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

The American and European Grotesqueimmediate reactions to grotesque. The great majority of answersemphasized three elements—distorted, fantastic, ugly.The problem remains that grotesque is essentially something wedistrust, the hidden demonic fantasy that still torments and attractsus, the shadow we repress because we don’t want to confront thiscentral problem in our society. In recent years we have learned muchabout the grotesque tradition in art and literature. Important bookson the subject have been written by such scholars as Wolfgang Kayser,Frances K. Barasch, Peter L. Hays, Philip Thomson, and WillardFarnham. We recognize the French and Italian background of theword, particularly the Italian grottesca with its vision of a special styleof opera or art. The Oxford Universal Dictionary with its impeccableBritish-European tradition defines grotesque as “A kind of decorativepainting or sculpture in which portions of human and animal formsare fantastically interwoven with foliage and flowers.” Today, linguisticallyand emotionally, we associate the word with the terrifyingand beautiful gargoyles of the great Gothic cathedrals. As Otto vonSimson writes in The Gothic Cathedral, “Two aspects of Gothic architectureare without precedent and parallel: the use of light and theunique relationship between structure and appearance.” Hidden, functioningas rain-spouts to release dark weather, the gargoyles representthe bestial counter-forces of light. That these dark, bestial forms canbe beautiful too if released into the open air by modern photographictechniques is the psychological lesson we have learned again and againin the twentieth century.Today in the age of concentration camps it is relatively easy foranyone interested in the arts to associate beauty and terror (strange,that this relationship seems so modern when the Greeks knew itintimately). Especially the comic tone in contemporary literature anddrama, as in Joyce’s Ulysses and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, reflects aunique combination of terror, fear, beauty, and laughter. As long ago asour Civil War, in the early 1860s, grotesque was applied to clowns andbuffoons. After the First and Second World Wars, Korea, Vietnam,the Russian invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Middle-Eastern disasters, and the constant threat of nuclear warfare, artistsand writers have used increasingly stylistic variations on the worldas grotesque to emphasize their themes. In Germany Günter Grass,in Italy Cesare Pavese, in France Beckett, Genet, and Ionesco, in