English 2020-24
Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Spring 2015
100-225 | PH 308
The Grotesque in
Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
The true iconoclast is the image itself which
explodes . . . allegorical meanings, releasing
new insights. Thus the most distressing
images in dreams and fantasies, those we shy
away from for their disgusting distortion and
perversion, are precisely the ones that break
the allegorical frame of what we know about
this person or that, this trait of ourselves or
that. The “worst” images are the best, for
they are the ones that restore a figure to its
pristine, numinous, power. . . .
James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
There is a nature that is grotesque within
The boulevards of the generals. Why should
We say that it is man’s interior world
Or seeing the spent, unconscious shapes of night,
Pretend they are shapes of another consciousness?
The grotesque is not a visitation. It is
Not apparition but appearance, part
Of that simplified geography, in which
The sun comes up like news from Africa.
Wallace Stevens, “A Word with Jose Rodriguez-Feo”
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
 Philip Thomson, The Grotesque
A DEFINITION
The preceding discussion of the role of the abnormal in
the grotesque should not be allowed to dominate our
notion of the phenomenon as a whole. The abnormal is
a secondary factor, of great importance but subsidiary
to what I have outlined as the basic definition of the
grotesque: the unresolved clash of incompatibles in
work and response. It is significant that this clash is
paralleled by the ambivalent nature of the abnormal as
present in the grotesque: we might consider a
secondary definition of the grotesque to be 'the
ambivalently abnormal'.
The Grotesque by Philip Thomson
ENGL 2020
Themes in
Literature and
Culture: The
Grotesque
The
Grotesque
in Theory
 As William J. Free reminds us, the grotesque is multifaceted.
 In a discussion of the grotesque in Fellini’s I Clowns (1972),
Free argues that the grotesque’s “fanciful and sinister”
nature actually has two distinct faces, perhaps best
represented visually in the paintings of Pieter Brueghel
and Hieronymous Bosch.
Free, William J. “Fellini’s I Clowns and the Grotesque.” Federico Fellini: Essays in
Criticism. Ed. Peter Bondanella. NY: Oxford UP, 1978: 188-201.
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
 For Free, Brueghel’s art exemplifies an essentially comic
“irreverent attitude toward his subject” and conveys “the
artist’s joy at contemplating the hurly-burly confusion of
life which swallows up any attempt of history to impose
meaning on it” . . .
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
The Peasant Dance
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
 . . . which Bosch’s “terrifying grotesque,” on the other
hand, exhibits an “insanely demonic world peeping from
beneath the order of life and threatening to destroy it in
disgusting violence” (Free 191).
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
The Grotesque in
Theory
Christ Carrying the Cross
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
According to Wolfgang Kayser in The Grotesque in Art and Literature, the
grotesque is
The expression of the estranged or alienated world . . . . [it] is a game
with the absurd, the sense that the grotesque artist plays, half
laughingly, half horrified, with the deep absurdities of existence. The
grotesque is an attempt to control and exorcise the demonic elements
of the world. (185).
The “unity of perspective” attained by all grotesque art thus has its source,
as Kayser would insists, in the belief that “the divinity of poets and the
shaping force of nature have altogether ceased to exist” (186).
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Mary Cass Canfield declares that the grotesque testifies that “The artist is ill.
Life is too literal and he takes to his fancy. Life is too pervasively discordant
and so his fancy does not soar, does not sanely and safely create beautiful
rhythms, but becomes infected with unrest, turns ape to the actual, is
rebellious slave to what it would be free from” and claims that all “grotesques
are damned” (9-10; my emphasis);
Canfield’s diction is itself a revelation: the grotesque prevents the artist form
“soaring” (presumably above the earth, as Guido, seeking to escape his
earthly fate, erroneously tried to do in 8 1/2’s famous opening scene)
condemning him to the mimicking or “aping” of the actual, from which
Canfield’s Northern (and Platonic) mind-set feels he should be free.
Canfield’s ascensionism is, however, strangely correct. The grotesque is, as
she insists, a revelation of immanence; it is stamped “on the observe of the
medal of idealism” (3).
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew
somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear
before his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within
himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.
You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the
eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and
women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.
The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some
almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the
old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise
like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might
have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps
indigestion.
For the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old
man, and then, although it was a painful things to do, he crept out of
bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a
deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a
book which he called "The Book of the Grotesque." It was never
published, but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on
my mind. The book had one central thought that is very strange and
has always remained with me. By remembering it I have been able to
understand many people and things that I was never able to
understand before, The thought was involved but a simple
statement of it would be something like this:
That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great
many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths
himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague
thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all
beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not
try to tell you all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the
truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of
profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds
were the truths and they were all beautiful.
