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PALGRAVE GOTHIC
The Grotesque
Modernist Body
Gothic Horror and Carnival Satire
in Art and Writing
David Cruickshank
Luke Roberts
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Palgrave Gothic
Series Editor
Clive Bloom
Middlesex University
London, UK
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Dating back to the eighteenth century, the term ‘gothic’ began as a designation for an artistic movement when British antiquarians became dissatisfied with the taste for all things Italianate. By the twentieth century, the
Gothic was a worldwide phenomenon influencing global cinema and the
emergent film industries of Japan and Korea. Gothic influences are evident
throughout contemporary culture: in detective fiction, television programmes, Cosplay events, fashion catwalks, music styles, musical theatre,
ghostly tourism and video games, as well as being constantly reinvented
online. It is no longer an antiquarian pursuit but the longest lasting influence in popular culture, reworked and re-experienced by each new generation. This series offers readers the very best in new international research
and scholarship on the historical development, cultural meaning and
diversity of gothic culture. While covering Gothic origins dating back to
the eighteenth century, the Palgrave Gothic series also drives exciting new
discussions on dystopian, urban and Anthropocene gothic sensibilities
emerging in the twenty-first century. The Gothic shows no sign of
obsolescence.
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David Cruickshank
The Grotesque
Modernist Body
Gothic Horror and Carnival Satire in Art
and Writing
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With special thanks to Dr Jon Day,
Dr Nathan Waddell, Prof. Paul Edwards,
and the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust,
without whom this project would not
have been possible.
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Contents
1 A Grotesque Modern Moment 1
2 J oseph Conrad 27
The Secret Agent, Anarchy, and the Body 27
The Tradition of the Grotesque: Puppetry and Marionettes in
Under Western Eyes 40
Heart of Darkness: Primitive Bodies, Modern Realities 55
Conclusion 71
3 W
yndham Lewis 77
Wyndham Lewis’s Grotesque Wild Body 77
Satire and Horror in The Apes of God and Tarr 97
Individuality and Mass-Production: The Revenge for Love and
the Grotesque Commodified Body 114
Conclusion 130
4 T
.S. Eliot135
Eliot’s “Juvenile” Poems and the Tradition of the Grotesque Body 135
History, Society and Impersonality in Sweeney’s Degenerate Body 149
The Urbanised Patient: Eliot’s Embodiment of the City 161
Conclusion 178
ix
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x
CONTENTS
5 D
juna Barnes183
Barnes’s (Un)Natural World: Animals, Plants and Women 183
Barnes, Power and Desire: The Taming of the Female Body 198
Repulsive Words: Censoring/Commodifying the Body 217
6 The Modern Grotesque Body235
Bibliography243
Index259
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Abbreviations
Djuna Barnes, Ryder
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Djuna Barnes, The Book of Repulsive Women
Edgar Allan Poe, Murders in the Rue Morgue
Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque Strategies of
Contradiction in Art and Literature
Heinrich von Kleist, ‘Michael Kohlhaas’
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror An Essay on Abjection
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
Shun-Liang Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems
T.S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare
Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature
Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God
Wyndham Lewis, Tarr
Wyndham Lewis, The Revenge for Love
Wyndham Lewis, The Wild Body
R
N
BRW
MRM
Harpham
MK
SA
HD
UWE
Kristeva
F
Bakhtin
Chao
WL
CP
IMH
Kayser
AG
T
RL
WB
xi
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List of Figures
Fig. 2.1
Fig. 3.1
Fig. 3.2
Fig. 5.1
A page from Ridgeway’s magazine. A section of Conrad’s The
Secret Agent describes the violent death of Stevie. It is wrapped
around an advertisement for Pompeian Massage Cream. At the
top of the image is the phrase “White” is not always white;
Clean is not always “clean.” Below this is an image of a jar of
cream, to the left is a large circle with the word “White?” in it,
to the right is an image of male hands being washed. At the
bottom is a form for collecting a free sample
A stylised painting of a pair of figures with highly angular,
bright red, mask-like smiling faces, blue coats and blue
brimmed hats, sit in front of a desk. The desk has a large book
on a lectern. The left figure is looking ambiguously towards the
book and the viewer. The right figure is turning backwards in
his chair to look at something behind him and to the right
A stylised painting of a woman in an off-white, soft cap,
sea-foam green coat and a bright yellow dress is sitting in a
chair in a study. The figure’s face is turned to face the viewer
and is looking down with closed eyes
A monochrome line-drawing of a large bull standing in the
middle of a town street. The bull is surrounded by small figures
and buildings. To the left of the image, the bull farts and
defecates on children who are flying kites, while two figures in
dresses sweep up the excrement. In the centre, the bull is
urinating, while children sail toy boats in the puddle of urine.
To the right, the bull is sneezing on female figures, whose
dresses are blown by the wind
38
84
105
190
xiii
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xiv
List of Figures
Fig. 5.2
Fig. 5.3
Fig. 5.4
Fig. 5.5
Fig. 5.6
Fig. 5.7
Fig. 6.1
A painting of scene in a jungle filled with flowers, orange trees
and ferns. To the left, a nude, fair-skinned figure reclines on a
couch. To the right, a black-skinned figure in a skirt with blue
red brown yellow and black bands plays a wind instrument. At
the right figures feet are two lions and a snake, and above the
figure is a bird. The head of an elephant can be seen in the
background195
A monochrome line-drawing of a creature with the head of a
goat, the body of a lion and feathered wings. It is laying both
paws on a laying female figure with ten breasts, cloven hooves
for feet and no face. To the left, there is a heart with lines
radiating from it with the words “THE BEAST” written on it.
To the right are two trees, with three sheep grazing behind them 199
A monochrome line-drawing of five women in peasant dress,
lying on the ground on a hill. Between them are six needle-like
trees without branches, with bushy spheres of leaves spaced
evenly down their trunks
212
A monochrome line-drawing of a woman, wearing a dress
covered in circles, sitting on a hill with her knees to her chest.
The figure is looking directly upwards at a hole in the sky
surrounded by five-pointed stars, from which a mask-­like face
with thin strands of a moustache looks down. At the bottom of
the image, the figure’s lower hand is hooked around an oval
bag, that hangs outside the frame
222
A monochrome line-drawing of a female figure in a large, black
dress with white stripes. The figure is leaning to the left, and
holds an object resembling a bell in her outstretched left hand.
Her right arm is thin and held near her waist. Her eyes are
closed, and two bubbles are placed above her head
226
A monochrome line-drawing of an arched shape. At the top is a
figure reclined in an alcove, in front of a pile of stones. The
figure has a small head tilted towards the ceiling, and their waist
is covered by a long black cloth with a circles design that hangs
down the length of the image. The figure’s arm is clasping the
head of a long-necked and long-snouted creature, resembling a
giraffe, on the right side of the image, with a second creature
below it. To the left, a figure with a long, tin beard and
moustache, wearing a priest’s mitre, faces to the left. In the
centre is a dark and indistinct seated figure with a distorted face 232
A painting of an apparently nude, long-necked, lumpy figure
carrying a rifle with a bayonet attached. The figure is striding
across a battlefield. The horizon is lined with spikes tilted to
the left
236
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CHAPTER 1
A Grotesque Modern Moment
Although the presence of grotesque bodies in modernist texts has often
been commented on by critics, these bodies have not been fully explored
and are rarely seen as an essential aspect of modernist style. Nor, indeed,
are they thought to be intimately entangled with ‘the modern’ more generally.1 Through a discussion of the literary—and in several cases visual—
works of Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes, I
will show that the embodiment of the grotesque in modernist literature is
critical to understanding modernism as a stylistic entity more generally,
and as a movement brought about by socio-political, economic, scientific
and technological upheavals of the early twentieth century. These authors
all use similar imagery—human-impersonating automatons, living corpses
and savage animal-human hybrids—to construct similar-looking, but
often contradictory, responses to modernity. Their use of the body in this
way is not an accident or coincidence; Conrad, Lewis, Eliot and Barnes all
draw their bodies from distinctly grotesque sources, reworking these
images to suit their specific contextual, personal and stylistic goals. By
tracing this tradition of the grotesque body back to medieval satire and
gothic literature, we come to a better understanding of how modernists
viewed their ‘modern’ moment: a time that is both the fin de siècle—the
1
For example, see Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., ‘On the Grotesque in Science Fiction,’ Science
Fiction Studies 29, no.1 (2002): 71; Csicsery-Ronay claims the grotesque is ‘the dominant
sensibility of modernism’ but does not elaborate on this claim.
