GROTESQUE

Grotesque provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the use (and

abuse) of this complex literary term. Justin D. Edwards and Rune
Graulund explore the influence of the grotesque on cultural forms
throughout history, with particular focus on its representation in
literature, visual art and film.
The book:
• presents a history of the literary grotesque from Classical writing to
the present
• examines theoretical debates around the term in their historical and
cultural contexts
• introduces readers to key writers and artists of the grotesque, from
Homer to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Carson McCullers and David
Cronenberg
• analyses key terms such as disharmony, deformed and distorted
bodies, misfits and freaks
• explores the grotesque in relation to queer theory, postcolonialism
and the carnivalesque.
Grotesque presents readers with an original and distinctive overview of
this vital genre and is an essential guide for students of literature, art
history and film studies.
Justin D. Edwards is Professor of English at the University of Surrey,
UK. He has taught at the Universities of Bangor (Wales), Copenhagen,
Quebec and Montreal, and has held research fellowships at Churchill
College, Cambridge (2005-6) and Cambridge University's Centre for
Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) in 2010.
Rune Graulund is a Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde,
Glasgow, UK. He has taught literature and cultural studies at the
University of Copenhagen and the University ofLondon.
 THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
SERIES EDITOR: JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY
OF STIRLING

Fhe Hew Criticai Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides to

today's criticai terminology. Each book:
• provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse) of the
term;
• offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary and
cultural critic;
• relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation.
With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest possible
breadth of examples, Fhe Hew Criticai Idiom is an indispensable
approach to key topics in literary studies.
Also available in this series:
The Author by Andrew Bennett
Autobiography - second edition by Linda Anderson
Adaptation and Appropriation by Julie Sanders
Allegory by Jeremy Fambling
Class by Gary Day
Colonialism/Postcolonialism - second edition by Ania Loomba
Comedy by Andrew Stott
Crime Fiction by John Scaggs
Culture/Metaculture by Francis Mulhern
Dialogue by Peter Womaclc
Difference by Marie Currie
Discourse - second edition by Sara Mi/Is
Drama/Theatre/Performance by Simon Shepherd andMie/e Wallis
Dramatic Monologue by Glennis Byron
Ecocriticism - second edition by Greg Garrard
Elegy by DavidKennedy
Genders - second edition by David Glover and Cora Kaplan
Geme by John Frow
Gothic by FredBotting
Grotesque by Justin Edwards and/?une Graulund
The Historical Novel by Jerome de Groot
Historicism - second edition by Paul Hamilton
Humanism - second edition by Tony Davies
Ideology - second edition by DavidHawlces
Interdisciplinarity - second edition by Joe .Moran
Intertextuality - second edition by Graham Allen
Irony by Claire Colebroolc
Literature by Peter Widdowson
Lyric by Scott Brewster
Magic(al) Realism by .Maggie Ann Bowers
Memory by Anne Whitehead
Metaphor by DavidPunter
Metre, Rhythm and Verse F orm by Philip Hobsbaum
Mimesis by .Matthew Potolslçy
Modemism - second edition by Peter Childs
Myth - second edition by Laurence Coupe
Narrative by Paul Cobley
Parody by Simon Dentith
Pastoral by Terry Gifferd
Performativity by James Loxley
The Postmodem by Simon Ma/pas
Realism by Pam Morris
Rhetoric by Jennifer Richards
Romance by Barbara Fuchs
Romanticism - second edition by Aidan Day
Science Fiction - second edition by Adam Roberts
Sexuality - second edition by Joseph Bristow
Stylistics by RichardBraeford
Subjectivity by DonaldE Hall
The Sublime by Philip Shaw
Travel Writing by Carl Thompson
The Unconscious by Antony Easthope
 GROTESQUE
Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund

1~ ~~~!!~~~~
LONOON AND NE.W YOttK
First published 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
.Routledge is an imprint efthe Taylor & Francis Group, an i'!farma business
© 2013 Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund
The right of Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund to be identified as authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part ofthis book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Frademarlc notice. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe .
.British Libra,y Cataloguing in Publication .Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Libra,y efCongress Cataloging in Publication .Data
Edwards, Justin D., 1970-
Grotesque / Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund.
pages cm. - (The new criticai idiom)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Grotesque in literature. 2. Literature, Modem-History and criticism.
1. Graulund, Rune. II. Title.
PN56.G7E39 2013
809'.915-dc23
2012049006
ISBN: 978-0-415-51909-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-51910-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-38343-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Garamond
by Taylor & Francis Books
 CONTENTS

SERIES EDITOR'S PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1 Grotesquerie
Incongruity and uncertainty
Uncanny grotesque
Ah/normal
Criticai genealogies
2 Groteskology; or, grotesque in theory
John Ruskin: symholic grotesque
Mikhail Bakhtin: carnivalesque grotesque
Michel Foucault: ah/normal grotesque
Julia Kristeva: ahj ect grotesque
3 Monstrous and grotesque
Monstrous forms
Hyhridity, monstrosity, grotesquerie
The grotesque and othemess
4 Grotesque bodies
Deformed hodies
Body horror
Bodyparts
S Disharm.ony and transgression
Exaggeration
Extravagance
 Excess
6 Attraction/repulsion
Freaks and misfits
Geeks and freaks
Opposites attract
The inhuman
Terrifying and comic
7 Laughter and grotesque
Laughter and grotesque bodies
Laughter and the carnival
8 Queerly grotesque
Freakishly queer
Queer body parts
9 Postcolonial grotesque
Grotesque states
Erupting states
Violated states
Expansive states
Conclusion: global grotesque
GL0SSARY
BIBLI0GRAPHY
INDEX
 SERIES EDITOR'S PREFACE

