2. A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF GROTESQUE
2.1 Grotesque
Grotesque is a decorative style in which animal, human, and vegetative
forms are interwoven and deformed to the point of absurdity (Merriam-Webster’s
Encyclopedia of Literature: 495). This nonliterary sense of the word first entered
the English language as a noun. The word comes ultimately from 16th-century
Italian grottesea, deriving from grotta (cave), in allusion to certain caves under
Rome in which painting in such a style were found. It came to be used as an
adjective describing something in this style and hence to mean bizarre,
incongruous, or unnatural, or anything outside the normal. The extension of the
word 'grotesque' to literature and to non-artistic things took place in France as
early as the sixteenth-century, but in England and Germany only in the eighteenth
century. With this extension 'grotesque' took on a broader meaning. In literature
the style is often used for comedy or satire to show the contradictions and
inconsistencies of life.
The word grotesque thus come to be applied in a more general fashion
during the age of Reason and of Neo-Classicism, when the characteristics of the
grotesque style in art, such as extravagance, fantasy, individual taste, and the
rejection of the natural conditions of organization are the object of ridicule and
disapproval. The most general sense which it has developed by the early
eighteenth century is therefore that of “ridiculous, distorted, unnatural, and
absurd.”(http://davidlavery.net/Grotesque/Major_Artist_Theorists/theorists/thoms
on/thomson2.html)
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For the modern critics, the “grotesque” refers to special types of writing,
to kinds of characters, and to subject matters (Harmon William, 2000: 240). The
interest in the grotesque is usually considered an outgrowth of interest in the
irrational, distrust of any cosmic order, and frustration at humankind’s lot in the
universe. In this sense, grotesque is the merging of the comic and tragic, resulting
from our loss of faith in the moral universe essential to tragedy and in rational
social order essential to comedy. For the nineteenth-century critics, grotesque is a
deplorable variation from the normal. Thomas Mann (1875-1955) sees it as the
“most genuine style” for the modern world and the “only guise in which the
sublime may appear” now. Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) seems to mean the
same thing when she calls the grotesque character “man forced to meet the
extremes of his own nature.”
William Van O’Connor (1915-1966) calls the grotesque as an American
genre. Sherwood Anderson defines a grotesque character as a person who takes
one of many truths to himself and calls it as his truth, then tries to live by it. The
person becomes a grotesque and the truth he embraces a falsehood. A work can be
called grotesque whenever the fictional character performs abnormal actions and
is physically or spiritually deformed. It may be used for the allegorical statement,
as Flannery O’Connor uses it. It may exist for comic purposes, as in Eudora
Welty’s works. It may be the expression of a deep moral seriousness, as it is in the
works of William Faulkner. It may be a basis for social commentary, as it is in the
works of Erskine Caldwell. It may make a comment on human beings as animals,
as in Frank Norris’s works. It may partake of satire, as in Nathanael West’s
novels. Clearly, the grotesque suits the spirit of the century. Example of the
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grotesque can be found in the characters and situations in the works of Edgar
Allan Poe (1809-1849), Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Eugene Ionesco,
Mervyn Peake, and Joseph Heller, among many others.
2.2 Grotesque Characteristics
Grotesque represents forms melting into one another. Like Roman’s
ornaments or paintings, which flowers, genii, men and beast, buildings, etc are
mingled together, literary work should combine grotesque characteristics with the
intention that the literary work could be called grotesque.
O’Connor presents many grotesque characteristics in Wise Blood, but I
will analyze seven characteristics only, namely: monster, violence, absurd,
mystery, comic, symbol, and irony.
2.2.1 Monster
The grotesque is the literary means of portraying the human condition in
such an unsure universe. Grotesque is an ancient mode with a long history and life
of its own. It has some special characteristics; and the monster is one of them. All
grotesque figures have some connections with human world. A ghost is a spirit
from the dead, a vampire is in origin the human victim of another vampire, even
an animal figure is performed grotesque by being given human perceptions and
superhuman powers, not simply brute force. Consequently, when figures of the
grotesque appear as nonhuman, supernatural beings, they still make the sense
human evil darker and less optimistic.
