Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque

Crashaw, Baudelaire, Magritte

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Seer aerdige grotissen dienstich, 1644. © Trustees of the British Museum
Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque
Crashaw, Baudelaire, Magritte

Shun-Liang Chao

Studies in Comparative Literature 22

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2010
 First published 201o

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 Contents
❖

Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations x
List of Figures xi
Introduction: Towards a Definition of the Grotesque 1
part i 23
1 ‘Aegri Somnia’: Towards an Aesthetics of the Grotesque 24
2 Monstrous Metamorphoses: Towards a Poetics of the Grotesque Body 45
part ii 65
3 The Baroque Grotesque: Crashaw’s Devotional Pseudometaphors 66
4 The Romantic Grotesque: Baudelaire’s Demonic Imagination 98
5 The Surrealist Grotesque: Magritte’s Object Lessons 130
Conclusion 168
Select Bibliography 173
Index 181
 to my parents and
the memory of tze-ming (triste) hu

獻給我的父母與胡慈銘
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
v

This book would not have been possible without the financial support of University
College London, the Overseas Research Student (ORS) Awards Scheme, and the
Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. I would like warmly to thank Timothy Mathews,
who guided this project through to completion with the utmost enthusiasm, and
Tim Langley for his careful and thoughtful comments on the first draft of this book.
I would also like to thank Marshall Grossman at the University of Maryland, with
whom I undertook an independent study of Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, and
thus first encountered the idea of the grotesque. I am especially grateful to Elinor
Shaffer (FBA), who provided invaluable advice on the revision of this book. I must
also express my gratitude to Graham Nelson at Legenda for his generous help, and to
Nigel Hope for his skilled copy-editing. My special thanks go to Lyn M. Lawrence
for his patience in teaching me to be a good writer, and to teachers and friends who
have offered encouragement and sincere friendship throughout the completion of
this book.
A rather different version of Chapter 2 has appeared in The State of Stylistics, edited
by Greg Watson (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 91–118. I gratefully
acknowledge permission to use this material.
I would like to dedicate this book to my working-class parents in Taiwan, who have
supported my ambition to pursue a PhD in a subject about which they have no idea
and in a country about which they only know through TV; and to my late girlfriend
Tze-Ming Hu (1972–2003), who equipped my mind with a literary sensibility to both
my inner and outer worlds.
Shun-Liang Chao
Taipei, Taiwan, November 2009
 ABBREVIATIONS
v

ABOC André Breton, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Marguerite Bonnet, 3 vols (Paris:
Gallimard, 1988–99)
PFL Sigmund Freud, The Penguin Freud Library, trans. by James Strachey, ed. by
Angela Richards and Albert Dickson, 15 vols (London: Penguin, 1991–93)
 LIST OF FIGURES
v

0.1 Nicolas Pence, engraving from the Domus Aurea, 1786, detail
0.2 After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Seven Deadly Sins: Superbia, 1558
0.3 G. L. Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622–25, Galleria Borghese, Rome
0.4 Giuseppe Arcimboldo, L’Automne, 1573, Le Louvre, Paris
1.1 Johannes Camers, C. Plynii Secundi Naturae historiarum libri XXXVII, 1518
1.2 After Nicasius Roussel, Ornamental engraving, 1684
1.3 After Jan van der Straet, The Temptation of St Anthony, 1612, detail
1.4 François Desprez, Les Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, 1565. Plate 29
2.1 Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1503–04, Museo del Prado,
Madrid, detail
3.1 Rosso Fiorentino, Dead Christ with Angels, 1525–26, Museum of Fine Art, Boston
3.2 Annibale Carracci, The Dead Christ, c. 1582, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart
3.3 Caravaggio, David, 1609–10, Galleria Borghese, Rome
3.4 Andrea Alciato, Emblema XVI, Emblemata, 1621
4.1 Eugène Delacroix, Méphistophélès dans les airs, 1828
4.2 Francisco Goya, Los Caprichos, 1799. Plate 63
4.3 Victor Brauner, Woman into Cat, 1940, Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
5.1 André Breton, Jacques Hérold, Yves Tanguy, and Victor Brauner, Le Cadavre exquis,
1934, Jacques Hérold Collection
5.2 Max Ernst, La Toilette de la mariée, 1939–40, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venezia
5.3 Max Ernst, Die Versuchung des Heiligen Antonius, 1945, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum,
Duisburg
5.4 Salvador Dalí, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936,
Phila­delphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
5.5 Hans Bellmer, Undressing, 1968, Private Collection
5.6 René Magritte, Hommage à Alfonse Allais, 1964, Private Collection
5.7 René Magritte, Le Portrait, 1935, Museum of Modern Art, New York
5.8 René Magritte, La Clef des songes, 1930, Private Collection
5.9 René Magritte, Le Viol, 1945, Le Musée René Magritte, Brussels
5.10 Salvador Dalí, Le Visage de Mae West, 1934–35, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
5.11 René Magritte, Le Mouvement perpétuel, 1935, Museum of Modern Art, New York
5.12 René Magritte, L’Invention collective, 1935, Private Collection
5.13 René Magritte, Le Thérapeute, 1937, Private Collection
A terrible beauty is born.
w. b. yeats, Easter, 1916
 INTRODUCTION
v
Towards a Definition of the Grotesque

Imagine a painter who wanted to combine a horse’s neck with a human head,
and then clothes a miscellaneous collection of limbs with various kinds of
feather, so that what started out at the top as a beautiful woman ended in
a hideously ugly fish. [. . .] Let me tell you, my Piso friends, a book whose
different features are made up at random like a sick man’s dreams [aegri somnia],
with no unified form to have a head or a tail, is exactly like that picture.
Horace, Ars Poetica1

1. A Review
The word ‘grotesque’ emerged in High Renaissance Italy as a term describing
the fanciful ornamental paintings on the walls and ceilings of the underground
chambers (grotte) of Nero’s Domus Aurea (Golden Palace), discovered beneath the
ruins of the Baths of Titus, which were excavated around 1480. Both al fresco and
al stucco, these paintings offered images of a jumble of human and animal forms,
strangely interwoven with fruit, f lowers, and foliage. They were the work of the
Roman painter Fabullus (or Famulus), who was charged by Nero to decorate the
walls of the Domus Aurea in a style that had been established as early as 100 bc and
been largely lost since the fall of Rome.2
Grotesque designs, discovered in the underground grottoes, soon became popular
on the Continent in the following two centuries. Nevertheless, notable attempts
to define the nature of the grotesque did not emerge until the late eighteenth
century. Friedrich Schlegel was one of the first to build a scholarship of the
grotesque (Groteskforschung). According to Wolfgang Kayser’s summary of Schlegel’s
fragments 75, 305, 389 in the first volume of the Athenäum (1798), ‘grotesqueness is
constituted by a clashing contrast between form and content, the unstable mixture
of heterogeneous elements, the explosive force of the paradoxical, which is both
ridiculous and terrifying’.3 Likewise, Victor Hugo, in his ‘La Préface de Cromwell’
(1827), writes of the paradoxical nature of the grotesque: playing a crucial part in
the idea of modern man, the grotesque ‘y est partout; d’une part, il crée le difforme
et l’horrible; de l’autre, le comique et le bouffon’ (‘is found everywhere; it creates
the deformed and the horrible and at the same time the comic and the ludicrous’).4
Hugo goes on to ascribe to the grotesque a pivotal role in the creation of drama,
‘the complete poetry’ (‘la poésie complète’).5 Hugo, however, stops short of further
explanations for the coexistence of conf licting factors in the grotesque. About three
decades later, Baudelaire turned the grotesque admixture of contradictory elements
into the very incarnation of the dual nature of mankind, torn between the diabolic
2 Introduction

and the angelic.6 Significantly, going one step further than Hugo, Baudelaire
regarded the grotesque as the highest form that contemporary art can achieve.
Not until John Ruskin’s 1874 ‘Grotesque Renaissance’, though, did we have a
more detailed account of the incompatible elements that constitute the grotesque:
‘the grotesque is, in almost all cases, composed of two elements, one ludicrous, the
other fearful; that, as one or other of these elements prevails, the grotesque falls
into two branches, sportive grotesque and terrible grotesque’. Hence, Ruskin’s
catchphrase: ‘the mind, under certain phases of excitement, plays with terror’.7
Ruskin thus sets the tone for twentieth-century scholarship on the contradictory
emotions the grotesque elicits.
It is widely agreed that rigorous and comprehensive investigations of the
grotesque did not appear until Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature
(1957).8 Kayser’s seminal study centres on the development of the grotesque as an
aesthetic concept in three periods of European (notably German) art and literature:
the period of the (Counter-) Reformation, the age extending from the Sturm und
Drang to Romanticism, and the twentieth century. In these three periods, according
to Kayser, the rationalistic world-view of the preceding ages is fundamentally
challenged, and thus the power of the grotesque is strongly felt.9 For Kayser, the
grotesque resides in three realms: the process of its creation (the artist’s psychological
state), the artwork itself, and the impact it makes on the observer (p. 180). Kayser,
though, foregrounds the third realm — the reception of the artwork — when
defining the nature of the grotesque: the grotesque presents a world in which the
inanimate is no longer separated from the animate; this world ‘is — and is not —
our own world. The ambiguous way in which we are affected by it results from our
awareness that the familiar and apparently harmonious world is alienated under the
impact of abysmal forces, which break it up and shatter its coherence’. (pp. 21, 37)
What Kayser especially has in mind is the works of the Bruegel family (Fig.
0.2) which allow their precursor Hieronymus Bosch’s infernal visions (Fig. 2.1) to
intrude into our everyday world and thus turn our seemingly symmetrical and static
world into a radically incoherent and undifferentiated one that inspires terror in us
by the unfathomable (pp. 21, 35); and which are developed to the full in Romantic
and Modernist grotesques. For Kayser, especially congenial to the grotesque are
certain ‘nocturnal and creeping’ animals, plants, and objects that inhabit territories
apart from mankind and take on ominous overtones: snakes, owls, spiders, vermin,
creeping animals, bats, tropical climbing plants, skeletons, automata, and so forth
(pp. 182–83). It is no accident, then, that whilst reckoning that the grotesque
contains ‘something playfully gay’ as well as ‘something ominous and sinister’ (p. 21),
Kayser considers the latter the predominant, or indeed, proper, nature of the
grotesque throughout the three periods on which he focuses.
In his The Ludicrous Demon (1963), Lee Byron Jennings seeks to redress the
supreme dominance of the ominous over the playful in the Kayserian grotesque by
highlighting the interdependence between the two contrary factors: ‘the grotesque
object always displays a combination of fearsome and ludicrous qualities — or, to be more
precise, it simultaneously [or alternately] arouses reactions of fear and amusement in
the observer’.10 This ‘double effect’ of the grotesque, he continues, can be illustrated
 Introduction 3

by Gothic gargoyles whose threatening talons and beaks are often accompanied by
clownish expressions. Moreover, ‘the most intense grotesque effect’ occurs when
the two contrary factors ‘are both present in pronounced form’ (p. 14).
Jennings’s primary concern, though, is not so much the ‘double effect’ itself as
the impact of the inner dynamics of cultural change on two types of grotesque
production, that is, the increase in and the decrease in fearsome factors. He argues
that the important manifestation of the grotesque does not merely appear in the
periods — roughly the three periods on which Kayser concentrates — whose
nature features ‘pronounced negative currents of fear or despair’ and thus enables
the grotesque to thrive as a means of expressing such nature (p. 151). In so doing,
Jennings culls materials from the prose works of German Poetic Realist authors like
Immermann and Stifter to demonstrate the other type of the grotesque in which the
negative currents ‘are counteracted [effectively by comic elements] and prevented
from attaining truly disruptive proportions’ (p. 151). Jennings stresses that these
two types of the grotesque — determined by the (de)emphasis on fearful elements
— ‘tend to alternate from one period to the next, in keeping with the general
alternation of cultural patterns: stability and instability, revolution and reaction,
disillusionment and contentment’.
It seems questionable to ground the (de)emphasis on fearsome forces in grotesque
production simply on the change of cultural patterns, insofar as critics may have
different — or even bipolar — views of the cultural patterns of any one period in
relation to its artistic patterns. For instance, the sixteenth century, for Jennings, is a
period whose cultural dynamics nurtures the ‘f lowering of the grotesque’ with ‘its
devils and Totentänze, its unbounded creative energy, and its final, intense outbreak
of medieval demonism’ (p. 151); on the contrary, for Bakhtin, it is a period in which,
as we shall see shortly, the grotesque f lourishes as the embodiment of the medieval
culture of folk humour. That is to say, the change of cultural patterns alone seems
not sufficient to explain truly the (de)emphasis on demonic menaces in grotesque
production in a certain period. Despite this problem, Jennings’s study contributes to
Groteskforschung by calling attention to the weight of playful or attractive elements
in the grotesque, thus paving the way for Bakhtin to counter Kayser’s dark vision
of the grotesque.
In Rabelais and his World (1965), Bakhtin carries the importance of the playful to
extremes by privileging the Renaissance grotesque — which, he maintains, is full
of carnivalesque laughter and devoid of fear — over other forms of the grotesque.
Inheriting medieval folk culture, the Renaissance grotesque, Bakhtin asserts, is
best represented by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s paintings, such as Dulle Griet (Mad
Meg, c.1562), and Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (first published in 1532), ‘the
most fearless book in world literature’.11 The latter, for example, provides images
of comically exaggerated bodies or bodily elements — such as the metamorphosis
of a belfry into a phallus that can impregnate women — which manifest at once
degradation and fertility, decay and birth (p. 311): ‘Degradation [of all that is high,
spiritual, ideal] here means coming down to earth, the contact with the earth as an
element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time’ (p. 21). In other words,
the replacement of the upper stratum by the lower stratum, such as the turning
4 Introduction

upside down of ‘the bodily hierarchy’ (p. 309), is a form of regenerating debasement
that carries with it the symbolic confusion of social and cultural hierarchies. For
Bakhtin, Rabelais’s novel abounds with regenerating degradation of this sort
which points to the carnivalesque suspension of all hierarchical rank (p. 10): the
Rabelaisian/Renaissance grotesque is ‘filled with the spirit of carnival [. . .]; it takes
away all fears and is therefore completely gay and bright. All that is frightening in
ordinary life is turned into amusing or ludicrous monstrosities’ (p. 47). Beginning
with Romanticism, however, the situation is reversed in Bakhtin’s analysis: laughter
is ‘sent to earth by the devil’ and therefore ‘loses its gay and joyful tone’; the
Romantic grotesque presents ‘an alien world’ that inspires fear (pp. 38, 39).
Apparently, the Rabelaisian/Renaissance grotesque is, for Bakhtin, the proper
form of the grotesque. That is why he denounces Kayser’s idea of the grotesque
as all too ‘gloomy and terrifying’ (p. 47). Kayser, as we have seen, argues that all
forms of the grotesque are overwhelmed by dark, unfathomable forces that turn
our familiar world into an estranged one which ceases to be reliable and liveable.
Hence, interestingly, unlike Bakhtin, Kayser, echoing Leo Spitzer, deems fantasy-
beings in Rabelais’s Gargantua ‘abysmal’, ‘terrifying’, ‘demonically alive, and capable
of dragging man into the nocturnal and inhuman sphere’.12 Here the difference
between Bakhtin and Kayser only shows that the Rabelaisian/Renaissance cannot
be (and is not) completely devoid of horror as Bakhtin describes it and that, equally,
horror or destructive factors do not prevail in all types of the grotesque as Kayser
understands it. It should be mentioned that although he proposes a questionable
view of the nature of the grotesque, Bakhtin gives one of the best descriptions of
grotesque physicality: the grotesque reveals ‘two bodies in one’, an ‘unfinished
metamorphosis’ in which ‘[f ]rom one body a new body always emerge in some
form or other’.13
Kayser’s and Bakhtin’s antithetical (and yet complementary) interpretations of the
grotesque represent two extremes of the spectrum of modern studies of grotesque
art: one takes only the fearful and the other only the playful as proper to the
grotesque. The scholarly consensus is that the grotesque combines two emotional
poles in one; when one of them comes to the fore, the other, still present, retreats
into the background. Dieter Meindl, for instance, sums up very well this peculiar
trait of the grotesque: the grotesque exists ‘as a tense combination of attractive
and repulsive elements, of comic and tragic aspects, of ludicrous and horrifying
features. Emphasis can be placed on either the bright or the dark side (or pole)
of the grotesque’.14 That is to say, although the grotesque can appear to be more
fearful/repulsive or more playful/attractive, both emotional poles are proper and
indispensable to the grotesque: they contradict and complement each other to
make the grotesque emotionally paradoxical. Nonetheless, it should be noted that
the co-presence of two jarring emotional elements has become one of the most
obvious and yet most obscure qualities of the grotesque: most obscure, because
many critics go so far as to see emotional dissonance as the defining nature of
the grotesque.
For example, in his discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’,
Meindl describes the narrator as a person ‘with a taste for the grotesque’ by quoting
 Introduction 5

his monologue as follows: ‘Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive
pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain’.15 In other words,
for Meindl, grotesque is the paradoxical co-mingling of pleasure and pain. In a
similar vein, Reuven Tsur reduces the grotesque to the experience of ‘emotional
disorientation’. Both horror and laughter, Tsur notes, are defence mechanisms in
the presence of threat; the former allows the threat its authority, whereas the latter
rejects it. ‘The grotesque is the experiencing of emotional disorientation when both
defence-mechanisms are suddenly suspended’.16 The problem with emotion-based
approaches like Meindl’s and Tsur’s is that emotional disorientation or dissonance is
merely a sufficient — rather than necessary — condition for the grotesque, in that
it can happen where the grotesque is not involved, as in black comedy. Both the
grotesque and black comedy juxtapose pain with laughter, cruelty with tenderness;
nevertheless, in the grotesque, but not in black comedy, the production of such an
emotional juxtaposition, as we shall see, is rooted in its paradoxical physicality —
namely, the incomplete metamorphosis of one bodily form into another.
Philip Thomson’s The Grotesque (1972) is one of the finest attempts to define
the grotesque in terms of both emotional and formal content. The grotesque, says
Thomson, is ‘the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and in response’; this
clash, he continues, exists side by side with ‘the ambivalently abnormal’.17 By the
latter, Thomson means the physically abnormal quality of an artwork that is both
amusing and horrifying, both ludicrous and monstrous. Thomson then goes on to
separate the grotesque from related terms such as the bizarre, parody, caricature, or
irony: although the grotesque and, say, irony are both based on the combination of
incompatibles, ‘irony depends on the resolvability, intellectually, of a relationship
(appearance/reality, truth/nontruth, etc.)’ (p. 50). That is, in irony, but not in the
grotesque, the tension between incompatibles can be worked out or released.18
Thomson’s approach would truly clarify the self-contradictory nature of the
grotesque if he offered a strict definition of physical abnormality. Whilst agreeing
with Bakhtin that the grotesque ‘refer[s] always to the body and bodily excesses’
(p. 56), Thomson defines physical abnormality so broadly as to include physical
cruelty, physical obscenity, and the like (p. 8). Thomson, for instance, considers
physi­cal cruelty ambivalently abnormal and thus grotesque as it can elicit a sadistic
plea­sure in cruelty (p. 56). Thomson, however, ignores the fact that, emotionally
ambi­valent as it is, physical cruelty, per se, does not necessarily contain ‘the unresolved
clash of incompatibles’ or, in Bakhtin’s terms, an unfinished metamorphosis of one
body into another. That is, although underscoring unsettled tension in form and
in emotion, Thomson’s notion of the grotesque turns out to be predominantly or
wholly emotion-orientated, and therefore does not avoid a definition by which all
artistic practices that arouse unresolved contradictory emotions can be conceived
of as grotesque.
In contrast to Thomson’s study, Geoffrey G. Harpham’s, On the Grotesque (1982),
centres more on (the cognition of ) structural contradiction in the grotesque than
on its ability to solicit ambivalent emotional responses. For Harpham, the grotesque
occurs in the ‘interval’ between things that logically or categorically should be kept
apart whilst still being joined together:
6 Introduction

When we encounter something new we ask, ‘What’s it like?’ which can be

translated as, ‘What familiar forms can you recognize in it?’ Eventually we
discover the proper place for the new thing [. . .]. The interval of the grotesque
is the one in which, although we have recognized a number of different forms
in the object, we have not yet developed a clear sense of the dominant principle
that defines it and organize its various elements.19
In other words, the grotesque exists in the interval between — or really, cognitive
confusion of — two or more forms that one single object contains. Such an interval
or confusion disturbs the familiar, threatens to paralyse language, and leads us into
the domain of logical impossibility, of a ‘category mistake’, the term that Gilbert
Ryles uses to define metaphor (p. 12).
Harpham thus links the grotesque to the idea of metaphor: ‘the grotesque is
embodied in the act of transition, of metonymy becoming metaphor’ (p. 47). For
example, my relationship with the laptop on my lap is metonymic and congruent,
but ‘a grotesque crushing together of man and machine, self and other’ (p. 124)
occurs in this metaphor ‘My lap is a laptop’. Facing this metaphor, the mind is
‘unable to match language with reality in a concrete or referential [i.e. literal]
way’ and lingers on ‘an ambivalent domain of the literal/nonliteral’ (p. 124).
Simply put, the mind has trouble making sense of — namely, rationalizing — a
category mistake, a logical impossibility. In relating the grotesque to the notion of
metaphor, Harpham makes a most significant contribution to our understanding
of the structure of the grotesque and its impact on cognition. Harpham, however,
goes too far in my view when he regards as grotesque any fusion of categories that
causes an interval in cognition. For instance, Raphael’s The Transfiguration (1516–20),
for Harpham, exemplifies the grotesque in that the upper and lower halves of the
composition depict incidents without ‘obvious narrative connection’:
The dividing line [between the two halves] is the blackness in the middle,
which has no distinctive features, but a number of analogues. It is a spatial
equivalent of ‘paradigm confusion’; or of the ‘conceptual leap of metaphor’, in
which unlike elements are yoked by violence together. (pp. 45–46)
If we follow Harpham’s logic here, any art form that yokes together unlike elements
becomes grotesque: for example, montage is grotesque because it consists of shots
without ‘obvious narrative connection’ and so is stream-of-consciousness writing
because it comprises seemingly unrelated thoughts.
Perhaps aware of the weakness of Harpham’s study, Noël Carroll, in his recent
article on contemporary grotesqueries, aims to provide a strict structural account
of the grotesque. Carroll restricts the notion of the grotesque to the ‘violations of
our biological and ontological categories’.20 Hence, composite or hybrid beings are
grotesque per se, whereas stylistic or aesthetic incongruity — as seen in Raphael’s
The Transfiguration — can be called grotesque only figuratively speaking. Carroll
then goes on to link violations of this sort to the production of horror and humour
through categorical problematization. The grotesque, he argues, can function to
inspire horror because it is biologically and ontologically impure. Impure things
— like blood, sickening waste, pieces of f lesh — are horrible or repulsive, in that
they are ‘interstitial between categorical distinctions such as me/not me, living/
 Introduction 7

dead, and inside/outside’ (p. 300). Likewise, grotesque hybrids are interstitial
beings and thus horrible, as they are biologically and ontologically uncategorizable:
the grotesque mixes disparate elements into one body that involves an ongoing
transformation of death into birth, decay into growth. On the other hand, the
grotesque can serve as a vehicle for generating humour, because both the grotesque
and humour transgress conceptual categories to lead to ‘conceptual anomaly’ (p.
303). Carroll certainly deserves credit for his incisive explanation of the arousal of
both horror and humour in the physical structure of the grotesque. Nevertheless, his
structural discussion of the grotesque becomes exorbitant when he deems gigantism
a fundamental attribute of the grotesque because it ‘go[es] beyond the limits of what
we think possible’ (p. 296). The grotesque no doubt violates what it is possible to
conceive, but what is impossible is not necessarily grotesque. Ron Mueck’s giant
human sculptures such as Boy (2006), for instance, look impossible or incredible
without being grotesque.
To sum up, in spite of approaching the grotesque in various critical perspectives,
critics share the view that the (con)fusion of dissonant emotions and/or of discordant
forms is central to the grotesque. Emotion-based approaches like Tsur’s make it
difficult to avoid the reduction of the grotesque to the experience or production
of emotional dissonance. Structure-based approaches like Harpham’s have the
danger of subsuming under the grotesque any type of categorical confusion. With
this in mind, I propose to synthesize these two types of approach to provide
a strict definition of the grotesque, one that will help not merely to mark off
boundaries between the grotesque and other seemingly similar modes of discordant
composition, but to illuminate the paradoxical nature of the grotesque itself.

2. Towards a Definition of the Grotesque

My study seeks to offer a strict approach to a subject that seems for many to be
indefinable. The strict approach is intended to be in response to loose uses of the
term ‘grotesque’ — even by scholars of the grotesque — to describe any mode
of discordia concors, any form of bizarrerie. As an artistic mode, the grotesque is
predominantly visual; its main habitat lies in the plastic arts: ‘[t]he grotesque’, as
Harpham notes, ‘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’.21 Therefore, in literature, the grotesque tends
to reside in descriptions which conjure up striking visual images that hit the mind’s
eye with ‘moments of sudden insight’; and poetic imagery is arguably the most
effective ‘sorcellerie évocatoire’ (‘evocative sorcery’)22 of such moments. One aim of
this study is to explore the general aesthetics of the grotesque image and the process
of its evocation in poetry as well as in painting.
Since it (re)saw the light in the late fifteenth century, the grotesque has been
invested with meanings such as fantastic, absurd, antic, monstrous, bizarre,
marvellous, disgusting, terrible, and incongruous; and it has been associated or
equated with artistic styles and genres such as the Gothic, the arabesque, Danse
macabre, chinoiserie, caricature, the Commedia dell’arte, diablerie, and the comic.23 One
8 Introduction

may have to agree after all with Joyce Carol Oates that ‘[t]he arts of the grotesque
are so various as to resist definition’.24 On the other hand, one cannot help but
question how and whether the grotesque, as an artistic mode, is indeed so various
and f lexible as to encompass — without a hitch — such a wide gamut of meanings,
styles, and genres. Whilst the grotesque is always, say, fantastic,25 the fantastic is
not always grotesque; or whilst both the grotesque and caricature are based on
exaggeration, caricatural exaggeration does not essentially involve the (con)fusion
of heterogeneous forms in general or biological categories in particular.
The loose approach to the grotesque occurs most frequently in referring to the
coupling of contradictory or irreconcilable elements. We have seen several examples
of this approach. Another example can be found in the introduction to Victorian
Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (1999): ‘As an aesthetics of the irreconcilable’, the
editors write, ‘the grotesque here is construed [. . .] as a means to realize experience
which tends to overwhelm, or fundamentally to dismember, representations’.26
Accordingly, one of the contributors considers Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus to be
grotesque because it carries within itself an irreconcilable quality: ‘Sartor’s aspiration
to the sacred is built on an experience of faithlessness’; its ‘aspiration to totality
reveals the arbitrary conjoining of the irresolvably alien’.27 But such a generalizing
approach would allow large portions of the history of art (including literature) to be
turned into the history of the grotesque, since the irreconcilable or the discordant
underlies so much of artistic construction throughout the history of art: montage,
parody, satire, magical realism, l’humour noir, tragicomedy, and so on. .
Therefore, it is necessary to return to the ‘origins’ of the grotesque to locate
a stricter use of the term: in the decorative images of the Domus Aurea (Fig. 0.1),
the lower half of a human transforms into tendrils, as does the body of a winged
lion; also, in the Horatian hybrid, a woman’s lower half transforms into a fish
tail and her arms into feathery limbs. In other words, the grotesque is, first and
foremost, physically in-between or trans-formal. To be precise, the grotesque
(con)fusion or conglomeration of heterogeneous body parts breeds, in Dacos’s
terms, a ‘perpétuelle métamorphose’ (‘perpetual metamorphosis’) of one form into
another or, in Bakhtin’s words, ‘a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished,
never completed’.28 It is a body that is both dying and procreating, so to speak.
Hence, Daphne’s complete transformation into a laurel tree is not grotesque per
se. Nonetheless, in his Apollo and Daphne of 1622–25 (Fig. 0.3), the Baroque artist
Bernini turns Daphne into a grotesque figure by making perpetual the act of her
becoming a tree: her hair and hands are transforming into branches and leaves; bark
is surrounding her legs and turning her lower half into a trunk. In other words,
Bernini’s Daphne is, biologically and ontologically, both/neither a human being and/
nor a tree. This is also true of Kaf ka’s Gregor Samsa, who is both/neither a human
being and/nor a giant insect throughout Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) of
1915. The grotesque body, so to say, is ‘the epitome of incompleteness’29 and thus,
as I shall argue against Edmund Burke in Chapter 1, makes itself a source of the
sublime, one that entertains the imagination with a sort of terrible uncertainty.
The pattern of ‘both-and’, the physically in-between, brings us to another feature
of the grotesque which arises from the paradoxical confusion of the fantastic and
 Introduction 9

Fig. 0.1. Nicolas Pence, engraving from the Domus Aurea, 1786, detail

Fig. 0.2. After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Seven Deadly Sins: Superbia, 1558.
© Trustees of the British Museum
10 Introduction

the verisimilar: intellectual uncertainty. Verisimilitude, as we have just seen, is

evident in the early modern grotesque: fantastic hybrid creatures are rendered
verisimilar as though they were real beings.30 The verisimilar nature of grotesque
hybrids continues to exist or thrive in the later developments of the grotesque,
from Goya’s grotesque monsters in Los Caprichos (1799), which strike Baudelaire as
‘vraisemblable’ (‘verisimilar’),31 to Magritte’s trompe-l’œil grotesque objects, and to
Jerry Uelsmann’s grotesque photomontage (such as Journey into Night). It is proper to
say, then, that verisimilitude — or rather, making fantastic hybrids look verisimilar
— has become a prominent attribute of grotesque representations.
This attribute creates ample room for the grotesque to become uncanny (unheimlich),
an effect caused by an intellectual or cognitive confusion of fantasy and reality. For
S. T. Coleridge, verisimilitude is necessary for an artwork of supernatural quality
to motivate the reader provisionally to accept it as true — ‘willing suspension of
disbelief for the moment’ 32 — and thereby collapse the psychical border between
the reader and the artwork. In Freud, such a moment is required for the occurrence
of the uncanny in art. Freud holds that an artwork cannot evoke the effect of the
uncanny without verisimilitude: the artist first makes a realistic setting to ‘give us
the sober truth’ and then after all exceeds it ‘by bringing about events which never
or very rarely happen in fact’ (PFL xiv, 374). In so doing, the artist arouses in our
(rational) minds ‘intellectual uncertainty’, a conf lict of judgement, about whether
what is regarded as imaginary or magical may be, after all, frighteningly possible
(pp. 354, 363). That is, the happening of fantastic events in a verisimilar setting gives
rise to the cognitive confusion of fantasy and reality, the alien and the familiar, the
‘I’ and the ‘not I’. That Samsa exists as both a human being and an insect in everyday
reality, for instance, causes a serious breach of the natural and the familiar and
activates an imagination of a monstrous world that is rooted in everyday experience.
I will elaborate on the relation of the grotesque to the uncanny in Chapter 1.
The ability of the grotesque to trigger uncannily our imagination of a monstrous
world in everyday reality introduces us to its emotional content. Horror or terror
is the emotion most often associated with the grotesque, since the physically
in-between fits in the category of the (biologically) impure and thus can spark off
the fear of ‘pain, sickness, and death’: such fear, according to Burke, arises from an
awareness of a threat to ‘self-preservation’ and therefore ‘fill[s] the mind with strong
emotions of horror’.33 Meanwhile, as an incongruous juxtaposition that involves
transgressions in logic, the physically in-between can also yield pleasure in novelty,
the comic, absurdity, and the like. In the grotesque, two such antithetical emotional
forces do not cancel each other out; instead, they either alternate with each other
when one of them appears to be predominant at first sight, or concur when both
of them are equally prominent. As Harpham has put it, ‘the grotesque is always
a civil war of attraction/repulsion’.34 To be precise, without a certain clash and
collaboration of the playful and the fearful — playing with terror (in Ruskin’s terms)
— the grotesque can no longer be ‘grotesque’ but is more properly designated as
comic or horrible.
Carroll offers a judicious exposition of the interaction between the contradictory
emotions in the grotesque with recourse to cognitive psychology. Carroll, as
 Introduction 11

Fig. 0.3. G. L. Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622-25, Galleria Borghese, Rome
12 Introduction

mentioned before, considers grotesque physicality — which epitomizes categorical

anomaly or incongruity — as a privileged vehicle for emotions of horror and humour
or awe.35 For Carroll, grotesque physicality becomes predominantly horrible when
its ‘impure’ or ‘harmful’ elements — such as corporeal decomposition, sickening
waste, or dangerous animals — appear to be conspicuous at first sight and thus
create a strong psychological threat. Crashaw’s grotesque imagery of Christ’s
wounds, as I will show in Chapter 3, presents the vividness of sickness and pain and
thereby provides an example of the arousal of a visceral sense of divine terror as a
means of stimulating piety.
Where threatening elements, Carroll notes, are diminished or subdued to a
certain degree, grotesque physicality can produce a high degree of absurdity to
amuse the reader or viewer effectively. In his grotesque objects, Magritte, as we shall
see in Chapter 5, shows us how to subdue effectively the fearfulness of grotesque
physicality by investing it with a very high degree of play — stemming from the
Freudian dream-work as well as joke-work. Carroll’s scheme, comprehensive as it
seems, leaves out the situation in which two antithetical emotional factors appear
to be equally pronounced to result in the most intense grotesqueness. In Chapter
4, I will pick up where Carroll left off by examining Baudelaire’s grotesque
sensualization/sexualization of the body in which two contradictory forces — such
as lust and disgust, le beau and le mal — are in-corporated on equal terms to the
extent of subverting the reader’s habitual mode of favouring one over the other, and
thereby giving him/her an irresistible sensation of vertigo.
The last feature of the grotesque I want to explore is hermeneutic indeterminacy.
As we have seen, grotesque physicality — as well as its cognitive and psychological
effects — works by contradiction that cannot be completely resolved or by tension
that cannot be fully released. The grotesque body draws attention to an apparent
contradiction or discrepancy between (bio)logical categories that teases the mind,
plays with rational discourse, and disrupts the normal functioning of language.
Take as an example Arcimboldo’s painting L’Automne of 1573 (Fig. 0.4). Looking at
the image up close, one sees a mass of fruit and vegetables of autumn; from further
away, one sees a human head. From either of the positions, the image — or rather,
the identity involved — remains unified. From a position in between, however,
perceptual confusion sets in between two entities which (bio)logically exclude
each other: the image becomes a composite — a grotesque — head straddling the
conf licting categories of the human and the vegetal, the normally inedible and the
normally edible, composition and decomposition. Put another way, the grotesque
occurs when the contiguous and congruous relationship between a human head
and a bunch of fruit and vegetables suddenly turns out to be one of contradiction:
‘Human beings eat fruit and vegetables’ is familiar and normal, whereas ‘Human
beings are fruit and vegetables’ is (bio)logically incongruous and strange. The latter
confronts us with a new and unexpected world that escapes classifications or the
rules of nomenclature. What can be named and categorized, so to speak, becomes
unnameable and uncategorizable.
For Barthes, such a new and unexpected world burgeons from what he calls
‘métaphores improbables’ (‘improbable metaphors’),36 namely, metaphors whose
 Introduction 13

Fig. 0.4. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, L’Automne, 1573, Le Louvre, Paris

14 Introduction

components are so illogically or unnaturally combined as to de-familiarize familiar

objects and throw the mind into a disorientating domain of the literal/figurative,
nonsense/sense. An improbable metaphor, so to speak, confronts the mind with
a statement so novel and bewildering that the mind has trouble making sense of
— i.e. transcending — its literal (or concrete) impossibility or falsehood. In more
conventional metaphors, such as ‘My heart is a deserted castle’, it would not be hard
to look through the literal (concrete discordance) into the figurative (conceptual
similitude). By contrast, in the case of Arcimboldo’s composite head, even though
we learn that (fruit and vegetables of ) autumn can figuratively refer to (the head
of ) a fully mature man, it becomes difficult to transcend the literal because it is
impossible to rationalize (figuratively) the complete identification of a potato with
a nose, of a mushroom with an ear, of clusters of grapes with hair, and so forth.
That is, Arcimboldo’s composite head embodies the resistance to hermeneutic
totalization, to structural unification. It is fair to say, then, that the grotesque
mode of ‘both–and’, the physically in-between, makes a kind of metaphor that
shows the invasion of the literal (nonsense) into the figurative (sense), of concrete
discordance into conceptual similitude; as such, the signifying process proceeds by
differentiation rather than by unification. It is through the idea of metaphor that
the grotesque, which is primarily visual or pictorial, becomes also verbal and thus
invites a comparative study.
Here then is the working definition of the grotesque on which I base my study of
the poetic and pictorial works of Crashaw, Baudelaire, and Magritte: the grotesque
is a corporeal, or f lesh-made, metaphor which produces within itself (and within
the reader/viewer’s response) intellectual uncertainty, emotional disharmony, and
hermeneutic indeterminacy. In the grotesque metaphors of these three figures,
body imagery, as we shall see, contains a self-contradictory physical structure that
makes possible such intellectual, emotional, and hermeneutic ambiguities.

3. ‘The Play of the Structure’

To understand better the grotesque as a metaphor whose literalness tampers with
its structural unity or totality, it is useful to refer to the line David Punter draws
between the two traditions in the history of metaphor: ‘metaphor as adornment’
and ‘metaphor as the basic structure of language’; that is, decorative and constitutive
metaphors.37 Punter sees metaphor as ‘a dialectic of similarity and difference’, of
familiarity and strangeness, of figurativeness and literalness (p. 88). Decorative
metaphor features the supreme dominance of (figurative) similarity over (literal)
difference: the literal is designed to be transparent enough to enable the reader to
look readily through it into the figurative. By contrast, in constitutive metaphor,
dissonant items are yoked together by violence to the extent that one cannot consider
figurativeness without paying considerable attention to literalness or materiality.
For Punter, constitutive metaphor, at its most extreme, is what he terms ‘metaphor
towards nowhere’, namely, metaphor which, instead of ‘persuad[ing] us that “X is like
Y” ’, confronts us with ‘the possibility that, in fact, there is no real likeness to be
found’ (pp. 78–79). Metaphor as such — which has been termed ‘pseudometaphor’
 Introduction 15

(see Chapter 3) — functions like the act of dream which ‘undermines our “dayworld”
sense that the world is as it is’ and sharpens our awareness of the fact that ‘we make
sense of the world only by perceiving likenesses and differences between things
and other things; thus, metaphor itself becomes a metaphor for the continuing
encounter with the other which makes up most of our mental life’ (p. 81). In a
word, constitutive metaphor of this sort effectively challenges our habitual modes
of perception and of thinking, through which we discover (or recover) strangeness
or otherness within ourselves.
Constitutive metaphor, Punter notes, emerges in the history of metaphor ‘perhaps
most decisively with the romantic poets’ (p. 15). Going further than Punter, we may
as well classify constitutive metaphor into two types according to the distinction
Coleridge establishes between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’. For Coleridge, both
‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ manifest themselves in the irrational act of yoking together
items that are remote from or opposite to each other; nevertheless, the former,
represented by Cowley, is analogous to ‘delirium’ and the latter, represented by
Milton, to ‘mania’. ‘Fancy’ is the faculty that ‘brings together images which have no
connection natural or moral, but are yoked together by the poet by means of some
accidental coincidence’. By contrast, ‘imagination’ — which Coleridge considers
superior to ‘fancy’ — refers to the ‘synthetic and magical power’ that enables the
poet to harmonize or reconcile distant or discordant items into a unified whole.38
To put it further, ‘fancy’ combines dissonant items on the basis of coincidental
similitude to the point that a structural unity is often lacking; as such, the reader
cannot help but linger on the concrete (or literal) incompatibility between the items
and thereby register the emotional impact of the literal image. By contrast, whilst
drawing attention to the literal level of incompatibility in the image, ‘imagination’
provides accurate similitude to allow eventually dissonant combinations to reach
structural unification or hermeneutic totalization.
Coleridge’s notion of ‘fancy’ prefigures what Breton calls ‘similitudes partielles’
(‘partial similarities’). Deviating from Pierre Reverdy’s belief in ‘juste’ (‘correct’
or ‘accurate’) likenesses as the first principle of imagistic combinations,39 Breton
argues that it is ‘partial similarities’ that empower imagistic combinations to trigger
‘la plus vive lumière’ (‘the strongest light’), to evoke ‘un très haut degré d’absurdité
immédiate’ (‘a high degree of immediate absurdity’). By ‘partial similarities’, Breton
means accidental physical or sensuous similarities of the kind he describes with
regard to the ‘valeurs oniriques’ (‘oneiric values’) of the Surrealist image: ‘Une
tomate est aussi un ballon d’enfant, le surréalisme, je le répète, ayant supprimé
le mot comme’ (‘A tomato is also a child’s balloon: surrealism, I repeat, having
suppressed the word like’) (ABOC iii, 769; i, 327; ii, 301).40 Here a tomato is
identified with a balloon on the basis of a coincidental similarity in shape — which
is nevertheless insufficient to justify (figuratively) their complete identification
with each other because the similarity is only partial and also literal. This is also
true of Arcimboldo’s L’Automne: a potato happens to look like a nose; clusters of
grapes like hair; a half-open beechnut like a mouth; and so forth. In other words,
the grotesque relies on ‘images which have a [coincidental] physical similarity, but
which experience classifies quite separately’.41 One can say that the grotesque (in
16 Introduction

the proper sense) functions like a constitutive metaphor born of ‘fancy’ or ‘partial
similarities’, one which prefers accident to accuracy, literalness to figurativeness,
concrete discordance to conceptual harmony.
Coleridge’s ‘fancy’ or Breton’s ‘partial similarities’ can be linked to a type of
schizophrenic cognition described by Silvano Arieti as ‘paleologic (from the Greek
palaios, “ancient and old”)’ thinking, preceding our normal secondary-process logic
‘generally called Aristotelian’.42 Schizophrenic patients of paleologic (or primitive)
thinking are inclined to identify one thing with another simply because they share
some kind of quality which is nevertheless not juste. A patient, for instance, considers
himself identical to Switzerland: ‘Switzerland loves freedom, I love freedom. I am
Switzerland’ (p. 231). Incidentally, such a ‘delusional conclusion’, Arieti notes, is
also evident in infantile cognition: an almost four-year-old girl identified two nuns
walking together on the street as ‘twins because they were dressed alike’ (p. 234).
Paleologic thinking, as we can see, also applies to Breton’s fortuitous identification
of a tomato with a (child’s) balloon or Arcimboldo’s fanciful substitution of, say, a
potato for a human nose: in both cases, coincidental physical/sensuous likenesses
initiate the injuste equation of one object with another and therefore, as Lacan writes
of the psychotic’s inability to symbolize, unties the point de capiton (the prototype of
which is the Name-of-the-Father): the point is ‘où viennent se nouer le signifié
et le signifiant’ (‘where the signified and the signifier are knotted together’), and
a certain number of these points are required for a person to be called normal.43
Put another way, both Breton’s and Arcimboldo’s cases display a kind of paleologic
thinking which disrupts the juste link between one signifier and another and thus
hinders ‘les transferts de signifié’ (‘the transferences of the signified’).44
To put it in Kristeva’s terms, Breton’s and Arcimboldo’s cases introduce into
metaphor a very high degree of the semiotic activity, namely, ‘a heterogeneousness
to meaning and signification’.45 Taking a cue from Lacan’s model of the three
interacting symbolic, imaginary, and real orders, Kristeva maintains that the signifying
process consists of the symbolic, the thetic, and the semiotic: the three components
work together in a dialectical manner to constitute different types of discourse.
For Kristeva, the semiotic is anterior to the ‘mirror phase’ (le stade du miroir), which,
according to Lacan, forms a unified consciousness and inaugurates the imaginary
order; and out of this phase emerges the thetic phase of establishing signification;
thetic signification then acts as the doorway to the symbolic, a stable sign system
that serves to settle the transfer of sense, the signified.46 The symbolic, together with
the thetic, operates to convey meanings as univocally as possible in the signifying
process. On the other hand, the semiotic is governed by affective or instinctual
energies as in infantile articulation (e.g. echolalias) or psychotic discourse (e.g.
glossalalias), and functions to produce ‘nonsense effects that destroy not only
accepted beliefs and signification, but, in radical experiments, syntax itself ’.47 It
follows, then, that scientific discourse tends to reduce the semiotic to a minimum in
order for the symbolic to exercise its power, as Derrida would say, ‘not only to orient,
balance, and organize the structure [of signification] [. . .] but above all to make
sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call
the play of the structure’.48 Artistic or literary discourse, however, allows semiotic
 Introduction 17

energies to disturb the symbolic function of signification in order to make possible

‘the play of the structure’, to de-familiarize our habitual, ossified modes of thinking
and feeling.
Seen in this light, the grotesque effectively dramatizes the subversive power of
the semiotic to activate ‘the play of the structure’, thereby waging a war on structural
totality. The grotesque, as we have seen in Arcimboldo’s L’Automne, brings into
itself the schizophrenic manner of identifying one term or signifier with another
which unsettles the transfer of sense through nonsense. As a body composed of
heterogeneous semiotic fragments, the grotesque, to use Lacan’s words, destroys the
imaginary gestalt of the body formed in the ‘mirror phase’ — the matrix of any
sense of unity, identity, or wholeness — and opens up a void in the symbolic use
of language to transmit meanings or to name things. That is to say, the grotesque
exposes us to the experience of the real, which emerges ‘in whatever concerns the
radical nature of loss at the center of words, being and body’.49
Derived from Freud’s idea of ‘psychical reality’, the core of which is the unconscious,
the Lacanian real is not to be confused with external or factual reality (see Chapter
2, sect. 1). In Lacan, the real precedes language and thus is un-symbolisable or
unpresentable; it refers to that which is cancelled out by the symbolic order in creating
(factual) reality. Whilst the real is in principle pre-linguistic, one can still experience
the real, which returns or intrudes into the symbolic structure in the form of loss —
loss of reality, of words, of order, of a unified form — as Lacan compares it to the
anxiety-provoking encounter with the deformed Medusa’s head, ‘this something
which is properly speaking unnameable’ and uncategorizable.50 The real, so to
speak, is the excess of that which can be transformed or organized properly through
language. One can say that, by denying itself the solace of structural/hermeneutic
totality, the grotesque (re)awakens our awareness of the chaotic nature of the real
human condition, that which we always strive to overcome in the attempt to satisfy
our constant desire for mastery (a unified ‘self ’). This fundamental desire is created
by the méconnaissance of an (alienated) idealized mirror-image and maintained by
the symbolic phallus, ‘the [transcendental] signifier [which is] intended to designate
as a whole the effects of the signified’ or a position in language which ‘promises
the possibility of wholeness, completion, perfect knowledge and authority’.51 For
Lacan, in this desire itself lies the very essence of anxiety, that is, the anxiety of
‘sliding back again into the chaos’ before the ‘mirror phase’.52 One can say, then,
that, paradoxically, by waging a war on totality, or rather, by estranging us from
the illusion of totality that we have internalized since the ‘mirror phase’ onwards,
the grotesque allows us an opportunity to become familiar with the very cause of
anxiety in human existence, ‘the void or abyss at the core of our being that we
constantly try [in vain] to fill out’.53

4. A Preview
The study that follows sets itself the task of discussing the grotesque in the strict
sense. Ranging across different literary and artistic periods, it picks out the thread of
the grotesque in poetry and painting in order to formulate a lineage of a poetics of
18 Introduction

contradiction, one that propels the semiotic deluge of ‘nonsense effects’ to tear open
the symbolic structure and bring about/back the experience of the real. The study
centres on the Baroque, Romanticism, and Surrealism, because these three periods
all feature the pursuit of the marvellous, whose purpose — ‘to surprise, to astonish,
to dazzle’ — represents, for E. R. Curtius, ‘the common denominator’ for all
aesthetic tendencies ‘opposed to Classicism’ and is ‘a constant’ in European art and
literature starting from Mannerism/the Baroque.54 In the three periods, the pursuit
of the marvellous, as we shall see, manifests itself one way or another in the cult
of fantasia, the power to amalgamate dissonant items into improbable or unfamiliar
metaphors/images; this situation provides rich loam for the grotesque to grow
in. Each of the figures chosen — Crashaw, Baudelaire, and Magritte — offers a
representative and also unique example of the cult of marvellous metaphors/images
in his period. With his metaphors of exorbitant, explosive f leshliness, Crashaw,
critics have agreed, makes himself more typical of Giambattista Marino’s poetics
of ‘far stupir’ (‘to astonish’) than any Baroque poet (including Marino himself ).55
Baudelaire has been considered the Romantic inheritor of the Baroque poetics
of ‘far stupir’, into which he adds modern debauchery and demonic bizarrerie; he
ventures further than any Romantic poet in mixing together opposites, such as
cruelty and volupté, to create ‘a poetry of the body’.56 In pursing the marvellous,
Magritte, according to Breton, is unique amongst the Surrealists, insofar as he alone
employs a fully deliberate — rather than automatic — approach to the mélange of
the familiar and the unknown into a surréalité, and thereby brings a new direction
into Surrealism.57 Magritte himself claims that, like Baudelaire, he ‘look[s] for
poetry [i.e. the unknown] in the world of familiar objects’.58
In addition to the pursuit of the marvellous, these three periods provide the
most favourable milieu for poets and painters to learn from each other in investing
their marvellous metaphors with grotesqueness: Crashaw, Baudelaire, and Magritte
introduce the power of painting and of poetry, respectively, into their metaphors
to conjure up grotesque images. The further aim of this study is therefore to cast
light on the function of the visual in poetry and of the verbal in painting in the
evocation of grotesque images. To the best of my knowledge, so far there is no
full-length study of the grotesque which is devoted to the function of the visual
and of the verbal in grotesque production in three periods that all witness the cult
of marvellous metaphors.
The main body of this book consists of five chapters. The first two chapters
form its theoretical framework; the others concern ‘theory into practice’. Chapter 1
focuses on the aesthetic nature of grotesque physicality as a transgression of classical
norms of reason and completeness. This chapter weaves together the thread of furor
poeticus, of the uncanny, and of the sublime into an aesthetics of excess which defines
the irrational nature — both in work and in response — of the (antique/Mannerist)
grotesque and foregrounds its crucial role in the pursuit of the marvellous. Chapter
2 is concerned with the poetic nature — i.e. the hermeneutic plurality — of
grotesque physicality. I construct a psychoanalytic reading of the grotesque body
as a kind of poetic language that, as Kristeva would say, semioticizes the normal (or
symbolic) process of signification through its fragmented syntax and improbable or
 Introduction 19

unfamiliar metaphors. By relating the grotesque body to poetic language, I further

develop the concept of the corporeal, or f lesh-made, metaphor as a theory of verbal
grotesque metaphor.
The third chapter deals with the ways in which Crashaw introduces unrestrained
Baroque sensuousness into his devotional (pseudo)metaphors — notably those
related to the Passion of Christ and the contrition of Magdalene — and thereby
evokes grotesque images that enable the mind to ‘savour’ divine suffering, to surge
with carnal knowledge of the joy of divine terror or awe. If Crashaw’s grotesque
imagery represents the joy of divine terror, Baudelaire’s epitomizes the charm or
beauty of demonic horror. The fourth chapter is devoted to a discussion of the ways
in which Baudelaire develops to the full the Romantic taste for terrible beauty by
plunging his poetic vision into ‘abîmes sans lumière’ (‘abysses without light’)59 to
cull demonic charm, a sensation which is best in-corporated in his grotesque images
that nurture bestial or diabolic sexuality/sensuality. By contrast, Magritte endows
his grotesque objects with a high degree of play to amuse much more than horrify
the viewer. The fifth chapter deals with the ways in which Magritte endows his
grotesque objects with two levels of pleasurable or nonsense effects to promote
fully the Surrealist pursuit of the triumph of the pleasure principle over the reality
principle, (childhood) pleasure over (childhood) pain.
Although the range of my critical itinerary here is far from exhaustive, it seeks
to illustrate a strict approach to the grotesque (as a corporeal metaphor) and
its lineage in the modes of aesthetic construction spanning from the antique/
Mannerist grotesque to the Surrealist grotesque. By examining grotesque
metaphors in Crashaw, Baudelaire, and Magritte as the individual representatives
of Baroque, Romantic, and Surrealist grotesques, I seek to establish the grotesque
as the centrepiece of the pursuit of the marvellous, which reveals itself in the cult
of fantasia, namely, the unbridled artistic licence to combine the opposite or the
discordant; and which is the common denominator for all that is anti-classical and
a constant in the history of European art (including literature). Lastly, for better or
for worse, all translations offered herein are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

Notes to the Introduction

1. Horace, The Art of Poetry, trans. by D. A. Russell, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. by D. A.
Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp.
98–110 (p. 98).
2. Nicolas Dacos, La Découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques à la renaissance
(London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1969), p. 8.
3. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. by Ulrich Weisstein (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1957), p. 53.
4. Victor Hugo, ‘La Préface de Cromwell’, in Cromwell, ed. by Annie Ubersfeld (Paris: Garnier-
Flammarion, 1968), pp. 61–109 (p. 71).
5. Ibid., p. 77.
6. Charles Baudelaire, ‘De l’essence du rire’, in Œuvres complètes (OC), ed. by Claude Pichois (Paris:
Gallimard, 1961), pp. 975–93 (p. 983).
7. John Ruskin, ‘Grotesque Renaissance’, in The Stones of Venice, 3 vols (London: Smith, Elder and
Co., 1873–74), iii (1874), pp. 112–65 (pp. 126, 140).
8. See, for example, W. I. Lucas, Review of Das Grotesk. Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung, by
Wolfgang Kayser, The Modern Language Review, 54.1 (1959), 129–30 (p. 129); and Ewa Kuryluk,
20 Introduction

Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex. The Grotesque: Origins, Iconography, Techniques (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1987), p. 2.
9. Kayser, p. 188.
10. Lee Byron Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), p. 10.
11. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), p. 39.
12. Kayser, p. 157.
13. Ibid., pp. 26, 24.
14. Dieter Meindl, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque (Columbia and London:
University of Missouri Press, 1996), p. 14.
15. Ibid., p. 24; Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, in Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales, ed. by
David Van Leer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 84–91 (p. 84).
16. Reuven Tsur, ‘The Infernal and the Hybrid: Bosch and Dante’, in Tsur, On the Shore of
Nothingness: A Study in Cognitive Poetics (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003), pp. 264–85 (pp. 266–
67); ‘Poetry of Disorientation’, in Tsur, On Metaphoring ( Jerusalem: Israel Science Publishers,
1987), pp. 191–208 (p. 194).
17. Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 27.
18. Noticeably, whilst distinguishing irony from the grotesque, Thomson does hold that irony can
become grotesque when it is exaggerated to the extent that ‘[a] powerful emotional impact [is]
created, conf licting with the standard response to irony’ (p. 49).
19. Geoffrey G. Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 16.
20. Noël Carroll, ‘The Grotesque Today: Preliminary Notes toward a Taxonomy’, in Modern Art
and the Grotesque, ed. by Frances S. Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. 291–311 (p. 297).
21. Bernard Mc Elroy, Fiction of the Grotesque (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 6–7; Harpham, ‘The
Grotesque: First Principles’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 34.4 (1976), 461–68(p. 465).
22. Baudelaire, Le Poëme du haschisch, in OC, pp. 347–87 (p. 376).
23. See Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings (The Hague and Paris: Mouton,
1971).
24. Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Afterword: Ref lections on the Grotesque’, in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
(New York: Dutton, 1994), pp. 303–07 (p. 303).
25. The fantastic, as Tzvetan Todorov defines it, is a ‘hesitation experienced by a person who knows
only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event’ (The Fantastic: A Structural
Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. by Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975),
p. 25). That is, the fantastic arises when an artwork forces the reader or viewer to consider
the world of its characters as real and therefore hesitate between a supernatural and a natural
explanation of the events in the artwork.
26. Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow, and David Amigoni, ‘Introduction’, in Victorian Culture and the Idea
of the Grotesque, ed. by Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow, and David Amigoni (London: Ashgate, 1999),
pp. 1–20 (p. 2).
27. Paul Barlow, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s Grotesque Conceits’, in Victorian Culture and the Idea of the
Grotesque, pp. 37–55 (p. 41).
28. Dacos, p. 73; Bakhtin, p. 317.
29. Bakhtin, p. 26.
30. Michelangelo once said of the importance of verisimilitude in the creation of grotesque or
improbable creatures: ‘And if any be unconvinced and say ‘How is it possible that a woman
with a beautiful face should have the tail of a fish or the feet of a swift deer or ounce or wings
on her sides like an angel?’ one might answer that, if that anomaly be rightly proportioned in
each of its parts, then it is normal and very natural; and that a painter is worthy of great praise
if he paint[s] an impossible thing which has never been seen with such art and skill that it seems
alive and possible.’ (Francisco de Hollanda, Four Dialogues on Painting, trans. by Aubrey F. G. Bell
(London: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 63).
31. Baudelaire, Quelques caricaturistes étrangers, in OC, pp. 1014–24 (p. 1019).
 Introduction 21

32. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. by J. Shawcross, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907),
ii, p. 6.
33. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed.
by Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 35–36.
34. Harpham, On the Grotesque, p. 9.
35. Carroll, pp. 291–311.
36. Roland Barthes, ‘Arcimboldo ou Rhétoriqueur et magician’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Éric
Marty, 3 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1993), iii, pp. 854–69 (p. 861).
37. David Punter, Metaphor (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 11–12.
38. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i, 62; ‘Table Talk: June 23, 1834’, in Coleridge’s Miscellaneous
Criticism, ed. by Thomas M. Raysor (London: Constable & Co, 1936), pp. 435–36; Biographia
Literaria, ii, 12–13.
39. Pierre Reverdy, ‘L’Image’, in Nord-Sud: Self defence et autres écrits sur l’art et la poésie (1917–1926)
(Paris: Flammarion, 1975), pp. 73–80 (pp. 73–74).
40. See the fourth section of Chapter 5 for a full discussion of this point.
41. Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 14.
42. Silvano Arieti, Interpretation of Schizophrenia (London: Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1974), p. 229.
43. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan: Les Psychoses, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris:
Seuil, 1981), pp. 303–04.
44. Ibid., p. 261.
45. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. by Leon S.
Roudiez, trans. by Thomas Gora et al. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 133. See also Chapter
2, sect. 2.
46. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. by Margaret Walter (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), pp. 48, 62–63; Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New
York and London: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 1–7. Noticeably, I am not implying here that
Lacan’s tripartite model is interchangeable with Kristeva’s, as Kristeva ascribes to the maternal a
more central role in the formation of her tripartite model. For details, see Noëlle McAfee, Julia
Kristeva (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 30–37.
47. Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 133.
48. Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Writing
and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978),
pp. 278–95 (p. 278).
49. Ellie Ragland, ‘An Overview of the Real, with Examples from Seminar I’, in Reading Seminars I
and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, ed. by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 192–211 (p. 195).
50. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Sylvana
Tomaselli (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 164.
51. Lacan, Écrits, p. 285; Pamela Thurschwell, Sigmund Freud (London and New York: Routledge,
2000), p. 127.
52. Lacan, ‘Some Ref lections on the Ego’, International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 34 (1953), 11–17
(p. 15).
53. Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 87–88.
54. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. by Willard R. Trask
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 273, 282.
55. Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations
between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973),
p. 252; Frank J. Warnke, Versions of the Baroque: European Literature in the Seventeenth Century
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 32.
56. Jonathan Culler, ‘Introduction’, in Charles Baudelaire: The Flowers of Evil, trans. by James
McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. xiii–xxxvii (pp. xx, xxiv–xxv);
Hans Robert Jauss, ‘On the Question of the “Structural Unity” of Older and Modern Lyric
Poetry (Théophile de Viau: Ode III; Baudelaire: Le Cygne)’, in Aesthetic Experience and Literary
Hermeneutics, trans. by Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982),
pp. 221–62 (pp. 222–23).
22 Introduction

57. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 72

58. René Magritte, Écrits complets, ed. by André Blavier (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), p. 609.
59. Baudelaire, Un mangeur d’opium, in OC, pp. 388–462 (p. 426).
 PA R T I
v

Le beau n’a qu’un type; le laid en a mille.