Fhe New Criticai Idiom is a series of introductory books which seeks to

extend the lexicon of literary terms, in order to address the radical
changes which have taken place in the study of literature during the last
decades of the twentieth century. The aim is to provide clear, well-
illustrated accounts of the full range of terminology currently in use, and
to evolve histories of its changing usage.
The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one where there
is considerable debate conceming basic questions of terminology. This
involves, among other things, the boundaries which distinguish the
literary from the non-literary; the position of literature within the larger
sphere of culture; the relationship between literatures of different
cultures; and questions conceming the relation of literary to other
cultural forms within the context of interdisciplinary studies.
It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a dynamic
and heterogeneous one. The present need is for individual volumes on
terms which combine clarity of exposition with an adventurousness of
perspective and a breadth of application. Each volume will contain as
part of its apparatus some indication of the direction in which the
definition of particular terms is likely to move, as well as expanding the
disciplinary boundaries within which some of these terms have been
traditionally contained. This will involve some re-situation of terms
within the larger field of cultural representation, and will introduce
examples from the area of film and the modem media in addition to
examples from a variety of literary texts.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the keen insights and detailed criticism

offered by John Drakakis. A big thanks goes to Sue Niebrzydowski for
tea, sympathy and, most importantly, her knowledge and understanding
of pre-modem English literature and culture.
 1
GROTESQUERIE

There is one thing I have learned since being paralyzed, and that is
that in the absence of sensory information, the imagina/km a/ways
tends to the grotesque . . . . The scene I construct will be one of
venereal depravity, of sex .... This is what I mean when I speak of
the grotesque - the fanciful, the bizarre, the absurdly incongruous.
(Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque, 1989: 69)

What do we mean when we speak of the grotesque? Peculiar, odd,

absurd, bizarre, macabre, depraved, degenerate, perverse: all of these
attributes are, for Sir Hugo, the first-person narrator of McGrath's 1989
novel, part of what he calls grotesque. Yet weird and peculiar thoughts
and visions are not, Sir Hugo continues, just figments of the imagination.
Nor are they confined to the abnormal creatures of books or the
deformed bodies of some Flemish paintings. For grotesque also
manifests itself in the corporeal, material world of the physical body. A
bone-collector and amateur palaeontologist in his youth, Sir Hugo's
ageing body has broken down; he can no longer control his movements.
He suffers from complete paralysis so he is unable to walk, drink or feed
himself. All he can do is to sit in his wheelchair with his body
deteriorating, his bones atrophying, as he stares at the blank walls of his
now unhomely estate. ln this, the grotesque is not only something he
observes from a distance, or imagines in moments of despair, rather, it
defines his life, his very identity: 'I have come to believe', he explains,
'that to be a grotesque is my destiny. For a man who turns into a
vegetable - isn't that a grotesque?' (ibid.: 16).
 It may well be. But it comes in other forms too. For grotesque bodies
are, at times, incomplete, lacking in vital parts, as they sometimes have
pieces cut out of them: limbs are missing, to be replaced sometimes by
phantom limbs, and bodily mutations become dominant traits. ln some
cases, grotesque figures combine human, non-human, animal and, in the
case of Sir Hugo, 'vegetable' attributes. ln other cases, the corporeal
deformity consists of extra body parts: eleven toes, a human tail, a third
nipple or the two heads of Siamese twins. These are excessively
grotesque.
McGrath's novel Fhe Grotesque employs its title with a peculiar
accuracy. For the narrator's description of grotesqueness is consistent
with conventional definitions of the term: 'repulsively ugly or distorted',
the OED tells us, 'the grotesque is incongruous or inappropriate to a
shocking degree'; or, it can consist of 'comically distorted figures,
creatures or images'. The distorted and deranged characters of grotesque
representations, of the sort we find in the deformed bodies of Edgar
Allan Poe's Narrative efArthur Gordon Pym (1838), can, according to
this definition, fade into black humour or the wittily bizarre, as in the
bitter irony of Evelyn Waugh's Vt"/e Bodtes. These aspects of
grotesquerie are vital to McGrath's novel: the repulsive images of
decaying bodies and dug up skeletal bones, as well as the butler, Fledge,
who is, according to the narrator, 'the source of the evil', combine with
elements of grim social comedy and dark irony as the plot meditates on
the master/butler relationship. The distortions of class in the fluid
movements between master and servant offer elements of comic
grotesquerie alongside themes that are deadly serious.