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The characters with monster quality tend to be demonic. The figures of
grotesque monsters, such as vampires, ghosts, and the figure of animal, as well as
deformed human beings such as dwarfed and hunchbacked figures to make life
seem uncertain and directionless. Monster is a pejorative term for a grossly
deformed individual. These severely deformed humans rarely survive.
Michael Foucault (1926-1984) in his book Abnormal explains the idea of
the monster in the following way: the monster is essentially a mixture . . . of two
realms: the animal and the human, as example, a man with the head of an ox or
the man with a bird’s feet monsters. It is the blending, the mixture of two species:
the pig with a sheep’s head is a monster. It is the mixture of two individuals: the
person who has two heads and one body or two bodies and one head is a monster.
It is the mixture of two sexes: the person who is both male and female is a
monster. It is a mixture of life and death: the fetus born with a morphology that
means it will not be able to live but that nonetheless survives for some minutes or
days is a monster. Finally, it is a mixture of forms: the person who has neither
arms nor legs, like a snake, is a monster.
2.2.2 Violence
Violence is very significant in literature. It could refer to physical force,
abusive language or harassing action. Without violence, there would be nothing in
the world but goodness, and literature is not mainly about goodness: it is mainly
about badness. Violence is much used in grotesque for the reason that it gives the
shock-effect to the readers.
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Eric Bentley (1916- ) says that Charlie Chaplin is the best example in
violence (Corrigan, 1981:203). Audiences love Charlie because he is less violent.
He seems less violent because he put the violence in the other characters. The
violence is done to him, not by him. In The Kid, Charlie finds himself literally
holding the baby. By all means, he is going to become a charming and sentimental
foster-father, but as he sits there with his feet in the gutter he notices an open
drain, and he has almost thrown the baby sown it before sentiment comes again
into his own.
2.2.3 Absurd
Grotesque is a decorative style in which animal, human, and vegetative
forms are interwoven and deformed to the point of absurdity. Grotesque refers to
something ridiculous, unnatural, and absurd. Absurd is from Latin word absurdus.
It means specifically “away from the right sound,” but the general modern usage
is broader: away from ‘all reason or right sense; laughable foolish or false.’ For
the purposes of this work, a slight modification of the contemporary definition
will serve well: ‘away from ordinary reason and right sense; laughably foolish and
true.’ There are some characteristics of absurdity: first, a ‘going away from’ a
norm; second, a questioning of validity of human reason itself, from which our
perceptions of natural laws arise; third, absurd hero’s sense of isolation from God,
from humanity, and from love; fourth, pervasive element of absurdity may simply
be termed the gross coincidence, or prank of fate.
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2.2.4 Mystery
The central of all human being has been to deal with the mysteries of life,
with those aspects of the numinous which haunt our experience. There are certain
abiding mysteries in human life that we can never totally understand or explain in
rational terms no matter how hard we might try to do so. No matter how boldly
each of us may assert that: “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my
soul,” we are nonetheless haunted by a nagging sense that there are unseen,
undefined, or unknowable forces which shape our lives; that there is a script of
someone else’s making which directs what happens to us. (Corrigan, 1981: 1)
Mystery has always been O’Connor important element in creating her
grotesque novel. O’Connor’s grotesque always relates to God’s will which cannot
be explained by natural determinable event or behavior because God cannot be
judged by human knowledge (Fitzgerald, 1988: 954). O’Connor’s essential
mystery of religious experience is suggested by pointing toward it rather than
trying to describe it from inside.
2.2.5 Comic
As Sigmund Freud writes:
Thus a uniform explanation is provided of the fact that a person
appears comic to us if in comparison with ourselves, he makes to
great an expenditure that in both these cases our laughter expresses
a pleasure sense of the superiority which we feel in relation to him.