Victor Hugo, ‘La Préface de Cromwell’
 C h apt e r 1
v

‘Aegri Somnia’:
Towards an Aesthetics of the Grotesque
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 1

By the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of
silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation
where the world is forced to question itself.
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization2

Both in antiquity and the High Renaissance, grotesque images, as David

Summers has noted, were called ‘monsters’, because they were born of ‘unnatural
combinations of natural things, or part of things’; due to the ‘ambivalent and
contradictory’ couplings, according to Bakhtin, they were ‘contrary to the classic
images of the finished, completed man, cleansed, as it were, of all the scoriae of
birth and development’.3 Hence, for those who follow classical principles of art,
grotesque hybrid monsters, as we shall see, mean nothing but ‘a catalogue of sins
to be avoided’: the irrational, the improper, the disorderly, and so forth.4 On the
other hand, for non- or anti-classical artists and critics, the grotesque marks a
conscious break with classical tradition and is the quintessence of ingenium, novelty,
and marvel.
In light of the history of art (including literature), we see that the grotesque
‘thrives in an atmosphere of disorder and is inhibited in any period characterized
by a pronounced sense of dignity, an emphasis on the harmony and order of life,
an affinity for the typical and normal, and a prosaically realistic approach to the
arts’.5 In other words, the grotesque blossoms in the aesthetic climates in which
transgressing classical rationalism and order is greatly praised. Accordingly, whilst
withering during the Age of Reason, the grotesque is ‘a hallmark of European
Mannerism’ and continues to be popular in the Baroque because grotesque orna­
ment is widely used during these two periods from architecture to book illustrations
(Fig. 1.1); an epitome of Romantic creativity when Baudelaire, going further than
Hugo, considers the grotesque, the incarnation of a permanent duality in the human
condition, as the highest form of contemporary art; and almost a synonym of
Surrealism, insofar as the grotesque embodies literally and figuratively the so-called
surréalité.6
 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque 25

Fig. 1.1. Johannes Camers, C. Plynii Secundi Naturae historiarum libri XXXVII, 1518
© Trustees of the British Museum
26 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque

Indeed, grotesque trans-formation is an excessive pursuit of incompleteness and

contradiction: it transgresses the natural order of things and produces within itself
a self-contradictory (or in-between) physical structure, one that, as we shall see,
displeases classicists because of its ability to feed the feelings of (dis)pleasure and to
obscure the borderline between life and death, beauty and deformity, the central
and the peripheral. With this in mind, I propose to weave together the thread of
furor poeticus, of the uncanny, and of the sublime, into an aesthetics of excess which
defines the irrational nature — both in work and in response — of the (antique/
Mannerist) grotesque and which marks the critical role of the grotesque in the
pursuit of the marvellous.

1. Origins of the Grotesque Monster

The fanciful hybrid images that adorned the chambers of the Domus Aurea, buried
beneath the Baths of Titus, were discovered in the 1480s. Virtually unseen before
then, they soon became an object of imitation in Italy and other parts of Europe,
and the period that John Ruskin called ‘Grotesque Renaissance’ was thus born. By
1502, they were being called grottesche (grotesques) in Italy, according to where they
had been found, in a grotta or ‘underground cave’.7 Markedly, the most intriguing
and inf luential of High Renaissance/Mannerist grottesche was the decoration of
the Vatican Loggia, completed in 1519 by Giovanni da Udine under the direction
of Raphael. At the command of Pope Leo X, Raphael built the Loggia around
1515 and appointed Giovanni to decorate all the pillars there with, as Giorgio
Vasari described, ‘most beautiful ornaments bordered by grotesques similar to the
antique, and with very lovely and fantastic inventions, all full of the most varied and
extravagant things that could possibly be imagined’.8
Vasari, who decorated the ceiling of the main corridor of the Uffizi Gallery
with grottesche, was the cardinal figure in the codification of the grotesque in the
sixteenth century. It was Vasari who highly valorized the fantastic or irrational
nature of grottesche in his Le Vite (first published in 1550):
Grotesques [Le grottesche] are an irregular and highly ridiculous sort of painting,
done by the ancients to adorn vacant space, where in certain places only things
set up high were suitable. For this purpose they created all kinds of absurd
monsters, formed by a freak of nature or by the whims and fancies of the
workmen, who in this kind of picture are subject to no rule, but paint a heavy
weight attached to the finest thread which could not possibly bear it, a horse
with legs of leaves, a man with crane’s legs, and any number of bumble-bees
and sparrows; so that the one who was able to dream up the strangest things was held
to be the most able.9 (my italics)
To be sure, for Vasari’s Mannerist taste, the value of grottesche lies in the excess of
classical norms of nature and reason.
Outside Italy, France was the first place where ornamental grotesques came into
vogue. Before his death in 1527, Florimond Robertet, secretary to King Louis
XII, already showed his enthusiasm for the invention of ornamental grotesques.10
Also, the major construction of grotesque ornamentation first began in 1530,
when François I imported a team of Italian artists and craftsmen led by Rosso
 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque 27

Fiorentino to decorate his new château at Fontainebleau in the most recent Italian
ornamental style.11 The Fontainebleau grotesques were popular throughout the
Continent during the second half of the sixteenth century. Meanwhile, the word
‘grotesque’, in the form crotesque, was introduced to France during the construction
of Fontainebleau.12
Significantly, in an essay written before 1574, Montaigne describes that, motivated
by grotesque paintings whose only charm lies in ‘variety and novelty’, he feels a
desire to write his own essays in the same manner as ‘monstrosities and grotesques
botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order
sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous’. He goes on to compare the
formless style of his essays to the Horatian mermaid: ‘A fair woman terminating
in the tail of a fish’.13 Making this comparison, Montaigne certainly had in mind
Horace’s contempt for the invention of ‘a sick man’s dreams’ (aegri somnia): ‘a book
whose different features are made up at random like a sick man’s dreams, with no
unified form to have a head or a tail’.14 For Montaigne, however, aegri somnia are
those which give rise to the charm of grotesques. Although Montaigne uses the
term ‘grotesque’ figuratively to refer to heterogeneous composition, his favourable
reference to grotesques not merely speaks to the Mannerist taste of his time, but
also marks the first French literary use of ‘grotesques’.15 Moreover, his conception of
the grotesque body as a product of fortuity or chance points ahead to the Surrealist
game of le cadavre exquis; and the lack of a unified form of his essays, for Lyotard,
exemplifies the postmodern (as opposed to modern) mode of fragmentation
‘without concern for the unity of the whole’.16
Montaigne’s use of monstrosities and grotesques together also brings out the
fact that by the third quarter of the sixteenth century, the word ‘grotesque’ had
the connotation of ‘monstrous’ in the French language. This was also the case
in sixteenth-century Germany, where the first use of the word as the monstrous
mixture of incongruent materials occurred in Johan Fischart’s introduction to
Geschichtklitterung (History of Junk) of 1575.17 In addition, since the second half of the
sixteenth century, the word ‘grotesque’ in Germany had been used to designate
or describe exotic ornamental styles of non-Roman origin such as moresque,
arabesque, Grubengrotteschische (which later became known as the school of diablerie),
and so forth.18 In the sixteenth century, whilst Italy, France, Germany, and the
Low Countries were absorbed in the extravagant grotesque style, there was no
so-called ‘grotesque’ art in England — except that the word (in the French form)
was first recorded in English in 1561.19 For the puritan climate of Tudor England
was hardly congenial to the growth of grotesque ornamentations. Nonetheless,
the late Elizabethan Age witnessed a rise of interest in Italian art and architecture,
which was to develop during the next two centuries.20
Markedly, f lourishing in seventeenth-century England, the word ‘grotesque’, as
in sixteenth-century France and Germany, took on the connotation ‘monstrous’
or ‘chimerical’. In his Timber, or Discoveries (1640–41), for instance, Ben Jonson
justifies his classical view of poetry and painting with recourse to Vitruvius’ and
Horace’s rebuke against grotesque images; unlike Vasari and Montaigne, who
valorized grottesche for their monstrosities, Jonson placed himself in the tradition of
28 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque

stigmatizing the grotesque as nothing but ‘chimaeras’ or ‘monsters against nature’.21

On the other hand, as the notion of the sublime was transplanted from France,
started to strike root — with much effort, though — in the rational soil of Augustan
England, and eventually bore the fruits of the Romantic expressive theory of art,
grotesque monsters, as we shall see, found shelter in the sublime from the Neo-
Classical dogma of reason and decorum.

2. The Sleep of Reason22

Both Vitruvius and Horace ‘appeal in the Stoic manner to nature as a criterion
for restraint’;23 their strongly disparaging views of grotesque art have become loci
classici of much that is anti-grotesque. In his ten-volume interpretation of Roman
architecture De Architectura (c. 27 bc), Vitruvius blames grotesque designs like those
in the Domus Aurea for being ‘monsters rather than definite representations taken
from definite things’.24 Rather than out of necessity, they were made to ‘f latter
the habits of sense through the delight of the eyes and ears’,25 i.e. through the
spell of the grotesque. Vitruvius then regards them as ‘improper taste’ of his time
and concludes that only ‘[m]inds darkened by imperfect standards of taste’ cannot
discern ‘whether any of them can really occur’ and approve images ‘which do not
resemble reality’.26 For Vitruvius, nature and reason constitute the sine qua non of
proper taste.
In the very beginning of his Ars Poetica (c. 10 bc), Horace, following Vitruvius,
ridicules hybrid images as the invention of aegri somnia. Truly enough, ‘[p]ainters
and poets’, Horace stresses, ‘have always enjoyed recognised rights to venture on
what they will’; it is, however, absurd and monstrous that ‘fierce and gentle can be
united, snakes paired with birds or lambs with tigers’.27 For Horace, such unnatural
couplings of natural things may fabricate an (ingenious) poem or painting, but
its lack of unity and probability cannot, as C. O. Brink explicates, ‘make it into
a viable entity — ars’. Without ars, poetry would be merely inspired madness or
‘imagination uncontrolled by reason’28 and, as such, fails ‘either to do good or to
give pleasure [prodesse et delectare] — or thirdly, to say things which are both pleasing
and serviceable for life’.29 This is the warning Horace intends to give at the end of
Ars Poetica by comparing a mad poet to ‘a man suffering from a nasty itch, or the
jaundice, or fanaticism, or Diana’s wrath’ (p. 109). Due to its frantic nature, the
verse — or really, spell — of the mad poet is dangerous, in that, Horace sarcastically
implies, it will not only destroy the poet himself but also the community at large
(pp. 109–10). Horatian artistic licence, so to speak, must be subject to reason,
decorum, and natural laws; it turns out to be ‘a rejection of ingenium sine arte’.30
Significantly, in Horace’s hands, aegri somnia became identical with Plato’s concept
of ‘the Muses’ madness’; the unconscious, so to speak, was thereby connected with
the transcendental.
In rejecting grotesque art, both Vitruvius and Horace shroud the mental state
of its artists in an unmistakable image of irrationality and morbidity and thus link
grotesque art to the Platonic tradition of ‘the Muses’ madness’, or furor poeticus. In
the Ion, Plato describes the poet as ‘a light and winged and holy thing, and there is
 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque 29

no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of senses, and reason is
no longer in him’; he ascribes elsewhere the irrational nature of the poetic creation
to ‘the Muses’ madness’, namely, ‘the madness of those who are possessed by the
Muses’.31 It has been a commonplace that Plato largely holds a negative attitude
towards poetry because of its irrational nature and lack of truth: the poet ‘destroys
the rational part by feeding and fattening up this other [i.e. emotional] part [. . .]
and by being far removed from truth’.32 Moreover, in order to debase the social
and moral status of the poet, Plato, as Penelope Murray has put it, inverts — by
opposing poetic inspiration to wisdom (sophia) — the traditional concept (as in
Homer and Hesiod) that poetry, as a product of divine inspiration, serves to reveal
truth and wisdom.33
Nevertheless, beyond the values of truth and non-truth, by introducing the idea
of furor poeticus, Plato does create an opportunity — albeit inadvertently — for
poetic inspiration to become an aesthetic or creative faculty. For example, Aristotle,
whilst arguing against Plato’s view of imitative art, affirms in the Poetics that poetry
demands a man ‘with a touch of madness in him’; Longinus, in Peri Hupsous, goes
one step further by making ‘strong and inspired emotion’ a fundamental source of
sublimity (hupsous) — which was to provide the rich loam for the growth of the
expressive theory of poetry and art in the Romantic era.34
When Plato describes poetic inspiration as ‘the Muses’ madness’ and reprimands
the poet for building ‘a bad system of government in people’s mind by gratifying
their irrational side’,35 what he has in mind is actually the Dionysiac furor: in
antiquity, artists, according to Plutarch, ‘attribute[d] to Apollo in general a
uniformity, orderliness, and unadulterated seriousness, but to Dionysus a certain
variability combined with playfulness, wantonness, seriousness, and frenzy’.36 In the
Laws, Plato’s last, posthumous work, we see again that poetic inspiration carries with
it the image of madness: ‘when he [the poet] sits down on the tripod of the muse,
and is not in his right mind; like a fountain, he allows to f low out freely whatever
comes in’.37 Notably, the poet here serves as ‘the passive, unconscious mouthpiece
of a higher power’,38 a situation similar to the Surrealist technique of ‘automatisme
psychique’ (‘psychic automatism’), one that uses the grammar of dreams (Les Pas
perdus, ABOC i, 274; see also Chapter 5, sect. 1).
Inspired madness and the dream become more closely tied up with each other
in the Timaeus: ‘no man achieves true and inspired divination when in his rational
mind, but only when the power of his intelligence is fettered in sleep or when it is
distraught by disease or by reason of some divine inspiration’.39 Freud would regard
divine inspiration, or furor poeticus, as repressed, unconscious drives: in dreams, a
form of ‘the return of the repressed’, our unconscious wishes or desires — which are
repressed by the (super-)ego, or reason — have the opportunity to slip past the gate
of censorship when it is partially relaxed and thus become symbolically fulfilled
(PFL iv, 244). As a result, it is typical of dreams, says Freud, to form hybrid images
‘out of elements in our waking thought we should certainly have kept separate’
(PFL xv, 400). As a matter of fact, critics such as Michaela Janan have paralleled
the Freudian system of mental life with the tripartite theory of the soul or mind
(divided amongst the domains of reason, spirit, and appetite) that Plato develops in
the Republic and Phaedrus.40
30 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque

Opposite to the rational part, the ruler of the soul, the appetitive, or desirous,
part contains not merely desires, but also, according to the Timaeus, the faculty of
fantasia. Fantasia is essentially outside of reason; and ‘even if it did have some share
in the perception of reasons, it would have no natural instinct to pay heed to any
of them but would be bewitched for the most part both day and night by images
and phantasms’.41 Reason is the best part of the soul and yet lacks the capacity to
feed ‘all the desires and feelings of pleasure and distress which [. . .] accompany
everything we do’. Poetic fantasia, however, ‘irrigates and tends to these things
when they should be left to wither, and it makes them our rulers when they should
be our subjects’.42 Simply put, poetic fantasia (or furor poeticus) for Plato has the power
to bewitch the soul or, as Freud would say, to give free rein to our unconscious
drives, to what we desire or dread. It therefore becomes ‘ce dangereux supplément’
(‘that dangerous supplement’) to reason.
Because of this ‘fatal advantage’, poetic fantasia, to quote Derrida in a different
context, ‘is properly seductive; it leads desire away from the good path, makes it err
far from natural ways, guides it toward its loss or fall. [. . .] It thus destroys Nature’.43
This is exactly why St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) railed against the grotesque
sculptures that ornamented the cloister of Benedictine monasteries: properly
seductive, ‘that marvellous and deformed comeliness, that comely deformity
[deformis formositas ac formosa deformitas]’ will lead desire away from the law of God:
To what purpose are those unclean apes, those fierce lions, those monstrous
centaurs, those half-men, those striped tigers, those fighting knights, those
hunters winding their horns? [. . .] Here is a four-footed beast with a serpent’s
tail; there, a fish with a beast’s head. Here again the forepart of a horse trails
half a goat behind it, or a horned beast bears the hinder quarters of a horse.
In short, so many and so marvellous are the varieties of divers shapes on every
hand, that we are more tempted to read in the marble than in our books, and
to spend the whole day in wondering at these things rather than in meditating
the law of God.44
The grotesque art of the cloister, so to say, is distracting and dangerous to meditation
because it ‘f latter[s] the habits of sense through the delight of the eyes’ (in Vitruvius’
words), or really, because it ‘intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of [logos]; if
it fills, it is as if one fills a void,’ that is, ‘[i]t adds only to replace’ (in Derrida’s
terms).45 In a word, for St Bernard, the grotesque belongs to that which Derrida
calls ‘a seductive adornment’ in his reading of Kant, namely, an improper parergon
(ornament, supplement) whose sensory attraction draws attention to itself as if it
were the ergon (the work).46 The grotesque adornment is thus a dangerous parergon,
a hybrid of outside and inside.
It is this spell — or rather, fear — of the grotesque that Horace kept in check whilst
granting artistic licence to poets and painters, in that, like poetry with ars, grotesque
hybrids, the creation of aegri somnia, are able to please by indulging the emotions of
(dis)pleasure or, in Freud’s terms, to bring out/back that which is repressed in the
unconscious, the reservoir of the immoral, the insane, and the morbid. Indeed, ‘[t]
he performance of the grotesque is “unconscious” ’:47 in the unconscious, whilst the
power of reason falls asleep, the grotesque awakens and thus the confusion of the
natural order of things occurs. This is why during the sixteenth century, as Kayser
 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque 31

points out, the term sogni dei pittori (‘dreams of painters’) became synonymous with
the grotesque.48 Besides, Vasari, as we recall, stressed that, in creating grottesche, ‘the
one who was able to dream up the strangest things was held to be the most able’.
The relation of dreams to the grotesque leads us to the fact that, in a topographical
sense, the unconscious, the subterranean part of the mind, serves to be a metaphor
for the grotesque, insofar as grottesche were found in underground grottoes, or
grotte, whose Latin form is probably crupta (‘crypt’), deriving from the Greek term
kpύπτη for ‘vault’ or ‘to hide’. ‘Grotesque, then, gathers into itself suggestions of the
underground, of burial, and of secrecy’.49 The grotesque, so to speak, is the crypt
of the conscious mind. For classicists like Horace, grotesque hybrids stand for the
destructive emotions of fantasia, or ingenium, the dangerous supplement; as such,
they must be excluded from the domain of the classical ideal — to wit, must remain
repressed in the crypt.
As a result, it is fair to say that when they were discovered in the underground
grottoes in the High Renaissance and soon became popular afterwards, grottesche,
the product of aegri somnia, became literally and figuratively ‘the return of the
repressed’ — figuratively because, as we shall see, the grotesque speaks directly to
what Freud calls ‘the uncanny’: that which, in the eyes of classicists, ‘ought to have
remained secret and hidden but has come to light’ (PFL xiv, 345).

3. The Return of the Repressed

Before grottesche were exposed to sight, Renaissance theory of art was dominated
by the Vitruvian/Horatian doctrine of restraint and reason — i.e. the distrust of
ingenium sine arte. Exemplary of those who followed their critical path was Leon
Battista Alberti, who, incidentally, set the stage for the Neo-Classical ideals of
decorum, grace, and order. In his De Pictura (written originally in Latin in 1435),
Alberti maintains that, in order to paint properly, we must not follow
those who strive for distinction in painting by the light of their own intelligence
[ingenio] without having before their eyes or in their mind any form of beauty
taken from Nature. [. . .] So, let us always take from Nature whatever we are
about to paint, and let us always choose those things that are most beautiful
and worthy.50
In constructing rules for the art of painting, Alberti barely sees ingenium as a positive
term, insofar as ‘the ingegno of the artist [can become] too fervent and furious’, and
thus the bounds of reason and nature are transgressed.51
Since ingenium is dangerous, inventio, a vital requirement of art and yet a power
of ingenium, ‘must be subject to constraint, decorum and discipline. Inventions
which outstrip feasibility are unacceptable’,52 as Martin Kemp writes of Alberti.
Apparently, then, grotesque ornamentation, as Alberti suggests in De re aedificatoria
(1485), is not even invention, in the sense that it comes out of excessive ingenium and
so exceeds feasibility:
We are told that Nero used to employ miraculous Architects, who never
thought of Invention, but what it was almost impossible for the Skill of Man
to reduce to practice. Such Geniusses [sic] I can by no means approve of; for,
indeed, I would have the Architect always appear to have consulted Necessity
32 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque

and Convenience in the first Place, even tho’ at the same Time his principal
Care has been Ornament.53
In other words, since they are not made for necessity, grottesche become parerga of
parerga, surpluses of ornaments, supplements of supplements. Far from being inven­
tive ornaments, grottesche are improper parerga per se in the sense of ‘the exceptional,
the strange, the extraordinary’ (in Derrida’s words).54
On the other hand, concurrent with Alberti’s marked distrust of excessive
ingenium was the worship of fantasia promoted by Cennino Cennini, who, in Il
Libro dell’arte (c.1435), inverts Horace’s idea of bridled licence and, without realizing
it, prepares a favourable milieu for grottesche, which were to come to light about
half a century later. The painter, Cennini asserts, ‘must be endowed with both
imagination ( fantasia) and skill in the hand, to discover unseen things concealed
beneath the obscurity of natural objects [. . .], presenting to sight that which did not
before appear to exist’. Furthermore, painting, like poetry, deserves to be ranked
next to science:
the poet, by the help of science, becomes worthy, and free, and able to compose
and bind together, or not, at pleasure. So to the painter liberty is given to
compose a figure, either upright or sitting, or half man, half horse, as he pleases,
according to his fancy.55
In Cennini, fantasia is the very creative power to ‘compose and bind together’ in
order to unveil unseen things, such as a hybrid figure. Cennini’s definition of
fantasia, as I will show in this book, serves as the embryo of the Baroque theory of
‘wit’ (ingenio or ingegno) and Romantic and Modernist (notably Surrealist) theories
of imagination. Also, Cennini’s poetry-painting analogy, built on the grounds of
imaginative liberty, anticipates many passages in the criticism of the following two
centuries;56 one of the crucial critical passages was the work of Michelangelo.
According to the Roman Dialogues (1548), Michelangelo justified ornamental
grotesques of classical antiquity by, as in Cennini, transforming Horatian artistic
licence: ‘he [Horace] says that poets and painters have licence to dare, that is to dare
do what they choose’. Indeed, it is of great import, Michelangelo continued, for the
painter to paint in accordance with Nature:
But if, in order to observe what is proper to a time and place, he exchange[s]
the parts or limbs (as in grotesque work which would otherwise be very false
and insipid) and convert[s] a griffin or a deer downwards into a dolphin or
upwards into any shape he may choose, [. . .] this converted limb [. . .] will be
most perfect according to its nature; and this may seem false but can really only be
called ingenious or monstrous. And sometimes it is more in accordance with reason
to paint a monstrosity (to vary and relax the senses and the object presented to
men’s eyes, since sometimes they desire to see what they have never seen and
think cannot exist) rather than the ordinary figure, admirable though it be, of
man or animals.57 (my italics)
Here Michelangelo deviated conspicuously from Stoic classicism by embracing the
gratification of irrational desires as a significant and inventive part of art. In so
doing, he transgressed or transcended the classical belief of art as mimesis of truth;
art, for him, is in fact artifice in the form of ingenium or fantasia.
 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque 33

In decorating the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo (The Medici Tombs) of 1524–31,
Michelangelo already showed his ingenious artifice by inventing ‘new fantasies’
which Vasari called ‘alla grottesca’: he glorified Michelangelo for having ‘done much
to give courage to those who have seen his methods to set themselves to imitate
him’.58 Michelangelo thus founded a new school of architecture and ornamentation
that made Vitruvian views of art mostly a school of thought rather than of practice
after 1524.59 Seen in this light, grottesche are even more significant in the history
of art: if Mannerism, as Arnold Hauser states, marks the first deliberate departure
of art from nature and consequently becomes the origin of modern art,60 then
grottesche, the hallmark of Mannerism, take art to the world of the super-natural, or
rather, of the uncanny.
Paradoxically, High Renaissance/Mannerist grottesche, notwithstanding a product
of fantasia, were made with a meticulously illusionistic and naturalistic technique,
which ‘makes the impossible and unnatural as if actual and natural: they are not
true, but rather verisimilitudinous, like the truth’.61 That is to say, ‘[l]’éicastique et
le fantastique apparaissent comme une seule et même operation. La nature devient
songe, alors que les fantasmi prennent corps et realité’ (‘[t]he icastic and the fantastic
appear to be one and the same operation. Nature turns into the dream, whilst
fantasies take on f lesh and bone’).62 Simply put, grottesche are the hybrids of the
imaginary and the mimetic, the strange and the familiar, the inside and the outside;
this paradoxical situation creates a particularly favourable condition for producing
the aesthetic experience of the uncanny.
The uncanny (unheimlich), according to Freud, is ‘something repressed [or
surmounted] which recurs’: it is something which is initially ‘familiar and old-
established in the mind’, but the development of civilization has estranged it from
the (rational) mind ‘only through the process of repression’ (PFL xiv, 363–64). The
uncanny occurs, so to speak, when ‘something which we have hitherto regarded
as imaginary [or superstitious] appears before us in reality’ (p. 367). Examples of
uncanny sources are involuntary repetition, the omnipresence of thoughts and
wishes, the animation of the inanimate, and so forth. The occurrence of such things
in real life creates in the minds of civilized people ‘intellectual uncertainty’ (p. 354)
about the division between the familiar and the alien, reality and imagination, life
and death, the heimlich and the unheimlich. Rather, it arouses an uncertain feeling of
fear of the breakdown of the division — the loss of order — caused by the return of
‘something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light’ (p. 364).
Since the effect of the uncanny often arises when the realization of the imaginary
or superstitious occurs, the creation of it, Freud emphasizes, is much more likely in
art than in real life. Art that can arouse uncanny feelings is neither the kind that
has an imaginary setting nor the kind that is totally realistic, but the kind in which
the artist ‘pretends to move in the world of common reality’:
In this case he [the artist] accepts as well all the conditions operating to produce
uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect
in reality has it in his story. But in this case he can even increase his effect and
multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing about events
which never or very rarely happen in fact. In doing this he is in a sense betraying
34 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque

us to the superstitiousness which we have ostensibly surmounted; he deceives us

by promising to give us the sober truth, and then after all overstepping it. We
react to his inventions as we would have reacted to real experience. (p. 374)
To put it another way, uncanny feelings cannot arise without causing in work
and in response a (con)fusion of reality and imagination; the artist does not
repress superstition but puts it to artistic/literary uses to allow the viewer/reader
a ‘real experience’ of the supernatural. Take as an example a seventeenth-century
ornamental engraving (Fig. 1.2): this image is rendered in a realistic manner to make
us believe that we are given ‘the sober truth’; we are disorientated and disturbed,
however, as we move up close to the image and see some of the stalks grow into
unknown creatures or monsters. This situation, as Freud would say, touches ‘those
residues of animistic [or anthropomorphic] mental activity within us’ (p. 363), and a
conf lict of judgement occurs about whether what has been repressed and is regarded
as imaginary or magical may be, after all, terrifyingly possible.
The grotesque, as a fantastic monster rendered verisimilar, especially speaks to
this world-transforming power of the uncanny: the grotesque confronts us
not with a world as we know it to be, but with the world as we fear it might
be. [. . .] To imagine a monstrosity is to imagine a world capable of producing
that monstrosity. To imagine a world in which the common run of humanity
look and behave like Bosch’s crowd is to imagine a world that is, literally,
Unheimlich.63
That is to say, grotesque monsters — which look verisimilar — make uncertain not
merely the intellectual border between imagination and reality but the psychical
border between the ‘I’ and the ‘not I’. Grotesque monsters have the power to activate
our imagination of a potential threat, a threat that arises from the destruction of the
natural or familiar — i.e. physical normality — and thus can easily develop into the
sensation of horror or terror. We are on our way to the sublime.

4. Sublime Sensations
In ‘La Préface de Cromwell’ (1827), Hugo argues that the grotesque is both contrary
and complementary to the sublime, and their marriage gives birth to ‘the modern
genius’ (‘le génie moderne’).64 Throughout the ‘Préface’, Hugo treats the sublime
and the grotesque as different categories without seriously expounding upon
the distinction between them. In examining the major treatises of the sublime,
however, we will find that the grotesque resides inside the sublime in terms that
grotesque physicality — the monstrosity of incompleteness — can be an appropriate
object for provoking sublime sensations.
To begin with, amongst the several sources that, according to Longinus, achieve
the sentiment of sublimity — brief ly, a lofty or turgid kind of discourse that
sparks ‘ecstasy’ (ekstasis) as opposed to persuasion — ‘strong and inspired emotion’
deserves our careful attention since, as we shall see, it is the one type of emotion
most intimately related to the grotesque. In Longinus, extremely conducive to the
arousal of emotion is ‘visualization’ (phantasia), the ability to create ‘the situation
in which enthusiasm and emotion make the speaker see what he is saying and bring
 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque 35

Fig. 1.2. After Nicasius Roussel, Ornamental engraving, 1684. © Trustees of the British Museum
36 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque

it visually before his audience’. There are two types of phantasia: the poetical type
gives rise to ‘astonishment’ (ekplēxis) and the rhetorical type to ‘clarity’ (enargeia); it
is from the former that sublimity arises (see also Chapter 3, sect. 2). Most helpful
in the poetical production of image are audacious metaphors, for which ‘passages
involving emotion and description are the most suitable field’. Longinus cited Plato
to illustrate the poetical use of bold metaphors by a sublime writer. In so doing,
significantly enough, Longinus brought to the fore the unconscious ways in which,
like poets, Plato himself was ‘often carried away by a sort of literary madness’,65
thereby deconstructing the Platonic principle that philosophy is true knowledge and
that poetry, due to its irrational quality of divine aff latus, is far separated from truth.
In the hands of Longinus, then, furor poeticus — in the form of daring metaphors or
tropes — developed into an instrument for evoking ecstasy or powerful emotion in
the mind of the reader.
It was Nicholas Boileau who codified in the late seventeenth century the
Longinian sublime as the pathetic sublime in contrast to the rhetorical sublime:
the former, per se, functions as an end and the latter as a means to an end.66 In the
‘Préface’ to Traité du sublime (1674), his rendition of Longinus’ Peri Hupsous, Boileau
argues that by sublime, Longinus means not what orators call ‘le stile sublime: mais
cet extraordinaire et ce merveilleux qui frappe dans le discours, et qui fait qu’un
ouvrage enleve, ravit, transporte’ (‘the sublime style, but the extraordinary and
the marvellous that strikes in discourse, and that makes a work elevate, ravish and
transport’). The sublime, he emphasizes, does not necessarily exist in a grand style;
instead, a single thought, figure, or turn of phrase can be sublime if it contains
something either ‘extraordinaire’ or ‘surprenant’.67 Boileau thus legitimately had
the sublime move from the rhetorically lofty style to the marvellous, the surprising,
and the extraordinary. In other words, the sublime became more than a stylistic
term; it can exist in all the arts, especially those of fantastic or surreal nature.
Boileau thereby, as we shall see, left ample room for the grotesque to be in touch
with the sublime.
Taking a cue from Boileau, John Dennis, the first theorist of the sublime in
England, carried the Longinian sublime one step further by subordinating all
traits of the sublime to emotion and, more importantly, by making the emotion
of terror predominant in his own theory of the sublime.68 Apropos of the relation
of art to emotion, he declares in The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry
(1701): ‘Passion is the Characteristical Mark of Poetry, and therefore it must be
every where; for without Passion there can be no Poetry, no more than there
can be Painting’; ‘where-ever a Discourse is not Pathetick, there it is Prosaic’.69
Furthermore, in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), Dennis holds that the
sublime ‘is never without Enthusiastick Passion: For the Sublime is nothing else but
a great Thought, or great Thoughts moving the Soul from its ordinary Situation by
the Enthusiasm which naturally attends them’. And of all enthusiastic or aesthetic
passions, terror ‘contribute[s] extremely to the Sublime’, because, accompanied by
admiration, surprise, and astonishment, it is arguably
the violentest of all the Passions, [and] it consequently makes an Impression
which we cannot resist, and which is hardly to be defaced: and no Passion is
 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque 37

attended with greater Joy than Enthusiastick Terror, which proceeds from our
ref lecting that we are out of danger at the very time that we see it before us.
This thread of thought was later fully developed by Edmund Burke. Those which
are able to stir up enthusiastic terror, according to Dennis, are: gods, demons, hell,
monsters, miracles, earthquakes, torrents, and so forth.70 If we follow Dennis’s
logic, then the grotesque can embody joyful terror: grotesque monsters (Fig. 1.3)
terrify us by arousing our uncanny imagination of a potential threat, and yet please
us because we are in reality out of danger.
Dennis’s idea of joyful terror found an echo in his contemporary critic Joseph
Addison, who, in The Spectator (1711–14), elaborates upon one of the ‘Pleasures of
the Imagination’ produced by terrible and strange descriptions:
When we look on such hideous Objects, we are not a little pleased to think we
are in no Danger of them. We consider them at the same time, as Dreadful and
Harmless; so that the more frightful Appearance they make, the greater is the
Pleasure we receive from the Sense of our own Safety.71
Nonetheless, it should be noted that for Addison, terror, per se, without greatness,
cannot generate the sublime. In ascribing the pleasures of the imagination to the
great, the beautiful, and the uncommon, he actually identifies greatness with
sublimity: Homer, who ‘strikes the imagination wonderfully with what is great’,
inspires ‘his Readers with Sublime Ideas’ (no. 417, pp. 564–65). The aesthetic value
of great objects, such as the ocean or an immense desert, lies in the fact that
Our Imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at any thing that
is too big for its Capacity. We are f lung into a pleasing Astonishment at such
unbound Views, and feel a delightful Stillness and Amazement in the Soul at
the Apprehensions of them. (no. 412, p. 540)
The idea that the unbound fills the imagination with a sort of pleasing wonder
points ahead to Burke’s conception of infinity or incompleteness as a source of the
sublime.
Addison more often associates terror with the uncommon or strange, which ‘raises
a Pleasure in the Imagination, because it fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise,
gratifies its Curiosity, and gives it an Idea of which it was not before possest. [. . .]
It is this that bestows Charms on a Monster, and makes even the Imperfections of
Nature please us’ (no. 412, p. 541). Ovid is the poet of what is strange par excellence,
insofar as he ‘every where entertains us with something we never saw before, and
shews Monster after Monster to the end of Metamorphoses’ (no. 417, p. 566). It would
follow, then, that monstrous grotesques are aesthetically significant because they
delight the imagination at least with the strange, if not the great or sublime.
Mention should be made of the fact that the beautiful, rather than the sublime
or the strange, is considered ideal by Addison: ‘there is nothing’, he contends, ‘that
makes its way more directly to the Soul than Beauty, which immediately diffuses a
secret Satisfaction and Complacency thro’ the Imagination, and gives a Finishing
to any thing that is Great or Uncommon’ (no. 412, p. 542). Whilst treating the
great and the uncommon indulgently, Addison still has to privilege the beautiful
in order to meet the Neo-Classical standards of taste, which can be adumbrated by
38 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque

Fig. 1.3. After Jan van der Straet, The

Temptation of St. Anthony, 1612, detail.
© Trustees of the British Museum

Fig. 1.4. François Desprez, Plate 29,

Les Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, 1565
 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque 39

John Dryden’s remarks of 1695: ‘The principal and most important part of painting is, to
know what is most beautiful in nature, and most proper for that art’.72 The beautiful and
the strange had not been treated as identical until Baudelaire declared that ‘Le beau
est toujours bizarre’ (‘The beautiful is always bizarre’).73
Whilst the Neo-Classical criteria for ideal art were subsumed under the domain
of the beautiful, the sublime, together with the strange, ‘came as a justifiable
category into which could be grouped the stronger emotions and the more irrational
elements of art’.74 This is evident in Kant’s 1764 observation that ‘[t]he sublime moves
[rührt], the beautiful charms [reizt]’; that the sublime ‘arouse[s] enjoyment but with
horror’ and the beautiful ‘a pleasant sensation [. . .] that is joyous and smiling’.75
Also, Diderot says in Salon de 1767: ‘Tout ce qui étonne l’âme, tout ce qui imprime
un sentiment de terreur conduit au sublime’ (‘Everything that astonishes the soul,
that impresses it with a sense of terror, leads to the sublime’).76 Preceding Kant
and Diderot, Burke privileged the sublime over the beautiful, terror over pleasure.
In contrast to pleasure, the emotion central to the beautiful, terror, he says in the
Enquiry (1757), ‘is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling
principle of the sublime’. For ‘[n]o passion so effectually robs the mind of all its
powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or
death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain’.77 If, nevertheless, pain
and terror ‘are so modified as not to be actually noxious [. . .] [and] clear the parts
[. . .] of a dangerous and troublesome incumbrance, they are capable of producing
delight, not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged
with terror’ (p. 123).78 A tension, so to speak, arises between destruction and ‘self-
preservation’,79 one of the two categories of the Burkean sublime (see also Chapter
4, sect. 1).
Delightful horror, as discussed earlier, constitutes the very emotion of the
grotesque in light of Dennis’s and Addison’s aesthetics. Burke, in the Enquiry, writes
momentarily of the grotesque when building the borders between obscurity and
clearness, sublimity and beauty, pleasantness of pain and pleasantness of pleasure.
For Burke, obscurity, a counterpart of infinity, is much more effective than
clearness in affecting the imagination: ‘in nature dark, confused, uncertain images
have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those have
which are more clear and determinate’ (p. 58). In the arts, then, poetry, as a verbal
art, is always able to raise images of this obscure, confused kind to f lirt with the
imagination, whereas the images in painting present clear, visible ideas of objects
and therefore lose the effect of the unbound. Implicit in Burke’s arguments is the
view that poetry, owing to its obscure nature, is the sublime proper and painting,
because of its visible nature, is the beautiful. Burke’s notion of the sublime thus
shades off into verbo-centrism.
Since painting, which by its definition is ‘clear representation’, should fall under
the category of the beautiful, grotesque figures — which, in Burke’s eyes, should be
the property of the (verbal) sublime — are clearly represented in painting and thus
look ‘ludicrous’ rather than beautiful:
When painters have attempted to give us clear representations of these very
fanciful and terrible ideas, they have I think almost always failed. [. . .] Several
40 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque

painters have handled a subject of this kind [i.e. hell], with a view of assembling
as many horrid phantoms as their imagination could suggest; but all the designs
I have chanced to meet of the temptations of St. Anthony, were rather a sort of
odd wild grotesques, than any thing capable of producing a serious passion. In
all these subjects poetry is very happy. Its apparitions, its chimeras, its harpies,
its allegorical figures, are grand and affecting. (pp. 58–59)
In other words, poetic obscurity — e.g. verbal grotesques — is sublime exactly
because it frustrates ‘the power of vision. Physiologically, it induces pain by making
us strain to see that which cannot be comprehended’.80 This would explain why
Burke equates ugliness with sublimity under this following condition: ‘But I would
by no means insinuate that ugliness of itself is a sublime idea, unless united with
such qualities as excite a strong terror’.81 It is fair to say that visual grotesques are for
Burke clearly ugly rather than sublime, insofar as they lack obscurity or infinity, the
qualities that excite or delight the imagination with a sort of terror, or rather, that
tend to ‘fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine
effect, and truest test of the sublime’.82 Therefore, I disagree with Clayborough’s
observations that the sublime and the grotesque are for Burke antithetical.83 In fact,
Burke, as we have seen, does not oppose the sublime to verbal grotesques, but only
to visual grotesques or, broadly, visible or sensible images.
Interestingly, though, visual grotesques are what push Burke’s verbo-centric
arguments into an aporia. In nature, according to Burke, spring and young animals,
in contrast to full-blown summer and full-grown animals, have something sublime
in them because they are ‘far from being compleatly fashioned’ and thus ‘the
imagi­nation is entertained with the promise of something more’. This is also true
of ‘unfinished sketches of drawing’, wherein, to quote Burke, ‘I have often seen
something which pleased me beyond the best finishing’.84 If the unfinished or
incomplete is a sublime source because it pleases the imagination with something
unknown or uncertain, then visual grotesques are sublime per se, in that they are,
as mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, ‘contrary to the classic images of
the finished, completed man’ (Bakhtin) (Fig. 1.4). Like unfinished sketches, they
are incom­plete representations. Rather, visual grotesques embody, as Bakhtin has
put it, ‘a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of
death and birth, growth and becoming’. The ongoing, never-quite-complete meta­
morphosis combines two bodies and ontological poles in one: ‘the one giving birth
and dying, the other conceived, generated, and born’. The grotesque body, so to
speak, is ‘pregnant death, a death that gives birth’85 or Thanatos that breeds Eros;
it is a death that is ‘so modified as not to be actually noxious’ (in Burke’s words),
thus invoking terror or pain that gives delight. It is proper to say, then, that the
paradoxically incomplete metamorphoses of visual grotesques point directly to the
necessary condition for delightful terror, ‘the most genuine effect, and truest test
of the sublime’.
* * * * *
To conclude, the grotesque, as we have seen, embodies the pursuit of incompleteness
and contradiction which carries within itself an aesthetics of excess, namely, an
 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque 41

aesthetics that exceeds our sense of order by (con)fusing fantasia and mimesis, the
central and the peripheral, death and life, and so forth. The grotesque, as a product
of aegri somnia, runs off the rails of reason, penetrates the orderly empirical world,
and unveils the penetralia of being in which objects are not perfectly defined and
designated but melt into and permeate one another, or contraries exist side by side
without cancelling each other out. The grotesque, then, makes itself a kind of
‘Dionysiac art’, wherein, according to Nietzsche,
all the excess of pleasure and suffering and knowledge in nature reveal[s] itself at
one and the same time. Here everything which [. . .] [has] been acknowledged
as a limit, as a definition of measure, prove[s] to be an artificially created
illusion: ‘excess’ unveil[s] itself as the truth.86

Notes to Chapter 1
1. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. by Mary Lynn
Johnson and John E. Grant (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 81–102 (p. 89).
2. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. by
Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 288.
3. David Summers, ‘The Archaeology of the Modern Grotesque’, in Modern Art and the Grotesque,
ed. by Frances S. Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 20–46 (p. 24);
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), p. 25.
4. E. H. Gombrich once pointed out that the procession of artistic styles can be roughly reduced
to two categories, the classical and the non-classical. Classical rules of art were formulated first,
and so was ‘a catalogue of sins to be avoided’ (Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance
(London: Phaidon, 1966), pp. 83, 89).
5. Lee Byron Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 26–27.
6. Summers, p. 23; Charles Baudelaire, De l’essence du rire, in Œuvres complètes (OC), ed. by Claude
Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 975–93 (p. 993); André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme, in
ABOC i, 338.
7. Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971),
p. 24.
8. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. by Gaston du C.
de Vere, 2 vols (London: Everyman’s Library, 1996), ii, 489.
9. Quoted in and translated by Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1980), p. 8.
10. See André Chastel, La Grotesque (Paris: Le Promeneur, 1988), p. 18.
11. Barasch, pp. 22–23.
12. Ibid., pp. 23, 32.
13. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. and ed. by M. A. Screech (London: Penguin,
1991), p. 206.
14. Horace, The Art of Poetry, trans. by D. A. Russell, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. by D. A.
Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp.
98–110 (p. 98).
15. See Barasch, pp. 34–36; Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. by Ulrich
Weisstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), p. 24; Arthur Clayborough, The
Grotesque in English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 3–4.
16. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff
Bennington and Brian Maddumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 81,
80.
17. Quoted in Kayser, p. 24 and in Barasch, p. 39.
42 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque

18. Barasch, pp. 39–40.

19. Ibid., pp. 63–68.
20. Ibid., pp. 47–52.
21. Ben Jonson, ‘Timber, or Discoveries’, in Ben Jonson: The Poems and the Prose Works, ed. by
C. H. Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), viii (1947),
pp. 561–649 (p. 661). See also Barasch, pp. 68–70.
22. I am referring to Goya’s plate El sueño de la razon produce monstuos (The Sleep of Reason Produces
Monsters) in his Los Caprichos (1799). See Chapter 4, sect. 4.
23. Summers, p. 22.
24. Pollio Vitruvius, On Architecture, trans. and ed. by Frank Granger, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 1999), iii, 105.
25. Quoted in Summers, p. 22.
26. Vitruvius, p. 106.
27. Horace, p. 98. In retrospect, no matter how disdainful his attitude towards the grotesque,
‘Horace spelled out a procedure that shed light on the range of technique’ (Giancarlo Maiorino,
The Portrait of Eccentricity: Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque (University Park and London:
Penn State University Press, 1991), pp. 117–18).
28. C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry: the ‘Ars Poetica’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971),
pp. 516, 421.
29. Horace, pp. 106, 109–10.
30. Brink, p. 429.
31. Plato, Ion, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. by B. Jowett, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953),
i, 533e–534b, pp. 107–08; Phaedrus, in The Dialogues of Plato, iii, 245a, p. 151.
32. Plato, Republic, trans. by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 605b–c,
pp. 358–59. In Plato, the irrational nature and the lack of truth that characterize poetry (and
painting) are in fact two sides of the same coin (see, for example, 595b, p. 344 and 604e, p.
358).
33. Penelope Murray, ‘Introduction’, in Plato on Poetry, ed. by Penelope Murray (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–33 (pp. 9–10). In the Meno, for instance, poets, Socrates
argues, ‘say many things truly when they are inspired, but they know not what they say’ (Plato,
Meno, in The Dialogues of Plato, i, 99c, p. 300). See also Murray, ‘Poetic Inspiration in Early
Greece’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 101 (1981), 87–100 (pp. 90–92).
34. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. by Ingram Bywater, in The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, ed. by
Friedrich Solmsen (New York: Modern Library, 1984), pp. 223–66 (1455a, p. 245); Longinus, On
Sublimity, trans. by D. A. Russell, in Classical Literary Criticism, pp. 143–87 (8.1, p. 1490).
35. Plato, Republic, 605b, p. 359.
36. Quoted in Alice Sperduti, ‘The Divine Nature of Poetry in Antiquity’, Transactions and
Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 81 (1980), 209–40 (p. 215, n. 29).
37. Plato, Laws, in The Dialogues of Plato, iv, 719c–d, p. 289.
38. E. N. Tigerstedt, ‘Furor Poeticus: Poetic Inspiration in Greek Literature before Democritus and
Plato’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 31.2 (1970), 163–78 (p. 164).
39. Plato, Timaeus, in Plato, trans. by R. G. Bury, 12 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1921–30), ix (1929), pp. 16–253 (71e, p. 187). See also Sperduti, p. 217.
40. Michaela Janan, ‘When the Lamp is Shattered’: Desire and Narrative in Catullus (Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), p. 7. In the Republic (434d–441c), the soul
is divided into the rational, the passionate, and the desirous. The counterpart of this tripartite
soul in the Phaedrus (246b) is the charioteer, the noble horse, and the ignoble horse.
41. Plato, Timaeus, in Plato, ix, 71a, p. 185.
42. Plato, Republic, 606d, p. 360.
43. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by G. C. Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 151.
44. St Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘ “Apologia” to William, Abbot of St. Thierry’, A Documentary History
of Art, ed. by Elizabeth G. Holt, 3 vols (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), i, pp. 18–22 (p. 21).
St Bernard’s distrust of grotesque ornaments later found an echo in Cardinal Federico
Borromeo during the Counter-Reformation, who found it improper and profane to use
 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque 43

grotesques in framing sacred painting because they were ‘designed for pleasure’s sake’ (Marcia
B. Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 206). Noticeably, Hall draws attention to the fact that the attitude
towards the use of grotesques as framing devices varied according to different pontificates
during the Counter-Reformation.
45. Derrida, p. 145.
46. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press 1987), p. 64.
47. Summers, p. 41.
48. Kayser, pp. 21–22.
49. Geoffrey G. Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 27.
50. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua,
ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 98–101.
51. Ibid., pp. 83–85. This Alberti’s quote is taken from Summers’s ‘Contrapposto: Style and Meaning
in Renaissance Art’, The Art Bulletin, 59.3 (1977), 336–61 (p. 340).
52. Martin Kemp, ‘From “Mimesis” to “Fantasia”: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation,
Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts’, Viator, 8 (1977), 347–98 (p. 351).
53. Alberti, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. by James Leoni, ed. by Joseph Rykwert (London: Alec
Tiranti Ltd, 1955), p. 206.
54. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 58.
55. Cennino Cennini, The Book of the Art: A Contemporary Practical Treatise on Quattrocento Painting,
trans. by Christiana J. Herringham (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd, 1899), pp. 4–5.
56. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York and London:
W. W. Norton, 1967), p. 5, n. 14.
57. Francisco de Hollanda, Four Dialogues on Painting, trans. by Aubrey F. G. Bell (London: Oxford
University Press, 1928), pp. 61–62. See also Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 135–37, 141–42.
58. Vasari, ii, 680.
59. Barasch, p. 31.
60. Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (Cambridge,
MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 4–5.
61. Summers, ‘The Archaeology of the Modern Grotesque’, p. 26.
62. Philip Morel, Les Grotesques: Les figures de l’imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la
Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), p. 39.
63. Bernard Mc Elroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 11.
64. Victor Hugo, ‘La Préface de Cromwell’, in Cromwell, ed. by Annie Ubersfeld (Paris: Garnier-
Flammarion, 1968), pp. 61–109 (pp. 71, 70).
65. Longinus, 1.4, 15.1–2, 32.6–7, 32.7, pp. 143, 159, 174, 175.
66. See Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), pp. 84–85.
67. Nicolas Boileau, ‘Préface’, Traité du sublime, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Françoise Escal (Paris:
Gallimard, 1966), pp. 334–40 (p. 338). See also Monk, pp. 30–31.
68. Monk, p. 54.
69. John Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry, in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed.
by Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939),
i, pp. 197–278 (p. 215).
70. Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in The Critical Works of John Dennis, i, pp. 325–73
(pp. 359, 361).
71. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. by Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965),
iii, no. 418, p. 568.
72. John Dryden, ‘A Parallel of Poetry and Painting: Prefixed to the Version of Du Fresnoy De Arte
Graphica’, Essays of John Dryden, ed. by W. P. Ker, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), ii,
pp. 115–53 (p. 136).
73. Baudelaire, Exposition universelle 1855: Beaux-Arts, in OC, pp. 956–74 (p. 956).
44 Towards an Aesthetic of the Grotesque

74. Monk, p. 85.

75. Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. by John T. Goldthwait
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 47.
76. Denis Diderot, Salon de 1767, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Else Marie Bukdahl et al., 25 vols (Paris:
Hermann, 1975–2004), xvi (1990), pp. 55–525 (pp. 233–34).
77. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed.
by Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 53–54.
78. This idea of ‘delightful horror’ later reverberated through Kant’s notion of ‘the dynamically
sublime’, which, together with ‘the mathematically sublime’, constitutes the Kantian sublime:
both arouse ‘a negative pleasure’: the former results in delightful terror and the latter in pleasant
pain (Critique of Judgment, trans. by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), §28,
pp. 119–21; §23. p. 98).
79. Burke, p. 35.
80. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), p. 126.
81. Burke, p. 109.
82. Ibid., p. 67.
83. Clayborough, p. 27.
84. Burke, p. 70.
85. Bakhtin, pp. 24–26.
86. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Dionysiac World View’, in The Birth of Tragedy and other Writings,
trans. by Ronald Speirs, ed. by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), pp. 119–38 (p. 128).
 C h apt e r 2
v

Monstrous Metamorphoses:
Towards a Poetics of the Grotesque Body

There Scylla came; she waded into the water,

Waist-deep, and suddenly saw her loins disfigured
With barking monsters, and at first she could not
Believe that these were parts of her own body.
She tried to drive them off, the barking creatures,
And f lees in panic, but what she runs away from
She still takes with her; feeling for her thighs,
Her legs, her feet, she finds, in all these parts,
The heads of dogs, jaws gaping wide, and hellish.
She stands on dogs gone mad, and loins and belly
Are circled by those monstrous forms.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, XIV1

Or la ‘merveille’ — ou le ‘monstre’ — c’est essentiellement ce qui transgresse

la séparation des règnes, mêle l’animal et le végétal, l’animal et l’humain; c’est
l’excès, en tant qu’il change la qualité des choses auxquelles Dieu a assigné un
nom: c’est la métamorphose, qui fait basculer d’un ordre dans un autre.
Roland Barthes, ‘Arcimboldo ou Rhétoriqueur et magician’2

The grotesque body, as previously discussed, involves a perpetual, never-ending

metamorphosis of one form or substance into another. That is to say, the complete
transformation of Daphne into a laurel tree is not grotesque, whereas Scylla in
Ovid’s passage above is no doubt grotesque — insofar as she exists as a cross
between a human being and ‘barking monsters’. In Daphne, the (bio)logical
conf lict between a human and a plant no longer exists, since her metamorphosis is
finished. The tension between bodily forms of two different categories, however,
is taking place in Scylla, who is both a human being and dogs. Indeed, Scylla ‘is
experiencing the grotesque, suffering the logically impossible though undeniable
recognition that “her loins” are also “dogs gone mad” ’ (my italics).3 Thus, as long as
her metamorphosis remains incomplete, her body — composed of both human and
animal forms — is grotesque. Scylla’s body is the very prototype of the grotesque
body, in which the pattern of ‘either–or’ is replaced with that of ‘both–and’ (or
‘neither–nor’).
This model of ‘both–and’, (bio)logical impossibility, features the Freudian
dream-work (Traumarbeit) of ‘condensation’ (Verdichtung), whose name, as Lacan
46 Monstrous Metamorphoses

has noted, ‘condensing in itself the word Dichtung [poetry; versification], shows
how the mechanism is connatural with poetry to the point that it envelops the
traditional function [i.e. metaphor] proper to poetry’.4 With this in mind, I
propose to argue that the grotesque body, as a product of dream-condensation, is
the pictorial representation of the poetry or poetic language that, critics such as
Kristeva have observed, brings to the fore the polysemic function of the signifying
practice, i.e. what standard language tends to repress. The grotesque body, as we
shall see, deforms and destabilizes — or semioticizes (in Kristeva’s terms) — the
normal functioning of standard language by fragmenting its body, its ‘syntax’, and
foregrounding its metaphorical dimensions. In this respect, the grotesque body
functions like poetic language whose syntax is disconnected and whose metaphors
are audacious and ambiguous. By linking the grotesque body to poetic language
and metaphor, I also aim to bring forth a notion of the f lesh-made metaphor as an
index to verbal grotesque imagery.

