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Let us begin by considering the origins and meanings of the word grotesque. Maximillian E. Novak doubtless oversimplifies when he suggests that the grotesque stems exclusively from “the rendering of skeletons, demons, witches and ghosts,” but he is certainly correct in urging that the “serious grotesque” is significantly utilized in the eighteenth-century gothic novels. Responses to the word gothic have clearly varied over the ages; in the late eighteenth century, the gothic represented the mystically mysterious architecture of the long-ago medieval period all too often visible only as “ruins,” its ghosts “haunting” the Age of Sensibility that sought to exercise pent-up emotions and to indulge in thrills, sighs, and titillations.1 The gothic also represented the awesome and threatening powers of Catholicism; the Church had once been universal in its sway and fearful in its persecutions and in supplying visions of hellfire. But the gothic also indicated the barbaric invasions of Eastern hordes and served perennially as an object lesson to human pride: man’s highest attainments in civilization could at any moment come tumbling down as had the grandeur that was Rome. A near-apocalyptic tide of barbarism could initiate “dark ages” when least expected. Sir William Temple and Jonathan Swift often appealed to the cyclic nature of history, calling attention to culture’s decline and to the potential reinfestation of society by savages.2
Particularly as an antidote to Enlightenment optimism, neoclassicism, and rationalism, the theory that heralded dark irrationalism as an inevitability generated in the spectator an ambivalent frisson and Schadenfreude: one could tremble at the black uncouth heart of darkness in man and his penchant for bringing civilization down with an axe and at the same time feel justified smugness in repudiating excessive optimism and naive rationalism. But the optimism prevailed throughout most of the nineteenth century, with the full blossoming of the idea of progress to ripeness. To be sure, many back-benchers of the opposition—Browning, Baudelaire, Hawthorne, Melville, and, later, Dickens, Twain, and Flaubert—expressed their objection to progressive idealism by utilizing features of the gothic vein.3 But with the twentieth century the ideal of inevitable progress came terribly crashing to the ground, shattered by monumental world wars, revolutions, indeterminacy, atomic energy, the Freudian id, and the Holocaust. In the present century, then, the gothic and the grotesque mate and become the dominant imagery of our era.
The term grotesque originally referred to a specific art of the grotto. In the fifteenth century the remnants of Nero’s first-century Domus Aurea, or Golden House, were discovered and excavated beneath the baths of Trajan and of Titus. The bizzare wall paintings in the palace represented elaborate knots and festoons of floral decorations, designs oddly transforming into snakes, satyrs, mythological animals, as well as human figures or parts of human appendages. Hence, an art that unconscionably mingled and interfused human, animal, vegetable, and mineral in eerie and nightmarish fashion (the atmosphere in the darkened crypt generated some of this mood) became but one more exotic mode or style—la grottesca. The style flourished in the work, over the years, of Bosch, the Brueghels, Raphael, Velázquez, Hogarth, Callot, Goya, and Dali.4
The grotesque, however, does not merely come down to us from the eerie etchings in Nero’s house. Much evolves from early Roman dramatic and public practice—in mimes, in the Saturnalia—that celebrated nonrationality and laughter and was thoroughly incorporated into the medieval period in popular folkways stressing ambivalence, jollity, and release. Mikhail Bakhtin terms it the “carnival grotesque.”5 But despite its twofold overtones—exhilarating exaggeration and the ominously extraterrestial—the grotesque was always understood to be excessive, requiring boundaries and regulation lest it burgeon, “break out,” or get out of hand.
Such an effete and incredible art was not merely the invention of the supposedly decadent Neronian age. Art has always wavered in cycles betwixt the classical and the romantic, betwixt the idealized humanistic and the imaginative sub- and suprahuman sublime. Egyptian fantastic art was subsequently replaced by the formalized sculpture of the Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and these extremes in conception have continued to manifest themselves alternately throughout history. Indeed, even in so-called classical Augustan Rome, ca. 1 B.C.-A.D. 10, the irrational creations of a baroque art were popular, and Vitruvius complained about popular tastes that preferred
monsters rather than definite representations taken from definite things. [In architecture nowadays] instead of columns there rise up stalks; instead of ga bles, striped panels with curled leaves and volutes. Candelabra uphold pictured shrines and above the summits of these, clusters of thin figures seated upon them at random. Again, slender stalks with heads of men and of animals attached to half the body. Such things neither are nor can be, nor have been.6
We might add that the so-called staid era of ideals and order in Augustan Rome produced one of the masterpieces of grotesque art, Ovid’s Metamorphoses—a now-witty, now-awesome catalog of human transformations into godhood, into animal and vegetable creatures.