(Corrigan, 1981: 168)
Comic element in grotesque has a function of defensive laughter. The
laughter exists because we find a figure that is laughable and we could consider
him as a fool. Laughter is the consequence in man of the idea of his own
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superiority (Corrigan, 1981: 316). There is a feeling of superiority when we
compare ourselves to a laughable comic figure. The comic figure is the fool
(Corrigan, 1981: 39). Being isolated, he serves as a “center of indifference,” from
which position the rest of us may, if we will, look through his eyes and appraise
the meaning of our daily life.
All the theorists of comic are based on some notions of incongruity,
conflict, and contradictory. Incongruity is effectively used in all dramatic forms:
serious and comic. It can produce dire emotion as well as side splitting laughter.
Conflict is a state of discord caused by the actual or perceived opposition of need,
values, and interest between people. And contradictory means deny the truth of
something said or written.
2.2.6 Symbol
According to Ruskin “a fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a
series of symbol is thrown together in a bold and fearless connection, of truths
which it would have taken a long time to haste of the imagination, forming the
grotesque character.” When we have experience something too great or too
difficult to grasp fully and most truths are beyond human being, we encounter the
grotesque. For example, paintings, in which we can find grotesque element such
as Hieronymus Bosch’s painting is called symbolic for it stands for or represents
something that is difficult to be understood by the audience.
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2.2.7 Irony
Irony is very significant in grotesque. Irony is an implied discrepancy
between what is said and what is meant. Three kinds of irony:
a. Verbal irony is when an author says one thing and means something.
b. Dramatic irony is when an audience perceives something that a character in the
literature does not know.
c. Situational of situation is a discrepancy between the expected result and actual
results.
2.3 The Southern Grotesque
The terms Gothic and Grotesque are often interchanged when applied to
the South (the only place to which both rubrics have been consistently applied as
literary denominators). Southern Grotesque works usually depict Southern
lifestyle, oftentimes focusing on small-minded country people who believe they
understand the world without having experienced it. The Southern Grotesque
refers to literature that mixes terror and horror in order to shock or disturb. Writers
of southern Grotesque combine comic or obscene exaggeration with sometimes
gratuitous violence, often within representations of physical deformity or sexual
deviance. The Grotesque genre in southern literature begins with southern-born
Edgar Allan Poe, whose radical experience of repression and alienation (in his
case, alienation from the upper-class Richmond society of his adoptive father) is
reflected in the nightmare landscapes that appear in his fiction. His gothic works
of horror appeared around the same time as southwestern humor writing, and as
different as the two genres might seem, they share elements of distortion and
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displacement, gratuitous violence, and outrageous hostility. Possibly these similar
traits represent a kindred response to the stultifying effects of traditional
antebellum plantation society, which in a resistance view functioned only through
blindness to the horrors inherent in slavery and through pretentious rituals of
honor and obedience. In stories such as The Masque of the Red Death and The
Fall of the House of Usher, Poe presents terrifying, irrational inversions of order.
His characters' obsession with control explodes into bizarre excesses and
disfiguring disease.
Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams apply different kinds of
gothic effects in some of their works, often as they address alienation and disorder
in modern southern settings. Yet the most interesting, and most radical inheritors
of the Grotesque are women writers of the later modernist era, Carson McCullers
(1917-1967) and Flannery O'Connor, who developed this sensibility into very
different strands. McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Café and O’Connor in
stories such as Good Country People, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, and
Revelation displace the horrors of a world without morality or reason onto
grotesque female bodies. Their deformed, freakish, psychotic, or imbecilic female
characters are inversions of the pure white southern woman, icon of the wellordered universe of southern tradition. The dramas of Tennessee Williams (19111983) and the stories of Truman Capote and Peter Taylor reflect this iconography
of estrangement as well in physical, often sexual grotesqueries. If the South seems
especially hospitable to such types, some scholars and writers speculate, it may be
because its social codes have allowed so few avenues for the expression of
disagreement or even confusion about the controlling norms.
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Flannery O'Connor's affinity for the grotesque is unique because her
explanations and usages are tied to her firm sense of spiritual realities that
southerners, she says, have always been more ready to acknowledge than other
Americans are. Her imagined South is defined as that "Christ-haunted landscape"
in which characters can be forgiven anything except spiritual complacency.