1. The Return of the Real

Freud describes the id, ‘the dark and inaccessible part’ of the mind, as ‘a chaos,
a cauldron full of seething excitations’: it is filled with concurrent contradictory
drives or impulses; as such, the governing rules of logic do not apply there (PFL ii,
105–06). The id, so to speak, is the very kernel of the unconscious, which is ‘the
Realm of the Illogical’ (PFL xv, 401) and ‘the true psychical reality’, ‘a particular
form of existence not to be confused with material reality’ (PFL iv, 773, 782). Since
the id or the unconscious is hard to access, it only becomes visible under conditions
of (day-)dreaming, jokes, psychical symptoms, parapraxes, and so forth. Amongst
these conditions, dreams are considered to be the royal road to the unconscious,
primarily because the dream state, like the unconscious system, is characterized by
the exemption from mutual contradiction, that is, by the logic of ‘both–and’. As
Freud explains in The Interpretation of Dreams,
The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictions
is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. ‘No’ seems not to exist so far as
dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into
a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves
at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary. (PFL iv,
429; my italics)
Here Freud refers to two types of images created by the so-called dream-
condensation in contrast to dream-displacement (Verschiebung), which transfers the
reference of one object onto another alluding to it, thereby eliding or disguising
the original object (PFL i, 208). Dream-condensation breeds two types of images:
composite images fuse dissonant figures that yet ‘have something in common’
into a unity, a photomontage, with parts of the original figures being discernible;
collective images present only one figure as the representative of the others in absentia
whilst they all share some attributes (PFL i, 205–06; iv, 431–34). Simply put, having
something in common is the prerequisite for the dream-work of condensation.
Clearly, composite images are more pertinent to the study of the grotesque.
Indeed, Freud goes on to liken them to fantastic figures such as centaurs or fabulous
 Monstrous Metamorphoses 47

beasts in Arnold Böcklin’s paintings (PFL iv, 436; i, 206). Lacan links the psychically
charged composite images to the ‘imagos of the fragmented body’, which often appear
in dreams
in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy,
growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions — the very
same that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch has fixed, for all time, in painting,
in their ascent from the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of modern
man.
In Lacan, ‘the fragmented body’ (le corps morcelé) is the matrix of any sense of
fragmentation and disintegration; it refers to the fact that the infant, owing to his/
her sensory and ‘motor un-coordination’, experiences his/her body as piecemeal
or shapeless before s/he (mis)identifies with the unified (and yet alienated) image
of his/her own body in the mirror.5 Hence, the birth of the narcissistic ‘ideal ego’
(moi idéal), the function of which is ‘one of mis-recognition [méconnaissance]; of refusing
to accept the truth of fragmentation and alienation’;6 and of establishing a unified
consciousness. This is what Lacan calls the ‘mirror phase’ (le stade du miroir), which
inaugurates the imaginary order.
Paradoxically, the méconnaissance, or the illusion of totality, ‘in which a human
being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a constant danger of sliding
back again into the chaos from which he started; it hangs over the abyss of dizzy
Ascent in which one can perhaps see the very essence of Anxiety’,7 says Lacan. Put
another way, from the ‘mirror phase’ onwards, the infant, having internalized the
ideal ego, will continue to identify with his/her images of wholeness as a promise
of ‘self-mastery’ throughout his/her life — even when s/he enters the symbolic order
of language and socialization, and then learns to face up to the inevitable anxiety
of fragmentation or incompleteness. At the same time, s/he will continue to be
haunted and tormented by the surviving memory of the fragmented body, which
usually crops up in fantasies and dreams of body parts being dislocated, devoured,
or distorted.8 In other words, the fear or anxiety of ‘sliding back again into the
chaos’ will remain present as long as the ego carries with it the (fundamental) desire
for self-mastery or wholeness resulting from the idealised illusion of unity in the
‘mirror phase’.
Seen in this light, Ovid’s Scylla, one can say, is being stricken with fear or anxiety
arising from the return of and to the fragmented body and motor incapacity. She
anticipates seeing in the river the integrated image of her body, only to find that her
body parts are being ‘disfigured’ or trans-formed into barking monsters. She then
‘f lees in panic’ and yet cannot master her own bodily movements: ‘what she runs
away from | She still takes with her’. Her loss of corporeal or formal integration
and integrity, then, may be seen as the lapse into the chaotic state preceding the
‘mirror phase’, the state that Lacan has compared to Bosch’s paintings of deformed
creatures or grotesque bodies. They present a radically untidy, incoherent, and
undifferentiated world, in contrast to the imaginary world of perfectly defined
objects implied in the unified ego or consciousness. In this regard, the grotesque
embodies a ‘dehiscence’ (in Lacan’s terms)9 of the unified consciousness; it opens
onto ‘vertiginous new perspectives characterised by the destruction of logic and
48 Monstrous Metamorphoses

regression to the unconscious — madness, hysteria, or nightmare’;10 it shows that

which, as R. Grant Williams observes,
subjectivity in its attempts to master identity perpetually strives to repress.
Constituting the return of the real, the monster is the ineffable residue of
the symbolic and imaginary orders, that is, the subjective realms of language
and projection. It is only the imaginary gestalt of the body that psychically
protects the subject from slipping into an awareness of his or her fundamental
monstrosity.11
It is fair to say, then, that the grotesque lays bare the chaotic, turbulent nature of
the real experience by its (bio)logical and ontological confusion which peels off
the illusory gestalt veneer of rational unity created by the imaginary projection and
sustained by the symbolic order of language.
Seen in this light, the grotesque marks ‘the return of the real’ rather than of
the imaginary, as indicated by Rosemary Jackson in her psychoanalytic reading of
fantastic arts (including the grotesque):
Fantasies try to reverse or rupture the process of ego formation which took place
during the mirror stage, i.e. they attempt to re-enter the imaginary. Dualism
and dismemberment are symptoms of this desire for the imaginary. [. . .] A
fantasy of physical fragmentation corresponds, then, to a breakdown of rational
unity. That linguistic order which creates and constitutes a whole self, a total
body, is un-done.12
Jackson is certainly right in explicating the disruptive or revolutionary power of
fantastic arts. Nevertheless, she seems to confuse the imaginary with the real: she goes
on to underscore that fantastic arts ‘express a desire for the imaginary, for that which
has not yet been caught and confined by a symbolic order’.13 In Lacan, the very basis
of the imaginary order is the ‘mirror phase’, during which, as we have seen, the ideal
ego is constructed by the (mis)identification with the visual gestalt of the body in
the mirror. ‘It is this identification and unification of a self as a self ’s image’, Allon
White observes, ‘which is important for the generation of a unified consciousness
capable of producing speech’ as well as ‘reason through the propositional structures
embedded in syntactic order’.14 Accordingly, what fantastic arts seek to ‘reverse or
rupture’ — to wit, unified consciousness and its accompaniments — is in fact the
very product of the imaginary.
That is to say, fantastic arts seek to re-enter the real, which is characterized
by physical dismemberment/degradation and resistance to symbolization — the
phenomena Jackson mistakenly ascribes to the imaginary. Like Freud’s idea of
psychical reality, the Lacanian real is not to be mixed up with material or social
reality. In Freud, there are three kinds of realities: ‘material reality, the reality of
intermediate thoughts or of the psychological field, and the reality of unconscious
wishes and their “truest shape”: fantasy’.15 Whilst regarding as real all these three
kinds of realities, Freud is primarily concerned with psychical reality — i.e. the
reality of unconscious wishes or desires — as he maintains that ‘[e]verything
conscious has an unconscious preliminary stage’ (PFL iv, 773). Unconscious wishes
or desires are manifested through fantasy. Fantasy — which can take various forms
such as (day-)dreaming — fulfils wishes in a distorted way because of ‘the ego-
 Monstrous Metamorphoses 49

censor’ (PFL i, 479). In a letter to Fliess dated in 1897, Freud compares psychical
censorship to political censorship:
Have you ever seen a foreign newspaper which has passed the Russian censorship
at the frontier? Words, whole clauses and sentences are blacked out so that what
is left becomes unintelligible. A Russian censorship of this kind comes about in
psychoses and produces the apparently meaningless deliria.16
In other words, psychical reality, like psychoses, indicates impaired or distorted
contact with social reality and is inherently unintelligible.
In his discussion of psychoses, Lacan describes ‘le phénomène psychotique’ (‘the
psychotic phenomenon’) as something that belongs to the real: this phenomenon is
‘l’émergence dans la réalité d’une signification énorme qui n’a l’air de rien — et
ce, pour autant qu’on ne peut la relier à rien, puisqu’elle n’est jamais entrée dans le
système de la symbolisation’ (‘the emergence in the reality of an enormous signifi­
cation that appears to be nothing at all — insofar as it cannot be tied to anything,
since it has never entered into the system of symbolization’).17 In Lacan, ‘the
system of symbolization’, or the symbolic order, is a linguistic(ally stable) structure
and creates (social) reality by wiping out what is unnameable, non-meaning­ful,
ineffable, namely, the real. The real, so to speak, refers to what is rejected (i.e. fore­
closed) or has not been organized by the symbolic order of language and sociali­zation,
and therefore escapes total comprehension or perfect knowledge. What Lacan adds
to the Freudian conception of psychical reality, then, is the notion that the real
precedes language and returns or intrudes into our symbolic, or social, reality in the
form of loss or rupture: ‘The real appears’, to quote Ellie Ragland, ‘in whatever
concerns the radical nature of loss at the center of words, being and body’.18
The real, Lacan has put it, is ‘the domain of whatever subsists outside
symbolization’ and is therefore unpresentable.19 Though in principle un-symbolizable
or unpresentable, the real, Bruce Fink suggests, can be conceived of as ‘an infant’s
body “before” it comes under the sway of the symbolic order’ of socialization, as
‘a time before words, to some sort of presymbolic or prelinguistic moment in the
development of homo sapiens or in our own individual development’.20 Or if the
subject in the symbolic is structured by syntactico-semantic coherence, by the proper
use of language, to produce meanings, then ‘parcelled-out, broken-up, separated
pieces of body, language, thought comprise the subject in the real’.21 The real, so
to speak, occurs in the loss of words, of order, of totality. It is tempting to say,
then, that E. H. Gombrich is in fact describing the experience of the real when
elaborating on the viewer’s response to grotesque hybrids:
[T]he reaction of exasperated helplessness [is] provoked by hybrid creatures,
part plant, part human; part woman, part fish; part horse, part goat. [For] [t]
here are no names in our language, no categories in our thought, to come
to grips with this elusive dream-imagery in which ‘all things are mixed’. It
outrages both our ‘sense of order’ and our search for meaning.22
The loss of a unified form of grotesque hybrids gives rise to the experience of the
real, for Lacan regards Medusa’s grotesque head as an example of ‘the apparition of
the terrifying anxiety-provoking image’ that reveals the real, namely, what ‘properly
speaking is unnameable’ and what is ‘the essential object which isn’t an object any
50 Monstrous Metamorphoses

longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail’.23
In a word, the grotesque body presents the experience of the un-nameable and
un-classifiable nature of the real. ‘Lire’, says Roland Barthes in S/Z, “c’est trouver
des sens, et trouver des sens, c’est les nommer’ (‘To read is to find meanings; to
find meanings is to name them’).24 But the grotesque, with its body composed of
heterogeneous bits and pieces, fractures the orderly use of language as a means of
conveying meaning, thereby returning the viewer/reader to the pre-verbal or pre-
symbolic stage of the inability to name things.

2. ‘Le Scriptible’
The transgression of denomination or categorization is a defining trait of Barthes’s
notion of ‘le Texte’ (‘the Text’), as opposed to ‘l’œuvre’ (‘the work’). Their
opposition, he exemplifies, can be compared to ‘la distinction proposée par Lacan:
la “réalité” se montre, le “réel” se démontre’ (‘Lacan’s distinction: “reality” is
displayed; “the real” is revealed’). By this, Barthes suggests that the work is a
palpable and classifiable existence as displayed in bookshops or libraries; the Text,
however, resists being properly designated or classified or symbolized (in Lacan’s
sense) and ‘ne s’éprouve [ou se démontre] que dans un travail, une production’ (‘is experienced
[or revealed] only in a labour of production’).25 For the Text is ‘un espace à dimensions
multiples, où se marient et se contestent des écritures variées, dont aucune n’est
originelle’ (‘a multi-dimensional space, wherein various writings, none of which is
original, mingle and collide’).26
The Text, so to speak, is irreducible to a closed meaning, a proper name, a
transcendental signified. The work is ‘lisible’ (‘readerly’) because it closes on a
signified and therefore plunges the reader into ‘une sorte d’oisiveté’ (‘a kind of
idleness’). By contrast, the Text is ‘scriptible’ (‘writerly’), insofar as it is ‘une galaxie
de signifiants, non une structure de signifiés’ (‘a galaxy of signifiers rather than
a structure of signfieds’), thus demanding the reader to ‘apprécier de quel pluriel
il est fait’ (‘appreciate what plural it is made of ’) and to co-produce the plurality
of signification: ‘il n’a pas de commencement; il est réversible; on y accède par
plusieurs entrées dont aucune ne peut être à coup sûr déclarée principale; les codes
qu’il mobilise se profilent à perte de vue, ils sont indécidables’ (‘it has no beginning;
it is reversible; one reaches it via several entrances, none of which can be definitely
declared to be the principal one; the codes it mobilizes spread out as far as the eye can
see, they are unfixed’).27 It is proper to say, then, that grotesque hybrids, per se, are
writerly, in that ‘we cannot even tell’, as Gombrich writes of the grotesque, ‘where
they begin or end — they are not individuals, because their bodies merge or join
with those plants and tendrils. [. . .] Thus there is nothing to hold on to, nothing
fixed, the deformitas is hard to “code” ’.28
It is because the grotesque body is difficult to ‘code’ or ‘name’, Barthes would
argue, that the reader/viewer is required to collaborate practically in re-writing
or re-creating it. Hence, the pleasure — or really, pleasure in pain — of the text:
the grotesque belongs to the kind of text that, Barthes reckons, has ‘un corps de
jouissance fait uniquement de relations érotiques’ (‘a body of jouissance made solely
of erotic relations’).29 To put this in Freud’s terms, the grotesque body creates
 Monstrous Metamorphoses 51

a ‘polymorphously perverse’ body in which various components function as

erogenous zones — none of which predominates — and create an interplay (PFL
i, 246). In short, the grotesque body is a f loating signifier, a text of polysemic
nature that breaks through or tears open the determinate aspects of the signifying
process and as such, to quote Kristeva on the semiotic, ‘brings about all the various
transformations of the signifying practice that are called “creation” ’.30
Kristeva divides language, or rather, the signifying process that forms language,
into two modes: the semiotic (le sémiotique) and the symbolic (le symbolique). The former
is governed by drive energies and their indeterminate articulations that ‘[do] not yet
refer (for young children) or no longer [refer] (in psychotic discourse) to a signified
object for a thetic consciousness’,31 i.e. to sense. The semiotic chronologically
precedes the ‘mirror phase’, with which comes the ‘thetic’ phase, the one that posits
signification and acts as ‘the “deepest structure” of the possibility of enunciation’.32
The thetic, so to speak, is that which renders any signifying practices possible and
thus serves as the entrance into the symbolic, the ‘inevitable attribute of meaning, sign,
and the signified object for the [thetic] consciousness’ necessary to communication
proper.33 In a nutshell, ‘[t]he semiotic could be seen as the modes of expression that
originate in the unconscious whereas the symbolic could be seen as the conscious
way a person tries to express using a stable sign system’.34
Notably, in Kristeva, the semiotic and the symbolic are not mutually exclusive
but rather dialectically and dynamically ‘combined in different ways to constitute
types of discourse, types of signifying practices’.35 Scientific or rational discourse, for
instance, is dominated by the symbolic component in order to convey meaning as
unequivocally and determinately as possible. On the other hand, in the discourse
of art — notably, poetry — the semiotic component unsettles the symbolic function
or ‘the position of the signified’ by producing ‘nonsense effects’, what frustrates
significations and violates certain grammatical rules or syntactic coherence.36
Poetry, especially avant-garde poetry, therefore develops to the full the unstable
function of the signifying system. In this way,
poetry — more precisely, poetic language — reminds us of its eternal function:
to introduce through the symbolic that which works on, moves through, and
threatens it. The theory of the unconscious seeks the very thing that poetic
language practices within and against the [symbolic] order.37
The semiotic component of (avant-garde) poetic language, so to say, ‘can be seen as
an articulation of unconscious processes’ or drives that disturb the ossified structure
of the symbolic signification and thereby ‘operate a return or, in Kristeva’s language,
a revolution from [the symbolic] to [the semiotic]’.38 As a result, the function of (avant-
garde) poetic language, says Kristeva, is to retrieve that which the symbolic tends to
reduce, or really, repress into the unconscious: ‘ “signifier”, “primary processes”,
displacement and condensation, metaphor and metonymy, rhetorical figures —
[that] which always remains subordinate — subjacent to the principal function of
naming-predicating’.39 Brief ly put, (avant-garde) poetic language manifests the
return of the repressed in the unconscious.
The grotesque body, as a ‘creation’ of the primary process of the dream-work,
serves to be a pictorial presentation of poetic language in its radically disruptive form:
52 Monstrous Metamorphoses

it mixes diverse sorts of items into a locus of the displacement and condensation of
semiotic fragments, into a ‘semioticizing body, heterogeneous to signification’ (in
Kristeva’s words).40 Here is the point of turning to the ways in which the grotesque
body deforms the normal process of signification, or rather, semioticizes itself as
(avant-garde) poetic language.

3. The Semiotization of the Symbolic

To better apprehend and appreciate the semiotic utilization of language by and in
the grotesque body, it is necessary to obtain a sense of the normal or conventional
operation of language. Of special significance to our concern is Saussure’s concept
of syntagm and association (or paradigm), ‘two forms of our mental activity, both
indispensable to the life of language’.41 Whilst, according to Saussure, different
signs in the former ‘are arranged in sequence on the chain of speaking [or writing]’,
a sign in the latter ‘will unconsciously call to mind a host of other [signs]’ which
‘have something in common’ with it (p. 123). To use a non-verbal example:
syntagmatic is the co-ordination of different body parts (the head, the trunk, and
the limbs) in praesentia to form a human body as a whole or corpus; on the other
hand, paradigmatic is the ‘[m]ental association’ (p. 125) of, say, a human head with
other signs in absentia — e.g. a gorilla’s or an ostrich’s head or, more remotely, a
sunf lower. The former comprises an interlocking grammatical chain or context;
the latter suggests associations or substitutions of signs and ‘discards [those] that
becloud the intelligibility of discourse’ (p. 127, n. 10). Together they provide a
stable, coherent structure in which discourse or words make sense.
Poetic language nevertheless tampers with the proper or Saussurean structure of
language. This structure may break down in various ways, amongst which Jakobson’s
two types of aphasia have become a vital guide to the literary or artistic disturbance
of language: the similarity disorder and the contiguity disorder. Aphasics of the first
type are confined to the syntagmatic connection or contiguity of the whole to the
part; therefore, they are only able to speak about one object with reference to its
parts or the context it belongs to rather than by means of synonyms, antonyms, or
paraphrases existing in the paradigmatic axis.42 They will, for instance, refer to a
human body as walking on two legs (as the body and its legs are physically or spatially
contiguous). In Jakobson, the pattern of the similarity disorder matches with that
of metonymy (p. 109), which depends on the transfer of reference between, say, a
human body as a whole and its various parts.
On the other hand, aphasics of the second type are restricted to the paradigmatic
substitution of words that are semantically (or functionally) similar, i.e. the process
of naming, defining, paraphrasing, etc. In other words, they are unable to organize
words to form a grammatical context or syntactic coherence; as such, sentences fall
apart into agrammatical heaps of words: ‘Word order becomes chaotic; the ties of
grammatical coordination and subordination [. . .] are dissolved’ (p. 106). Here we
encounter a verbal version of Lacan’s images of the fragmented body (stemming
from the child’s motor un-coordination). A human trunk may be combined with
an ostrich’s head (substituting a human head) on its top and with a gorilla’s limbs
 Monstrous Metamorphoses 53

(substituting human limbs); this body is thus with no unified form, a deformitas.
Markedly, the pattern of the contiguity disorder, Jakobson points out, coincides
with that of metaphor (p. 109), which normally entails a transfer of sense between,
say, a human head and an ostrich’s head. Metaphor, he continues, ‘dominates’ in
(Romantic/Symbolist) poetry and Surrealist painting; yet metonymy in (Realist)
prose and Cubist painting (p. 111). It is tempting to say, then, that the language of
art and literature serves to be the aesthetic performance of aphasia or, to quote Jan
Mukařovský, ‘the esthetically intentional distortion of the linguistic components’.43
For Mukařovský, literature is possible only when the norm of the standard
language is violated — viz. the act of ‘foregrounding [aktualisace]’ — and poetry,
or rather, poetic language, is ‘the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance’.44
‘Foregrounding’, Kristeva would agree, illustrates the ‘semiotization of the
symbolic’.45 The standard language (or the symbolic mode of signification) renders
our consciousness or stimuli automatized, so the function of foregrounding is to
use linguistic devices, says Bohuslav Havránek, ‘in such a way that this use itself
attracts attention and is perceived as uncommon, as deprived of automatization,
as deautomatized, such as a live poetic metaphor’.46 In a similar vein, Paul de
Man bases the distinction between literary and non-literary language on the fact
that literary language ‘foregrounds’ what he calls ‘the rhetorical dimension of
discourse’ — i.e. figures of speech such as metaphor — to undermine or destabilize
its grammatical and logical function.47 Metaphor, especially marvellous metaphor,
is indeed a great means of poetic foregrounding or semioticization, in that metaphor
has been the signature of poetry or poetic novelty at least since Aristotle in the
Poetics lauds it as ‘a sign of genius’; that poetic language, P. B. Shelley has declared,
‘is vitally metaphorical’ as ‘it marks the before unapprehended relations of things’;
that ‘[m]etaphor’, according to Donald Davidson, ‘is the dreamwork of language’;48
and so forth.
Davidson’s concept of metaphor recalls Lacan’s equation of metaphor with
dream-condensation (Verdichtung) on the basis of poetry (Dichtung). Taking a cue
from Saussure and Jakobson, Lacan understands the primary process of displacement
and condensation as that of metonymy and metaphor and thus re-writes the
Freudian dream-work: ‘the dream-work follows the laws of the signifier’.49 For
displacement and condensation are in fact ‘two “sides” of the effect of the signifier
on the signified’ (p. 160). In Lacan, the displacement of, say, a human body by its
head — which does not involve signification — ‘is nowhere but in the signifier,
and [. . .] it is in the word-to-word [signifier-to-signifier] connexion that metonymy
is based’ (p. 156). By contrast, condensation is based on the substitution of one
signifier for another in which the poetic spark of metaphor ‘f lashes between two
signifiers[,] one of which has taken the place of the other in the signifying chain,
the occulted signifier remaining present through its (metonymic) connexion with
the rest of the chain’ (p. 157). From metaphor emerges signification (p. 164) or, as I.
A. Richards writes of metaphor, ‘a borrowing and intercourse of thoughts’.50 I shall
shortly return to this thread in relation to the grotesque body.
Attention should be paid to the fact that the grotesque body as a type of discourse
does not merely proceed like poetic language but, more precisely, like avant-garde
54 Monstrous Metamorphoses

poetic language, insofar as the ‘syntactical’ sequence of the grotesque body is

seriously fragmented in such a way as to darken or destroy the causal relationship
between body parts. The grotesque body, such as Bosch’s Tree- or Egg-Man (Fig.
2.1), consists of diverse animate and/or inanimate parts which are so mysteriously
juxtaposed as to render the body full of lexical lacunas or imaginative gaps. To
put it in Kristeva’s terms, semiotic fragments are arranged one alongside the other
without obvious logical sequence; as such, a hole or void is left in the signifying
chain. The absence of causal connections is characteristic of avant-garde poetic
language, inasmuch as it ‘does not proceed discursively, in unison with the laws of
language’, but jettisons ‘syntactical sequence’, writes Joseph Frank, ‘for a structure
depending on the [simultaneous] perception of relationships between disconnected
word-groups’.51
Simply put, avant-garde poetic language presents its material in the manner of
collage, montage, or jump cut (as in the case of Apollinaire, cummings, Eliot, etc.).
Take Apollinaire’s lines as an instance:
Ta langue
Le poisson rouge dans le bocal
De ta voix.52 (ll. 7–9)
[‘Your tongue | The goldfish in the bowl | Of your voice’.]
These lines appear to be a heap of disjointed images because obvious discursive or
predicative relations do not exist between them; instead, they proceed like collage, in
which several images are perplexingly juxtaposed: what is the relationship between
‘your tongue’ and ‘the goldfish’, and between ‘the bowl’ and ‘of your voice’? The
latter seems to be possessive; if so, what does ‘the bowl of your voice’ refer to? With
the loss of ‘la nature relationnelle’ (‘the relational nature’) of language, avant-garde
poetry, as Barthes asserts, divests itself of ‘la nature spontanément fonctionnelle
du langage’ (‘the spontaneously functional nature of language’) and reveals ‘la
splendeur et la fraîcheur d’un langage rêvé’ (‘the splendour and freshness of a dream
language’).53 Structured like the language of avant-garde poetry, the grotesque is a
body in which the interlocking syntagmatic bonds — which constitute an utterance
— between components are shattered; that is, miscellaneous parts are mysteriously
combined in such a way that the viewer has much freedom to create his/her own
response to the gaps between them or, Barthes would say, to ‘play with the text’: ‘le
texte lui-meme joue [. . .]; et le [spectateur] joue, lui, deux fois’ (‘the text itself plays
[. . .]; and the [viewer] plays twice’).54
One way of playing with the text is to discover or discern the connections
that have been repressed or created in the signifying chain. To do so, one may
return to the operation of Freudian condensation: likeness in unlike objects is the
precondition for the dream-work of condensing them into hybrid or composite
figures. This brings us to the idea of metaphor: for example, Aristotle defines
metaphor as the expression ‘of the similarity in dissimilars’.55 There are certainly
several aspects of similarity that allow two disparate objects to be joined together. In
addition to semantic similarity, on which Jakobson grounds his ideas of metaphor,
of great help in discovering or discerning the similar aspects of two combined
 Monstrous Metamorphoses 55

Fig. 2.1. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1503-04,

Museo del Prado, Madrid, detail
56 Monstrous Metamorphoses

objects are Willard Bohn’s categorizations of Surrealist images: ‘those that depend
on physical/formal similarity, functional similarity, or similarity involving other
characteristics’.56
Take as an example the aforementioned Tree- or Egg-Man in the Hell panel
of Bosch’s The Garden of Early Delights (1503–04). From the invisible metonymic
reference of a human head to a human torso (‘the occulted signifier’), one can infer
that a (broken) egg has metaphorically substituted a human torso and connected
itself with a human head. This metaphorical substitution, an ‘intercourse of thoughts’
(in Richards’s terms), relies perhaps on a physical similarity in shape and/or on a
characteristic similarity, namely, that of containing animate objects. In a similar
vein, two ‘muscular’ tree trunks that grow out of the egg in place of a human torso
have metaphorically substituted human arms on the basis of a physical likeness in
shape. As a result, the two boats that carry the tree-arms have taken the place of
human hands because boats and hands share a similar shape and a similar function,
i.e. that of carrying something. Meanwhile, the tree trunks that are human arms
also serve as legs, insofar as the Tree- or Egg-Man postures like some kind of
two-legged animal. This situation turns the two boats into a metaphor for feet on
the basis of a physical similarity in shape and a functional similarity in mobility.
Notably, even though several aspects of similarity have been discovered in the
metaphorical operation of different parts of Bosch’s grotesque body, one may have
still found that a similarity — a central signified thought — is lacking that can
harmonize the discordant and discontinuous components (a human head, an egg,
tree trunks, boats, and an unknown two-legged animal) into a unified whole, into
hermeneutic totalization. That is, it seems impossible to rationalize (figuratively)
Bosch’s grotesque body as a whole with a sustainable explanation, in that there
is always some part of the body exceeding the reconciliation of the incongruous
qualities of the components. Seen in this light, this grotesque body, as a metaphorical
construction, tampers with the normal, or symbolic, operation of metaphor: that
is, to lead the attention away from the literal (concrete discordance) towards the
figurative (conceptual similitude). Put another way, Bosch’s grotesque body allows
the semiotic to exercise its ‘nonsense effects’ — the disturbance of semantic and/or
syntactic coherence — so effectively as to make the reading of the body proceed by
differentiation rather than by unification. This brings us to the borderline between
metaphor in general and grotesque metaphor in particular.

4. The Flesh-Made Metaphor

Admittedly, the grotesque body is metaphorical as it mixes up (biological and
conceptual) categories. To be precise, the grotesque body is a marvellous metaphor
which contains a high degree of obvious contradiction or incongruity. To better
understand the grotesque body as a marvellous metaphor, one should have a close
look at the notion of metaphor and its proper operation. In general, metaphor urges
the reader to look beneath or disregard its surface to bring to light the latent, or
figurative, similarities between its two components (see also Introduction, sect. 3).
As Hegel explains in his Aesthetics: ‘When, e.g. we hear “the springtime of these
cheeks” or a “sea of tears” we are compelled to take this expression not literally
 Monstrous Metamorphoses 57

but only as an image, the meaning of which the context expressly indicates to us’
(my italics).57 Nevertheless, as a metaphor, the grotesque body, whilst demanding
figurative interpretations, makes visible the superficial or literal level of dissimilarity
and thereby gives rise to a powerful effect of the biologically horrible and the
logically absurd. The grotesque body, so to speak, reveals itself as ‘a literalisation
of metaphor’.58 This literalization is especially important when it comes to the
construction of the verbal type of grotesque metaphor, since the visual type, due
to its immediate visibility, never fails to strike the viewer with grotesqueness
at the literal level — no matter how close the imaginative distance between its
components. That is to say, in order to acquire the marvellous or shocking effect
of visual grotesques, the verbal type needs to foreground its literal dissimilarity to
enable the mind’s eye to see ‘immediately’ its physically incongruous image.
To throw light on the borderline between metaphor in general and grotesque
metaphor in particular, one may resort to the two processes of the Freudian dream-
work: the secondary process (normal thinking) is foregrounded in the former and
yet the primary process (logical impossibility) in the latter. The literal level of
metaphor operates like the primary process, in which the rules of logic carry no
weight at all because, incited by the id, it discharges psychical energy to construct
a ‘perceptual identity’ of wishes. On the other hand, the function of the figurative
level parallels that of the secondary process, which follows the lead of the (super-)
ego to establish a ‘thought identity’, that is, to search for objects in reality that match
the psychical images created in the primary process (PFL iv, 761–62). Simply put,
the primary process is of the signifier and the secondary process of the signified.
It is fair to say, then, that Jackson is in fact referring to the primary/literal process
(logical impossibility) of metaphor when she argues that
the fantastic does not proceed by analogy — it is not based on simile and
comparison (like, as, as if ) but upon equation (this did happen). With the
problem of ‘character’, the fantastic does not introduce scenes as if they were
real [. . .]: it insists upon the actuality of the transformation (as in [. . .] Kaf ka’s
Metamorphosis).59
Or in the fantastic, as Barthes speaks of Arcimboldo’s composite heads (Fig. 0.3),
‘l’analogie devient folle, parce qu’elle est exploitée radicalement, poussée jusqu’à
se détruire elle-même comme analogie: la comparaison devient métaphore’
(‘the analogy goes mad, because it is radically exploited, pushed to the point of
demolishing itself as analogy: the simile becomes metaphor’).60 That is, the fantastic
burgeons from actual rather than virtual metamorphoses. Whence comes the prima
facie absurdity of the fantastic or the primary process, namely, that which metaphor
in general wants to withdraw and yet grotesque metaphor — especially, the verbal
type — aims to spotlight.
Mention should be made brief ly of the distinction between metaphor and simile
before we continue to elaborate on the idea of verbal grotesque metaphor. Whilst
metaphor is for Aristotle only slightly different from simile, Quintilian in the
Institutio Oratoria draws a rather clear line between them: ‘in the latter we compare
some object to the thing which we wish to describe, whereas in the former this
object is actually substituted for the thing’.61 That is, simile depends on comparison
58 Monstrous Metamorphoses

(comparaison) but metaphor on substitution. It is the actual transformation of one item

into another that gives birth to literal absurdity or actual falsehood that Davidson
ascribes to metaphor:
all similes are true and most metaphors are false. The earth is like a f loor, the
Assyrian did come down like a wolf on the fold, because everything is like
everything. But turn these sentences into metaphors, and you turn them false.62
It is, so to speak, simply an obvious transgression of categories or the sense of order
to identify, say, the Assyrian with a wolf (i.e. the Assyrian is a wolf ) because they
are by nature dissimilar or discordant.
In order, then, for it to make sense, metaphor asks for figurative understanding
at a deeper level to locate the underlying common ground which rationalizes the
complete identification of one component or signifier with the other. Rudolf
Arnheim sees the hidden common ground in a metaphor as its ‘structural unity’,
which ‘can be obtained on the basis of certain salient physiognomic qualities
the components have in common. Therefore the discordant qualities of the
components will retreat, the common ones will come to the fore’. In this manner,
the incongruous components lose their individual concreteness and ‘become
more abstract’, that is, they smooth out the ‘intercourse of thoughts’. ‘Otherwise’,
Arnheim underscores, ‘the [metaphorical] construction would either split up into
incompatible elements or give birth, on the reality [i.e. literal] level, to a Surrealistic
monster’.63 This situation, to use Kristeva’s words, ‘exercise[s] a desemanticization
function analogous to the fragmentation of syntax’.64 In Arnheim, the proper
operation of metaphor relies on abstraction or abstracted meaningful characteristics
that outshine the concrete or visual incompatibility of the components. In Christine
Brooke-Rose, literalization of metaphor occurs and ambiguity arises when ‘the
functional element [of a metaphor] is lacking or weak, or not easily apprehensible or
far-fetched’. By ‘functional element’, she refers to functional similarity (‘A is called
B by virtue of what it does’) — as opposed to ‘sensuous’ similarity (‘A is called B
by virtue of what it looks like, or more rarely, sounds like’, etc.) — which triggers
figurative understanding or metaphorical abstraction.65 To sum up, then, to weaken
the characteristic or functional element of a metaphor is to frustrate the cognitive
process of its abstraction and foreground its visual incongruity or literal absurdity.
Let us look at several metaphors to illustrate this assumption. In Thomas
Campion’s metaphor as follows:
There is a Garden in her face
Where Roses and White Lillies grow;66 (ll. 1–2)
the visual conf lict arises immediately between a human face and a garden of roses
and lilies, but it does not take long for the conf lict to give way to their abstracted
common features: the lady has a young face, one that contains the pink and pure
qualities of roses and lilies. For the characteristic similarities are not far-fetched
and are strong enough to reach the structural unity of the metaphor. By the same
token, it is not hard to distil from the following Shakespeare’s metaphor a functional
element which is strong enough for the components to lose their individual
concreteness:
 Monstrous Metamorphoses 59

When fortie Winters shall beseige thy brow,

And digge deep trenches in thy beauties field.67 (ll. 1–2)
As an army will relentlessly ravage the city of the enemy, so ‘fortie Winters’ (as a
metonymy for time) will mercilessly destroy the beautiful face of a youth. Once this
prominent functional similarity is unveiled, the literal or visual collision retreats
between a youth’s face and a besieged city, his eyebrows and city walls, his forehead
and the field before the walls, and the like. Campion’s and Shakespeare’s metaphors
are predominantly functional or characteristic, whereas T. S. Eliot’s is completely
sensuous:
Daffodil bulbs instead of balls
Stared from the sockets of the eyes!68 (ll. 5–6)
Daffodil bulbs may look like eyeballs, but they are otherwise unlike. Hence, the
physical similarity that may initially allow them to be mingled into a metaphor
nevertheless brings into relief their visual incompatibility because physical/sensuous
similarity alone is insufficient to spark metaphorical abstraction. As a result, a surreal
image steps to the fore. This kind of metaphor has been termed ‘pseudometaphor’,
of which, as we shall see in Chapter 3, Crashaw is a master.
It is fair to say, then, that without the support of strong functional or characteristic
or semantic similarity, a metaphor would spawn visually jarring or surreal images
which, as Reuven Tsur observes, serve to ‘delay the smooth cognitive process’ or
‘prolong a state of disorientation’ in such a way that the reader ‘lingers at the visual
images without appraising their significance’.69 This situation is for Breton the
greatest virtue of the Surrealist image: the virtue rests upon
celle qui présente le degré d’arbitraire le plus élevé [. . .]; celle qu’on met le plus
longtemps à traduire en langage pratique, soit qu’elle recèle une dose énorme
de contradiction apparente, soit que l’un de ses termes en soit curieusement
dérobé.
[the one that presents the highest degree of arbitrariness [. . .]; the one that takes
the longest time to translate into practical language, either because it possesses
an enormous amount of obvious contradiction, or because one of its terms is
strangely hidden.]70
When contradictory or arbitrary combinations of this sort happen, the primary
process (nonsense) resists readily succumbing to the secondary process (sense), that
is, the signifier refuses to be anchored to the signified but instead continues to f loat.
This situation would act as a requisite for the birth of verbal grotesque metaphor.
One must be aware of the fact that not all surreal metaphors or images would
breed grotesque monsters. In a broad sense, the seed of the grotesque, as Harpham
points out, lies in ‘all metaphors with a spark of life’, wherein ‘the referential (usually
called the literal) always confronts us. It is a prior phase, whose self-annihilating
absurdity motivates us to the act of interpretation that completes the understanding
of the metaphor’.71 To specify Harpham’s observations, one can refer to Quintilian’s
classifications of metaphor: the transformation of (1) the animate into the animate
(wounds pant); (2) the animate into the inanimate (iron-hearted); (3) the inanimate
into the animate (barking bells); (4) the inanimate into the inanimate (poetry is eternal
60 Monstrous Metamorphoses

treasure).72 Here one finds that the first three kinds are potentially grotesque because
they obviously contain ‘a spark of life’ or are f lesh-made. Flesh-made metaphors are
able to produce grotesqueness, in that, as Philip Thomson puts it, ‘the grotesque
is essentially physical, referring always to the body and bodily excesses’.73 And
in terms of psychical effects, f lesh-made metaphors, to quote Robert Rogers on
body imagery, tend ‘to stimulate primary-process mentation in the reader’, that is,
functional regression to the unconscious in the reader’s mental activity.74
Despite the fact that all f lesh-made metaphors harbour grotesqueness to some
extent, a high degree of grotesqueness arises, I suggest, when the components of
a f lesh-made metaphor are weakly similar — in terms of function, characteristic,
and/or semantics — to the extent that its literal nonsense/f leshiness refuses to
annihilate itself and become abstract (as in Crashaw); or when a war of domination
occurs between the primary and secondary processes, the literal and the figurative
(as in Baudelaire); or when the five senses are confused in and by images that are
phantasmagorical. We have seen a conspicuously f lesh-made metaphor by Eliot
which gives birth to a highly grotesque image. Let us look at another example by
recalling Apollinaire’s complex metaphor: a tongue transforms itself into a goldfish,
the oral cavity into a bowl, and a woman’s voice into water. On the one hand, we
have a mouth inside which a tongue is moving (to speak) and, on the other, a bowl
inside which a goldfish is swimming. One set of objects is in-corporated into the
other. That is, what should remain contiguous suddenly turns out to be identical:
as one may drink from a bowl of water (with her mouth), her mouth is suddenly
turning into the bowl because of functional similarity (both are a kind of container);
the tongue inside is growing into a goldfish perhaps because of a physical similarity
in shape and because of a sensuous similarity in colour, an association sparked by the
tongue’s contiguity with water. Again, the grotesque, as we have seen, takes place
in the transition of metonymy into metaphor (see Introduction, sect. 1).
Other aspects of similarity can be found: the soft tactile sensations of a goldfish
and a tongue (sensuous similarity), together with the tender qualities of female
voice and water (characteristic similarity), could suggest the idea of comfort or
agreeableness. Nevertheless, even after the above common elements are found, the
individual concreteness of these various objects does not disappear but sticks around
in the mind’s eye. For none of them is strong enough to serve as a central thought
or signified that defines this complex metaphor in such a way as to make the (bio)
logical impossibility, or grotesqueness, retreat into the background. Accordingly,
this metaphor effectively exposes the reader to composite figures such as those
born of the Freudian dream-condensation. It is tempting to say, then, that in
verbal metaphors that kindle a high degree of grotesqueness, the primary process
(nonsense) is always reluctant to give up fully its seat to the secondary process
(sense). Such a foregrounding of the primary process speaks to Kristeva’s argument
that (avant-garde) poetry ‘wipe[s] out sense through nonsense and laughter’: ‘every
practice which produces something new (a new device) is a practice of laughter’75 or
of a rebellious and humorous attitude, as Breton would say, towards the compulsion
of reason (see Chapter 5, sect. 2).
To sum up, grotesque practices, as we have seen, are fond of generating novel
 Monstrous Metamorphoses 61

metaphors, which promote the triumph of the human imagination over the order
of nature to make bodies or bodily parts free to move from one order of substance
into another, as the free f low of drives in the primary process of dreams. Borders
thus fall apart and so do complete body forms. That is to say, as one order is turning
into another without limit, that which is determinate, clean, and continuous turns
out to be ambiguous, untidy, and fragmented. The grotesque effectively activates
‘the f low of the semiotic into the symbolic’.76
* * * * *
‘Only in dream logic’, Kristeva notes, do the semiotic practices of poetic language
dominate the signifying process.77 Clearly, the grotesque proceeds by dream logic: it
is composed of the displacement and condensation of semiotic fragments and thus full
of (both syntactic and semantic) fissures or hiatuses. More precisely, the grotesque
performs the semiotic by making itself a f lesh-made metaphor whose primary process
(nonsense; referential absurdity; concreteness; the signifier) tends to vie with or
even prevail over its secondary process (sense; figurative similarities; abstraction; the
signified). In this way, the grotesque ‘mak[es] one suddenly doubt one’s comfortable
relationship with the language’.78 Moreover, since the grotesque is a body without
a unified form, a structural unity, a central signified, i.e. a decentred or ‘writerly’
body, it demands the second type of the two interpretations Derrida brings forth:
The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which
escapes play and the order of the sign. [. . .] The other, which is no longer
turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and
humanism [. . .].79
In a word, the grotesque is eccentric/ex-centric; it materializes a poetics of
contradiction that effectively ruptures the symbolic use of language to convey
meaning and thereby exposes the viewer/reader to the untidy, incoherent
experience of the real.

Notes to Chapter 2
1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. by Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955),
p. 340.
2. Roland Barthes, ‘Arcimboldo ou Rhétoriqueur et magician’, in Œuvres complètes (OC), ed. by
Éric Marty, 3 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1993), iii, pp. 854–69 (p. 868): ‘Now the “marvel” — or the
“monster” — is essentially that which transgresses the separation of realms, mixes the animal
and the vegetable, the animal and the human; it is excess, since it changes the quality of the things
to which God has assigned a name: it is metamorphosis, which turns one order into another.’
3. Geoffrey G. Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 16–17.
4. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W.
Norton, 1977), p. 160. For Lacan, poetry is, first and foremost, metaphor: poetry ‘commence à
la métaphore, et [. . .] là où la métaphore cesse, la poésie aussi’ (‘begins with metaphor and [. .
.] where metaphors stops, poetry stops as well’) (Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan: Les Psychoses, ed.
by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1981), p. 247).
5. Lacan, Écrits, pp. 11, 2–5. See also Dylan Evans, ‘Fragmented Body’, in An Introductory Dictionary
of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge, 1996), p. 67 (p. 67).
6. Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 25.
62 Monstrous Metamorphoses

7. Lacan, ‘Some Ref lections on the Ego’, International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 34 (1953), 11–17 (15).
8. Lacan, Écrits, pp. 11–12.
9. Ibid., p. 4.
10. Harpham, ‘The Grotesque: First Principles’, Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism, 34.4 (1976),
461–68 (p. 462).
11. R. Grant Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert
Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy’, ELH, 68.3 (2001), 591–613 (pp. 605–06).
12. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Methuen, 1981),
p. 90.
13. Ibid., p. 91.
14. Allon White, Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing: Collected Essays and Autobiography (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 76, 64.
15. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’, The International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, 49 (1968), 1–18 (p. 3).
16. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans.
and ed. by James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), i (1966), 273.
17. Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan: Les Psychoses, p. 99.
18. Ellie Ragland, ‘An Overview of the Real, with Examples from Seminar I’, in Reading Seminars I
and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, ed. by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 192–211 (p. 195).
19. Quoted in Evans, “Real (Réel), pp. 159–61 (p. 159). See also Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan:
Book I, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by John Forrester (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 66.
20. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995), p. 24.
21. Ragland, ‘Lacan, the Death Drive, and the Dream of the Burning Child’, in Death and
Representation, ed. by Sarah W. Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 80–102 (p. 82).
22. E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (London: Phaidon,
1979), p. 256.
23. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Sylvana
Tomaselli (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 164.
24. Barthes, S/Z, in OC, ii, pp. 557–728 (p. 562).
25. Barthes, ‘De l’œuvre au texte’, in OC, ii, pp. 1211–17 (p. 1212).
26. Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, in OC, ii, pp. 491–95 (pp. 493–94).
27. Barthes, S/Z, pp. 558–59.
28. Gombrich, p. 256.
29. Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte, in OC, ii, pp. 1495–1529 (p. 1502).
30. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. by Margaret Walter (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), p. 62.
31. Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez,
trans. by Thomas Gora et al. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 133.
32. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 62, 43–44.
33. Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 134. See also White, p. 73.
34. Noëlle McAfee, Julia Kristeva (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 17.
35. Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 134.
36. Ibid., pp. 133–35.
37. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 81.
38. Anne-Marie Smith, Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable (London: Pluto Press, 1998), pp. 16,
21.
39. Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 136.
40. Ibid., p. 139.
41. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin, ed. by Charles Bally
and Albert Sechehaye (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), p. 123.
42. Roman Jakobson, ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, in
 Monstrous Metamorphoses 63

Language in Literature, ed. by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 95–114 (pp. 100–06).
43. Jan Mukařovský, ‘Standard Language and Poetic Language’, in A Prague School Reader on Esthetics,
Literary Structure, and Style, trans. and ed. by Paul L. Garvin (Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press, 1964), pp. 31–69 (p. 18).
44. Ibid., p. 19.
45. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetry Language, p. 79.
46. Bohuslav Havránek, ‘The Functional Differentiation of the Standard Language’, in A Prague
School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, pp. 3–16 (p. 10).
47. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
p. 14.
48. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. by Ingram Bywater, in The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, ed. by
Friedrich Solmsen (New York: Modern Library, 1984), pp. 223–66 (1459a, p. 255); Percy Bysshe
Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by Harry Buxton
Forman, 4 vols (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880), iii, pp. 99–144 (p. 103); Donald Davidson,
‘What Metaphors Mean’, in On Metaphor, ed. by Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979), pp. 29–45 (p. 29).
49. Lacan, Écrits, p. 161.
50. I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 94.
51. Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 10,
14.
52. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Fusée-Signal’, in Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Marcel Adéma and Michel
Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), p. 363 (p. 363). See also Chapter 5.
53. Barthes, Le degreé zero de l’écriture, in OC, i, pp. 139–86 (pp. 163, 165).
54. Barthes, ‘De l’œuvre au texte’, p. 1216.
55. Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a, p. 255.
56. Willard Bohn, The Rise of Surrealism: Cubism, Dada, and the Pursuit of the Marvelous (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2002), p. 155.
57. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. by T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975), i, p. 403.
58. Peter Stockwell, ‘Surreal Figures’, in Cognitive Poetics in Practice, ed. by Joanna Gavins and Gerard
Steen (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 13–25 (p. 17).
59. Jackson, pp. 84–85.
60. Barthes, ‘Arcimboldo ou Rhétoriqueur et magician’, p. 856.
61. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by W. Rhys Roberts, in The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle,
pp. 19–218 (1406b, p. 173); Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. by H. E. Butler,
4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920–22), iv (1922), Book VIII, vi. 8–9, p.
305.
62. Davidson, p. 39.
63. Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Abstract Language and the Metaphor’, in Towards a Psychology of Art (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 266–82 (p. 279). See also Bohn,
pp. 144–45.
64. Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 142.
65. Christine Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958), pp. 156,
155.
66. Thomas Campion, ‘There Is a Garden in Her Face’, in The Works of Thomas Campion: Complete
Songs, Masques, and Treaties on a Selection of the Latin Verse, ed. by Walter R. Davis (London: Faber
& Faber, 1969), p. 174 (p. 174).
67. William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 2’, in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Helen Vendler (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 52 (p. 52).
68. Eliot, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, in Collected Poems: 1909–1962, ed. by T. S. Eliot (New York and
London: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1963), p. 45 (p. 45).
69. Reuven Tsur, ‘Aspects of Cognitive Poetics’, in Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in
Text Analysis, ed. by Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 2002), pp. 279–318 (p. 294).
64 Monstrous Metamorphoses

70. André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme, in ABOC i, p. 338.

71. Harpham, p. 124.
72. Quintilian, vi. 7–10, p. 305. Examples are mine.
73. Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 56.
74. Robert Rogers, Metaphor: A Psychoanalytic View (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1978), p. 78.
75. Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 142; Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 225.
76. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 58.
77. Ibid., p. 29.
78. Thomson, p. 65.
79. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1978), p. 292.
 PA R T I I
v
There are certain things that are beautiful just because they are deformed,
And thus please by giving great displeasure.
Celio Calcagnini (d. 1541)
 C h apt e r 3
v

The Baroque Grotesque:

Crashaw’s Devotional Pseudometaphors
The poet’s end is to strike with wonder; whoever fails to astonish deserves the whip.
Giambattista Marino, Sonnet XXXIII, La murtoleide1
The baroque is the regulating of the soul by corporal radioscopy.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX 2
In [vicarious] pain the body affects the soul.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman3

Although remaining a largely unread poet, Crashaw, who was considered in his
day to take rank with Shakespeare and Sidney,4 occupies a significant position
in the history of poetry when it comes to the Baroque in literature, because he
ventures further than any poet in creating graphically sensuous metaphors to strike
the reader with wonder in the Baroque Age, a period in which the pursuit of the
marvellous reaches its first apogee. T. S. Eliot once claimed that ‘Crashaw is more
baroque than the baroque, more seicento than the seicentisti. Had he lived today[,]
he could only have dwelt in Florence or in Rome’.5 Eliot may have gone too far
in saying so, but no one can read Crashaw’s poetry without being attracted to his
energetically sensuous and highly extravagant images which, as Mario Praz has
noted, have ‘an air of unbearable luxuriance like certain works of Southern baroque
architecture’. The unbridled sensuous energy of Crashaw’s images, Praz continues,
allows Crashaw to have a better claim than his poetic mentor Marino, the father of
Marinismo, to the title ‘Baroque’.6
Indeed, for Crashaw, says Austin Warren,
the world of the senses was evidently enticing; yet it was a world of appearances
only — shifting, restless appearances. By temperament and conviction, he
was a believer in the miraculous; and his aesthetic method may be interpreted
as a genuine equivalent of his belief, as its translation into a rhetoric of
metamorphosis.7
Typical of ‘a rhetoric of metamorphosis’ is his (in)famous poem ‘The Weeper’, which
proceeds by ‘the logic of affection and the dream-logic of association’ and which has
been deemed ‘the most notoriously baroque poem in English’.8 In this poem, Mary
Magdalene’s tears undergo a series of miraculous metamorphoses into, for example,
stars, pearls, cream, rills, snow, watery f lowers, sky-climbing tears, and, most
 The Baroque Grotesque 67

(in)famously, ‘two faithfull fountaines; | Two walking baths; two weeping motions;
| Portable, and compendious oceans’ (st. XIX).9 These metamorphic images are
born of rhetorical devices such as metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, catachresis, and
paradox.
Markedly, many of Crashaw’s miraculous metamorphic images are exaggerated to
the point of grotesqueness, in that they yield physically contradictory or in-between
metamorphoses, the very sine qua non of the grotesque. For example, in the 1646
version of Crashaw’s ‘The Weeper’, we see the metamorphosis of Magdalene’s eyes
into wombs:
What hath our world that can entice
You to be borne? what is’t can borrow
You from her eyes swolne wombes of sorrow. (st. 21, p. 83)
It makes one’s eyes hurt to read the graphic terrible image of the swollen wombs of
Magdalene’s eyes literally giving birth to tears (‘You’). If in Christianity, as Georges
Bataille puts it, ‘terror and nausea are a prelude to bursts of burning spiritual
activity’,10 this terribly grotesque metamorphosis motivates the reader to undergo
vicariously the labour or pain of Magdalene’s penance and thus allows him/her to
ref lect corporeally and emotionally upon sin and divine grace. Crashaw’s devotional
grotesque images, as we shall see, tend to strike terror or awe into the heart and
make it surge with a carnal knowledge of religious truth or revelation.
It is not new, of course, to describe Crashaw’s images as grotesque since almost
all Crashaw scholars touch upon the grotesqueness of his images one way or
another. Nevertheless, they either fall short of explanations for the way in which
Crashaw’s devotional grotesque images are evoked, or employ the term ‘grotesque’
loosely to label any incongruous qualities of his images; as such, the grotesqueness
of Crashaw’s images becomes obscure and so does the identity of the grotesque
itself. For instance, in his noted Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age, R. V.
Young goes so far as to use the word ‘grotesque’ to refer to all sorts of Crashaw’s
discordant combinations (be they physical or non-physical): for example, Young
regards as ‘grotesquely violent’ the jarring combination of love and battle, sensuality
and violence, in the following metaphor in ‘The Flaming Heart’:11 ‘For in love’s
field was never found | A nobler weapon then a WOUND’ (ll. 71–72, p. 326). It
is perhaps incongruous and violent to describe divine love in terms of battle; it
is, however, certainly excessive to see such a violent juxtaposition as ‘grotesque’,
inasmuch as the juxtaposition, per se, does not produce physical incongruity.
In this chapter, then, I aim to provide a comprehensive discussion of the art of
Crashaw’s devotional grotesque images — notably, those related to the Passion of
Christ and the contrition of Magdalene — by contextualizing it within Catholic
visual piety and Baroque poetics. As we shall see, the power of Crashaw’s grotesque
images to fill the mind with divine terror or awe has much to do with what
Aristotle calls ‘liveliness’ (energeia), the appeal to the sense of sight to actively stir the
reader’s emotion as if s/he were present in actual events. The Aristotelian energeia
as an effectual emotional stimulus serves as an important foundation of Catholic
visual piety and of Baroque poetics of the marvellous, both of which are essential
to a solid understanding of Crashaw’s energetically sensuous metaphors that breed
68 The Baroque Grotesque

grotesque images. In order to increase the spirit of devotion, Catholic visual piety
— which carries with it the primacy of sight — seeks to activate the viewer’s visual
sensation and thereby stimulates a vicarious in-corporation of him/herself into the
suffering bodies of tormented saints. The primacy of sight also lies at the heart of
the Baroque metaphor, which endeavours to hit the mind’s eye with ‘la meraviglia’
(‘the marvellous’). The Baroque metaphor, at its most extreme, is pseudometaphor.
It is a type of metaphor which violates — or semioticizes (in Kristeva’s terms) — its
own normal function of producing a figurative sense; as such, it forces the reader
continuously to see physically incongruous imagery that emerges at the literal level
and thereby to register its emotional impact. We will see that Crashaw is the master
of pseudometaphor: his devotional pseudometaphors, notably those of Christ’s
wounds, effectively produce grotesque images that motivate the mind to ‘savour’
divine terror.

