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

The American and European GrotesqueIn the final instance tragedy is an appraisal of human fate, ameasure of the absolute. The grotesque is a criticism of theabsolute in the name of frail human experience. That is whytragedy brings catharsis, while grotesque offers no consolationwhatsoever . . . In the world of the grotesque, downfall cannotbe justified by, or blamed on, the absolute. The absolute is notendowed with any ultimate reasons; it is stronger, and that isall. The absolute is absurd. Maybe that is why the grotesqueoften makes use of the concept of a mechanism which has beenput in motion and cannot be stopped.When Kott says that “grotesque offers no consolation whatsoever,”he seems to me wrong. Treated with artistry and compassion thegrotesque can console. Many artists, European and American, testifyto this. The difference lies in tone. The confrontation of existentialquestions has led to savage comedy, black humor, the pursuit of styleand techniques into abstract areas where human elements are increasinglymissing. All of these pervasive problems of meaning and faithlead to dominant trends in the arts that lift technique above content.Art becomes the masks of art rather than the direct confrontation ofexperience.After the Second World War, caught in the age of concentrationcamps, the European artist began to struggle with Camus’ sense ofthe absurd:A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, isa familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived ofillusions and of light, man feels a stranger. He is an irremediableexile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homelandas much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. Thisdivorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting,truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.[From The Myth of Sisyphus, as quotedby Martin Esslin in The Theatre of the Absurd.]Naturally European artists after the Second World War tendedto reflect a grotesque world in which man had become an absurdistcipher. Yet in the great works of European Grotesque, such as Beckett’s