Epiphanies occur for O'Connor's ideal modern readers when they experience a
sense of the uncanny (translated for O'Connor into spiritual grace) through the
grotesque mode's combining of strange, often violent "discrepancies" or
oppositions in plot, character or imagery. Following O'Connor, and deeply
indebted to her, are several contemporary southern writers who are interested in
her use of the Grotesque as a way to comment on a stultifying, spiritually arid
modern landscape. Cormac McCarthy, Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, Tim
McLaurin, Lewis Nordan and Larry Brown apply the principles of the Grotesque
in works of fiction that often are considered under a separate rubric. Like
O'Connor's grotesque comedies, some of these writers' works can be violently
comic, while others are more likely to shock or repulse readers through raw
portrayals of life at its grimmest.
2.4 The Author and Grotesque
Flannery O’Connor work is full of eccentric characters, bizarre situations,
violent behaviors and macabre death. Her satire can provoke laughter at the
beginning of a story, and end with panic and a heart attack. As a Roman Catholic
she finds ‘the centre of existence’ in the Holy Ghost. Avowedly ‘not interested in
abnormal psychology’, Flannery O’Connor uses grotesque characters in most her
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works partly because the most enduring childhood influence on her was a volume
called The Humerous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, partly because she wants to
delight in sheer originality, and particularly because she wants to show people
who think God is dead that the Holy Ghost infuses grace into the most improbable
poor white souls of the Southern Bible belt.
O’Connor uses grotesque characters in most her works because of the
influence of The Humerous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. These tales consists of
grotesque characters, one about a young man who was too vain to wear his glasses
and consequently married his grandmother by accident; another about a fine figure
of a man who in his room removed wooden arms, wooden legs, hair piece,
artificial teeth voice box, etc; another about the inmates of a lunatic asylum who
take over the establishment and run it to suit themselves.
The rest of what I read was Slop with a capital S. the Slop period
was followed by the Edgar Allan Poe period which lasted for years
and consisted chiefly in a volume called The Humerous Tales of
EAPoe. I went to a progressive high school where one did not read
if one did not wish too; I did not wish to (except the Humerous
Tales etc.) (Fitzgerald, 1988: 950)
O’Connor’s usage of grotesque is to delight a sheer original style of the
South about the place and people their minds embraced most knowingly. For
O’Connor, the South’s novel does not grapple with any particular culture and
there is no genuine sense of place. The social is superior to the purely personal
and traditional manners are better than no manners at all. It is important to have
senses respond to a particular society and a particular history, to particular sounds
and a particular idiom.
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When one Southern character speaks, regardless of his station in
life, an echo of all Southern life is heard. This help to keep
Southern fiction from being a fiction of purely private experience
(Fitzgerald, 1988: 855)
Most people in the South lose their faith of God. As a pious writes,
O’Connor wants to show people who think God is dead that the Holy Ghost
infuses grace into the most improbable poor white souls of the Southern Bible
belt. Peter W. Williams writes in his book America’s Religions: From Their
Origins to the Twenty-first Century (2000: 287) that most evangelicals in South
America were united in their endorsement of a strict code of personal moral
behavior, which forbade smoking, alcoholic beverages, gambling, theater and
movie going, and even, especially among Pentecostals, the wearing of neckties for
men and the use of cosmetics. But it contrasts with the reality, that a cultural
analyst W. J. Cash there is “orgiastic religion” in the region’s tradition.
O’Connor’s usage of grotesque IS to emphasize the salvation through the mystery
of life to remind the Southerners that God is real and salvation really exists. In one
of the letter published as The Habit of Being she writes:
One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is
that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present
reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation;
that is, nobody in your audience. My audiences are the people who
think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of
writing for (Fitzgerald, 1988: 943).
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O’Connor realizes that the Southern readers she faces are people who do
not believe in God’s grace. The God’s grace is that God comes to the earth as a
Man 2 and be crucified to save human from sins. The grotesque characters
O’Connor creates are taken from Southern people who most think that God is
dead. O’Connor wishes her readers could believe that God does exist after reading
her work.
2
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the
Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1,14a)
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