1. The Rhetoric of Baroque Sensuousness

The exuberant sensuousness of Crashaw’s images has led critics to describe him
as ‘the least typical of the English Metaphysicals’ or ‘the most sensuous of the
Metaphysical poets’.12 Indeed, ‘the brain dominates’ in Donne’s poetry and ‘an art
of plainness’ permeates Herbert’s to the point that sensuous vivacity gives way to ‘a
tough reasonableness’ in their work.13 For instance, even in Donne’s most emotional
poems such as ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’ and ‘Holy Sonnet V’, sensuous — or
really, just concrete — images and diction are employed almost only for the purpose
of reasoning. By contrast, Crashaw in his poetry — especially the later verses —
gives free rein to the emotions and senses. As Frank J. Warnke writes: ‘Whereas
Donne, Herbert, and, in much of his work, Marvell, favor a diction stripped almost
bare of its sensuous implications, Crashaw revels in sensuous detail: a rose “sweating
in a too warm bed”, melting incense, precious stones, mother’s milk’.14
Crashaw’s indulgence in sensuous imagery and language has a religious rationale.
Crashaw scholars such as Thomas Healy have called our attention to the bond
between Crashaw’s employment of boldly sensuous images and the Laudian (or
High Anglican) belief in the extravagant use of imagery and diction as a means of
moving the heart more efficaciously.15 A passionate proponent of this Laudian belief
is John Cosin, who, in his posthumous The History of Popish Transubstantiation (1676),
argues that the ‘emphatical, and even hyperbolical’ accounts of Christ’s wounds
help ‘instruct the people to look [. . .] in them to eye with their minds the body
and blood of Christ, and with their hearts lift up to feed on that heavenly meat’.
An example Cosin provides is the following description that appears under the
name of St. Cyprian: ‘We are close to the cross, we suck the blood, and we put our
tongues in the very wounds of our Redeemer; so that both outwardly and inwardly
we are made red thereby’.16 Latent within such a graphically sensuous description
is the rhetorical power of corporeality, the visceral piety which results from the
vicarious in-corporation of oneself into the suffering body of Christ by activating
his/her visual and gustatory sensations. Cosin was an advocate of sensuous piety,
which showed his intention to continue the Catholic tradition of visual piety in
Anglicanism to confront the Puritan distrust of visual and verbal ornamentation; he
 The Baroque Grotesque 69

was the most crucial Laudian figure in Crashaw’s years at Peterhouse, Cambridge
(1635–43).17 Presumably, this situation paved the way for Crashaw to become a
Catholic convert in c.1645.
Seen in the history of art and literature, the impact of the Laudian belief on
Crashaw cannot be separated from the more inf luential Catholic visual piety
fostered by the Counter-Reformation in the second half of the sixteenth century.
In 1563, the Council of Trent legitimized the value of painted and carved images as
a means of stimulating piety.18 Catholic visual piety thus kindled a new interest in
religious miracles, martyrdoms, dramatic representations of religious ecstasy, and
so forth, as rhetorical instruments of bringing people to God. The rhetorical use
of devotional images can be best illustrated by the following passage in Gabriele
Paleotti’s Discorso intorno le immagini sacre e profane (Bologna, 1582):
To hear the narration of the martyrdom of a saint, the fervor and the
perseverance of a virgin, the passion of Christ Himself, this is something that
really touches us inside; but to have in front of our eyes, set in live colors, here the
saint tortured, there the virgin martyred and in another place Christ nailed [to
the cross], all this undoubtedly so much increases our devotion that those who
do not acknowledge it are made of wood or marble.19 (my italics)
For Paleotti, visual representations of martyrdoms are rhetorically more powerful
than verbal ones in ‘touch[ing] us inside’ and ‘increas[ing] our devotion’. Again,
this is the rhetorical power of corporeality: the power of encouraging a vicarious
participation in the suffering and death of tormented saints, of, as Kristeva would
put it, arousing uncannily an imagination of ‘the collapse of the border between
inside and outside’,20 between subject and object. Paleotti’s principle of art, as we
shall see, echoes the Jesuit devotional use of imagery.
Arnold Hauser considers Paleotti’s statement to be an index of the borderline
between Mannerist and Baroque art: ‘This emotionalism and sentimentalism, this
wallowing in pain and suffering, wounds and tears, is baroque, and has nothing to do
with the intellectualism, spiritual aloofness, and emotional remoteness of manner­
ism’.21 Likewise, Nikolaus Pevsner remarks: ‘bloodlust, open enjoyment of cruelty,
makes its appearance in visual art and in literature only in the age of Baroque’.22
Whilst arguing that the Baroque is not so much a break with, as a continuation of,
Mannerism since ‘Baroque freedom was largely derived from Mannerist licence’,
John Shearman admits that the Baroque style features ‘a rediscovery of the dynamism
and sensuousness’ disapproved by Mannerist aesthetics.23 It is tempting to say, then,
that Mannerism appeals to the intellect and the Baroque to the senses — although
they both share an artistic freedom of indecorum or invention (capricci).
This can be illustrated by the distinction between Rosso Fiorentino’s Dead
Christ with Angels (Fig. 3.1) of 1525–26 and Annibale Carracci’s The Dead Christ
(Fig. 3.2) of c. 1582. Rosso divested his Christ of emotional overtones of pain and
suffering: his wound does not bleed, nor does his face look strained; instead, his
body looks serenely beautiful, as if he had not suffered at all. Also, Rosso’s Christ
is iconographically ambiguous: without the angels’ torches symbolic of eternity and
the instruments of the Passion surrounding Christ’s feet, one would mistake him
for Adonis. The nature of this painting, says Shearman, can best be described as
70 The Baroque Grotesque

Fig. 3.1 (left). Rosso Fiorentino, Dead

Christ with Angels, 1525-26, Museum of
Fine Art, Boston
Fig. 3.2 (below). Annibale Carracci,
The Dead Christ, c. 1582, Staatsgalerie,
Stuttgart
 The Baroque Grotesque 71

maniera (style),24 from which Mannerism is derived. By contrast, Carracci’s Christ,

whose wounds are bleeding, feet dirty, and body rendered distorted through the
perspectival use of foreshortening, fits very well into the proper representation of
Christ that Paleotti suggested is a powerful stimulus to piety: Christ should be
shown ‘aff licted, bleeding, spat upon, with his skin torn, wounded, deformed, pale
and unsightly’.25 Indeed, Carracci’s Christ is much more rhetorically effective than
Rosso’s in provoking piety, in penetrating to the heart; its gruesome sensuousness
is so striking as to arouse, as David Morgan says of Catholic visual piety, ‘a visceral
response: the body participated in an integrated devotional practice of imitating
Christ, of imaging him in one’s own body’.26 This is exactly the rhetorical power of
Baroque corporeality: grim liveliness enables the spectator to suffer physically with
Christ or saints and thereby experience spiritual revelation. Cruelty and ecstasy
become two sides of the same coin.
In terms of grim and gruesome sensuousness, Carracci’s The Dead Christ
anticipates Crashaw’s ‘On the wounds of our crucified Lord’, a poem featuring a
series of grotesque metamorphoses of Christ’s wounds which strike into the heart
the fear of pain, sickness, or death. This poem begins with the transformation of
the ‘wakefull’ wounds on Christ’s feet into mouths and eyes:
O These wakefull wounds of thine!
Are they Mouthes? or are they eyes?
Be they Mouthes, or be they eyne,
Each bleeding part some one supplies.
In the following stanza, a wound on one foot transfigures into a mouth with full-
blossomed rosy lips. This horribly tender or tenderly horrible image is followed by
a predominantly terrifying metamorphosis of a wound into ‘a blood-shot eye’:
Lo! a mouth, whose full-bloom’d lips
At too deare a rate are roses.
Lo! a blood-shot eye! that weepes
And many a cruell teare discloses.
After a stanza that addresses Mary Magdalene, who has laid on Christ’s feet many
kisses and tears, comes one of Crashaw’s most phantasmagorical images: the foot has
a wound which turns into a mouth kissing Magdalene back and into an eye weeping
jewels; or the foot is transformed into a face that has a wound-mouth which is also
an eye that weeps jewels:
O thou that on this foot hast laid
Many a kisse, and Many a Teare,
Now thou shal’t have all repaid,
Whatsoe’re thy charges were.
This foot hath got a Mouth and lippes,
To pay the sweet summe of thy kisses:
To pay thy Teares, an Eye that weeps
In stead of Teares such Gems as this is.
The difference onely this appears,
(Nor can the change offend)
72 The Baroque Grotesque

The debt is paid in Ruby-Teares,

Which thou in Pearles did’st lend. (p. 99)
Throughout this poem, Crashaw tinges gruesome sensuousness with tenderness to
heighten emotional intensity, to nurture a savoury sense of divine terror. Moreover,
he renders the metaphors extravagantly f leshly to the extent that the mind’s eye
cannot help but engage in catching the marvellous metamorphic images running
from one to another; that wounding ‘becomes almost physically inscribed on the
reader [. . .] [and thus] transforms [him/her] from passive respondent to active
participant’; that ‘it makes one’s eyes ache and body squirm to read the poem. These
and similar effects are not the extraneous by-products of Crashaw’s poetry: they are
at the center of what he is doing’.27 In plain terms, the psychical border no longer
exists between inside and outside, the ‘I’ and the ‘not I’: ‘In [vicarious] pain the body
affects the soul’, to put it in Lyotard’s terms.
The pronounced gruesomeness of this poem, John Ruskin would perhaps agree,
is a prime example of ‘the terrible grotesque’ (as opposed to ‘the sportive grotesque’),
the type of the grotesque whose fearfulness appears to be more dominant than
playfulness and is used ‘for good purposes, and to contrast with beauty’:
The element of distortion which affects the intellect when dealing with subjects
above its proper capacity, is as nothing compared with that which it sustains
from the direct impressions of terror. It is the trembling of the human soul in the
presence of death which most of all disturbs the images on the intellectual
mirror, and invests them with the fitfulness and ghastliness of dreams.28 (my
italics)
By bringing into prominence the horrible f leshliness of Christ’s wounds, Crashaw
registers on the reader’s mind with the terror of divine suffering and death as if s/
he perceived it directly or experienced it physically. The terror-struck f leshliness or
sensuousness of Crashaw’s images would explain why Wylie Sypher considers him
the most characteristic poet of Catholic Baroque piety, which inf lames devotion
by elevating the f lesh or the senses, to wit, ‘transfus[ing] the spirit with the f lesh
instead of transfusing the f lesh with the spirit’.29
It would be a serious f law to discuss Catholic Baroque piety without mentioning
Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, which, as the spearhead of
the Counter-Reformation, played a critical role in the budding and f lowering of
Baroque art.30 In his 1548 Exercitia spiritualia (Spiritual Exercises), Ignatius places a great
emphasis on the application of the five senses to re-present to exercitants themselves
scenes from Holy Scripture as the approved method of meditation: for example, to
arouse the fear of the horrible pain of the damned in hell, one must ‘see with the
sight of the imagination [. . .] the souls as in bodies of fire [. . .,] hear with the ears
wailings, howlings, [. . .] smell with the smell smoke, sulphur, [. . .] taste with the
taste bitter things, like tears, [. . .] [and] touch with the touch; that is to say, how
the fires touch and burn the souls’.31 Here each of the senses, starting with sight, is
engaged in embodying the idea of pain with emotive images. The Ignatian method
of meditation has thus been called ‘sensuous worship’.32 From the artistic point of
view, this method is crucial for religious artists as it demonstrates how to achieve
the virtuality of making present. This is why, as Vernon Hyde Minor has noted,
 The Baroque Grotesque 73

‘[w]hether consciously or not, many baroque painters created rhetorical structures

that represent Ignatian mental images’.33 Carracci’s grisly re-presentation of the dead
Christ, as we have seen, can be seen as a great example. Simply put, fundamental to
Ignatian worship are sensuous re-presentations of meditations on (in)visible events;
the divine or spiritual is thereby concretized, or better still, incarnated, within the
realm of the sensuous.
As a result of Ignatian sensuous worship, the Jesuits were always zealous pro­
moters of (sensuously appealing) images — be they visual or verbal, real or ima­
gined. This attitude contributed to a sharp rise in the demand for engravings,
etchings, illustrations, church decorations, etc., at the end of the sixteenth century.
The Jesuit contribution to art reached its climax when the interior of the Gesù, the
mother church of the Society of Jesus, was decorated by Giovan Battista Gaulli in
1672 with extremely lavish ornaments to overwhelm the senses. For instance, the
vault fresco, representing ‘The Triumph of the Name of Jesus’, is an illusionist open
sky peopled with masses of allegorical figures being carried by clouds upward into
heavenly light cascading from the monogram of Jesus. Dramatically miraculous
and stunningly sensuous, the ceiling fresco of the Gesù exemplifies the Baroque
preoccupation with the sensation of the marvellous or the sublime.

2. The Primacy of Sight

The idea of ‘making visible’, or visualization, lies at the very core of Jesuit sensuous
meditations, as seen in the recurrent urge to ‘see with the sight of the imagination’
in the Spiritual Exercises. In his Discours des Images (Bordeaux, 1597), Louis
Richeome, the most articulate Jesuit pictorial theorist, offers a cognitive rationale
for the fact that Ignatius privileged sight over the other senses: ‘The eye, you see, is
a very proficient sense; it rivals the mind in quickness, catching and apprehending
its object quickly and all at once while the other senses take it in partially, bit by
bit’.34 The Jesuit primacy of sight, as previously discussed, carries with it the rhetoric
of presence, the ability to (re-)present objects in front of the eye as if they were
tangible. It is for this reason that Roland Barthes relates sight to the f lesh when
commenting on Ignatius: ‘la vue, procuratrice du toucher, est facilement associée au
désir de la chair’ (‘sight, the procuress of touch, is easily associated with the desire
of the f lesh’).35 The rhetorical power of sight, so to speak, cannot be separated
from tangibility and corporeality. An apt gloss on this situation can be found in
the fact that Thomas, doubting Christ’s resurrection, demands to see and touch
Christ’s wounds in his hands and side before being convinced (St. John 20. 27).36
Caravaggio’s interpretation of this event in The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601–02)
serves as a practice of Jesuit/Catholic visual piety: this painting stimulates a visceral
response to Christ’s pain and suffering by guiding the viewer — through Thomas’s
finger — to probe into Christ’s wound. In Jesuit/Catholic piety, the appeal to sight,
one can say, collaborates intimately with tangibility and corporeality with a view to
turning each faithless person into a believing Thomas.
The Jesuit primacy of sight is in fact deeply rooted in the tradition of classical
rhetoric, which has a great inf luence on Baroque poetics: that is, the rhetoric of
74 The Baroque Grotesque

energeia (or enargeia). In De Anima (On the Soul), Aristotle regards sight as the most
highly developed sense, on which depends phantasia (imagination), the faculty of
reproducing in the mind impressions of sensible objects without their presence:
(reproductive) imagination does not occur without ‘sensation actively operating. But
since vision is pre-eminently sensation, the name φαντασία (imagination) is derived
from φάος (light), because without light it is impossible to see’.37 That is, to see is to
activate sensation and thereby reproduce mental images — without which, Aristotle
stresses, the soul never thinks.38 As a result, Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, encourages
orators to make ‘your hearers see things’ in order to affect their minds. He calls this
visibility ‘liveliness’ (energeia), which ‘is specially conveyed by metaphor, and by
the further power of surprising the hearer; because the hearer expected something
different, his acquisition of the new idea impresses him all the more. His mind
seems to say, “Yes, to be sure; I never thought of that” ’.39 Liveliness, he continues,
can be best achieved by metaphors that ‘suggest activity’: static is the metaphor that
a good man is ‘four-square’, whereas active is the metaphor that his vigour is ‘in
full bloom’ (1411b, p. 190). It is active metaphors that render thoughts graphically
surprising. The primacy of sight, so to speak, is a question of insight.
Metaphors, Aristotle stresses, ‘must not be far-fetched, or they will be difficult
to grasp’ and to appear lively for the hearer: ‘For instance, Gorgias talks of “events
that are green and full of sap”, and says “foul was the deed you sowed and evil the
harvest you reaped”. That is too much like poetry’ (1410b, 1406b, pp. 187, 173).
In other words, for Aristotle, the use of far-fetched metaphors in poetry is not
improper, for ‘just as in philosophy also an acute mind will perceive resemblances
even in things far apart’ (1412a, p. 191). This was to become a fountainhead of the
concept of wit (acutezza, ingegno, ingenio, esprit) fashioned in the seventeenth century
by theorists such as the Jesuit Baltazar Gracián in Spain and the Jesuit Emmanuele
Tesauro in Italy.40
Cicero, following Aristotle, maintained that metaphorical expressions give more
pleasure than non-metaphorical ones, ‘because every metaphor, provided it be a
good one, has a direct appeal to the senses, especially the sense of sight, which is the
keenest’. In order directly to hit the sense of sight, he continued, ‘the first thing is
to eschew a metaphor where there is no real resemblance’ or where a resemblance is
far-fetched.41 Following Cicero, Quintilian highlighted the rhetorical importance
of appealing to the mind’s eye so that ‘our emotions will be no less actively stirred
than if we were present at the actual occurrence’.42 And ‘an admirable means’ of
doing so is the use of metaphor, ‘by far the most beautiful of tropes’ (Book VIII, iii.
72, vi. 4, 9, pp. 251, 303, 305).
Apropos of far-fetched metaphors, however, Quintilian took sides with Aristotle
by granting the use of them to poets to give rise to novelty and surprise (Book VIII,
iii. 73, vi. 17, pp. 253, 311). For poetry merely aims to give pleasure ‘by inventing
what is not merely untrue, but sometimes even incredible’ (Book X, i. 28, p. 19).
In categorizing metaphors into four classes (see Chapter 2, sect. 4), Quintilian
stated: ‘effects of extraordinary sublimity [sublimitas] are produced when the theme
is exalted by a bold and almost hazardous metaphor [audaci et proxime periculum
translatione] and inanimate objects are given life and action, as in the phrase [in
 The Baroque Grotesque 75

Virgil’s Aeneid] “Araxes’s f lood that scorns a bridge”” (Book VIII, vi. 11, pp. 306–
07). Orators, Quintilian suggested, should learn from poets bold expressions such
as sublime metaphorical personifications to enliven the emotions of the audience,
but they must be very careful in using them, lest the audience refuse to believe their
statements. For instance, in the use of hyperbole, he warned orators that ‘although
every hyperbole involves the incredible, it must not go too far in this direction,
which provides the easiest road to extravagant affectation’ (Book VIII, vi. 74, p.
343). Crashaw, as we shall see, ventures further than any Baroque poet in picking up
where orators left off in the use of hyperbole to evoke ‘extravagant affectation’.
Cicero and Quintilian — and to a lesser degree Aristotle — subordinated
rhetorical clarity to poetical incredibility. It was Longinus, E. R. Curtius notes,
who not only unscrupulously ‘cuts the tie between rhetoric and literature’43 but
prefers the latter to the former. Longinus subsumed incredibility and visibility
under poetical ‘visualization’ (phantasia) in contrast to rhetorical ‘visualization’.44
Both literature and rhetoric strive for the excitement of emotion, but in strikingly
different ways: the former succeeds by ‘a quality of exaggeration which belongs to
fable and goes far beyond credibility’, whereas with the latter, ‘it is the element of
fact and truth which makes for success’ (15.8, p. 161). The latter results in ‘clarity’
(enargeia) and the former in ‘astonishment’ (ekplēxis) (15.1, p. 159): ‘when the content
of the passage is poetical and fabulous and does not shrink from any impossibility,
the result is a shocking and outrageous abnormality’ (15.8, p. 161). More significantly,
Longinus privileged the poetical use of visualization over the rhetorical use, viz.
enthralment over clarity, in that the former ‘produces ecstasy rather than persuasion
in the hearer; and the combination of wonder and astonishment always proves
superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant’ (1.4, p. 143). Longinus exemplified
the poetical use of visualization with, say, Euripides’ comparison of the Furies
chasing Orestes to ‘the women with the blood in their eyes and the snakes’ (15.2, p.
159). In Longinus, such vibrant and violent metaphorical descriptions with an air of
incredibility are born of furor poeticus and conducive to sublimity (hupsous) (see also
Chapter 1, sects. 2 and 4).
The idea of visibility, or pictorialization, became popular in the hands of
Plutarch, who, in his Moralia, terms as ‘pictorial vividness’ (ἐυάργεια; enargeia)
verbal descriptions which are graphic ‘like a painting’, by referring to Simonides of
Ceos’ saying that ‘Poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poem’.45 It should
be noted, though, that a crucial distinction exists between Aristotle’s energeia and
Plutarch’s enargeia:
Poetry possesses [Aristotelian] energeia [. . .] when it has achieved its own
independent being quite apart from its analogies with nature or another art.
[. . .] But Plutarch, Horace, and the later Hellenistic and Roman critics found
poetry effective when it achieved verisimilitude — when it resembled nature
or a pictorial representation of nature.46
That is to say, the Platonic dictum that ‘art is like a mirror’47 is crucial to the
Plutarchian enargeia but not to the Aristotelian energeia. The inclination of
poetry towards painting or visibility (and vice versa) was widespread in both
the Renaissance and the Baroque. Nonetheless, whilst the pursuit of the mirror
76 The Baroque Grotesque

simile, the verisimilitude that is true to nature, dominated in the Renaissance,

‘the requirement of fidelity to reality, though present, was not a prominent critical
demand’ in the Baroque.48 The former, so to speak, deals with the verisimilar as
credible, whereas the latter deals with the verisimilar as marvellous.
A key figure in the transition from the (Renaissance) credible to the (Baroque)
marvellous is Giacopo (or Jacopo) Mazzoni. In his 1587 Della Difesa della Comedia
di Dante (On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante), ‘the most fully developed system
of literary aesthetics in the Renaissance’,49 Mazzoni, in order to justify Dante’s use
of unrealistic dream allegory, reverses the Platonic priority of icastic imitation over
phantastic imitation, the Plutarchian enargeia over the Aristotelian energeia, rhetoric
over poetry, the credible over the marvellous:
[T]he credible insofar as it is credible is the subject of rhetoric and the credible
insofar as it is marvelous is the subject of poetry, for poetry must not only utter
credible things but also marvelous things. [. . .] So that, if two things equally
credible were offered to the poet, one of them more marvelous than the other,
though false, not just impossible, the poet ought to take it and refuse the other
[the less marvelous, though true].50
Echoing Longinus, Mazzoni divorced poetry from rhetoric and thereby liberated
the poet from the Platonic prison of mimetic fidelity. Moreover, by merging the
credible and the marvellous into ‘the credible marvelous’, Mazzoni cleared the path
for Marino to carry out his poetry of meraviglia in the Seicento. To impugn Mazzoni,
Torquato Tasso, a sixteenth-century representative of the Plutarchian enargeia,
claims in his 1594 Discorsi del poema eroico (Discourses on the Heroic Poem): ‘Poetry is
nothing else than imitation [. . .]; imitation cannot be separated from verisimilitude,
for imitation is nothing else than giving a resemblance; no part, then, of poetry can
be other than true to fact’.51 By making poetry conform to the rhetorical tradition
of credibility and persuasion, Tasso sought to marry poetry and rhetoric, which
Mazzoni separated.
The borderline between Tasso and Mazzoni, the Plutarchian enargeia and the
Aristo­telian energeia, would be equivalent of the distinction Murray Krieger
establishes
between the cool aesthetic based on the distance between audience and object
and the heated aesthetic based on fusion, or empathy, between audience and the
object into which they enter (feel themselves into) as imaginary subjects. This
becomes the basis of a strikingly different aesthetic, one that is emotionalist
rather than mimetic [. . .]: an aesthetic that, consequently, would find any
suggestion of the natural sign undesirable. We are on our way to Edmund
Burke’s Longinian distinction between the beautiful and the sublime [. . .],
which in turn foreshadows Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian and
the Dionysian.52
That is, the ‘cool’ enargeia aims to pictorialize natural signs before the body’s
eye in order to delight; and the ‘heated’ energeia to pictorialize arbitrary (though
conventional) signs in order to surprise or shock. In the case of metaphor, the
former foregrounds the liveliness of the figurative, the signified, and the latter the
liveliness of the literal, the signifier.
 The Baroque Grotesque 77

In Renaissance England, it was Sir Philip Sidney who, in theory and in practice,
opened the door to the heated or Aristotelian energeia. In his An Apology for Poetry
(1580–81), Sidney maintains that poetry, as Aristotle defined it, is ‘a representing,
counterfeiting, or figuring forth — to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture’;
that only the poet, working ‘within the zodiac of his own wit’, has the right to
make ‘things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such
as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and
such like’.53 In other words, poetry is not an art of imitation servile to nature but
an art of pictorializing things either better than or unseen in nature. To create ‘a
speaking picture’, then, Sidney wrote ‘in the extravagant style of the most artificial
among the Petrarchists’54 to embellish his poems with soft or sweet images that
appeal to the senses. For instance, in his Sonnet 100, arguably the most sensuous
sonnet in Astrophil and Stella (first published in 1591), Sidney draws on objects full
of soft emotional implications to describe Stella’s melancholic beauty (the coupling
of melancholy and beauty, as we shall see in Chapter 4, was to be radicalized in the
Romantic era):
O TEARS, no tears, but raine from beautie’s skies
Making those Lillies and those Roses grow,
Which ay most faire, now more then most faire show,
While gracefull pitty beauty beautifies.
O honied sighs, which from that breast do rise
Whose pants do make unspilling creame to f low,
Wing’d with whose breath, so pleasing Zephires blow,
As can refresh the hell where my soule fries.55 (ll. 1–8)
Rather than blemishing her beauty, Stella’s sorrow (‘gracefull pitty’) makes her
ever-lovely face even lovelier in such a way as to invigorate the speaker’s suffering
soul.
Sidney adorns this paradox with hyperbolical Petrarchan metaphors. Typically
Petrarchan are the first four lines, in which Sidney employs natural objects to
‘figure forth’ Stella’s beauty that ‘beautifies’ nature: Stella’s eyes are likened to the
sky, her tears to rain, and her face to a garden of lovely lilies and roses — a metaphor
repeated later by Thomas Campion and Robert Blair (see Chapter 2, sect. 4; Chapter
4, sect. 1); and so forth. In the last four lines, Sidney seeks to ‘counterfeit’ things
other than nature by creating bombastic and fantastic images: Stella’s ‘honied’ sighs
and pants are ‘Wing’d with’ her breath to blow such pleasing zephyrs as to ‘refresh
the hell where’ the speaker’s soul burns. Soft sensuousness — lilies, roses, honey,
cream, breast, wing, Zephyr, etc. — permeate the poem: even the image of the soul
frying in hell is devoid of horror and tinted with decadent cheerfulness instead.
It is this kind of sweet sensuousness with a touch of ‘extravagant affectation’ (in
Quintilian’s terms) that Crashaw admired and introduced to his images: ‘Sydnæan
showers | Of sweet discourse, whose powers | Can Crowne old Winters head with
f lowers’ (‘Wishes: To his (supposed) Mistresse’, ll. 88–90, p. 197). Hence, Crashaw
created ‘showers of sweet discourse’ by resorting to fantastic, prodigal use of f lowery
language (or jewel imagery): ‘Of all the faire cheekt f lowers that fill thee, | None so
faire thy bosome strowes; | As this modest Maiden Lilly, | Our sinnes have sham’d
into a Rose’ (‘An Himn for the Circumcision day of our Lord’, ll. 9–12, p. 141).
78 The Baroque Grotesque

Crashaw’s own ‘showers of sweet discourse’ motivated S. T. Coleridge to state that

Crashaw, though not always good at selecting words, is a sweet poet who has the
‘Power and Opulence of Invention’; that no poet is superior to Crashaw ‘[w]here he
does combine richness of thought and diction’.56 In a letter to Richard Townsend in
1847, Coleridge’s poet-daughter Sara mentions her father’s admiration for Crashaw
and makes the statement — to which Wordsworth ‘responded very warmly’ —
that Crashaw’s sacred poetry, though the general reader would find it ‘queer and
extravagant’, is ‘more truly poetical than any other except Milton and Dante’.57 It is
to Coleridge’s critical authority ‘that Crashaw’s admirers of the [Romantic] period
refer for corroboration of their taste’.58

3. Discordia Concors
Nevertheless, S. T. Coleridge was only half correct, in that Crashaw’s power
of invention, I think, lies not merely in his rich sweet sensuousness, but, more
importantly, in his ability to introduce horror or fear into sweetness to demonstrate
the stupefying power of the divine. In this matter, the poet whom Crashaw followed
(more in poetic sentiment than in technique) and then surpassed was Marino, ‘the
poet of the marvelous’.59 Marino’s predilection for horror or sweet horror manifests
itself in his secular as well as sacred poems. For instance, in his love poem ‘La donna
che cuce [The Woman Who Sews]’,60 Marino paints a lively picture in which the
arrow of love becomes the sewing needle of the speaker’s beloved that ‘pierces and
stabs’ his heart ‘with a thousand points’; thus, the thread she uses to sew becomes
the ‘sanguine’ thread of his life. In this poem, images contain sensuous vividness
woven with a certain cruelty or perversity. Such dissonant qualities are also present
in Marino’s sacred poems, as illustrated in his ‘Alla piaga del costato [To the Wound
of the Sacred Side]’:
Piaga dolce d’amore,
Già tu piaga non sei,
Ma bocca à i sensi miei:
E quante in te consperse,
Son stille sanguinose,
Tante son per mio ben lingue amorose.
[Sweet wound of love, yet you are not a wound, but the mouth of that heart
which speaks to my senses: and as many as the drops of blood stand by you are
the tongues of love that serve my good.]61
Again we see the paradoxical combination or discordia concors of sweet horror: the
wound opened in Christ’s side metamorphoses into a mouth (‘bocca’) that speaks
sweet words to the speaker’s senses; and Christ’s drops of blood into lovely tongues
(‘lingue amorose’) that serve the speaker’s good. Metamorphic images of this sort are
what Curtius calls ‘corporal metaphors’: such metaphors ‘violate visual perception’
and are distinctly Baroque.62 Curtius’s ‘corporal metaphor’ is in fact another name
for catachresis, to which I shall return in the last section.
We have seen corporal metaphors in Crashaw’s ‘On the wounds of our crucified
Lord’. Though inf luenced by Marino, Crashaw, many critics have agreed,
outperforms Marino in creating marvellous metaphors.63 It is not the purpose of
 The Baroque Grotesque 79

this chapter to compare Marino and Crashaw in detail, so suffice it to look at how
Crashaw polishes Marino’s metaphors in Stanza 40 in his longest poem, ‘Sospetto
d’Herode’, his translation of Canto One of Marino’s religious epic La Strage de
gl’Innocenti (The Slaughter of the Innocents) of 1632:
V’ha la Vendetta in su la soglia, e’n mano
Spada brandisce insanguinata ignuda.
Hauui lo Sdegno, e col Furor insano
E la Guerra, e la Strage anhela, e suda. (Marino, ll. 1–4)
[There was vengeance on the threshold and in her hand she brandished a bloody
unsheathed sword. There was Wrath, and mad Fury, with her, and War, and
Massacre pants and sweats.]
There has the purple Vengeance a proud seat,
Whose ever-brandisht Sword is sheath’d in blood.
About her Hate, Wrath, Warre, and slaughter sweat;
Bathing their hot limbs in life’s pretious f lood. (Crashaw, ll. 1–4)64
Both Marino and Crashaw pictorialize abstract characters of vengeance such as
wrath and hate via the use of personification. But whilst Marino’s characters of
vengeance are ‘pant[ing] and sweat[ing]’, Crashaw’s are not merely ‘sweat[ing]’
but ‘[b]athing their hot limbs in life’s pretious f lood’. Marino’s metaphors, to use
Quintilian’s words, are ‘almost hazardous’, and yet Crashaw’s are utterly hazardous,
inasmuch as Crashaw gives abstract concepts not only life and action but f lesh (‘their
hot limbs’). Therefore, Marino’s images ‘seem ready to explode at any moment,
while Crashaw’s have already burst’; Crashaw’s images, so to speak, ‘awaken and fill
the senses with a living world’.65 It is unbridled sensuous energy (energeia) as such
that, as mentioned earlier, motivated Praz to consider Crashaw more Baroque than
Marino.
To sum up, Marino and, especially, Crashaw, unlike Sidney or Petrarchan
poets,66 tend to weave a strong sense of horror — coming from wounds, blood,
or physical pain — into their soft or sweet sensuous images to enhance emotional
intensity: as Marino wrote, ‘even a tragic event may be a dear object, and [. . .]
often horror goes hand in hand with delight’; so Crashaw wrote, ‘Deliciæ irarum!
torvi, tenera agmina, risus! | Blande furor! terror dulcis! amande metus!’ (‘Delights
of pains! Cruel smiles! tender soldiers! | Gentle madness! Sweet terror! lovable
fear!’).67 It comes as no surprise, then, that the grotesque — which carries within
itself two emotional poles — becomes the art form Crashaw often takes to invest
his devotional poetry with a high degree of emotional intensity.
The expression of dissonant emotions is also evident in Catholic Baroque visual
arts. A celebrated example is Bernini’s Beata Ludovica Albertoni (The Blessed Ludovica
Albertoni) of 1671–74, wherein the agony of the dying Ludovica is mingled with
the jouissance of everlasting relief. Also, in Caravaggio’s David of 1609–10 (Fig.
3.3), the champion David casts a melancholic gaze on Goliath’s severed head as
if he feels remorse for his brave deed — ‘No where but here did euer meet’, as
Crashaw would say, ‘Sweetness so sad, sadnesse so sweet’ (‘The Weeper’, st. VI,
p. 309). For Erwin Panofsky, the Baroque taste for dissonant emotions is due to
the liberation of emotional values promoted by Catholic visual piety: for instance,
80 The Baroque Grotesque

Fig. 3.3 (above). Caravaggio,

David, 1609-10, Galleria Borghese,
Rome
Fig. 3.4 (left). Andrea Alciato,
Emblema XVI, Emblemata, 1621.
Courtesy of Glasgow University
Library, Special Collections
Department
 The Baroque Grotesque 81

‘a new conception of martyr scenes, physical pain intensely felt (in contrast with
medieval and Renaissance representations) but fusing into a blissful rapture’.68 John
R. Martin suggests that, in addition to Catholic visual piety, the rise of the study of
psychology in the Baroque age — e.g. Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621) and Decartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649) — helped carry to the summit
the expression of emotional intensity and allowed artists ‘an opportunity to explore
the psychology of mysticism, and [. . .] they brought to this task, following the
example of the ancient rhetoricians, a practical knowledge of the art, or technique,
of persuasion’,69 namely, of penetrating to the heart of the viewer by exciting his/
her bodily sensations proceeding from the sense of sight.
Judith Hook, from the perspective of intellectual history, regards Baroque
dissonant emotions as a product of the unresolved clash between the spiritual and
the sensual: medieval man was able to feel at home in his spiritual nature, and
Renaissance man was, at times, in his sensual nature; in the seventeenth century,
however, man
seemed unable any longer to choose between the two sides of his nature.
Willing to reject neither, he seemed most aware of their inevitable conf lict,
their contradictory pulls and impulses. ‘Our souls would go to one end, heaven,
and all our bodies must go to one end, the earth’, wrote Donne.70
This brings us to the difference in the method of expressing clashing contraries
between Donne or Metaphysical poets and Crashaw or Continental Baroque poets.
In the main, seventeenth-century poetry displays a vision of contradiction in the
form of conceit, paradox, antithesis, or oxymoron. Nevertheless, Metaphysical
poets present their contradictory visions through a rigorously intellectual work
on paradox, whereas Baroque poets do so through the marvellous (con)fusion of
incongruous sensuous experience. That is, the former group works through ‘the
witty subversion of the intellect’ and the latter group through ‘the vivid distortion
of the senses’.71
A good example of the Metaphysical paradox can be found in Herbert’s ‘The
Agonie’, a dialectical definition of agony, or rather, sin and love. The poem starts
with an indirect definition:
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.
Sin and love are two things too immense for philosophers or scientists to measure
or quantify. Herbert strategically changed verbs from to measure to to sound when
shifting from physical objects to sin and love: to sound is to measure the depth of
a body of water by finding its bottom; it is, however, impossible to measure sin
and love since there is no way of finding the bottom, base, or beginning of either.
Sin and love, two incompatible ideas, thereby share a kind of analogy. The poem,
then, moves on to a definition of sin in the second stanza, which contains the most
sensuous images in ‘The Agonie’:
82 The Baroque Grotesque

Who would know Sinne, let him repair

Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.
Sin (or its effect) is defined by Christ’s anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane: the
greatest sin that one can know is man’s causing Christ to bleed. It is noteworthy that
here images, albeit sensuous, are not sensuously appealing because they are charged
much more with thought than with feeling; besides, it is not easy to visualize the
hyperbolical image of pain hunting blood ‘through ev’ry vein’.
Granted that Christ’s bleeding for man defines the greatest sin, it also serves to
define the greatest love in the last stanza:
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.72
Herbert’s use of the same basic image, Christ’s agony in the garden, to define sin
and love renders the two contrary ideas paradoxically similar: Sin is bottomless
(cannot be sounded) and Christ’s love is the answer to sin; therefore, love too
must be infinite. Mankind’s sinfulness and Christ’s love, so to speak, are both
inexhaustible; they cannot be measured other than by the agony (derived from the
Greek agon,73 which means contest or mental struggle) in the individual soul, i.e.
by the mental struggle between sin and love. The paradoxical relation of sin to love
in Herbert’s poem is thus an agony in this sense. Obviously, witty intellectualness
overshadows sensuousness in Herbert’s ‘The Agonie’. The poem exemplifies that
which Murray Roston says of the ‘true “meta-physical” wit of religious poetry’: it
employs ‘ambiguity of paradox [. . .] to redirect the reader from the physical world
to an existence “beyond-the-physical”, undermining his confidence in the logical
processes of reason in favour of the impalpable principles of faith’.74
Whilst Herbert, in ‘The Agonie’, redirects the reader to go ‘beyond the physical’
through a knotty and witty dialectical process, Crashaw, in his Latin epigram ‘In
vulnera Dei pendentis’ (‘On the wounds of God hanging [on the cross]’), embodies
the ‘meta-physical’ for the reader through monstrous — or even grotesque —
sensuous experience:
O streams of blood from head, side, hands, and feet!
O what rivers rise from the purple fountain!
[. . .]
O side, o torrent! For what Nile goes forth in greater
f lood where it is carried headlong by the rushing waters?
His head drips and drips with thousands and thousands of drops
at once: do you see how the cruel shame reddens his cheeks?
 The Baroque Grotesque 83

The thorns cruelly watered by this rain f lourish

and hope forthwith to change into new roses.
Each hair is a slender channel for a tiny rill,
a little stream, from this red sea, as it were.
O too much alive [are] the waters in those precious streams!
Never was he more truly the fountain of life.75
In stark contrast to Herbert, here Crashaw deals with Christ’s agony through
phantasmagorical images that jump from one overwhelming hyperbole to another,
from one signifier to another: Christ’s blood undergoes a series of marvellous
metamorphoses into rivers, dew, thousands of drops, and rain that will turn the
grim thorns worn by Christ into sweet roses; each of Christ’s hairs grotesquely
transforms into ‘a slender channel for a tiny rill’; and the like. Clearly, Quintilian’s
notion of ‘extravagant affectation’ is embodied to the full here: throughout the
poem, hyperbolical metamorphoses emerge one after another in our mind’s eye
as if we were hallucinating. They present to us, as Warren puts it, ‘a world of
appearances only — shifting, restless appearances’; this world, ‘by [its] infidelity to
nature, claim[s] allegiance to the supernatural’.76
We are not sure whether Crashaw ever read Longinus, but his vehement use of
sensuous or f leshly images indubitably finds a truly happy home in Longinus’ notion
of poetical ‘visualization’, produced by images going ‘far beyond credibility’ and
therefore resulting in ‘a shocking and outrageous abnormality’ (discussed before).
It is through this ‘outrageous abnormality’ rather than paradoxical reasoning (as
seen in Herbert) that Crashaw sensualizes Christ’s spiritual salvation of mankind
or embodies the wondrous glory of divine grace: Christ’s blood is ‘truly the fountain
of life’.

4. A Poetics of the Marvellous

To comprehend better Crashaw’s conspicuous tendency towards marvellous or
grotesque pictorialization of the divine, one should obtain a sense of the literary
climate which cultivated Crashaw’s poetic sensibility. In this section, I shall seek
to construct a poetics of the marvellous to contextualize Crashaw’s poetic mode of
expression. The second half of the sixteenth century, as we have seen, witnessed
the shift from mimetic fidelity to marvellous invention (capricci). An important
predecessor of Mazzoni and Sidney was Julius Caesar Scaliger, who, in his Poetices
libri septem (1561), affirms the poet’s ability to create ‘another sort of nature’ — i.e.
things unreal or fictitious — and thereby turn ‘himself almost into a second deity’.77
Scaliger’s notion of the poet as a divine creator, as we shall see, later found an echo
in Tesauro in the Seicento.
Poetic creation or invention becomes identical with imagination in Pierre de
Ronsard’s Abbregé de l’Art Poetique Françoys (1565). In Ronsard, poetry cannot be
pleasant or perfect ‘without fine inventions’ (‘sans belles inventions’); invention
‘n’est autre chose que le bon naturel d’une imagination, concevant les Idées et formes
de toutes choses qui se peuvent imaginer, tant celestes que terrestres, animées ou
inanimées’ (‘is nothing other than the good nature of an imagination, conceiving
84 The Baroque Grotesque

the Ideas and forms of all things that can be imagined, celestial and terrestrial,
animate or inanimate’).78 Having said so, however, Ronsard was immediately aware
of the irrational, Dionysiac implications that the term ‘imagination’ contained in
the Renaissance.79 Therefore, Ronsard went on to say that poetic imagination
must not go so far as to spawn ‘inventions fantastiques et melancoliques’ (‘fantastic
and melancholic inventions’), such as ‘les songes entrecoupez d’un frenetique, ou
de quelque patient extremement tourmenté de la fievre’ (‘the broken dreams of
a frenetic person or of some patient extremely tormented by a fever’) in which
appear ‘mille formes monstrueuses sans ordre ny liaison’ (‘a thousand monstrous
forms without order or connection’).80 In writing unfavourably of monstrous
imagination, Ronsard in fact almost paraphrased Horace’s idea of ‘aegri somnia’ —
what gives birth to grotesque hybrids — and thus showed his anxiety in drawing a
line between imagination and monstrous imagination.
During the late sixteenth century, Ronsard was not alone in doing so. In his
The Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham seeks urgently to de-stigmatize
the poet’s imagination and at the same time to distinguish it from ‘disordered
phantasies’ or ‘any monstrous imaginations or conceits’: whilst acknowledging that
‘no man could devise any new or rare thing’ without “the inventive parte of the
minde’, Puttenham warns that this part, if ‘disordered’, would ‘breede Chimeres &
monsters [not only] in mans imaginations, [. . .] but also in all his ordinarie actions
and life which ensues’.81 With Puttenham, as with Ronsard, inventive imagination,
though lying at the core of poetry, leaves no room for the marvellous and the
monstrous, inasmuch as they exceed the bounds of reason and verisimilitude. That
is, inventive imagination should engender the belle or the ‘bewtifull’ rather than
the grotesque or the monstrous. Ronsard and Puttenham therefore anticipated
Enlightenment critics such as Jean-François Marmontel and Louis Chevalier de
Jaucourt who, whilst stressing the indispensability of the imagination, regulated it
in accordance with verisimilitude or the task of perfecting nature and thus excluded
chimerical or monstrous creations.82
It was critics such as Sidney and Mazzoni who picked up that which Ronsard
and Puttenham had jettisoned. Sidney, as discussed earlier, entitled the poet to lift
up ‘with the vigour of his own invention’ or work ‘within the zodiac of his own
wit’ to counterfeit supernatural or preternatural beings such as demigods, Cyclops,
and chimeras. Incidentally, ‘chimera’ was to become a dominant meaning of the
word ‘grotesque’ during the first half of the seventeenth century in England.83 In
preferring the phantastic imitation of ‘the caprice of the artist’ to the icastic imitation
of things that do exist, Mazzoni carried Sidney’s critical project one step further by
setting poetry into the realm of fantasy and dream: ‘dream and poetry are founded
in the same power [i.e. fantasy], which does not necessarily regard truth’.84 In
poetry as in dream, truth is not the first principle; instead, ‘the end of the poet and
of poetry is to speak in such a way as to fill the hearers with wonder’.85 In other
words, the poet’s task is, with recourse to the marvellous or phantastic, to motivate
the reader to enlarge the domain of acceptability or credibility.86 Mazzoni was
not alone in promoting the marvellous in sixteenth-century Italy. For instance,
Francesco Patrizi, in his 1573 La deca ammirabile (Ten Books on the Marvellous),
 The Baroque Grotesque 85

proclaims that, unlike all other writers, the poet, due to his quality of furor poeticus,
is both a ‘facitore del mirabile [maker of the marvellous]’ and a ‘mirabile facitore
[marvellous maker]’; that the end of poetry is to make itself ‘mirabile’ (‘marvellous’)
by using incredible elements such as paradox, augmentation, and the divine in order
to strike the reader with ‘la meraviglia’ (‘the marvellous’).87
The sixteenth-century notion of la meragivlia or mirabile thrived in the following
century with its focus being shifted from feigning marvellous subject matter to
feigning marvellous metaphors,88 from res (content) to verba (form). For it is the
form rather than the content, as Cardinal Sforza-Pallavicino argued in 1646, that
determines the originality or ingenium of the poet.89 A key figure who activated
the shift in the sixteenth century was Fernando de Herrera, who, in his 1580 Obras
de Garcilaso de la Vega con anotaciones de Fernando de Herrera (Works of Garcilaso de la
Vega with Comments by Fernando de Herrera), puts emphasis on the astonishing use of
metaphor — the transference (traslación) between things remote — to engage the
reader’s mind by ‘touch[ing] the very senses, and particularly that of sight’.90 In
Herrera, metaphor is no longer a verbal ornament but an expression of the poet’s wit
(ingenio) or power to enthral the reader. Herrera’s concept of metaphor and ingenio
later became full-blown in the hands of both Gracián and Tesauro, the two most
important theorists of the Baroque conceit.
In his Agudeza y arte de Ingenio (Conceit and the Art of Wit), first published in
1642, Gracián highlights ingenio as the cradle of conceit (agudeza or concepto) — ‘the
food of the soul’ — which consists ‘in a harmonic correlation among two or three
extreme knowables [conoscibles extremos], expressed by an act of the understanding’.91
Here we are reminded of Dr. Johnson’s (negative) comments on the Metaphysical
conceit: it is ‘a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or
discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike’. Uncongenial to the
Neo-Classical taste, ingenio, together with its product conceit, is for Dr. Johnson ‘a
voluntary deviation from nature in pursuit of something new and strange’.92 On
the contrary, Gracián deems ingenio the aesthetic and noblest way of understanding:
‘The ingenio is for him what the poetic imagination is for the romantic; the concepto
is its shortest f light’.93
In a similar vein, Tesauro, in Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Perspective-
Glass), first published in 1654, holds that, in opposition to intelletto, the faculty of
seeking logical truth, ingegno (wit) is the faculty of ‘binding together the remote
and separate notions of the proposed objects’, and thus exactly corresponds to
‘the function of metaphor’, of ‘express[ing] one concept by means of another
very different one’, of ‘finding similarity in things dissimilar’.94 Tesauro takes an
extremely high view of metaphor as he considers it to be the ‘mother of poetry, of
conceits, of ingenious notions, symbols, and imprese’ (p. 25). In Tesauro, metaphor
and wit are interchangeable; and ‘the metaphor is more witty and acute when the
notions are very remote’ (p. 27). In addition to the imaginative distance between
its components, metaphor, to be successful, also depends on its novelty because ‘the
novelty causes wonder’ (p. 33). To render metaphor far-fetched and novel, the poet
is required to have his/her ingegno sharpened by furor poeticus, because ‘the insane’,
as Mazzeo paraphrases Tesauro, ‘are especially gifted at making metaphor where the
86 The Baroque Grotesque

insane person is continually taking one thing for another’.95 In other words, it takes
ingegno and furor for the poet to name one thing by means of another very different
one, to create something ex nihilo as does God. Tesauro says:
So, it is not without reason that ingenious men are called divine. Since, just as
God produces what is from what is not, in the same way wit produces beings
from non-beings: it makes the lion become a Man, and the eagle a town.96
As Gracián and Tesauro formulated their poetics of marvellous metaphors or conceits
on the Continent, Thomas Hobbes, ‘the philosopher of the Baroque’,97 fashioned
a theory of artistic fancy or imagination in England which resonated with the
Continental poetics. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes accords to Fancy or Imagination
the central role in creating poetry: ‘In a good Poem, [. . .], both Judgement and
Fancy are required: But the Fancy must be more eminent; because they please for
the Extravagancy’. Whilst a Good Judgement is the ability to distinguish between
similar things, a Good Fancy or a Good Wit is the ability to observe similitude
in things of different natures (pp. 50–51).98 Here Hobbes prefigures Shelley’s
Romantic theory of poetic imagination: ‘Reason respects the differences, and
imagination the similitudes of things. [. . .] Poetry, in a general sense, may be
defined to be “the expression of the imagination” ’.99 More importantly, Hobbes
brings forth two kinds of imagination/fancy: simple and compounded. The former
occurs ‘when one imagineth a man, or horse, which he hath seen before’; the latter
‘when from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive
in our mind a Centaur’. Simply put, the distinction between the two kinds is that
between reproductive imagination and creative imagination (or between icastic
imitation and phantastic imitation). Hobbes ascribes to the poet the ‘compounded’,
or creative, imagination, the faculty of ‘making up a Figure out of the parts of divers
creatures’: poets are allowed to venture on what they will to ‘make their Centaures,
Chimaeras, and other Monsters never seen’.100 Here we are reminded of Cennini’s
fifteenth-century conception of fantasia as the faculty to ‘compose a figure, either
upright or sitting, or half man, half horse’ (see Chapter 1, sect. 3).
In fine, in the Baroque poetics of the marvellous, a far cry from the Platonic/
Horatian principle of art, the imagination — intimately bound up with furor poeticus
— has a creative rather than reproductive nature; the phantastic, so to speak, is
privileged over the icastic. It is through his creative imagination that the Baroque
poet, as Odette de Mourgues describes,
carr[ies] his reader into his own world which is often a sort of surreality, and
to light up for him those strange vistas which such baroque sensibility can
open up both in the concrete world of nature and in the recesses of man’s
consciousness.101
The Baroque imagination is in fact the poet’s ingenio (or ingegno) and furor: the two
qualities combine to provide the poet with the divine faculty of arbitrarily naming
one thing in terms of another or of compounding discordant parts into an object
at the cost of truth (to nature). The Baroque poetics of the marvellous therefore
(re)kindles the interest in metaphor, or rather, the use of metaphor or conceit to
create graphically marvellous imagery as a means of yielding the aesthetic pleasure
of (sublime) astonishment.
 The Baroque Grotesque 87

The Baroque metaphor at its most extreme, I would suggest, is ‘pseudometaphor’,

a type of metaphor which tantalizes ‘us with a figurative sense that isn’t there’102
because, as in schizophrenic cognition, one thing is identified with another so
arbitrarily as to create an unbridgeable logical gap between them, to discharges
effectively the semiotic deluge of ‘nonsense effects’.103 That is, pseudometaphor
semioticizes metaphor’s normal, or symbolic, function of generating a figurative
sense strong enough to lead the reader’s attention away from its literal nonsense
or falsehood. In the following section, we shall see that Crashaw is a leading
practitioner of pseudometaphor.

5. The Art of Crashaw’s Grotesque Imagery

‘Exaggeration, hyperbolism, excessiveness’, according to Bakhtin, are the underlying
principles of the grotesque; and the grotesque occurs when exaggeration or
hyperbole reaches fantastic dimensions, say, the human nose being metamorphosed
into a snout.104 That is, to be grotesque, hyperbole or exaggeration has to be f lesh-
made enough to bring about an in-between physical structure and thus throw
us into a domain of (bio)logical contradiction. In this section, I will show how
Crashaw impregnates his hyperbolical pseudometaphors with energetic f leshliness
to breed grotesque physicality that stimulates the mind to ‘savour’ divine awe and,
notably, terror.
Quintilian, as we recall, asserted that bold metaphorical personification —
i.e. inanimate objects springing to life — results in the extraordinary effect of
sublimity. Bold metaphorical personification alone may be enough to engender
sublimity but not grotesqueness; personification, to be grotesque, has to become
physically hyperbolical — or rather, trans-formal — to the extent that the mind’s
eye sees vividly one form being changed into another. Thus, grotesqueness is absent
in Virgil’s personification in the Aeneid that Quintilian quoted:
Araxes’ f lood that scorns a bridge.
The verb ‘scorn’ is not associated with the f lesh so strongly as to transfuse into the
f lood a fantastic image of bodily metamorphosis. By contrast, in Crashaw’s ‘Luc. 7’,
Her eyes f lood lickes his feets faire staine,
Her haires f lame lickes up that againe. (ll. 1–2, p. 97)
the verb ‘lick’ instantly arouses an image f leshly enough to present graphically to
the mind’s eye the exaggerated transformation of the f lood and of the f lame into
a tongue. Grotesque physicality is therefore born: whilst these metamorphoses are
absurd or playful because of logical impossibility, it makes one’s eyes ache and body
shiver — because of the fear of pain — to visualize a watery tongue sticking out of
Magdalene’s eyes and a fiery tongue growing out of her head to lick Christ’s feet.
Significantly, these metamorphic images are so energetic or lively as to stick
around in the mind’s eye even after one reaches the figurative understanding of
the metaphors in the above two lines — i.e. Magdalene’s penitent behaviour of
washing Christ’s feet with her tears and wiping them with her hair.105 For the
functional elements of these metaphors are weak or absent: first, the conjunction of
88 The Baroque Grotesque

tears and a f lood may not be too far-fetched, but hair and f lame have nothing in
common other than that Magdalene might have long f lowing red hair which looks
like fire; second, tears and a tongue may share the function of cleaning, but f lame
and a tongue resemble each other only in colour and perhaps in shape. Here the
unjustifiable identification of hair with f lame or of f lame with a tongue is typical
of pseudometaphor or schizophrenic cognition. Such identifications, governed
by affective rather than intellectual links between combined items, dramatize
the power of literal nonsense to break down symbolic signification and bring into
relief the impossibility of total comprehension or perfect knowledge in relation to
religious mysticism.
This situation can be also found in ‘On our crucified Lord Naked, and bloody’:
Th’ have left thee naked Lord, O that they had;
This Garment too I would they had deny’d.
Thee with thy selfe they have too richly clad,
Opening the purple wardrobe of thy side.
O never could bee found Garments too good
For thee to weare, but these, of thine owne blood. (p. 100)
Here Crashaw guides us to envision the spear wound on Christ’s side as a ‘purple
wardrobe’, a ‘closet for the valuable and lavish clothing of the blood’106 that gives us
salvation. A wardrobe, by definition, is a kind of container and yet a wound is not
— although it may contain things like f luids. That is to say, the likeness between
a wound and a closet is not juste enough to rationalize (figuratively) their complete
identification with each other. This would explain why Richard Rambuss considers
this hyperbolical metaphor ‘one of the [Baroque] period’s strangest devotional
conceits’.107
In elaborating on Crashaw’s prodigal use of hyperbolically sensuous imagery,
Healy writes: ‘Exaggerating an object is designed to emphasize not the object
itself, but what it spiritually represents. Hyperbole acts to direct attention from the
literal, leading the reader toward an awareness of a greater religious reality which
is being intimated’.108 I agree with Healy that hyperbole is intended to highlight
a spiritual reality; nevertheless, I shall argue that it is on the literal that rests a
higher religious reality in Crashaw’s f lesh-made hyperbolical metaphors, especially
pseudometaphors. Hyperbole is a rhetorical figure which intensifies the literal
to the extent that the signifier exceeds the signified. And pseudometaphor pushes
hyperbole to the limit: instead of leading the reader away from the literal, from the
signifier, pseudometaphor — of which Crashaw is ‘the notorious past master’109
— coerces him/her to take it literally because it lacks a figurative sense, or rather,
because the combination of its components depends predominantly or completely
on sensuous/physical similarity, the condition for the literalization of metaphor (see
Chapter 2, sect. 4). By means of effectively empowering literal nonsense, the excess
of what is possible at the level of symbolic signification, pseudometaphor in sacred
poetry, says Skulsky, excites an ‘exclamatory force’ in order to dethrone intellect or
reason in favour of emotion, namely, ‘to shock the joyless mind into wonder, and (if
all goes well) out of wonder into joy’ (pp. 61, 59). In this way, the mind surges with
emotional or carnal knowledge of the divine: ‘For Latinate Christendom, wisdom
 The Baroque Grotesque 89

is “sapience” in the root sense in which you “savor” what you enjoy immediate
contact with’ (p. 58). Literal nonsense or falsehood — that which one encounters
immediately when reading a metaphor — therefore becomes figurative. This would
constitute the raison d’être of Crashaw’s frequent use of hyperbolical f lesh-made
pseudometaphors to make his reader savour divine terror or awe.
Another telling example of pseudometaphor can be found in the hyperbolical
transformation of Christ’s hair in the previously discussed Latin epigram ‘In vulnera
Dei pendentis’:
Each hair is a slender channel for a tiny rill,
a little stream, from this red sea, as it were.
A hair and a channel can be alike only in the sense that they both are thin and long.
Thus, the reader would find it impossible to locate a functional likeness between
them that is strong enough to move the mind’s eye away from the nonsensically
horrible image of each of Christ’s hairs being transformed into ‘a slender channel’
which directs his blood. That is, this hyperbole rejects rationalization. Hence, the
longer the mind’s eye gazes on this physically outrageous image, the more the mind
surges with carnal knowledge of the terror of Christ’s agony, and the more the mind
is filled with the gratitude to divine grace.
The resistance to rationalization — which shows the intrusion of the semiotic
stream of ‘nonsense effects’ into the symbolic operation of metaphor — is also true
of the following awe-inspiring pseudometaphor of the head of a teardrop:
Faire Drop, why quak’st thou so?
‘Cause thou streight must lay thy Head
In the Dust? ô no;
The Dust shall never bee thy Bed:
A pillow for thee will I bring,
Stuff with Downe of Angels wing. (‘The Teare’, st. 6, p. 85)
If we insist on a figurative reading of this personification, we will have to ask
exactly why Magdalene can shed a tear with a head that lies on a pillow stuffed
with down from angels’ wings. But a tear and a head have nothing in common
other than that they are perhaps similar in shape. In other words, it seems impossible
to rationalize this grotesque personification with a plausible explanation unless in
terms of miracle: it is literal nonsense rather than figurative sense that makes sense in
miracles in general. It comes as no surprise, then, that this pseudometaphor strikes
Eliot as ‘freak[ish]’ to the point that he remarks: ‘One cannot conceive the state
of mind of a writer who could pen such monstrosities’.110 Presumably, Eliot would
also find freakish the following image that Magdalene’s tear turns into dew rubbing
its nose on a lily’s neck: ‘The deaw no more will sleepe | Nuzzel’d in the Lillies
necke’ (‘The Weeper’, sta. 7, p. 80). Such nonsensical, grotesque images born of
pseudometaphors are designed to undermine rational detachment in the reader and
thus fill his/her (joyless) mind with the joy of divine awe or wonder, as when one
sees the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes or the transubstantiation
of water into wine.
The pseudometaphor of a tear’s head brings us to another device that
Crashaw often employs to create devotional grotesque images which escape total
90 The Baroque Grotesque

comprehension or hermeneutic totalization: the (con)fusion of the senses or the

displacement of bodily parts. This device in fact lies at the heart of Crashaw’s art of
grotesque images as it appears in almost all his grotesque images we have seen. In
the poem ‘On the wounds of our crucified Lord’ I have discussed, for instance:
This foot hath got a Mouth and lippes,
To pay the sweet summe of thy kisses:
To pay thy Teares, an Eye that weeps
In stead of Teares such Gems as this is. (ll. 13–16, p. 99)
Crashaw turns a foot into a face: the redemptive wound on the foot transforms
into a mouth that kisses Magdalene back as well as into an eye that sheds gems
to pay back her tears. In so doing, he transfigures metonymic congruence into
metaphorical incongruity. A foot and a face are physically or spatially contiguous
(and congruous); as such, their relationship is metonymic. This is also the case in
the relationship between the wound on the foot and a mouth or an eye. Crashaw
nevertheless renders their metonymic relationships metaphorical in such a way as
to confront us as grotesque. That is, the grotesque occurs when the senses (con)
fuse themselves together, when that which should remain metonymic or contiguous
suddenly turns out to be metaphorical or identical: a foot is a face; a wound
is a mouth or an eye. Well taken are David Reid’s observations on Crashaw’s
displacement of bodily parts in this poem:
One is drawn into adoration so intense that the wound on the foot can take over
from the normal expressive indices of the person, the mouth and the eye in the
face. And at the same time, this displacement develops a conventional paradox
of the Magdalene epigram: in her humility Mary lavished on Christ’s feet while
he was alive the tears and kisses an ordinary lover would have spent on his
face. The most disturbing discords of the poem are at the same refinements of
preciosity, a combination of artifice and expressive violence.111
In other words, it is in the disturbing literal nonsense, the violent (con)fusion of
bodily parts, that a greater religious reality is rooted.
As a matter of fact, the (con)fusion of the senses or bodily organs is commonly
seen in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Emblemata or emblem books. For
instance, in the 1621 edition of the Italian jurist Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum
liber (1531), probably the first emblem book, Emblema XVI (Fig. 3.4) consists of
a pictura (picture) of a hand with an eye on the palm; a motto (lemma) which has
the phrase ‘membra mentis’ (‘the limbs of the mind’); and an epigram (subscriptio)
which contains the expression ‘nervi humanae membraque mentis’ (‘the sinews
and the limbs of the human mind’).112 Here images — visual and verbal — are
in fact the product of catachresis (literally, misuse), a rhetorical figure that refers
to any misuse or misapplication of a word that violates visual perception, as in
‘the sword devours f lesh’. ‘Imagistic grotesqueness is therefore rooted in a sort
of grammatical legerdemain’.113 Catachresis, according to Rosemond Tuve, is a
powerful figure frequently used by religious poets to express mysticism: ‘Religious,
notably mystical, poets, are forced toward catachresis by the transcendental nature of
what they are attempting to convey through metaphor’.114 Admittedly, Crashaw,
as we have seen, relies frequently on catachresis to create the grotesque (con)fusion
 The Baroque Grotesque 91

of the senses or bodily parts — which embodies the transcendental or metaphysical

and which nullifies the reader’s rational detachment and makes his/her mind surge
with a carnal/emotional knowledge of the divine.
Of all Crashaw’s catachrestic images, the most somatically horrible and
emotionally effective are those in which gustatory processes are involved, and blood
is the substance to be savoured. For the taste (and the sight) of blood, as Edmund
Burke would say, immediately provokes the fear of ‘pain, sickness, and death, [which]
fill[s] the mind with strong emotions of horror’.115 Indeed, no one ventures further
than Crashaw in creating devotional grotesque images that allow the reader to savour
blood, ‘the symbol of God’s redemptive act’.116 Grotesque images as such inspire not
simply awe but intense horror meant to dethrone reason most effectively.
In Stanza 2, ‘On the wounds of our crucified Lord’, as we remember, Crashaw
turns the wound on Christ’s foot into a rosy, bloody mouth which again turns into
a weeping blood-shot eye; in ‘On our crucified Lord Naked, and bloody’, Christ’s
body is draped in bloody garments taken out of the wound-wardrobe of his own
side. Also, in ‘Sancta Maria’, Crashaw mixes up wounds and eyes in depicting a
pietà scene:
While with a faithfull, mutuall, f loud
Her eyes bleed TEARES, and his wounds weep BLOOD. (st. II, p. 285)
Likewise, in ‘Adoro Te’, the speaker’s (or Crashaw’s) heart ‘gaspes’ for the balmy
blood that Christ’s wound-breast ‘weeps’ to wash his ‘worlds of sin’:
O soft self-wounding Pelican!
Whose brest weepes Balm for wounded man.
As this way bend thy benign f loud
To’a bleeding Heart that gaspes for blood.
That blood, whose least drops soueraign be
To wash my worlds of sins from me. (ll. 45–50, p. 293)
Here we see Christ’s wound is a breast equipped with an eye that weeps blood for
the mouth of a heart to taste. ‘Ô métamorphose mystique’, as Baudelaire would
put it, ‘De tous mes sens fondus en un!’ (‘O mystical metamorphosis | Of all my
senses fused in one!’).117 The horrible (con)fusion of a wound and a breast can also
be found in ‘Luke 11: Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked’:
Suppose he had been Tabled at thy Teates,
Thy hunger feels not what he eates:
Hee’l have his Teat e’re long (a bloody one)
The Mother then must suck the Son. (p. 94)
Here Crashaw directs us first to envision Christ as a son sucking his own mother’s
teats and then as ‘a monstrous hermaphrodite deity’:118 the wound of Christ’s side
transforms into a breast, and the spear that pierced his side turns into a long bloody
teat that suckles the Mother, or really, all mothers.
In all the above catachrestic pseudometaphors, grotesque images involve bleeding
wounds mixed with soft or tender materials such as tears and milk not only to
activate our visual and gustatory sensations but also to heighten emotional intensity;
in this way, we savour the blood of God and therefore, to quote St. Cyprian, ‘both
92 The Baroque Grotesque

outwardly and inwardly we are made red thereby’. In other words, such imagistic
grotesqueness terrifies the reader by triggering his/her vicarious participation in
the pain and death of suffering Christ and yet delights him/her because, thanks to
Christ’s blood, s/he is under the aegis of divine grace. Grotesque metamorphoses
caused by catachreses or f lesh-made pseudometaphors can be seen as Crashaw’s
imaginative extension of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which carries
with it, to quote Clark Hulse on metamorphic metaphors, ‘the [divine] ecstasy or
terror of the f lesh made free to move across the categories of substance, and of
the mind to move across the categories of thought’.119 It is, so to speak, through
corporeal metamorphoses — which appear at the literal level of metaphors — that
the mind savours divine terror or awe. And Crashaw, as we have seen, semioticizes
the normal, or symbolic, function of metaphor — that of engendering a (strong)
figurative sense — and thereby coerces the mind’s eye to linger on corporeal
metamorphoses.
* * * * *
In his Sacred Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (1835), one of the first anthologies of
English religious poetry, Richard Cattermole writes: ‘Crashaw is a genuine and
glowing poet: he is equally at home in the playful and the terrible, and throws an
equal interest over the familiar and the sublime’.120 If so, it is Crashaw’s f lesh-made
pseudometaphors that best illustrate such dissonant qualities (which, as we shall see
in the following chapter, speak to the Romantic taste). Crashaw sensualizes and
semioticizes his devotional pseudometaphors in such a way as to force the mind’s eye
to dwell on the vivid images of corporeal trans-formation that shock the mind into
an emotional/carnal knowledge of divine death or pain which carries with it the
joy of divine grace. In these pseudometaphors, Catholic visual piety, as we have
seen, collaborates with the Longinian visualization and the Baroque imagination to
evoke the most energetic devotional grotesque images in the Baroque Age.

