Blooms Literary Themes - THE GROTESQUE.pdf - ymerleksi - home

xviVolume Introduction by Harold Bloomindividuation and augmentation of the ego, where sexuality necessarilyplayed a key developmental role. If we can speak of Freud’sown quest-romance it would be his drive to free cognition from itssexual past. In a brilliant perception Freud surmised that all cognitionbegan with a child’s curiosity as to gender differences, a curiosity thatremains an endlessly moody brooding in most of us but that an elitegroup could transcend, by way of an intellectual discipline and of aprofound immersion in culture. And yet our discomfort with culturegrows incessantly. In Freudian quest-romance, we always are marchingon to defeat because each of us is her or his own worst enemy. We havea will-to-fail, an unconscious sense of guilt, a sado-masochistic drivebeyond the Pleasure Principle.2Freud was the last and greatest of the Victorian prophets: SamuelButler, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Ruskin, WalterPater, Matthew Arnold and, in Germany, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.Browning, a fiercely Protestant sensibility but scarcely a pious Christian,was the lifelong disciple of Percy Bysshe Shelley, archetypal HighRomantic rebel against the established order, Christianity included.From his early poetry—Pauline and Paracelsus—which were essentiallyShelleyan voyages to the impossible ideal—on to his mature dramaticmonologues, Browning was faithful to the spirit of Shelley. But the ShelleyanSublime is transformed into Browning’s Romantic Grotesque, asit had been by Shelley himself in his verse-drama, The Cenci.Browning’s darkly splendid Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Cameis a controlled phantasmagoria in thirty-four six-line stanzas, spokenby a nameless “childe” or candidate for knighthood. The poem’s titleis taken from a snatch of anonymous song uttered by Shakespeare’sEdgar (impersonating madness) in King Lear (III, IV, 173):Child Rowland to the dark Tower Came,His word was still, “Fie, foh, and fum,I smell the blood of a British man.”That brief bit of weird lyric was enlarged by Browning into a grandnightmare of a poem, dependent for many of its grotesque singularitiesupon a chapter, “Of Things Deformed and Broken,” in The Art of