ABSTRACT
Even prior to the fi rst print publication of Chuck Palahniuk’s short story “Guts” in the March 2004 issue of Playboy, rumor on various Internet sites had it “that when the author reads it in public, audience members fl ee, faint, and-vomit” (BoingBoing). Mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon in reporting these incidents; Carol Memmot, for example, wrote in USA Today, “Maybe a handful of authors can claim that fans have fainted at their readings. But only Chuck Palahniuk boasts that 67 have passed out since he began promoting his sixth book, Diary, in fall 2003.”Though Memmot’s article places the burden of the claim on the author’s shoulders, suggesting that the number of affl icted or the degree of their affl iction might be overstated, she still considers it worth reporting. Not only that, the piece of news about fainting readers serves as the lead-in to her article, overshadowing whatever attempt at contextualizing or relativizing of this outrageous piece of news she might be making later on. Others express their doubts more openly. For example, Joshua Terrell expresses his reservations as follows:
This seems to be a sort of ongoing and semi-organized public art performance that your witnesses were party to-people have been fauxvomiting, fainting and having fi ts at Palahniuk readings going back several years. In fact, from what I have read and heard (and seen, once, in San Francisco), something like this happens at every single one of his readings. (BoingBoing)
The veracity of the reports notwithstanding, however, the idea that Palahniuk’s fi ction makes readers faint is too tempting to dismiss altogether. Rachel Fershleiser, though admitting that some “Internet buzz claims it’s all a pre-planned publicity stunt anyway,” nonetheless goes on to repeat the rumor that Palahniuk’s story “often sends fans running for the nearest basin.” Undecided what stand to take on the story, Fershleiser ends on this
wry note: “Whether or not he’ll add to his tally of fan collapses is anyone’s guess [but] he clearly values his ability to bring an audience together.”