1
D. Cruickshank, The Grotesque Modernist Body, Palgrave Gothic,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54346-3_1
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2
D. CRUICKSHANK
end of an era—and the beginning of a new, unknown epoch. This modern
moment is itself a grotesque merging of past and future, producing a
hybrid modernity where progress and regression lead to the same, uncertain destination.
Before I explain why these four authors are invaluable to understanding
modernism, the body, and the grotesque, I must first explain what the
modernist grotesque body is and why studying it is important. There are
three key issues surrounding the use of grotesque bodies in modernist
literature (and art) that need to be addressed. Firstly, despite the dearth of
criticism on the subject, I argue that the grotesque survives in modernist
literature. Modernism draws upon both visual and literary traditions of the
grotesque, as seen in the works of Barnes and Lewis, who use visual imagery to inform their writing and vice-versa. Both modernists frequently
depict the same idea in different media, demonstrating the shared history
between seeing and writing the grotesque. Second, I want to establish the
‘modernity’ of the grotesque. All four authors draw upon earlier sources
of the grotesque, but in doing so they adapt its imagery to their own contemporary concerns. These modernist uses of the body produce grotesques that represent the present: the uncertainty of their changing society
and their consequent alienation from it. Thirdly, I want to show how
modernist bodies are useful tools for comprehending the grotesque’s
ambivalent effect, and how bodies are conceived of in modernist works.
Grotesque bodies make confusion and uncertainty visible by marking
them on physical forms. Bodies allow authors, critics and readers to confront ‘reality,’ and how reality often fails to obey the socially constructed
codes of ‘realism’ used to understand it. Depictions of the body provide a
structural organising principle with which to understand this collapse of
semantic meaning, and the collapse of the text itself under the weight of
social and authorial demands. Although I am hesitant to define the grotesque in this introduction, or to make proclamations about how we
should interpret it, this is unavoidable to some extent if we are to use it as
a framework for discussion. While the word ‘framework’ implies structure
and definition that both modernism and the grotesque seemingly lack, we
can still use the grotesque body to discover why modernism endorsed the
grotesque as the most valuable method for understanding modern reality.
I argue that gothic horror and carnival satire, particularly from the long
nineteenth century, are continually referenced and adapted into modernist
works via modernist depictions of the body as grotesque: something
unfinished, hybrid, automatic and otherwise outside our ownership and
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1
A GROTESQUE MODERN MOMENT
3
control. Modernism adapts gothic depictions the body, possessed by forces
outside human understanding, in order to represent humans reduced to
machines, tools and animals by a capitalist, imperial society that values the
body only for its use as a profitable tool or commodity. However, as seen
in these works—and in Lewis’s work in particular—the destabilisation of
rigid boundaries can also be a liberating, comedic force. The uncontrollability of the body is the foundation of slapstick comedy, and animal-­
human-­machine hybridisation also produces the absurdity found in the
violent and repulsive satires of Rabelais and Swift, but which is minimised
in analyses of gothic works. As we will see, modernists recognised and
theorised that combinations of humour and horror have unsettling and
destabilising powers, and they emphasise this grotesque hybridity in order
to question the connection we have, between our idea of the self and the
body we inhabit. Their grotesque bodies unsettle the clear-cut boundaries
between the individual body, and the material and social worlds which
impose themselves upon it from outside.
Analyses of the grotesque in modernism, whilst gesturing towards self-­
contradiction and ambivalence, usually employ the term simply to describe
a work as either horrible or satiric. Kelly Anspaugh’s analysis of grotesquery in James Joyce and Lewis demonstrates the problematic nature of
this ‘see-saw’ analysis. He accuses two prominent theorists of the grotesque, Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser, of being ‘uncomfortable
with the ambiguity and [striving] to eliminate it,’ but does exactly this in
his analysis by referring to the ‘differing attitudes-toward and uses-of the
grotesque’. Joyce is ‘the modernist avatar of Rabelais’ while Lewis employs
the ‘universal gloom and doom’ of Swift, and there can be ‘no gay carnival
here’.2 In contrast, Francesca Orestano reaches the opposite conclusion,
stating that Lewis ‘engulfs, at once, tragedy and the comic elements of
farce and cabaret,’ producing ‘the dark, caustic laughter of satire’ with
‘tramps, buffoons, clowns, innkeepers and mechanical puppets’ that
‘belong to the stage of the Bakhtinian Carnival’.3 Shun-Liang Chao even
argues that, though the ‘fearfulness and joyfulness’ of the grotesque are
both ‘still present’ in modernism, when one ‘emerges in pronounced form,
2
Kelly Anspaugh, ‘“Jean Qui Rit” and “Jean Qui Plus”: James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and
the High Modern Grotesque,’ in Literature and the Grotesque, ed. Michael J. Meyer (Atlanta:
Rodopi, 1995), 129, 132.
3
Francesca Orestano, ‘Arctic Masks in a Castle of Ice: Gothic Vorticism and Wyndham
Lewis’s Self Condemened,’ in Gothic Modernisms, eds. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 170–1.
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4
D. CRUICKSHANK
the other […] retreats into the background’.4 The grotesque loses much
of its potential in being reduced to merely ‘dark comedy’ or ‘satiric horror’
like this. It is more important to preserve the grotesque’s deliberate ambiguity of feeling than to try and conclusively define it.
However, if we are to use it as a framework for discussion, we must
make an attempt at definition and ask: what is the grotesque, and where
did it originate? The term ‘grottesche’ was first coined during the Italian
Renaissance to describe the ornamental paintings and sculptures adorning
the walls and ceilings of Nero’s Golden Palace. These images depicted
intertwined animal, human and vegetable forms and fantastic hybrids
composed of disparate parts. While these images were the first to be called
grotesque, the tradition does not originate from or belong to Rome.5
Such imagery appears in ancient cave paintings, medieval carnivals, gothic
tales, science fiction and, indeed, modernist works. However, the definition of the grotesque—what it signified for artists and how its effects were
understood—has changed significantly across these periods. For example,
Renaissance artists viewed grotesque bodies as fantastical and absurd. The
hybrid monsters they depicted could not exist and were thus confined to
the fanciful (Harpham, xviii, xix). However, the grotesque’s ability to render the unreal in extremely realistic ways captivated and disturbed artists,
audiences and critics alike. By exploiting the rationalist codes used to represent ‘reality’ in order to instead code ‘unreality,’ Renaissance artists
could invent monsters of such detail that it seemed they might, in fact,
actually exist. These grotesques violated the mimetic relationship between
reality and artistic representation, and thus came to signify the separation
of the human mind from the world it inhabited.
By the mid-eighteenth century, however, Gothic works by authors such
as Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve had begun to shift the grotesque from
fantasy into the supernatural, employing themes of horror, possession, and
madness in its combinations of strange bodies and forms. Rejecting
Renaissance reason and rationality, gothic works instead dealt with absurd
decadence and decay, influencing everything from the works of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge to the Marquis de Sade. In the wake of the violence of
the French Revolution (Harpham, xix), however, such fantastical horror
became reality, as Francisco Goya illustrates in his painting The Sleep of
Shun-Liang Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque (London: Maney, 2010), 169.
Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and
Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), xvi.
4
5
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1
A GROTESQUE MODERN MOMENT
5
Reason Produces Monsters (1799), where a sleeping figure’s runaway intellect produces nightmarish hybrid creatures. The transformation of knowledge—traditionally symbolised by the owl—into obscured, black bats in
this image represents the shift the grotesque underwent over this period.
These texts employed this new conception of grotesquery to depict the
violent and strange nature of their modern world, where logic was used in
service of mass-destruction. Gothic works such as Mary Shelly’s
Frankenstein questioned Renaissance assumptions about the fundamental
power of the human mind to describe the world and, like the Révolution
Française, turned reason into madness. Of course, the gothic as a genre
did not end here. Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) continued
these themes of madness, possession, and the impossibility of knowledge,
all of which influenced Joseph Conrad, who viewed James as a mentor.
H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) partakes in much the
same scientific horror as Shelly did—to call it merely ‘science fiction’ is to
ignore its distinctly gothic and grotesque origins in vivisection, hybridisation, and the dangerous limits of human reason, especially when that reason is turned against humanity.
Even today, the very definition of ‘grotesque’ is still indeterminate, suggesting a wider problem with our conception of what the grotesque is and
does. This definitional ambiguity is reflected in the much wider lack of
consensus among critics concerning what the grotesque is as a stylistic
effect, let alone how or why it appears in modernism. No two critics or
eras have had identical definitions of the word. The term is slippery, sliding
easily from one response into its opposite: from horror into laughter, from
regression to a primeval past, to an uncertain apprehension of possible
futures. This is clearly demonstrated by the fundamental disagreement
between two prominent critical appreciations of the grotesque by Mikhail
Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser. Kayser, in The Grotesque in Art and
Literature (1957), argues that the grotesque constitutes a ‘comically, and
partly satirically, drawn world that pleasantly entertains us,’ but as we
progress further into it our laughter ‘finally altogether vanishe[s]’; we are
left with a feeling ‘of surprise and horror, […] in the presence of a world
which breaks apart’.6 This shift from laughter to horror occurs because
‘the grotesque world is – and is not – our own,’ the ‘familiar and harmonious world is alienated under the impact of abysmal forces’: the uncanny
6
Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 16.
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6
D. CRUICKSHANK
horror is all the more effective because our established expectations of
light-hearted amusement and unreality become unpleasantly real (Kayser,
31, 37). Human bodies are ‘reduced to puppets, marionettes, and automata, and their faces frozen into masks’—too human to be fully dead matter, causing the ‘familiar and natural’ to ‘suddenly turn out to be strange
and ominous’ (Kayser, 183–5). Kayser’s grotesque stresses horror to such
an extent that even our laughter is ‘filled with bitterness,’ ‘mocking, cynical, and ultimately satanic’ (Kayser, 187), similar to what Charles Baudelaire
describes as ‘grotesque’ in ‘Of the Essence of Laughter’ (an essay which
undoubtedly had a strong influence on T.S. Eliot’s grotesque bodies).
However, Kayser asserts that in ‘the French use of the seventeenth century’ the grotesque ‘has lost all its sinister overtones’ (Kayser, 27). It is
apparently only through the continuation of the gothic tradition in
Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe that light-hearted laughter becomes ‘an
indefinable uneasiness, something not unlike fear’ of ‘diabolic origin’.7
This ‘French use of the seventeenth century’ is almost certainly referring to the satire of François Rabelais, whose work turns the extreme violence, death-turned-life and bodily mutilation Kayser identifies as
grotesque into a source of comic mockery of the church and state. In
Rabelais and His World, written partly in response to Kayser but censored
until 1984, Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the grotesque ‘cannot be separated from the culture of folk humour and the carnival spirit,’ and that
Kayser’s ‘gloomy, terrifying tone’ is true only for the ‘modernist form of
the grotesque’.8 Bakhtin’s ‘grotesque realism,’ in absolute opposition to
Kayser, is instead ‘filled with the spirit of carnival, liberates the world from
all that is dark and terrifying’ (Bakhtin, 19). Laughter is ‘ambivalent. […]
It asserts and denies, it buries and revives’ undermining horror by turning
it into a ‘gay monster’ (Bakhtin, 11–2, 151), diminished and rendered
harmless through mocking laughter. Bakhtin links the grotesque with
what he calls the ‘carnivalesque’: the use of the bodily ‘lower stratum’ in
medieval satire which ‘digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only
a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one’ (Bakhtin, 21).
It undermines reality, but it also allows us ‘to bring forth something more
7
Charles Baudelaire, ‘Of the Essence of Laughter, and Generally of the Comic in the
Plastic Arts,’ in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P.E. Charvet
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 144–5.
8
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1984), 47–8; Note: Bakhtin is referring to late-nineteenth-century
literature and onwards generally, not specifically modernism.
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A GROTESQUE MODERN MOMENT
7
and better’ to replace it. The old world is killed, eaten, incorporated into
the human body, and then defecated onto the ground as fertiliser from
which new life grows. The grotesque therefore has a ‘utopian character’ in
its ability to deconstruct the normality of everyday life by dismantling and
degrading ‘all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract’ (Bakhtin, 12, 19) and
continually rebuilding it from the first principles of real, material life—literally from the ground up—into new revolutionary forms. Bakhtin’s influence on literary criticism was equally as revolutionary. As recently as 2013,
essays in Grotesque Revisited focus on ‘the enduring impact of Bakhtin’s
ideas.’9
This lack of clear direction has carried over into modern criticism more
generally. It is almost impossible to pin down a critical consensus on the
grotesque due to its apparent timelessness and the wide range of reactions
it provokes. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, for example, argues that ‘the grotesque is a concept without form’ (Harpham, 3). Instead of viewing the
grotesque as having mutually exclusive ‘styles’ or ‘eras,’ Harpham suggests
all these various grotesques are part of a single phenomenon, capable of
provoking both humour and horror ‘within the gap of ambivalence’
(Harpham 71–2, 8, 11)—the merging of unlike categories of experience.
It occurs in things that ‘should be kept apart whilst still being joined
together,’ causing the mind to stumble over what Chao calls ‘a logical
impossibility’ (5–6). This moment of uncertainty constitutes the experience of the grotesque and is therefore not constrained to the purview of
only gothic horror or medieval satire.
Consequently, Harpham’s grotesque appears as a merging of disparate
elements to form something new. As a stylistic device, the grotesque takes
familiar objects and concepts and, in combining them in chimerical fashion, makes new and alien objects, things which do not yet have names and
categories to describe them. Therefore, in many cases the grotesque is also
associated with the abnormal, which—as is the case for Bakhtin and
Kayser—includes the disfigured, the disabled, the sexually non-­conformist,
minority bodies and the neurodivergent, combining as they do unfamiliar
forms and narratives with the ‘familiar’ human form, determined not by
reality but by cultural norms and stereotypes. Such bodies destabilise narrative conceptions of the human body as normal and perfectible because,
9
Laurynas Katkus, introduction to Grotesque Revisited: Grotesque and Satire in the Post/
Modern Literature of Central Europe, ed. Laurynas Katkus (Newcastle Upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars 2013), 1.
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8
D. CRUICKSHANK
as Tobin Siebers puts it, ‘serious consideration of the disabled body,’ and
indeed any body that is not straight, white and male in the Western conception, ‘exposes that our current theories of reality are not as sophisticated as we would like them to be,’ ‘countering the illusion that “reality is
sound,” smooth, and simple with the claim that it is in fact sick, ragged,
and complex.’10 But this is not to say that everything unfamiliar is grotesque. As Chao notes, in its inclusion of anything ‘confusing’ as grotesque, Harpham’s definition seems too broad a category. The grotesque
is undoubtedly confusing, but confusion is not our first response to it.
The grotesque appears as a momentary phenomenon, appearing and
disappearing in response to societal shifts. While Bakhtin, Kayser, and past
instantiations of the grotesque can help us explore the grotesque, none of
them actually acknowledge modernism as grotesque because their analysis
is confined to medieval and early modern social analysis, and the very specific grotesquery that formed in response to that society. This narrow
scope limits grotesquery, regardless of which critical opinion one chooses,
to only one style and one time period. This is perhaps an inevitability of
the grotesque, as it relies on subverting ‘normality,’ which is structurally
and socially determined. Society defines what sort of things can be true or
exist, and so the grotesque is always a response to that specific society’s
interpretation of reality. In fact, this mirrors a similar debate about the
historicity of modernism. Are modernism and the grotesque both temporal, historically determined phenomena that belong to a specific moment
in history? Or are they a-temporal genres: stylistic features that recurrently
crop up in response to contemporary events?
