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

The American and European GrotesqueBrecht discovered a new rental library. Poor White by SherwoodAnderson made a great impression on him.” After reading it, he wrotethe poem, “Coals for Mike.” The episode about the widow, MaryMcCoy, is in Chapter 12, Book Four, of Anderson’s novel.It is easy to see how Anderson’s short, direct, colloquial style, hispopulist concerns, and his focus on the social problem of the transitionfrom an agricultural to an industrial society would fascinate Brecht.Yet today we see even more central connections in style betweenBrecht and Anderson. There is a curious relationship between grotesqueand epic in both writers. The epic form, as Brecht developed it out ofShakespeare and other sources such as contemporary film techniques,is marked by short, fragmented rhythms and quick scenes portrayingan entire community or society. In epic drama the characters are notfully rounded in depth, but grotesque in the distortions that societyhas imposed on them. It is especially interesting in this regard thatBrecht’s work is so often set in America. Unconsciously, Brecht felt adeep connection between the distortions in American society and thedistortions in German society after the First World War. As I wrotein my theater book, Breakout:The image of America in Brecht’s work is puzzling—fantastic,brutal, chaotic, materialistic, romantic, daring, primitive andsophisticated at the same time—a strange mixture of attractionand repulsion, the same attitudes that Brecht revealed inconversation about the United States. Reading Brecht’s workand talking to him was a lesson in what the United Statesmeant to Europeans in the 1920s, and a warning why theUnited States is still regarded by Europeans as a grotesquemixture of raw materialism and free openheartedness.Consider Brecht’s play, In the Jungle of Cities, written shortlybefore he read Poor White, but revised afterwards, a revision that maywell have been influenced particularly in the relationship betweenagricultural and industrial environments by his reading of Poor White.In the Jungle of Cities is about a mysterious battle to the death inChicago between a Chinese lumber dealer, Schlink, and a clerk in arental library called George Garga. As Brecht describes it, “It is theyear 1912 in Chicago. You are witnessing an inexplicable wrestlingmatch and the destruction of a family that has come from the prairie