Grotesque sensibility in literature
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The earliest written texts describe grotesque happenings and monstrous creatures. The literature of Myth has been a rich source of monsters; from the one-eyed Cyclops (to cite one example) from Hesiod's Theogony to Homer's Polyphemus in the Odyssey. Ovid's Metamorphoses is another rich source for grotesque transformations and hybrid creatures of myth. Horace's Art of Poetry also provides a formal introduction classical values and to the dangers of grotesque or mixed form. Indeed the departure from classical models of order, reason, harmony, balance and form opens up the risk of entry into grotesque worlds. Accordingly British literature abounds with native grotesquerie, from the strange worlds of Spenser's allegory in The Faerie Queene, to the tragi-comic modes of sixteenth century drama. (Grotesque comic elements can be found in major works such as King Lear.)
Literary works of mixed genre are occasionally termed grotesque, as are "low" or non-literary genres such as pantomime and farce. Gothic writings often have grotesque components in terms of character, style and location. In other cases, the environment described may be grotesque - whether urban (Charles Dickens), or the literature of the American south which has sometimes been termed "Southern Gothic." Sometimes the grotesque in literature has been explored in terms of social and cultural formations such as the carnival(-esque) in François Rabelais and Mikhail Bakhtin. Terry Castle has written on the relationship between metamorphosis, literary writings and masquerade.
Another major source of the grotesque is in satirical writings of the eighteenth century. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels provides a variety of approaches to grotesque representation. In poetry, the works of Alexander Pope provide many examples of the grotesque.
In fiction, characters are usually considered grotesque if they induce both empathy and disgust. (A character who inspires disgust alone is simply a villain or a monster.) Obvious examples would include the physically deformed and the mentally deficient, but people with cringe-worthy social traits are also included. The reader becomes piqued by the grotesque's positive side, and continues reading to see if the character can conquer their darker side. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the figure of Caliban has inspired more nuanced reactions than simple scorn and disgust. Also, in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the character of Gollum may be considered to have both disgusting and empathetic qualities, which fit him into the grotesque template.
Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of the most celebrated grotesques in literature. Dr. Frankenstein's monster can also be considered a grotesque, as well as the Phantom of the Opera and the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. Other instances of the romantic grotesque are also to be found in Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, in Sturm und Drang literature or in Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Romantic grotesque is far more terrible and sombre than medieval grotesque, which celebrated laughter and fertility.
The grotesque received a new shape with Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, when a girl meets fantastic grotesque figures in her fantasy world. Carroll manages to make the figures seem less frightful and fit for children's literature, but still utterly strange.
Southern Gothic is a genre frequently identified with grotesques and William Faulkner is often cited as the ringmaster. Flannery O'Connor wrote, "Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one" ("Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," 1960). In O'Connor's often-anthologized short-story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the Misfit, a serial killer, is clearly a maimed soul, utterly callous to human life but driven to seek the truth. The less obvious grotesque is the polite, doting grandmother who is unaware of her own astonishing selfishness. Another oft-cited example of the grotesque from O'Connor's work is her short-story entitled "A Temple Of The Holy Ghost."
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Checklist
This list is from the index of The Grotesque (1972) by Philip John Thomson, which is somewhat axed towards German literature.
Writers
Arthur Adamov - Aristophanes - Walter Bagehot - Mikhail Bakhtin - John Barth - Samuel Beckett - Bellerive (Joseph Tishler - Gottfried Benn - Henri Bergson - William Blake - Hieronymus Bosch - Bertolt Brecht - Robert Browning - Pieter Brueghel - Jacques Callot - Albert Camus - Elias Canetti - Lewis Carroll - G. K. Chesterton - John Cleveland - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Ludwig Curtius - Salvador Dalí - Dante - Honoré Daumier - Charles Dickens - Denis Diderot - J. P. Donleavy - Friedrich Dürrenmatt - Max Ernst - William Faulkner - Federico Fellini - Sigmund Freud - Jean Genet - Francisco Goya - Grandville - Günter Grass - Robert Graves - George Grosz - Joseph Heller - E. T. A. Hoffmann - Victor Hugo - Eugène Ionesco - Alfred Jarry - Jean Paul - Franz Kafka - Friederike Kempner - G. Wilson Knight - Comte de Lautréamont - D. H. Lawrence - Edward Lear - C. S. Lewis - Gerhard Mensching - Christian Morgenstern - Justus Moser - Vladimir Nabokov - Joe Orton - Harold Pinter - Edgar Allan Poe - François Rabelais - Raphael - Rainer Maria Rilke - John Ruskin - Friedrich Schlegel - Heinrich Schneegans - William Shakespeare - Tobias Smollett - Michael Steig - Laurence Sterne - John Addington Symonds - Jonathan Swift - Dylan Thomas - Friedrich Theodor Vischer - Vitruvius - Evelyn Waugh - Thomas Wright
Theory
- Arthur Clayborough ( The grotesque in English literature (1965))
- Thomas Cramer (Das Groteske bei E.T.A. Hoffmann. München 1966.)
- Arnold P Hinchliffe (Critical Idiom writer)
- Lee Byron Jennings (The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose.)
- Wolfgang Kayser (The Grotesque in Art and Literature, 1957)
See also