INCONGRUITY AND UNCERTAINTY

Disjunctions between the vile and the comic, disgust and irony, provoke
incongruities and uncertainties arising out of the irreconcilable
dimensions of grotesque forms. With this in mind, the literary critic
Philip Thomson offers a helpful definition of the grotesque in literature
and visual culture: he calls it 'the unresolved c/ash efincompatibles in
worlc and response 'and, he continues, 'it is significant that this clash is
paralleled by the ambivalent nature of the abnormal as present in the
grotesque' {Thomson, 27; Thomson's italics). Thomson's words in this
passage - unresolved, incompatible, ambivalent, clash - speak to the
ambiguities, juxtapositions and uncertainties surrounding the term. Yet
the attributes of incompatibility and ambivalence do not simply lead to a
conceptual dead-end or a place where meaning is absent and
unattainable. Instead, the grotesque offers a creative force for
conceptualizing the indeterminate that is produced by distortion, and
reflecting on the significance of the uncertainty that is thereby produced.
This means that the discombobulating juxtapositions and bizarre
combinations found in grotesque figures in literature and the other arts
open up an indeterminate space of conflicting possibilities, images and
figures. A grotesque body that is incomplete or deformed forces us to
question what it means to be human: these queries sometimes arise out of
the literal combination of human and animal traits or, at other times,
through the conceptual questions about what it means to deviate from the
norm.
The questions prompted by these ambiguities lead to a sense of
instability and uncertainty. But this is not just uncertainty for the sake of
uncertainty. For by acknowledging the lack of certainty at the heart of
grotesque texts, we remain open, multiple, and, as such, we can embrace
uncertainty over certainty: this, then, resists totalization, in all its many
forms, and offers many routes into multiple readings.
Why is this significant for an understanding of grotesque forms? An
answer to this query lies in our ungrasping of forms that challenge
absolute authority and aesthetic measure as a guiding principie. This
process of systematic unattachment, in tum, acknowledges the
possibilities of an open structure in which there can be no certainty, no
exclusive or permanent state of something which does not already
contain within it something else: there is no beauty without ugliness, no
comedy without tragedy, no black without white. Opening upa space of
possibilities, where humans merge with animais and disgust mixes with
laughter, the grotesque does not inhabit a stable or predetermined
ground. Nor does it provide a simple measure for prearranged decision-
making about literature and aesthetics. The grotesque can, at times, lead
to anxious indeterminacy, but where the emphasis is on anxiety as much
as it is on creativity.
 Grotesque fiction, in a general sense, violates the laws of nature. Here,
clear-cut taxonomies, definitions and classifications break down and, as a
result, there is a built-in narrative tension between the ludicrous and the
fearful, the absurd and the terrifying. A salient example of this is William
Beckford's rathelc (1786), an Orientalist tale of terror that employs an
ironic mode of narration. The transgressive excesses of the protagonist,
Caliph Vathek, include the construction of five palaces, each designed to
gratify one of the senses, that are tributes to his insatiable appetites and
his pursuit of pleasure. Excessive consumption is, throughout the text, a
manifestation of grotesque corporeality and this is combined with a
series of grotesque themes such as necrophilia, libertinism and incest.
The novel also includes many grotesque figures: fifty one-eyed, mute
black servants, various ghouls, several eunuchs, and scenes involving
skeletons and mummies. These bizarre creatures are introduced by the
mad and zany Giaour, whose influence over Vathek drives the
protagonist far beyond the bounds of human decency as he commits
horrific atrocities to attain eternal sensual completion. Described as a
grotesque stranger, Giaour isso abominably hideous that the very guards
who arrest him are forced to shut their eyes as they lead him to the
dungeons.
The physicality of grotesque bodies that 'hurt the eyes' is repeated in
the corruptions of human behaviour to represent ethical disorder and the
chaos of the human condition, and this unruliness is reflected in the text's
setting. At a crucial moment, a grotesque sage, a heavy-drinking, anti-
Islamic palm-tree climber, leads Zulkais, who has confessed a passionate
physical attraction to her brother, into a cavemous grotto surrounded by
reptiles with human faces. This place of terror is paved with flesh-
coloured marble that is marked with the veins and arteries of the human
body. Human heads grow out of lizard-like forms and the rock-face
appears to have human innards: the animais and the cavems are
physically anthropomorphized. The latter is particularly significant, for it
includes an etymological reference. We must remember that the word
'grotesque' is linked to the word 'grotto': the English word derives from
the Italian pittura grottesca, meaning a work (or painting) found in a
grotto and refers to the rooms in ancient buildings in Rome which were
excavated to reveal murals in a grotesque style. Indeed, the grotto is, like
the labyrinth or the crypt, a disorienting and threatening place that
inflames anxiety and fear. It is also a potential place of spatial internment
that echoes the state of being confined within the physical limits of
grotesque bodies.
But bodies are not only trapped within the limits of their own
physicality; they are also defined by grotesque traits. ln rathelc, for
instance, the rebellion of the body, dueto excessive consumption, does
not engender a morality tale warning against the dangers of insatiable
appetites; after all, the narrative voices of the text do not always express
disapproval. Rather, Beckford's mastering of the stratagems of the horror
tale (the gloom-ridden atmosphere creating suspense, the display of
bloodstains left by horrendous murders, the depictions of imprisonment
and torture) is conveyed with a comic twist. The tone throughout most of
the text is 'coolly sardonic' and even the most horrific events are related
with 'ironic reserve and understatement' (Punter and Byron, 182). ln
fact, the scenes of terror often include touches of humour through an
ironic treatment of the characters and the development of a bathetic
contrast between drama and absurdity. The darker tones of the mordant
sections of prose are fused with the ludicrous and the comic, thus
creating emotional uncertainty by swiftly changing mood while still
retaining a sinister undertone. A tale of terror anda mawkish narrative,
rathelc illustrates the structural dynamics of grotesque forms: the text
fluidly moves between horror and terror, the ludicrous and the absurd,
the humorous and the comic, the material and the mysterious.

UNCANNY GROTESQUE
The grotesque and the uncanny both reflect an ambiguity that relates to
an interior condition and can produce a range of responses, from
alienation and estrangement to terror and laughter. The grotesque has the
power to move from the material world into the uncanny realm of
mystery through its experience of disorientation, bewilderment,
confusion and bafflement. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White describe a
unique form of the grotesque that is not limited to that which is
completely alien to that which we accept as normal. Rather, they point to
a liminal form of the grotesque that is not monstrous Other, but that
emerges as a 'boundary phenomenon of hybridization or inmixing, in
which the self and the other become enmeshed in an inclusive,
heterogeneous, dangerously unstable zone' (Stallybrass and White, 193).
They assert that many methods of hybridization integral to bourgeois
society produce 'new combinations and strange instabilities in a given
semiotic system' that surpass the conventional oppositions of
refined/foul, high/low, or culture/savagery. This version of the grotesque
as a liminal phenomenon disturbs the coherence of these kinds of logical
oppositions. Within this liminal form, the grotesque derives from both
the play upon the bodily form and a play upon the conceptual form that
we associate with the uncanny.
ln his essay, 'The Uncanny,' Sigmund Freud defines the uncanny
experience as 'that class of the frightening which leads back to
something long known to us, once very familiar' (Freud, [1919] 1985:
336). The experience of something being both foreign and familiar
engenders the emotive responses of discomfort and alienation. Indeed,
for Julia Kristeva, the concept of 'the uncanny' is a significant source for
her theory of abjection in which the human corpse can be simultaneously
experienced as alien (object) and also strangely familiar (resembling the
subject). Within the liminal grotesque, then, the body merges with forms
of repression so that the uncanny is nothing new or alien, but something
that is familiar and old, for it is formed in the mind and yet becomes
alienated from the subject through repression. 'The uncanny', writes
Christoph Grunenberg,

describes the return of repressed events, memories, and fantasies -

the encounter with one's own most intimate fears. [&] The invasion
of the private and secure sphere of the home by some unknown evil
force exemplifies the conflict between interior and exterior world,
between individual and society, and between the intra- and
intersubjective'.
(Grunenberg, 213)

Indeed, the etymology of 'unheimlich, , the German word for 'uncanny',

includes a link between the uncanny and the domestic space of the home,
for the German aas Heimlich 'means that which is homely, comfortable
and familiar. The inversion of aas Unheimlich : then, negates feelings of
comfort, triggering an estrangement or the feeling of not being at home,
'unhomely.'
The uncanny, like the grotesque, depends on a conflict or
confrontation based on the notion of incongruity or the juxtaposition of
opposites. Moreover, the grotesque and the uncanny resist the resolution
of conflicts, and those who emphasize the terrifying quality of the
grotesque often shift it toward the realm of the mysterious and the
uncanny. Likewise, an uncanny text might become grotesque, not
because of some shocking oddity of invention, but because of the
fluctuations or confusions of a variety of shifting perspectives. The
stamp of the grotesque in the realm of the fantastic is the conscious
confusion between fantasy and reality. But the uncanny, for Freud, can
also arise out of that which is gruesome or physically grotesque: the
return of the dead, being buried alive, corpses and cannibalism, can
engender an uncanny response. Regarding cannibalism, the literary critic
Nicholas Royle points out that 'The Uncanny' does not address the
uncanniness of cannibalism, but he goes on to write that 'we might
surmise that cannibalism, for Freud, would be uncanny because it is "too
much intermixed with what is purely gruesome"' (Royle, 21 O). Dreadful,
hideous and macabre, cannibalism is seen to be the taboo desire par
excellence, for it breaks down artificial distinctions between the human
and the animal, even the human-as-animal, and figures the flesh of the
human body as meat. Such conceptions of human consumption blur the
boundaries between civilization and savagery, not just in the discontents
of civilization, but also through a rupture in the relationship between self
and other. After all, cannibalism plays out, materially and figuratively,
the integration of the self into the other, the other into the self, the
abnormal into the normal.

