Great Farts of Literature—Ranked

Two Gentleman from Verona

/ 4

by William Shakespeare

Act 4, scene 4, lines 1843–1860

Credit: OpenSourceShakespeare

Text

LAUNCE: . . . O, 'tis a foul thing when a cur cannot keep himself
in all companies! I would have, as one should say,
one that takes upon him to be a dog indeed, to be,
as it were, a dog at all things. If I had not had
more wit than he, to take a fault upon me that he did,
I think verily he had been hanged for't; sure as I
live, he had suffered for't; you shall judge. He
thrusts me himself into the company of three or four
gentlemanlike dogs under the duke's table: he had
not been there—bless the mark!—a pissing while, but
all the chamber smelt him. "Out with the dog!" says
one: "What cur is that?" says another: "Whip him
out" says the third: "Hang him up" says the duke.
I, having been acquainted with the smell before,
knew it was Crab [the dog], and goes me to the fellow that
whips the dogs: "Friend," quoth I, "you mean to whip
the dog?" "Ay, marry, do I," quoth he. "You do him
the more wrong," quoth I; "'twas I did the thing you wot of."

Curator's Note

In this scene, we learn of the great magnanimity of Launce, who not only doesn't blame his dog for his own farts but claims his dog's as his own. Launce's bravery asks us to reflect on our own willingness to own up to the harm we have caused . . .

The year was 1999, and my teammates and I were playing in a high school volleyball tournament in Youngstown, Ohio. As we sat on the bleachers, a silent but consequential fart wafted into our nostrils. Rachel, sitting next to me, sniffed loudly and asked, "Who farted?" As there were no dogs in the vicinity, the culprit had no one to blame, and we sat through a long, awkward silence amid the vile air. Dear Rachel: 'Twas I did the thing you wot of. It was me.

The Canterbury Tales

/ 4

by Geoffrey Chaucer

“The Miller’s Tale,” lines 698–702

Credit: https://librarius.com

Text

This Nicholas just then let fly a fart
As loud as it had been a thunder-clap,
And well-nigh blinded Absalom, poor chap;
But he was ready with his iron hot
And Nicholas right in the arse he got.

Bonus Text

Original Middle English
This Nicholas anon leet fle a fart,
As greet as it had been a thonder-dent,
That with the strook [Absolon] was almoost yblent;
And he was redy with his iren hoot,
And Nicholas amydde the ers he smoot.

Curator's Note

This fart from Chaucer is one of the best known in the Western canon. Nicholas is carrying on an affair with Alisoun, whom Absolon also desires. Alisoun has previously tricked Absolon by presenting the cheeks of her buttocks for a kiss Absolon had intended to plant on the cheeks of her face. This time, when Nicholas puts his tush out the window, Absolon is ready with a red-hot piece of iron.

While there is little evidence that Nicholas and Alisoun's prank was widely practiced during the Middle Ages, and even less to support the notion that it was commonly known as "ye olde orifice switcheroo," we do know that a blinding fart to the face never gets old.

The Divine Comedy

/ 4

by Dante Alighieri, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Inferno," canto 21, lines 136-39

Text

Along the left-hand dike [the troop of demons] wheeled about;
But first had each one thrust his tongue between
His teeth towards their leader for a signal;

And he had made a trumpet of his rump.

Curator's Note

While surely Dante was not the first person to realize the physical and sonic similarities between farting and playing a trumpet, he was possibly the first person to write a moral tale featuring a fart as a demonic signifier. The demon's message is in response to his minions first having blown raspberries with their tongues between their lips, merely imitating a fart. The principal demon shows us why he is boss.

Much credit is due to Longfellow in this translation for his choice of "rump" and "trumpet" for cul and trombetta in the original Italian, as the word "rump" is playfully doubled in the word "trumpet." Other options the poet doubtless weighed—such as "butt horn," "ass cornet," and "bum bugle"—still strike one as infelicitous, though "booty kazoo" has a nice ring to it.

The Satanic Verses

/ 4

by Salman Rushdie

Chapter 3

Text

The [manticore] composed itself. “The point is,” it said fiercely, “some of us aren’t going to stand for it. We’re going to bust out of here before they turn us into anything worse. Every night I feel a different piece of me beginning to change. I’ve started, for example, to break wind continually [. . .] I beg your pardon.”

Curator's Note

Both Rushdie's man-turning-into-a-manticore character and Milan Kundera's translator below avoid the word "fart" and opt for the euphemistic image of "breaking wind." Similarly, the man-cum-manticore begs pardon for his flatulence. Unlike several farts analyzed elsewhere, this fart is neither defiant nor strategic. We have very few details about the scent or strength of this fart, as the passing of gas in this case is not purposeful but an ongoing mild embarrassment to this character. In fact, the fart is not narrated at all but presented in an ellipsis.* Rushdie does not linger, unlike most farts.

