The Grotesque: First Principles

Author(s): Geoffrey Harpham

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 461468
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
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GEOFFREY

The

Grotesque:

HARPHAM

First

Principles

The unformed character of our ideas about the grotesque is in sharp contrast to the highly
developed interest shown in it by contemporary artists and critics. How do we arrive at the source?
Not by going back: etymology, in this case at least, is little help. Perhaps the germ, the secret of
the grotesque, lies not in the origins or derivations of the word, but in the conditions of a particular
cultural climate, a particular artist, a particular audience. Perhaps we should approach the
grotesque not as a fixed thing....
AN

UNANTICIPATED

by-product

of the

Renaissance interest in Antiquity, the grotesque wormed its unwelcome way into the
European consciousness near the end of the
fifteenth century through a series of excavations in caves (grotta) near Rome. These
excavations unearthed murals dating from
the Roman Decadence in which human
and animal figures are intertwined with
foliage in ways which violate not only the
laws of statics and gravity, but common
sense and plain observation as well. Although the grotesque is now fully certified
and licensed, it might seem highly improbable that that child is father to this man,
so radically different from these murals are
the forms we now call grotesque.
The grotesque is the slipperiest of aesthetic categories. The word itself, now
applied to the work of di Chirico, Francis
Bacon (the painter), Stravinsky, Magritte,
Berlioz, Flannery O'Connor, Nathanael
West, and Henry Miller, has also been
applied to that of Shakespeare, Chaucer,
Dante, Poe, Coleridge, Hogarth, Callot,
and Bosch-to
name only those in the
mainstream. If we have further appetite
for muddle we can chew on such facts as
that the grotesque has become increasingly
prominent in recent Dickens scholarship
GEOFFREYHARPHAMis assistant professor of English
at the University of Pennsylvania.

and criticism while it was only rarely

considered by his contemporaries, or that
many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics of Browning saw his work
as indisputably-even
quintessentiallygrotesque while later critics do not stress
this element. The novels which seemed to
Hazlitt "Gothic and grotesque" hardly
seem so to us, who have evolved forms of
the grotesque unimaginable to Monk Lewis
or Mary Shelley. Add to this the perils of
dissociation implied in the fact that the
original "grotesque" murals no longer form
the center of our definition of the term do
not, even, to most modern sensibilities,
seem very grotesque-and one is left with a
bewildering image of the grotesque as an
aesthetic orphan, wandering from form to
form, era to era.
All of this implies that, in approaching a
definition of the grotesque, we should not
always take etymological consistency for
conceptual accuracy; the definition of this
concept, almost as fluid as that of beauty,
is good for one era-even one man-at a
time. When dealing with the grotesque, it
seems, one must deal either with gross generalizations, arbitrariness, or specific statements about specific works. While one can
define it in terms of the forms employed by
artists who, either consciously or unconsciously (in other words, in the critic's
judgment) used the grotesque, or in terms

462
of the psychology of such an artist, easily
the most crucial and measurable aspect is
the effect of the grotesque on the reader,
listener, or spectator. This is not to say
that the genre of a work depends upon the
sang-froid, gullibility or sense of humor of
the audience; it is simply to recognize that
while the forms of the grotesque have
changed remarkably over the centuries, the
emotional complex denoted by the word
has remained fairly constant.
While consistency of grotesque forms is
clearly not to be had, certain elements
seem to appear more frequently than
others. Wolfgang Kayser, whose The Grotesque in Art and Literature is the most
exhaustive modern attempt to explore the
grotesque, notes that snakes, toads, reptiles, nocturnal animals such as spiders,
owls, and particularly bats are the favorite
animals of the grotesque; and further remarks that jungle vegetation, "with its
ominous vitality, in which nature itself
seems to have erased the difference between plants and animals,'1 the mechanical object brought to life, the robot, and the
mask also recur frequently. But these are
given almost incidentally; and no critic
recently has seriously tried to define the
grotesque exclusively by its forms.
Rather, the grotesque is a structure, the
structure of estrangement.2 Suddenness
and surprise, Kayser asserts, are essential
elements in this estrangement; the familiar
and commonplace must be suddenly subverted or undermined by the uncanny or
alien: " . . . it is our world which ceases to

be reliable, and we feel that we would be

unable to live in this changed world. The
grotesque instills fear of life rather than
fear of death."3 Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" gives perhaps the perfect example
of instant alienation, brilliantly, suddenly
literalizing Dostoevsky's metaphor of
man-as-beetle, raising the existential to
the grotesque. But while the criterion of
suddenness might apply to Kafka, I see no
need to insist on it as a general rule.
Thomas Mann's "realistic" work Death in
Venice shows the perceptions of its hero
Gustave von Aschenbach always threatening to betray a distortion which might at
any moment merge into the grotesque. The
grotesque is present as thematic metaphor

GEOFFREY

HARPHAM

in this work, in the images of decay, of

Plague, in the young-old man, the minstrel-in the entire story, in fact. Its appearance, however, is not sudden, but
insidious. The familiar world is never
wholly absent, but always on notice of
dismissal. While most writers do not employ the inherently extreme methods of the
grotesque with such tact, that is no argument against subtlety.
The grotesque must begin with, or contain within it, certain aesthetic conventions which the reader feels are representative of reality as he knows it. The characteristic themes of the grotesque-the
Plague, the Dance of Death, the masked
ball, the Temptations of St. Anthony, the
Apocalypse, to name a few-jeopardize or
shatter our conventions by opening onto
vertiginous new perspectives characterized
by the destruction of logic and regression to
the unconscious-madness,
hysteria, or
nightmare. But this threat depends for its
effectiveness on the efficacy of the everyday, the partial fulfillment of our usual
expectations. We must be believers whose
faith has been profoundly shaken but not
destroyed; otherwise we lose that fear of
life and become resigned to absurdity, fantasy, or death. Fairy tales, for example,
represent an alien but not an alienated
world. The Theater of the Absurd has rules
of incongruity which effectively disqualify
it from being truly grotesque. When the
absurd happens, it must subvert rather
than confirm our expectations. The Temptations of St. Anthony are much more grotesque to St. Anthony than they are to us,
who are familiar with the tradition and the
didactic point. In fact, Ivan Le Lorrain
Albright has recognized this, creating a
"Temptations" which is literally that: St.
Anthony is nowhere to be seen in the
boiling mass of grotesqueries which covers
his canvas-which places the burden of St.
Anthony on us.
Kafka's metamorphosis from idea to
symbol shows us that the grotesque may be
latent in an idea or a situation as well as in
a physical condition; and common usage
supports this. The fact that the radical
deformity which is the ground base for the
grotesque can be intellectual or moral is
largely responsible for the twisting and

The Grotesque: First Principles

shifting in definitions described earlier: the
grotesque depends not only on physical
conditions the deformity of which most
people would recognize, but also on our
conventions, our prejudices, our commonplaces, our banalities, our mediocrities.
As our perceptions of the physical world
the world itself is changed
change-as
by technology, pollution, wars, and urbanization-some
things which had appeared as distortions are now perceived as
commonplace or seen to obey other, previously unknown laws. Each age redefines
the grotesque in terms of what threatens its
sense of essential humanity. As good wit is
novel truth, Santayana said, good grotesque is novel beauty. We see like phenomena all around us. Even so moral a
man as George Orwell would now hesitate
to classify homosexuality with necrophilia,
as he did in a 1944 essay on Salvador Dali.4
Blacks, who previously existed in the public mind as caricatures, have moved, with
exposure, beyond this reductive image.
One can't be shocked forever; and to the
Parisian who strolls by Notre Dame on his
way to work, even the gargoyles must seem
as comfortable as old slippers. Domesticating our grotesqueries, we pay, applaud, or
admire them, and finally pay them the
ultimate tribute of ignoring their deformity.
Furthermore, a particular situation or
object or character or action may acquire
the force of the grotesque depending upon
the context of expectations. Envision, for
example, a picture of "The Papist Devil"
as a swine-in-a-mitre. To whom would this
be more grotesque-a pious twelfth-century Italian peasant or Martin Luther? To
Luther it would be mere satire-and tepid
satire at that. A Griinewald painting perfectly illustrates this contextuality: an
aged, decrepit, withered couple, crawling
with toads and spiders, with vipers twisting out of festering wounds, and giant flies
feasting on fresh sores. The picture is
astonishing, disgusting, but it becomes
grotesque only in the context of the title"Pair of Lovers"-which, providing a stereotype, also furnishes the radical incongruity which intensifies our disgust and
coerces us to laugh-a short snort with no
smile-in spite of our disgust. For an object

463
to be grotesque, it must arouse three responses. Laughter and astonishment are
two; either disgust or horror is the third.
The laughter associated with the grotesque is reductive or ambiguous, innocent
or satanic, depending upon point of view.
To the artist, the grotesque represents a
partial liberation from representationalism, a chance to create his own forms-a
prerogative usually reserved for others.
The opportunity to fashion new Adams,
monstrous to the multitude merely for
their novelty, can be a cause of what
Baudelaire analyzed as "pure joy" to the
artist. According to Baudelaire, other
forms of comic expression appeal to man's
satanic impulse to rise superior over others,
to laugh at their misfortunes. We laugh at
the grotesque, however, in astonishment at
the artist's boldness, daring or ingenuity.
The grotesque, he says, is easily the more
primitive form, expressing not one man's
superiority over his fellows, but the artist's
superiority over nature.
This view of course presupposes the
exclusively subjective nature of the grotesque, a view which, as I will suggest later,
many artists soon came implicitly to question. The artist who creates the pure
grotesque-who does not lard his creations
with non-grotesque elements-is
man in
his primal pointlessness, innocent of moral
ideas.
While the laughter of the grotesque
might be radically innocent for the creator,
it is never innocuous. And the less sophisticated the response of the audience, the
more ambiguous, confused or fringed with
hesitations that laughter will be. In a naive
reading, the corruption of the natural order
is likely to be associated with a satanic
intrusion of pandemonium into the world.
Such naive laughter, which might arise on
the comic or caricatural fringe of the grotesque as a superiority-response to the
ugly, deformed or distorted, becomes complex, withdrawn in confusion as the reader
senses, according to his degree of sophistication, either that the artist is mocking
him or that the familiar world is being
mocked and subverted by the abysmal, the
nocturnal, the irrational, the satanic.
The laughter of the grotesque can be an
involuntary response to situations which

464
cannot be handled any other way, regardless of the sophistication of the audience-why else do we gasp with laughter at
Goya's Desastres De La Guerre? In such
cases, laughter serves to diminish the horror or perplexity and make the nightmare
seem more bearable. Such ambiguity is
itself central to the response to the grotesque, which opens into a realm of contradiction and ambiguity, frequently through
the fusion of forms or realms we know to be
separate. This element was characteristic
of the grotesque even during the Renaissance in the incongruous medleys of the
monstrous and natural, human and animal, of the decorative grotesque of that
period. The Viennese court painter Arcimboldo worked in this tradition, creating
assemblages of animal or vegetable figures
which, if one takes a step backward, infallibly suggest a human face. The point needs
no further elaboration; even so accessible
an author as Kurt Vonnegut has availed
himself of this aspect of the grotesque in
his depiction of man as a machine made
out of meat.
To help settle some of the problems of
classification posed by this ambiguity both
of form and response, we need at least two
major divisions of the grotesque, based on
whether the comic or terrible predominates. This is not news: Ruskin discriminated between the ludicrous and terrible grotesque; Kayser, between the satiric
and fantastic. Whether a work falls into
either category depends upon whether the
middle ingredient is closer to the disgusting, the repulsive, the obscene, or to the
nocturnal, the horrifying or the macabre.
The subdivisions can be represented, albeit
crudely, as follows:
a)
b)
c)
d)

caricature
comic grotesque, (ludicrous or satiric)
fantastic grotesque (terrible)
Gothic-macabre

A perfect formula for most grotesque satire

or comedy is Goethe's dictum, "Looked at
from the height of reason, life as a whole
seems like a grave disease, and the world a
madhouse." There are several methods for
achieving this "height of reason" perspective. For example, Mark Spilka, in his book
on Dickens and Kafka, maintains that the

GEOFFREY

HARPHAM

effect of the grotesque is attained through

the infantile perspective:
For one thing, the child's view of the world is
literally oblique; he stands below the sight-line of
adult activity, for which the man made scene is
built. For another, his view is often animistic....
He also lacks control of inner promptings, and
projects them into the scene before him, as we do in
dreams. Finally, his affective innocence . . . proves
reassuring as the world around him cracks and
topples.5

Perhaps the most famous examples of the

child's-eye, height of reason indictment of
the adult madhouse are Lewis Carroll's
Alice books, the grotesqueness of which is
marred only-but seriously-by the reader's acceptance of the fantastic as a commonplace of Wonderland and LookingGlass Land. But even here, the child's
"affective innocence" is threatened and
the child almost engulfed by the universal
insanity of the world around her. This is
much more the case in Kafka and the later
Dickens. When even innocence is no protector, the comedy is likely to turn bitter.
The formula for this darker, fantastic
grotesque is Goya's motto, "The Sleep of
Reason Produces Monsters." Macabre
dream worlds abounding in rattling skeletons, creeping, root-like creatures, frightful
monsters or the like characterize the fantastic grotesque, a category into which
would fall naturally the work of Bosch,
Bruegel, Odilon Redon, some of Poe, and
some of Goya. However, where we cease
altogether to laugh, we cease altogether to
have the grotesque.
Real and apparent contradictions
abound in discussions of the grotesque; it is
an extremely flexible category. Kayser,
noting the "absurdity" of the tragic
nucleus-a mother killing her children, a
son murdering his father, etc.,6 aligns the
grotesque with tragedy. Others, as we have
seen, align it with comedy. But the grotesque is ultimately of neither of these
categories, but defies the notion of categorization altogether. The term tragicomedy
approaches it. Thomas Mann strikes this
note on the grotesque in one of his essays in
Past Masters:
For I feel that, broadly and essentially, the striking
feature of modern art is that it has ceased to

The Grotesque: First Principles

recognize the categories of tragic and comic. ... It
sees life as tragicomedy, with the result that the
grotesque is its most genuine style. ...

As one critic put it,17 tragedy demands a

moral universe, comedy a rational one; we
believe in neither, and the grotesque,
where one category erupts within another,
satisfies our need for a more flexible ordering.

But now we come to a point where the

strong brew of our definition must be
diluted. The most common use of the
grotesque is not by artists who quaff hogsheads of the stuff, but those who sip and
nibble-not by those who employ the grotesque unadulterated, but those who use it
as an element in a larger, non-grotesque
structure. In such a larger context, where
the norm is truly a norm and not just bait
for the grotesque, the grotesque might have
the effect of raising the specter of insanity
or of introducing chaos, even if momentarily, into a world or a work which does not
wholly embrace it. And this is the point
where a flexible definition serves us best.
For the assertion that a particular perspecor otherwise-is a signpost
tive-infantile
to the grotesque cannot fully account for
the fact that some works are more grotesque than others, that in some worksDjuna Barnes' Nightwood?-the grotesque
seems to have run riot and enslaved its
creator while in others-Huxley's
Point
Counter Point?-the author, regardless of
his point of view, is fully in control, manipulating grotesque effects. The grotesque
cannot serve as structural basis for a work
of any great length; it remains primarily a
pictorial form, with its greatest impact in
moments of sudden insight. Prolonged, it
loses its force; most instances in literary art
are merely instances.
One of the most frequent ways for an
artist to use the grotesque in this limited
way is through the creation of grotesque
characters. And one of the most obvious
ways to effect this alienation is through
physical deformity. Ugliness has a long and
respectable tradition dating from, in Western culture, at least the late medieval
period, when sin, linked with bestiality,
was commonly portrayed in grotesque images. Since then, artists who equated the

465
flesh with evil have distorted its form.
Misshaped form can be read forward to
indicate spiritual or intellectual perversity,
or backward, Quasimodo-wise, to indicate
triumphant inner beauty, life where life
can scarcely flourish.
Another kind of grotesque character is
the product of a reductive vision which
produces what E. M. Forster calls flatness.
Forster was speaking of Dickens, many of
whose characters-Fagin,
Quilp, Cuttle,
Gradgrind-seem to expend a perpetual
energy which points not to a "rounded"
personality but to an impersonal, mechanical driving force behind them. Victims of
obsession particularly lend themselves to
grotesque characterization; V.S. Pritchett
has noted that many of Dickens's characters "live or speak as if they were the only
self in the world." On this point, Spilka
says that the grotesque "displays the
power of the human spirit in regression."8
This is in part true for nearly all reductive
grotesques. Sherwood Anderson's psychic
cripples, for example, still enlist our sympathies in their pathetic attempts to take
parts of the truth for the whole truth: "It
was his notion," Anderson says in "The
Book of the Grotesque," that the moment
one of the people took one of the truths to
himself, called it his truth and tried to live
by it, he became a grotesque and the truth
he embraced became a falsehood. The
rigidity which for Anderson was manifested
in an inner sense of entrapment derives
from impersonal forces (broadly, Puritanism, and the Machine) rather than from a
flexible, complete human spirit. In grotesque comedy we might even be reassured
at the spirit dancing in the psychic cage of
its own making, but if the work is not
comic, we might be suddenly confronted
with the fixed brilliant stare of the monomaniac, the fanatic, the madman. The
victimized innocents of Winesburg, Ohio,
clutching a single moment of revelation,
distort the truth of that moment by taking
it out of the flow of experience, just as, for
example, a fixed smile when not counterbalanced or framed by other expressions
will seem terrifying, mocking, or satanic.
Dickens's work is proof enough of the
potential for terror in such reductive gro-

466
tesque. In a passage written in 1850 in
which he discusses his first toys, Dickens
gives a perfect metaphor not only for his
use of this kind of grotesque, but for his
work in general. The passage begins merrily enough, but gradually a note of terror
creeps in, almost unnoticed, struggles
briefly with the spirit of play, then dominates altogether: the frog with cobbler's
wax on his tail was "horrible"; the cardboard man "was ghastly, and not a creature to be alone with." Most terrifying,
however, was the Mask:

