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GEOFFREY
The
Grotesque:
HARPHAM
First
Principles
The unformed character of our ideas about the grotesque is in sharp contrast to the highly
developed interest shown in it by contemporary artists and critics. How do we arrive at the source?
Not by going back: etymology, in this case at least, is little help. Perhaps the germ, the secret of
the grotesque, lies not in the origins or derivations of the word, but in the conditions of a particular
cultural climate, a particular artist, a particular audience. Perhaps we should approach the
grotesque not as a fixed thing....
AN
UNANTICIPATED
by-product
of the
Renaissance interest in Antiquity, the grotesque wormed its unwelcome way into the
European consciousness near the end of the
fifteenth century through a series of excavations in caves (grotta) near Rome. These
excavations unearthed murals dating from
the Roman Decadence in which human
and animal figures are intertwined with
foliage in ways which violate not only the
laws of statics and gravity, but common
sense and plain observation as well. Although the grotesque is now fully certified
and licensed, it might seem highly improbable that that child is father to this man,
so radically different from these murals are
the forms we now call grotesque.
The grotesque is the slipperiest of aesthetic categories. The word itself, now
applied to the work of di Chirico, Francis
Bacon (the painter), Stravinsky, Magritte,
Berlioz, Flannery O'Connor, Nathanael
West, and Henry Miller, has also been
applied to that of Shakespeare, Chaucer,
Dante, Poe, Coleridge, Hogarth, Callot,
and Bosch-to
name only those in the
mainstream. If we have further appetite
for muddle we can chew on such facts as
that the grotesque has become increasingly
prominent in recent Dickens scholarship
GEOFFREYHARPHAMis assistant professor of English
at the University of Pennsylvania.
462
of the psychology of such an artist, easily
the most crucial and measurable aspect is
the effect of the grotesque on the reader,
listener, or spectator. This is not to say
that the genre of a work depends upon the
sang-froid, gullibility or sense of humor of
the audience; it is simply to recognize that
while the forms of the grotesque have
changed remarkably over the centuries, the
emotional complex denoted by the word
has remained fairly constant.
While consistency of grotesque forms is
clearly not to be had, certain elements
seem to appear more frequently than
others. Wolfgang Kayser, whose The Grotesque in Art and Literature is the most
exhaustive modern attempt to explore the
grotesque, notes that snakes, toads, reptiles, nocturnal animals such as spiders,
owls, and particularly bats are the favorite
animals of the grotesque; and further remarks that jungle vegetation, "with its
ominous vitality, in which nature itself
seems to have erased the difference between plants and animals,'1 the mechanical object brought to life, the robot, and the
mask also recur frequently. But these are
given almost incidentally; and no critic
recently has seriously tried to define the
grotesque exclusively by its forms.
Rather, the grotesque is a structure, the
structure of estrangement.2 Suddenness
and surprise, Kayser asserts, are essential
elements in this estrangement; the familiar
and commonplace must be suddenly subverted or undermined by the uncanny or
alien: " . . . it is our world which ceases to
GEOFFREY
HARPHAM
463
to be grotesque, it must arouse three responses. Laughter and astonishment are
two; either disgust or horror is the third.
The laughter associated with the grotesque is reductive or ambiguous, innocent
or satanic, depending upon point of view.
To the artist, the grotesque represents a
partial liberation from representationalism, a chance to create his own forms-a
prerogative usually reserved for others.
The opportunity to fashion new Adams,
monstrous to the multitude merely for
their novelty, can be a cause of what
Baudelaire analyzed as "pure joy" to the
artist. According to Baudelaire, other
forms of comic expression appeal to man's
satanic impulse to rise superior over others,
to laugh at their misfortunes. We laugh at
the grotesque, however, in astonishment at
the artist's boldness, daring or ingenuity.
The grotesque, he says, is easily the more
primitive form, expressing not one man's
superiority over his fellows, but the artist's
superiority over nature.
This view of course presupposes the
exclusively subjective nature of the grotesque, a view which, as I will suggest later,
many artists soon came implicitly to question. The artist who creates the pure
grotesque-who does not lard his creations
with non-grotesque elements-is
man in
his primal pointlessness, innocent of moral
ideas.
While the laughter of the grotesque
might be radically innocent for the creator,
it is never innocuous. And the less sophisticated the response of the audience, the
more ambiguous, confused or fringed with
hesitations that laughter will be. In a naive
reading, the corruption of the natural order
is likely to be associated with a satanic
intrusion of pandemonium into the world.
Such naive laughter, which might arise on
the comic or caricatural fringe of the grotesque as a superiority-response to the
ugly, deformed or distorted, becomes complex, withdrawn in confusion as the reader
senses, according to his degree of sophistication, either that the artist is mocking
him or that the familiar world is being
mocked and subverted by the abysmal, the
nocturnal, the irrational, the satanic.
The laughter of the grotesque can be an
involuntary response to situations which
464
cannot be handled any other way, regardless of the sophistication of the audience-why else do we gasp with laughter at
Goya's Desastres De La Guerre? In such
cases, laughter serves to diminish the horror or perplexity and make the nightmare
seem more bearable. Such ambiguity is
itself central to the response to the grotesque, which opens into a realm of contradiction and ambiguity, frequently through
the fusion of forms or realms we know to be
separate. This element was characteristic
of the grotesque even during the Renaissance in the incongruous medleys of the
monstrous and natural, human and animal, of the decorative grotesque of that
period. The Viennese court painter Arcimboldo worked in this tradition, creating
assemblages of animal or vegetable figures
which, if one takes a step backward, infallibly suggest a human face. The point needs
no further elaboration; even so accessible
an author as Kurt Vonnegut has availed
himself of this aspect of the grotesque in
his depiction of man as a machine made
out of meat.