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not
try to tell you all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the
truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of
profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds
were the truths and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up
one of the truths and some who were strong snatched up a dozen of
them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had
quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion
that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to
himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a
grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his
life writing and was filled with words, would write hundreds of pages
concerning this matter. The subject would become so big in his mind
that he himself would be in danger of becoming a grotesque. He
didn't, I suppose, for the same reason that he never published the
book. It was the young thing inside him that saved the old man.
Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only
mentioned him because he, like many of what are called very
common people, became the nearest thing to what is
understandable and lovable of all the grotesques in the writer's
book.
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
François Rabelais
(1494-1553). French
priest and author
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
François Rabelais
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
François Rabelais
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
François Rabelais
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Gustave Doré
(1832-1883). French
illustrator
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and
Culture: The Grotesque
Gustave Doré’s
Rabelais Illustrations
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Gustave Doré’s Rabelais
Illustrations
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Gustave Doré’s Rabelais
Illustrations
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and
Culture: The Grotesque
Gustave Doré’s Rabelais
Illustrations
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and
Culture: The Grotesque
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Mister Rogers, and Me
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Mister Rogers
Seeing an image of the late Fred Rogers (1928-2003) on the Academy of
Television Arts and Sciences website reminded me that I have meant to
record here my two encounters with this gentle, wonderful man.
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Mister Rogers, and Me
Mister Rogers
I was on a plane flight in the early
eighties from Atlanta to Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania and was surprised to
find Fred Rogers sitting across the
aisle from me, but it was not the
first time our paths had crossed.
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Mister Rogers, and Me
A decade before I was standing in a bookstore in downtown Pittsburgh (I grew
up in Oil City, PA, about fifty miles north of the Steel City), drooling at the most
comprehensive collection of books I had ever seen at the time, when behind
me I heard an unmistakable voice asking the information desk if the store had
"Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel." As luck would have it, I was standing
in front of the medieval literature section, and I pulled the book off the shelf
and handed it to Mister Rogers.
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Mister Rogers, and Me
Years later, the sketch in Kentucky Fried Movie--at least I think that was the
movie (1977)--in which the host of a children's television show pleads with the
kids at home to get their parents out of the room so he can read them another
chapter of Lady Chatterley's Lover made me remember the moment. Mister
Rogers, of course, would never have actually read to visitors to his
neighborhood the profane, grotesque masterpiece (written by a French priest)
which I handed him that day many years ago. But it says everything about
him that he had sought it out as his own essential reading. He was a man of
great depth and humanity with the profound gift of seeming profoundly simple
and transcendentally kind. Only a deranged academic like Willow's mom
would think otherwise.
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Ribald and Bawdy
Erudite
Picaresque
Folkloric
Humanist
Grotesque
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Wherever men laugh and curse, particularly in a familiar
environment, their speech is filled with bodily images. The
body copulates, defecates, overeats, and men's speech is
flooded with genitals, bellies, defecations, urine, disease,
noses, mouths, and dismembered parts. Even when the flood
is contained by norms of speech, there is still an eruption of
these images into literature, especially if the literature is gay
or abusive in character. . . . This boundless ocean of grotesque
bodily imagery within time and space extends to all
languages, all literatures, and the entire system of
gesticulation; in the midst of it the bodily canon of art, belles
lettres, and polite conversations of modern times is a tiny
island. This limited canon never prevailed in antique
literature. In the official literature of European peoples it has
existed only for the last four hundred years. . .
--Mikhail Bakhtin
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin shows that in the past four
hundred years a preoccupation with politeness, taste,
manners, and rational, institutional values has eclipsed an
earlier, pre-modern fascination with the "grotesque body,"
imposing a "bodily canon" on expression and on perception
itself. This earlier wonder at the "earthy"—created and
sustained by folkloric imagination—is readily apparent,
according to Bakhtin, as the shaping force behind the
exuberant but thoroughly grotesque genius of the French
priest.* The "grotesque" body depicted in pre-Renaissance art
in general and Gargantua and Pantagruel in particular is one
which, according to Bakhtin, unashamedly "fecundates and is
fecundated, that gives birth and is born, devours and is
devoured, drinks, defecates, is sick and dying.“
The "bodily canon," however, asserts instead that human
beings exist outside the hierarchy of the cosmos. It stresses
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
that we are finished products, defined characters, and in its
reductionism attempts to seal off the bodily processes of
organic life from any interchange with the external world.
The bodily canon therefore seeks to: 1) close all orifices; 2)
stop all mergers of the body with the external world; 3) hide
all signs of inner life processes and bodily functions (hence,
for example, prohibitions against farting or belching in public);
4) ignore all evidence of fecundation and pregnancy; 5)
eliminate protrusions; 6) present an image of a completed,
rational, individual body.