What then is our response to the grotesque? Instead of confusion, when
Kayser claims that ‘we are unable to orient ourselves in the alienated world,
because it is absurd’ (Kayser, 185), he in fact suggests that, in grotesquery,
horror and humour become indistinguishable. The absurdity of reality
provokes our horrified alienation from it. We are ‘unable to orient ourselves’ towards either laughter or horror, and so we cannot form any clear
opinion about the bodies we confront. As I shall elaborate upon later,
horror and humour appear in grotesquery as two possible responses to the
same indeterminate ‘object’ (although they are not properly objects, as
they lack the clearly defined boundaries that separate one ‘thing’ from
another). This forms the basis Lewis’s rejection of ‘English humour’ for
his own ‘painful satire’. Horror repels us from the thing which shatters our
10
Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (University of Michigan Press, 2008), 67.
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A GROTESQUE MODERN MOMENT
9
world-view, while humour seeks to maintain that distance, to reduce the
grotesque to a ‘one-off,’ momentary lapse in reason that can be safely
contextualised, contained and diminished through laughter. Horror arises
from being in close proximity to grotesquery and causes us to recoil from
it, whilst humour arises from distancing ourselves from the source of the
grotesque. Horror and humour—gothic and carnival – are not opposites;
both are inherent and critical parts of grotesque style and the ambiguous
feeling it provokes.
In taking this stance, I argue that what we conceptualise as grotesque,
and what the grotesque’s effect and affect is, might be better explored via
Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘abjection’. Abjection provides a useful analytical framework for explaining how the grotesque body forces the uncategorisable and inexplicable nature of reality before interpretation upon us.
Abjection, Kristeva states, is ‘a border that has encroached upon everything’ where ‘man strays on the territories of animal,’ a ‘death infecting
life’ that threatens the boundaries of the self.11 As opposed to clearly delineated objects, these ‘ab-jects’ are things which are not yet ‘things,’ objects
which have no objectivity, which ‘cannot be assimilated’ into language
because it is ‘beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’
(Kristeva, 1–4).12 Her examples of the abject—spit, blood, excrement,
corpses, friends who kill you, smiling murderers—are all things out of
place, threatening the integrity of the body by allowing our insides to leak
out, foreign objects to penetrate within, categories to blur, narratives to
fail, and finally for our world, and the body itself, to be lost to us. This
physical threat to bodily integrity substitutes for an assault on our mental
separation from the external world. We respond to these unnameable
abjects by rejecting them. Our horrified recoiling distances us from the
thing that is tearing us apart, literally and figuratively reaffirming the
boundaries of the self against their collapse under the assault from the
unclassifiable. That which threatens individual identity serves only to
define it more clearly: an idea which Conrad, Lewis, Eliot and Barnes all
echo in their presentation of the individual body turned grotesque puppet,
animal, or automaton.
11
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 12, 3–4.
12
See also Chao, Concept, 50; he equally argues that ‘[the grotesque] fractures the orderly
use of language for conveying meaning’.
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D. CRUICKSHANK
Kristeva postulates a ‘primal abjection’ (Kristeva, 12–13)—the point at
which a baby must inevitably separate itself from the mother-figure if it is
to ever become an independent, self-supporting being. Kristeva traces all
acts of repulsion and disgust back to this moment of rejecting the female
body, allowing us to differentiate between ourselves and all that lies outside our bodies. Everything which provokes horror is a reminder of our
assimilation back into the mother’s body: a desire to have all our desires
fulfilled, to lose our identity and let someone else live for us, a ‘power as
securing as it is stifling’ (Kristeva, 13).13 To reject this feeling of unity with
the world is to assert a set of (arbitrary) boundaries between what is self
and what is other. However, abjection need not be horrible. As we shall
see, Barnes—in contrast to Conrad, Lewis, and Eliot—configures the
reunion with the female body as a utopian demonstration of a female-­
oriented society. Similarly, Lewis’s theorising of ‘painful satire’ suggests a
way we might expand abjection to include laughter, for it too is a recoiling
from anything which challenges our sense of reality by defining it as abnormal or unreal. The grotesque might therefore be understood as something
which overwhelms our limited understanding of the world with a glimpse
of what the world truly is, revelling in our foolhardy attempts to make
sense of it. Laughter and horror provide landmarks by which readers can
navigate and respond to reality, but in combining both in the grotesque,
modernism ‘defamiliarises’ reality—making the familiar strange by preventing the reader from orienting themselves within it.
The way in which Kristeva illustrates the abject is notable for its very
bodily element, and almost all theories of the grotesque agree on this fact:
even Bakhtin and Kayser corroborate this bodily dimension. The term
‘grotesque body’ was first used by Bakhtin, who states ‘the grotesque
body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits’
(Bakhtin, 26). Bakhtin claims that the ‘distinctive character of this body is
its open unfinished nature, its interaction with the world’; the grotesque
body is perpetually ‘unfinished’ and thus remains at the forefront of the
new. As the point of contact between ourselves and the world, it
13
See also: Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilisation and its Discontents,’ in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 21, ed. and trans. James Strachey,
(London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 64; who makes a similar comparison with the ‘oceanic feeling’ of religion, suggesting writers of the early 1930s may have conceptualised this in similar ways.
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A GROTESQUE MODERN MOMENT
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challenges definitions and limits—especially those concerning ‘the human’
(Bakhtin, 281)—by going beyond what we acknowledge as clean, individual, rational and normal to include animals, objects and other people,
things we must exclude from human identity. This is not to say Kayser has
no conception of the body. Rather, the ‘grotesque fusion of human and
non-human’ of ‘masks,’ ‘caricaturely distorted figures’ and ‘automata’
where ‘the mechanical object is alienated by being brought to life, the
human being by being deprived of it,’ produce an unsettling ‘estranged
world’ in which ‘instruments […] overpower their makers’ (Kayser,
183–4). The body-as-instrument reveals the insignificance of our thoughts,
when a mindless machine could perform all our actions as well as, if not
better than, we could. Both Kayser and Bakhtin’s grotesque bodies undermine our straightforward relationship with corporeal reality, alienating us
from the world we assume we inhabit directly, yet are somehow materially
distinct from. This has potential for a comic, utopian and joyous return to
nature, reality, and primitive animality, but also the potential to destroy
our sense of self, reduce us to mindless animals and strip us of bodily
autonomy.
The body is therefore critical to engaging with the grotesque. We
assume the body to be a direct extension of our self, a fixed and unchanging incarnation of our intent. The grotesque body challenges these
assumptions by changing into alien forms, merging with other objects, or
severing our control over it. Abstract ideas are given flesh: the collapse of
the ordered, reasonable world is mirrored by the collapse of the ordered
and rational body which, because it inhabits physical space, cannot be easily dismissed as unreal. The body thus visually embodies the fragility of our
perceptual world by turning it into something we must confront. This idea
of an essentially visual, spatial grotesque is not new: Chao has argued that
no modernist art movement ‘can provide a more successful habitat for the
grotesque than can Surrealism’ (Chao, 7, 130). He argues that painting
and poetry provide a much stronger visual framework for grotesquery, and
relegates modernist literature to the background. However, this is an
incomplete description, especially when discussing Lewis and Barnes. As
both artists and authors, their literary and visual bodies constantly draw
upon and inform one-another, sharing traditions, imagery and language.
While critics such as Greenberg, Clark and Anspaugh have analysed
modern uses of the grotesque, few critics have made an explicit connection between the grotesque and modernism itself. Harpham asserts that
‘the grotesque shares with the classic an independence from time, place,
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D. CRUICKSHANK
and culture’ (Harpham, 80), but this apparent timelessness has misled
criticism into viewing the grotesque as being somehow a primal, atemporal force, and thus not ‘new’ or related to modernity. When modernist
studies approach the subject, it is typically with reference to some specific
use of grotesque style, although what this ‘grotesque style’ actually constitutes varies considerably. For example, Bakhtin argues that ‘the grotesque
became the prevailing form of various modernist movements […] found
in Kayser’s concept’ in which regenerative laughter ‘is completely absent,’
leaving it ‘deprived of regenerating ambivalence’ (Bakhtin, 51, 21).
Bakhtin’s grotesque has a stronger link to the past than to the present,
which has supposedly lost the art of producing ambivalent grotesques
altogether. Even Kayser suggests that ‘modern’ texts are ‘replete with grotesque features’ that show a ‘greater affinity’ (Kayser, 11) for horror. This
is an unsustainable view in its assertion that the modern period is uniquely
bleak, and that the past was somehow utopian. If modernist writers use
the grotesque, it is seen only as an ironic reference to earlier art forms—as
in Joyce—in order to satirise their dingy, miserable, modern world, rather
than something intertwined with the idea of modernity itself. The grotesque thus belongs to the past in much the same way modernism was
traditionally reserved for the ‘men of 1914’. Critics like Harry Levin
described modernism purely in the past tense, but drawing such arbitrary
boundaries around modernist works fails to impose any definitive ‘end’ or
‘meaning’ on modernism. Modernist criticism has begun to challenge
such assumptions about its temporal and geographic exclusivity, but the
same cannot be said of the grotesque.14
I argue that the grotesque is a contemporary phenomenon that arises
out of the clash between past and future. Like modernism, it is strongly
linked to sudden change, social upheaval, and newness. In moments like
these, the codes used in art to inscribe ‘realism’ suddenly fail to capture
contemporary reality and are revealed as illusions—mediation, rather than
mimesis. Conrad, Lewis, Eliot and Barnes capture this moment of rapid
change by marking it on the grotesque body. In their work, mass-culture,
commodification, mechanisation and violence are represented by human-­
automaton hybrids, marionettes, exploded corpses, unthinking beast-­
women and bodies pushed and pulled by crowd-forces. The very literature
and art that depict these bodies seems to become grotesque too. Works of
14
For example, see Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,’
Modernism/modernity 25, no.3 (2018): 437–459.
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A GROTESQUE MODERN MOMENT
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this period are often sprawling, combine different artistic traditions, and
are frequently abandoned, left unfinished for their apparent failure to conform to their author’s desires. They resist easy classification, employing
horror and humour simultaneously, providing insight into the self-­
undermining and contradictory style of modernist literature. Greenberg
argues that Lewis’s Tarr ‘anticipates a tendency that emerges more fully in
satire of the 1930s wherein modernism’s oppositional and satiric energy
begins to take itself as its own target,’ but I argue this ‘self-targeting’ permeates modernism throughout the period, and is made visible by the
deployment of the body as a site of ambiguity—loathing and desire, self
and other combined.15 Through modernist presentations of bodies as
alien, dysfunctional, mechanical things that escape control, producing
dual disgust and amusement, we see modernism itself exposed as a grotesque ‘body of work’. Modernist texts extend past their authors, often
undermining the messages they set out to make.
The grotesque does not belong to any single time period, but to the
idea of modernity itself. While critics, including Bakhtin and Kayser, heavily periodise the grotesque, in doing so they conclude that the grotesque
is confined to only one era, because they do not recognise the changes the
grotesque undergoes. Harpham argues that ‘the grotesque object impales
us on the present […] forestalling the future’: he is correct to see the grotesque as painfully and violently intertwined with the present, but rather
than a ‘forestalling,’ the grotesque seems to pull the future into the present, confronting us with its limitless, uncertain potential. The monster in
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1869), for example, is a grotesque attempt
to ‘renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption,’ ‘tortur[ing] the living animal to animate the lifeless clay,’ ‘collecting
bones’ and ‘materials’ from the ‘dissecting room and the slaughter
house’.16 Shelly anticipates future technological and scientific developments that may rework the human body into something alien and inhuman—collections of impersonal, modular parts. But this holds less
grotesque potential today because readers are familiar with transplants,
prostheses, and artificial life-support. ‘Eventually we discover the proper
place for the new thing’ as Harpham states, and ‘to understand the
15
Jonathan Greenberg, Modernism, Satire and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 29.
16
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus (Boston and Cambridge: Sever,
Francis and Co., 1869), 42–3.
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D. CRUICKSHANK
grotesque is to cease to regard it as grotesque’ (Harpham, 16, 76). Thus,
the grotesque is of necessity always evolving; as new bodies are incorporated into cultural knowledge, they lose their ability to horrify or amuse.
Harpham seems correct in his assertion that ‘the grotesque stands as a type
of that-which-generates-progress’ (Harpham, 149)—namely, it is
avant-garde.
Frankenstein is particularly relevant to Eliot’s conception of originality
in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). Frankenstein’s ‘profane’
(F, 43) exploration of the ‘human frame,’ his ‘filthy creation’ which he
turns ‘in loathing from’, might be likened to Eliot’s description of the
author’s ‘occupation,’ where ‘the most individual parts of [a poet’s] work
may be those in which dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality’,
and ‘art may be said to approach the condition of science’.17 Frankenstein
builds his monster by ‘select[ing] his features as beautiful’ (F, 45) and,
despite ensuring the disparate ‘limbs were in proportion,’ he produces
something of ‘breathless horror and disgust,’ which becomes ‘more powerful than thyself [Frankenstein]’ (F, 78). Like the construction of the
monster, modern works are ‘something more’ than their authors.
Modernist reworkings of earlier traditions of the grotesque reveal something important about how modernist authors viewed modernity. There is
something inherently grotesque in being on the cusp of two epochs: a
hybrid monster of old and new, primitive and civilised, regressive and progressive, and this is especially true of modernism. It was an unshackling of
tradition, filled with regenerative potential for limitless new possible
futures, and a source of anxiety that this unshackled future may be filled
with degeneration, collapse and apocalypse. The grotesque body provides
a set of codes with which to capture a modern moment which resists
depiction in language, and therefore it remains a productive framework
for analysing both modernism and our own modernity today.
Therefore, we might ask: what it is that marks out modernism as particularly apt for grotesquery? Over the modernist period, the past and
future of the European state and subject was rendered uncertain and
unreal through a vast number of overlapping events. The body underwent
rapid recontextualisation and defamiliarisation. The violence of the First
World War, Russian revolutions and the Spanish Civil War produced
deformed and amputated bodies, demonstrating the inherent divisibility
17
T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and
Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 43, 47.
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A GROTESQUE MODERN MOMENT
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of the self in a very visual and affronting form. On the street, war-wounded
veterans became so numerous that it was no longer possible to ignore their
presence. In this destruction and reformation of the body, its inherent use-­
value is revealed: those left without arms, legs and eyes become unproductive and thus worthless (because their bodies are ‘worth less’) to society.
The rise of mass production and machinery—as well as scientific attempts
to explain the human body via evolution and degeneration—turned bodies into collections of parts and functions that could be disassembled and
remade in modernist conceptions. Tireless, precise, and mindless machines
supplanted human labour and rendered the living body obsolete.
Consequently, the modernist use of the grotesque does not resemble
the earlier Medieval satire, early nineteenth century Gothic literature and
fin de siècle decadence. Yet the modernist grotesque is nevertheless a continuation of those forms. These modernists drew on and adapted earlier
sources of the grotesque body to modernist uses to subvert and deconstruct modern reality. Any analysis of modernist grotesquery would be
incomplete without discussing what they chose to adapt, how they altered
it and why they did so. In fact, there are notable connections between the
rise of modernism and the rise of the Gothic towards the end of the eighteenth century. Considering the French Revolution, numerous wars
throughout Europe, the rise of Romanticism, the invention of the novel,
the industrialisation of cities and the rise of imperialism, it is perhaps not
surprising that this period produced a genre which employed the old,
decrepit and decayed to stage the emergence of the unknown, unfamiliar
and supernatural. In fact, the works of H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, and
Henry James participate in a similar resurgence of Gothic literature
towards the end of the nineteenth century, suggesting these authors—and
their audiences—had similar tastes, expectations and worldviews to their
Gothic forbearers.
Although recent scholarship has taken an increased interest in the relationship between modernism and the gothic, more needs to be done to
demonstrate the gothic inheritance visible in modernism’s grotesque presentations of the body.18 I argue that modernism was responding to a similarly gothic, rapidly changing society. The most direct example of this
sudden cultural shift was in technology and scientific developments over
the period. The twenty years leading up to the twentieth century
18
See for example, Gothic Modernisms, eds. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2001).
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D. CRUICKSHANK
witnessed the invention of everything from electric motors to x-rays, radio
telegrams to recoil-operated machine guns. Where the early nineteenth
century saw the rise of industry, the twentieth century saw the rise of technology. These new scientific possibilities were mirrored by an equally sharp
rise in narratives of decline in civilisation, which forms a critical element to
Conrad’s sense of grotesquery. The failure of the British to secure a decisive victory during the First Boer War, and the steep cost of military attrition during the Second Boer War, prompted concerns that ‘The Age of
Empire’ was over. The horrible conditions produced by the creation of
concentration camps over this period, and an increasing interest in urbanisation, provided a convenient scapegoat for eugenicists to explain the perceived decline in white European supremacy via industrialisation and
urban sprawl.19 Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895), like Cesare Lombroso
before him, employed the language of Darwinism to produce the dehumanising science of criminology, attempting to explain ‘degenerates’ using
purely physical and environmental descriptions of their bodies.
Such ‘degenerates’ included anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin and Peter
Kropotkin, whose attempts to free Russia from autocratic rule prompted
numerous assassination attempts, bomb plots and political revolutions
across Europe and America, culminating in various Russian revolutions.
These events provided exciting new diversions for Western audiences,
which could be sensationalised for profit.20 Indeed, for figures like
Marinetti and the Futurists, violence was conceived of as the cure for
degeneracy. However, following the enormous destruction wrought by
mechanised warfare at Verdun and the Somme, machinery and technology
became intimately linked with death and mass-destruction. Even before
violence broke out, artists such as Franz Marc, in Fate of the Animals
(1913), turned images of nature into apocalyptic scenes in which animal
figures are struck down by shafts of light and fire, while others remain
unaware of the destruction surrounding them. The hard lines, edges and
beams which divide the canvas evoke both machinery and gunfire’s ability
19
Richard Soloway, ‘Counting the Degenerates: The Statistics of Race Deterioration in
Edwardian England,’ Journal of Contemporary History 17, no.1 (1982): 138; ‘In an era of
expanding biological explanation dominated by the popularization of Darwinian evolution,
it is not surprising that thoughtful people sought explanations for Britain’s multiplying difficulties […] in the interaction of changing environmental conditions and organic adaptation’; see also 140.
20
Sarah Cole, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 87.
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to divide bodies, similar to Jacob Epstein who, following the war, removed
the ‘Metal Torso’ from the top of his machine-man hybrid sculpture The
Rock Drill (1913–16), leaving it deformed, one-armed and without legs.
During the war, William Roberts’s First German Gas Attack at Ypres
(1918) and Otto Dix’s Signal Flare (1917) depicted figures frozen at the
moment of death, their faces distorted into inhuman masks of pain,
impaled on machines, spikes, and weapons. Machines become symbols of
death, and such imagery remained pervasive in the inter-war period, such
as in Picasso’s Guernica (1937), whose intertwined human and animal
bodies, hard lines and distorted faces represent the Spanish civil war in
similar visual ways as Lewis does in The Revenge for Love. But Picasso’s
absurd exaggerations of violence differ from Lewis’s own ‘non-moral’ and
‘painful’ satire, which refuses either laughter or horror outright. Lewis,
who witnessed the First World War first-hand as an artilleryman, employed
deformed, mutilated and blind bodies to represent war in an offensive
manner, penetrating deeper than the surface level visual façades of propaganda to expose the conflict’s alien, absurd and all-too-real nature. As
Tobin Siebers notes in Disability Theory, it is often the case that ‘the body,
whether able or disabled, figures as a causal agent, excluding embodiment
from the representational process almost entirely’.21 Following the war,
bodies became a non-linguistic signifier—what Kristeva calls the semiotic—of the reality of war, and the violence inflicted by modernity. These
disabled bodies act instead to challenge our connection with our body,
and how easily it can be severed, and the non-disabled can become a disabled minority.
These constant outbreaks of violence and ‘savagery’ within civilised
Western society, alongside fears of degeneration and imperial collapse,
renewed interest in European imperial conquests. Artists, such as Picasso,
turned to Africa in search of inspiration for what they hoped would prevent the decline of Western art: namely, images of primal savagery, pre-­
industrial and pre-civilised bodies that carried a masculine vitality which
they believed the modern European male lacked.22 Black, Jewish, female,
disabled, and otherwise non-heteronormative white male bodies, are thus
frequently employed by white, male modernists as images of grotesque
fear and abject disgust. For instance, H.P. Lovecraft’s eldritch horrors and
Siebers, Disability, 2.
See also Dennis Duerden ‘The “Discovery” of the African Mask,’ Research in African
Literatures 31, no.4 (2000): 36.
21
22
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D. CRUICKSHANK
inhuman monsters are very often coded as minorities or disabled. In The
Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936), Lovecraft deploys ideas of racial interbreeding and deformity to create fearful, half-human monstrosities intent
on staging an alien invasion. Modernity ‘sutures together opposites, turning them into apparent compliments,’ and anything which reveals this
hybridity inherent in the modern body immediately becomes grotesque in
its destruction of certainty.23 The body is consequently seen, for Siebers, as
‘at worst […] a fashion accessory,’ something ‘both inconsequential and
perfectible’ in that ‘we are capable of believing at once that the body does
not matter and that it should be perfected’.24 Conrad comes closest to
rendering this particular contradiction within colonialism visible, but lacking the terminology to describe it, he instead turns the grotesque body of
racialised Africa back upon the European bodies that created it. Africa is
imagined not only as Europe’s primeval past, but a past produced by modern imperialism and slavery, and a vision of Europe’s own degenerate
future, forcing the entire continent into a homogenous a-temporality. The
racist discourses of the West produce Africa as a place where the primeval
past exists seamlessly alongside the mechanised present.
Of course, there were numerous artists and modernists of colour working during this period who were distinctly aware of the abject disgust, fear
and hybridity white European and American modernists were exploiting
their bodies to convey. Although Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille
was never published during his lifetime—written around 1929–33 but
only published posthumously in 2020—it shares numerous themes in
common with Djuna Barnes’ work, in its queer characters, deformed protagonist Lafala, and the impossibility of love in the face of sexual exploitation and violence. And, like Lewis’s The Revenge for Love, it too is
concerned with the exploitation and deformation of the body for capital
gain. Nella Larson’s Passing is keenly aware of the disgust and horror
inscribed upon not only black bodies, but any body which fails to adhere
to narratives of what a modern body is or should be. She represents the
real, violent consequences of white authors using coloured (and female)
bodies as sources of hybridity, disgust, and absurdity. In Sieber’s words
‘Jim Crow laws in the American south counted on people policing themselves – not drinking at a white water fountain if they were black’.25 Like
Siebers, Disability, 8; see also 63.
Siebers, Disability, 7.
25
Siebers, Disability, 18.
23
24
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A GROTESQUE MODERN MOMENT
19
the war wounded, it was easy to ‘become’ black via bodily action and
performance of ‘blackness,’ while ‘whiteness’ had to be constantly maintained—with fatal consequences for letting the mask fall. Because ‘we
must be able to distinguish a group before we can begin to imagine an
identity’, individuals which straddle the line, bodies which cannot be
clearly delineated, are a challenge and threat to the normative order of
modernity.26 Larson represents the grotesque from the perspective of an
abject, female body which is not clearly delineated by race, and the fear,
violence and eventual death Passing’s characters experience in being forced
to adopt one racial identity over another.