Doubtless the popularity of insidious nonrational art led Horace in his classic Ars Poetica to depict such profusions in one of his most striking images: “If a painter wishes to join a horse’s neck to a human head and to place varied plumage on limbs brought together helter-skelter so that a woman beautiful in her upper parts should terminate hideously in a black fish,” who could avoid laughter, Horace queries. For such a portrayal, he adds, would be similar to a chaotic book “whose meaningless ideas will be shaped like a sick man’s dreams.” And yet, after all, with a bestial flourish, Horace merely describes with some contorted variation a species of mermaid. And classical art (in Homer, in Virgil, in Seneca) had profusely delineated and proliferated hydras, sphinxes, pig-manufacturing Circes, gorgons, Polyphemuses, Stygian birds, and bewitching sirens.7 The standards of classical tradition, however, incline it to label such art (in Stoic terms) as deviant from right reason, from normality, and from rigorously harmonious mathematical form—in short, to label grotesque art “unnatural.” And such have been, down the ages, the repeated grounds for censure of Blakean monsters and all such visionary and opium-induced ambulations down the road of excess.
Yet not only the violation of harmony, symmetry, and proportion characterizes the grotesque. Mere association of this ludicrous and effete art with the name of the mad tyrant Nero lent it more macabre qualities of the ominous and the berserk. In addition, its location in a darkened crypt suggests that it was an underground artistry. Man always associated the underworld with the shadowy, the chaotic, and the unnatural, and the popular imagination regularly peopled Hades and Sheol with monstrous creatures (one thinks of the triple-headed Cerberus), devils, and demons. Even the dead acquired attributes of the unnatural, conceived of as becoming haunting spirits and ghosts. As early as the Odyssey, Homer depicts the shades of the slaughtered suitors as fluttering and flying, gibbering like bats as they descend to the underworld. Hence the grotesque is repeatedly associated with gross unnatural distortion and calls to mind the fearful, the unearthly, the nightmarish, and the demonic. At its mildest, the grottesco style black root of nearly all significant modern art.” Accordingly, such art utilizes “Symbols of the grotesque and the violent.”14
Of course, since much of the grotesque manner appears startling, demonic, disorderly, and depressing, it is not surprising that its deployment has frequently discomfited and annoyed the popular audience. Moralists particularly object that such art lacks piety, joy, and affirmation. And neoclassicists frequently protest, as Horace had done, that grotesquerie violates the canons of ordonnance and of form. We wish, however, to remind the modern audience that grotesque art has always been a weapon in the hands of the classicists who seem so stridently to disapprove of its use. Horace himself was not averse to introducing ghosts, witches, transformations, and disorderly arrangement and conduct into his epodes, satires, epistles, and odes. The satirist usually fosters the grotesque as a mirror held up to chaotic and distraught generations, and grotesquerie has been a dominant feature in major satiric art—in Lucian’s Lucius; or, The Ass, in Juvenalian jeremiads, in Reynard the Fox, in Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne, von Grimmelshausen, Jonson, Pope, and Swift.
Hence Montaigne with studied aplomb cultivates in his writing the “Crotesko” painter’s “fantasticall pictures, having no grace.” Indeed, he claims that his own loose essays are grotesques: “What are these my compositions in truth, other than antike workes, and monstrous bodies, patched and hudled up together of divers members, without any certaine or well ordered figure, having neither order, de-pendencie, or proportion.”15 As ironist and paradoxer, he claims an innocence that produces chaotic matter, just as Horace had insisted that he could not achieve classic or epical status and had to settle for only sermones or “chats” in his lowly writings. Yet such a naive pose allows him to attack much questionable opinion and conduct in his own day with seeming impunity.