As a flight from the reality of human embodiment, the anality
described by culture critics from Sigmund Freud to Ernest
Becker and Norman O. Brown (who argued for the essential
anality of capitalism's pursuit of "filthy lucre") is thus
thoroughly modern, both cause and effect of the bodily
canon.
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Rabelaisian man, if Bakhtin's thesis is correct, possessed "true . . .
fearlessness" in the face of the human condition. Because he felt
his own body to contain within it the presence of the cosmos,
because he experienced his embodiment as "a point of transition
in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and
conception," Rabelaisian man found himself at home in the world
in a way that modern man finds difficult to imagine. Before the
censure of the bodily canon, Bakhtin insists, even urine and dung
could appear to be "gay matter, which degrades and relieves at the
same time, transforming fear into laughter" and not as memento
mori. ("In the modern image of the individual body," Bakhtin
reminds, "sexual life, eating, drinking, and defecation have
radically changed their meaning: they have been transferred to the
private and psychological level where their connotation becomes
narrow and specific, torn away from the direct relation to the life
of society and to the cosmic whole. In this new connotation they
can no longer carry on their former philosophic functions.")
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
Repression of the bodily—the
achievement of centuries—is now
efficiently accomplished in a single
childhood. All parents, myself
included, pass on the bodily canon
to our progeny. It's the least we can
do.
Children have in the space of a few
years to attain the advanced level of
shame and revulsion that has
developed over many centuries.
Their instinctual life must be rapidly
subjected to the strict control and
specific molding that give our
societies their stamp, and which
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
developed very slowly over centuries. In this the
parents are only the (often inadequate) instruments,
the primary agents of conditioning; through them and
thousands of other instruments it is always society as a
whole, the entire figuration of human beings, that
exerts its pressure on the new generation, bending
them more or less perfectly to its purpose.
The Grotesque in
Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo regales Kublai
Khan with the story—one of five in the book designated as
tales of “Cities & the Sky”—of Perinthia, a metropolis
which, from its very inception, had been intended as a
utopia, its ordering cosmologically inspired.
In Perinthia, we learn, all aspects of the city are laid out
according to the highest wisdom of astrology and
astronomy. Buildings, for example, are cited in such a way
as to receive “the proper influence of the favoring
constellations. The astronomers who oversaw Perinthia’s
development from the ground up guaranteed the city that
it would, without question, “reflect the harmony of the
firmament.”
Reality, of course, turns out to be anything but ideal. For,
Marco Polo informs us,
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
In Perinthia’s streets and squares today you encounter
cripples, dwarfs, hunchbacks, obese men, bearded
women. But the worse cannot be seen: guttural howls
are heard from cellars and lofts, where families hide
children with three heads or six legs. (144)
Such grotesques bring the astronomer/architects of
Perinthea to an intellectual impasse, one that crops up all
through Calvino’s splendid fictions/thought experiments:
Either they must admit that all their calculations were
wrong and their figures are unable to describe the
heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the
gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters. (145)
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
For the grotesque at its best the second
alternative seems the only viable one. It
celebrates the revelation that “the order
of gods is reflected exactly in the city of
monsters.” It brings us “news from Africa.”
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Bibliography
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, 1984.
Bazin, André. “Cabiria: The Voyage to the End of Neo-Realism.” What is
Cinema? Vol. II. Ed. and Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1971: 83-92..
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1972.
Canfield, Mary Cass. Grotesques and Other Reflections on Art and the Theatre.
Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1972.
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Bibliography
Cox, Harvey. “The Purpose of the Grotesque in Fellini’s Films.” Celluloid and
Symbols. Ed. John C. Cooper and Carl Skrade. Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1970: 92-101.
Fiedler, Leslie. Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. NY: Simon and
Schuster, 1978.
Free, William J. “Fellini’s I Clowns and the Grotesque.” Federico Fellini: Essays
in Criticism. Ed. Peter Bondanella. NY: Oxford UP, 1978: 188-201.
Hillman, James. “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic.” In The New
Polytheism. Ed. David L. Miller. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1981: 109-42.
___. Revisioning Psychology. NY: Harper and Row, 1975.
The Grotesque in Theory
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The Grotesque
Bibliography
___, with Laura Pozzo. Inter Views. NY: Harper and Row, 1983.
Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Bloomington: Indiana U
P, 1963.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems. NY: Knopf, 1954.
Thomson, Philip. The Grotesque. Critical Idiom Series. London: Methuen, 1972.
The Grotesque in Theory
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque