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

As I Lay Dying(William Faulkner),.“ ‘Great God, What They Got in That Wagon?’:Grotesque Intrusions in As I Lay Dying”by Michael Gillum,The University of North Carolina at AshevilleOutrageous, absurd, or outlandish situations are common in WilliamFaulkner’s narratives. For example, Ike Snopes in The Hamlet is deeplyin love with a cow. The Indians in “Red Leaves” imitate their Euro-American neighbors by acquiring black slaves, but only use them tohaul a derelict steamboat twelve miles overland to serve as the headman’spalace. At the end of The Sound and the Fury, Benjy Compson, amentally defective member of a distinguished family, bawls his lungsout in downtown Jefferson because the family carriage is circlingthe Confederate Memorial in the direction opposite to what he isused to. Tonally diverse as they are, all these situations are grotesque.Grotesque art is art with bad manners. It challenges our ideals andour notions of proper order with dissonant elements—disgusting,embarrassing, incongruous, or frightening intrusions. To date, themost systematic analysis of the literary grotesque is Philip Thomson’s.He writes that, structurally, the grotesque consists of “a mixture ofboth the comic and the terrifying (or the disgusting, repulsive etc.)in a problematical (i. e. not readily resolvable) way. . .” (21), addingthat the content of the grotesque must include “abnormality” (25). Inkeeping with Thomson’s point about contrasts being problematic orirresolvable, a fundamental quality of the grotesque is its complexity13