above should at least hint at what V. Allen offers phenomenologically minded thinkers. Touching (like Mr Hanky: begin at 8m please) on everything, Allen concentrates, naturally, on the Miller's, Summoner's, and Canon Yeoman's Tale, on Malaconda's butttrumpet, on Rabelais, but she also works through land tenure records, fabliaux and farces (of course), chronicle, political treatises, doctrinal anthologies, and the sound transformation rules by which we realize the link between the French pet and the English fart, which perhaps even takes us back to the Latin patior, whose deponent status reminds us, at least in this context, of nothing so much as the English "to smell," which is at once active (I smell something) and passive (I smell of something).
I would have liked to have seen more attention to medieval sensory science, where seeing is a form of touching and of being touched, and I would have liked to have seen more attention to the erotics of the anus, but, with such loving attention to La Farce du Pet, to Roland, who paid for his land tenure with a simultaneous whistle, jump, and fart, and to teasing out farts in so many places--earthquakes, erections, and tragic recognition (which is a kind of explosion of the self)--to complain strikes me as asking to be overfed.
March 2, 2018
2.5? Lots of interesting literary and linguistic things here, but somehow the structure lost me and I couldn't quite follow the thread, if indeed there was one. A bit of a candidate for pseud's corner. Best bits, some of the historical parts, especially the last section, but on the whole a bit disappointing.
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February 13, 2017Related book here.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews