We remember Salinger for the Edgar Marsalla moment in The Catcher in the Rye:
. . . then all of a sudden this guy sitting in the row in front of me, Edgar Marsalla, laid this terrific fart. It was a very crude thing to do, in chapel and all, but it was also quite amusing. Old Marsalla. He damn near blew the roof off.We think deliberate farting is a lethal counter-example to Erving Goffman’s sociological account of flatulence as a failed “performance of self.” In fact, we’ve established the Edgar Marsalla Award to recognize outstanding deliberate achievement in the area of disruptive gas-passing.
Very crude.
But also quite amusing.
2 comments:
Avery,
I suggest reading Dan Jenkins novel, Semi Tough, for much more, much cruder, and much funnier material for this category. I would blush to include examples...
Ed C:
Thanks for the tip--it's in the local library. I'm always ready to explore the malodorous outer reaches of literary flatulence.
Something tells me Henry James was a big farter although I'm not aware of his ever writing about it. And if he did it would take three paragraphs to describe, yet use no olfactory adjectives whatever.
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