Why academics avoid the body in books
A LitHub piece on literary flatulence reveals something uncomfortable about how we're taught to read
What happens when you spend years training yourself to ignore the physical world in favor of abstract concepts?
I caught myself laughing at a LitHub piece called "Seven of the Greatest Farts in Western Literature" and then immediately felt guilty about it. The author confesses to spending "the bulk of my twenties in various English programs writing papers with titles like 'Metonymy and Violent Signifiers in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend'" before discovering that literature is full of bodies doing embarrassing things.
I remember writing endless papers about symbolism and discourse while completely missing the fact that Chaucer's pilgrims are constantly talking about sex and bodily functions.
the great sanitization
Somewhere along the way, English departments decided that serious literary analysis meant floating above the messy physical world. We learned to write about "the body" as an abstract concept while ignoring actual bodies sweating, farting, having sex, getting sick.
In Great Expectations, Pip's sister is constantly threatening people with "Tickler" (her cane), and Joe Gargery spends half the novel awkwardly fumbling with his hat.
The LitHub piece mentions Dante placing flatterers in excrement in the Inferno. That's not just medieval grossness for shock value. Dante is making a point about what happens when language becomes divorced from truth.
what we miss when we float
I'm not sure this holds up completely, but I think our discomfort with bodily functions in literature mirrors a broader academic tendency to treat books as pure mind-stuff. We talk about "ideas" and "themes" but rarely about the fact that reading is a physical act performed by bodies.
Maybe that's why so much academic writing feels bloodless. When you train yourself to ignore the physical world in books, you start writing as if you don't have a body either.
The fart essay is funny, sure. But it's also doing something more serious: reminding us that the greatest writers never forgot they were writing for creatures who eat, sleep, laugh, and yes, occasionally break wind. Even when they were exploring the deepest philosophical questions.