GEOFFREY

HARPHAM

with pure comedy. According to Bergson,

rigidity is comic; Dickens's Mask, however,
suggests not the rigidity of awkwardness
but of death, nor does it serve any corrective Bergsonian purpose.
If the self is not congealed beyond correction, it may be shattered beyond repair.
Hyperbole can be applied not only to
rigidity, but also to the opposite extreme,
that of the disrupted, centerless self,
blasted beyond schizophrenia to a random
anarchy, a polity of conflicting selves. The
neurotic, diseased, fragmented self, torn by
conflicting, perverted, or involuted drives,
When did that dreadful Mask first look at me?
to achieve a sense of significant
trying
Who put it on, and why was I so frightened that the
conduct which on the surbeing
through
sight of it is an era in my life? It is not a hideous
visage in itself; it is even meant to be droll; why face seems perverse is an old story in these
then were its stolid features so intolerable? . . . our modern times, and scarcely needs
Was it the immovability of the Mask? . . . Perhaps retelling-except
to point out that the grothat fixed and set change coming over a real
is
most
kin,
tesque
among human condiface, infused into my quickened heart some remote
tions, to madness, in its loss of controls and
suggestion and dread of the universal change that
is to come on every face, and make it still? . . . The regression to the (particularly sexual)
mere recollection of that fixed face, the mere unconscious-the
Nietzschean, Dionysian,
knowledge of its existence anywhere, was sufficient
or the Freudian id.
to awaken me in the night all perspiration and
Another way of incorporating the grohorror, with, 'O! I know it's coming! O! the Mask!'9
tesque into non-grotesque structures is by
The child who experienced this was in the the use of certain themes which almost
presence of the grotesque: the ambiguous inherently involve the grotesque. Some of
mixture of hilarity and terror, the anxiety, these are predominantly literary, such as
the bewilderment, the merging of Mask the masked ball, the Carnival, and the
and face, the shadow of death passing over double. Some are predominantly pictorial,
the sunny world of children at play, the such as the Danse Macabre. And some
sudden alienation, the vision into the seem to lend themselves to both literary
and pictorial representation, such as The
abyss.
At this point we must differentiate be- Temptations of St. Anthony and the Apotween caricature which is grotesque and calypse. In works with such themes, the
caricature which is not. The pure carica- grotesque can serve as a thematic metaturist portrays what nature almost pre- phor for confusion, chaos, insanity, loss of
sented, emphasizing latent tendencies
perspective, social collapse, or disintegrarather than creating novel distortions. The tion, or angst. The plain assumption of the
human figure, even the most Hellenic, grotesque is that the rules of order have
offers innumerable opportunities for an collapsed; for this reason it is strongest in
imaginative caricaturist, who must, how- eras of upheaval or crisis, when old beliefs
ever, present characteristic rather than in old orders are threatened or crumbling.
In the relatively stable 1890s, for examarbitrary or perverse deformations. Typically, the caricaturist will offer a posture or ple, most of the energy of the grotesque was
an expression which a healthy man could decorative-Beardsley,
for example, parimitate with some effort, and this spirit of ticularly in a work such as the baroque tale
pantomime makes it funny. A posture or The Story of Venus and Tannhduser. But
an expression which a healthy man could the grotesque acquired new force after the
not produce betrays a spirit of pandemon- beginning of the twentieth century, when,
ium rather than pantomime, and the feel- following the fall of Decadence, both popuings evoked are closer to those associated lar and literary culture turned to the next
with the grotesque than those associated phase of the Roman/Apocalyptic topos, the

The Grotesque: First Principles

destruction of the old, rotten order. Particularly up to 1920 or so, the work of such diverse artists as Lawrence, Hesse, Wells,
and Yeats is greatly occupied with Apocalypse; the sense that things are falling
apart, nor can the center hold accounts
for the sense of estrangement, aimlessness and dark anarchy, reflecting the terrors and grotesqueries of Revelation.
Following the War, when it was swiftly
perceived that holocaust had not purged
the times of their corruption and degeneracy (which were, in fact, advancing even
more rapidly and spectacularly than before), the energy of the grotesque shifted
again, with the major stress falling on the
theme of The Temptations of St. Anthony.
The theme is old, but its peculiar significance in this century derives from the climate of the times. The nineteenth century
anticipated it; Poe, Hawthorne, Maupassant, Stevenson, Wilde, Melville, Twain,
Hugo, Keller, Kleist, Gogol, Carlyle, Hoffman, Dostoevsky-all, in their ways, testify
to a sense of inner disruption, to a self radically alienated from a dissolving social
structure, an increasingly pointless world.
While the grotesque is not quite omnipresent in twentieth-century art, almost no major artist has altogether escaped this theme,
some of the mutations of which are the
themes of the artist vs. the bourgeoisie,
capitalism vs. fascism, and the enlightened
soul vs. the benighted mob. And St. Anthony is the hero of contemporary art,
beset by terrors as he struggles to preserve
his version of sanity in a violently insane
world, to keep alive his special light, his
besieged vision of the eclipsed All-Holy in
the face of inhuman or anti-human forces,
the grotesque monstrosities which assault
him.
During the Renaissance, the grotesque
was regarded as a creation of the unruly
imagination: fantastic, unnatural, bizarre
-sogni dei pittori (the dreams of painters). Today, just the opposite seems to be
the case: no longer is the grotesque a
method of portraying only the distorted
inner landscapes of the diseased or neurotic
imagination; we all know there is still
plenty of that, but there are reasons: in a
bomb-dominated, anxious time, objective
reality, revealed to man by his most reli-