Notes to Chapter 3
1. Quoted in and translated by Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and
Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 251.
2. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by
Bruce Fink (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 116.
3. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and
Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 99.
4. In his An English Traveler’s First Curiosity, or the Knowledge of his owne Country (1657), Henry
Belasyse writes: ‘What nation can show more refined witts then those of our Ben [ Jonson], our
Shakespeare, our B[e]aumont, our Fletcher, [. . .] our Crashaw, [. . .] our Sidney, our Bacon, etc.’
(quoted in Burton Confrey, ‘A Note on Richard Crashaw’, MLN, 37.4 (1922), 250–51 (p. 251)).
5. T. S. Eliot, ‘Crashaw’, in The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. by Ronald Schuchard (New
York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1996), pp. 161–84 (p. 178).
6. Praz, pp. 229, 252.
7. Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1957), p. 192.
8. Anthony Low, Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (New
York: New York University Press, 1978), p. 138; Marc F. Bertonasco, ‘A New Look at Crashaw
and “The Weeper” ’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 10.2 (1968), 177–88 (p. 177).
 The Baroque Grotesque 93

9. Richard Crashaw, ‘The Weeper’, in The Poems, English, Latin and Greek of Richard Crashaw, ed.
by L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 312. Unless otherwise indicated, all of
Crashaw’s poems will be taken from this edition of Martin.
10. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. by Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1986), p. 69.
11. R. V. Young, Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1982), p. 154.
12. Frank J. Warnke, European Metaphysical Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 82;
Low, p. 145.
13. Milton Allain Rugoff, Donne’s Imagery: A Study in Creative Sources (New York: Russell &
Russell, 1962), p. 219; Arnold Stein, George Herbert’s Lyrics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1968), p. 2; T. S. Eliot defines Metaphysical wit as ‘a tough reasonableness beneath the
slight lyric grace’ (‘Andrew Marvell’, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. by Frank Kermode (New
York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1975), pp. 161–71 (p. 162)).
14. Warnke, p. 15.
15. Thomas F. Healy, Richard Crashaw (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), p. 138. See also Chapter IV
‘Laudian Inf luences’, pp. 66–93.
16. John Cosin, The History of Popish Transubstantiation, trans. by Luke de Beaulieu, rev. edn (Oxford
and London: John Henry Parker, 1850), pp. 147–48.
17. Healy, pp. 76–77.
18. Elizabeth G. Holt, ‘ from Canons and Decrees of the Council Trent’, in A Documentary History of
Art, ed. by Holt, 3 vols (New York: Anchor, 1957–66), ii (1958), pp. 62–65 (p. 64).
19. Quoted in Todd P. Olson, ‘Pitiful Relics: Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew’, Representations,
77 (2002), 107–42 (p. 126).
20. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York and
London: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 51.
21. Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 77.
22. Nikolaus Pevsner, Studies in Art, Architecture and Design: From Mannerism to Romanticism, 2 vols
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), i, p. 32.
23. John Shearman, Mannerism (London: Penguin, 1967), pp. 180–81.
24. Ibid., p. 67.
25. Quoted in Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy: 1450–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1962), p. 134.
26. David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), p. 66.
27. Healy, ‘Crashaw and the Sense of History’, in New Perspectives on the Life and Art of Richard
Crashaw, ed. by John R. Roberts (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990),
pp. 49–65 (pp. 56–57); Low, p. 126.
28. John Ruskin, ‘Grotesque Renaissance’, in Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 3 vols (London: Smith,
Elder and Co., 1873–74), iii (1874), pp. 112–65 (pp. 148–49, 156). For Ruskin, the terrible
grotesque is embodied to the full by Dante’s Inferno because of its ‘mingling of the extreme of
[demonic] horror [. . .] with ludicrous actions and images’ (p. 148).
29. Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400–1700 (New
York: Anchor Books, 1955), p. 189.
30. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610 (Toronto
and London: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 3.
31. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, trans. by Elder Mullan, ed. by David L.
Fleming, rpt. edn (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1991), pars. 65–70, pp. 44–46.
32. In this paragraph, I am particularly indebted to Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s ‘Sensuous Worship, or
a Practical Means to a Spiritual End’, in Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic
Reformation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 29–55.
33. Vernon Hyde Minor, The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 23.
34. Quoted in and translated by Inemie Gerards-Nelissen, ‘Otto van Veen’s Emblemata Horatiana’,
Simiolus, 5 (1971), 20–62 (p. 25).
94 The Baroque Grotesque

35. Roland Barthes, Sade-Fourier-Loyola, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Éric Marty, 3 vols (Paris: Seuil,
1993), ii, pp. 1041–162 (p. 1086).
36. The Bible, ed. by Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 145.
37. Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. by W. S. Hett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935),
424a, 427b, 429a, pp. 137, 159, 163.
38. Ibid., 431a, p. 177.
39. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Rhys Roberts, in The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, ed. by
Friedrich Solmsen (New York: Modern Library, 1984), pp. 19–218 (1412a, p. 192).
40. Critics have pointed out that Aristotle’s notion of metaphor in the Third Book of the Rhetoric
played a crucial role in seventeenth-century discussions of wit. See, for example, J. A. Mazzeo,
Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 30, 40;
Arthur Terry, Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry: The Power of Artifice (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), p. 37.
41. Cicero, De Oratore, trans. by H. Rackham, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1942), ii, Book III, xl. 159–63, pp. 125–27.
42. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. by H. E. Butler, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1920–22), ii (1921), Book VI, ii. 32, pp. 435–36.
43. E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. by Willard R. Trask
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 398.
44. Longinus, On Sublimity, trans. by D. A. Russell, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. by D. A.
Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989),
pp. 143–87 (15.1, p. 159). See also Chapter 1, sect. 4.
45. Plutarch, Moralia, trans. by Frank Cole Babbitt, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1927–36), iv (1936), 347a–c, pp. 501–03.
46. Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from
Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 12.
47. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 31–35.
48. Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1962), p. 5; Hagstrum, p. 100.
49. Hathaway, p. 118.
50. Giacopo Mazzoni, On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante: Introduction and Summary, trans. by
Robert L. Montgomery (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1983), pp. 85–86.
51. Torquato Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem (Selections), in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, ed.
by Allan H. Gilbert (New York: American Book Co., 1940), pp. 467–503 (p. 480).
52. Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991), p. 94.
53. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. by Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1984), pp. 100–01.
54. Praz, p. 272.
55. Sidney, ‘Sonnet 100’, in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. by W. A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 231 (p. 231).
56. Coleridge, ‘Richard Crashaw’, in Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. by Roberta Florence
Brinkley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1955), pp. 612–14 (pp. 613, 612).
57. Sara Coleridge, Memoir and Letters, ed. by Edith Coleridge, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: Henry S.
King, 1873), ii, 72–73.
58. Warren, ‘Crashaw’s Reputation in the Nineteenth Century’, PMLA, 51.3 (1936), 769–85
(p. 772).
59. James V. Mirollo, The Poet of the Marvelous: Giambattista Marino (New York and London:
Columbia University Press, 1963).
60. Quoted in and translated by Mirollo, p. 144.
61. Ibid., p. 148.
62. Curtius, pp. 136–38.
63. See, for example, Warren, Richard Crashaw, esp. pp. 118–32; Praz, pp. 233–53; Ruth C. Waller­
 The Baroque Grotesque 95

stein, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Style and Poetic Development, rpt. edn (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1959), esp. pp. 73–84; and Paul A. Parrish, Richard Crashaw (Boston: Twayne,
1980), pp. 62–69.
64. Crashaw’s and Marino’s lines are taken from The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. by
George W. Williams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), pp. 238–39; the English translation of
Marino’s lines is taken from Wallerstein, p. 75, n. 3.
65. Anne O’Connor, ‘Crashaw’s Marino in English: Crashaw’s Sospetto d’Herode’, in The Senses of
Marino: Literature, Fine Arts and Music of the Italian Baroque, ed. by Francesco Guardiani (New
York and Toronto: Legas, 1994), pp. 267–87 (p. 279); Wallerstein, pp. 77–78.
66. John Porter Houston points out: ‘the effect of surprise, so essential to the conceit, is generally
absent from Petrarch’s verse. The meraviglia prized in later centuries is limited to a few
mythological poems and counters the general tendency to the smoothly pleasing γλαφυρός
style’ (The Rhetoric of Poetry in the Renaissance and Seventeenth Century (Baton Rouge and London:
Louisiana State University Press, 1983), p. 15).
67. Marino, La Strage de’ fanciulli innocenti de Guido Reni, quoted in and translated by Mirollo, p. 200;
Crashaw, ‘Luke 2:21. On the Circumcision’, in The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, p. 274.
68. Erwin Panofsky, ‘What is Baroque?’, in Three Essays on Style, ed. by Irving Lavin (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 19–88 (p. 68).
69. Martin, Baroque (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 73, 101.
70. Judith Hook, The Baroque Age in England (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), p. 107.
71. Warnke, Versions of the Baroque: European Literature in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 65. See also pp. 22–23, 54, 60.
72. George Herbert, ‘The Agonie’, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. by F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 37 (p. 37).
73. OED, s.v. ‘Agony’.
74. Murray Roston, Renaissance Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987), p. 323.
75. Crashaw, ‘On the wounds of God hanging [on the cross]’, in The Complete Poetry of Richard
Crashaw, p. 390.
76. Warren, Richard Crashaw, pp. 192–93.
77. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetics, trans. by F. M. Padelford, in The Great Critics: An Anthology of
Literary Criticism, ed. by J. H. Smith and E. W. Parks (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932), pp.
107–19 (pp. 112–13).
78. Pierre de Ronsard, Abbregé de l’Art Poetique Françoys, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jean Céard et al.,
2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1993–94), ii (1994), pp. 1174–89 (pp. 1177–78). In this paragraph, as in
the following, I am particularly indebted to Murray W. Bundy’s ‘ “Invention” and “Imagination”
in the Renaissance’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 29 (1930), 535–45.
79. Ambroise Paré, for instance, lists the imagination as one of the major sources of creating
monsters in his Des monstres et prodiges (1573) (see Pontus Hulten, ‘Three Different Kinds of
Interpretations’, in The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the Sixteenth to the
Twentieth Century, ed. Hulten (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), pp. 19–34 (p. 23)).
80. Ronsard, p. 1178.
81. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. by G. Gregory
Smith, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), ii, pp. 1–193 (pp. 19–20).
82. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone
Books, 2001), p. 212.
83. Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971),
p. 69.
84. Quoted in Hathaway, p. 386. Mazzoni’s relation of poetry to fantasy and dream, according
to Hathaway, ‘is the locus classicus for the study of theories of imagination in the Renaissance’
(p. 350).
85. Mazzoni, On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante: Introduction and Summary, p. 46; On the Defense
of the Comedy (selections), in Literary Criticism: From Plato to Dryden, ed. by Allan H. Gilbert (New
York: American Book Co., 1940), pp. 359–403 (p. 388).
96 The Baroque Grotesque

86. Krieger, pp. 125–26.

87. Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1961), ii, pp. 772–73.
88. Ullrich Langer’s ‘Invention’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. by
Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 136–44 (p. 141); Mazzeo,
p. 45.
89. Mazzeo, p. 31.
90. Quoted in Terry, p. 51.
91. Quoted in S. L. Bethell, ‘Gracián, Tesauro, and the Nature of Metaphysical Wit’, The Northern
Miscellany of Literary Criticism, 1 (1953), 19–40 (p. 23).
92. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. by George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols (New York:
Octagon Books, 1967), i, pp. 20, 35.
93. See T. E. May, Wit of the Golden Age: Articles on Spanish Literature (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1986),
pp. 56, 59–60.
94. Quoted in Bethell, pp. 26–27. Unless otherwise indicated, all of Tesauro’s quotations are taken
from Bethell’s article. See also Mazzeo, pp. 32–33; Eugenio Donato, ‘Tesauro’s Poetics: Through
the Looking Glass’, MLN, 78.1 (1963), 15–30 (p. 19).
95. Mazzeo, p. 39.
96. Quoted in Fernand Hallyn, ‘Cosmography and Poetics’, in The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism, pp. 442–48 (p. 448).
97. Hook, p. 110.
98. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), pp. 51, 50–51.
99. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by Harry
Buxton Forman, 4 vols (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880), iii, pp. 99–144 (p. 100).
100. Hobbes, pp. 16, 448.
101. Odette de Mourgues, Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953),
p. 74.
102. Harold Skulsky, Language Recreated: Seventeenth-Century Metaphorists and the Act of Metaphor
(Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 48–49.
103. Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez,
trans. by Thomas Gora et al. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 133. See also Introduction, sect.
3 and Chapter 2, sect. 2.
104. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), pp. 303, 315–16.
105. St Luke writes in the Bible: ‘And, behold, a woman [Mary Magdalene] in the city, which was a
sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of
ointment, And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wipe them with the hairs of
her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.’ (St. Luke 7. 37–38, in The
Bible, p. 83)
106. Williams, Image and Symbol in the Sacred Poetry of Richard Crashaw (Columbia, SC: University of
South Carolina Press, 1967), p. 121.
107. Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 28.
108. Healy, Richard Crashaw, p. 139.
109. Skulsky, p. 50.
110. Eliot, ‘Crashaw’, p. 172. It is in such freakish imagery that Eliot sees ‘odd beauty’ and finds
Crashaw more ingenious than Donne (pp. 171–72).
111. David Reid, The Metaphysical Poets (London: Longman, 2000), p. 158.
112. Andrea Alciato, ‘Emblema XVI’, in Alciato’s Book of Emblem: The Memorial Web Edition in Latin
and English, ed. by William Barker et al. <http://www.mun.ca/alciato/016.html> [accessed 16
June 2009].
113. K. K. Ruthven, The Conceit (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 50.
114. Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century
Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), pp. 131, 133.
115. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed.
by Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 36.
 The Baroque Grotesque 97

116. Bertonasco, Crashaw and the Baroque (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1971), p. 10.
117. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Tout entière’, Les Fleurs du Mal, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Claude Pichois
(Paris: Gallimard, 1961), p. 40 (sta. 6, p. 40).
118. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1977), p. 221.
119. Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981), p. 7.
120. Quoted in Warren, ‘Crashaw’s Reputation in the Nineteenth Century’, pp. 774–75.
 C h apt e r 4
v

The Romantic Grotesque:

Baudelaire’s Demonic Imagination
Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion [. . .] are
necessary to human existence.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell1

Le mélange du grotesque et du tragique est agréable à l’esprit comme les

discordances aux oreilles blasées.
Charles Baudelaire, Fusées2

For Eliot, one of the major reasons why Baudelaire, ‘a deformed Dante’, qualifies
himself as ‘the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language’ lies in his
‘mor­bid­ity of temperament’, without which ‘none of his work would be possible
or significant’.3 Indeed, morbidity, or rather, morbid charm, is one — if not the
— defining nature of Baudelaire’s poetry: ‘Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons
des appas’ (“In repugnant objects we find charms’) (l. 14, p. 5), as he declares in
‘Au Lecteur’, the introductory poem of Les Fleurs du mal, first published in 1857.
Baudelaire seeks to poeticize the horrible or the disgusting — that which was con­
ven­tionally considered distinctly un- or anti-poetic — and thereby gives, as Erich
Auerbach has noted, the Romantic Age ‘a new poetic style: a mixture of the base and
contemptible with the sublime, a symbolic use of realistic horror, which was unpre­
cedented in lyric poetry and had never been carried to such lengths in any genre’.4
The medley of incongruous qualities is indeed the hallmark of Baudelaire’s poetry
and, noticeably, has motivated critics to consider it to be the very foundation of
the grotesque in his poetry.5 Noticeably, the grotesque, I repeat, is no doubt always
incongruous; the incongruous, however, is not always grotesque: e.g. John Donne’s
noted compass conceit, albeit born of discordia concors, does not generate grotesque
images.6 In other words, incongruous combinations are simply a sufficient rather than
necessary condition for the grotesque. In order to be grotesque, these combinations
must involve physically in-between images and thus open onto a domain of (bio)
logical incongruity that deposes reason in favour of emotion or sensation. With its
highly sensuous physical incongruity, the Baroque grotesque, as seen in Crashaw,
is designed to stimulate a vicarious in-corporation of oneself into divine suffering
and death and thereby make the mind surge with a carnal knowledge of the joy of
divine terror or awe. By contrast, the Romantic grotesque, as Kayser and Bakhtin
have noted, gives rise to an alienating world dominated by demonic horror.
 The Romantic Grotesque 99

Baudelaire goes further than any Romantics in cultivating, or indeed, poeticizing,

demonic horror as he plunges his poetic vision into ‘abîmes sans lumière’ (‘abysses
without light’) (Un mangeur d’opium, p. 426): ‘With Baudelaire’, as John Houston
writes, ‘the demonic becomes part of everyday reality’.7
The demonic in art, Northrop Fry writes, presents a ‘world of nightmare and
the scapegoat, of bondage and pain and confusion[,] [. . .] of perverted and wasted
work, ruins and catacombs, instruments of torture and monuments of folly [. . .]
[and a world that] is closely linked with an existential hell, like Dante’s Inferno, or
with the hell that man creates on earth, as in 1984’.8 Simply put, the demonic is the
presentation of the world that desire rejects. If so, in his grotesque images which
nurture bestial or diabolic sexuality/sensuality, a central motif of his ‘poetry of the
body’,9 Baudelaire paradoxically renders the demonic desirable, in that, as we shall
see, he poeticizes demonic horror to the extent that the demonic and the angelic,
le mal and the le beau become indivisible, and what Hugo calls ‘un frisson nouveau’
(‘a new frisson’) therefore arises.10 Herein lies Baudelaire’s unique contribution
to the Romantic grotesque: he impregnates demonic alienation with attractive
or desirable elements in such a way as to produce the most intense, or indeed
vertiginous, grotesque effect: grotesqueness becomes most intense, as Jennings has
put it, when its two contradictory forces ‘are both present in pronounced form’.11
In other words, going further than Hugo, who sees the grotesque — which
he associates with the ugly — simply as an aesthetic means of intensifying the
beautiful,12 Baudelaire regards the grotesque as the very incarnation of horror and
beauty — or undesirable and desirable forces — which are ‘identiques, comme
l’extrême chaud et l’extrême froid’ (‘identical, like extreme heat and extreme cold’)
(Mon cœur mis à nu, p. 1278).
In this chapter, I shall first give an overview of the Romantic grotesque in
relation to the taste for terror or horror in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
I shall then move on to discuss how the taste for terror shapes the Romantic concept
of beauty and how Baudelaire ventures further than anyone else in extracting
beauty or charm from/of terror, or broadly, the desirable from/of the undesirable
— as the title Les Fleurs du mal suggests. Nowhere does the charm of terror or
the undesirable manifest itself more powerfully than in Baudelaire’s grotesque
metaphors of bestial or diabolic sexuality/sensuality which confront the reader
with ‘le vertige de l’hyperbole’ (‘the vertigo of hyperbole’) (De l’essence du rire, p.
989). Baudelaire hyperbolizes — or semioticizes — these metaphors to the point that
it is no longer possible to draw a clear line between the literal and the figurative,
nonsense and sense; moreover, he endows these metaphors with equally strong
opposite sensational forces and thereby gives the reader no room for favouring one
force over the other. In this way, the reader is pushed into an irresistible frisson
of vertigo (a word that recurs throughout Baudelaire’s writings), into a tangible
experience of the equal coexistence of the opposing duality in human life. If at the
heart of Romanticism lies the ‘obsession with the duality of good and evil inherent
in the human condition’,13 Baudelaire’s theory and practice of the grotesque, as we
shall see, exactly epitomize this Romantic obsession in such a way that the dual
forces appear in various forms and compete with each other — in a dialectical
100 The Romantic Grotesque

manner — for dominance in work and in response: the demonic and the angelic;
horror and beauty; cruelty and volupté; monstrosity and humanity; lust and disgust;
the desirable and the undesirable; fantasy and reality; literalness and figurativeness;
and so forth.

1. ‘’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror’

Kayser and Bakhtin, albeit defining differently the nature of the grotesque proper
(see Introduction, sect. 1), concur that the Romantic grotesque is dominated by
demonic or infernal terror. For Kayser, the Romantic grotesque develops to the full
the ominous and nocturnal nature of the early modern grotesque, which represents
the intrusion of Bosch’s or Bruegel’s infernal visions into everyday reality and thus
turns the world of familiar objects into an ‘estranged’ one that ‘instills fear of life’.14
Markedly, for Kayser, the intrusion of infernal/demonic horror into the everyday
world is nevertheless able to produce ‘a secret liberation’ in the sense that ‘[t]he
darkness has been sighted, the ominous powers discovered, the incomprehensible
forces challenged’; the grotesque can be therefore seen as ‘AN ATTEMPT TO
INVOKE AND SUBDUE THE DEMONIC ASPECTS OF THE WORLD’.15 Whilst
blaming Kayser’s account of the early modern grotesque for being too sombre
and terrifying, Bakhtin agrees that Romantic grotesque bodies and bodily life are
overwhelmingly horrible: they ‘express the fear of the world and seek to inspire
their reader with this fear’.16 Loosing its tie with medieval folk culture which is
carnivalesque and regenerative and which characterizes the early modern grotesque,
the Romantic grotesque becomes ‘an individual carnival, marked by a vivid sense of
isolation’; it presents a ‘subjective, individualistic world outlook’, ‘a terrifying world,
alien to man’ (pp. 36–38). Hence, no longer joyful and festive, laughter caused by
the Romantic grotesque is ‘infernal laughter’, one which is ‘sent to earth by the
devil’ who is portrayed as ‘terrifying, melancholy, and tragic’ (pp. 38, 41). In other
words, the Romantic grotesque, for Bakhtin, jettisons the carnivalesque humour
in favour of what Jean Paul called in 1804 ‘annihilating humor’, a melancholy
humour which is deprived of regenerating power and whose greatest practitioner is
the Devil.17 In Bakhtin, as in Kayser, the Romantic grotesque marks the return or
invasion of demonic or infernal forces into our everyday world.
The pervasiveness of the demonic in the Romantic grotesque manifests itself in
Delacroix’s Méphistophélès dans les airs (Fig. 4.1), one of eighteen lithographs produced
in 1828 for a French edition of Goethe’s Faust. This painting displays the triumphant
reign of the Devil: hovering in a gloomy sky above a city landscape with the setting
sun that appears to be ominous, the Devil, grinning sinisterly, seems to be showing
his power, as Baudelaire would put it, to pull ‘les fils qui nous remuent’ (‘the strings
that move us’) (“Au Lecteur,” l. 13, p. 5) and to turn the city into a living hell. E.
T. A. Hoffman’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs), first published in 1815
and inf luenced by M. G. Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk (1796), serves as a literary
example of the Devil’s power to pull ‘les fils qui nous remuent’. The protagonist
Brother Medardus’s first experience of his own sexuality designates the beginning
of his constant conf lict between f lesh and spirit, the lustful Euphemia and the
 The Romantic Grotesque 101

Fig. 4.1. Eugène Delacroix, Méphistophélès dans les airs, 1828. © Trustees of the British Museum
102 The Romantic Grotesque

innocent Aurelia, the demonic and the angelic. Medardus’s internal battle grows so
intense that eventually he has to murder Euphemia, Aurelia’s stepmother, in order
to resist the temptation of carnal pleasure and fulfil his spiritual quest for Aurelia,
the symbol of purity. Nevertheless, Medardus’s spiritual quest for Aurelia later
develops into a carnal desire; as such, the conf lict between f lesh and sprit returns
to torment Medardus and reaches a climax on their wedding day, during which he
stabs Aurelia and f lees in order to conquer an upsurge of violent lust and guilt.
Medardus’s internal conf lict, though, does not stop haunting him. Hoffmann
presents a grotesque scene in which Medardus dreams of the innocent Aurelia
turning into Satan, taunting him with his repressed desires:
I wanted to pray. There was a confused rustling and whispering; people
I had known before appeared, madly distorted; heads crawled about with
grasshopper’s legs growing out of their ears, and leering at me obscenely;
strange birds, ravens with human heads, were beating their wings overhead.
[. . .] The chaos became madder and madder, the figures more and more weird,
from the smallest ant dancing with human feet to the elongated skeleton of a
horse with glittering eyes, its skin a saddle-cloth on which was sitting a knight
with a shining owl’s-head. [. . .] The jests of hell were being played on earth.
[. . .] Then the rabble dispersed and the figure of a woman appeared. [. . .] It was
Aurelia. ‘I am alive, and yours alone!’ she said. [. . .] In lustful frenzy I threw
my arms round her [. . .], but there was a burning pain against my breast, coarse
bristles plucked at my eyes, and Satan screeched with delight: ‘Now you are
mine alone!’ With a cry of horror I awoke.18
Here Medardus’s dream, or indeed nightmare, reads like a Boschian or Dantescan
hell full of grotesque monsters which, albeit ludicrous, horrify the reader by
instilling the fear of death; Medardus’s grotesque nightmare, so to speak, marks
the triumph of the demonic over the angelic, of the horrible over the joyful, of the
inhuman over the human.
The emphasis on demonic horror is also evident in Hugo’s Romantic conception
of the grotesque. In his ‘La Préface de Cromwell’ (1827), Hugo emphasizes that it
is the grotesque
qui fait tourner dans l’ombre la ronde effrayante du sabbat, [. . .] qui donne à
Satan les cornes, les pieds de bouc, les ailes de chauve-souris [. . .] [et] qui tantôt
jette dans l’enfer chrétien ces hideuses figures qu’évoquera l’âpre génie de
Dante et de Milton, tantôt le peuple de ces formes ridicules au milieu desquelles
se jouera Callot, le Michel-Ange burlesque.
[that runs secretly the terrifying dance of witches’ Sabbath, [. . .] that gives
Satan his horns, cloven feet, and bat’s wings [. . .], [and] that now throws into
Christian hell the hideous faces that the grim genius of Dante and Milton will
evoke, and sometimes peoples it with the ludicrous figures amongst which
Callot, the burlesque Michelangelo, will disport himself ’.]19
Here the grotesque is almost synonymous with the demonic or the infernal. Hugo’s
Notre Dame de Paris (1831) — a novel set in late fifteenth-century Paris — provides
several grotesque scenes that illustrate his own notion of the grotesque. One of
these scenes can be found in the third chapter of Book Four, wherein we see the
grotesque coupling of Quasimodo — the deformed bell-ringer of Notre-Dame —
 The Romantic Grotesque 103

and his ‘dearly beloved’ bell nicknamed ‘Marie’ into ‘a strange centaur, half man,
half bell’:
Then, suspended over the abyss, launched on the fearsome swinging of the
bell [Marie], he [Quasimodo] seized the bronze monster by its lugs, gripped it
with both knees, spurred it on with both heels and added the whole shock and
weight of his body to increase the frenzy of the peal. Meanwhile the tower
swayed; he shouted and ground his teeth, his red hair bristled, his chest sounded
like the bellows in a forge, his eye f lashed fire. The monstrous bell whinnied,
panting beneath him, and then it was no longer the bourdon of Notre-Dame or
Quasimodo, it was a dream, a whirlwind, a tempest; vertigo on sound; a spirit
clinging to a f lying crupper; a strange centaur, half man, half bell [. . .]; the
Middle Ages [would have] thought he was its demon; he was its soul.20
This scene consists of extravagant exaggerations that provoke terrifying visions of
a grotesquely estranged world experienced as if literally true. In this nightmarish
world, the border between the human and the inhuman falls apart to turn Quasi­
modo into a grotesque creature (‘half man, half bell’) endowed with demonic horror.
In light of aesthetics, the accentuation of demonic horror in the Romantic
grotesque is inseparable from the sublimity of terror that was made popular by
Edmund Burke. His forerunner John Dennis, mentioned in Chapter 1, made terror
the emotion most conducive to the sublime. By 1740, then, English poetry was full
of terrifying or horrifying elements.21 For instance, in The Grave (1743), which,
incidentally, William Blake illustrated with etchings in 1808,22 the graveyard poet
Robert Blair creates grimly decomposing images as follows:
The Grave discredits thee [Beauty]: Thy Charms expung’d
Thy Roses faded, and thy Lillies soil’d
[. . .]
Methinks! I see thee with thy Head low laid;
Whilst, surfeited upon thy Damask Cheek,
The high-fed Worm in lazy Volumes roll’d,
Riots unscar’d. [. . .]23 (ll. 240–47)
Here Blair strikes the reader with the terror of death by painting a horrific picture
in which worms have surfeited themselves with the rosy cheeks of a young lady
in her grave. The earliest explanation of the taste for the terrible can be found
in Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he holds that ‘we delight to see the most realistic
representations of ’ horrible objects such as ‘the lowest animals’ or ‘dead bodies’
in art because ‘one is at the same time learning’.24 It was Burke in the Enquiry
(1757), though, ‘who converted the early [eighteenth-century] taste for terror into
an aesthetic system and who passed it on with great emphasis to the last decades of
the century, during which it was used and enjoyed in literature, painting, and the
appreciation of nature scenery’.25
Central to Burke’s theory of the sublime is emotion, the kernel of which is terror,
‘the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’.26 In Burke, the arousal
of terror most concerns ‘self-preservation’ or physical/psychical threat:
The ideas of pain, sickness, and death, fill the mind with strong emotions of
horror; but life and health, though they put us in a capacity of being affected
with pleasure, they make no such impression by the simple enjoyment. The
104 The Romantic Grotesque

passions therefore which are conversant about the preservation of individual,

turn chief ly on pain and danger, and they are the most powerful of all passions.
(p. 36)
In almost all cases, death, Burke continues, is the most affecting idea of the sublime,
‘because there are very few pains, however exquisite, which are not preferred to
death’ (p. 36); death, so to speak, is a (if not the) most undesirable object. Burke’s
notion of death in relation to the terrible sublime, as we shall see, later became
an undercurrent of the idea of beauty that Romantic poet-critics, such as Poe and
Baudelaire, cultivated.
To be sure, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Burke was not alone
in fostering the taste for terror or the terrible. In 1763, taking Burke’s project one
step further, Kant divided the sublime into three kinds — ‘terrifying’, ‘noble’,
and ‘splendid’ — according to the elements that tint it, i.e. dread (or melancholy),
wonder, and beauty.27 The ‘terrifying’ sublime later became the emotion of the
sublime itself in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). One of Burke’s cardinal followers
was Denis Diderot, who, in his Salon de 1767, says in the language of Burke that
everything striking the soul with terror results in the sublime: ‘Les grands bruits
ouïs au loin; [. . .] le silence, la solitude, le désert, les ruines, les cavernes, [. . .] le cri
des oiseaux nocturnes, celui des bêtes féroces en hiver, pendant la nuit, surtout s’il
se mêle au murmure des vents’ (“Loud noises heard far off; [. . .] silence, solitude,
the desert, ruins, caverns, [. . .] the cry of nocturnal birds and of wild beasts in
winter, in the night, especially when it is mixed with the murmur of the winds’).28
For Diderot, the sublime, so to speak, resides in things that take on ominous or
threatening overtones and thus stimulates the imagination of terror.
In addition to Kant and Diderot, G. E. Lessing, in Laocoön (1766), remarks that
the description of physical ugliness or distortion can be used in poetry as a contrast
to perfection or ‘as an ingredient in producing or heightening the mixed sensations
of the ridiculous and the terrible’. For instance, Homer’s Hector, when ‘his face
is disfigured by blood and dust’ after being dragged on the ground, becomes ‘a
disgusting object, but he is for that reason all the more terrible and moving’.29 This
is what Baudelaire was to call in the following century ‘la jouissance de la laideur’
(‘the jouissance of ugliness’): it ‘provient d’un sentiment encore plus mystérieux,
qui est la soif de l’inconnu, et le goût de l’horrible’ (‘arises from an even more
mysterious sentiment, which is the thirst for the unknown and the taste for the
horrible’) (‘Choix de maximes consolantes sur l’amour’, pp. 472–73). Through the
elaboration of the notion of the sublime, the (late) eighteenth-century cult of terror
enlarged the domain of beauty30 and eventually in the Romantic period blossomed
into a new poetics of feeling or emotion and a new sense of beauty. Emotionalist
poetics was, of course, not entirely new: we have seen the great emphasis that
Baroque poetics lays on the creation of marvellous metaphor to inspire the reader
with the pleasure of wonder or novelty. Such an aesthetic end, however, is no longer
the first principle of Romantic emotionalist poetics, with its habitual reference to
the feelings of the poet’s mind as the quarry of poetry: poetry becomes, first and
foremost, the expression of the poet’s mental state or ‘the spontaneous overf low of
powerful feelings’.31
 The Romantic Grotesque 105

In his Dialogue on Poetry (1799–1800), Schlegel stresses that ‘the [Romantic] poet
must create all things within himself ’; that ‘poetry bursts forth spontaneously from
the invisible primordial power of mankind’; and that Romantic is what ‘presents
a sentimental theme in a fantastic form’: by ‘sentimental’, he refers to ‘that which
appeals to us, where [spiritual] feeling prevails’.32 In a similar vein, Coleridge
elaborates on the relation of poetry to feeling in ‘On Poesy or Art’ (1818): arguing
against the idle copying of nature, he maintains that ‘the genius must act on the
feeling’, viz. the mind, for ‘man’s mind is the very focus of all the rays of intellect
which are scattered throughout the images of nature’. That is to say, like music,
which ‘has the fewest analoga in nature’, poetry ‘is purely human; for all its materials
are from the mind, and all its products are for the mind’.33 In short, poetry is the
poet’s internal state made external to awaken or sharpen the reader’s internal state.
The intimate bond between poetry and feeling reached its apogee with Baudelaire’s
definition of Romanticism in Salon de 1846: ‘Le romantisme n’est précisément ni
dans le choix des sujets ni dans la vérité exacte, mais dans la manière de sentir’ (‘To
be precise, romanticism rests neither on the choice of subjects nor on the exact truth
to nature, but on the manner of feeling’) (p. 879). For Baudelaire, the Romantic
manner of feeling is ‘l’expression [. . .] la plus actuelle du beau’ (‘the most modern
[. . .] expression of beauty’) (p. 879).
Remarkably, in expressing their inner feelings, Romantic poets showed a
predilection for the so-called ‘negative emotion’. In A Defence of Poetry (1821), for
instance, the ‘Satanic School’ poet Shelley writes: ‘Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair
itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good’,
inasmuch as ‘[t]he pleasure that is in, [say,] sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of
pleasure itself ’.34 Also, Hugo, in ‘La Préface de Cromwell’, valorizes the aesthetic
importance of the grotesque in the perception of the beautiful, of difference in
sameness:
Cette beauté universelle que l’ Antiquité répandait solennellement sur tout
n’était pas sans monotonie; [. . .] le grotesque soit un temps d’arrêt, un terme
de comparaison, un point de départ d’où l’on s’élève vers le beau avec une
perception plus fraîche et plus excitée. La salamandre fait ressortir l’ondine; le
gnome embellit le sylphe.
[That universal beauty that the ancients spread solemnly on everything was not
without monotony; [. . .] the grotesque may serve as a halt, a contrast, a start­
ing point where people appreciate the beautiful with a fresher and keener per­
ception. A salamander foregrounds an undine; a gnome embellishes a sylph.]35
Hugo, as mentioned before, treats the grotesque — which he links to the ugly — as
an aesthetic means of foregrounding the beautiful. Seen in this light, the grotesque
bell-ringer Quasimodo — portrayed as a hunchback with a ‘horse mouth’, a
Cyclopean eye, etc. — serves as an able foil to the beautiful Gypsy dancer Esmeralda
and creates an aesthetic tension between ugliness and beauty in Notre-Dame de
Paris.36 Hugo brings into the province of art what was formerly rejected by classical
idealism to offer an alternative to the Platonic universality of the good and the
beautiful. For universal good and beauty, per se, are not most aesthetically expressive
and affective; instead, it is the mélange of binaries to form a contrast that gives birth
106 The Romantic Grotesque

to the most intense aesthetic pleasure of poetry. In Baudelaire’s hands, what runs
counter to classical idealism, as we shall see, is not merely a way of intensifying the
beautiful but a source of the beautiful.
A new concept of beauty is therefore born. Beauty is fully perceptible only when
it is ‘contaminated’ by its other: ‘For the Romantics’, Mario Praz notes, ‘beauty was
enhanced by exactly those qualities which seem to deny it, by those objects which
produce horror; the sadder, the more painful it was, the more intensely they relished
it’.37 Indeed, for Edgar Allan Poe, an admirer of Hoffmann’s penchant for ghastly
and criminal elements, beauty, a concept including the sublime, is what ‘excites
the sensitive soul to tears’ and thus cannot be distinguished from melancholy;
the most melancholic of all is death, and ‘the death then of a beautiful woman is
unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world’.38 Poe’s poetics of beauty may
have motivated Baudelaire — whose poetry, for Praz, epitomizes the Romantic
concept of ‘tainted beauty’39 — to conjure up ‘La Muse malade’ (‘the sick muse’) (p.
14) to beautify beauty ‘par un morbide attrait’ (‘with a morbid charm’) (‘L’Amour du
mensonge’, l. 5, p. 94). Just as, writes Baudelaire in ‘Madrigal triste’, storms refresh
f lowers, so do tears glamorize a woman’s face:
Je t’aime surtout quand la joie
S’enfuit de ton front terrassé;
Quand ton cœur dans l’horreur se noie.
[. . .]
Je t’aime quand ton grand œil verse
Une eau chaude comme le sang. (ll. 6–12, p. 169)
[I love you above all when joy | Flees from your oppressed brow; | When your
heart drowns in horror.[. . .] || I love you when your deep eye pours | A water
warm like blood.]
Consequently, Baudelaire maintains that almost every type of beauty is tinctured
with melancholy (Fusées, p. 1255) and that Delacroix is the most Romantic of all
painters mainly because of ‘cette mélancolie singulière et opiniâtre’ (‘that bizarre
and persistent melancholy’) which permeates all his works: almost all the women in
Delacroix’s works, for instance, are not pretty but ‘malades, et resplendissent d’une
certaine beauté intérieure’ (‘morbid, and glow with a certain internal beauty’) (Salon
de 1846, p. 898).
The most morbid of all women, for the Romantics, would be Medusa, whose
severed grotesque head struck Shelley with ‘tempestuous loveliness of terror’ (l. 33)40:
It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain-peak supine;
Below far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seem to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death. (ll. 1–8)
Medusa’s grotesque head, for Shelley, delights by affording a shadow of that loveli­
ness which exists in terror; terror, so to say, has beauties of its own. Significantly,
 The Romantic Grotesque 107

by singing of the beauty of Medusa’s terrible head, Shelley calls into question
the Platonic equation of the beautiful and the good and thus clears the way for
Baudelaire to fully ‘extraire la beauté du Mal’ (‘extract beauty from Evil’ or ‘extract
the beauty of Evil’) (‘Préface des Fleurs’, p. 185).

2. The (Con)fusion of ‘sentiments contradictoires’

Baudelaire did not sing directly of Medusa. Nevertheless, given that Milton’s
Satan, for him, substantiates ‘Beauté virile’ (‘manly Beauty’) par excellence, Medusa
would epitomize his catchphrase that ‘le beau est toujours bizarre’ (‘the beautiful is
always bizarre’) (Fusées, p. 1255; Exposition universelle, 1855, Beaux-Arts, p. 956). We
may as well imagine that Medusa’s demonic gaze would fill Baudelaire’s mind with
‘sympathetic horror’ (‘Horreur sympathique’):
Et vos [yeux] sont le ref let
De l’Enfer où mon cœur se plaît. (‘Horreur sympathique’, ll. 13–14, p. 73)
[And your [eyes] are the ref lection | Of the Hell where my heart delights.]
Medusa’s head would strike him as ‘[u]ne tête seduisante et belle [. . .] [qui comporte]
un désir de vivre, associé avec une amertume ref luante, comme venant de privation
ou de désespérance’ (‘[a] seductive and beautiful head [. . .] [that comprises] a desire
for life tainted with a certain f luctuating bitterness coming from deprivation or
despair’) (Fusées, p. 1255). In other words, Medusa’s grotesque head would dem­
onstrate Baudelaire’s concept of ‘sentiments contradictoires’ (‘contradictory senti­
ments’): the combination of ecstasy and horror in human life (Mon cœur mis à nu,
p. 1296).41
The mélange of contradictory sentiments is a thread that runs through the
fabric of Baudelaire’s life and works, and a trait that, Jonathan Culler suggests,
makes Baudelaire the founder of modern poetry: dissonant combinations serve ‘as
models for combining or synthesizing disparate sensations, offering moderns a way
of appreciating and thus dealing with inchoate experience, encouraging a poetic
attitude to the alienation said to characterize modern life’.42 That is to say, Baudelaire
invests an alienating world with alluring forces to make it approachable or, better
still, desirable. Baudelaire’s pronounced inclination to combine contradictory
sensations and ideas cannot be severed from his theory of the imagination. For
Baudelaire, it is the power of the imagination that enables the poet to fuse together
different or discordant materials:
Elle [L’Imagination] a créé, au commencement du monde, l’analogie et la
métaphore. Elle décompose toute la création, et, avec les matériaux amassés et
disposés suivant des règles dont on ne peut trouver l’origine que dans le plus
profond de l’âme, elle crée un monde nouveau, elle produit la sensation du neuf.
(‘It [the imagination] created analogy and metaphor. It decomposes all creation,
and, with the materials amassed and arranged according to the rules whose
origin can be found only in the deepest recess of the soul, it creates a new world and
produces the sensation of novelty.’) (Salon de 1859, pp. 1037–38; my italics)
Baudelaire, to that extent, aligns his theory with the Romantic conception of the
108 The Romantic Grotesque

imagination as the power to amalgamate binaries. For instance, the poet, according
to Coleridge,
diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each
into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively
appropriated the name of imagination. This power [. . .] reveals itself in the
balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.43
Taking Coleridge’s definition a step further, Poe brings into relief the function of
the imagination to mix up opposites — without reconciling them with each other
— to open up unlimited possibilities:
The pure Imagination chooses, from either Beauty or Deformity, only the com­
binable things hitherto uncombined. [. . .] [T]he admixture of two elements
results in a something that has nothing of the qualities of one of them, or
even nothing of the qualities of either [. . .]. Thus, the range of Imagination is
unlimited.44
To be sure, following Poe and, to a lesser degree, Coleridge, Baudelaire stresses
the mysterious power of the imagination to merge dissonant items into ‘un monde
nouveau’ that gives rise to ‘la sensation du neuf ’. The faculty of binding together
widely separate items, as we recall, is in fact the trademark of the Baroque poetics
of ingegno or agudeza (see Chapter 3, sect. 4); it is reshaped here in a modern vein in
the writings of Romantic poet-critics and, as we shall see in the next chapter, is to
be reshaped again more radically — with emphasis on le hasard (‘chance’) — in the
writings of Surrealist artist-critics.
Baudelaire’s theory of the imagination, of producing the sensation du neuf,
manifests itself in his canonical poem ‘Correspondances’, in which he posits a vision
of ‘l’immense analogie universelle’ (‘the immense universal analogy’) (Exposition
universelle, p. 953): all things — high and low, human and inhuman, intellectual and
sensual — are kindred to one another and ‘se confondent | Dans une ténébreuse
et profonde unité’ (‘blend | In a dark and profound unity’) to form a new world
(‘Correspondances’, ll. 5–6, p. 11). This ‘dark and profound’ vision initiates
the act of transition, of metonymy becoming metaphor, and, as we shall see in
Baudelaire’s observations on hashish, is fully performed by the alchemical power
of the drug to amalgamate sense perceptions and yield various sorts of grotesque
metamorphoses. The philosophical raison d’être for Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’
rests on Swedenborg’s mystical philosophy of correspondences between things
natural and things spiritual, or really, divine:
In a word, all things which exist in nature, from the least to the greatest, are
correspondents. The reason they are correspondents is that the natural world,
and all that it contains, exists and subsists from the spiritual world, and both
worlds from the Divine.45
Swedenborg’s philosophy has a great inf luence on the Romantic view of the
mystical. Nevertheless, while Swedenborg expresses a Neo-Platonic vision, the
Romantics, especially Baudelaire, tend to preoccupy themselves with plumbing ‘le
plus profond de l’âme’ or, in Freudian terms, the unconscious. ‘A direct application of
Swedenborgism’, as Anna Balakian explains,
 The Romantic Grotesque 109

would strive toward order and clarification in the world of confusion and
mystery. The entire history of literature from Romanticism to symbolism and
on to surrealism is, on the contrary, indicative of man’s shunning of order and
his cult of the mystery of things unknown rather than of a desire to associate
illumination with order or rationality.46
It is appropriate to say that Baudelaire exploits to the full the Romantic tendency
to unleash the subterranean part of actual experience or, in his words, to ‘Plonger
au fond du gouffre [. . .] | Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!’ (‘Plunge
into the abyss [. . .] | Into the Unknown to find the new!’) (‘Le Voyage’, VIII,
ll. 7–8, p. 127). As implied by Les Limbes, the original title of Les Fleurs du mal,
Baudelaire’s poetic vision soars much less into the divine than it dives into the
gouffre, the infernal, the demonic.

3. ‘Le charme infernal’

Indeed, Baudelaire is involved in the demonic — which, as we have seen, prevails
in the Romantic grotesque — more deeply than any other Romantic poet. In this
section, I seek to demonstrate the ways in which Baudelaire plunges his imagination
into the demonic to the point of turning Swedenborg’s divine correspondences
into infernal correspondences; and the ways in which he further creates beauty or
charm out of infernal correspondences and thereby makes a special contribution
to the Romantic mode of dissonant combinations in general and to the Romantic
grotesque in particular.
One can get a clear sense of Baudelaire’s aesthetic engagement in the demonic
from ‘Spleen: Quand le ciel bas et lourd’ (pp. 70–71), a poem which presents the
degradation of the world and of the f lesh. The poem begins with a stanza in which
a cloudy sky appears to be a heavy lid weighing on the mind hunted by ennui and
makes a day blacker and sadder than the night. As the poem proceeds, familiar
urban landscapes become more and more infernal to the point of being a living
hell. The terrestrial or celestial is turning into the infernal, the natural into the
supernatural, the angelic into the demonic, the living into the dead: threads of rain
are presented as prison bars; church bells as howling souls; the earth as a dungeon;
and so forth. Nothing would be more claustrophobic and despairing than the image
that hope becomes a distraught bat fighting for a way out of the city/dungeon (sta.
2). Nothing would be more disturbing than the image of spiders spinning threads
in the brain as some kind of crypt:
Quand la pluie étalant ses immenses traînées
D’une vaste prison imite les barreaux,
Et qu’un peuple muet d’infâmes araignées
Vient tendre ses filets au fond de nos cerveaux. (sta. 3)
[When the rain spreads its immense trails | Like the bars of a huge prison |
And a swarm of sordid spiders silently | Comes to spin their webs in the depths
of our brains.]
Nothing would be more violent and ominous than the image of anguish trium­
phantly planting its black f lag deep into a human skull (sta. 5). Paris becomes,
110 The Romantic Grotesque

to quote Fry on the demonic, a ‘world that desire totally rejects’,47 a waste land,
a death-in-life city ref lecting the psychological state of the poet, ‘[u]ne oasis
d’horreur dans un désert d’ennui’ (‘[an] oasis of horror in a desert of ennui’) (‘Le
Voyage’, VII, l. 4, p. 126).
Baudelaire immerses his poetic vision in the demonic and thus makes it
astonishingly different from, say, Wordsworth’s. The difference is striking when
we compare Wordsworth’s London at dawn and Baudelaire’s Paris at dawn in ‘Le
Crépuscule du matin’. For Wordsworth, London displays ‘A sight so touching in its
majesty’ (l. 3) only when it is steeped in tranquillity at dawn, namely, when it wears
the idyllic beauty of nature: ‘Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! | The river
glideth at his own sweet will’ (ll. 11–12).48 Wordsworth embellishes London with a
touch of divine beauty, whereas Baudelaire shrouds Paris at dawn in nightmares and
death: ‘C’était l’heure où l’essaim des rêves malfaisants | Tord sur leurs oreillers les
bruns adolescents; || [. . .] || Et les agonisants dans le fond des hospices | Poussaient
leur dernier râle en hoquets inégaux’ (‘It was the moment when the swarm of evil
dreams | Torture brunet adolescents on their pillows; || [. . .] || And the dying in
the depths of hospitals | Uttered their last rattle in uneven hiccups’) (p. 99). Whilst
London appears for Wordsworth to be divinely beautiful at the break of dawn, Paris
appears for Baudelaire to be full of evil forces. Again, we see here that Baudelaire
shows his pronounced proclivity for the demonic or, broadly, le Mal.
It is fair to say, then, that Swedenborg’s divine correspondences, in Baudelaire’s
hands, turn into ‘infernal correspondences’.49 As Baudelaire proclaims in ‘Alchimie de
la douleur’, with the help of ‘Hermès inconnu’ (‘mysterious Hermes’), who makes
him Midas’s counterpart, he transforms heaven into hell:
Par toi je change l’or en fer
Et le paradis en enfer;
Dans le suaire des nuages
Je découvre un cadavre cher,
Et sur les célestes rivages
Je bâtis de grands sarcophages. (ll. 9–14, p. 73)
[Through you I change gold into iron | And heaven into hell; | In the shroud
of clouds || I discover a dear cadaver | And on the celestial shores | I build
huge sarcophagi.]
As a result, ‘all the romantic iconography of snakes, bats, ravens, cats, and
female demons passed into Les Fleurs du mal’.50 What makes Baudelaire’s infernal
correspondences special, however, is that the demonic and the beautiful, alienation
and attraction become symbiotic: words with demonic or horrible overtones —
such as inconnu, gouffre, ténébreux, mauvais, poison, and cadaver — are constantly
accompanied by pleasant or tender words such as amour, parfum, baiser, rêve, and
fleur.
Here lies Baudelaire’s unique contribution to the (Romantic) mode of blending
binaries: he poeticizes and popularizes le Mal — in the form of the demonic, the
infernal, the repugnant, horror, melancholy, and so forth — by discovering beauty
in it or creating beauty out of it. That is to say, going one step further than his
 The Romantic Grotesque 111

Romantic precursors, Baudelaire treats le Mal not merely as a means of intensifying

beauty — as does Hugo — but, markedly, as an artistic quarry of beauty: ‘C’est un
des privilèges prodigieux de l’Art’, writes Baudelaire, ‘que l’horrible, aristiquement
exprimé, devienne beauté, et que la douleur rhythmée et cadencée remplisse l’esprit
d’une joie calme’ (‘It is one of tremendous privileges of Art that the horrible,
artistically rendered, becomes beautiful, and that pain, versified and cadenced,
fills the soul with a calm joy’) (‘Théophile Gautier’, p. 695). In other words, the
Baudelairean aesthetics is grounded on the denial of the unique and absolute
beautiful, namely, Platonic beauty, in that it allows horror — or what is excluded
from ideal beauty — to become a source of the beautiful. Indeed, for Baudelaire,
horror or le Mal cannot be excluded from beauty (and vice versa), as he writes in
‘Hymne à la Beauté’ that beauty’s ‘regard [est] infernal et divin’ (‘gaze [is] infernal
and divine) (l. 2, p. 23): ‘Tu marches sur des morts, Beauté, dont tu te moques; |
De tes bijoux l’horreur n’est pas le moins charmant’ (‘Beauty, you march on corpses
that you mock; | Horror is not the least charming of your gems’) (ll. 13–14, p. 23).
Beauty appears to be neither pure nor ideal; instead, it contains ‘charmant’ horror.
Hence, Baudelaire exclaims in the sixth stanza: ‘Ô Beauté! Monstre énorme,
effrayant, ingénu!’ (‘O Beauty! Enormous, frightful, innocent monster!’) (l. 22, p. 24).
Baudelaire’s oxymoronic juxtapositions of horror and beauty or of repulsive
and attractive elements indicate his aesthetic deconstruction of the Platonic unity
of the beautiful, the good, and the true: no longer do the opposite terms exclude
each other; instead, they generate or contain each other. Imagery born of the
Baudelairean oxymoron is meant to create a new world that yields la sensation du
neuf; the most violent sensation du neuf, I suggest, is that which he terms, in the
epilogue to his 1869 Le Spleen de Paris, ‘le charme infernal’ (‘infernal charm’), the
charm that ‘rajeunit sans cesse’ (‘ceaselessly rejuvenates’) Baudelaire himself (p. 310).
Infernal or demonic charm is best in-corporated in Baudelaire’s grotesque images
which cultivate bestial or diabolic sexuality/sensuality: these images combine
two ‘contradictory sentiments’ in one body in such a way as to push the reader
into the vertigo of desiring the undesirable. For instance, horror and jouissance are
in-corporated in worms that eat away a woman’s f lesh ‘with kisses’:
Alors, ô ma beauté! dites à la vermine
Qui vous mangera de baisers,
Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine
De mes amours décomposés! (‘Une Charogne’, sta. 12, p. 31)
[Then, o my beauty! tell the worms | Which eat you with kisses, | That I have
kept the form and divine essence | Of my decomposed loves!]
What is vertiginous here is not putrefaction itself but putrefaction combined with
what is cognitively and emotionally incompatible with it, namely, kissing: worms
that are imagined in terms of human form ‘kiss’ the f lesh of the speaker’s beloved.
This situation throws the reader into the disorientating domain of the literal/
figurative, nonsense/sense, the undesirable/desirable, as hardly anyone would
expect kissing in the context of putrefaction. Besides, hardly anyone would disagree
that Baudelaire’s decaying image is charged with emotional tension much more
than Blair’s which simply instils the horror of death (discussed before), inasmuch
112 The Romantic Grotesque

as the former mixes together extreme opposites — jouissance and horror, volupté
and decay, lust and disgust — on equal terms to collapse the border between what
is desirable and what is undesirable: as Baudelaire writes, ‘Cruauté et volupté,
sensations identiques, comme l’extrême chaud et l’extrême froid’ (‘Cruelty and
voluptuousness are identical sensations, like extreme heat and extreme cold’) (Mon
cœur mis à nu, p. 1278). Baudelaire has the extremes blend into each other in such
a way as to throw a new light on le baiser de la mort (‘the kiss of death’) and to
suffocate the possibility of favouring one extreme over the other, thus throwing the
reader into a state of cognitive and emotional vertigo. In sum, this image not only
illustrates but carries to the limit the effects of the grotesque I have established: the
grotesque, as a (bio)logically contradictory body, gives rise to cognitive uncertainty,
emotional disharmony, and hermeneutic indeterminacy.
It is fair to say, then, that the aesthetic aim of the Baudelairean oxymoron, or
really, the Baudelairean imagination, is to unify — without reconciling — two
extreme or contradictory sentiments into the most violent ‘sensation of novelty’, the
vertigo of demonic/infernal charm or desiring the undesirable. Unification as such,
as we shall see shortly, is inseparable from Baudelaire’s notion of the grotesque,
which, for him, is the highest form of contemporary art.