AD/NORMAL
Some literary and cultural critics suggest that the 'normative' is denied in
the grotesque insofar as the extreme, the decadent, the excessive and the
bizarre are the 'real' of the text. Other critics argue that a vital
component of grotesque representations are the distinctions between the
'normal' and the 'abnormal'; or, to put this another way, the grotesque
illustrates how the normal is defined in relation to the abnormal. But to
consider these distinctions, or even categories, as mutually exclusive, or
as binary oppositions, would be misleading. For to understand
grotesquerie in all its complexity we must acknowledge that it provokes
two key questions: 'what is normal?' and, by extension, 'what is
abnormal?' These questions are posed but not easily answered and, as a
result, they lead to ambivalence about the abnormal. ln this, the
ambivalently abnormal is part of the state of uncertainty where
predetermined conditions and ways of seeing the normative world are
challenged.
To retum to Patrick McGrath's novel The Grotesque, the narrator says
that his butler, Fledge, is not 'normal': he is, we are told, 'cunning',
'secret', 'lustful', 'decadent' and prone to violence, possibly murder
(McGrath, 73). The butler's 'monstrous anomalies', the narrator
continues, 'violate the natural order' of things and, as such, 'Fledges
"normality" must be seen ... for what it is: a sort of double inversion, an
inversion ofinversion itself (ibid.: 114, 70). Here, the word 'inversion' is
a clear reference to homosexuality, and the narrator is obsessed with
Fledges queer sexuality, but to invert something is also to tum it upside
down or place it in a reverse position. Inversion often connotes deviation
from the norm, putting something in reverse order or arrangement. And it
can refer to that which has been overtumed, uptumed or tumed around
- something that is the opposite of something else. An inversion is,
then, a reversai of the normal order of things, such as the butler who
becomes the master.
We sometimes speak of things as being 'all over the place' or 'topsy-
turvy', meaning they are in a state of confusion, disorder or in disarray.
But what is a 'double inversion'? Is such a thing possible? And how
might this shed light on 'normality'? Patrick McGrath's novel poses
these questions and, in so doing, suggests that the first inversion is
cancelled out by the second. That is, if one inversion tums something
upside down, making it 'topsy-turvy', then another inversion of the sarne
thing would allow it to revert to its original position. This is significant
because it suggests that the grotesque has the power to eliminate borders:
it can reveal how the boundaries between the 'normal' and 'abnormal'
are fluid, not fixed, and how grotesquerie can lead to an erasure of
common distinctions. At the end of the novel, for instance, the
increasingly delusional narrator describes the boundaries between
himself and the monstrous Fledge as dissolving. 'I am his grotesque
double', he states, Fledge 'reads in me the outward sign of his own
corruption, I am the extemalization, the manifestation, the fleshy
representation of his true inner nature - which is a deformed and
withered thing' (ibid.: 173).
Grotesque figures can cause the dissolution of the borders separating
the normal and abnormal, inside and outside, intemal and extemal. One
extreme flows into another. Territories will not be bounded as clear-cut
divisions are dissolved. This erasure of common distinctions speaks to
debates over stigmatization and normalcy, what it means to exist outside
the norm, and what the norm is. After all, we must remember that
normalization is a powerful discourse for control and institutionalization,
for dominant institutions sanction certain forms of 'normalcy', and this
always comes at the expense of others, which are constituted by contrast
as abnormal, inferior or even shameful. This lack of 'normalcy', indeed
the very idea of normality itself, can lead to an uneven distribution of
shame in people's lives, resulting in the negative consequences of
exclusion, demonization and even violence. The ah/normal aspects of the
grotesque, and the provocative way in which that lack of normality is
represented, have inspired some critics to condemn it as a marker of what
is 'uncivilized', thereby offensively reinscribing the distinctions between
the norm and its deviations. This perspective suggests that, like a number
of other terms that can operate through binary logic, grotesquerie
revolves around the categories of inclusion (the norm) and exclusion (the
abnormal) in order to preserve marked distinctions between 'us' and
'them', 'self and other'.
But the word 'grotesque' can also be hamessed as a powerful force to
resist the tools of normalization. For a grotesque figure can disrupt
notions of normality in favour of conceptualizing and recognizing
broader varieties of being and expression as dignified and respected. ln
this, the grotesque can criticize the idea that there is some ethically
compelling aspect to 'normality' by suggesting that the normal range is
simply a statistical category to which there is no ethical obligation to
correspond. If normal just means within a common statistical range, there
is no reason to be normal or not.
The Scottish philosopher David Hume challenges categories of
normalization through grotesque images of decapitation. Hume's
'Guillotine' appears in book three of A Treatise efHuman Nature (1739-
40) in an argument that criticizes those writers who make normative
claims about what 'ought' to be based on positive premises about what
'is'. This 'is--ought problem' arises when someone makes assertions
about what 'ought' to be on the basis of statements about what 'is'. For
Hume, the normative can occur discursively when there is a significant
difference between descriptive statements (about what is) and
prescriptive or normative statements (about what ought to be). The
problem arises when it is not obvious how we move from making
descriptive statements to making prescriptive declarations. The gap
between 'is' statements and 'ought' statements renders 'ought'
statements of dubious validity. ln this, one cannot make a normative
claim based on facts about the world, implying that normative claims
cannot be the conclusions of reason. This complete severing of 'is' from
'ought' has been given the gory designation of Hume's Guillotine and
illustrates the removal of the head from many ethical arguments about
what it means to be 'normal'.