467
ably "realistic" methods of observation,
provides the stimulus for the grotesque. In
addition, the neurotic himself, or at least
the outsider, has come to feel himself
custodian of the height of reason-the
perspective so conducive to the grotesque.
So not only has the neurotic asserted
himself as the standard of sanity (frequently dragging along the grotesque as the
standard of beauty: if the mob embraces
technological symmetry and efficiency as
Beauty, the alienato turns to the grotesque), but the world has itself become
more and more hallucinatory. With these
shifts, the grotesque is being granted an
ever larger share in objective reality, as an
engine in the hands of the artist of reality
without inverted commas.
These shifts are responsible, too, for the
critical stretching to which the grotesque is
susceptible: it can mean anything from a
two-headed toad to a Higher Truth. In
moments when, like St. Anthony, we feel
assailed, mocked, or subverted, we turn
naturally to the grotesque, which subverts
not only aesthetic categories, but human
virtue, dignity, and pretense. Among rhetorical modes, the grotesque is most congenial to irony, which, rippling up beneath
the surface, undercuts and subverts language itself. So long as we could admire
things orderly or harmonious as ideals
towards which human beings could strive
-ideals which represented essential Man,
shorn of his imperfections-then
the grotesque could be relegated to the greasy
underworld. But when we begin to doubt
that man is made in the image of God, we
begin to reflect differently on distortion
and perversity. In such a state of doubt the
grotesque may offer itself as a reflection of
the higher truths. Hard truths, certainly;
but for the time being at least, it seems we
are stuck with them.
' Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (New York, 1966), p. 183.
2 Of Kayser's four complementary definitions of the
grotesque, the most useful is the first-:the grotesque is
the estranged world. The others are: the objectivation
of the ghostly "It"; a play with the absurd; and an
attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of
the world.
3Kayser, 185.
4After wondering "why [Dali's] aberrations should

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be the particular ones they were," Orwell adds that
"One would still like to know why Dali's leaning was
towards necrophilia (and not, say, homosexualWritten (but suppressed on grounds of
ity)...."
obscenity) in 1944, this essay, "Benefit of Clergy:
Some Notes on Salvador Dali," appeared in the 1946
collection, Dickens, Dali and Others.
6Mark Spilka, Dickens and Kafka (Bloomington,
Ind., 1963), p. 64.
6Kayser, 185. Kayser adds, however, that "the
tragic does not remain within the sphere of

GEOFFREY

HARPHAM

incomprehensibility. As an artistic genre, tragedy

opens precisely within the sphere of the meaningless
and absurd the possibility of a deeper meaning- in
fate, which is ordained by the gods, and in the
greatness of the tragic hero, which is only revealed
through suffering" (185-86).
7William van O'Connor, The Grotesque: An
American Genre, (Carbondale, Ill.), 1962.
8Spilka, 71.
9Quoted in Angus Wilson, The World of Charles
Dickens (London, 1970) pp. 9-10.