To help settle some of the problems of
classification posed by this ambiguity both
of form and response, we need at least two
major divisions of the grotesque, based on
whether the comic or terrible predominates. This is not news: Ruskin discriminated between the ludicrous and terrible grotesque; Kayser, between the satiric
and fantastic. Whether a work falls into
either category depends upon whether the
middle ingredient is closer to the disgusting, the repulsive, the obscene, or to the
nocturnal, the horrifying or the macabre.
The subdivisions can be represented, albeit
crudely, as follows:
a)
b)
c)
d)
caricature
comic grotesque, (ludicrous or satiric)
fantastic grotesque (terrible)
Gothic-macabre
GEOFFREY
HARPHAM
465
flesh with evil have distorted its form.
Misshaped form can be read forward to
indicate spiritual or intellectual perversity,
or backward, Quasimodo-wise, to indicate
triumphant inner beauty, life where life
can scarcely flourish.
Another kind of grotesque character is
the product of a reductive vision which
produces what E. M. Forster calls flatness.
Forster was speaking of Dickens, many of
whose characters-Fagin,
Quilp, Cuttle,
Gradgrind-seem to expend a perpetual
energy which points not to a "rounded"
personality but to an impersonal, mechanical driving force behind them. Victims of
obsession particularly lend themselves to
grotesque characterization; V.S. Pritchett
has noted that many of Dickens's characters "live or speak as if they were the only
self in the world." On this point, Spilka
says that the grotesque "displays the
power of the human spirit in regression."8
This is in part true for nearly all reductive
grotesques. Sherwood Anderson's psychic
cripples, for example, still enlist our sympathies in their pathetic attempts to take
parts of the truth for the whole truth: "It
was his notion," Anderson says in "The
Book of the Grotesque," that the moment
one of the people took one of the truths to
himself, called it his truth and tried to live
by it, he became a grotesque and the truth
he embraced became a falsehood. The
rigidity which for Anderson was manifested
in an inner sense of entrapment derives
from impersonal forces (broadly, Puritanism, and the Machine) rather than from a
flexible, complete human spirit. In grotesque comedy we might even be reassured
at the spirit dancing in the psychic cage of
its own making, but if the work is not
comic, we might be suddenly confronted
with the fixed brilliant stare of the monomaniac, the fanatic, the madman. The
victimized innocents of Winesburg, Ohio,
clutching a single moment of revelation,
distort the truth of that moment by taking
it out of the flow of experience, just as, for
example, a fixed smile when not counterbalanced or framed by other expressions
will seem terrifying, mocking, or satanic.
Dickens's work is proof enough of the
potential for terror in such reductive gro-
466
tesque. In a passage written in 1850 in
which he discusses his first toys, Dickens
gives a perfect metaphor not only for his
use of this kind of grotesque, but for his
work in general. The passage begins merrily enough, but gradually a note of terror
creeps in, almost unnoticed, struggles
briefly with the spirit of play, then dominates altogether: the frog with cobbler's
wax on his tail was "horrible"; the cardboard man "was ghastly, and not a creature to be alone with." Most terrifying,
however, was the Mask:
GEOFFREY
HARPHAM
467
ably "realistic" methods of observation,
provides the stimulus for the grotesque. In
addition, the neurotic himself, or at least
the outsider, has come to feel himself
custodian of the height of reason-the
perspective so conducive to the grotesque.
So not only has the neurotic asserted
himself as the standard of sanity (frequently dragging along the grotesque as the
standard of beauty: if the mob embraces
technological symmetry and efficiency as
Beauty, the alienato turns to the grotesque), but the world has itself become
more and more hallucinatory. With these
shifts, the grotesque is being granted an
ever larger share in objective reality, as an
engine in the hands of the artist of reality
without inverted commas.
These shifts are responsible, too, for the
critical stretching to which the grotesque is
susceptible: it can mean anything from a
two-headed toad to a Higher Truth. In
moments when, like St. Anthony, we feel
assailed, mocked, or subverted, we turn
naturally to the grotesque, which subverts
not only aesthetic categories, but human
virtue, dignity, and pretense. Among rhetorical modes, the grotesque is most congenial to irony, which, rippling up beneath
the surface, undercuts and subverts language itself. So long as we could admire
things orderly or harmonious as ideals
towards which human beings could strive
-ideals which represented essential Man,
shorn of his imperfections-then
the grotesque could be relegated to the greasy
underworld. But when we begin to doubt
that man is made in the image of God, we
begin to reflect differently on distortion
and perversity. In such a state of doubt the
grotesque may offer itself as a reflection of
the higher truths. Hard truths, certainly;
but for the time being at least, it seems we
are stuck with them.
' Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (New York, 1966), p. 183.
2 Of Kayser's four complementary definitions of the
grotesque, the most useful is the first-:the grotesque is
the estranged world. The others are: the objectivation
of the ghostly "It"; a play with the absurd; and an
attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of
the world.
3Kayser, 185.
4After wondering "why [Dali's] aberrations should
468
be the particular ones they were," Orwell adds that
"One would still like to know why Dali's leaning was
towards necrophilia (and not, say, homosexualWritten (but suppressed on grounds of
ity)...."
obscenity) in 1944, this essay, "Benefit of Clergy:
Some Notes on Salvador Dali," appeared in the 1946
collection, Dickens, Dali and Others.
6Mark Spilka, Dickens and Kafka (Bloomington,
Ind., 1963), p. 64.
6Kayser, 185. Kayser adds, however, that "the
tragic does not remain within the sphere of
GEOFFREY
HARPHAM