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    The Grotesque: First Principles

    Author(s): Geoffrey HarphamReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 461-468Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/430580 .Accessed: 03/02/2012 12:37

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    GEOFFREY HARPHAM

    h e Grotesque i r s t rinciples

    The unformed character of our ideas about the grotesque is in sharp contrast to the highlydeveloped 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 ofthe grotesque, lies not in the origins or derivations of the word, but in the conditions of a particularcultural climate, a particular artist, a particular audience. Perhaps we should approach thegrotesque not as a fixed thing....

    AN UNANTICIPATED by-product of theRenaissance interest in Antiquity, the gro-tesque wormed its unwelcome way into theEuropean consciousness near the end of thefifteenth century through a series of exca-vations in caves (grotta) near Rome. Theseexcavations unearthed murals dating fromthe Roman Decadence in which humanand animal figures are intertwined withfoliage in ways which violate not only thelaws of statics and gravity, but commonsense and plain observation as well. Al-though the grotesque is now fully certifiedand licensed, it might seem highly improb-able that that child is father to this man,so radically different from these murals arethe forms we now call grotesque.

    The grotesque is the slipperiest of aes-

    thetic categories. The word itself, nowapplied to the work of di Chirico, FrancisBacon (the painter), Stravinsky, Magritte,Berlioz, Flannery O'Connor, NathanaelWest, and Henry Miller, has also beenapplied to that of Shakespeare, Chaucer,Dante, Poe, Coleridge, Hogarth, Callot,and Bosch-to name only those in themainstream. If we have further appetitefor muddle we can chew on such facts asthat the grotesque has become increasinglyprominent in recent Dickens scholarship

    GEOFFREY HARPHAM s assistant professor of Englishat the University of Pennsylvania.

    and criticism while it was only rarelyconsidered by his contemporaries, or thatmany nineteenth- and early twentieth-cen-tury critics of Browning saw his workas indisputably-even quintessentially-grotesque while later critics do not stressthis element. The novels which seemed toHazlitt "Gothic and grotesque" hardlyseem so to us, who have evolved forms ofthe grotesque unimaginable to Monk Lewisor Mary Shelley. Add to this the perils ofdissociation implied in the fact that theoriginal "grotesque" murals no longer formthe center of our definition of the term donot, even, to most modern sensibilities,seem very grotesque-and one is left with abewildering image of the grotesque as anaesthetic orphan, wandering from form to

    form, era to era.All of this implies that, in approaching adefinition of the grotesque, we should notalways take etymological consistency forconceptual accuracy; the definition of thisconcept, almost as fluid as that of beauty,is good for one era-even one man-at atime. When dealing with the grotesque, itseems, one must deal either with gross gen-eralizations, arbitrariness, or specific state-ments about specific works. While one candefine it in terms of the forms employed byartists who, either consciously or uncon-sciously (in other words, in the critic'sjudgment) used the grotesque, or in terms

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    462of the psychology of such an artist, easilythe most crucial and measurable aspect isthe effect of the grotesque on the reader,listener, or spectator. This is not to saythat the genre of a work depends upon the

    sang-froid, gullibility or sense of humor ofthe audience; it is simply to recognize thatwhile the forms of the grotesque havechanged remarkably over the centuries, theemotional complex denoted by the wordhas remained fairly constant.

    While consistency of grotesque forms isclearly not to be had, certain elementsseem to appear more frequently thanothers. Wolfgang Kayser, whose The Gro-tesque in Art and Literature is the mostexhaustive modern attempt to explore thegrotesque, notes that snakes, toads, rep-tiles, nocturnal animals such as spiders,owls, and particularly bats are the favoriteanimals of the grotesque; and further re-marks that jungle vegetation, "with itsominous vitality, in which nature itselfseems to have erased the difference be-tween plants and animals,'1 the mechani-cal object brought to life, the robot, and themask also recur frequently. But these aregiven almost incidentally; and no critic

    recently has seriously tried to define thegrotesque exclusively by its forms.