4. The Baudelairean Grotesque

In De l’essence du rire (1855), which began as ref lections on the comic in the plastic
arts (especially caricature) and developed into a work on the grotesque, Baudelaire
brings forth two aesthetic ideas, le grotesque and le comique. From the perspective of
art, the comic, or le comique significatif, is an imitation with a touch of creativity and
speaks in a language easier for common people to follow; the source of laughter it
provokes derives from the superiority of man over man (p. 985), as in our laughing
at a comedian tripping on a banana skin. By contrast, the grotesque, or le comique
absolu, belongs to ‘créations fabuleuses, les êtres dont la raison, la légitimation ne peut
pas être tirée du code du sens commun’ (‘fabulous creations, whose raison d’être goes
beyond common sense’), because it carries within itself ‘quelque chose de profond,
d’axiomatique et de primitif ’ (‘something profound, axiomatic, and primitive’), that
is, something uncivilized or untamed by moral or cultural inhibition.
Baudelaire goes on to say that the grotesque, the highest form that contemporary
art can achieve, is ‘une création mêlée d’une certaine faculté imitatrice d’éléments
préexistants dans la nature’ (‘a creation mixed with a certain faculty of imitating
elements found in nature’), and its laughter results from ‘l’idée de supériorité,
non plus de l’homme sur l’homme, mais de l’homme sur la nature’ (‘the idea
of superiority, no longer of man over man, but of man over nature’) (p. 985).
The grotesque, as Yvonne B. Rollins explains, would not provoke ‘un tel rire si
l’homme ne pouvait pas y [le fantastique] retrouver des éléments de la nature à
laquelle il se croit supérieur. Le grotesque forme donc un lien évident entre le réel
et le fantastique’ (‘such laughter if man could not find in it [the fantastic] some
elements of nature to which he feels superior. The grotesque thus forms an obvious
link between the real and the fantastic’).51 That is to say, man feels superior to nature
 The Romantic Grotesque 113

because he finds in fantastic creations the triumph of the human imagination over
the order of nature to make the f lesh free to f low from one order of substance into
another.
To be more precise, the grotesque demonstrates the satanic ambition — with
a divine act — to introduce pandemonium into the (orderly/ordinary) world, to
create the supernatural out of the natural, the fantastic out of the real, the demonic
out of the divine; it is the constant clash of the two elements that gives rise to ‘une
ivresse de rire, quelque chose de terrible et d’irrésistible’ (‘a convulsion of laughter,
something terrible and yet irresistible’) (p. 989). That is, ‘a convulsion of laughter’
expresses ‘un sentiment double, ou contradictoire’ (‘a double or contradictory
sentiment’); it can be compared to the ‘rire terrible’ (‘terrible laughter’) of Melmoth,
who, like Hoffmann’s Brother Medardus, is torn between the diabolic and angelic
forces of his soul (p. 984). The grotesque, so to speak, is an artistic phenomenon that
embodies ‘dans l’être humain l’existence d’une dualité permanente’ (‘the existence
of a permanent duality in the human being’) (p. 993), that is, the coexistence of
‘contradictory sentiments’: the ecstasy and horror of life. It is for this reason that
Baudelaire regards the grotesque as the highest form of contemporary art.
Noticeably, from the artistic viewpoint, by placing the grotesque between
the fantastic and the real, Baudelaire connects his idea of the grotesque to the
paradoxical nature of Mannerist grottesche, namely, the combination of fantasia and
mimesis (see Chapter 1, sect. 3). In the sixteenth century, grottesche were intimately
bound up with the verisimilar: grotesque figures, as the sixteenth-century Italian
artist Pirro Ligorio once argued, ‘sont comparables aux songes vains mais naturels
des choses vraies et des choses vraisemblables’ (‘correspond to illusory but natural
dreams of things true and of things verisimilar’).52 Besides, ‘good’ grottesche were
expected to ‘meet the standard of verisimilitude’.53 Hence, in her recent book on the
Baudelairean grotesque, Virginia E. Swain is mistaken when implicitly linking it to
the (High Renaissance/Mannerist) grotesque on the basis of ‘refus[ing] the demand
for verisimilitude (vraisemblance)’.54
As discussed in Chapter 1, without the verisimilar quality, the grotesque could
not exert any uncanny inf luence, in that artworks of totally fantastic nature cannot
create in our minds intellectual uncertainty about the division between imagination
and reality, the alien and the familiar, the primitive and the civilized. To produce
the aesthetic effect of the uncanny, according to Freud, a verisimilar or realistic
context is required to make us react to fantastic creations as we would have reacted
to real experiences; therefore, the cognitive border becomes uncertain between
imagination and reality, the inside and the outside, and so does the psychical
border between the ‘I’ and the ‘not I’ (PFL xiv, 374). It is through the blurring
of the psychical border that the emotions or sensations of artworks exercise their
power over us. Baudelaire understands the import of verisimilitude in the reader’s
or viewer’s perception of fantastic creations, as he shows his admiration for Goya’s
‘grand mérite’ (‘great virtue’) of ‘créer le monstrueux vraisemblable’ (‘making
the monstrous verisimilar’) in the artist’s Los Caprichos, a series of eighty etchings
published in 1799 that are meant to satirize human follies and vices.
In Quelques caricaturistes étrangers, first published in 1857, Baudelaire praises
114 The Romantic Grotesque

these etchings highly: in Los Caprichos, Goya, one of Baudelaire’s artistic ‘phares’
(‘beacons’),55 presents ‘toutes les débauches du rêve, toutes les hyperboles de
l’hallucination’ (‘all the debaucheries of dreams, all the hyperboles of hallucination’);
he combines ‘grotesques horreurs’ (‘grotesque horrors’) and ‘singulière jovialité’
(‘unusual joviality’) to reveal ‘le sentiment des contrastes violents’ (‘the sentiment
of violent contrasts’) (pp. 1018, 1019). Such a combination, Baudelaire continues, is
embedded in Goya’s involvement in ‘making the monstrous verisimilar’:
[S]es monstres sont nés viables, harmoniques. Nul n’a osé plus que lui dans
le sens de l’absurde possible. Toutes ces contorsions, ces faces bestiales, ces
grimaces diaboliques sont pénétrées d’humanité [. . .]; en un mot, la ligne de
suture, le point de jonction entre le réel et le fantastique est impossible à saisir;
c’est une frontière vague que l’analyste le plus subtil ne saurait pas tracer.
(pp. 1019–20)
[[H]is monsters are born viable, harmonious. No one has ventured further than
he in making the absurd possible. All those contortions, those bestial faces,
those diabolic grimaces are imbued with humanity [. . .]; in a word, the line
between the real and the fantastic is impossible to discern; it is a vague frontier
that even the subtlest analyst could not trace.]
For instance, in Miren que grabes! (Look How Serious They Are!) (Fig. 4.2), two
verisimilar grotesque monsters riding on horseback not only have human torsos
but behave so humanly as to create cognitive confusion of fantasy and reality. That
is, Goya’s grotesque monsters are ‘harmoniques’ in the sense that they in-corporate
contradictory forces — monstrosity and humanity, the fantastic and the real, the
absurd and the possible — on equal terms to embody the equation of the diabolic
and angelic aspects of human nature. Aesthetically, Goya’s grotesque monsters
carry to extremes the uncanny uncertainty — the vaguest frontier — between
these contradictory forces and thus fully disorientate the viewer’s intellectual
and emotional judgements. Goya thereby ‘a ouvert dans le comique de nouveaux
horizons’ (‘opened up new horizons in the comic’) (p. 1017).
To be sure, these new horizons lie in the uncanny, clashing equilibrium between
fantasia and mimesis, monstrosity and humanity, horror and joviality; opposing forces
of this kind are both equally prominent to the extent of leaving the viewer no
room at all for preferring one over the other and thereby throwing him/her into
an irresistible sensation of vertigo. These new horizons find an echo in Baudelaire’s
grotesque image of worms ‘kissing’ female f lesh that we have seen. In this grotesque
image, as in others we shall see in the last section, Baudelaire makes it impossible
to ascertain the clear-cut borderline between humanity and monstrosity, volupté and
cruelty, ecstasy and horror; as such, the reader is pushed into a vertiginous state of
desiring the undesirable, into a tangible experience of the diabolic vying with the
angelic for dominance in the human condition.

5. ‘Le culte des images’

To have a comprehensive discussion of Baudelaire’s grotesque imagery, one cannot
ignore his urge to ‘[g]lorifier le culte des images’ (‘[g]lorify the cult of images’) (Mon
cœur mis à nu, p. 1295). For Baudelaire’s ‘culte des images’ — which aims to make
 The Romantic Grotesque 115

Fig. 4.2. Francisco Goya, Plate 63,

Los Caprichos, 1799
Fig. 4.3. Victor Brauner, Woman into Cat, 1940,
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York. © Victor
Brauner / ADAGP, Paris – SACK, Seoul, 2009
116 The Romantic Grotesque

poetic language sensuously appealing and thus sensationally stimulating — is in fact

the cult of tangible or f lesh-made images, which, as we have seen, is the cradle of
grotesque metamorphoses in verbal arts (see Chapter 2, sect. 4).
For Baudelaire, ‘the most visual of French nineteenth-century poets’,56 the purpose
of the imagination, as we remember, is to create a new world full of la sensation du
neuf; the imagination cannot carry out this purpose without images: ‘Tout l’univers
visible n’est qu’un magasin d’images et de signes auxquels l’imagination donnera
une place et une valeur relative; c’est une espèce de pâture que l’imagination doit
digérer et transformer’ (‘The whole visible universe is just a warehouse of images
and signs to which the imagination will give a place and a relative value; it is a kind
of pasture that the imagination must digest and transform’) (Salon de 1859, p. 1044).
Baudelaire’s ‘culte des images’ is typical of the interest of the Romantic poet in the
medium (rather than subject) of painting as an attempt to render poetic language
more plastic or more visually appealing to affect the mind; and with the shift of
aesthetic import from line to colour in Romantic painting (as in Géricault and
Delacroix), ‘the “line” in literature, the line of discourse, syntax and rhetoric, that is
the rational, structuring, metonymic element in language, was to cede the initiative
increasingly to the figurative and metaphorical, the “image” ’.57 As a result, the
Romantic poet began to ‘think in images’, which, to be sure, reaches its summit in
Baudelaire’s ‘culte des mages’.
Baudelaire’s involvement in images, as McKay Johnson cogently elucidates, is a
call for the translation into poetry of Delacroix’s notion of ‘la puissance de la peinture’
(‘the power of painting’).58 Throughout his journal, Delacroix consistently privileges
painting over poetry (and music) by promoting the power of painting: tangibility,
visibility, immediacy, expressivity, brevity, and the like. On 20 October, 1853, for
instance, Delacroix wrote:
Ce genre d’émotion propre à la peinture est tangible en quelque sorte; la poésie
et la musique ne peuvent le donner. Vous jouissez de la représentation réelle de
ces objets, comme si vous les voyiez véritablement [. . .]. Ces figures, ces objets
[. . .] semblent comme un pont solide sur lequel l’imagination s’appuie pour
pénétrer jusqu’à la sensation mystérieuse et profonde [. . .]: art sublime dans ce
sens, si on le compare à celui où la pensée n’arrive à l’esprit qu’à l’aide des lettres
mises dans un ordre convenu.59
[The kind of emotion proper to painting is tangible in a way. You enjoy the
actual representation of objects, as if you really saw them [. . .]. These figures,
these objects [. . .] seem like a solid bridge on which the imagination stands to
dive into the mysterious and profound sensation [. . .]: this art is sublime in this
sense, if one compares it to the one in which thought reaches the mind only
with the help of letters arranged in a conventional manner.]
Here Delacroix continues the Baroque tradition of the primacy of sight — the
power to re-present objects to the sense of sight as the royal road to the stimulation
of emotion or sensation (see Chapter 3, sect. 2); and latent behind the primacy of
sight is the pursuit of the f lesh, namely, f lesh-made images: ‘la vue, procuratrice
du toucher, est facilement associée au désir de la chair’ (‘sight, the procuress
of touch, is easily associated with the desire of the f lesh’), as Barthes writes.60
 The Romantic Grotesque 117

Markedly, Delacroix’s accent on the tangible power of painting to affect the viewer
inspires contemporary poets — notably Baudelaire — to create the impression of
sensuousness or f leshliness.
Baudelaire seems to agree with Delacroix’s idea of the inferiority of the verbal to
the visual in terms of exciting emotion or sensation, as he himself remarks on the
wondrous power of the first English pantomime he saw to cause a burst of terrible
laughter: ‘Avec une plume tout cela est pâle et glacé. Comment la plume pourrait-
elle rivaliser la pantomime?’ (‘With the pen the whole thing is pale and chill.
How could the pen rival pantomime?’) (De l’essence du rire, p. 990). It is therefore
tempting to say that Baudelaire appreciates Delacroix’s idea of ‘tangible’ emotion
and endeavours to introduce ‘the power of painting’ — the primacy of sight — into
poetry, in order to make his poetic images tangible or f leshly enough to be a solid
bridge on which the reader’s imagination stands to dive into la sensation mystérieuse
et profonde (in Delacroix’s terms) or la sensation du neuf (in Baudelaire’s terms). It is
no accident, then, that Baudelaire’s poetry is, for Culler, ‘more explicit than most
in its engagement with the body as the site of phantasms, stimulus to imagination
and reverie’;61 and that Baudelaire’s grotesque images — which nurture bestial or
diabolic sexuality/sensuality — serve to plunge the reader’s imagination into the
most vertiginous sensation du neuf. In fact, Baudelaire’s indulgence in the alchemical
power of hashish reveals his desire for tangible or f lesh-made verbal images:
La grammaire, l’aride grammaire elle-même, devient quelque chose comme
une sorcellerie évocatoire; les mots ressuscitent revêtus de chair et d’os, le
substantif, dans sa majesté substantielle, l’adjectif, vêtement transparent qui
l’habille et le colore comme un glacis, et le verbe, ange du movement, qui
donne le branle à la phrase.
[Even grammar, arid grammar itself, becomes something like an evocative
sorcery; the words revive in f lesh and bone, the noun, in its substantial majesty,
the adjective, the transparent garment that clothes and colours the noun with a
glaze, and the verb, angel of movement, that gives momentum to the sentence.]
(Le Poëme du haschisch, p. 376)
Thanks to hashish, the verbal becomes f lesh-made and thus has the magical power
to become visual, or better still, visually sensational.
Baudelaire’s fascination with ‘the power of painting’ also manifests itself in his
frequent use of personification, the form that, as seen in Crashaw, pictorialization
often takes:
Et [l’Ennui] dans un bâillement avalerait le monde. (‘Au lecteur’, sta. 9, p. 6)
[And [Ennui] in one yawning would swallow the world.]
— Un parfum nage autour de votre gorge nue! (‘Causerie’, l. 11; p. 54)
[— A perfume swims around your naked throat!]
In these examples, abstract ideas and inanimate objects are given life and action
to hit the mind’s eye through powerful visual sensations. That is, Baudelaire
strives to enable poetry to emulate the power of painting by re-presenting tangible
or f lesh-made images in the mind’s eye as a means of affecting the mind or the
118 The Romantic Grotesque

soul. As Hiddleston convincingly writes of Baudelaire’s striking images: central to

Baudelaire’s poetry is ‘[i]magery of the most original and disconcerting kind’; his
similes and metaphors are never weak or humdrum; they spring dramatically
into life with a physicality so powerful as to give an acute sense of the tactile,
and because the gap within the figure, between the tenor and the vehicle, is so
great as to produce a creative explosion in the mind of the reader.62
To put it simply in Longinus’ terms, Baudelaire’s tangible or f leshly images contain ‘a
quality of exaggeration which belongs to fable and goes far beyond credibility’.63
Baudelaire has a prominent fondness of exaggeration or hyperbole, because
hyperbole, as he observes, provides the English pantomime with the power to
provoke terrible laughter (De l’essence du rire, p. 989). Hyperbole, as discussed in
Chapter 3, empowers the literal (nonsense) to emulate or exceed the figurative
(sense), thus readily leading to bizarrerie, the keystone of Baudelaire’s notion of
beauty. Hyperbole or exaggeration, according to Bakhtin, is a prerequisite of the
evocation of the grotesque image: the grotesque starts when f lesh-made hyperbole
reaches fantastic dimensions,64 say, a human hand being metamorphosed into a
snake in Baudelaire’s ‘Le Revenant’ (sta. 2, p. 62). For Baudelaire, hashish proves
to be the most effective ‘sorcellerie évocatoire’, enabling f lesh-made hyperbole to
reach fantastic dimensions, that is, making the f lesh free to move across biological
and conceptual boundaries.
For the drug causes hallucinations in which the natural order of things collapses,
and the incomplete metamorphosis of one thing into another occurs:
Les hallucinations commencent. Les objets extérieurs prennent des apparences
monstrueuses. Ils se révèlent à vous sous des formes inconnues jusque-là. Puis ils
se déforment, se transforment, et enfin ils entrent dans votre être, ou bien vous
entrez en eux. Les équivoques les plus singulières, les transpositions d’idées les
plus inexplicables ont lieu.
[‘Hallucinations start. External objects have monstrous appearances. They reveal
themselves to you in forms unknown before. Then they deform themselves,
transform themselves, and eventually they become part of you or the other way
around. The most unusual evocations, the most inexplicable transpositions of
ideas take place.] (Du vin et du hachish, p. 338)
This is the intoxication of hashish — ‘the vertigo of hyperbole’ — which allows
the semiotic deluge of ‘nonsense effects’65 to break through the symbolic structure:
the governing rules of logic or reason fail and so do all categories; thence emerge
monsters that are properly speaking unnameable, uncategorizable, or inexplicable.
In a word, hashish, for Baudelaire, renders ‘l’imagination de l’homme plus subtile’
(‘the human imagination more subtle’) (Le Poëme du haschisch, p. 349) and more
able to ‘digest and transform’ crude images — or rather, (con)fuses contradictory
sentiments — into a new and unexpected world full of grotesque metamorphoses,
thereby producing la sensation du neuf.
 The Romantic Grotesque 119

6. The Art of Baudelaire’s Grotesque Imagery

For Baudelaire, the grotesque, as we recall, embodies the coexistence of the
‘contradictory sentiments’ inherent in the human condition — the diabolic and
the angelic, horror and ecstasy — and thus becomes the highest achievement of
Romantic art. For him, Goya’s ‘harmoniques’ monsters open up new horizons in
the grotesque, because they in-corporate contradictory sentiments on equal terms to
the point of making it impossible to draw a clear line between them. That is, they
leave us no room at all for favouring one over the other and thus confront us with an
irresistible sensation of vertigo. This situation speaks directly to Baudelaire’s belief
that contradictory sentiments are ‘identiques, comme l’extrême chaud et l’extrême
froid’ (mentioned before).
In terms of cognition, Goya’s ‘harmoniques’ monsters — monsters ‘pénétrées
d’humanité’ — can be best understood in terms of Jennings’s idea of the grotesque:
‘The grotesque object’, as Jennings observes, ‘is a figure imagined in terms of
human form but devoid of real humanity’:
In the case of gnarled stumps, and the like, it is common to find animal figures
in their contorted forms (since animal shapes are among the fixed forms with
which the imagination comes to the aid of perception); but the real grotesque
effect begins when human faces and figures come to light. The impression of
humanness must not be too strong, the distortion not so great that it obliterates all traces
of the human figure; but, on the other hand, it must show a drastic departure from the
elements of human appearance and personality that we commonly experience. This is
shown in the case of the deformed person; the deformity must be sufficiently
pronounced that we momentarily forget that we have an actual person before us.66
Two points need our attention here. First, Jennings suggests that ‘real’ grotesque
effects happen only when metamorphoses involve the human form. Such
metamorphoses, however, simply constitute one type of the grotesque — although
it would be the most emotionally stimulating type because it contains the human
body. Besides, the grotesque effect takes place also in metamorphoses without
human forms, as in the case of chimeras.
Second, Jennings’s idea of the grotesque lies in the uncanny, conf licting balance
between human and inhuman forms which at once interferes and f lirts with
perceptual constancy and therefore f lings us into a state of cognitive indecision.
Such a cognitive indeterminacy can effectively cause a sort of psychodynamic
uncertainty to which Tsur draws our attention:
What characterizes the grotesque [. . .] is a disruption of alternativeness. Instead of
deciding unambiguously in favour of one or another defense mechanism, the
grotesque leaves the observer in an intermediate state, in uncertainty, in a state
of indecision. He has a sense of ‘emotional disorientation’.67
Take as an example Goya’s monsters ‘pénétrées d’humanité’ in the afore-said Miren
que grabes!. Instead of being unambiguously human or unambiguously inhuman,
or predominantly human or predominantly inhuman, they give the observer no
alternative of either allowing the threat coming from monstrosity its authority
or denying it. Goya’s grotesque monsters, so to say, actively unsettle the habitual
120 The Romantic Grotesque

mode of cognitive and emotional alternativeness with two equal and incompatible
possibilities and thereby leave the observer in a state of disorientation, or indeed,
vertigo. In Tsur’s, as in Jennings’s, theory of the grotesque, the two opposing forces
of the grotesque do not prevail over each other but instead are equally distinct. Such
a situation, as Jennings has put it, gives rise to the most intense grotesque effect,68 in
that it pushes to the limit the in-between, indefinite nature of the grotesque.
Amongst Baudelaire’s grotesque images, those born of metaphors which nurture
bestial or diabolic sexuality/sensuality are able to arouse the most intense grotesque
effect: in these metaphors, Baudelaire disrupts (or semioticizes) the normal (or
symbolic) operation of metaphor in such a way as to blur the borderline between
the literal and the figurative, nonsense and sense, fantasy and reality; besides, he
endows grotesque bodies with two equally strong contradictory emotional forces
to make them desirable as much as undesirable. Accordingly, the reader is thrown
into a vertiginous state of indecision, into a tangible experience of the dual forces of
human nature competing for dominance.
In creating grotesque images, Baudelaire often de-humanizes human figures by
transforming them to a certain extent into animals, notably those that, according
to Kayser, fit well in the grotesque (characterized by demonic horror): ‘Certain
animals are especially suitable to the grotesque — snakes, owls, toads, spiders — the
nocturnal and creeping animals which inhabit realms apart from and inaccessible to
man’.69 For instance, ‘A celle qui est trop gaie’ (addressed to Mme Sabatier), one of
the six poems initially banned because of their supposedly obscene exaltation of the
f lesh, begins with the speaker’s humane description of the woman he adores: her
smile is like the fresh wind in a clear sky; her colourful dresses conjure up a ballet of
f lowers in poets’ minds; and so forth. In the last three stanzas, however, this sense of
sweet tenderness is overstepped by the conf lict between horror and (sexual) ecstasy
when suddenly occurs the (con)fusion of a human and a serpent, of humanity and
bestiality: the speaker becomes a human figure ‘devoid of real humanity’:
Ainsi je voudrais, une nuit,
Quand l’heure des voluptés sonne,
Vers les trésors de ta personne,
Comme un lâche, ramper sans bruit,
Pour châtier ta chair joyeuse,
Pour meurtrir ton sein pardonné,
Et faire à ton f lanc étonné
Une blessure large et creuse,
Et, vertigineuse douceur!
A travers ces lèvres nouvelles,
Plus éclatantes et plus belles,
T’infuser mon venin, ma sœur! (p. 141)
[So I would like, one night | When the time for pleasure comes, | To creep
silently, like a coward, | Towards the treasures of your body, || To punish your
joyous f lesh | To bruise your pardoned breast | And inf lict in your astonished
f lank | A wound deep and wide, || And, vertiginous sweetness! | Through
these new lips, | More brilliant and more beautiful, | Inject my venom into
you, my sister!]
 The Romantic Grotesque 121

Here the cognitive and hermeneutic boundaries between a human and a serpent, the
literal and the figurative are uncertain, and so is the emotional boundary between
jouissance and horror: is the speaker (literally or figuratively) a human who would
like to have carnal pleasure with the woman; or (literally or figuratively) a serpent
that crawls noiselessly to inf lict a deep wound in her body and thereby inject its
venom; or both/neither a human and/nor a serpent? In this in-between state, to quote
Maiorino in a different context, ‘confusion sets in; identity is split and referentiality
spawns uncertain choices. Art is lodged between two worlds, where vision and
ontology become grotesque insofar as they justify “multiple and mutually exclusive
interpretations” that tease normality and abnormality’.70 This in-between state, one
can say, is a hallucinatory state induced by hashish in which unconscious fantasy
f loods the conscious mind with its illogicality, perplexing affective associations.
In the case of Baudelaire’s grotesque image, the two mutually exclusive forces —
the literal (nonsense) and the figurative (sense), humanity and bestiality, jouissance
and horror, the desirable and the undesirable — are both present in pronounced
form and thus effectively push the reader into a state of cognitive, emotional, and
hermeneutic vertigo.
Such a state of vertigo, I suggest, defines — or better still, re-defines — the
‘new frisson’ that Hugo discovers in Baudelaire’s poetry: Hugo wrote to Baudelaire
in a letter in 1859, ‘Vous dotez le ciel de l’art d’on ne sait quel rayon macabre. Vous
créez un frisson nouveau’ (‘You colour the sky of art with unknown macabre ray.
You create a new frisson’).71 The new frisson can be also found in the grotesque
metamorphosis of the speaker’s hand into a serpent in ‘Le Revenant’ (perhaps
addressed to Jeanne Duval):
Et je te donnerai, ma brune,
Des baisirs froids comme la lune
Et des caresses de serpent
Autour d’une fosse rampant. (p. 62)
[And I will give you, my brunette, | Kisses chill like the moon | And caresses
of a serpent | Creeping out of a tomb.]
The frisson arises neither from the horror caused by the serpent crawling out of a
grave nor from the jouissance associated with caresses. Instead, the frisson stems from
the serpent merged with that which is cognitively and emotionally incompatible
with it: serpents do not caress, just as, we remember, worms do not kiss. That is
to say, cognitively and hermeneutically, the metaphor ‘caresses of a serpent’ pushes
the reader into a disorientating domain of the literal/figurative, nonsense/sense.
Emotionally, jouissance and horror, the desirable and the undesirable are equally
incarnated in the serpent-hand that ‘caresses’ the body of the speaker’s beloved: the
serpent-hand incites repulsion as much as pleasure. Such a clashing harmony gives
the reader no room at all for favouring one over the other; s/he finds him/herself
exposed to an irresistible vertigo of demonic charm, a tangible experience of the
diabolic vying with the angelic in the human existence.
Baudelaire’s uncanny manner of (con)fusing humanity and bestiality, attraction
and revulsion manifests itself not merely in the speakers he presents in his poems,
but in the women of whom these speakers are amorous. Throughout ‘Le Serpent
122 The Romantic Grotesque

qui danse’, for example, the arbitrary switch of identity between a serpent and
a woman powerfully de-stabilizes the distinction between the literal and the
figurative, between horror and beauty. The speaker, in the first stanza, describes
how he loves to see his serpent’s (woman’s?) skin shimmer like silk; in the next two
stanzas, he likens her (its?) deep and aromatic hair to a wavy ocean that takes his
dreamy soul towards a sky far away; he then goes on to portrays its (her?) eyes: ‘Tes
yeux [. . .] | Sont deux bijoux froids où se mêle | L’or avec le fer’ (‘Your eyes [. .
.] | Are two cold gems where are mingled | Iron and Gold’) (sta. 4, p. 28); and so
on. By the same token, ‘Le Chat’ (probably addressed to Jeanne Duval) (pp. 33–34),
which anticipates Victor Brauner’s Woman into Cat of 1940 (Fig. 4.3), confronts the
reader with identity ambiguity. The poem creates cognitive indeterminacy about
whose eyes — the cat’s or the woman’s — the speaker wants to plunge into; whose
head and supple back he is caressing; whose body he is touching; and whose cruel
and dangerous aura he is referring to. Just as the woman and the cat appear to be
one and the same, so do volupté and cruelty. In the two poems just discussed, with
the blurring of the borderline between the woman and the animal, it becomes
impossible for the reader to distinguish definitely humanity from bestiality, the
literal from the figurative, allure from aversion; this situation dramatizes the power
of the grotesque to thwart alternativeness, thus exposing the reader to a giddy state
of indecision.
As we have seen, in all the above love poems, with the semioticization of metaphor’s
symbolic function of subordinating literalness/nonsense to the figurativeness/
sense, two contradictory forces — such as humanity and monstrosity or volupté
and cruelty — meet in the form of the grotesque to nurture bestial or diabolic
sensuality/sexuality and bring forth the vertiginous sensation of demonic charm, of
desiring the undesirable. In terms of sensuality, Tucker writes of Baudelaire’s radical
departure from the smoothly pleasing style of Petrarchan love poetry with regard
to the grotesque:
For Baudelaire [. . .] the work of art and the transcendence it makes possible
depend upon a complete descent into sensuality; and consequently, while
closely identifying the woman in his poems with beauty, Baudelaire transposes
the ideal and moral experience into an inferno of the senses, where the lady
and the poet who imagines her combine and crystallize into art. The reader
familiar with the abstractive rhetoric and attitudinizing in the light style of
the Renaissance experiences the grotesque in the unsettling incongruity he feels
when, however consciously, Baudelaire renovates them.72
Simply put, Baudelaire’s aesthetics centres on (bestial or diabolic) sensuality which
confronts the reader with ‘an inferno of the senses’; and it is in the grotesque that
(bestial or diabolic) sensuality is incarnated. The ‘inferno of the senses’ is perhaps
nowhere expressed more forcibly and vertiginously than in Baudelaire’s delineation
of ‘une charogne infâme’ (‘a repulsive carrion’) in ‘Une Charogne’:
Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique,
Brûlante et suant les poisons,
Ouvrait d’une façon nonchalante et cynique
Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons.
 The Romantic Grotesque 123

Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,

Comme afin de la cuire à point,
[. . .]

Et le ciel regardait la carcase superbe

Comme une f leur s’épanouir.
La puanteur était si forte, que sur l’herbe
Vous crûtes vous évanouir.

Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride,

D’où sortaient de noirs bataillons
De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
Le long de ces vivants haillons. (stanzas 2–5, pp. 29–30)
[Legs in the air, like a lewd woman, | Burning and sweating poisons, | Its belly
full of exhalations | Opened nonchalantly and cynically || The sun shined
upon that rotten meat, | as if to make sure it was ready to eat, | [. . .] || And
the sky watched that marvellous carcass | Blooming like a f lower. | So strong
was the stench that on the grass | You believed you would faint. || Flies buzzed
around the putrid belly, | Whence emerged black hordes | Of larvae, which
oozed out like a thick liquid | All along those living rags.]
(Sur)realistic images that are born of this carrion appeal to all the five senses:
horror mixed with beauty, disgust blended with lust thrills through the reader’s five
senses when s/he encounters these images whose realistic foulness bears surrealistic
vivaciousness. This prostitute-like cadavre, Kristeva would put it, is ‘the utmost of
abjection’, that which breaks down the border between subject and object, between
I and what threatens I, between my life and the other’s death:
the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is [. . .] death infecting life. Abject.
It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does
not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it
beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.73
One can say, then, that Baudelaire’s carrion beckons us to the traumatic experience
of witnessing a corpse and thus engulfs us by arousing our imagination of our own
eventual death.
Nevertheless, Baudelaire’s carrion is more than ‘death infecting life’; it is death
begetting life: the sky watches the cut-open belly of the carrion ‘s’épanouir’
(‘bloom’). This is a pseudometaphor in that a cut-open belly and a blooming f lower
share nothing (figurative) but perhaps an accidental physical likeness; this physical
similarity gives birth to a surrealistic, or indeed, paranoiac, image which ‘is a
striking inversion of the ancient flos foeni, for here it is not the beautiful ephemeral
f lower which suggests death and decomposition but the reverse’.74 It is, so to speak,
death and decay (Thanatos) that procreate life and beauty (Eros): this carrion is a
death that gives birth, a (realistic) decomposition that breeds a (surrealistic) meta­
morphosis. It is thus no longer possible to make a clear-cut distinction between
the undesirable and the desirable, le mal and le beau. This carrion is vertiginously
in-between or composite, which, as Tucker indicates, exposes the reader to the
experience of the grotesque. This experience leads us straight to Baudelaire’s claim
124 The Romantic Grotesque

in the introductory poem of Les Fleurs du mal that ‘[i]n repugnant objects we find
charms’ (mentioned before).
Tucker, however, goes too far in regarding any type of incongruity — be it
physical or non-physical — as grotesque: in contrast to the Petrarchan moralized
connection of lust to poison, for instance, ‘Baudelaire’s appropriation of the motif
[in poems such as ‘Le Flacon’] becomes grotesque’, inasmuch as ‘death by the poison
of “lust in action” is not an “expense of spirit in a waste of shame”, but precisely
what makes the work of art and the poet’s redemption possible’.75 In other words,
for Tucker, grotesque is the incongruous or paradoxical situation that the poison of
lust gives life to Baudelaire’s poetry as well as his redemption. If we follow Tucker’s
loose definition of the grotesque, however, any sort of incongruity or paradox
can be seen as grotesque. Hence, it cannot be stressed enough that it is in physical
incongruity or paradox that the reader’s experience of the grotesque is rooted:
incongruity, per se, is simply a sufficient condition for the grotesque; the necessary
condition lies in physical incongruity — which opens onto the domain of (bio)
logical contradiction that makes reason succumb to emotion or sensation.
As we have seen, in Baudelaire’s love poems featuring bestial or diabolic
sexuality/sensuality, physical incongruity — which contains two equally strong
opposing elements — exactly embodies his belief that the diabolic and angelic
sentiments of human nature or human life are identical. Physical incongruity of
this sort — which exposes the reader to a vertiginous sensation of demonic charm
— can also serve as the incarnation of Baudelaire’s ambivalence towards the women
he adores, as he writes in ‘A celle qui est trop gaie’: ‘Folle dont je suis affolé, | Je
te hais autant que je t’aime!’ (‘Mad woman about whom I am crazy, | I hate you as
much as I love you!’) (ll. 15–16, p. 141). Baudelaire’s contradictory desires for women
may very well account for his comparison of love ‘à une torture ou à une opération
chirurgicale’ (‘to a torture or to a surgical operation’) (Fusées, p. 1249). In his poetic
opérations of women, then, Baudelaire shows his propensity to fragment or détailler
their bodies: paradoxically, for Baudelaire, ‘woman must be apprehended in pieces
if her beauty is to be thoroughly relished’; thus, he ‘chooses to represent woman in
scattered fashion, often referring to her presence by the mention of isolated bodily
parts, such as her eyes, hair, legs, feet, arms, hands’.76
Amongst these bodily parts, the vertigo of demonic charm, of desiring the
undesirable is most firmly in-corporated in the representation of the eyes, the
bodily part that recurs most frequently throughout Les Fleurs du mal. In Baudelaire’s
hands, woman’s eyes become the prime examples of what J. A. Hiddleston’s calls
‘enormous comparisons’ (‘comparaisons énormes’),77 because they are bizarrely
mated with different forms and textures in such a way as to obfuscate — or even
wipe out — the comparison they are supposed to serve. That is, the identification
of one item or signifier with another, as in schizophrenic cognition, is so injuste, or
semioticized, as to tamper with the transfer of sense, the signified; in this way, reason
is dethroned in favour of emotion or sensation (see also Introduction, sect. 3). In
‘Danse macabre’, for instance, woman’s eyes are catachrestically transformed into
mouths or noses that ‘exhale’:
 The Romantic Grotesque 125

Le gouffre de tes yeux, plein d’horribles pensées,

Exhale le vertige, [. . .] (ll. 37–38, p. 93)
[The abyss of your eyes, full of horrible thoughts, | Exhales vertigo, [. . .]]
Here Baudelaire presents a pseudometaphor: eyes and mouths (or nostrils) hardly
share anything figurative other than a physical resemblance in shape. Also, in ‘Le
Poison’, woman’s (green) eyes hyperbolically metamorphose into poisonous lakes in
which the speaker sees his own ref lection tremble and his dreams slake their thirst:
Tout cela ne vaut pas le poison qui découle
De tes yeux, de tes yeux verts,
Lacs où mon âme tremble et se voit à l’envers [. . .]
Mes songes viennent en foule
Pour se désaltérer à ces gouffres amers. (sta. 4, p. 47)
[All that cannot be compared with the poison that f lows | From your eyes,
from your green eyes, | Lakes where my soul shivers and sees itself inverted [. .
.] | my dreams all go | To quench their thirst in these bitter abysses.]
This is a ‘vertigo of hyperbole’, that is, a vertigo of the signifier or nonsense
outreaching the signified or sense. Such a vertigo also appears in ‘Les Petites Vieilles
(I)’, wherein we see woman’s eyes turn into a kind of Crashavian oxymoron of
weeping fire or f laming wells:
— Ces yeux sont des puits faits d’un million de larmes,
Des creusets qu’un métal refroidi pailleta [. . .]
Ces yeux mystérieux ont d’invincibles charmes
Pour celui que l’austère Infortune allaita! (sta. 9, p. 86)
[ — These eyes are wells made by a million teardrops, | Crucibles which a
cooled metal spangled [. . .] | These mysterious eyes have invincible charms |
For those whom austere Misfortune has suckled!]
In all the above examples, Baudelaire semioticizes the proper operation of metaphor
and thereby forces the mind’s eye to linger on undesirable physicality which he
nevertheless invests with desirable elements: woman’s grotesque eyes break down
the wall between charm and horror, allure and alienation. Baudelaire thereby
allows the reader to have a tangible experience of his belief in the equal co-existence
of the diabolic and the angelic in the human condition.
If, in antiquity, ‘[t]he eye is a symbol to express the hidden powers of the
individual and the supernatural vision of God’,78 Baudelaire’s modern creation of
grotesque metaphors of woman’s eyes materializes his endeavour to expose to sight
the demonic vision of le plus profond de l’âme: Baudelaire plunges his soul into the
gouffre of woman’s eyes, the penetralia of her soul, to experience the vertiginous
co-presence of two opposing forces such as volupté and cruelty. Furthermore,
Baudelaire urges the reader — ‘mon semblable, mon frère’ (‘Au Lecteur’, p. 6) — to
go with him: as he speaks to the reader in ‘L’Avertisseur’,
Plonge tes yeux dans les yeux fixes
Des Satyresses ou des Nixes. (ll. 5–6, p. 170)
[Plunge your eyes into the fixed eyes | Of Satyresses or of Nixies.]
126 The Romantic Grotesque

In sum, symbolically, Baudelaire’s grotesque sensualization/sexualization of the

body can be seen as an attempt to provide a springboard for the reader’s soul (‘tes
yeux’) to dive into the very ‘hidden powers’ (‘les yeux fixes’) of grotesque monsters
(Satyresses or Nixes), to have it wallow in the clashing harmony between the ecstasy
and the horror of human life.

* * * * *
Marcel Raymond writes in De Baudelaire au surréalisme: ‘avec Baudelaire, “le pre­
mier des voyants” selon Rimbaud, l’imagination commence à prendre con­science
de sa fonction démiurgique’ (‘with Baudelaire, “the first of the seers”, accord­ing
to Rimbaud, the imagination starts to become aware of its demiurgic function’).79
The demiurgic function of the imagination, as we have seen, lies at the heart
of Baudelaire’s conception of the grotesque as the manifestation of the satanic
ambition to create the (con)fusion of the demonic and the divine, le mal and le
beau, to embody the existence of a permanent duality in the human being. In his
own grotesque images that nurture bestial or diabolic sexuality/sensuality, Baude­
laire combines the duel, antithetical forces — in the form of horror and beauty,
monstrosity and humanity, fantasy and reality, literalness and figurativeness, and
the like — on equal terms to render the desirable and undesirable forces of the
grotesque body both present in pronounced form and thus confront the reader with
the most violent sensation du neuf, the vertigo of demonic charm. In Baudelaire, as
Apollinaire puts it, ‘the modern spirit is for the first time incarnated’, because he
has ‘the boldness to examine the sublimity and monstrousness of something new’,80
thereby thrusting the reader into ‘[l]es charmes de l’horreur [qui] n’enivrent que les
forts!’ (‘[t]he charms of horror [that] intoxicate only the strong!’) (‘Danse macabre’,
sta. 9, p. 93).

Notes to Chapter 4
1. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. by Mary Lynn
Johnson and John E. Grant (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 81–102 (p. 86).
2. Charles Baudelaire, Fusées, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961),
p. 1259. ‘The mélange of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords
to the blasé ear’. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Baudelaire are taken from
Pichois’s 1961 edition.
3. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Lesson of Baudelaire’, Tyro 1 (1921), p. 4 (p. 4); ‘ from Baudelaire’, in Selected Prose
of T. S. Eliot, ed. by Frank Kermode (New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1975),
pp. 231–36 (pp. 234, 231).
4. Erich Auerbach, ‘The Aesthetic Dignity of the Fleurs du mal’, in Baudelaire: A Collection of Critical
Essays, ed. by Henri Peyre (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 149–69 (p. 168).
5. See, for instance, Cynthia Grant Tucker, ‘Petrarchisant sur l’horrible: A Renaissance Tradition
and Baudelaire’s Grotesque’, The French Review, 48.5 (1975), 887–96; Virginia E. Swain, Grotesque
Figures: Baudelaire, Rousseau, and the Aesthetics of Modernity (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 19–22.
6. John Donne, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, in John Donne’s Poetry, ed. by A. L.
Clements (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), p. 29 (p. 29).
7. John P. Houston, The Demonic Imagination: Style and Theme in French Romantic Poetry (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), p. 116. See also Culler, ‘Baudelaire’s Satanic
Verses’, Diacritics, 28.3 (1998), 86–100.
 The Romantic Grotesque 127

8. Northrop Fry, ‘Theory of Archetypal Meaning (2): Demonic Imagery’, in Fry, Anatomy of
Criticism (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 147–58 (p. 147).
9. Jonathan Culler, ‘Introduction’, in Charles Baudelaire: The Flowers of Evil, trans. by James
McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. xiii–xxxvii (pp. xx, xxiv–xxv).
10. Victor Hugo, “À Charles Baudelaire,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jean Massin, 18 vols (Paris: Le
Club français du livre, 1967–70), x (1969), p. 1327 (p. 1327).
11. Lee Byron Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), p. 14.
12. Hugo, ‘La Préface de Cromwell’, in Cromwell, ed. by Annie Ubersfeld (Paris: Garnier-
Flammarion, 1968), pp. 61–109 (p. 72).
13. Jeffrey Coven, Baudelaire’s Voyages: The Poet and his Painters (New York and London: A Bulfinch
Press Book, 1993), p. 47.
14. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. by Ulrich Weisstein (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1957), pp. 184–85.
15. Ibid., p. 188.
16. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), p. 39.
17. Jean Paul, from ‘Preschool of Aesthetics’, in Jean Paul: A Reader, ed. by Timothy J. Casey, trans.
by Erika Casey (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 244–68
(p. 253).
18. E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Devil’s Elixirs, trans. by Ronald Taylor (London: John Calder, 1963),
pp. 245–46.
19. Hugo, ‘La Préface de Cromwell’, p. 71.
20. Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, trans. by Alban Krailsheimer (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), pp. 167–68, 170.
21. Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 54.
22. See Robert Blair’s The Grave, Illustrated by William Blake, ed. by Robert N. Essick and Morton D.
Paley (London: Scholar Press, 1982).
23. Robert Blair, The Grave (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1973), pp. 14–15.
24. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. by Ingram Bywater, in The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, ed. by
Friedrich Solmsen (New York: Modern Library, 1984), pp. 223–66 (1148b, p. 227).
25. Monk, p. 87.
26. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed.
by Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 36. See also Chapter 1, sect. 4.
27. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. by John T.
Goldthwait (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 47–48.
28. Denis Diderot, Salon de 1767, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Else Marie Bukdahl et al., 25 vols (Paris:
Hermann, 1975–2004), xvi (1990), pp. 55–525 (p. 235).
29. G. E. Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. by Edward Allen
McCormick (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 132, 134.
30. See Michael Cardy, ‘La Découverte du beau au sein de la laideur: Essai d’esthétique comparée’,
in Toward a Theory of Comparative Literature, ed. by Mario J. Valdés (New York and Berne: Peter
Lang, 1990), pp. 33–40 (pp. 37–38).
31. William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballad (1800)’, in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. by
Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1969),
pp. 734–40 (p. 740).
32. Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. by Ernst
Behler and Roman Strug (University Park and London: Penn State University Press, 1968),
pp. 53–117 (pp. 54, 81, 98–99).
33. S. T. Coleridge, ‘On Poesy or Art’, in Biographia Literaria, ed. by J. Shawcross, 2 vols (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1907), ii, pp. 253–63 (pp. 257–58, 261, 254).
34. Percy Bysse Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in The Prose Works of Percy Bysse Shelley, ed. by Harry
Buxton Forman, 4 vols (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880), iii, pp. 99–144 (p. 133).
35. Hugo, ‘La Préface de Cromwell’, p. 72.
128 The Romantic Grotesque

36. Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, p. 58.

37. Mario Praz, ‘The Beauty of the Medusa’, in The Romantic Agony, trans. by Angus Davidson
(London: Fontana, 1960), pp. 41–71 (p. 43).
38. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed.
by G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 13–25 (pp. 17–19). Poe mentions
elsewhere that he uses the word beauty ‘as inclusive of the sublime’ (‘The Poetic Principle’,
pp. 71–94 (p. 78)).
39. Praz, p. 56.
40. Shelley, ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery’, in The Complete
Poetical Works of Shelley, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1935),
pp. 578–79 (p. 578). This painting was initially mistakenly attributed to Leonardo, but now is
considered to be the work of an unknown sixteenth-century Flemish painter.
41. Baudelaire says: ‘Tout enfant, j’ai senti dans mon cœur deux sentiments contradictoires, l’horreur
de la vie et l’extase de la vie’ (‘Since childhood, I have felt in my heart two contradictory
sentiments, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life’).
42. Culler, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxv–xxxvi.
43. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii, 12–13.
44. Poe, ‘Marginalia: Southern Literary Messenger, May 1849’, in Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 1445–54
(p. 1451).
45. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell: From Things Heard and Seen (London:
Swedenborg Society, 1915), pp. 56–57.
46. Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (New York: New York University
Press, 1977), p. 14.
47. Fry, p. 147.
48. Wordsworth, ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’, p. 124 (p. 214).
49. Houston, p. 118.
50. Ibid., pp. 114–15.
51. Yvonne B. Rollins, ‘Baudelaire et le grotesque’, The French Review, 50.2 (1976), 270–77 (p. 272).
52. Quoted in Philip Morel, Les Grotesques: Les figures de l’imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin
de la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), p. 39.
53. David Summers, ‘The Archaeology of the Modern Grotesque’, in Modern Art and the Grotesque,
ed. by Frances S. Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 20–46 (p. 43,
n. 26).
54. Swain, p. 31.
55. In ‘Les Phares’, a poem dedicated to eight most admired painters, Baudelaire pays homage to
Goya for the spell of l’inconnu that his work casts (sta. 7, p. 13).
56. J. A. Hiddleston, ‘Art and its Representation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, ed. by
Rosemary Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 130–44 (p. 130).
57. David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 21, 28–29.
58. McKay Johnson, ‘Baudelaire and Delacroix: Tangible Language’, in Johnson, The Metaphor of
Painting: Essays on Baudelaire, Ruskin, Proust, and Pater (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980),
pp. 11–64; Eugène Delacroix, Journal de Eugène Delacroix, ed. by André Joubin, 3 vols (Paris:
Librairie Plon, 1932), ii, pp. 98–99.
59. Delacroix, pp. 97–98.
60. Roland Barthes, Sade-Fourier-Loyola, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Éric Marty, 3 vols (Paris: Seuil,
1993), ii, pp. 1041–162 (p. 1086).
61. Culler, ‘Introduction’, p. xxiv.
62. Hiddleston, p. 130.
63. Longinus, On Sublimity, trans. by D. A. Russell, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. by D. A.
Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989),
pp. 143–87 (15.8, p. 161). See also Chapter 3, sect. 2.
64. Bakhtin, pp. 303, 315.
65. Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. by Thomas Gora et
al., ed. by Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 133.
 The Romantic Grotesque 129

66. Lee Byron Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), p. 9 (my italics).
67. Reuven Tsur, ‘The Infernal and the Hybrid: Bosch and Dante’, in Tsur, On the Shore of Nothing­
ness: A Study in Cognitive Poetics (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003), pp. 264–85 (pp. 266–67).
68. Jennings, p. 14.
69. Kayser, p. 182.
70. Giancarlo Maiorino, The Portrait of Eccentricity: Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque (University
Park and London: Penn State University Press, 1991), pp. 123–25.
71. Hugo, ‘À Charles Baudelaire’, p. 1327.
72. Tucker, p. 889.
73. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York and
London: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 3–4.
74. Philip Knight, ‘Baudelaire’s Flower Poetics’, in Knight, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century
France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 62–130 (pp. 72–73).
75. Tucker, p. 894.
76. Eliane DalMolin, Cutting the Body: Representing Woman in Baudelaire’s Poetry, Truffaut’s Cinema,
and Freud’s Psychoanalysis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 21, 19, 39.
77. Hiddleston, Essai sur Laforgue et les derniers vers suivi de Laforgue et Baudelaire (Lexington,
KY: French Forum, 1980), p. 106. By ‘comparaisons’, Hiddleston refers to both similes and
metaphors.
78. Peter Fingesten, ‘Sight and Insight: A Contribution toward an Iconography of the Eye’, Criticism,
1.1 (1959), 19–31 (p. 20).
79. Marcel Raymond, De Baudelaire au surréalisme: Essai sur le mouvement poétique contemporain (Paris:
Éditions R.-A. Corrêa, 1933), p. 330.
80. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Introduction to the Poetical Work of Charles Baudelaire’, in Selected
Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, trans. by Roger Shattuck (New York: New Directions Books,
1971), pp. 242–45 (p. 243).
 C h apt e r 5
v

The Surrealist Grotesque:

Magritte’s Object Lessons
Des rêves! Toujours des rêves! et plus l’âme est ambitieuse et délicate, plus les
rêves l’éloignent du possible.
Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris1

I look for poetry in the world of familiar objects. It is like a poet who
works with simple words. The great poems of Baudelaire, for example, are
accomplished with very simple words.
René Magritte, Écrits complets2

None of the Modernist or avant-garde art movements can provide a more success­
ful habitat for the grotesque than can Surrealism, inasmuch as many of the
tenets of Surrealism are applicable to the grotesque: the fascination with dreams,
the destruction of logic and reason, the (con)fusion of incongruous forms, the
unfettered play of the imagination, the pursuit of the marvellous, and so forth. In
fact, as the Surrealist journal Minotaure itself suggests, the grotesque lies at the heart
of Surrealism. That is, the relationship between the grotesque and Surrealism is
reciprocal: the grotesque — the epitome of (bio)logical confusion or contradiction
— clears the path for Surrealist art to (con)fuse items from different or discordant
categories into hybrids; at the same time, Surrealist art turns the grotesque —
which, per se, contains both fearful and playful or destructive and constructive
factors — into the very incarnation of surréalité, the combination of two states —
such as pleasure and pain, dream and reality, or Eros and Thanatos — which are ‘en
apparence si contradictoires’ (‘seemingly so contradictory’) (Manifeste du surréalisme,
ABOC i, 319).
The desire to unite two seemingly opposite states, for Breton and his colleagues,
is a desire for the dominance of pleasure over displeasure: taking his cue from
Freud, Breton stresses, in ‘Situation surréaliste de l’objet’ (1935), that Surrealist art
travaille à l’abolition du moi dans le soi, s’efforce par suite de faire prédominer de
plus en plus nettement le principe du plaisir sur le principe de réalité. Elle tend à
libérer de plus en plus l’impulsion instinctive, à abattre la barrière qui se dresse
devant l’homme civilisé, barrière qu’ignorent le primitif et l’enfant.
[works towards the abolition of the ego by the id, and consequently endeavours
to make the pleasure principle predominate more and more over the reality
principle. It tends to liberate more and more instinctual impulses, to knock
 The Surrealist Grotesque 131

Fig. 5.1 (left). André Breton, Jacques Hérold, Yves Tanguy, and Victor Brauner, Le Cadavre exquis,
1934, Jacques Hérold Collection. © André Breton et al. / ADAGP, Paris – SACK, Seoul, 2009
Fig. 5.2 (right). Max Ernst, La Toilette de la mariée, 1939-40, Peggy Guggenheim Collection,
Venezia. © Max Ernst / ADAGP, Paris – SACK, Seoul, 2009
132 The Surrealist Grotesque

down the barrier which civilized man faces and which the primitive and the
child do not experience.] (ABOC ii, 490)
For Breton, automatism serves as a vital vehicle for liberating instinctual impulses
in the id, in the unconscious at large, in that it ‘correspond assez bien à l’état de
rêve’ (‘virtually corresponds to the dream state’) and thus effectively stimulates
the effect of chance, ‘le maître de l’humour’ (‘the master of humour’) (‘Entrée des
médiums’, ABOC i, 274).3 That is to say, automatism is especially suited to causing
chance encounters between unrelated items such as occur in dreams and thereby
gives rise to ‘un très haut degré d’absurdité immédiate’ (‘a high degree of immediate
absurdity’) that shocks the rational mind into laughter — one of the desired ends of
the Surrealist image (Manifeste du surréalisme, ABOC i, 327, 339). In the process of
its work and in the response it elicits, Surrealist art, one can say, aims to conquer
the reality principle by the pleasure principle, unpleasure by pleasure, and horror
by humour.
It would follow, then, that the Surrealist execution of the grotesque seeks the
subordination of its fearful/destructive element to its playful/constructive element,
of fear to laughter, so as to allow the triumph of the pleasure principle over the
reality principle in merging two contradictory realities into a surréalité. In other
words, the dark aspect of the grotesque would be dominated by pronounced
pleasurable effects to motivate the civilized mind to (re)discover, to quote Freud,
‘enjoyments in the attraction of what is forbidden by reason’ (PFL vi, 175). Some
Surrealist grotesque images, such as those born of automatic writing/drawing
(Fig. 5.1), indeed appear to be little threatening and thus allow the playful to gain
prominence; as such, they effectively attract the reader or viewer to what Freud
calls ‘pleasure in nonsense’, which can be traced back to the learning of a child who
assimilates words or objects ‘without regard to the condition that they should make
sense’ (PFL vi, 174). However, many Surrealist grotesque images — notably visual
images — allow horror or repulsion to prevail over laughter or attraction by mixing
human bodies with exotic threatening animals as in Max Ernst’s works (Fig. 5.2);
by extremely distorting human bodies as in Dalí’s (Fig. 5.4) and André Masson’s
works; or again by violently destroying sexual difference as in Hans Bellmer’s works
(Fig. 5.5). To the extent that these images inspire a strong sense of horror, they go
‘beyond the pleasure principle’ to favour nightmares over (day-)dreams,4 a high
degree of fear over a high degree of absurdity.
Magritte, I shall argue, is more consistent than his painting colleagues in pursuing
a Surrealist-inspired notion of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the
reality principle, of pleasure over displeasure. That is, Magritte’s grotesque objects
serve as the best examples of that ambition, in that they are endowed with two levels
of humorous effects which effectively downplay fear or anxiety in the very process
of their production and in the responses to them. Magritte’s grotesque objects, as
we shall see, yield not only the manifest pleasure of chance effects (derived from
the dream-work) but, more significantly, the latent pleasure of play with thoughts
(derived from the joke-work). The two combine to increase humorous effects to
enable — or at least encourage — the viewer to enjoy what is repressed or forbidden
by civilization. To put it in Kristeva’s terms, in Magritte’s grotesque objects, the
 The Surrealist Grotesque 133

Fig. 5.3 (above). Max Ernst,

Die Versuchung des Heiligen
Antonius, 1945, Wilhelm
Lehmbruck Museum,
Duisburg.
© Max Ernst / ADAGP,
Paris – SACK, Seoul, 2009
Fig. 5.4 (right). Salvador
Dalí, Soft Construction with
Boiled Beans (Premonition
of Civil War), 1936,
Philadelphia Museum of
Art, Philadelphia.
© Salvador Dalí, Foundation
Gala-Salvador Dalí, VEGAP,
Madrid 2009
134 The Surrealist Grotesque

semiotic deluge of ‘nonsense effects’ — related to the destruction of syntactic and/

or semantic coherence — effectively exerts its power against symbolic prohibition:5
manifest absurdity and latent absurdity, or physical/syntactic incongruity and
conceptual/semantic incongruity, cooperate with each other to lift inhibition
by undermining prohibition. This will account for what, according to Breton,
Surrealism owes to Magritte’s object lessons: the interplay of the literal (physical
incongruity) and the figurative (conceptual incongruity) that achieves ‘une “pensée
parfaite ”, c’est-à-dire parvenue à sa complète émancipation’ (‘one “perfect thought”,
that is to say, thought that has reached its complete emancipation’).6
In the main, Magritte’s grotesque images do not make one’s eyes ache and body
shiver as we have seen in Crashaw’s and Baudelaire’s: that is, the fearful is often
not presented in a pronounced form and, more importantly, is effectively pushed
into the background by a latent humorous or nonsense effect which comes either
from the images themselves, or from the comic contrast between the images and
their titles. The grotesque, I repeat, is the (con)fusion of (bio)logical categories
that carries within itself two emotional poles; whilst one of them prevails, the
other, still present, retreats into the background. To illustrate the predominance of
playfulness over fearfulness in the Magrittean grotesque, I shall examine grotesque
objects in paintings that Magritte composed in the 1930s, because they set the
tone for his later ones; and because during that period he developed a method of
uniting correlated — rather than unrelated — objects and thereby made a special
contribution to Surrealist image-making. I shall contextualize my examination
within Freudian psychoanalysis, Nietzsche’s philosophy of language, and Breton’s
poetics of the Surrealist image, to offer a comprehensive discussion of Magritte’s
grotesque objects.

