The Art of Farting: A Methodical and Physico-Theoretical Essay

With “Slavery Undone, or The Society of Free-Farters” by Pierre-Jean Le Corvaisier  / Translated, with an introduction, by Terry Bradford / April 2027 / 4.5 x 7, 200 pp. / 978-1-962728-15-7

First published in 1751 in French, Pierre-Thomas-Nicolas Hurtaut’s The Art of Farting had precedents in the work of such authors as Rabelais, Laurence Sterne, and Jonathan Swift (particularly with the latter’s “The Benefit of Farting Explain’d”), but it was a text more firmly ensconced in the French Age of Enlightenment, a satire of academic writing and scientific discourse that today hasn’t aged an iota. In its time, its mockery of the pompous style of scholars and its challenge to social propriety arguably communicated a send-up of Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, a project with which Hurtaut himself was involved.

Hurtaut’s logorrhea covers all the necessary classifications and divisions, clarifying the distinctions to be made between the pleni-vocal from the semi-vocal Bangers, the clear Crepitus from the thick fart, and the simple from the compound, and concludes with a taxonomy that covers the output of everyone from the Fencing Master, Shepherdess, and Baker to the Geographer and Cuckold. Throughout it all Hurtaut draws on the likes of Martial, Horace, Cicero, and Aristophanes to emphasize the erudition natural to such analysis.

When the book was republished in 1776 (just five years before Benjamin Franklin would tackle the same topic to similar ends in his own “Letter to the Royal Academy”) it was augmented with an additional text, “Slavery Undone, or The Society of Free-Farters.” While long assumed to have been written by Hurtaut himself, it was in fact authored by Pierre-Jean Le Corvaisier, a somewhat mysterious figure of whom little is known. The added text was less a parody of academe than a mockery of the excessive ceremonial rituals and proto-bureaucracy of the Masons (and possibly, if to a lesser extent, the publishing world). Both texts are included in this first English translation of an overlooked Enlightenment classic.

Pierre-Thomas-Nicolas Hurtaut (1719–1791) moved in the same literary and intellectual circles as Voltaire and Rousseau and collaborated in various capacities with Denis Diderot on the latter’s Encyclopédie. He was a polymath historian and lexicographer, and an eclectic writer of books on various topics; an iconography of European monarchs, a dictionary of French-language synonyms, and examinations of such topics as the ritual of marriage in England and menstruation.

Of Pierre-Jean Le Corvaisier (1719–1758), little is known.