CRITICAL GENEALOGIES
One of the most influential studies of the grotesque is The Grotesque in
Art andLiterature by the German critic Wolfgang Kayser ( 1957). Kayser
traces the historical development of the grotesque from the Italian
Renaissance through the epochs of Romanticism and nineteenth-century
realism, to its modem forms in poetry, dream narration and surrealist
painting. Throughout European literature and painting, Kayser finds the
grotesque in the combination of the horrific with the comic: he writes,
the grotesque 'appears to us in paradoxical guise ... and it elicits from us
paradoxical responses' (Kayser, 56). It would be wrong to say that
Kayser argues for an evolution of the concept. lnstead, he relocates the
integral element of significance from inherently grotesque form/function
to grotesque as an effective description of the act of mediation itself. ln
this, he assesses the grotesque as the appearance of a reality that is
simultaneously of and opposed to the worlds in which the audience
exists. The direction from which he approaches this definition is unique,
for he does not abandon the basic concepts of unity, or disunity, in form
and function but integrates them into a consideration of a new concem
for effect that propels the grotesque toward a psychological trajectory.
This criticism, then, facilitates a comprehensive assessment of the role of
the grotesque in European literature and art, thus helping us to unpack
Mikhail Bakhtin's deployment of the term in relation to the camivalesque
through the inversion of reality by temporarily destabilizing a closed,
hierarchical society (see Chapters 2 and 7).
On the Grotesque: Strategies ef Contradiction in Art and Literature
(1982) by Geoffrey Galt Harpham is, among other things, a response to
Kayser's approach. Harpham's writing about grotesquerie tries to
demarcate its parameters and to distinguish it from related writing that
can be defined as absurd, surreal, funny or weird. The grotesque, he
maintains, is an ambiguous category for analysis, but it is also one that is
helpful when it is clearly defined and made distinct from other forms of
art and literature. One of the methodological problems when approaching
grotesque texts is that the label can be over-determined: it can mean
everything and nothing. A way to <leal with this problem is to recognize
that the grotesque appeals to readers and audiences across periods and
regions, but that which is considered grotesque is tied to an historical
context. What is considered grotesque to a twenty-first century audience,
for instance, might not have been thought to be grotesque by an Early
Modem audience. Thus, in order to understand the grotesque, the work
must be placed and understood in relation to the socio-historical context
in which it is produced. This process, he continues, can be difficult
because the grotesque is always about that which is estranged,
defamiliarized and dislocated. Thus, critics of grotesque works are faced
with a double sense of alienation: the critic might be alienated from the
context in which the work is created, but the work itself will also be
estranged within the historical moment. ln this, a grotesque work is not a
cultural product based on fantasy, for the materiality of its relation to the
reality of the world around is vital for its impact on the audience. The
grotesque, then, functions according to its audience expectations in time
and place: its effects of discomfort, discomposure and uneasiness are
reliant on the historical standards of 'normalcy' and what is 'proper'. As
a result, a grotesque work influences a collective consciousness, a shared
set of social, cultural and historical assumptions that arise from
conventional beliefs and attitudes. It is for this reason that Harpham
regards the grotesque as always being relegated to the margins of the
society in which it is created.
Since the 1970s, there has been a strand of literary criticism that has
focused on the American grotesque. Influenced by Irving Howe's 'The
Book of the Grotesque' (published in his 1951 study of the American
author Sherwood Anderson), the grotesque in American fiction has, for
some critics, tended to focus on estrangement and loss: the grotesquerie
of an isolated rural life, depressed landscapes populated by deformed
characters, the inhuman and inhumane racial grotesque, the outcasts in a
community of rugged individualism, grotesque versions of evangelical
Christianity, and the excessive consumption associated with material
success. ln this, grotesque figures and images lie in sharp contrast to the
economic and social mythologies of an 'American dream' or the
religious utopic vision of the 'city on the hill'. The grotesque existence
that the characters of such novels must endure is often read as
symptomatic of the unhealthy and deformed nightmare of a malign
nation. Indeed, for some literary critics the frightening descriptions of
America by early American writers such as William Bradford, Mary
Rowlandson, and Cotton Mather, with their allusions to a terrifying
wildemess and its even more terrifying inhabitants, represent the nascent
elements of the American grotesque, a tradition that emerged in full force
in the nineteenth-century writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar
Allan Poe and Herman Melville. While the interest in this genre has
varied over the years, it has been a consistent stream in American
literature up to the present day, a form that is evident in the work of
authors as diverse as Frederick Douglass, William Faulkner, Flannery
O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison. Taking a wide variety
of forms, including the religious grotesque, the frontier grotesque, and
the southem grotesque, it has proved an enduring genre for examining
social and cultural concems, as well as issues of race, gender, and class,
as seen in, for example, Faulkner's As .l Lay .Dying (1930), McCarthy's
Child efGod(1973), or Morrison's Beloved(1987).
ln his interdisciplinary study of the American grotesque, Modern
American Grotesque: Literature and Photography (2009), James
Goodwin explores meanings of the term in twentieth-century texts and
images. As contemporary life is increasingly influenced by mass media
and new communications technologies, he argues, the deeply rooted
representations of the grotesque in the United States have become
ubiquitous and have proliferated in a multiplicity of forms. Thus,
grotesquerie is a significant part of the national scene: it appears in
diverse genres from tabloid journalism and horror films to reality TV,
from celebrity news to YouTube downloads and popular fiction.
Goodwin reads texts and images to explore how the grotesque is
continually re-worked and recontextualized to depict different versions
of American culture, society and history. 'The grotesque figure and its
meanings', Goodwin writes,

are designed to be detected and understood in terms of pronounced,

and often absolute, contrasts. Much modem American literature and
photography of the grotesque depends upon iconographic processes
that enlarge awareness of the social sphere through delimiting one's
perspective on it to antitheses such as perception/obscurity and
light/dark.
(Goodwin, 2)

Studies focusing on national traditions of the grotesque have arisen

alongside gendered readings of the form. ln The Female Grotesque. •Ris/e,
Excess and Modemity (1994), Mary Russo re-examines the concept in
the light of gender and explores depictions of women in Westem culture
by combining the iconographic and the historical to locate the role of the
woman's body in the discourses of the grotesque. Because it includes the
incomplete, the unfinished and evolving body, the female grotesque is
open, dynamic, boundless, whereas the male idealisation of female
beauty is static, closed, contained. Russo, then, relates grotesque bodies
to the specificities of time, space and the dimensions of the modem
spectacle. ln this, she builds on the definitions of transgression and
grotesque explored by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics
and Poetics ef Transgression (1986): 'the grotesque returns as the
repressed of the political unconscious, as those hidden cultural contents
which by their abjection had consolidated the cultural identity of the
bourgeoisie' (Russo, 8-9). Russo thus highlights the possibilities of the
grotesque for a feminist project that is transgressive, and she examines
representations of the body that go against the normative mainstream
discourses of feminist thought. Her work is significant because it
foregrounds the constitutive interdependence of the grotesque and the
normal: grotesque bodies provide, she argues, room for chance within the
context of the spectacle, the male gaze and the power dynamics in
representations of the female body.
This denotes the power of the female grotesque, for it challenges
masculinist visions of women's bodies and provokes an anxiety that
arises out of the gap between the expected and the actual, opening up the
possibility for social transformation. ln this, the loss of boundaries can
redefine social categories, if only temporarily. ln her thoughtful readings,
Russo considers the female grotesques of the camival, and how the
'unruly' woman of popular uprisings, or disruptive festivais, must be
viewed as deeply ambivalent. This ambivalence arises for two reasons.
First, the power of transgression can challenge normativity through
representations of women who exist outside of the strict confines of
traditional gender roles. Grotesquerie, she writes, 'does not always
function to keep women in their place' because the writer or artist
'intends to baffle, intimidate, and shock the viewer or reader and to
stimulate his own (criticai) thought process' to demand change in the
world by breeding a grotesque female (ibid.: 219). A grotesque
transgressive woman of a camivalized state can, then, undermine gender
codes and empower women through transgression: 'women and their
bodies, certain bodies, in certain public framings, in certain public
spaces, are always already transgressive - dangerous' (ibid.: 217).
Second, Russo recognizes that a grotesque woman of the camival can
also 'reinforce' pre-inversion social ideals, for the comic and festive
'disorderly woman' ... 'gives rein to the lower in herself. Here, there is a
reincorporation of the transgressive into the normative: the excesses and
reversais of women in the camivalesque can operate to reaffirm the
status quo, granting sanctioned and contained occas1ons for
transgressions that can then be de-activated. The empowerment of
transgression in the context of the female grotesque can be, in certain
circumstances, undermined by the dominant discourses and re-
appropriated into the conventional power structures of gender difference.
As a term, grotesque can thus never be locked into any one meaning or
form, historical period or specific political function. This means that any
attempt to locate the grotesque is by definition bound to fail. For if there
is any one thing that defines 'the' grotesque it is precisely that it is
hybrid, transgressive and always in motion.
 2
GROTESKOLOGY; OR,
GROTESQUE 1N TR EORY

ln addition to its having a recognizable structural significance, as we saw

in Chapter 1, the grotesque is an aesthetic form of expression with a
historical dimension that can be traced from antiquity to the present. It is
perhaps not surprising, then, that art historians, philosophers, as well as
literary and cultural critics have attempted to theorize various
manifestations of grotesque depictions in visual, textual, and cultural
forms. ln this chapter, we seek to track a selective trajectory of the
grotesque in theory, as a means of drawing attention to certain theoretical
texts about grotesque forms of representation.