Alexander Pope maintains a like-minded naïveté when he allows his persona, Martinus Scriblerus, to extol wretched modern poetry. Scriblerus’s manual, the Peri Bathous, actually attempts to aid aspirants in the writing of bad poetry; Scriblerus recommends that poets avoid common sense and strive for “a most happy, uncommon, unaccountable Way of Thinking.” The neophytic bad poet should “consider himself as a Grotesque painter, whose works would be spoiled by an imitation of nature, or uniformity of design. He is to mingle bits of the most various, or discordant kinds, landscape, history, portraits, animals, and connect them with a great deal of flourishing, by heads or tails, as it shall please his imagination, and contribute to his principal end, which is to glare by strong oppositions of colours, and surprise by contrariety of images.” Yet for all of this irony, Pope himself is an absolute master of chaotic and discordant modern creations, his masterpiece being that grand dilapidated and defective epic, The Dunciad (1728–43).16
In a similar manner, modern satire has been especially fond of utilizing the absurdities of perverse gothic underground men entrapped in their entropic universe. Such satire gains poignant force from shattered and ominous images of demonic disarray. Doubtless our century of warfare, bloodshed, and mass communications has earned the violent public art (one thinks of Picasso’s Guernica) it has inspired. Being necessarily selective, we will examine five influential modern writers of this grotesque art—Kafka, Faulkner, Beckett, Grass, and García Márquez.
Franz Kafka, one of the seminal influences in twentieth-century literature, generated a fiction of inexplicable trials, persecutions, and dismemberment. His medium was especially effective for its internal contradictions—the patient, rational analysis of the wildly irrational. “A Common Confusion” well illustrates his method. Its genre is close to a logical problem frequently encountered in course texts in algebra and plane geometry. All is neatly labled, A, B, C, D, and one expects in such a genre that the alert arithmetical student will do some paperwork and provide a solution. Yet Kafka’s “problem” is insoluble: different characters operate forever in different “sets”; time is forever different in each character’s world. As a result, Kafka’s creatures dwell on different planes and can never meet. Mathematics and the world it seeks to measure and regulate have run out of control.
Much the same occurs in “A Hunger Artist,” in which an emaciated artiste starves in public for a living. Opposites suddenly conflict—a man may be a creator of nonconsumption, a composer of starvation. This generator of sterility lives in straw and a cage, like a beast; the apex of his achievement becomes synonymous with self-destruction. And all around this immobile, decaying carcass swirls a public senselessly committed to violent changes in taste. Even more grotesque is “The Metamorphosis,” wherein Gregor Samsa, the bourgeois office clerk, is inexplicably converted into a gigantic insect.17 He continues to rationalize like a middle-class human, while behaving like a bug. And almost inadvertently his family, which cannot cope, slowly and ineptly bruise, batter, and starve the creature to death. Paradoxically, his demise triggers joy and relief and is the means of his sister’s “transformation” into vigorous and healthy female adulthood. Kafka, of course, powerfully exemplifies the existential absurd: the universe has betrayed man, but man’s perverse values have also led to his betrayal of himself.
One of William Faulkner’s best novels of the comic-grotesque is The Hamlet (1940). All his novels, to some degree, are inhabited by obsessed maniacs, desperate little men, and maimed leaders, but The Hamlet concentrates them all together in an especially rich abundance.18 The novel satirically portrays the triumph of vice and folly. The southern white-trash horde of Snopeses proliferates on the land like mink, overpopulating and inundating rural Yoknapatawpha County with criminals and halfwits. Good men are conned, deceived, robbed, driven mad, and the implacable Flem Snopes, silent and intransigent, irrevocably takes over in Frenchman’s Bend. Common sense is driven out, and the only kind of love in evidence is bestial and perverse. A climactic vision conjured by Ratliff, the sewing machine salesman, portrays Flem Snopes as outmaneuvering Satan and taking the underworld as his prize. Such a grotesque operator is intended to be seen as the new comptroller of a universe gone awry. William Faulkner has simply up-ended the romantic tall tale, converting it into a lyrical (and epical) account of the triumph of civic savagery.