    Rather, the grotesque is a structure, thestructure of estrangement.2 Suddennessand surprise, Kayser asserts, are essentialelements in this estrangement; the familiarand commonplace must be suddenly sub-verted or undermined by the uncanny oralien: " . . . it is our world which ceases tobe reliable, and we feel that we would beunable to live in this changed world. Thegrotesque instills fear of life rather thanfear of death."3 Kafka's "The Metamor-phosis" gives perhaps the perfect exampleof instant alienation, brilliantly, suddenlyliteralizing Dostoevsky's metaphor ofman-as-beetle, raising the existential tothe grotesque. But while the criterion ofsuddenness might apply to Kafka, I see noneed to insist on it as a general rule.Thomas Mann's "realistic" work Death inVenice shows the perceptions of its heroGustave von Aschenbach always threaten-

    ing to betray a distortion which might atany moment merge into the grotesque. Thegrotesque is present as thematic metaphor

    GEOFFREY HARPHAM

    in this work, in the images of decay, ofPlague, in the young-old man, the min-strel-in the entire story, in fact. Its ap-pearance, however, is not sudden, butinsidious. The familiar world is never

    wholly absent, but always on notice ofdismissal. While most writers do not em-ploy the inherently extreme methods of thegrotesque with such tact, that is no argu-ment against subtlety.

    The grotesque must begin with, or con-tain within it, certain aesthetic conven-tions which the reader feels are representa-tive of reality as he knows it. The charac-teristic themes of the grotesque-thePlague, the Dance of Death, the maskedball, the Temptations of St. Anthony, theApocalypse, to name a few-jeopardize orshatter our conventions by opening ontovertiginous new perspectives characterizedby the destruction of logic and regression tothe unconscious-madness, hysteria, ornightmare. But this threat depends for itseffectiveness on the efficacy of the every-day, the partial fulfillment of our usualexpectations. We must be believers whosefaith has been profoundly shaken but notdestroyed; otherwise we lose that fear of

    life and become resigned to absurdity, fan-tasy, or death. Fairy tales, for example,represent an alien but not an alienatedworld. The Theater of the Absurd has rulesof incongruity which effectively disqualifyit from being truly grotesque. When theabsurd happens, it must subvert ratherthan confirm our expectations. The Temp-tations of St. Anthony are much more gro-tesque to St. Anthony than they are to us,who are familiar with the tradition and thedidactic point. In fact, Ivan Le LorrainAlbright has recognized this, creating a"Temptations" which is literally that: St.Anthony is nowhere to be seen in theboiling mass of grotesqueries which covershis canvas-which places the burden of St.Anthony on us.

    Kafka's metamorphosis from idea tosymbol shows us that the grotesque may belatent in an idea or a situation as well as ina physical condition; and common usagesupports this. The fact that the radical

    deformity which is the ground base for thegrotesque can be intellectual or moral islargely responsible for the twisting and

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    The Grotesque: First Principles

    shifting in definitions described earlier: thegrotesque depends not only on physicalconditions the deformity of which mostpeople would recognize, but also on ourconventions, our prejudices, our common-places, our banalities, our mediocrities.

    As our perceptions of the physical worldchange-as the world itself is changedby technology, pollution, wars, and ur-banization-some things which had ap-peared as distortions are now perceived ascommonplace or seen to obey other, previ-ously unknown laws. Each age redefinesthe grotesque in terms of what threatens itssense of essential humanity. As good wit isnovel truth, Santayana said, good gro-

    tesque is novel beauty. We see like phe-nomena all around us. Even so moral aman as George Orwell would now hesitateto classify homosexuality with necrophilia,as he did in a 1944 essay on Salvador Dali.4Blacks, who previously existed in the pub-lic mind as caricatures, have moved, withexposure, beyond this reductive image.One can't be shocked forever; and to theParisian who strolls by Notre Dame on hisway to work, even the gargoyles must seemas comfortable as old slippers. Domesticat-ing our grotesqueries, we pay, applaud, oradmire them, and finally pay them theultimate tribute of ignoring their deform-ity.

    Furthermore, a particular situation orobject or character or action may acquirethe force of the grotesque depending uponthe context of expectations. Envision, forexample, a picture of "The Papist Devil"as a swine-in-a-mitre. To whom would thisbe more grotesque-a pious twelfth-cen-

    tury Italian peasant or Martin Luther? ToLuther it would be mere satire-and tepidsatire at that. A Griinewald painting per-fectly illustrates this contextuality: anaged, decrepit, withered couple, crawlingwith toads and spiders, with vipers twist-ing out of festering wounds, and giant fliesfeasting on fresh sores. The picture isastonishing, disgusting, but it becomesgrotesque only in the context of the title-"Pair of Lovers"-which, providing a ste-reotype, also furnishes the radical incon-gruity which intensifies our disgust andcoerces us to laugh-a short snort with nosmile-in spite of our disgust. For an object

    463to be grotesque, it must arouse three re-sponses. Laughter and astonishment aretwo; either disgust or horror is the third.

    The laughter associated with the gro-tesque is reductive or ambiguous, innocentor satanic, depending upon point of view.To the artist, the grotesque represents apartial liberation from representational-ism, a chance to create his own forms-aprerogative usually reserved for others.The opportunity to fashion new Adams,monstrous to the multitude merely fortheir novelty, can be a cause of whatBaudelaire analyzed as "pure joy" to theartist. According to Baudelaire, otherforms of comic expression appeal to man's

    satanic impulse to rise superior over others,to laugh at their misfortunes. We laugh atthe grotesque, however, in astonishment atthe artist's boldness, daring or ingenuity.The grotesque, he says, is easily the moreprimitive form, expressing not one man'ssuperiority over his fellows, but the artist'ssuperiority over nature.

    This view of course presupposes theexclusively subjective nature of the gro-tesque, a view which, as I will suggest later,many artists soon came implicitly to ques-tion. The artist who creates the puregrotesque-who does not lard his creationswith non-grotesque elements-is man inhis primal pointlessness, innocent of moralideas.

    While the laughter of the grotesquemight be radically innocent for the creator,it is never innocuous. And the less sophis-ticated the response of the audience, themore ambiguous, confused or fringed withhesitations that laughter will be. In a naive

    reading, the corruption of the natural orderis likely to be associated with a satanicintrusion of pandemonium into the world.Such naive laughter, which might arise onthe comic or caricatural fringe of the gro-tesque as a superiority-response to theugly, deformed or distorted, becomes com-plex, withdrawn in confusion as the readersenses, according to his degree of sophisti-cation, either that the artist is mockinghim or that the familiar world is beingmocked and subverted by the abysmal, thenocturnal, the irrational, the satanic.

    The laughter of the grotesque can be aninvoluntary response to situations which

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    464cannot be handled any other way, regard-less of the sophistication of the audi-ence-why else do we gasp with laughter atGoya's Desastres De La Guerre? In suchcases, laughter serves to diminish the hor-

    ror or perplexity and make the nightmareseem more bearable. Such ambiguity isitself central to the response to the gro-tesque, which opens into a realm of contra-diction and ambiguity, frequently throughthe fusion of forms or realms we know to beseparate. This element was characteristicof the grotesque even during the Renais-sance in the incongruous medleys of themonstrous and natural, human and ani-mal, of the decorative grotesque of thatperiod. The Viennese court

    painterArcim-

    boldo worked in this tradition, creatingassemblages of animal or vegetable figureswhich, if one takes a step backward, infalli-bly suggest a human face. The point needsno further elaboration; even so accessiblean author as Kurt Vonnegut has availedhimself of this aspect of the grotesque inhis depiction of man as a machine madeout of meat.

    To help settle some of the problems ofclassification posed by this ambiguity both

    of form and response, we need at least twomajor divisions of the grotesque, based onwhether the comic or terrible predomi-nates. This is not news: Ruskin dis-criminated between the ludicrous and ter-rible grotesque; Kayser, between the satiricand fantastic. Whether a work falls intoeither category depends upon whether themiddle ingredient is closer to the disgust-ing, the repulsive, the obscene, or to thenocturnal, the horrifying or the macabre.The subdivisions can be represented, albeitcrudely, as follows:

    a) caricatureb) comic grotesque, (ludicrous or satiric)c) fantastic grotesque (terrible)d) Gothic-macabre

    A perfect formula for most grotesque satireor comedy is Goethe's dictum, "Looked atfrom the height of reason, life as a wholeseems like a grave disease, and the world amadhouse." There are several methods for

    achieving this "height of reason" perspec-tive. For example, Mark Spilka, in his bookon Dickens and Kafka, maintains that the

    GEOFFREY HARPHAM

    effect of the grotesque is attained throughthe infantile perspective:

    For one thing, the child's view of the world isliterally oblique; he stands below the sight-line ofadult activity, for which the man made scene isbuilt. For another, his view is often animistic....He also lacks control of inner promptings, andprojects them into the scene before him, as we do indreams. Finally, his affective innocence . . . provesreassuring as the world around him cracks andtopples.5

    Perhaps the most famous examples of thechild's-eye, height of reason indictment ofthe adult madhouse are Lewis Carroll'sAlice books, the grotesqueness of which ismarred only-but seriously-by the read-

    er's acceptance of the fantastic as a com-monplace of Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land. But even here, the child's"affective innocence" is threatened andthe child almost engulfed by the universalinsanity of the world around her. This ismuch more the case in Kafka and the laterDickens. When even innocence is no pro-tector, the comedy is likely to turn bitter.

    The formula for this darker, fantasticgrotesque is Goya's motto, "The Sleep ofReason Produces Monsters." Macabredream worlds abounding in rattling skele-tons, creeping, root-like creatures, frightfulmonsters or the like characterize the fan-tastic grotesque, a category into whichwould fall naturally the work of Bosch,Bruegel, Odilon Redon, some of Poe, andsome of Goya. However, where we ceasealtogether to laugh, we cease altogether tohave the grotesque.

    Real and apparent contradictionsabound in discussions of the grotesque; it is

    an extremely flexible category. Kayser,noting the "absurdity" of the tragicnucleus-a mother killing her children, ason murdering his father, etc.,6 aligns thegrotesque with tragedy. Others, as we haveseen, align it with comedy. But the gro-tesque is ultimately of neither of thesecategories, but defies the notion of categor-ization altogether. The term tragicomedyapproaches it. Thomas Mann strikes thisnote on the grotesque in one of his essays inPast Masters:

    For I feel that, broadly and essentially, the strikingfeature of modern art is that it has ceased to

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    The Grotesque: First Principlesrecognize the categories of tragic and comic. ... Itsees life as tragicomedy, with the result that thegrotesque is its most genuine style. ...

    As one critic put it,17 tragedy demands amoral universe, comedy a rational one; webelieve in neither, and the grotesque,where one category erupts within another,satisfies our need for a more flexible order-ing.

    But now we come to a point where thestrong brew of our definition must bediluted. The most common use of thegrotesque is not by artists who quaff hogs-heads of the stuff, but those who sip andnibble-not by those who employ the gro-tesque unadulterated, but those who use it

    as an element in a larger, non-grotesquestructure. In such a larger context, wherethe norm is truly a norm and not just baitfor the grotesque, the grotesque might havethe effect of raising the specter of insanityor of introducing chaos, even if momentar-ily, into a world or a work which does notwholly embrace it. And this is the pointwhere a flexible definition serves us best.For the assertion that a particular perspec-tive-infantile or otherwise-is a signpostto the grotesque cannot fully account forthe fact that some works are more gro-tesque than others, that in some works-Djuna Barnes' Nightwood?-the grotesqueseems to have run riot and enslaved itscreator while in others-Huxley's PointCounter Point?-the author, regardless ofhis point of view, is fully in control, manip-ulating grotesque effects. The grotesquecannot serve as structural basis for a workof any great length; it remains primarily apictorial form, with its greatest impact in

    moments of sudden insight. Prolonged, itloses its force; most instances in literary artare merely instances.

    One of the most frequent ways for anartist to use the grotesque in this limitedway is through the creation of grotesquecharacters. And one of the most obviousways to effect this alienation is throughphysical deformity. Ugliness has a long andrespectable tradition dating from, in West-ern culture, at least the late medievalperiod, when sin, linked with bestiality,was commonly portrayed in grotesque im-ages. Since then, artists who equated the

    465

    flesh with evil have distorted its form.Misshaped form can be read forward toindicate spiritual or intellectual perversity,or backward, Quasimodo-wise, to indicatetriumphant inner beauty, life where lifecan scarcely flourish.

    Another kind of grotesque character isthe product of a reductive vision whichproduces what E. M. Forster calls flatness.Forster was speaking of Dickens, many ofwhose characters-Fagin, Quilp, Cuttle,Gradgrind-seem to expend a perpetualenergy which points not to a "rounded"personality but to an impersonal, mechani-cal driving force behind them. Victims ofobsession particularly lend themselves to

    grotesque characterization; V.S. Pritchetthas noted that many of Dickens's charac-ters "live or speak as if they were the onlyself in the world." On this point, Spilkasays that the grotesque "displays thepower of the human spirit in regression."8This is in part true for nearly all reductivegrotesques. Sherwood Anderson's psychiccripples, for example, still enlist our sym-pathies in their pathetic attempts to takeparts of the truth for the whole truth: "Itwas his notion," Anderson says in "TheBook of the Grotesque," that the momentone of the people took one of the truths tohimself, called it his truth and tried to liveby it, he became a grotesque and the truthhe embraced became a falsehood. Therigidity which for Anderson was manifestedin an inner sense of entrapment derivesfrom impersonal forces (broadly, Puritan-ism, and the Machine) rather than from aflexible, complete human spirit. In gro-tesque comedy we might even be reassured

    at the spirit dancing in the psychic cage ofits own making, but if the work is notcomic, we might be suddenly confrontedwith the fixed brilliant stare of the mono-maniac, the fanatic, the madman. Thevictimized innocents of Winesburg, Ohio,clutching a single moment of revelation,distort the truth of that moment by takingit out of the flow of experience, just as, forexample, a fixed smile when not counter-balanced or framed by other expressionswill seem terrifying, mocking, or satanic.

    Dickens's work is proof enough of thepotential for terror in such reductive gro-

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    466

    tesque. In a passage written in 1850 inwhich he discusses his first toys, Dickensgives a perfect metaphor not only for hisuse of this kind of grotesque, but for hiswork in general. The passage begins mer-rily enough, but gradually a note of terrorcreeps in, almost unnoticed, strugglesbriefly with the spirit of play, then domi-nates altogether: the frog with cobbler'swax on his tail was "horrible"; the card-board man "was ghastly, and not a crea-ture to be alone with." Most terrifying,however, was the Mask:

    When did that dreadful Mask first look at me?Who put it on, and why was I so frightened that thesight of it is an era in my life? It is not a hideous

    visage in itself; it is even meant to be droll; whythen were its stolid features so intolerable? . . .Was it the immovability of the Mask? . . . Perhapsthat fixed and set change coming over a realface, infused into my quickened heart some remotesuggestion and dread of the universal change thatis to come on every face, and make it still? . . . Themere recollection of that fixed face, the mereknowledge of its existence anywhere, was sufficientto awaken me in the night all perspiration andhorror, with, 'O I know it's coming O the Mask '9

    The child who experienced this was in thepresence of the grotesque: the ambiguousmixture of hilarity and terror, the anxiety,the bewilderment, the merging of Maskand face, the shadow of death passing overthe sunny world of children at play, thesudden alienation, the vision into theabyss.