The rise of psychoanalytic theories in the twentieth century participates
in a similar application of scientific models to human beings, incorporating
ideas of the primitive and animal mind into explanations of civilisation and
society, as Sigmund Freud did. In Lewis’s satire of John B. Watson’s
behaviourism in Snooty Baronet, human consciousness is reduced to explicable scientific phenomena and rendered alien to itself. The loss of control
over the self and an inability to think outside of a repressive society is
expressed in madness, sleepwalking, animal instinct and automatons: bodies turned against their inhabitants. Indeed, culture itself acted as a form
of censorship that could attack, rewrite and control the past, present and
future. There were frequent trials for the suppression of ‘socially unacceptable’ works, D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (London, 1915), James
Joyce’s Ulysses (New York, 1921), and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of
Loneliness (London, 1928) to name a few. Conrad illustrates the prevailing
modernist viewpoint, claiming in 1907 in a letter to the Daily Mail that:
I learned of the existence of the Censor of Plays. I may say without vanity
that I am intelligent enough to have been astonished by that piece of information […] I was aware of being in England – in the twentieth century
England. The fact did not fit the date and the place.27
Censorship is ‘an heirloom of past ages, a bizarre and imported curiosity’; what makes it a ‘grotesque potiche’ for Conrad is that it ‘still works!’,
‘the absurd and hollow creature of clay [the Censor] seems to be alive with
a sort of (surely) unconscious life worthy of its traditions’.28 The Censor is
Siebers, Disability, 17.
Joseph Conrad, ‘The Censor of Plays: An Appreciation,’ in Notes on Life and Letters, The
Medallion Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, vol.19 (London: Gresham, 1925), 76.
28
Conrad, ‘Censor,’ 77–8.
26
27
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D. CRUICKSHANK
a fossilised remnant of the past embedded in the present, a runaway
bureaucratic system that has obtained an alien (un)consciousness. The systematic act of censorship presents a façade of protecting the public from
the grotesque, but censorship becomes personified by Conrad as a grotesque monster itself, many individuals combined into the monolithic,
undying ‘Censor’. The modernist period is ripe with grotesque bodies,
hidden beneath the surface but waiting to be uncovered and shatter the
veneer of the normal, the progressive, and the modern.
I have chosen this specific period of early-to-high modernism to give a
sense of both where these bodies came from, and where they were going.
This not-quite-post fin de siècle period allows for the influence of the nineteenth century’s decadent bodies upon modernism to be more easily felt,
and how modernism attempted to anticipate this new century’s uncertain
direction. This intersection of old and new is ‘metaphorised’ as a physical
body, which is substituted for, and acts as a sign of, a world beyond language and comprehensibility. This is only the beginning of the modernist
grotesque; there is a distinct need for more widespread critical engagement with modernist bodies, how the grotesque is bound up in modernity, what the grotesque can tell us about modernist style, and its possible
relevance to modernity today.
Why, then, should we look specifically at Conrad, Lewis, Eliot and
Barnes to discover the meaning of the grotesque body in modernism? I
have elected to focus primarily on their works, in a study that begins at the
turn of the twentieth century and continues through to the end of the
inter-war period, because these writers all employ the grotesque body in
similar ways and to similar ends. Eliot is a fossilised, canonical modernist
who nevertheless has strong ties to a grotesque tradition of simultaneously
elitism and self-loathing. Lewis is a comparatively under-studied modernist whose works, often unpublishable in his own day, continue to shock
and disturb us now. Conrad’s works border on the modernist, his frame-­
narratives collapse the reality of his novels, returning modernity back to its
gothic and carnival heritage. Barnes is a fitting end to any discussion of
modernist grotesquery, as she disassembles the very idea of canonical
modernism and grotesquery by inverting the meanings the other three
authors ascribe to these bodies, often sabotaging her own meanings in the
process.
What sets Conrad, Lewis, Eliot and Barnes apart from other modernists—and what I argue makes them ideal for a study on the grotesque body
in modernist literature and art—is their intense focus on visuality. Unlike
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A GROTESQUE MODERN MOMENT
21
authors such as Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, who privilege the internal,
psychological world over the material realm, these authors are instead
interested in bodies. Their works are highly external, concerned with
material things, and employ visual language and imagery even in their literature. Their works clearly trace an inheritance of the visual traditions of
grotesque art, as well as the literary. Lewis and Barnes are the easiest to
categorise. As both were visual artists and writers, it is fairly easy to see the
influence that visual media, and both past and modern depictions of the
body, have had upon their writing and art. While Barnes seeks to represent
the material conditions of ‘normal’ modern life as queer using the visually
unfamiliar and affronting images of bestiality, rape and death, Lewis’s
‘external method’ seeks to find truth in the movement of bodies, below
the façades of personality and normality that disguises the dirty, unpleasant reality of modern capitalism we dwell within. Conrad and Eliot, on the
other hand, are a little harder to categorise. As I will argue below, Conrad’s
‘impressionistic style,’ as argued for by Ian Watt, is impressionistic in the
sense of impressionist painting. His works represent bodies as mysterious
and strange, as externalisations of an impossible internal world. His characters partake of the marionette theatre, controlled by outside social and
mechanical forces like puppets. Eliot, too, is interested in marionettes and
theatre, but his distinctly visual poetry conjures up images of primitive,
animalistic and mechanical bodies—lacking in psychology and thought—
and the unnerving living cities and faceless crowds these bodies
dwell within.
Narrowing the scope of such a project inevitably entails the omission of
works that would undoubtedly fit it—such as those by Samuel Beckett,
Jean Rhys and Nella Larson to name a few. This grotesque jumping off
point is a distinctly white, mostly male (with a critical exception), Western
view of modernism that leans closer to ‘canonicity’ than not. I have elected
to focus on this aspect of modernism to demonstrate that the grotesque is
not a fringe or ‘weak’ modernist style, to borrow Paul Saint-Amour’s
term, but fundamental to the idea of modernism as a movement, style, and
genre of writing about the present. The modernist grotesque body could
easily be expanded to include Caribbean modernism, the Harlem renaissance, Indian modernism, postcolonialism, disability theory, painting,
sculpture and more. However, I have specifically chosen not to include
works by James Joyce and some of Eliot’s earlier grotesque poetry, such as
his ‘Bolo’ poems, despite their apparent grotesquery. I argue Joyce partakes in the grotesque with a classical understanding of the term. He
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D. CRUICKSHANK
references past uses of grotesque imagery in his Rabelaisian satire, but not
in an innovative way which puts this grotesquery to modernist uses. I propose a modernist grotesque body, that Joyce and Eliot’s ‘Bolo’ poems do
not partake in, which decodes a present moment rendered inexpressible in
conventional realistic language. My aim is to demonstrate that many modernists are—less obviously, but nevertheless eminently—interested in the
grotesque, and that grotesquery is inherent to their conception of modernism more generally, incorporating and developing past traditions of the
grotesque body, both gothic and carnivalesque, into modernist form.
I will first approach Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), Under
Western Eyes (1908) and Heart of Darkness (1899). Conrad is a good
starting point for an analysis of the grotesque modernist body because his
novels are quite literally ‘end of the century’ works. Heart of Darkness is
especially relevant: prototyped as ‘An Outpost of Progress’ in 1897, the
novel is not only situated at the end of an epoch: the text itself deals extensively with the intersection of past and future. Drawing upon both past
and contemporary sources of the gothic, from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The
Sandman’ to H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, Conrad introduces
modernism to ideas of a-temporality, societal and state violence, loss of
bodily self-control and the impossibility, or uncertainty, of change. All of
these are critical themes taken up by the later authors of the pre- and post-­
First World War period. In this chapter, I also stress the importance of
Conrad’s ‘irony’ for reading his works in terms of the grotesque. While
Conrad does undeniably use the language of anti-Semitism, racism and
eugenics in his work, I hope to show that he does not use this language
uncritically. Conrad uses the body to express a discontent at the modern
European society, and the lack of language to think outside it for alternatives. The body provides a site for Conrad to express the instability of the
present, a way of exploring the unsustainability of old traditions, and the
uncertainty of the new traditions that may replace them.