Another master, Günter Grass, is best known for his monumental metaphor for the German war years in The Tin Drum (1959). Perverting the Bildungsroman, this novel offers in a sense no “development” at all. Its protagonist is the stunted dwarf, Oskar Matzerath; with full intellectual growth at birth, he elects to stop growing physically at the age of three and is magically capable of shattering glass with his voice. Symbolically beating a tin drum throughout, he subsequently becomes a mad dwarfish leader of street gangs. Oskar, believing that he is destined for some messianic goal, represents the rise of Nazi power and the chaotic destructiveness of the war years. He is at once barrenly infantile and sexually potent, a brilliantly creative destroyer surrounded by a world of brilliantly greater destruction. His loudly beaten drum is the thunder that represents the militant jungle magic of primitive man and that throughout this novel, as one critic observes, “calls the world’s tune.”19
An additional masterpiece of grotesque satire is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which treats the panorama of eight generations of the Buendía family, from the founding of the remote village of Macondo in the Colombian jungle until the town’s destruction by hurricane. The Buendías have a penchant for obsessive and singular as (married cousins) had migrated to and founded Macondo in an attempt to escape the curse of incest: an offspring that would manifest a little pig’s tail. At the novel’s close, before the town is demolished by storm and flood, an aunt and her nephew, violating this taboo, do indeed manage to beget a little pig-tailed son—as if this were the fated and desired completion of an entire family’s fantastic quest. We are assaulted by a near-mythic tale of a civilization’s rise, decline, and apocalyptic demise, but it is a uniquely modern myth, without any evident heroes or virtues, suggesting a sick land without standards or noteworthy achievements—in short, the jaundiced realm of our own modern history and consciousness.
Doubtless the greatest purveyor of grotesquerie in our century is Samuel Beckett. His panoply of novels perhaps best dramatizes modern man’s boredom, claustrophobia, and withdrawal inward—to a barren lunatic terrain. The earliest hero in his short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), is Belacqua, named after the sloth in Dante’s Purgatory. Subsequent figures exceed him marvelously in lethargy and inertness: Murphy in voluntary isolation in his rocking chair, Watt endlessly devising “possible” rational strings of explanations for trivial everyday events, Molloy maniacally pondering the probable arrangements for his sixteen suckingstones in four pockets. Inevitably, Beckett’s characters are more and more constricted and physically confined: Vladimir and Estragon wait interminably; Lucky and Pozzo exchange roles as master and slave, horse and buggy; Molloy is reduced to traveling by bicycle, then to crutches, then to crawling, moving toward paralysis; Macmann (in Malone Dies) rolls in a circle of mud and rain; the speaker of How It Is is a captive in lukewarm mud in the dark; Nagg and Nell (in Endgame) appear legless, in garbage cans; Winnie (in Happy Days) is buried to her chin in the desert sand; and the Unnameable appears armless and legless, his torso stuffed in a jar in front of a Parisian restaurant. Many such mutilated victims have nothing but writing, or tapes, or endless talk to keep them going—but there is always the threat of total insanity, final annihilation, acts without words, silence. Beckett’s clowns and tramps eternally metamorphose into victims. He is clearly a master of comic small talk, with its incessant repetitions and elongated lists, of parody of learning, of obscene puns, and his satire pushes his readers closest to the abyss.20 For here, his fictions seem to tell us, lies man in his human condition: solipsistic yet paralyzed by ignorance and the absurd. No one has been able, more comically or horribly, to dig down further into man’s intellectual grotto. Perhaps Beckett takes us as far underground as we can bear to go.
Horace, in conceiving his hideous mermaid-beast, spoke of the inventions of a “sick man’s dreams.” In its shocking way, the modern grotesque appears to postulate that such a sick man’s brain is possibly the lowest common denominator of the human condition itself. Normally the middle class is perfectly content with touches of the grotesque in comedy, or with threads and frills of the odd in the decorative arts. The Victorians were placidly fond of garish furniture, elaborate and wildly ornate lamps and screens and wallpaper, or of sofas whose arms and legs were transmogrified into eagle’s talons, elaborate vines, or lion’s claws. But in the persistent grotesque the themes of unworldly upheavals and transformations and near lunatic disarray threaten to overturn the bourgeoisie’s own world of sanitary and sanctimonious normalcy and diurnal mediocrity. Baudelairean flowers of evil, mystifying (and sinister) symbolist imagery, surrealism’s mayhem, Jarry’s murderous Ubu puppets, Büchner’s insane half-wit Woyzeck, Čapek’s invading newts, Golding’s pig-hunting child-savages, Céline’s journeys into the heart of darkness, Burgess’s slang-ridden menacing street gangs, and Ionesco’s evolving rhinoceroses present pervasive scenes of malice and distortion, far more disturbing to conventional expectations and dissatisfying to citizens bent upon the pursuit of happiness, quietus, and relief. Yet it is upon that rough road that the many classic satirists increasingly have determined to propel a nervous and unwilling readership. Generating a paradox, we can assert that classical satiric artists find for themselves a happy medium for their message in the gothic and truncated extravagances of anticlassical artistry. Nowhere is such a practice more in evidence than in the creations of twentieth-century art.