    At this point we must differentiate be-tween caricature which is grotesque andcaricature which is not. The pure carica-turist portrays what nature almost pre-sented, emphasizing latent tendenciesrather than

    creatingnovel distortions. The

    human figure, even the most Hellenic,offers innumerable opportunities for animaginative caricaturist, who must, how-ever, present characteristic rather thanarbitrary or perverse deformations. Typi-cally, the caricaturist will offer a posture oran expression which a healthy man couldimitate with some effort, and this spirit ofpantomime makes it funny. A posture oran expression which a healthy man couldnot produce betrays a spirit of pandemon-

    ium rather than pantomime, and the feel-ings evoked are closer to those associatedwith the grotesque than those associated

    GEOFFREY HARPHAM

    with pure comedy. According to Bergson,rigidity is comic; Dickens's Mask, however,suggests not the rigidity of awkwardnessbut of death, nor does it serve any correc-tive Bergsonian purpose.

    If the self is not congealed beyond correc-tion, it may be shattered beyond repair.Hyperbole can be applied not only torigidity, but also to the opposite extreme,that of the disrupted, centerless self,blasted beyond schizophrenia to a randomanarchy, a polity of conflicting selves. Theneurotic, diseased, fragmented self, torn byconflicting, perverted, or involuted drives,trying to achieve a sense of significantbeing through conduct which on the sur-face seems

    perverseis an old

    storyin these

    our modern times, and scarcely needsretelling-except to point out that the gro-tesque is most kin, among human condi-tions, to madness, in its loss of controls andregression to the (particularly sexual)unconscious-the Nietzschean, Dionysian,or the Freudian id.

    Another way of incorporating the gro-tesque into non-grotesque structures is bythe use of certain themes which almostinherently involve the grotesque. Some of

    these are predominantly literary, such asthe masked ball, the Carnival, and thedouble. Some are predominantly pictorial,such as the Danse Macabre. And someseem to lend themselves to both literaryand pictorial representation, such as TheTemptations of St. Anthony and the Apo-calypse. In works with such themes, thegrotesque can serve as a thematic meta-phor for confusion, chaos, insanity, loss ofperspective, social collapse, or disintegra-

    tion,or angst. The

    plain assumptionof the

    grotesque is that the rules of order havecollapsed; for this reason it is strongest ineras of upheaval or crisis, when old beliefsin old orders are threatened or crumbling.

    In the relatively stable 1890s, for exam-ple, most of the energy of the grotesque wasdecorative-Beardsley, for example, par-ticularly in a work such as the baroque taleThe Story of Venus and Tannhduser. Butthe grotesque acquired new force after thebeginning of the twentieth century, when,

    following the fall of Decadence, both popu-lar and literary culture turned to the nextphase of the Roman/Apocalyptic topos, the

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    The Grotesque: First Principlesdestruction of the old, rotten order. Partic-ularly up to 1920 or so, the work of such di-verse artists as Lawrence, Hesse, Wells,and Yeats is greatly occupied with Apoc-alypse; the sense that things are fallingapart, nor can the center hold accountsfor the sense of estrangement, aimless-ness and dark anarchy, reflecting the ter-rors and grotesqueries of Revelation.

