Reading from the Guts: of Text and Disgust

Abstract

The founder of the Saturday Review of Literature, Henry Seidel Canby, had strong opinions about William Faulkner’s novels, to say the least. Sanctuary, especially, ignited his ire. In a scathing essay entitled “The School of Cruelty,” published in March 1931, Canby deplored what he perceived as the terrible situation of Southern writers, declaring Faulkner the figurehead of a so-called “American sadism.” “So it will be with this new sadism,” Canby wrote, “the novel cruelty by which the American scene with all its infinite shadings is made into something gross, sordid, or, as here, depraved with an ironic depravity in which the trivial by a kind of perversion becomes more horrible than professional evil.” Faulkner is expectedly not the only example of literature deemed “disgusting:” according to Chuck Palahniuk himself, seventy-three people have fainted during public readings of this short story “Guts.” Despite the writer’s obvious delight in describing in vivid detail the fainting spells he witnessed, this specific number is difficult to corroborate. However, numerous readers’ reviews on the popular website Goodreads.com indicate that Palahniuk’s assertions were not unfounded. One reviewer wrote: “I need to talk to someone about this book. I’m trying to digest it. I don’t know if it’s vile trash or provocative writing. It made me feel very strong emotions, which is usually a hallmark of good writing in my opinion, but the emotions were so, so unpleasant […]. I don’t know if my heart or stomach can handle the rest of the book. Is it worth it?” A good question indeed. How can a text, which relies on words on a page and not images, provoke such violent reactions? And finally, can a text be “digested”? Can there be any “pleasure of the text,” to use Roland Barthes’ expression, in the description of something “so, so unpleasant”? This paper is interested in the literary and aesthetic mechanisms enabling a profoundly somatic reading of fiction, especially in the violent experience of disgust, Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg and Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted. I will try to determine the aesthetic and political role disgust plays in these works, in order to prove that the physical unpleasantness caused by the experience of disgust forces readers to confront their societal conditioning by bringing them to the limits of readability.