*Here and elsewhere, bracketed ellipses indicate ellipses in the original text.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

/ 4

by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim

Part 2, Body and Soul, section 6

Text

Once her mother decided to go naked in the winter when the lights were on. Tereza quickly ran to pull the curtains so that no one could see her from across the street. She heard her mother's laughter behind her. The following day her mother had some friends over: a neighbor, a woman she worked with, a local schoolmistress, and two or three other women in the habit of getting together regularly. Tereza and the sixteen-year-old son of one of them came in at one point to say hello, and her mother immediately took advantage of their presence to tell how Tereza had tried to protect her mother's modesty. She laughed, and all the women laughed with her. Tereza can't reconcile herself to the idea that the human body pisses and farts, she said. Tereza turned bright red, but her mother would not stop. What's so terrible about that? and in answer to her own question she broke wind loudly. All the women laughed again.

Curator's Note

File this one under Farts for Feminism? We have bodies, and so long as we do, let the leaked evidence of their uncontainable nature be an intransigent stench in the noses of all who would control us! To be fair, though, Tereza's mother is shown to be less an apologist of body acceptance and more a mean girl intent on shaming people who are less exuberant than she is about their excretory systems. The takeaway: While the body's unruliness can be a source of embarrassment, it also reminds us how survival depends on sometimes letting loose.

The School for Good and Evil

/ 4

by Soman Chainani

Chapter 3, The Great Mistake

Text

. . . Agatha felt . . . a nervous rash across her neck—

"You know what happens to intruders, don't you," Beatrix said.

. . . Girls crowded around her ominously.

Do something now!

She did the first thing she thought of and delivered a swift, loud fart.

An effective diversion creates both chaos and panic. Agatha delivered on both counts. Vile fumes ripped through the tight corridor as squealing girls stampeded for cover and fairies swooned at first smell, leaving her a clear path to the door.

Curator's Note

The School for Good and Evil is a YA fantasy novel, but as Chainani's artful descriptions of Agatha ripping a big one remind us, even in the realm of magic, few forces can match the power a well-timed fart.

Hatchet

/ 4

by Gary Paulsen

Chapter 1

Text

Now the plane lurched slightly to the right and Brian looked at the pilot. He was rubbing his shoulder again and there was the sudden smell of body gas in the plane. Brian turned back to avoid embarrassing the pilot, who was obviously in some discomfort. Must have stomach troubles.

. . . [Brian's father] was working in the oil fields of Canada [and] Brian was riding up from New York . . . , riding in the bush plane with the pilot named Jim or Jake or something who had turned out to be an all right guy, letting him fly and all.

Except for the smell. Now there was a constant odor, and Brian took another look at the pilot, found him rubbing his shoulder and down the arm now, the left arm, letting go more gas and wincing. Probably something he ate, Brian thought.

. . .

More smell now. Bad. Brian turned again to glance at the pilot who had both hands on his stomach and was grimacing in pain, reaching for the left shoulder again as Brian watched.

"Don't know, kid [. . .]" The pilot's words were a hiss, barely audible. "Bad aches here. Bad aches. Thought it was something I ate but [. . .]"

He stopped as a fresh spasm of pain hit him. Even Brian could see how bad it was—the pain drove the pilot back into the seat, back and down.

"I've never had anything like this [. . .]"

. . .

Brian knew.

The pilot was having a heart attack and even as the knowledge came to Brian he saw the pilot slam into the seat one more time, one more awful time he slammed back into the seat and his right leg jerked, pulling the plane to the side in a sudden twist and his head fell forward and spit came. Spit came from the corners of his mouth and his legs contracted up, up into the seat and his eyes rolled back in his head until there was only white.

Only white for his eyes and the smell became worse, filled the cockpit, and all of it so fast, so incredibly fast that Brian's mind could not take it in at first.

Curator's Note

This opening scene from Gary Paulsen's Hatchet provides us with a deeply ominous sense of the fart. Poor Brian is just learning to navigate shared custody due to his parents' divorce and is flying to meet his father for the summer. He politely attempts to ignore the increasingly potent stench emanating from the pilot, Jim or Jake, or whoever this assblaster flying the plane is, but as he soon realizes, the pilot's loss of sphincter control portends not a momentary breakdown of bodily integrity but DEATH.

Note Paulsen's use of the somewhat peculiar phrase "body gas," presumably to prevent readers from thinking the plane is leaking fuel.

Don Quixote

/ 4

by Miguel Cervantes, translated by Samuel Putnam

Chapter 20

Text

At this juncture, whether it was the cool of the morning which was coming on, or something laxative he had eaten at supper, or—which is most likely—merely a necessity of nature, Sancho felt the will and desire to do that which no one else could do for him; but so great was the fear that had lodged in his heart that he did not dare stir by so much as the tip of a fingernail from his master’s side. It was, however, out of the question not to satisfy the need he felt; and what he did, accordingly, in order to have a little peace, was to remove his right hand which held the back of the saddle, and with this hand he very adroitly and without making any noise unloosed the slip-knot which alone sustained his breeches, thus letting them drop to the ground, where they lay like fetters about his feet; after which, he lifted his shirt and bared his behind, no small one by any means.

