[en] 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.

[fr] Le fondateur du Saturday Review of Literature, Henry Seidel Canby, avait des opinions pour le moins tranchées sur les romans de William Faulkner. Sanctuary, en particulier, avait attisé sa colère. Dans un essai cinglant, intitulé " The School of Cruelty " et publié en mars 1931, Canby déplore ce qu'il perçoit comme la situation tragique des écrivains du Sud, faisant de Faulkner la figure de proue d'un prétendu " sadisme américain ". " So it will be with this new sadism ", écrivait Canby, " 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 n'est évidemment pas le seul exemple de littérature jugée " dégoûtante " : selon Chuck Palahniuk lui-même, soixante-treize personnes se sont évanouies lors de lectures publiques de sa nouvelle " Guts ". Malgré le plaisir évident de l'écrivain à décrire avec force détails les évanouissements dont il a été témoin, ce chiffre précis est difficile à corroborer. Cependant, de nombreuses critiques de lecteurs publiées sur le site Goodreads.com indiquent que les affirmations de Palahniuk ne sont pas infondées. Un lecteur écrit ainsi : " 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? " Voilà une très bonne question. Comment un texte, qui repose sur des mots sur une page et non sur des images, peut-il provoquer des réactions aussi violentes ? Par ailleurs, un texte peut-il être " digéré " ? Et peut-il y avoir un quelconque " plaisir du texte ", pour reprendre l'expression de Roland Barthes, dans la description de quelque chose de " tellement, tellement désagréable " ? À travers l'étude de trois textes (Sanctuary de Faulkner, Hogg de Samuel R. Delany et Haunted de Chuck Palahniuk), cet article s'intéresse aux mécanismes littéraires et esthétiques permettant une lecture profondément somatique de la fiction, notamment par l'expérience violente du dégoût. Nous tenterons de déterminer le rôle esthétique et politique qu'occupe le dégoût dans ces œuvres, afin de démontrer que le désagrément physique provoqué par l'expérience du dégoût dans un texte littéraire oblige les lecteurs à affronter leur conditionnement social en les amenant aux limites de la lisibilité.