“The function of the narrative is not to represent, it is to constitute a spectacle.” – Roland Barthes
The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections by James Luther Adams, Wilson Yates and Robert Penn Warren is a survey of the grotesque and its function with regard to the understanding of religion. While its focus on theology is not quite useful for the purposes of my FYP, the book ventures into attempts to define the grotesque which I found incredibly useful for my own understanding.
The roots of the term grotesque lie in grottesche, a word coined to describe the wall paintings of human-animal hybrids discovered in the grottoes and burial halls of Rome and its counterparts. Grotesque thus has its beginnings in encompassing these ideas of subterranean discovery and of a world that is unfamiliar given our affiliation with the light of the surface. I will not go into the history of the development of the grotesque in art – I was altogether more interested in the conception of what grotesque signifies.
The grotesque encompasses the idea of rejecting reason and immersing oneself in subconscious tendencies and imagery. It is often preoccupied with the concepts of sexuality and violence, which I feel is very much apparent in the ero guro nansensu genre that also interests me. Visual juxtapositions and clashing elements are often identified as grotesque – grotesque images inhabit the junctures between opposites and threaten the foundations of existence through their subversions of norms.
Wolfgang Kayser defines the grotesque as a paradoxical beast – it fuses what is incompatible and incites accordingly paradoxical reactions in the observer. One can be simultaneously fascinated and delighted and disgusted by the grotesque. Kayser’s central thesis lies in the grotesque being something that is a fusion of incompatible parts, and that its function is to illuminate the grotesque facets of human nature so as to facilitate the acceptance of evil as an inherent part of humanity.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s exploration of the grotesque in the writings of Rabelais contains ideas that are also worth exploring for the purposes of my project. Bakhtin considers the carnival grotesque an all-inclusive celebration of the unity of the spirit and the body. The uncensored function of the body in all its natural processes of respiration, reproduction, defecation and death is not something to be hidden for the purposes of glorifying the purity of the soul. Rather, the physicality of the body is to be celebrated alongside the spirit as a cohesive whole, and the grotesque serves to facilitate the acceptance of this principle.
Bakhtin’s definition of the grotesque includes its infinite possibilites and boundlessness, which may seem counter-intuitive for the purposes of a definition but make sense to me in the light of how conceptions of beauty appear to be structured along very clear boundaries as opposed to the visual diversity of what can be construed as grotesque. Perhaps it is also a matter of taste. Bakhtin’s conception of the grotesque is thus celebratory, an entreaty to engage with the fullness of humanity.
Geoffrey Galt Harpham posits that the grotesque alters with social and cultural norms. His view of what the grotesque might be is in agreement with Kayser’s. He makes reference to Thomas Kuhn’s idea of the paradigm shift – that as society undergoes metamorphosis, so does its conception of the grotesque. I now see the nature of the problem that haunted me for the past two weeks – the nebulous concept of the grotesque precludes a firm, fixed definition, which I find is recognized in Harpham’s line of thought. Finally, Harpham brings myth into his conception of the grotesque, where notions of the fantastic are a vessel for the possibility of alternatives to the familiar that could in some other universe be equally valid and true.
The analysis of the grotesque finishes with Ewa Kuryluk’s augmentation to the existing ideas of Kayser and Bakhtin. Kuryluk asserts that the grotesque is always counter-norm and counter-culture in nature and concerns itself with the realm of symbolism.
Another interesting idea with regard to the grotesque that I find manifesting in my own work (and in the references I admire) is the centrality of the female body to our understanding of what the grotesque might be. The female body, often stigmatized for its functions in religious texts and mythology (i.e. the idea that menstruation is a manifestation of the inherent unclean nature of the female body), has often been presented as a perversion of the perfect male form. The female genitals in particular have been adapted as visual language for the presentation of Hell itself.
While I personally find the conception of the unclean female body a dated and repulsive idea, it is clear to me that in the visual language of the grotesque the female body plays a significant role. In the ero guro nansensu works and the erotica that I have been inspired by, the distorted female body, whether metamorphosed or exposed, is far more prevalent than the distorted male body. The female form is a far more common visual subject than the male form, and has been so in much of the artistic tradition. One needs only to observe the nude human body in paintings to find that the female nude is far more documented than the male nude, and in a more objectified fashion.
The grotesque body “outgrows its own self, transgressing its own body,” as Bakhtin writes. This anchors my interest in the mutability of the human form to express that which is uncanny and different. The horror of the familiar (i.e. the female genitals) is at once distancing and intimate. I found that all the readings I’ve been looking at so far have brought the theoretical richness that I felt was lacking in my project so far. Moving ahead, I would like to reconsider the objectives for my thematic concerns and for my illustration and form up a more solid concept for my FYP.
My interest remains in the realm of the grotesque and of the body, but I may open the floor to hybrid forms that mix human and animal and plant. The purposes of this are not yet clear to me but any writing I do will concern itself closely with these ideas of the grotesque and the monstrous as a dark mirror for humanity and the self.