Having done this—and he thought it was all he needed to do in order to be rid of his agonizing cramps—he encountered another difficulty: how was he to vent himself without making some noise or sound? Gritting his teeth and huddling his shoulders, he held his breath as best he could; but despite all these precautions, the poor fellow ended by emitting a little sound quite different from the one that had filled him with such fear.

“What noise was that, Sancho?” said Don Quixote.

“I do not know, sir,” he replied. “It must be something new; for adventures and misadventures never come singly.”

Bonus Text

He then tried his luck again and succeeded so well that, without any more noise or disturbance than the last time, he found himself free of the load that had given him so much discomfort. But Don Quixote’s sense of smell was quite keen as his sense of hearing, and Sancho was so close upon him that the fumes rose in almost a direct line, and so it is not surprising if some of them reached the knight’s nostrils, whereupon he came to the aid of his nose by compressing it between two fingers.

“It strikes me, Sancho,” he said in a somewhat snuffling tone of voice, “that you are very much frightened.”

“That I am,” replied his squire, “but how does your Grace happen to notice it, now more than ever?”

“Because you smell now more than ever, and it is not of ambergris.”

“That may well be,” said Sancho, “but I am not to blame; it is rather your Grace, for keeping me up at such hours and putting me through such unaccustomed paces.”

“Retire, if you will, three or four paces from here, my friend,” said Don Quixote, without taking his fingers from his nose; “and from now on, see to it that you take better care of your person and show more respect for mine. It is my familiarity with you that has bred this contempt.”

“I’ll wager,” said Sancho, “your Grace thinks I have done something with my person that I ought not to have done.”

“It only makes it worse to stir it, friend Sancho,” Don Quixote answered him.

Curator's Note

The fart that hatched the idea for this project. My friend, have you read Don Quixote? Did you know that it is hilarious? The genius of this particular misadventure, and the more tangible events that follow, speaks for itself.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

/ 4

by Louise Erdrich

Chapter 18, fart 1

Text

It was the winter of instructional beans, for every time Margaret boiled up a pot of rock-hard pellets drawn from the fifty-pound sack of beans that were their only sustenance beside the sour strings of meat, she reminded Nanapush of each brainless turning point last fall at which he should have killed the moose but did not.

. . . She never boiled the beans quite soft enough, either, for she could will her own body to process the toughest sinew with no trouble. Nanpush, however, suffered digestive torments of a nature that soon became destructive to his health and ruined their nightly rest entirely, for that was when the great explosive winds would gather in his body. His boogidiwinan, which had always been manly, but yet meek enough to remain under his control, overwhelmed the power of his ojiid, and there was nothing he could do but surrender to their whims and force. At least it was a form of revenge on Margaret, he thought, exhausted, near dawn. But at the same time, he worried that she would leave him. Already, she made him sleep on a pile of skins near the door so as not to pollute her flowered mattress.

. . . He rolled up in his blankets by the door, then, and waited for the gas pains to tear him apart.

They did come. That night was phenomenal. Margaret was sure that the cans of grease rattled on the windowsill, and she saw a glowing stench rise around her husband but chose to plug her ears with wax and turn to the wall, poking an airhole for herself in the mud between the logs, and so she fell asleep not knowing that the symphony of sounds that disarranged papers and blew out the door by morning were her husband’s last utterances.

Yes, he was dead.

Curator's Note

In addition to being, generally speaking, one of the greatest novelists of our time, Louise Erdrich is, more specifically, the reigning queen of the literary fart. In this exquisitely rendered and uproarious scene, Nanapush farts himself to death. But wait, there's more.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

/ 4

by Louise Erdrich

Chapter 18, fart 2

Text

The whole crowd of Nanapush’s friends and loved ones, packed into the house, lifted a toast to the old man and made a salute. At last, Father Damien spoke, and his speech was so eloquent and funny that in moments the whole room was bathed in tears and sobs.

It was at that moment, in the depth of their sorrow, just at the hour when they felt the loss of Nanapush most keenly, that a great explosion occurred, a rip of sound. A vicious cloud of stink sent mourners gasping for air. As soon as the fresh winter cold rolled into the house, however, everyone returned. Nanapush sat straight up, still wrapped in Margaret’s best quilt.

“I just couldn’t hold it in anymore,” he said, embarrassed to find such an assembly of people around him.

Bonus Text

Yes, he was alive again, because Nanapush farted himself back to life. A farting resurrection—simply sublime.