1. The Primacy of the Pleasure Principle

The relation of Surrealism to Freud has been much discussed; nevertheless, a brief
discussion of this relation will be useful here, since it can help clarify the artistic
and socio-political purposes of the Surrealist pursuit of the victory of the pleasure
principle over the reality principle, of pleasure over pain. This clarification, as we
shall see in other sections, can further help us better understand the importance of
the power of Magritte’s grotesque objects to deliver a high degree of pleasurable
effects.
Surrealism, as Breton defines it, seeks to unveil what Freud considers as the
chaotic, illogical state of the unconscious and (the primary process of ) the dream-
work to shake off the yoke of reason and civilization. In The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), Freud discredits a human being’s rational ability to control his/her inner self,
inasmuch as he believes it is the unconscious — ‘the true psychical reality’ — that
plays a decisive role in everyday life (PFL iv, 773). Markedly, the unconscious is
by nature irrational and ‘timeless’: the disregard for logic and contradiction is the
cardinal characteristic of the unconscious, wherein repressed, conf licting instinctual
impulses can be imagined to be f lowing freely without diminishing each other and
without the order of time. Magritte’s L’Empire des lumières of 1954 can be seen as a
pictorial manifestation of the ‘timeless’ nature of the unconscious. Magritte divides
 The Surrealist Grotesque 135

the world of this painting into bipolar halves. The first half shows a landscape
composed of a pond, a lamp-post, and a house surrounded by the silhouettes of
trees; several parts of this landscape indicate night-time: lamplight gleams in two
of the house’s windows; the street lamp is on and therefore casts light on part of
the house’s façade; the sources of light are ref lected in the pond. Magritte sets the
night-time landscape mysteriously against its bipolar half, a luminous sky with
white clouds which represents the daytime. By entitling this painting L’Empire des
lumières, Magritte seems to imply the ascendency of light, fantasy, or the pleasure
principle in this (con)fusion of antithetical states. Titles play an indispensable role in
Magritte’s painting; I shall return to the part they play in the production of latent
pleasure, or conceptual incongruity, in Magritte’s grotesque objects.
Not directly (but indirectly) related to the external world, the unconscious is
the inaccessible part of the mind. The royal road to knowledge of the unconscious,
according to Freud, is the interpretation of dreams (PFL iv, 769). In dreams, a
form of ‘the return of the repressed’, our unconscious wishes or impulses have the
opportunity to slip past the gate of censorship and become symbolically fulfilled.
The interpretation of dreams, then, aims to lift the veil of the unconscious activities
of the mind to bring repressed wishes to light.
Taking his cue from Freud, Breton makes the dream and the unconscious
central to the artistic and the socio-political goals of Surrealism: ‘Le surréalisme
repose sur la croyance à la réalité supérieure de certaines formes d’associations
négligées jusqu’à lui, à la toute-puissance du rêve, au jeu désintéressé de la pensée’
(‘Surrealism lies in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously
neglected associations, in the omnipresence of the dream, in the disinterested
play of thought’), Breton writes in his 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme (ABOC i, 328).
Automatic writing/drawing, as mentioned before, is considered by Breton as a
crucial technique of conducting the Surrealist disinterested play of thought, in
that automatism is a near equivalent of the dream state and thus serves as a portal
to represent unconscious activities. That is why Breton deems automatism ‘une
véritable photographie de la pensée’ (‘a true photography of thought’) (‘Max Ernst’,
ABOC i, 245): that is, it directly represents or materializes the free f low of thought;
it brings to light the inaccessible part of the mind.
In Breton, automatism, the unconscious, and the dream combine to form a (if not
the) keystone of Surrealism. An artwork, as Breton claims, cannot be considered
Surrealist unless the artist has endeavoured to reach the unconscious:
Freud a montré qu’à cette profondeur ‘abyssale’ règnent l’absence de
contradiction, [. . .] l’intemporalité et le remplacement de la réalité extérieure
par la réalité psychique, soumise au seul principe du plaisir. L’automatisme
conduit à cette région en droite ligne.
[Freud has shown that at this ‘unfathomable’ depth reigns the total absence of
contradiction, [. . .] timelessness and the substitution of psychical reality for
external reality, all subject to the pleasure principle alone. Automatism leads
straight to this region.]7
At least two symbiotic senses arise from the statement ‘L’automatisme conduit
à [l’incon­scient] en droite ligne’. First, automatic writing/drawing seeks the
136 The Surrealist Grotesque

‘language’ of the unconscious, in that, as Kristeva would say (see Chapter 2, sect. 2),
it effectively dramatizes the power of the primary process of the Freudian dream-
work — condensation (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy) — to produce a
high degree of ‘nonsense effects’ and thus propels a revolution from the symbolic to
the semiotic. Second, automatism carries the irrational effect of the unconscious,
in the sense that it is dictated by the free f low of thought ‘en l’absence de tout
contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou
morale’ (‘in the absence of any control exercised by reason, outside any aesthetic or
moral concern’) (Manifeste du surréalisme, ABOC i, 328). Automatism, so to speak,
penetrates prohibition to introduce aggressive, liberating drives: it stands for ‘toute
licence en art’ (‘complete artistic freedom’), which aims at ‘l’émancipation de l’homme’
(‘the emancipation of man’) (La Clé des champs, ABOC iii, 687, 686).
This last point directly brings out the revolutionary nature of the Surrealist
movement: the ambition to liberate the mind from the harness of civilization,
which carries within it the ideology of subordinating fancy and superstition to
reason and morality (Manifeste du surréalisme, ABOC i, 316). Thanks to Freud,
Breton notes, the unconscious — the realm of the illogical and the immoral — is
revealed as the most important part of our mental world. Therefore, by offering
the equivalents of what exists in the unconscious, Surrealist art seeks to act as an
adamant negation of the conformist mind: ‘La poésie veritable’, as Paul Éluard
asserts, ‘est incluse dans tout ce qui ne se conforme pas à cette morale qui, pour
maintenir son ordre, son prestige, ne sait construire que des banques, des casernes,
des prisons, des églises, des bordels’ (‘True poetry lies in everything that does not
conform to that morality which, to maintain its order and its prestige, can only
conceive of building banks, barracks, prisons, churches, and brothels’).8 These
are ‘toute les valuers idéologiques bourgeoises’ (‘all bourgeois ideological values’)
of which, Magritte argues, Surrealism is ‘l’ennemi irréductible’ (‘the relentless
enemy’). It is fair to say, then, that the Surrealists, following Freud, attempt to bring
back to light that which is repressed in the unconscious and in the development
of civilization.
Civilization, according to Freud in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), depends
on the repression of instinctual passions, which is made possible once the super-
ego — in the form of conscience — is set up within the ego to watch over an
individual’s instinctual desires, ‘like a garrison in a conquered city’ (PFL xiii, 316).
Civilization requires people to work together in groups, and repression is crucial in
creating and maintaining the conditions under which such cooperation is possible.
To enforce those conditions, the super-ego punishes the ego with tense feelings of
guilt for not living up to its standards. Hence, the more civilized a society becomes,
the more repressed an individual’s instinctual desires are, and the more often and
more intensely the individual will feel guilty. In a civilized society, then, the ego
in fact becomes ‘the actual seat of anxiety’, in that it is invariably torn apart, writes
Freud in The Ego and the Id (1923), by the struggle between the super-ego and the
id, between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, between conscience and
the lack of remorse, between Eros and Thanatos (PFL xi, 399). That is why Freud
holds in An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940) that it is easy
 The Surrealist Grotesque 137

for a barbarian to be healthy: for a civilized man the task is a hard one. The
desire for a powerful and uninhibited ego may seem to us intelligible, but, as
is shown by the time we live in, it is in the profoundest sense antagonistic to
civilization. (PFL xv, 420)
In short, to live is therefore to suffer, insofar as ‘the price we pay for our advance
in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt’
(PFL xiii, 327).
Freud shows a strong compassion for the (poor) split ego in the civilized society,
plagued by the pleasure principle and at the same time castigated by the reality
principle. There are at least two ways, he believes, in which individuals can go
beyond the conf lict between the two principles. The first way is destruction: death,
whose ‘final aim is to lead what is living into an inorganic state’ (PFL xv, 380),
enables an individual to shake off utterly the yoke of guilt and anxiety caused by
the conf lict. The second way, according to Freud on the two principles of mental
functioning, is artistic creation:
Art brings about reconciliation between the two principles in a peculiar way.
An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot
come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first
demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life
of phantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world of
phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a
new kind. (PFL vi, 41–42)
In Breton’s view, Surrealist art, as we have seen, seeks to allow instinctual drives full
play and thereby lifts inhibitions which the primitive and the child do not undergo.
One can say, then, that Surrealist art attempts to make visible ‘in a peculiar way’
what Freud calls the ‘world of phantasy’ in order to revive childhood pleasure,
to ‘satisf[aire] réellement’, as Magritte notes, ‘ce désir profondément humain du
merveilleux’ (‘truly satisf[y]’ ‘this deep-rooted human desire for the marvellous’)
(p. 82): the ‘world of phantasy’ mingles the conf licts caused by the demands of
civilization into a reality ‘of a new kind’. What Magritte’s grotesque objects seek
to achieve, as we shall see, is to satisfy this desire by yielding two levels of playful
or nonsense effects to dethrone effectively the compulsion of reason and morality
in favour of fantasies.
Indeed, in the ‘world of phantasy’ lies the supreme goal of Surrealism: ‘nous
avons tendu’, writes Breton in Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme, ‘à donner la réalité
intérieure et la réalité extérieure comme deux éléments en puissance d’unification,
en voie de devenir commun’ (‘we have aimed to make interior reality and exterior
reality as two elements that have the potential to be unified in the process of
becoming one’) (ABOC ii, 231). This potentially unified ‘one’ is what Breton calls
‘surréalité’, a kind of absolute reality built on the integration of two opposite states
such as life and death, reality and imagination (ABOC I, 319, 781). To be precise,
such an integration in fact relies on the victory of the pleasure principle (over the
reality principle), through which Surrealism revives the happiness or euphoria that,
Freud has pointed out, is lost in the progress of civilization. That is why Breton
regards the Surrealist mind as the return of or to childhood: that is, the age at which
138 The Surrealist Grotesque

children, since the complete reign of logic and morality has not arrived, are not
yet ‘sevrés de merveilleux’ (‘weaned from the marvellous’) and maintain ‘une assez
grande virginité d’esprit’ (‘a sufficient virginity of mind’) to fully enjoy the world
of fantasy (Manifeste du surréalisme, ABOC i, 340, 320).
The pursuit of the marvellous is the very quintessence of Surrealism. Following
Apollinaire’s pursuit of la surprise (‘surprise’) as ‘ressort le plus moderne’ (‘the most
modern driving force’) and as the embodiment of unhampered imagination,9
Breton, in Manifeste du surréalisme, regards the marvellous as the artistic principle of
Surrealism: ‘le merveilleux est toujours beau, [. . .] il n’y a même que le merveilleux
qui soit beau’ (‘the marvellous is always beautiful, [. . .] only the marvellous is
beautiful’) (ABOC i, 319). The marvellous and surréalité are one and the same. The
marvellous, as Louis Aragon writes, burgeons from the refusal of a conventional
reality and from ‘le développement d’un nouveau rapport, d’une réalité nouvelle
que ce refus a libérée’ (‘the development of a new rapport, of a new reality that
this refusal has liberated’); the reality thus established is a ‘miracle’, a ‘surréalité’.10 In
short, it is by the beauty of the marvellous that the whole purpose of Surrealism
is achieved: the triumph of the pleasure principle in the commingling of two
incongruous states.

2. The Revival of Childhood Pleasure

The primacy of the pleasure principle in the creation of surréalité, or the marvellous,
seeks to recover, in Freud’s terms, ‘lost laughter of childhood’ (PFL vi, 289). For
Breton, automatism — or more broadly, the disinterested play of thought —
especially lends itself to the creation of the most marvellous images, in that it
effectively brings forth the chance or fortuitous encounter of two terms or objects as
occurs in the dream or the unconscious (ABOC i, 338). The Surrealist disinterested
play of thought, Freud would agree, revives certain pleasurable effects that children
gain from ‘[p]lay with words and thoughts’ which has been criticized by the faculty
of reason as ‘meaningless or actually absurd’. The pleasurable effects
arise from a repetition of what is similar, a rediscovery of what is familiar,
similarity of sound, etc., and [. . .] are to be explained as unsuspected economies
in [psychical] expenditure. It is not to be wondered at that these pleasurable
effects encourage children in the pursuit of play and cause them to continue
it without regard for the meaning of words or the coherence of sentences.
(PFL vi, 178)
Like infantile play, the Surrealist play of thought frequently (con)fuses items or
objects from different categories simply because of their ‘similitudes partielles’ (‘partial
similarities’) (La Clé des champs, ABOC iii, 769) to result in highly absurd images:
‘Ma femme [. . .] | À la langue de pierre incroyable | [. . .] | Aux doigts de foin
coupé | [. . .] | Ma femme aux fesses de grès’ (‘My woman [. . .] | With a tongue
of fantastic stone | [. . .] | With fingers of mown hay | My woman with buttocks
of sandstone’); ‘Je vois les arêtes du soleil’ (‘I see the ridges of the sun’); and so forth
(‘L’Union libre’, ABOC ii, 87; ‘Vigilance’, p. 94).11 Breton compares fortuitous
associations of this sort to children’s word-games, whose principle also lies behind
 The Surrealist Grotesque 139

the pictorial game of le cadavre exquis, devoted to the production of ‘la plus belle
humeur’ (‘the greatest humour’).12
It is fair to say that by ‘the greatest humour’ Breton means what Freud calls
‘pleasure in nonsense’ (mentioned before), a type of pleasure which is derived
from the way children learn words through play and which is discouraged or
repressed by the compulsion of logical reasoning. To be sure, humour or pleasure
in the above examples arises from ‘a high degree of immediate absurdity’ related
to physical incongruity or contradiction, the very sine qua non of the grotesque.
That is, Surrealist chance encounters or free associations often lead to imagistic
grotesqueness. Here comes a vital question. For Breton, the Surrealist image aims to
stimulate liberating laughter in such a way as to inspire the reader or viewer with a
humorous attitude towards the destruction of a rational unity. Nevertheless, Breton
never touches upon how the reader or viewer is able to find pleasure in physical
incongruity or hybridization which occurs so frequently in the Surrealist pursuit
of a destroyed rational unity, since, as discussed in previous chapters, physical
incongruity/hybridization, owing to biological impurity, can also arouse the fear
of sickness and death or revive the anxiety-provoking memory of ‘the fragmented
body’ (see Chapter 2, sect. 1). It would seem, then, that the Surrealist revival of
childhood pleasure through the liberation of unconscious impulses, or semiotic
drives, is inevitably accompanied by that of childhood pain.
In fact, a great number of Surrealist grotesque images — especially visual images
— tend to induce fear or horror much more than laughter or humour. Ernst’s
grotesque images, for example, are generally dominated by strong menacing or
repugnant factors, because they involve exotic hybrid monsters or human bodies
mixed with threatening or sordid animals: La Toilette de la mariée of 1940 (Fig. 5.2)
presents a man with a head of an exotic bird whose pointed beak looks harmful,
and a homunculus that exists as a cross between a four-breasted woman and
some kind of frog. In a similar vein, horror or disgust often prevails in many of
Dalí’s grotesque images because of their excessive physical distortion, corporeal
decomposition, or ghastly appearances: Pressentiment de la guerre civile of 1936 (Fig.
5.4) shows a dismembered grimacing figure whose grotesque body is extremely
distorted and partly decayed. Also, Hans Bellmer’s destruction of sexual difference
tends to be pronouncedly repellent or undesirable: Undressing of 1968 (Fig. 5.5)
displays a woman whose legs grow into a huge erect penis that penetrates a huge
vaginal opening which is also part of her torso.
Although Surrealist grotesque images such as Ernst’s, Dalí’s, and Bellmer’s do
produce certain playful or nonsense effects because of (bio)logical absurdity, the
effects are forced to stay in the background by the overwhelming ominous or
destructive forces that, as Kristeva would say, beckon us to the traumatic experience
of witnessing pain, sickness, and death, and end up engulfing us.13 The grotesque, as
I have repeatedly shown, contains a self-contradictory emotional structure in which
emphasis can be placed on either of two emotional poles. In Ernst’s, Dalí’s, and
Bellmer’s cases, with the fearful pole coming into prominence, Surrealist grotesque
images, one can say, go beyond the pleasure principle to prefer nightmares to
(day-)dreams and, as Freud would say, ‘bring to memory the psychical traumas of
childhood’ (PFL vi, 304).
140 The Surrealist Grotesque

Therefore, if Surrealist art, as Breton stresses, seeks to trigger liberating laughter

by unleashing unconscious drives to allow the triumph of the pleasure principle
over the reality principle, of (childhood) pleasure over (childhood) pain, it is crucial
to address the following question: under what condition does physical incongruity
— which lies at the centre of the Surrealist image — inspire the reader/viewer with
laughter more than with horror? From the perspective of cognitive psychology, Noël
Carroll convincingly argues that physical incongruity or contradiction, because of
being (bio)logically anomalous, provides a fertile ground for exciting both horror
and laughter. If, then, it is to promote laughter more than horror, amusement more
than alienation, physical incongruity must prevent its fearfulness from appearing in
pronounced form:
[T]hough horror and incongruity humor share one condition, they diverge in
other respects. Horror requires fearsomeness in addition to category jamming.
So where the fearsomeness of the monster is convincingly in place, horror
will not drift over into incongruity humor. But where the fearsomeness of
the monster is compromised or def lected by either neutralizing it or at least
drawing attention away from it, the monster can become an appropriate object
for incongruity humor.14
Simply put, the stronger the fearsomeness of the monster, the weaker the play­
fulness. Thus, the answer to the above question is: in order for Surrealist physi­cal
incongruity to be pronouncedly playful, its threatening or fearsome force must not
be so predominant as to inhibit its humorous force from coming to the fore.
Amongst Surrealist visual artists, Magritte is most involved in downplaying the
fearful force and increasing the degree of play in his grotesque objects. It is not
typical of his mature grotesque objects to contain elements — such as sickening
waste, corporeal distortion, or exotic menacing animals — which, as is seen in
Ernst, Dalí, and Bellmer, trigger the fear of pain, sickness, and death, and thus
threaten the mind with intense disgust or horror. Moreover, the sense of fear, which
does not appear to be intense and predominant at first sight, is further humorously
treated by conceptual incongruity — provided either by images themselves or by
the interplay of images and their titles — to foreground the playfulness of physical
incongruity. Simply put, Ernst, Dalí, and Bellmer tend to invest their grotesque
objects with threatening or disgusting factors to foreground the fearfulness of
physical incongruity, whereas Magritte seeks to have the playfulness of physical
incongruity come to the fore by equipping his grotesque objects with two levels of
humorous or nonsense effects: the manifest pleasure of physical incongruity and the
latent pleasure of conceptual incongruity.
A great example is Magritte’s Hommage à Alfonse Allais of 1964 (Fig. 5.6). The title
obviously suggests a dedication to the French writer Allais, who, Breton writes,
exercises ‘une activité terroriste de l’esprit’ (‘a terrorist activity on the mind’) to
endow his work with humour (Anthologie de l’humour noir, ABOC ii, 1019). At the
literal level, this painting demonstrates a kind of infantile play: a hybridization of
two contrary everyday objects, a swimming fish (the animate) and a smoking cigar
(the inanimate), into a ‘figar’ on the basis of a coincidental physical similarity in
shape. The prima facie absurdity of this grotesque hybrid may arouse immediate
 The Surrealist Grotesque 141

laughter because its physical incongruity appears to be hardly fearful at first sight. In
addition, underneath the literal absurdity or manifest pleasure lies Magritte’s other
rebellious attitude towards the yoke of logical reasoning, namely, a play upon words
that arbitrarily identifies with each other two objects belonging to incompatible
categories: a fish can be smoked and so can a cigar; therefore, a fish is a cigar.
Freud would call such illogical identifications as ‘faulty reasoning’, a technique in
joke-making which ‘by means of a double meaning’ builds ‘a connection [between
two situations] which [is] not valid in reality’; faulty reasoning is one of the acts of
‘[c]onsciously giving free play to unconscious modes of thought [. . .] [,] a means of
producing comic pleasure’ (PFL vi, 98, 266).
One can locate the source of ‘faulty reasoning’ in a kind of schizophrenic
cognition called ‘paleologic’ (or primitive) thinking, preceding the usual logic of
normal people: schizophrenic patients who exhibit such thinking, according to
Silvano Arieti, tend to identify one thing with another if those things share some
identical attributes which are nevertheless illogical: a patient, for instance, identifies
herself with the Virgin Mary simply because they both are virgins: ‘The Virgin
Mary was a virgin; I am a virgin; therefore I am the Virgin Mary’.15 For Lacan, such
a delusional conclusion shows the psychotic’s failure to knot together the signifier
and the signified to form the point de caption — a person cannot be called ‘normal’
without a certain number of these points (see Introduction, sect. 3). Thus, a hole is
left in the symbolic signifying chain, a hole through which what is excluded from or
has not been organized by symbolization — namely, the real — comes to light (see
Chapter 2, sect. 1). For Kristeva, such a conclusion manifests an intrusion of the
semiotic drives of ‘nonsense effects’ into symbolic signification and prohibition.
Seen in this light, Magritte’s illogical (or schizophrenic) identification of a fish
with a cigar designates the semioticization of the symbolic: the object ‘figar’ (a fish
is a cigar) does not carry out the normal function of metaphor, that of unveiling
or creating a convincing likeness between two different or discordant objects or
ideas; instead, it is a deliberate attempt to cause a crack or hole in logical reasoning
to inspire the viewer with a humorous attitude towards the fissure between them.
The infantile play or visual nonsense thus turns into verbal nonsense — the cigar
(or the fish) can be smoking whilst the fish (or the cigar) swims in water — or
indeed, a joke, ‘a judgement which produces a comic contrast’ (PFL vi, 40).
Admittedly, Magritte’s ‘figar’ is a visualization of play with words; it is both literally
and figuratively a visual paradox: literally because it (con)fuses the animate and
the inanimate and figuratively because it mixes together water and fire, Eros and
Thanatos, the pleasure principle and the reality principle.
Magritte’s Hommage à Alfonse Allais — in which the use of faulty reasoning already
appears in Le Thérapeute (1937) (Fig. 5.14) — serves to illustrate the line Freud draws
between dreams and jokes, between infantile play and ‘developed play’. Dreams
and jokes share many essential features in the functioning of mental activities to
gain pleasure and avoid pain: the dream-work of displacement, condensation, and
indirect representation is also involved in the joke-work. Nevertheless, they differ
from each other in several aspects, the most important of which is ‘intelligibility’:
unlike dreams, which have ‘nothing to communicate to anyone else’, jokes
142 The Surrealist Grotesque

remain the most social of all the mental functions aimed at producing pleasure;
intelligibility is therefore required to invite the participation of someone else (PFL
vi, 238). This may explain why many Surrealist dream-like images, especially
those born of automatism (the virtual dream state), tend to be unintelligible; they
provoke laughter largely because of their prima facie absurdity or apparent nonsense.
By contrast, Magritte’s Hommage à Alfonse Allais is a joke, a ‘developed play’, in
that underneath its prima facie absurdity lurks a moment of sudden ‘insight’, one
that brings about a comic or humorous contrast. This grotesque object therefore
contains two levels of playful or nonsense effects: visual nonsense and verbal
nonsense, or physical incongruity and conceptual incongruity.
Magritte claims to keep aloof from automatism (pp. 218–19, 479); his painting,
however, proves to be no less irrational or less effective in the production of ‘the
greatest humour’ (mentioned before). Magritte’s painting often results from the
playful contemplation of objects in order to describe ‘la pensée poétique [qui]
est “irrationnelle” ’ (‘poetic thought [that] is “irrational” ’) (p. 354); or, in Freud’s
terms, his painting consciously gives free rein to unconscious modes of thought.
For Breton, this situation places Magritte sui generis amongst the Surrealists:
Magritte enriches Surrealism, Breton emphasizes, with a new direction by alone
using a ‘pleinement déliberée’ (‘fully deliberate’) — rather than an ‘automatique’
(‘automatic’) — approach to the construction of painting, a construction which he
carries out ‘dans l’esprit des “leçon de choses” ’ (‘in the spirit of “object lessons” ’).16
By ‘object lessons’, Breton means that, as J. H. Matthews elucidates, Magritte offers
painting ‘in which things, taken in eminently recognizable form from the world
about him, are arranged in a manner that undermines generally accepted notions
regarding objective reality’.17 That is to say, Magritte turns objective reality against
itself by (dis)placing familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts to bring about unsettling
liaisons between objects themselves and/or between objects and their environments.
His object lessons therefore defy the viewer’s rational categorizations.
The defamiliarization of the familiar is in fact a trademark of Modernist art;
its execution varies according to different artists: for instance, Marcel Duchamp
defamiliarizes a regular urinal with the title Fountain and the signature ‘R. Mutt’.
In Magritte’s hands, defamiliarization becomes a rich loam for the growth of the
effect of the uncanny — which arises when the viewer is led to confuse the realistic
and the imaginary in artworks. Amongst Surrealist painters whom one may class
as ‘realistic’ or ‘illusionist’, Magritte is arguably most engaged in creating uncanny
surréalité. In, say, Ernst’s and Dalí’s paintings (see Figs. 5.2–5.4), surréalité appears to
be on the verge of giving up its realistic side for its imaginary side; by contrast,
Magritte seeks to strike a balance between both sides by sticking to a true-to-life
representation of objects (or at least certain elements of them). In answering the
question of why he portrays surréalité with the trompe-l’œil technique, Magritte
writes: ‘ma peinture doit ressembler au monde pour pouvoir en évoquer le mystère’
(‘my painting must resemble the world in order to be able to evoke its mystery’)
(p. 537). In his own paintings, he further explains, objects are rendered ‘avec
l’apparence qu’ils ont dans la réalité’ (‘with the appearance they have in reality’)
and yet are ‘situés là où nous ne les rencontrons jamais. C’est la réalization d’un désir
 The Surrealist Grotesque 143

Fig. 5.5. Hans Bellmer, Undressing, 1968, Private Collection.

© Hans Bellmer / ADAGP, Paris – SACK, Seoul, 2009
Fig. 5.6. René Magritte, Hommage à Alfonse Allais, 1964, Private Collection.
© René Magritte / ADAGP, Paris – SACK, Seoul, 2009
144 The Surrealist Grotesque

réel, sinon conscient pour la plupart des hommes’ (‘situated where we never encounter
them. This is the realization of a real — if not conscious — desire existing in most human
beings’) (p. 143).
In Le Portrait of 1935 (Fig. 5.7), for instance, Magritte, to quote Freud on the
uncanny, pretends to ‘give us the sober truth’ by giving each object the appearance
of reality, but then exceeds it by (dis)placing a staring eye in the centre of a slice
of ham. As such, ‘[w]e react to his inventions as we would have reacted to real
experience’ (PFL xiv, 374; see also Chapter 1, sect. 3). In other words, this grotesque
‘eye-ham’, by animating the inanimate, resurrects a residual primitive and animistic
mentality which has been repressed in the development of civilization; this object
thus creates in the civilized mind a conf lict of judgement about whether what
has been repressed and is regarded as imaginary or superstitious may be, after all,
possible or real. This grotesque ‘eye-ham’, so to speak, causes a critical disturbance
of the natural and the proper as it brings out/back a primitive function of human
f lesh: an eye (which is associated with a human face) becomes naturally edible when
it is part of a ham. Nevertheless, Magritte enables this uncanny fear, or the fear of
the uncanny, to retreat into the background by providing a title, Le Portrait, which
forms a humorous contrast to this ‘eye-ham’: a portrait, by definition, is a likeness
of a person’s face, but here a slice of ham with an eye, apparently intended to be like
a face (Magritte’s?), only shows its categorical difference from a face. Again, we see
a crack or hole in logical reasoning or symbolic signification, a deliberate inaccuracy
of the resemblance or analogy proposed between two objects. At this point, the
grotesque ‘eye-ham’ which initially inspired fear now becomes playfully absurd.
Le Portrait, as well as Hommage à Alfonse Allais, demonstrates Magritte’s involve­
ment in a high degree of play — or indeed, the interplay of incongruity at the
physical and conceptual levels — to discharge effectively semiotic drives of ‘nonsense
effects’ to downplay fear or anxiety, and ultimately to realize the triumph of the
pleasure principle over the reality principle in work and in response. I shall return
in the last section to elaborate at length on the nature of such interplay in Magritte’s
grotesque objects. In the above two grotesque objects, as in others we shall see,
physical incongruity and conceptual incongruity, the realistic and the imaginary,
co-operate with each other to engender what Magritte calls ‘le charme de l’étrange’
(‘the spell of the strange’) (p. 460), whose aim it is to fulfil our (un)conscious desire
to re-make reality, to transform the physical world. For Magritte, this desire is best
fulfilled by metamorphosis, a phenomenon that speaks directly to the alchemical
aspect of Surrealism (Second manifeste du surréalisme, ABOC i, 818–20): the barriers
separating the human, animal, vegetal, and mineral worlds fall apart to make
possible all sorts of (incomplete) metamorphosis. As we shall see in the following
section, ‘the spell of the strange’ — which carries within it the re-making of reality
— cannot be separated from Magritte’s pursuit of poetry, the critical issue of his
(grotesque) object lessons.
 The Surrealist Grotesque 145

Fig. 5.7. René Magritte, Le Portrait, 1935, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
© René Magritte / ADAGP, Paris – SACK, Seoul, 2009
146 The Surrealist Grotesque

3. The Pursuit of Poetry

The evocation of mystery, central to Magritte’s construction of object lessons, is
entwined with the pursuit of poetry. Magritte’s involvement in poetry started around
1925, when ‘a new vision’ (‘une nouvelle vision’) that Giorgio de Chirico revealed
in Il canto d’amore (The Song of Love) of 1913 struck him as the triumph of poetry
over painting (p. 103) and inspired him to pursue the power of poetry in painting
throughout the rest of his life. This new vision of de Chirico — who, together
with Lautréamont, is most admired by the Surrealists — lies in the manifestation
of mystery within puzzling juxtapositions of everyday objects. Magritte’s L’Empire
des lumières, as we have seen, portrays an enigmatic, or rather, oxymoronic,
juxtaposition of a night-lit landscape against a fully sun-lit sky. He equates poetry
with the power of such mysterious juxtapositions ‘de nous surprendre et de nous
enchanter’ (‘to surprise and enchant us’) (p. 422). The power of this poetic evocation
in fact rests on a conceptual incongruity or paradox, one that at once revokes and
invokes our sense of time. It is day and night at the same time: time no longer
passes; and it is impossible to measure things in the painting any more according to
the laws of consequence or material reality.
The other figure — in addition to de Chirico — whom Magritte sees as the first
to incorporate poetry into his painting is Ernst, whose work, as Magritte describes,
‘a cette “réalité” qui sait réveiller [. . .] notre confiance dans le merveilleux’ (‘has
this “reality” that can awaken [. . .] our belief in the marvellous’) (p. 482). Ernst is a
renowned practitioner of Surrealist collage, which he connects with ‘l’irrationnel’
(‘the irrational’) and compares to ‘l’alchimie de l’image visuelle’ (‘the alchemy of
the visual image’).18 That is to say, collage breeds all kinds of metamorphosis, which
is itself a major feature of alchemy. For Magritte, Ernst’s painting is marvellous, in
the specific sense that it ‘collages’ things known into things unknown and yet still
verisimilar.
Whilst acknowledging his debt to de Chirico and Ernst in the pursuit of poetry,
Magritte claims that he himself is ‘le seul à préciser la poésie’ (‘the only one to think
specifically about poetry’) (p. 568). Magritte’s definition of poetry in fact remains
rather vague throughout his writings. Nevertheless, one can certainly ascertain that,
for Magritte, poetry occurs when the familiar and the known become mysterious
and that the purpose of his painted images is to make poetry appear in a visible
form in such a way as to (cor)respond to our innate interest in ‘l’inconnu’ (‘the
unknown’), namely, ‘la réalité de l’univers’ (‘the reality of the universe’) (p. 686):
L’art de peindre [. . .] se borne à la description de la pensée inspirée susceptible
d’apparaître visiblement. C’est-à-dire la pensée qui unit — dans l’ordre qui
évoque le mystère — les figures du monde visible: personnes, ciels, montagnes,
arbres, meubles, solides, inscriptions, etc. [. . .] La description de la pensée
inspirée permet l’avènement de la poésie visible. (p. 565)
[The art of painting [. . .] is merely the description of inspired thought that is
likely to appear in a visible form. That is to say, the thought that unites — in
the order that evokes mystery — the figures of the visible world: persons,
 The Surrealist Grotesque 147

skies, mountains, trees, pieces of furniture, solids, inscriptions, etc. [. . .] The

description of inspired thought allows the advent of visible poetry.]
For Magritte, poetry and mystery are closely tied up with each other: poetry is the
evocation of mystery in the world of everyday reality; mystery is the manifestation
of inspired poetic thought that irrationally ‘unit’ (‘unites’) familiar visible figures.
Poetry and mystery together endow painting with ‘the spell of the strange’, the
enchanting power of defamiliarizing the familiar or making the unknown with the
known in the visible world.
To better comprehend Magritte’s pursuit of (visible) poetry, it is necessary to
examine his frequent use of words (l’usage de la parole)19 in his painting, as his
execu­tion of combining word and image will provide us with a more fundamental,
philosophical sense of his object lessons, his visual play with thoughts: the remaking
of reality through the (con)fusion of physical and conceptual categories into
something unknown (as seen in his grotesque objects). Magritte’s La Clef des songes
of 1930 (Fig. 5.8) serves as a revealing example of his use of word with image. This
painting displays a set of six signs, each of which consists of an image and a word. At
one level, this painting is a (radical) operation of Saussurean linguistics. By linking
incongruous items, such as ‘la neige’ (a signifier) and a bowler (a signified), to form a
sign, Magritte calls our attention to the arbitrary nature of all signs. In terms of the
philosophy of language, this painting goes beyond the level of Saussurean linguistics
to ref lect upon the nature of language as a means of constructing reality or truth,
a crucial issue that Nietzsche — to whom Magritte refers several times throughout
his writings — discusses in ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’ (1873).
By arbitrarily assigning to an object a name that does not conventionally match it,
Magritte not merely defamiliarizes, or semioticizes, the object but, more importantly,
brings us to the fundamental questions Nietzsche has posed: ‘Is there a perfect
match between things and their designations? Is language the full and adequate
expression of all realities?’20
For Nietzsche, a word or name is by no means the ‘thing-in-itself ’, or ‘pure truth’,
which is too elusive or f lickering for language to grasp. Human beings believe,
however, that ‘when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and f lowers, we have know­
ledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which
in no way correspond to the original entities’ (p. 144). By ‘metaphors of things’,
Nietzsche suggests that we generalize all sensuous variations amongst, say, leaves by
translating them first into an image and then into an articulated sound, namely, the
word or concept ‘leaf ’. In so doing, we equate words or concepts with the things
themselves, as truths, and gradually forget that they are merely metaphors, or rather,
residues of metaphors:
Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors
that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins
which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer
as coins. (p. 146)
Truths, so to speak, are metaphors stripped of their first sensuous quality and their
engagement with tangible reality; they are dead metaphors.
148 The Surrealist Grotesque

Fig. 5.8. René Magritte, La Clef des songes, 1930, Private Collection.
© René Magritte / ADAGP, Paris – SACK, Seoul, 2009
 The Surrealist Grotesque 149

Dead metaphors have accustomed us to conceptual abstractions of things in such

a way that we forget or ignore the subjective, sensuous perceptions of them. Thus,
Nietzsche calls for a fundamental subversion of the generalizing abstraction of
sensory particulars:
if one of us were to see a stimulus as red, a second person were to see the same
stimulus as blue, while a third were even to hear it as a sound, nobody would
ever speak of nature as something conforming to laws; rather they would take
it to be nothing other than a highly subjective formation. (p. 149)
This subversion of abstraction, Nietzsche suggests, depends on human creativity,
viz., the drive to spawn new metaphors:
This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing
forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. It continually
manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking
man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence,
charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. (p. 146)
In the creation of ‘new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies’, the confusion
of categories — which also defines the nature of the grotesque — will awaken
or sharpen our awareness of multiple experiences of nerve stimulation, of things
themselves, and thus project new possibilities for ‘refashion[ing] the world’.
But how do new metaphors refashion the world? In La Clef des songes, Magritte
offers an answer by bringing into play the very act of naming, of defining, or,
indeed, of metaphorization. ‘Un objet’, Magritte puts it, ‘ne tient pas tellement à son
nom qu’on ne puisse lui en trouver un autre qui lui convienne mieux’ (‘An object
does not hold to its name so much that one cannot find a more suitable name for it’)
(p. 60). Giving an object a new name can not only diversify the sensuous perception
of an object but also, Magritte argues, ‘créer entre [eux] de nouveaux rapports et
préciser quelques caractères du langage et des objets, généralement ignorés dans la
vie quotidienne’ (‘create new links between [them] and specify some characteristics
of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life’).21 Therefore, a high-
heel shoe is ‘the moon’; a bowler hat is ‘the snow’; a glass is ‘the storm’; and so forth.
Or in the case of Hommage à Alfonse Allais, a fish is a cigar and vice versa; in the
case of L’Île au trésor (1942), a leaf is a bird and vice versa; in the case of L’Explication
(1952), a carrot is a bottle and vice versa; and so forth.
As we can see again, the (schizophrenic) act of naming is not an extraneous
by-product of Magritte’s object lessons but lies at the heart of what he is doing.
Here Magritte’s act of naming opens up a void in the symbolic order of language to
introduce what has not been organized by symbolization; it generates a high degree of
immediate incongruity or ‘nonsense effects’ to inspire the viewer with a humorous
and rebellious attitude towards ‘the compulsion of logic and reason’ which governs
the course of civilization (PFL vi, 175). In Magritte’s examples, to name is in fact
to (con)fuse physical and conceptual categories, to create a new metaphor, or rather,
a diaphor. Diaphor, as opposed to epiphor, is a mode of metaphor in which, Philip
Wheelwright explains, the relationship between components is ‘presentational
rather than representational’, created rather than recorded, and thus any similarity
150 The Surrealist Grotesque

between them is more ‘induced’ than ‘antecedent’.22 Brief ly, diaphor is, to borrow
Nietzsche’s words, ‘a highly subjective formation’.
In other words, diaphor effectively re-forms or trans-forms the natural order
of things. Its counterpart in visual arts is hybrid imagery or collage. For instance,
Cubist collage is what Reverdy had in mind in 1919 when calling Cubism ‘plastic
poetry’ (‘la poésie plastique’): the Cubists employ the poetic method of binding
things together to re-form or trans-form objects into ‘quelque chose d’entièrement
neuf ’ (‘something entirely new’), namely, ‘une image inouïe’ (‘an unseen image’).23
Likewise, in ‘Modern Art — II: Preface Note and Neo-Realism’, an apologia for
Cubism published in 1914, two years after Picasso created the first Cubist collage
Still Life with Chair Caning, T. E. Hulme commends Picasso for having ‘isolated and
emphasised relations [between objects] previously not emphasised’ in his paintings.24
In ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ (1908), Hulme terms a new relation previously
unnoticed as ‘a visual chord’, a new poetic image formed by the unification of two
images.25 Following Nietzsche’s notion of new metaphors, Hulme maintains that
metaphors ‘soon run their course and die’ and therefore the poet must constantly
create ‘fresh metaphors’ to present to the reader a ‘life-communicating quality’ that
allows him/her to ‘see things freshly as they really are’.26 Fresh metaphors prevent
the reader from ‘gliding through an abstract process’, whereas dead metaphors
‘cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract counters’.27 In Hulme, the
line between the two types is that between poetry and prose: ‘Verse is pedestrian,
taking you over the ground[,] prose — as a train delivers you at a destination’.28
That is, poetry presents metaphors so fresh as to force the mind’s eye to linger on
the materiality of language, whereas prose makes language so transparent as to
allow the reader to look through it readily into abstract thought.
Hulme’s separation of poetry from prose finds an echo in Breton’s call for the
pursuit of ‘la vitalité concrète’ (‘the concrete vitality’) in poetic creation as a revolt
against ‘les habitudes logiques de la pensée’ (‘logical habits of thought’). To achieve
this end, Breton emphasizes, the poet
doit résolument creuser toujours davantage le fossé qui sépare la poésie de la
prose; il dispose pour cela d’un outil et d’un seul, capable de forer toujours plus
profondément, qui est l’image et, entre tous les types d’images, la métaphore.
[must resolutely dig the trench even deeper between poetry and prose; he
uses for that purpose only one tool — capable of drilling deeper and deeper
— which is image, and, amongst all types of images, metaphor.] (‘Situation
surréaliste de l’objet’, ABOC ii, 485)
Breton, like Hulme, maintains that the freshness or vitality of metaphor lies in
‘sensuous force’ (in Nietzsche’s terms); and that metaphor, as we shall see, gives
rise to the strongest sensuous force when its two components share only ‘similitudes
partielles’ as in fortuitous associations or children’s word-games. Noticeably, in
Breton, not only for the poet but for the painter metaphor acts as the mortal enemy
of prosaic or logical habits of looking at things: he gives Chagall credit for enabling
metaphor to mark ‘son entrée triomphale dans la peinture moderne’ (‘its triumphant
entry into modern painting’) in 1911 by producing images that ‘abatt[ent] la barrière
des elements et des règnes [animaux et végétaux]’ (‘collaps[e] the barrier between
 The Surrealist Grotesque 151

elements and between [the animal and vegetable] kingdoms’).29 In Breton, as in

Hulme, metaphor, instead of being a poetic ornament, is the very marrow of
poetry or poetic image: poetry, image, and metaphor form a trinity in making
reality, to use Nietzsche’s words, ‘eternally new as the world of dreams’; that is, the
world of dreams is one full of fortuitous encounters between objects from different
categories which constantly undermine our habitual modes of thinking and make
us see the world afresh. Such an ambition to remake reality, one can say, underpins
Magritte’s pursuit of (visible) poetry.

4. The ‘Oneiric Values’ of Metaphor

Magritte, Breton, and Reverdy, as we have seen, all have a conspicuous propensity
for a highly subjective formation of metaphor — i.e. diaphor — in which similarity
between its components is created rather than recorded. Nevertheless, upon closer
examination, each of them in fact has a different approach to metaphor/image. My
aim in this section, then, is to examine their different approaches to metaphor/
image and highlight the ways in which Magritte’s special method of making
(grotesque) images contributes to the Surrealist creation of surréalité, the marvellous.
Let me start by comparing Breton’s and Reverdy’s notion of metaphor/image.
For Breton, the success of a surréalité depends on ‘notre volonté de dépaysement
complet’ (‘our desire for complete disorientation’) (ABOC ii, 305) that comes with
the denial of a rational reality; the more intense our desire to plunge ourselves
into ‘un dépaysement complet’, the more constructive the destruction of a rational
reality — that is, the stronger our susceptibility to a new reality, one that introduces
liberating drives against prohibition. It is the marvellous image, the manifestation of
the unknown, that sparks this desire: ‘C’est par la force des images [merveilleuses]’
, according to Breton, ‘que pourraient bien s’accomplir les vraies révolutions’ (‘It
is by the might of [marvellous] images that true revolutions would be able to
succeed’) (ABOC i, 901); and the creation of marvellous images relies on the faculty
‘d’atteindre deux réalités distantes [dans le champ de notre expérience] et de leur
rapprochement de tirer une étincelle’ (‘to attain two distant realities [within the
range of our experiences] and strike a spark from their conjunction’) (‘Max Ernst’,
ABOC i, 245–46).
Such a definition of the faculty to create marvellous images reminds us of
Reverdy’s 1918 description of the poetic image in Nord–Sud which Breton himself
famously quotes when elaborating on the beauty of the marvellous in the 1924
manifesto:
Elle [L’Image] ne peut naître d’une comparaison mais du rapprochement
de deux réalités plus ou moins éloignées. Plus les rapports des deux réalités
rapprochées seront lointains et justes, plus l’image sera forte — plus elle aura de
puissance émotive et de réalité poétique.30
[It [Image] cannot be born of a comparison but of a conjunction of two more
or less distant realities. The more the rapport between two assembled realities is
distant and accurate, the stronger the image will be — the greater its emotional
power and poetic reality.]
152 The Surrealist Grotesque

We are already familiar with the poetic mode of joining together remote items:
the Baroque metaphor, for Tesauro, ‘is more witty and acute when the notions
are very remote’; the Romantic imagination, as Baudelaire describes it, consists in
the power to blend ‘sentiments contradictoires’ (see Chapter 3, sect. 4; Chapter 4,
sect. 2). Here Reverdy defines image as the product of the common ground — i.e.
analogy or resemblance — that brings together two logically distant realities; more
importantly, its strength rests on the justesse of the analogy or resemblance.
Reverdy’s mode of assembling distant realities, unconventional as it is, seems
not too far away from Pierre Fontanier’s classical notion of metaphor. In his Les
Figures du discours (1830), Fontanier insists that metaphor be ‘vrai et juste’ (‘true and
accurate’) rather than ‘équivoque ou supposée’ (‘equivocal or imaginary’) in order
for it to be ‘lumineuse’ (‘clear’) enough to delight the mind immediately; and that
its terms not ‘s’exclure mutuellement’ (‘contradict each other’) in order for it to
be ‘cohérente’ (‘coherent’).31 In a rather similar manner, Reverdy argues that ‘[d]eux
réalités contraires’ (‘[t]wo contrary realities’) cannot be yoked together, because
‘[o]n obtient rarement une force de cette opposition’ (‘strength rarely arises from
such an opposition’).32 He then goes on to underline his belief that an image is strong
not because ‘elle est brutale ou fantastique — mais parce que l’association des idées
est lointaine et juste’ (‘it is brutal or fantastic — but because the association of ideas
is distant and accurate’); and that the result thus obtained ‘contrôle immediatement
la justesse de l’association’ (‘immediately controls the accuracy of the association’).33
To be sure, it is justesse rather than éloignement, the figurative (sense) rather than the
literal (nonsense), the signified rather than the signifier, that underpins Reverdy’s
notion of poetic image: justesse enables the coupling of two logically distant realities
to obtain a ‘structural unity’ (in Arnheim’s terms) that allows their concrete
dissimilarities to retreat and their complete union (at the figurative level) to come to
the fore;34 this situation, Reverdy maintains, occurs ‘rarement’ in the conjunction
of contrary or opposing realities.
For Breton, however, it is the lack of a structural unity, or justesse, that gives
birth to the beauty, or the marvellous spark, of the Surrealist image (in poetry).
Considering Reverdy’s definition of image to be insufficient, Breton, in ‘Signe
ascendant’, argues that (poetic) analogy triggers ‘la plus vive lumière’ (‘the strongest
light’) not by the complete equation of two remote terms, but by their ‘similitudes
partielles’ (‘partial similarities’) — which aims at a high degree of absurdity at first sight
as a means of provoking liberating laughter (ABOC iii, 769). This is what Breton
calls the ‘valeurs oniriques’ (‘oneiric values’) of the Surrealist image (‘Exposition X
. . . , Y . . .’, ABOC ii, 301).35 One of the examples Breton provides is Apollinaire’s
imagery in ‘Fusée-Signal’ — which Reverdy would deem ‘brutale ou fantastique’:
‘Ta langue | Le poisson rouge dans le bocal | De ta voix’. As already discussed in
Chapter 2, the likenesses between, say, ‘your tongue’ and ‘a goldfish’ are only partial
and at the same time literal; as such, it is impossible to gain a structural unity that
justifies (figuratively) the complete identification of one component of the image
with the other. Thence arises the literalization — as opposed to abstraction — of
metaphor, which gives birth to physically incongruous imagery. That is to say, the
marvellous occurs in the literal, the primary process of the dream-work. In Breton,
 The Surrealist Grotesque 153

the greater the semantic or logical gap at the literal level between two combined
terms, the higher the degree of absurdity and dépaysement, and the more powerful
the marvellous spark of the image produced.
As a result, the most powerful virtue of the Surrealist metaphor, according to
Breton in Manifeste du surréalisme, is ‘celle qu’on met le plus longtemps à traduire
en langage pratique, soit qu’elle recèle une dose énorme de contradiction apparente
[. . .], soit qu’elle déchaîne le rire’ (‘the one that takes the longest time to translate
into practical language, either because it possesses an enormous amount of obvious
contradiction [. . .], or because it stirs up laughter’); the more arbitrary and
contradictory a combination, the more absurd and disorientating the resultant image
(ABOC i, 338). In other words, the more powerful the semiotic drives of ‘nonsense
effects’, the longer it takes to iron out the cognitive difficulty of a metaphor, and
the longer the mind is immersed in the marvellous. It is for this reason that Breton
writes in ‘Le Merveilleux contre le mystère’: ‘La lucidité est la grande ennemie de la
révélation’ (‘Lucidity is the nemesis of revelation’) (ABOC iii, 656). Lucidity, so to
speak, makes it easy to rationalize — or make sense of — a metaphor or an image
with a sustainable logic and thereby extinguishes any spark of the marvellous.
Clearly, Breton’s idea of metaphor/image is a far cry from the Ciceronian
tradition of metaphor, which, unlike the Baroque Longinian tradition, strives for
semantic clarity to delight, rather than astonish, the mind (see Chapter 3, sect. 2).
One may as well imagine that had Breton ever read Crashaw, he would perhaps
have cited this poet’s sensuous pseudometaphors to illustrate the Surrealist image.
In fact, in terms of form, Breton’s oft-quoted hallucinatory image below bears a
striking resemblance to Crashaw’s Baroque grotesque image of a tear laying its head
on a pillow that I discuss in Chapter 3 (sect. 5):
Sur le pont, à la même heure,
Ainsi la rosée à tête de chatte se berçait.
(‘Au Regard des divinités: À Louis Aragon’, ABOC i, 172)
[On the bridge, at the same time, | Thus the dew with the head of a cat lulls
itself to sleep.]
Breton’s image is designed to stir up liberating laughter and Crashaw’s to strike
divine wonder or awe. In Breton’s image, dew and a cat’s head have nothing in
common other than perhaps a round shape; that is, the lack of justesse, or a strong
functional similarity, makes it impossible to rationalize the equation of one with
the other. The marvellous spark therefore f lashes in the unbridgeable logical or
semantic gap between these two items. It would then follow that, with its lack of a
figurative sense, pseudometaphor produces for the mind’s eye the most marvellous
sparks in its rejection of the sustained power of rationalization to familiarize and
to deaden.
It is proper to say, then, that by ‘similitudes partielles’, Breton means the ascendency
of physical/sensuous over functional/characteristic similarities in the encounter
between two terms or objects. For the dominance of physical/sensuous similarities,
as previously discussed in Chapter 2, obstructs the smooth process of metaphorical
abstraction, that is, the transaction of thoughts or signifieds between two terms
or signifiers. Surrealist pseudometaphors therefore not merely build new sensory
154 The Surrealist Grotesque

rapports between objects of different domains, but prevent themselves from

becoming dead metaphors too fast owing to the loss of Nietzsche’s ‘sensuous force’.
The ascent on ‘similitudes partielles’, as previously mentioned, is akin to infantile play
with words which carries with it pleasure in nonsense. Howard Gardner and Ellen
Winner’s research on children’s metaphoric competence testifies to the remarkable
dominance of sensuous metaphors in infantile play and to its similarity to Surrealist
play. According to their research, preschool children show a pronounced propensity
for literalizing metaphors, that is, for describing one thing in terms of another
simply on the basis of physical or sensuous similitude. ‘Only after a somewhat later
age [after the age of ten] did children hit upon the appropriate psychological trait
[i.e. justesse] that constituted the ground of metaphor’.36
For the Surrealists, the royal road to the making of ‘similitudes partielles’ is the
chance encounter between unrelated objects. That is why Lautréamont’s following
description becomes — especially for the painter — the de facto Surrealist formula
that two objects meet by chance in an inappropriate setting: ‘Beau comme la
rencontre fortuite, sur une table de dissection, d’une machine à coudre et d’un
parapluie’ (‘Beautiful as the fortuitous encounter between a sewing machine and an
umbrella on a dissecting table’) (quoted in ABOC ii, 492). Fortuitous encounters
centre much more on accidental than on accurate analogies or likenesses between
two logically distant or discordant realities. Markedly, it is the primacy of fortuity,
le hasard, that marks the ontological distinction between the Romantic imagination
and the Surrealist imagination. Because of the insistence on le hasard, image, for the
Surrealists, is not really the expression of the subjectivity of the artist as genius, but
an outcome of a ‘jeu désintéressé’ or a fortuitous association.37 Moreover, in the
Romantic imagination, as exemplified by Baudelaire, the dream, though playing
a significant role, tends to be a mystical concept or a metaphor of the infinite or
l’inconnu. By contrast, thanks to the general inf luence of Freud, the dream, for the
Surrealists, is no longer a mystical concept, but an (omnipresent) daily reality, one
that reveals to them how — through displacement and condensation — marvellous
images can be made by reference to dream logic, namely, by chance. In the Surrealist
imagination, so to speak, the focus of creativity is shifted from (divine or demonic)
inspiration to le hasard; Baudelaire’s ‘Muse malade’ — which symbolizes his demonic
inspiration — thus gives way to le cadavre exquis, a product of the chance encounter
within everyday experience.
In the Lautréamont formula, Magritte sees ‘inherent poetry and mystery’ (p.
647); and in his own grotesque objects, Magritte further develops this metonymic
formula — metonymic because Lautréamont keeps objects apart — into a formula
that is metaphorical by nature. In Hommage à Alfonse Allais, for instance, a fish and
a cigar, two distant and opposite objects or realities, do not merely encounter each
other by chance — in the form of a coincidental physical resemblance in shape —
but mate with each other (by faulty reasoning) to give birth to a grotesque hybrid,
an incomplete metamorphosis of a fish into a cigar. Likewise, in Le Portrait, a slice
of ham with an eye stands for a face only because by chance they share a physical
similitude in shape. In other words, advocating Breton’s notion of ‘similitudes
partielles’, Magritte, like Breton, distances himself from Reverdy’s belief in justesse
as the first principle of joining together unrelated or distant items.
 The Surrealist Grotesque 155