I will begin with The Secret Agent, and how Conrad uses the deformed,
animalistic and ‘pest’-like bodies of his anarchists to criticise both revolution and society. Conrad’s bodies reveal how violence and revolution are
commodified and redirected to support the very society they seek to overthrow. In Under Western Eyes, Conrad expands on the idea of society seizing control of revolutionary bodies and redirecting them against
themselves. I will discuss Conrad’s debt to gothic fiction in more depth,
and how Conrad adapts the idea of the automaton body to modernist
uses. I have elected to approach Heart of Darkness last, both because it
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A GROTESQUE MODERN MOMENT
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contains many of the elements of mechanisation, undermined bodies and
loss of control that he later employs in his novels, but also because, above
all of Conrad’s works, it produces what I view as ‘grotesque time,’ in
which technological and social progress are made indistinguishable from
atavism, degeneration and primal reversion. It is a text that is out of chronological order in every sense. Conrad’s work establishes that, in modernism, it is impossible to discuss the present without reference to the
grotesque possibilities of the past and future.
Secondly, I will focus on Wyndham Lewis’s bodies in the collected stories of The Wild Body (1927) and the novels The Apes of God (1930), Tarr
(1928), and The Revenge for Love (1934). Lewis draws upon many of the
same ideas as Conrad and expands them into the realm of visual art, whilst
his theories of satire recontextualise and expand upon Conrad’s ironic
method. Lewis’s presentation of the mechanised body is very similar to
Conrad’s, and his theorising about its relationship to humour and laughter provides a framework for approaching how Eliot uses the automaton
body, and how Barnes later subverts such theorising. Lewis’s work bridges
the First World War, demonstrating the enormous influence the war had
on how bodies and machines were represented. Lewis is thus critical to any
discussion of modernist bodies, because his bodies demonstrate the influence technology and socio-political forces had on changing the way bodily
identity was conceived of in the period.
I will begin with The Wild Body, discussing how and why the text
changed over the course of Lewis’s many post-war revisions: how Lewis
understands and deals with the body, his rejection of painting and his turn
to the ‘blindness’ of literature over the period. I will then look to The Apes
of God and Tarr for an explanation of Lewis’s ‘painful satire,’ which provides a framework for understanding the relationship between laughter
and abjection. Lewis’s bodies express dual amusement and loathing as a
means of paralysing, and silencing the reader. His satire demonstrates that
laughter, like horror, is a ‘first-rate means of evading reality’. The grotesque body forces a confrontation between Lewis, the reader and the
grim nature of art reduced to a mass-market commodity. Finally, in The
Revenge for Love, Lewis employs mechanical bodies to discuss the commodification of the individual, and the (im)possibility of revolutionary
action. The bodies of this text, converted into assembly lines, cars and
cardboard cut-outs, show the power capitalist society possesses over our
ability to self-express. By controlling the body, all expressions of
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24
D. CRUICKSHANK
individuality come to be expressions of profit. How can an individual exist
within a society dominated by mass-production and mass-appeal?
I will then approach the body in Eliot’s early poems in Inventions of the
March Hare (1909–1917), Ara Vos Prec (1920) to discuss the ‘Sweeney
body,’ and finally ‘Preludes’ (1917) and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’
(1917). I intend to delineate the strain of satire and irony in Eliot’s poetry,
and what effect the poetic format has on Eliot’s use of the bodily imagery
he employs. Eliot follows from Lewis not only in the sense of their artistic
relationship: Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ and ‘Preludes’ were
originally published by Lewis, and Lewis used Eliot for his infamous Royal
Academy portrait submission. In many ways Eliot belongs to the same
tradition as Lewis. His oft-disregarded early works employ figures such as
clowns, living marionettes and uncanny comedians who challenge their
unappreciative audiences by turning their own fallible bodies against them.
His marionettes express both a desire to control the masses, and to be
controlled by them: to be both puppet and puppeteer. Eliot seeks to be an
individual, but also to be accepted by the faceless crowds that inhabited
the various cities he moved between, the perpetual alien. Poetry is often
analysed in more visual terms than literature, and Eliot provides a way of
analysing the intersection of the literary and visual grotesques that were
united by Lewis.
I will analyse the grotesquery of Eliot’s early poems, and why he turns
first and foremost to images of clowns and marionettes to explore modern
societal structures and their effects upon the individual body and the
urban crowd. This idea is further expanded on in the ‘Sweeney poems.’
Here, Eliot draws on many of the same themes as Conrad and Lewis, especially their sense of hybrid temporality, to express his concern that modern
society has rendered the individual ‘crowd-minded,’ moved by economic
and mechanical forces and reduced to animality, but also the need to
appeal to that mass to be successful as an individual. Finally, Eliot makes a
significant contribution to the modernist body in his city poems ‘Rhapsody
on a Windy Night’ and ‘Preludes’. Eliot takes bodily imagery and applies
it to the city itself, which directs and shapes the lives of the people that
move through its streets. The architecture of the modern city maps out
the individual that lives within it, becoming an embodied metaphor for
the human mind. Eliot’s city makes urban forces tangible, and thus exposes
us to the loss of selfhood, identity and bodily separation that constitute
modern urban life.
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A GROTESQUE MODERN MOMENT
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Finally, I will approach Barnes’s Ryder (1924), Nightwood (1936) and
The Book of Repulsive Women (1918) in relation to the grotesque. I have
elected to place Barnes last, not to side-line her as the token female modernist, but because her use of the grotesque body represents a significant
re-contextualisation and departure from male-dominated grotesque modernism. Barnes, using similar imagery in similar ways, completely inverts
these representations by approaching them from the perspective of an
abjected, grotesque female body. By exploring the grotesque from the
perspective of a grotesque body, Barnes’s work forces a rethinking of the
female bodies which Conrad, Lewis and Eliot use to provoke grotesquery,
and why they did so. As we shall see, the grotesque is often coded as a
feminine challenge to masculine bodily identity. Barnes instead inscribes
meaning on her bodies that is often directly contradictory to the other
authors in this project, despite her use of the same themes of mechanised
bodies, loss of control and humans ‘reverting’ to nature. Her works resist
attempts to impose canonically modernist and grotesque meanings upon
them—meanings imposed by Eliot’s editing, the censors who concealed
her work, or even herself whilst writing. Barnes reminds us that neither
modernism nor the grotesque can be conclusively summed up as one single, finished thing.
As a marginalised lesbian writer, Barnes conceptualises the body as
something that both exposes and resists society’s attempts to control and
define the female body in opposition to the male: a site of simultaneous
sexual desire and loathing. I will begin with Ryder to discuss how Barnes
employs natural and animalistic bodies to unsettle patriarchal society. The
grotesque provides a natural world where the female body has power and
agency because it cannot be easily objectified. In Nightwood, Barnes turns
to the image of the female-as-animal or automaton but inverts the associations we see elsewhere in the male modernists’ writings. In spite of her
mentorship under Eliot, and his attempts at ‘editing’ (or perhaps censoring) the text, Barnes’s corpses and animalistic women show the degradation of the female body by patriarchal society, filled with everything the
male is not and thus rendered inferior by its abjection. Such bodies,
although they are mindless, are also uncontrollable, and thus not subject
to the power dynamics of male desire. The mindless animal-woman thus
comes to resist patriarchal authority precisely because of her abjection
under it: a counter to Conrad’s fatalistic anarchists. Finally, I will discuss
how Barnes conceives of resistance and control within capitalist, patriarchal society in The Book of Repulsive Women. Barnes deals with the
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26
D. CRUICKSHANK
commodification of body, manifesting in her poems as women converted
into vases, dresses, corpses and masks: passive objects of the male gaze.
Where Barnes differs from Lewis is in her suggestion that such commodification can be overcome. The grotesque bodies of her work force readers
to see the deformations imposed by capitalism in the flesh, defamiliarising
us to the ‘normality’ of capitalist society. The body allows Barnes to look
beyond the surface to seek new and queer realities that could one day
become normal themselves.
I will analyse the social and historical context surrounding the publications of the selected works, the ways in which they relate to modernity,
and the past and future bodies they draw upon, to determine how these
bodies inform our understanding of modernism’s fragmented, self-­
contradictory style. The grotesque body is essential to understanding the
modernist corpus, and the very idea of the modern itself. Conrad, lacking
the language to conceptualise the modern world, turns to grotesque bodies as a non-linguistic means of representing modern society, the erosion
of individuality, and the hypocrisy of colonialism.
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