    Following the War, when it was swiftlyperceived that holocaust had not purgedthe times of their corruption and degener-acy (which were, in fact, advancing evenmore rapidly and spectacularly than be-fore), the energy of the grotesque shiftedagain, with the major stress falling on the

    theme of The Temptations of St. Anthony.The theme is old, but its peculiar signifi-cance in this century derives from the cli-mate of the times. The nineteenth centuryanticipated it; Poe, Hawthorne, Maupas-sant, Stevenson, Wilde, Melville, Twain,Hugo, Keller, Kleist, Gogol, Carlyle, Hoff-man, Dostoevsky-all, in their ways, testifyto a sense of inner disruption, to a self rad-ically alienated from a dissolving socialstructure, an increasingly pointless world.While the grotesque is not quite omnipres-ent in twentieth-century art, almost no ma-jor artist has altogether escaped this theme,some of the mutations of which are thethemes of the artist vs. the bourgeoisie,capitalism vs. fascism, and the enlightenedsoul vs. the benighted mob. And St. An-thony is the hero of contemporary art,beset by terrors as he struggles to preservehis version of sanity in a violently insaneworld, to keep alive his special light, hisbesieged vision of the eclipsed All-Holy in

    the face of inhuman or anti-human forces,the grotesque monstrosities which assaulthim.

    During the Renaissance, the grotesquewas regarded as a creation of the unrulyimagination: fantastic, unnatural, bizarre-sogni dei pittori (the dreams of paint-ers). Today, just the opposite seems to bethe case: no longer is the grotesque amethod of portraying only the distortedinner landscapes of the diseased or neuroticimagination; we all know there is still

    plenty of that, but there are reasons: in abomb-dominated, anxious time, objectivereality, revealed to man by his most reli-

    467

    ably "realistic" methods of observation,provides the stimulus for the grotesque. Inaddition, the neurotic himself, or at leastthe outsider, has come to feel himselfcustodian of the height of reason-theperspective so conducive to the grotesque.So not only has the neurotic assertedhimself as the standard of sanity (fre-quently dragging along the grotesque as thestandard of beauty: if the mob embracestechnological symmetry and efficiency asBeauty, the alienato turns to the gro-tesque), but the world has itself becomemore and more hallucinatory. With theseshifts, the grotesque is being granted anever larger share in objective reality, as an

    engine in the hands of the artist of realitywithout inverted commas.These shifts are responsible, too, for the

    critical stretching to which the grotesque issusceptible: it can mean anything from atwo-headed toad to a Higher Truth. Inmoments when, like St. Anthony, we feelassailed, mocked, or subverted, we turnnaturally to the grotesque, which subvertsnot only aesthetic categories, but humanvirtue, dignity, and pretense. Among rhe-torical modes, the grotesque is most conge-nial to irony, which, rippling up beneaththe surface, undercuts and subverts lan-guage itself. So long as we could admirethings orderly or harmonious as idealstowards which human beings could strive-ideals which represented essential Man,shorn of his imperfections-then the gro-tesque could be relegated to the greasyunderworld. But when we begin to doubtthat man is made in the image of God, webegin to reflect differently on distortion

    and perversity. In such a state of doubt thegrotesque may offer itself as a reflection ofthe higher truths. Hard truths, certainly;but for the time being at least, it seems weare stuck with them.

    ' Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Lit-erature (New York, 1966), p. 183.

    2 Of Kayser's four complementary definitions of thegrotesque, the most useful is the first-: the grotesque isthe estranged world. The others are: the objectivationof the ghostly "It"; a play with the absurd; and anattempt to invoke and subdue the demonic

    aspectsof

    the world.3Kayser, 185.4After wondering "why [Dali's] aberrations should

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    468be the particular ones they were," Orwell adds that"One would still like to know why Dali's leaning wastowards necrophilia (and not, say, homosexual-ity)...." Written (but suppressed on grounds ofobscenity) 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

    incomprehensibility. As an artistic genre, tragedyopens precisely within the sphere of the meaninglessand absurd the possibility of a deeper meaning- infate, which is ordained by the gods, and in thegreatness of the tragic hero, which is only revealedthrough suffering" (185-86).

    7William van O'Connor, The Grotesque: AnAmerican Genre, (Carbondale, Ill.), 1962.

    8Spilka, 71.9Quoted in Angus Wilson, The World of Charles

    Dickens (London, 1970) pp. 9-10.