The Grotesque in Modern Art and Literature: Some more things to gnaw on
From Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s book On The Grotesque
1. “When we use the word ‘grotesque’ we record . . . the sense that though our attention has been arrested, our understanding is unsatisfied. Grotesqueries both require and defeat definition. . . . They stand at a margin of consciousness between the known and the unknown, the perceived and the unperceived, calling into question the adequacy of our ways of organizing the world, of dividing the continuum of experience into knowable particles” (p.3). So, just how do we know what we know? Is “knowning” different with the grotesque? How so? How not?
2. “The word itself betrays an irreducible queerness. As an adjective is has no descriptive value; its sole function is to represent a condition of overcrowding or contradiction in the place where the modifier should be. This place can never be occupied by any other single adjective but only by a number of adjectives not normally found together. The grotesque is concept without form: the word nearly always modifies such indeterminate nouns as monster, object or thing. As a noun it implies that an object either occupies multiple categories or that it falls between categories; it implies the collision of other nouns, or the impossibility of finding a synonym, nothing more. Before we can ask how the grotesque ‘functions’ or how it is ‘used,’ we must recognize that grotesques have no consistent properties other than their own grotesqueness, and that they do not manifest predictable behavior. The word designates a condition of being just out of focus, just beyond the reach or language. It accommodates the things left over when the categories of language are exhausted; it is a defense against silence when other words have failed” (pp.3-4). The idea seems to be that “grotesquery” is by definition a representation of the in-between, a condition of confusion and/or ambiguity rather than a precise “thing” itself. If so, how do we “know” it? What do we do with our knowledge? If not, what?
3. Quoting Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era “A grotesque is an energy which aborts, as if to express its dissatisfaction with available boundaries. . . .” (p.8).
4. The grotesque often arises in the clash between the ‘virtuous’ limitations of form and a rebellious content that refuses to be constrained. In Speak Memory, [Vladimir] Nabokov describes his creation of chess problems in precisely these terms: ‘Deceit, to the point of diabolism, and originality verging upon the grotesque, were my notions of strategy. . . . I was always ready to sacrifice purity of form to the exigencies of fantastic content, causing form to bulge and burst like a sponge-bag containing a small furious devil’”(p.7).
5. Quoting Dante in Hell: “’Lo! While I gazed there darted up a great / Six-legged worm, and leapt with all its claws/ On one of them fro in front and seized him straight; / / Clasping his middle with its middle paws, / Along his arms it made its fore-paws reach, / And clenched its teeth tightly in both his jaws;// Hind-legs to thighs it fastened, each to each, . . ./ / Till like hot wax they stuck; and, melting in, / Their tints began to mingle and to run, / Ad neither seemed to be what it had been. . . .// Two heads already had become one head, We saw two faces fuse themselves, to weld/ One countenance whence both the first had fled; / / Into two arms the four fore-quarters swelled; / Legs and thighs, breast and belly, blent and knit / Such nightmare limbs as never eye beheld; / / All former forms wholly extinct in it, / The perverse image - - both at once and neither - - / Reeled slowly out of sight on languid feet.” . . . [T]he sense of the grotesque arises with the perception that something is illegitimately in something else. The most mundane of figures, this metaphor of co-presence, in, also harbors the essence of the grotesque, the sense that things that should be kept apart are fused together.” So, are such fusions repulsive? Comical? Do they work on us at some level below consciousness? At consciousness? (pp.9-11)
6. “If the grotesque can be compared to anything, it is to paradox. Paradox is a way of turning language against itself by asserting both terms of a contradiction at once. . . . Because it breaks the rules, paradox can penetrate to new and unexpected realms of experience, discovering relationships syntax generally obscures. This sense of revelation accompanying a sudden enrichment of our symbolic repertory accounts for our experience of depth” (pp.19-20).
7. “The grotesque provides a model for a kind of argument that takes the exceptional or marginal, rather than the merely conventional, as the type” (p.22).
Is grotesque art, then, the art of confusion? Of surprise? Of mixed modes and methods? Of the “marginal”?