Nevertheless, when creating Les Affinités electives in 1933, Magritte took Breton’s
theory of metaphor one step further by combining two correlated (rather than
unrelated) objects to trigger marvellous sparks and thus developed a method of
image-making that is ‘entirely his own’.38 This painting arises from the fact that one
night Magritte, waking out of sleep, saw — owing to ‘[u]ne magnifique erreur’ (‘[a]
magnificent error’) — an egg rather than a bird in a cage in his room:
Je tenais là un nouveau secret poétique étonnant, car le choc que je ressentis
était provoqué précisément par l’affinité de deux objets [corrélés], la cage et
l’œuf, alors que précédemment ce choc était provoqué par la rencontre d’objets
étrangers entre eux.
[I grasped there an astonishing new poetic secret, because the shock I exper­
ienced had been provoked precisely by the affinity of two [correlated] objects,
the cage and the egg, whereas previously this shock would have been provoked
by the meeting of two remotely related objects.] (p. 110)
Clearly, this magnificent hallucinatory error is still the result of a chance encounter
(the dream-work) between a cage and an egg (which is almost the size of the cage
in the painting) on the basis of their similar shapes; no longer, though, does the
yoking together of unrelated or distant objects dominate.
A celebrated product of Magritte’s unique method of combining correlated
objects is Le Viol of 1945 (Fig. 5.9), which first appeared in 1934 and later became
the cover illustration of Breton’s pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme? (1934). I would
like to cast light on the uniqueness of this method by comparing Le Viol to Dalí’s Le
Visage de Mae West of 1934–35 (Fig. 5.10) — one of his few grotesque objects whose
playfulness prevails over fearfulness — with an eye to foregrounding Magritte’s
particular contribution to the Surrealist production of the beauty of the marvellous:
that is, marvellous sparks spring from the (con)fusion of correlated objects no less
than from that of unrelated objects. Both Magritte’s and Dalí’s grotesque objects
are a play on a woman’s facial features; also, the (con)fusion of categories is based
more on coincidental physical/sensuous similitude than on functional/characteristic
similitude. Nevertheless, the (con)fused categories in Dalí’s object are distant, and
in Magritte’s intimately related.
Dalí’s Le Visage de Mae West, born of his ‘la méthode paranoïaque-critique’ (‘paranoiac-
critical method’),39 consists of a woman’s facial features and a room’s interior
decorations. They both are displaced from their contexts and overlaid upon each
other to construct a surréalité, a reality based on the highly subjective unification
of a room’s inside and a woman’s outside, the internal and external world, dream
and reality. Le Visage de Mae West illuminates Breton’s idea of ‘oneiric values’ that
are manifest in ‘A tomato is also a child’s balloon’; it shows the triumphant reign
of metaphor, of naming, which, as Magritte would say, creates new links between
objects or draws attention to some traits of objects ignored in everyday life. That
is, the hair and curtains are physically or sensuously similar. Two eyes and framed
paintings share a functional similarity: the former are to see and the latter to be
seen. The transformation of the nose into a fireplace (and vice versa) reveals their
physical similarity in shape and perhaps their functional similarity, namely, a
ventilation. The mouth and the sofa share a similar shape, a similar textile sensation
156 The Surrealist Grotesque

Fig. 5.9 (left). René Magritte, Le Viol, 1945,

Le Musée René Magritte, Bruxelles.
© René Magritte / ADAGP, Paris – SACK,
Seoul, 2009
Fig. 5.10 (below). Salvador Dalí, Le Visage
de Mae West, 1934-35, The Art Institute of
Chicago, Chicago.
© Salvador Dalí, Foundation Gala-Salvador
Dalí, VEGAP, Madrid 2009
 The Surrealist Grotesque 157

(softness), and perhaps a similar function (a kind of container). Lastly, Mae West’s
face, a red-painted wall (the upper portion of the face), and a wooden f loor (the
lower portion) share a characteristic similarity: a face, a wall, and a f loor are all
visible surfaces.
Dalí’s ‘paranoiac-critical’ method of combining objects had been employed
by the Mannerist painter Arcimboldo to create double images of human heads
composed of materials like fruit and vegetables (Fig. 0.3), wherein, according
to Barthes, one object is made to ‘sauter sans prévenir d’un règne à l’autre; la
métaphore n’est ici que l’exploitation d’une identité, [. . .] qui a simplement glissé
et changé de point d’appui (de contexte). Ce léger déséquilibre produit la plus
forte des étrangetés’ (‘jump unexpectedly into another domain; here the metaphor
is nothing but the exploitation of an identity, [. . .] which has simply slipped and
changed its point d’appui (context). This slight disequilibrium produces the strongest
sense of strangeness’).40 In Arcimboldo’s double images, as in Dalí’s, the identity of
combined objects, as Barthes incisively writes, ‘ne tient pas à la simultanéité de la
perception, mais à la rotation de l’image, présentée comme réversible’ (‘does not
rely on the simultaneity of perception but on the rotation of the image, presented
as reversible’).41 But in the process of the rotation, identity confusion sets in and
dépaysement arises from an in-between state, an incomplete metamorphosis born of
the interplay of two mutually exclusive objects. Grotesqueness is thus born. This
is, I suggest, what gives rise to ‘the strongest sense of strangeness’: i.e., that which
should remain metonymic or contiguous suddenly turns out to be metaphorical
or identical. In Le Visage de Mae West, the relationship between (the face of ) a
woman and (the interior decorations of ) a room should be metonymic because of
their spatial contiguity: human beings live in rooms. Nonetheless, they are playfully
superimposed on each other to form a series of marvellous metaphors, or diaphors:
a woman’s face is a room’s f loor; a mouth is a sofa; a nose is a fireplace; and so forth.
Thence arises a high degree of immediate absurdity, the beauty of the marvellous.
Like Dalí’s Le Visage de Mae West, Magritte’s Le Viol is structured on a woman’s
‘facial features’ by dint of the slight change of contexts: a female torso (which
should remain inside) leaps unexpectedly to the domain of a female face (which
stays outside), and sexual organs to the domain of sensory organs. Also, in
Magritte’s grotesque object, as in Dalí’s, coincidental physical similarity initiates
the metaphorical substitution of one set of body parts for the other. A torso and
a face happen to have similar shapes, and each happens to contain three types of
organs. First, breasts and eyes are similar in shape; incidentally, the combination
of the two organs is redolent of Baudelaire’s bizarre simile: ‘Tes deux beaux seins,
radieux | Comme des yeux’ (‘Your two beautiful breasts, bright | Like eyes’).42
Here Magritte turns Baudelaire’s simile into a metaphor, a virtual metamorphosis
into an actual one.43 Second, the transformation of the nose into the navel also
depends on their physical similarity: both occupy a central position. Finally, the
mouth (lips) and the vulva (labia) share a similar shape as well as a similar function,
i.e. a kind of container or opening. Here we can see that in Le Viol, as in Le Visage
de Mae West, ‘the strongest sense of strangeness’ occurs when that which should
remain metonymic and contiguous suddenly turns into a series of metaphors or
158 The Surrealist Grotesque

diaphors: with a female torso turning into a female face, breasts are eyes, a navel
is a nose, and a vulva (labia) is a mouth (lips). Again, this is a (schizophrenic)
act of naming, a rebellion against the compulsion of logic, the reality principle,
and symbolization. But in contrast to Dalí’s Le Visage de Mae West, Magritte’s Le
Viol appears to be more immediately absurd, in that its grotesqueness, or physical
incongruity, is immediately visible rather than relying on the process of the rotation
of the image. More significantly, unlike Dalí (and Breton), Magritte here brings
together two correlated — rather than unrelated or distant — objects and unifies
them into a surréalité which proves to be no less marvellous than Dalí’s unification
of two distant objects. That is, if, for Breton, the power of the marvellous burgeons
from the unbridgeable logical gap between two combined terms, then Magritte’s
Le Viol shows that the conjunction of correlated objects can create such a gap as can
that of unrelated objects.
In sum, both Reverdy and Breton place a great emphasis on the distance between
the two terms of metaphor: the more distant the two combined terms, the more
emotionally powerful the resultant metaphor. Nevertheless, an essential difference
exists between them. In combining two distant terms, Reverdy foregrounds the
necessity of justesse which bridges the logical gap between the terms and thereby
makes the literal eventually succumb to the figurative, nonsense to sense, the
signifier to the signified; without the justesse of the figurative sense, a metaphor
or an image cannot produce strong emotional power. For Breton, however, it is
‘partial’ (rather than justes) similarities — the ‘oneiric values’ of metaphor — that
breed emotional strength: partial, or accidental, similarities open up a gap or
void that cannot be filled between two distant terms, a void through which the
marvellous — in the form of a high degree of absurdity — exerts its power upon
us. In other words, Breton prefers the literal (nonsense) to the figurative (sense), the
primary process of the dream-work to the secondary process.
Magritte, following Breton, pursues accidental rather than juste similarities
in (con)fusing two distant or opposite terms to engender manifest (or physical)
absurdity, as seen in Hommage à Alfonse Allais and Le Portrait. But at the same time,
Magritte goes one step further than Breton by showing that marvellous sparks
arising from the coupling of intimately related items, as in Le Viol, prove to be no
less — if not more — powerful than those from the coupling of distant items. More
significantly, in Hommage à Alfonse Allais and Le Portrait, as in other paintings we
shall see shortly, Magritte takes Breton’s project another step further by drawing on
the joke-work to produce latent (or conceptual) absurdity — in addition to manifest
(or physical) absurdity. That is, Magritte reveals to Breton that the figurative, like
the literal, can produce a high degree of absurdity when it becomes a comic or
paradoxical contrast to the literal; the figurative does not nullify literal/manifest
absurdity — from which, Breton maintains, the marvellous or laughter arises —
but instead forms an interplay between itself and the literal to bring out additional
humorous or nonsense effects. As we shall see in the following section, it is for the
creation of such interplay that, according to Breton, Surrealism owes to Magritte
one of its fundamental dimensions.
 The Surrealist Grotesque 159

5. The Art of Magritte’s Grotesque Objects

The 1930s witnessed a switch in the focus of Magritte’s approach from the arbitrary
combination of incompatible objects and words (e.g. La Clef des songes of 1930) —
which kindled Foucault’s interest in Magritte — to the arbitrary hybridization
of objects that lie close as well as distant. It is during the 1930s that Magritte’s
renowned and most inspiring grotesque objects saw the light: Le Viol first appeared
in 1934; Le Modèle rouge (1935) presents an uncanny pair of shoe-feet that are both
complementary and contradictory; In Memoriam Mack Sennett (1936) displays a
similar situation in which a nightdress bears female breasts; Le Portrait (1935), as we
have seen, shows a slice of ham with an eye; and so forth. It is also during the 1930s
that, as previously discussed, Magritte started to combine intimately related objects
and thus developed his own method of image-making. In this section, I will focus
on several grotesque objects that Magritte composed in the 1930s to illustrate at
length the ways in which they subordinate fearfulness to playfulness by allowing
the interplay of physical incongruity and conceptual incongruity, the literal and
the figurative, the dream-work and the joke work, images and their titles. With
the predominance of playfulness over fearfulness, of pleasure over pain, Magritte’s
grotesque objects inspire the viewer with a humorous attitude towards symbolic
prohibition and signification, and materialize the Surrealist triumph of the pleasure
principle over the reality principle in work and in response.
Le Portrait, as we recall, demonstrates the way in which a grotesque image, a slice
of ham with an eye, is in humorous contrast — conceptual incongruity — to its
title, and thus enables the fearsome aspects of physical incongruity to retreat and the
playful aspects of that same incongruity to come to the fore. Titles, per se, play a key
role in Magritte’s object lessons: ‘Je crois’, says Magritte, ‘que le meilleur titre d’un
tableau, c’est un titre poétique. [. . .] Le titre poétique n’a rien à nous apprendre,
mais il doit nous surprendre et nous enchanter’ (‘I believe that the best title of a
painting is a poetic title. [. . .] The poetic title does not need to tell us anything,
but it must surprise and enchant us’) (p. 262). It is fair to say that paintings and their
titles co-operate in a poetic or mysterious manner to give rise to ‘the spell of the
strange’ (which I discussed before).
In Magritte’s grotesque objects, titles often co-operate with images in a
humorously incongruous or paradoxical way to subdue the fearfulness of grotesque
physicality and to surprise and charm the viewer with humour. In addition to Le
Portrait, Le Mouvement perpétuel of 1935 (Fig. 5.11) offers another example. Similar to
Le Portrait, Le Mouvement perpétuel presents a realistic setting in which the (con)fusion
of a weightlifter’s face and the dumbbell he is lifting — on the basis of a coincidental
likeness in shape — appears to be uncannily sinister: whilst the setting makes us
feel heimlich, the bewildering grotesque figure awakens our primitive (unheimlich)
fear of the alteration of human identity. Nevertheless, the uncanny fear retreats
when we gain an ‘insight’ into the puzzling figure from the title of the painting,
Perpetual Motion, which suggests a humorous or comic paradox: (the head of ) the
weightlifter remains a dumbbell if he does not lift it up; if, however, he does lift up
the dumbbell, his head will be removed from his body. The core of this painting,
160 The Surrealist Grotesque

then, is a paradoxical interplay of perpetual stillness and perpetual motion, physical

incongruity and conceptual incongruity, the literal and the figurative, the dream-
work and the joke-work, the image and its title. As the degree of play increases, the
degree of uncanny fear decreases.
Another example is L’Esprit de géométrie of 1936–37, in which Magritte inter­
changes the heads of a baby and its (his?) mother and thereby turns their bodies
into grotesque incongruous anatomies, those which we would see in freak shows
and which arouse our antipathy and sympathy at the same time. As Leslie Fiedler
cogently writes of the ambivalent attitude towards freaks of nature:
The true Freak, however, stirs both supernatural terror and natural sympathy,
since unlike fabulous monsters, he is one of us [. . .]. Passing either on the
street, we may be simultaneously tempted to avert our eyes and to stare; but
in the latter case we feel no threat to those desperately maintained boundaries
on which any definition of sanity ultimately depends. Only the true Freak
challenges the conventional boundaries between male and female, sexed and
sexless, animal and human, large and small, self and other, and consequently
between reality and illusion, experience and fantasy, fact and myth.44
In Magritte’s L’Esprit de géométrie, the ‘true’ freaks cause in our minds a civil war
between aversion and attraction; our aversion to these freaks, nevertheless, would
weaken when the title turns physical incongruity into a humorous play on the idea
of geometry, or rather, symmetry: that is, these freakish bodies are symmetrical
only illogically or irrationally speaking; such a conceptual incongruity — a crack
or hole in logical reasoning — renders the grotesque bodies playfully absurd. To put
it still more strongly, Magritte’s minimal interchange of body parts is not only a
playful rebellion against biological categorization but against social categorization,
namely, the idea of maternity.
Another painting that involves a minimal interchange of body parts is L’Invention
collective of 1935 (Fig. 5.12), a play on the opposite of a mermaid. Here Magritte
touches on the defamiliarization or estrangement which, as I have shown, is crucial
to the arousal of grotesque effects. A mermaid, due to her physical incongruity
or in-betweenness, is supposed to be grotesque, but she has been embellished
or familiarized by Andersen’s fairy tale so much as to be stripped of grotesque
strangeness. In response, Magritte defamiliarizes the popular image of a mermaid
by inverting the two parts of her body; this minimal exchange (displacement)
of body parts nevertheless results in a highly grotesque body, an uncanny fish-
woman: this fish-woman is both naturally edible (as a fish) and naturally inedible (as
a woman), both sexually repellent and sexually alluring on equal terms. It leaves
the viewer in a state of cognitive and emotional vertigo, as seen in Baudelaire’s
grotesque images that nurture bestial sexuality. Nevertheless, the playfulness of
physical incongruity is brought to the fore when the title of this painting, L’Invention
collective, comes into play and thus forms a humorous contrast: this grotesque body
is not born of ‘collective invention’ but of Magritte’s idiosyncratic invention based
on the betrayal of our collective memory of a mermaid. Again, we see the interplay
of physical incongruity and conceptual incongruity, the literal and the figurative,
images and their titles. Moreover, such a betrayal proves that the grotesque is one
 The Surrealist Grotesque 161

Fig. 5.11. René Magritte, Le Mouvement perpétuel, 1935, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
© René Magritte / ADAGP, Paris – SACK, Seoul, 2009
Fig. 5.12. René Magritte, L’Invention collective, 1935, Private Collection.
© René Magritte / ADAGP, Paris – SACK, Seoul, 2009
162 The Surrealist Grotesque

Fig. 5.13. René Magritte, Le Thérapeute, 1937, Private Collection.

© René Magritte / ADAGP, Paris – SACK, Seoul, 2009
 The Surrealist Grotesque 163

of the obvious forms on which the artist can draw to wake us up from the drowse
of the familiar, the accustomed.
In L’Invention collective, as in L’Esprit de géométrie, Magritte, as Barthes would put it,
minimally exchanges the places of correlated items to produce ‘the strangest sense
of strangeness’ (mentioned before); we have seen this technique in Le Viol. All of
these images, of course, are born of Magritte’s unique method of image-making
dating back to 1933, when he created Les Affinités electives due to that ‘magnificent
[hallucinatory] error’. In the previous section, I discussed the playful operation
of the dream-work in Le Viol: i.e. the chance encounter between a female torso
(the inside) and a female face (the outside), between sexual organs and sensory
organs. Now I would like to demonstrate that the degree of play in this painting
is increased when the title, Le Viol, comes into play as a joke. According to Freud,
‘the rediscovery of what is familiar’ is a source of the pleasure of jokes grounded
on methods such as modifications of familiar phrases, allusion to quotations, and so
forth (PFL vi, 169–70). Seen in this light, Le Viol, with its grotesquely ‘modified’
female body, allows (heterosexual) men to recognize, or really, see, a familiar thought
or libidinal desire that should remain hidden or repressed in the unconscious: to see
a (beautiful) woman’s face is to fancy her naked body; hence, the visual rape of the
male gaze. Such an operation, to quote Timothy Mathews, ‘exemplifies a process
that places the artist as imagined by the viewer [. . .] in the position of the analyst in
the Lacanian construction of [. . .] the “sujet supposé savoir” ’.45 The male viewer,
so to speak, imagines Magritte to be in the position of an essential knowledge that
will transfer this repressed libidinal desire of his from the unconscious to a new
object — a grotesque female body in this case — to which he reacts in terms of
what he needs to see. Put another way, Magritte’s defamiliarization of the female
body — which allows what is inside to come outside — paradoxically brings to light
for the male viewer a repressed erotic desire (a hidden familiar thought) in such a
way as effectively to inspire laughter and lift moral inhibition by subverting symbolic
prohibition: paradoxically because such a comic impulse, as well as the subversion
of the symbolic it initiates, is made possible by defamiliarizing the female body in a
grotesque manner rather than seeking to present its sexual reification in any realistic
way.
From the perspective of aesthetic pleasure, such a recognition of a repressed
familiar thought, Freud would agree, exactly bears witness to his apology for the
value of art in relation to day-dreaming: the writer or artist, according to Freud,
affords us an ‘incentive bonus’ or ‘ fore-pleasure’ by bribing us into accepting his/her
artistic alteration of his/her ‘egoistic day-dreams’; the production of pleasure as such
is offered to us in order to ‘make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising
from deeper psychical sources’ (PFL xiv, 141). Freud calls such a release ‘a liberation
of tensions in [the] mind’ which enables adults to enjoy without self-reproach or
shame their own phantasies, or, in the case of Le Viol, the male gaze (whether or
not it is anti-feminist is another issue).
The last grotesque object I want to examine is Le Thérapeute of 1937 (Fig. 5.13).
Structurally similar to Le Viol, this painting features a grotesque figure whose
torso has transformed into a huge opened bird cage from which birds are free to
164 The Surrealist Grotesque

f ly away. At the literal level, a huge bird cage is (dis)placed in the human body to
replace the part largely occupied by the thoracic cage; this transformation has been
allowed through an accidental visual similarity in shape. At the figurative level,
the metamorphosis of one object into the other is in fact the visual product of a
play upon words — one based on the joke technique of faulty (or schizophrenic)
reasoning that Magritte also uses in Hommage à Alfonse Allais (discussed above).
On this occasion, this inclusion of arbitrariness to undermine the conventional
sustainability of reason unites two different kinds of ‘cages’ into a poetic thought:
Magritte first metaphorizes the literal use of the word ‘cage’ in the thoracic cage
(that stays inside) by turning it into a bird cage (that comes outside); and then —
with recourse to Le Thérapeute — metaphorizes the bird cage as a prison-house
whose gate is unlocked and open for the winged soul (that is inside) to f ly outside.
Simply put, Magritte visualizes the idea of a therapist, a person who sets free the
soul, confined within the body, by irrationally (or schizophrenically) naming one
kind of cage as the other. In so doing, Magritte creates a physically in-between
body invested with a high degree of playfulness. In this grotesque body, as in others
we have seen, as the viewer plays with Magritte’s play with words and thoughts, a
moment of ‘equilibrium is reached in which the element of fear, though still present,
appears in subdued form as an undercurrent in the contemplative process’.46 This
is the way Jennings characterizes the type of the grotesque in which playfulness
prevails over fearfulness; it is particularly pertinent here as Magritte provides this
grotesque body (as well as others) with two levels of absurdity to subdue effectively
the fearfulness of physical incongruity.
In all the grotesque objects I discuss in this section, the interplay of the images
and their titles, the literal and the figurative gives us a clear idea of why Surrealism,
according to Breton in 1961, owes to Magritte ‘one of its most foremost — and
ultimate — dimensions’ (‘Le surréalisme lui doit une de ses premières — et
dernières — dimensions’): Magritte sets out to reproduce
des objets, des sites et des êtres qui agencent notre monde de tous les jours, de
nous en restituer en toute fidélité les apparences, mais, bien plus loin — et c’est
là que se place l’intervention totalement originale et capitale de Magritte — de
nous éveiller à leur vie latente par l’appel à la f luctuation des rapports qu’ils
entretiennent entre eux. Distendre, au besoin jusqu’à les violer, ces rapports
de grandeur, de position, d’éclairage, d’alternance, de substance, de mutuelle
tolérance, de devenir, c’est nous introduire au cœur d’une figuration seconde,
qui transcende la première par tous les moyens que la rhétorique énumère
comme les ‘figures de mots’ et les ‘figures de pensée’. Si la figuration concrète,
au sens descriptif que réclame Magritte, n’était aussi scrupuleuse, c’en serait fait
du grand pont sémantique qui permet de passer du sens propre au sens figuré et
de conjuguer d’un même regard ces deux sens en vue d’une ‘pensée parfaite’,
c’est-à-dire parvenue à sa complète émancipation.47
[objects, sites, and beings that construct our everyday world, in order to
reconstruct for us their appearances with absolute fidelity. But going further
than this, Magritte awakens us to the latent life of all the components by
calling attention to the f luctuation of the rapports between them. To distend
and, if necessary, violate the rapports of size, position, lighting, alternation,
substance, mutual tolerance, and development is to introduce us to the heart of
 The Surrealist Grotesque 165

a second figuration that transcends the first by all the means that rhetoric lists
as ‘figures of speech’ and ‘figures of thought’. Had the concrete figuration, in
the descriptive sense Magritte claims, not been so scrupulous, the great semantic
bridge would not have been built which permits us to cross from the literal sense
to the figurative sense and to conjugate these two senses with a single glance in
order to reach one ‘perfect thought’, that is to say, thought that has reached its
complete emancipation.]
For Breton, Magritte’s ‘génie’ (‘genius’) lies in his ability to combine the literal
and the figurative to achieve a ‘pensée parfaite’, a surréalité. In Magritte’s grotesque
objects, the literal itself, as we have seen, plays to produce the visual shock or
absurdity of physical incongruity, and the figurative plays the literal again to
produce the verbal shock or absurdity of conceptual incongruity that downplays the
fearfulness of physical incongruity and increases its playfulness. Under the inf luence
of a high degree of playfulness, we can throw off the fetter of logical thought and
inhibition, and find enjoyments in the attraction of what Magritte calls ‘la pensée
poétique [qui] est “irrationnelle” ’ (discussed before).
* * * * *
If Surrealism, as Breton notes, is indebted to Magritte for conjugating the literal and
the figurative to achieve a surréalité, Magritte’s grotesque objects exactly epitomize
such a conjugation, or indeed, interplay, of the literal and the figurative. Magritte
seeks to arouse not merely visual shock or absurdity (at the literal level) but verbal
shock or absurdity (at the figurative level). In so doing, Magritte shows his Surrealist
colleagues how to embody a high degree of play in grotesque images — which
appear so frequently in the Surrealist destruction of a rational unity — and thereby
allow the triumphant reign of the pleasure principle (in work and in response), the
ultimate end of Surrealism. If, as Breton has suggested, the purpose of the Surrealist
image is to undermine a rational unity and thus give rise to ‘the greatest humour’,
then Magritte’s grotesque objects, by producing two levels of humorous or nonsense
effects through the interplay of the literal and the figurative, would have a better
claim to the title ‘Surrealist’ than those of other Surrealist painters.

Notes to Chapter 5
1. Charles Baudelaire, ‘L’invitation du voyage’, Le Spleen de Paris, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by
Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 253–55 (p. 255). ‘Dreams! Always Dreams! and the
more ambitious and delicate the soul, the more dreams move it away from the possible’.
2. René Magritte, Écrits complets, ed. by André Blavier (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), p. 609. Unless
otherwise indicated, all quotations from Magritte are taken from this book.
3. See also Paul Éluard and André Breton, Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, in Paul Éluard,
Œuvres complètes, ed. by Marcelle Dumas and Lucien Scheler, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), i,
pp. 723–96 (p. 748). ‘Le hasard est la maître de l’humour’ (‘Chance is the master of humour’).
4. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud admits that dreams are not always fulfilments of
unconscious wishes; certain dreams arise ‘in obedience to the compulsion to repeat [what
is unpleasant]’ rather than to gain pleasure: e.g. ‘the dreams [. . .] which occur in traumatic
neuroses, or the dreams during psychoanalyses which bring to memory the psychical traumas of
childhood’ (PFL xi, 304).
5. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. by Thomas
166 The Surrealist Grotesque

Gora et al., ed. by Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 133; Revolution in Poetic
Language, trans. by Margaret Walter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 217–
25.
6. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 270.
7. Ibid., p. 70.
8. Éluard, ‘L’évidence poétique’, in Œuvres complètes, i, pp. 513–21 (pp. 520–21).
9. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Le 30e salon des indépendants 1914’, in Œuvres en prose complètes, ed.
by Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1977–1993), ii (1991),
pp. 652–56 (p. 654); ‘L’Esprit nouveau et les Poètes’, ii, pp. 945–54 (949–50).
10. Louis Aragon, ‘La peinture au défi’, in Les Collages (Paris: Hermann, 1965), pp. 35–71 (pp. 36–37,
41).
11. According to J. H. Matthews, comparable to the function of glue in Surrealist visual collage is
the use of prepositions such as de and à to collage incompatible items into synthetic, or rather,
catachrestic, images (The Imagery of Surrealism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1977),
pp. 70–71).
12. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, pp. 288–90.
13. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York and
London: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 3–4.
14. Noël Carroll, ‘Horror and Humor’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57.2 (1999), 145–60
(p. 157).
15. Silvano Arieti, Interpretation of Schizophrenia (London: Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1974),
pp. 229–31.
16. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, p. 72.
17. Matthews, p. 217.
18. Max Ernst, Au-delà de la peinture, in Écritures (Paris: Gallimard, 1970),pp. 237–69 (pp. 264, 253).
19. In a series of paintings starting with L’usage de la parole I of 1928–29, in which underneath an
image of a pipe lies the sentence ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’), Magritte questions
the relationship between things and their representations, between images and words, between
signs and their referents.
20. Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’, in Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and
Other Writings, trans. by Ronald Speirs, ed. by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 141–53 (p. 143).
21. Quoted in Michel Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, ed. by Daniel Defert
and François Ewald, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), i, pp. 635–50 (p. 646).
22. Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press,
1968), p. 80. It should be noted, though, that, for Wheelwright, epiphor and diaphor are not
mutually exclusive (pp. 80, 86).
23. Pierre Reverdy, ‘La Cubisme, poésie plastique’, in Nord-Sud: Self defence et autres écrits sur l’art et la
poésie (1917–1926) (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), pp. 142–48 (pp. 143–44, 148); ‘Lyrisme’, pp. 183–85
(p. 184).
24. T. E. Hulme, ‘Modern Art — II: Preface Note and Neo-Realism’, in Hulme, The Collected Writings
of T. E. Hulme, ed. by Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 286–93 (p. 293).
25. Hulme, ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, pp. 49–56 (p. 54).
26. Hulme, ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, pp. 191–204 (pp. 195, 203).
27. Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, pp. 59–73 (p. 70).
28. Hulme, ‘Searchers after Reality — II: Haldane’, pp. 93–98 (p. 95).
29. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, p. 64.
30. Reverdy, ‘L’Image’, in Nord-Sud, pp. 73–80 (p. 73).
31. Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), pp. 103–04. Therefore,
Fontanier condemns as ‘absurde’ (‘absurd’) the French Baroque poet Théophile’s noted metaphor
in ‘La Solitude: Ode’: ‘Je baignerai mes mains [ folâtres] dans les ondes de tes cheveux’ (‘I will bathe my
[playful] hands in the waves of your hair’) (pp. 189–90). For Fontanier, a woman’s hair, when
gently shaken, indeed looks like undulating waves; it is, however, ‘unnatural and inaccurate’
(‘le défaut de naturel et de justesse’) to ‘bathe’ hands in the waves of hair because hair has no
salient attributes analogous to ‘water or some kind of liquid’ (‘l’eau, ou quelque chose de liquide’)
 The Surrealist Grotesque 167

(p. 190). Clearly, Théophile’s metaphor exceeds the bounds of probability and rationality, and
therefore runs counter to Fontanier’s classical judgement of taste.
32. Reverdy, ‘L’Image’, pp. 73–74.
33. Ibid., p. 74.
34. Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Abstract Language and the Metaphor’, in Arnheim, Towards a Psychology of Art
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 266–82 (p. 279). The lack
of structural unity in a metaphor, Arnheim notes, would give birth to ‘a Surrealistic monster’.
See also Chapter 2, sect. 4.
35. See also Introduction, sect. 3.
36. Howard Gardner and Ellen Winner, ‘The Development of Metaphoric Competence:
Implications for Humanistic Disciplines’, in On Metaphor, ed. by Sheldon Sacks (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 121–39 (p. 128).
37. The Surrealists are not the first, of course, to bring forth the role of le hasard in artistic practice.
One of their forerunners is S. T. Coleridge, who sees ‘fancy’ (as opposed to ‘imagination’) as the
faculty of the poet to yoke together remote images ‘by means of some accidental coincidence’
(see Introduction, sect. 3).
38. Suzi Gablik, Magritte (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), p. 101.
39. See Salvador Dalí, ‘The Stinking Ass’, in Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. by Mary
Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 179–83 (p. 180)). See also Breton, Qu’est-ce
que le surréalisme?, in ABOC ii, p. 255.
40. Roland Barthes, ‘Arcimboldo ou Rhétoriqueur et magician’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Éric
Marty, 3 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1993), iii, pp. 854–69 (p. 861).
41. Ibid., p. 856.
42. Baudelaire, ‘À une mendiante rousse’, Les Fleurs du Mal, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Claude
Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 79–81 (p. 80).
43. For a discussion of the difference between virtual and actual metamorphoses in relation to the
grotesque, see Chapter 2, sect. 4.
44. Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981),
p. 24.
45. Timothy Mathews, Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 90.
46. Lee Byron Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), p. 12.
47. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, pp. 269–70.
 CONCLUSION
v

Dissonance
(if you are interested)
leads to discovery
William Carlos Williams, Paterson, IV1

This study has set out to show discontent with loose or f lexible uses of the term
‘grotesque’ and to develop a strict approach to the grotesque, an approach that is
based on the conception of the grotesque as a corporeal, or f lesh-made, metaphor
which carries within itself cognitive, emotional, and hermeneutic dissonance.
Through the examination of grotesque images in the works of Crashaw, Baudelaire,
and Magritte, it has become evident that contradictory (or in-between) physicality
and the notion of metaphor are two keys to the understanding of the grotesque and
to the construction of its clear identity.
Throughout the history of art and literature, the grotesque, as we have seen, has
been invested with so many meanings and associated with so many artistic/literary
genres that it has lost its clear identity, and therefore a history of the grotesque
becomes difficult to conceive. As such, a contradictory physical structure, as I have
attempted to show, is necessary to distinguish the grotesque from other similar modes
of artistic construction which simply feature stylistic or emotional discordance.
The grotesque does not simply denote the physically abnormal but promotes the
physically trans-formal: it joins together two (or more) bodies or body parts to
produce an incomplete transformation of one bodily form into another and therefore
opens onto a domain of (bio)logical contradiction or confusion that dethrones
reason in favour of emotion. Although a number of critics such as Bakhtin have
called attention to the contradictory physical structure of the grotesque, I establish
grotesque physicality as the site where cognitive confusion, emotional disharmony,
and hermeneutic indeterminacy are born. That is to say, the occurrence of cognitive,
emotional, or hermeneutic dissonance need not and should not be considered
grotesque unless it is rooted in a contradictory or in-between physicality. This
necessary condition allows the grotesque to become distinct from other similar
modes of dissonant combinations: it has enabled us to mark off, for instance, the
boundaries between Crashaw’s dissonant combinations, which work through the
vivid deformation of the body, and Herbert’s or Donne’s dissonant combinations,
which lack corporeal elements to bring about contradictory physicality; or between
Baudelaire’s dissonant combinations in general and his dissonant combinations that
are f lesh-made and lie at the core of his ‘poetry of the body’.
The necessity of contradictory or in-between physicality unmistakably makes of
the grotesque an aesthetics of the body, an aesthetics that occupies a critical position
 Conclusion 169

in the construction of body imagery to affect the viewer or reader. If poets and
painters, as Robert Rogers notes, ‘instinctively turn to images of the body when
they mean to disturb the reader [and the viewer] most’,2 then the grotesque body
offers poets and painters a — if not the — most effective way of both disturbing and
amusing the reader or viewer. The grotesque, as a (bio)logically contradictory body,
allows the reader or viewer to play with terror. This study was partly begun as an
attempt to synthesize Kayser’s and Bakhtin’s opposing and yet complementary views
of the grotesque: Kayser considers only the fearful and Bakhtin only the joyful to
be proper to the grotesque. Through the discussions of Crashaw’s, Baudelaire’s,
and Magritte’s grotesque images, I have demonstrated that both fearfulness and
joyfulness — or two antithetical emotions in general — are proper and essential to
the grotesque and that when one of them emerges in pronounced form, the other,
still present, retreats into the background.
More significantly, drawing on cognitive psychology, I have rigorously explained
the cause of the dominance of fearfulness and of joyfulness which the critical
tradition has largely only implicitly intuited. The grotesque — a (bio)logically
contradictory body — inspires in the viewer or reader the fear of sickness and death
because of its biological impurity and at the same time amuses him/her because of
its logical or categorical incongruity. The fearfulness of the grotesque body prevails
when, as in Crashaw’s grotesque images of Christ’s wounds, it is contextualized
within strong terrifying factors such as blood (or threatening animals) in such a way
as to keep its pleasant force in the background. On the other hand, the joyfulness
of the grotesque body comes to the fore when, as in Magritte’s grotesque images
of everyday objects, its fearfulness does not gain prominence at first sight and/or
is tactically subdued to a certain extent by powerful factors associated with the
pleasure of life and health. These two types are most commonly seen in grotesque
arts. To these two types we can now add another type, one that gives rise to the
most intense, vertiginous grotesque effect because its fearfulness and joyfulness, as
in Baudelaire’s grotesque images fostering bestial sensuality, appear to be equally
pronounced to the extent of rejecting one’s preference for one over the other. I
will not venture to claim that all grotesque arts can be or should be categorized
according to these three types; nevertheless, they can serve as a point of departure
not merely for investigating the grotesque in the works of individual authors, but
for fashioning the specific power of the grotesque idiom as a whole.
For that power to be at its most emotionally effective, the grotesque body, as
I have shown, must strike the reader or viewer as verisimilar in such a way as to
prompt him/her to suspend disbelief and experience it as though it were a real
being. I do not mean that verisimilitude is a necessary condition for the grotesque;
rather that verisimilitude plays a crucial role in the power of the grotesque to exert
its emotional impact: verisimilitude enables fantastic arts to blur the cognitive
borderline between fantasy and reality and thus the psychical borderline between
the ‘I’ and the ‘not I’, between subject and object. In their evocation of grotesque
imagery, Crashaw, Baudelaire, and Magritte all inherit, from the antique/
Mannerist grotesque, the tradition of paradoxical (con)fusion of mimesis and fantasia,
the familiar and the strange; and each arouses uncannily — in his own way — the
170 Conclusion

imagination of a familiar, ordinary world being transformed into a world that both
is and is not our own world. The Baroque pursuit of the credible marvellous —
stemming from Longinus’ poetical (as opposed to rhetorical) ‘visualization’ — has
a significant bearing on Crashaw’s making of grotesque images which stimulate
the reader to undergo vicariously divine suffering and death. Inspired by Goya’s
great virtue of making the monstrous verisimilar, Baudelaire makes it impossible
to distinguish unequivocally the fantastic from the realistic in his own grotesque
images which appear to be so demonically charming as to push the reader into
the vertigo of desiring the undesirable. Following de Chirico, who perplexingly
juxtaposes everyday objects to reveal a mystery with the power to sustain its own
inexplicable quality, Magritte is engaged in making the unknown with things
known in the visible world to encourage the viewer to play with the loss of order
and reason.
The tradition of the (con)fusion of mimesis and fantasia, the familiar and the
strange continues to play a part in contemporary grotesques we find in both fine
art (such as the grotesque sculptures of the Chapman brothers) and popular culture
(such as Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series). This situation, for
critics like Jameson, would illustrate the postmodern ‘imitation of dead styles’,
insofar as stylistic innovation seems no longer possible.3 It testifies, however, to the
fact that the grotesque is for artists an aesthetics of the body aiming at the reader’s
or viewer’s empathetic — rather than a (Kantian) disinterested — contemplation of
the artwork; and that the grotesque remains one of the obvious and efficient forms
artists may employ to defamiliarize the familiar and thereby motivate us to ref lect
upon the so-called ordinary or normal.
In addition to contradictory or in-between physicality, the concept of metaphor
also proves to be a key to the apprehension of the grotesque. Both metaphor and
the grotesque are characteristic of categorical confusion or contradiction; also, they
both confront us with absurdity at the literal or referential level. This study has
been an attempt to relate the grotesque to the idea of metaphor and at the same
time to demonstrate that the grotesque tends not to operate like normal uses of
metaphor which seek to persuade us that two different or discordant categories are
justement related at the figurative level. That is, the grotesque is a use of metaphor
which resists the rationalization of its literal absurdity or categorical contradiction:
it is a metaphor which disturbs (or semioticizes) its own normal (or symbolic) function
of leading the reader’s or viewer’s attention away from the literal towards the
figurative, from concrete discordance towards conceptual similitude, from the
signifier towards the signified, from nonsense towards sense. Simply put, in the
tradition of metaphor, the literal (nonsense) is often ignored or considered marginal
since it is in the figurative (sense) that metaphor carries out its normal/symbolic
function. The grotesque, however, allows the literal to hold the spotlight and thus
makes it difficult to draw the line between the central and the marginal.
The cases of Crashaw, Baudelaire, and Magritte have provided three ways
of semioticizing the symbolic function of metaphor. With Crashaw, the Baroque
obsession with marvellous, or far-fetched, metaphors is carried to extremes,
inasmuch as he creates devotional pseudometaphors to make the literal play the role
 Conclusion 171

of the figurative: religious ‘meanings’ are incarnated in literal nonsense, namely,

the sensuous vivacity of deformed f lesh that appears at the literal level. In this way,
literal nonsense triggers the reader’s vicarious imagination of divine suffering and
death, thus allowing him/her to savour divine terror or awe. The Romantic cult
of sensual or f leshly metaphors reaches its apogee in Baudelaire’s metaphors, which
specifically cultivate bestial or diabolic sexuality/sensuality; in these metaphors,
Baudelaire empowers the literal to play against the figurative for dominance in
the signifying process, and therefore leaves the reader’s cognition vertiginously
lodged between literalness and figurativeness, nonsense and sense. With Magritte,
the Surrealist pursuit of le merveilleux, which involves a high degree of absurdity,
manifests itself not merely at the literal level but at the figurative level of imagery:
the literal and the figurative do not vie with each other; instead, they interact
with each other in the manner of faulty reasoning or comic contrast to endow
contradictory physicality with two levels of absurd or playful effects and turn it into
an irrational poetic thought.
Through the cases of Crashaw, Baudelaire, and Magritte, it has become clear
that the grotesque has a strong tendency to tamper with the normal operation of
metaphor: the grotesque does not seek to spawn an exact ‘fit’, or justesse, between two
categories or signifiers in such a way as to rationalize (figuratively) their complete
identification with each other and thus resolve their (literal) incompatibility to
reach a structural unity. That is, the grotesque prefers accidental to accurate ( juste)
likenesses between two categories; as such, a strong figurative sense is lacking that
reconciles discordant qualities and allows the interpretation of the grotesque to
proceed by unification. The grotesque, as Friedrich Schlegel cogently puts it, ‘loves
the illusion of the random and the strange and, as it were, coquettes with infinite
arbitrariness’.4
This situation serves to account for the phenomenon I have sought to tease out:
the grotesque, the arbitrary (con)fusion of heterogeneous body parts, continues
to remain the very epitome of unbridled artistic licence since antiquity. Horace’s
aegri somnia, as we have seen, is de-stigmatized by Cennini in the early fifteenth
century as the artist’s freedom to compose hybrid figures ‘according to his fancy’.
Cennini thus paves the way for Hobbes to define the Baroque imagination as the
faculty to create ‘a Figure out of the parts of divers creatures’; for Baudelaire to
promote the Romantic imagination as the artist’s power to ‘deform’ and ‘transform’
objects according to the rules found in ‘le plus profond de l’âme’; and for Breton
to highlight the indispensable role of le hasard (as exemplified by le cadavre exquis)
in the Surrealist imagination.5 One may as well, then, go on to suggest that if,
as Elza Adamowicz notes, collage, whose principle ‘privilege[s] such concepts
as heterogeneity, play, transgression and marginality, has been considered as the
paradigm of (post-)modernist aesthetic’,6 the grotesque, an ancient Roman art form,
can be seen as the prototype of the collage principle and provide an aesthetic link
between the ancient and the modern for future research.
In terms of the resistance to a structural unity, the grotesque, as a metaphorical
(con)fusion of diverse body parts, is indeed akin to collage, in contrast to
montage:
172 Conclusion

Montage fragments reality in order to reconstitute it in highly organized,

synthetic emotional and intellectual patterns. Collage does not do this; it
collects or sticks its fragments together in a way that does not entirely overcome
their fragmentation. It seeks to recover its fragments as fragments.7
Put another way, normal uses of metaphor, like montage, are designed to (con)
fuse categories in order to reconstruct and harmonize them into a unified whole,
whereas the grotesque is a use of metaphor which, like collage, (con)fuses categories
in order to impart a stronger sense of confusion and contradiction. The grotesque,
so to speak, is a metaphor which discharges the semiotic deluge of nonsense effects to
break through the symbolic structure and effectively open up a void in the signifying
process, a void that frustrates our fundamental desire for completion or wholeness
and thereby exposes us to the experience of the real.
The grotesque, writes Geoffrey Harpham in his On the Grotesque, ‘remains
elusive despite the fact that it is unchanging’.8 As this study shows, the grotesque has
been indeed unchanging since antiquity, insofar as it always presents a contradictory
or in-between physicality, one that can be read as a corporeal, or f lesh-made,
metaphor. The identity of the grotesque becomes elusive because critics ignore
the necessity of a contradictory physical structure and extend the use of the term
‘grotesque’ to anything or everything that is structurally or stylistically incongruous
or paradoxical. Therefore, I would like to end this study by appropriating W. C.
Williams’s lines quoted as the epigraph: the necessity of (bio)logical dissonance
leads to the discovery of a clear identity of the grotesque. This discovery epitomizes
human creativity:9 it bears witness not merely to the creative power of the artist
to mix together dissonant body parts into hybrid figures which are unnameable
or uncategorizable, but to our own power to engage in creating our responses to
the unfamiliar or the unknown and thereby (re)discover strangeness or otherness
within ourselves.

Notes to the Conclusion

1. William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1963), p. 176.
2. Robert Rogers, Metaphor: A Psychoanalytic View (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1978), p. 90.
3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991), p. 18.
4. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 60.
5. See Chapter 1, sect. 3; Chapter 3, sect. 4; Chapter 4, sects. 2 and 5; and Chapter 5, sect. 4.
6. Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 14.
7. Brian Henderson, ‘Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style’, in Film Theory and Criticism:
Introductory Readings, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), pp. 57–67 (p. 61).
8. Geoffrey G. Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. xvi.
9. Wilson Yates, ‘An Introduction to the Grotesque: Theoretical and Theological Considerations’,
in The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, ed. by James Luther Adams and
Wilson Yates (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 1–68 (p. 54).
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v

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1965), iii
Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De
Statua, trans. and ed. by Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972)
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 index
❖

Addison, Joseph 37, 39 Salon de 1859 107, 116

Alberti, Leon B. 31–32 Le Spleen de Paris 111, 130
Apollinaire 54, 60, 126, 138, 152 ‘Théophile Gautier’ 111
Arcimboldo 12, 14–15, 16, 17, 57, 157 Bellmer, Hans 132, 139, 140
Aragon, Louis 138 Bernard of Clairvaux, St 30, 42 n. 44
Aristotle 29, 53, 54, 57, 67, 74, 75, 77, 94 n. 40, 103 Blair, Robert 77, 103, 111
Arnheim, Rudolf 58, 152, 167 n. 34 Bohn, Willard 56
Auerbach, Erich 98 Boileau, Nicolas 36
Breton, André, 15–16, 18, 59, 60, 130, 132, 134–40,
Bakhtin, Mikhail 3–4, 5, 8, 24, 40, 87, 98, 100, 118, 142, 150–58, 164–65, 171
168, 169 Brooke-Rose, Christine 58
Balakian, Anna 108 Burke, Edmund 8, 10, 37, 39–40, 76, 91, 103–04
Barthes, Roland 12, 45, 50, 54, 57, 73, 116, 157, 163
Baudelaire, Charles 1, 2, 10, 12, 14, 18, 19, 24, 39, 60, Campion, Thomas 58, 59, 77
91, 98–129, 134, 152, 154, 157, 160, 168–71 Caravaggio 73, 79
Choix de maximes consolantes sur l’amour 104 Carracci, Annibale 69, 71, 73
De l’essence du rire 99, 112, 117, 118 Carroll, Noël 6–7, 10, 12, 140
Du vin et du hachish 118 Cennini, Cennino 32, 86, 171
Exposition universelle 107, 108 Cicero 74, 75
Fusées 98, 106, 107, 124 Clayborough, Arthur 40
Les Fleurs du mal 98–99, 109–10, 124 Coleridge, S. T. 10, 15, 16, 78, 105, 108, 167 n. 37
‘A celle qui est trop gaie’ 120, 124 Cosin, John 68
‘Alchimie de la douleur’ 110 Crashaw, Richard 12, 14, 18, 19, 59, 60, 66–97, 98,
‘Au Lecteur’ 98, 100, 117, 125 117, 134, 153, 168, 169, 170, 171
‘Causerie’ 117 ‘Adoro Te’ 91
‘Correspondances’ 108 ‘An Himn for the Circumcision day of our Lord’ 77
‘Danse macabre’ 7, 124, 126 ‘In vulnera Dei pendentis’ 82, 89
‘Horreur sympathique’ 107 ‘Luc. 7’ 87
‘Hymne à la Beauté’ 111 ‘Luke 2:21. On the Circumcision’ 95 n. 67
‘L’Avertisseur’ 125 ‘Luke 11: Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked’ 91
‘Le Chat’ 122 ‘On our crucified Lord Naked, and bloody’ 88, 91
‘Le Crépuscule du matin’ 110 ‘On the wounds of our crucified Lord’ 71, 78, 90, 91
‘Le Flacon’ 124 ‘Sancta Maria’ 91
‘Le Poison’ 125 ‘Sospetto d’Herode’ 79
‘Le Revenant’ 118, 121 ‘The Flaming Heart’ 67
‘Les Petites Vieilles (I)’ 125 ‘The Teare’ 89
‘Le Serpent qui danse’ 121–22 ‘The Weeper’ 66–67, 79, 89
‘Le Voyage’ 109–10 Culler, Jonathan 107, 117
‘Madrigal triste’ 106 Curtius, E. R. 18, 75, 78
‘Préface des Fleurs’ 107
‘Spleen: Quand le ciel bas et lourd’ 109 Dalí, Salvador 132, 139, 140, 142, 155, 157, 158
‘Une Charogne’ 111, 122 Davidson, Donald 53, 58
Un Mangeur d’opium 99 de Chirico, Giorgio 146, 170
Mon cœur mis à nu 99, 107, 112, 114 Delacroix, Eugène 100, 106, 116, 117
Le Poëme du haschisch 117–18 Dennis, John 36–37, 39, 103
Quelques caricaturistes étrangers 113 Derrida, Jacques 16, 30, 32, 61
Salon de 1846 105–06 Diderot, Denis 39, 104
182 Index

Élaurd, Paul 136 Magritte, René, 10, 12, 14, 18, 19, 130–67, 166 n. 19,
Eliot, T. S. 54, 59, 60, 66, 89, 93 n. 13, 98 168, 169, 170, 171
enargeia 36, 74, 75–76 Les Affinités electives 155, 163
energeia 67, 74, 75, 76–77, 79 La Clef des songes 147, 149, 159
Ernst, Max 132, 135, 139, 140, 142, 146, 151 L’Empire des lumières 134, 135, 146
L’Esprit de géométrie 160, 163
fantasia 18, 19, 30, 31, 32, 33, 41, 86, 113, 114, 169, Hommage à Alfonse Allais 140–42, 144, 149, 154,
170 158, 164
Fiorentino, Rosso 27, 69 In Memoriam Mack Sennett 159
Fontanier, Peirre 152, 166–67 n. 31 L’Invention collective 160, 163
Freud, Sigmund 10, 17, 29, 30, 31, 33–34, 46, 48–49, Le Modèle rouge 159
50, 113, 130, 132, 134–39, 141, 142, 144, 154, 163, Le Mouvement perpétuel 159
165 n. 4 Le Portrait 144, 154, 158, 159
Fry, Northrop 99, 110 Le Thérapeute 141, 163, 164
furor poeticus 18, 26, 28, 29, 30, 36, 75, 85, 86 L’usage de la parole 147, 166 n. 19
Le Viol 155, 157–58, 159, 163
Gombrich, E. H. 41 n. 4, 49, 50
Harpham, Geoffrey G. 5–6, 7, 10, 59, 172 Marino, Giambattista 18, 66, 76, 78–79
Hauser, Arnold 33, 69 Mathews, Timothy 163
Healy, Thomas. F. 68, 88 Matthews, J. H. 142, 166 n. 11
Hegel, G. W. F. 56 Mazzoni, Giacopo 76, 83, 84, 95 n. 84
Herbert, George 68, 81–82, 83, 168 Meindl, Dieter 4–5
Hiddleston, J. A. 118, 124, 129 n. 77 Montaigne, Michel de 27
Hobbes, Thomas 86, 171 Mourgues, Odette de 86
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 102, 106, 113 Mukařovský, Jan 53
Horace 1, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 42 n. 27, 75, 84, 171
Houston, John Porter 95 n. 66, 99 Nietzsche, Friedrich 41, 76, 134, 147, 149, 150, 151,
Hugo, Victor 1, 2, 24, 34, 99, 102, 105, 111, 121 154
Hulme, T. E. 150–51 nonsense 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 51, 56, 59, 60, 61, 87, 88,
hyperbole 67, 75, 83, 87–88, 89, 99 114, 118, 125 89, 90, 99, 111, 118, 120, 121, 122, 125, 132, 134,
136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 149, 152, 153,
Ignatius of Loyola 72, 73 154, 158, 165, 170, 171, 172
imagination 8, 15, 37, 39–40, 61, 69, 72–73, 74, 83–86,
95 n. 79, 104, 107–08, 112, 113, 116–17, 118, 119, Oates, Joyce Carol 8
126, 130, 138, 152, 154, 171 Ovid 37, 45, 47

Jackson, Rosemary 48, 57 Paleotti, Gabriele 69, 71

Jakobson, Roman 52–53, 54 Panofsky, Erwin 79
Jennings, Lee Byron 2–3, 99, 119, 120, 164 Paul, Jean 100
Plato 28–30, 36, 42 n. 32
Kayser, Wolfgang 1, 2, 3, 4, 30, 98, 100, 120, 169 Plutarch 29, 75
Krieger, Murray 76 Poe, Edgar Allan 4, 104, 106, 108, 128 n. 38
Kristeva, Julia 16, 18, 21 n. 46, 46, 51–52, 53, 54, 58, Praz, Mario 66, 79, 106
60, 61, 68, 69, 123, 132, 136, 139, 141 pseudometaphor 14, 59, 68, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 123,
semiotic 16–18, 51–52, 54, 56, 61, 87, 89, 118, 134, 125, 153, 170
136, 139, 141, 144, 153, 172 Punter, David 14–15
semioticize 18, 46, 52, 68, 87, 92, 99, 120, 124, 125,
147, 170 Puttenham, George 84
Lacan, Jacques 16, 17, 21 n. 46, 45, 47–50, 52, 53,
61 n. 4, 66, 141 Quintilian 57, 59, 74, 75, 77, 79, 83, 87
real 16–17, 18, 46–50, 61, 141, 172
Lautréamont 146, 154 Ragland, Ellie 49
Raymond, Marcel 126
Lessing, G. E. 104 Reverdy, Pierre 15, 150, 151–52, 154, 158
Longinus 29, 34, 36, 75, 76, 83, 118, 170 Richards, I. A. 53, 56
Lyotard, Jean-François 27, 66, 72 Rogers, Robert 60, 169
Rollins, Yvonne B. 112
 Index 183

Ronsard, Pierre de 83–84, 95 n. 78 Tesauro, Emanuele 74, 83, 85, 86, 152
Roston, Murray 82 Thomson, Philip 5, 20 n. 18, 60
Ruskin, John 2, 10, 26, 72, 93 n. 28 Tsur, Reuven 5, 7, 59, 119–20
Tucker, Cynthia Grant 122, 123–24
de Saussure, Ferdinand 52, 53
Scaliger, Julius Caeser 83 uncanny 10, 18, 26, 31, 33–34, 37, 113, 114, 119, 121,
Schlegel, Friedrich 1, 105, 171 142, 144, 159, 160
schizophrenic 16–17, 87, 88, 124, 141, 149, 158, 164 Vasari, Giorgio 26, 27, 31, 33
Shakespeare, William 58–59, 66, 92 n. 4 Vitruvius, Pollio 27, 28, 30
Shearman, John 69
Sidney, Sir Philip 66, 77, 79, 83, 84, 92 n. 4 Warnke, Frank J. 68
Skulsky, Harold 88 Warren, Austin 66, 83
sublime 8, 18, 26, 28, 34–40, 44 n. 78, 73, 75, 76, 86, White, Allon 48
92, 98, 103–04, 106, 116, 128 n. 38 Williams, R. Grant 48
Summers, David 24 Wordsworth, William 78, 110
Swedenborg, Emanuel 108, 109, 110 Wheelwright, Philip 149, 166 n. 22

Tasso, Torquato 76 Young, R. V. 67