JOHN RUSKIN: SYMBOLIC GROTESQUE

John Ruskin's writings on grotesque art and architecture include early
theories of this representational mode. His texts are particularly
significant because they revolve around symbolic depictions of the world
without negating the material politics of the form within a particular
context. ln the last volume of his book The Stones ef renice (1853) and
in volume three of .Modern Painters (1856), Ruskin relates grotesque to
various aspects of political satire, unreal fantasy, and the horror of the
unknown. More specifically, in .Modern Painters he argues that the
grotesque involves a creativity that invokes imaginative depictions of
tangible things to reveal that which has been concealed. This is
noteworthy, for he describes it as including anthropomorphized figures
that mix humans and animais, or man with vegetable matter like trees.
These hybrid forms have an impact on their audiences precisely because
they are so human; they enable us, in other words, to see humanity in a
new light, revealing ourselves in unique guises, and linked to other forms
oflife.
For Ruskin, grotesque is distortion, delineating the gap between
imagined possibility and reality. He distinguishes between the 'noble' or
'true' grotesque, recognising in this distinction the imperfection of
humanity and our tendency toward the sensational and the frivolous. Yet
for Ruskin, grotesque aesthetics are not necessarily signs of degeneration
or decadence. They can also be used as cultural critique. This is because
grotesque forms distort proportion and problematize vision, making
objects idiosyncratic and liberating the field of vision through the
freedom of the imagination. Ruskin concludes that 'it seems not only
permissible, but even desirable, that the art by which the grotesque is
expressed should be more or less imperfect'. ln this, the grotesque can be
not only 'a forceful instrument of teaching' but also 'a most natural
manner of expression' (Ruskin, [1856] 1955: 138). Grotesque forms such
as griffins, for instance, are not meant to be figurative or to reflect the
physical reality of our lives. As a mythological creature, half lion and
half eagle, the griffin is related to the symbolic field, for it emphasizes an
intrinsic connection between symbolism and the ludicrous that moves the
representational form outside of physical or contextual norms. The result
of this is the 'symbolic grotesque', Ruskin argues, the expression of
which is

a series of symbols thrown together in a bold and fearless connection,

of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any
verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to
work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the
imagination, forming the grotesque character.
(ibid.: 132)

ln a salient example of this, Ruskin points to an example of the true and

the false grotesque. The true grotesque is exemplified by a sculpture of a
griffin from the cathedral in Verona, the false grotesque by a frieze in
Rome in the temple of Antoninus and Faustina. While the sculpture and
the frieze depict the sarne mythological creature, and both are 'exquisite
in execution' (ibid.: 140), the two pieces are nevertheless miles apart to
the disceming eye. Vision is important in more senses than one, Ruskin
admits, in that both craftsmen were forced to envisage the griffin in front
of their mind's eye rather than simply copying a creature occurring in
nature. The difference between the two, however, is that the former
craftsman 'did really see a griffin in his imagination', whereas the latter
'never saw anything at all, nor anything else; but put the whole thing
together by line and rule' (ibid.: 141). Both are grotesques in that they
combine disparate natural categories. But the former is a 'true' grotesque
because it springs instinctually and directly from the craftsman's creative
imagination. The latter craftsman, on the other hand, produces a 'false'
grotesque because he pieces the griffin together by incongruent elements
of the world he already knows. The latter falls short, then, because he
fails to make all the unrelated parts of a lion and an eagle cohere into the
organic (true) whole of a griffin. ln an extended and meticulous part-by-
part analysis of the differences between the two griffins - including a
disparaging yet highly amusing analysis of the false griffin's ears that are
so designed as to give it an 'infallible earache' due to the 'continuai
humming of the wind on each side of his head' - Ruskin's final verdict
is thus that the latter griffin is lacking altogether in 'griffinism' (ibid.:
143 and 147).
While a griffin will inevitably always be a grotesque, there is therefore
a vast difference between the two types and the lessons they can teach us.
The former extends and enriches our horizons by enabling in us a new
way of seeing the world in that it is a product of an 'honest imagination'
that expresses 'grace and usefulness all at once'. The latter, contrarily,
has 'no other intent than that of covering a level surface with entertaining
form' (ibid.: 147). It is therefore trivial, misleading, false. Here, the
symbolic grotesque is used to express intricate truths with power and
economy in a single image. For the craftsman of the true grotesque has
attained what the craftsman of the false grotesque cannot; which is to
compress a host of seemingly incongruent parts into a perfectly imperfect
whole. While it remains grotesque, it is nevertheless an expression of
'truths which nothing else could convey', bringing together in one single
'grotesque conception' what ten times that number of natural images
could not (ibid.: 133 and 137).
To Ruskin, the grotesque is, however, historical as well as symbolical.
ln Fhe Stones ef renice, Ruskin terms the later period of the Venetian
empire 'The Grotesque Renaissance'. This was a period which saw 'the
worst and basest ever built by the hands of men', an era characterized by
'a spirit of brutal mockery and insolent jest' that resulted in 'deformed
and monstrous sculpture' (Ruskin, [1853] 1894: 113). Architecture lost
its moral compass, Ruskin argues, anda period of 'idiotic mockery' was
instigated, prompting architects to defile the buildings of Venice with
hundreds of 'inhuman and monstrous [heads] leering in bestial
degradation'. Ruskin deems this period grotesque, but reminds us that we
must differentiate this 'evil' epoch from former periods of grotesque
splendour. We must draw a line, he reminds us, between the 'base
grotesque' of this period and that of the 'magnificent condition of
fantastic imagination' of that which carne before (ibid.: 122). The
difference here is again that the noble grotesque grows from an ability to
convey symbolic imagery that can move us beyond the materiality of
everyday life, and that such imagery comes naturally and effortlessly to
the craftsman of the true grotesque. His work may be 'wild', but it
provides us with 'the evidence of deep insight into nature' (ibid.: 143).
Contrary to this, the ignoble grotesque exemplifies human imagination
artificially run wild in that 'a man naturally apathetic is forcing himself
into excitement' (ibid.: 142), the result of which is a transgression of
order, form and stability that serves no other purpose than that of
transgression itself.
We see this exemplified in Fhe Stones ef renice, where Ruskin refers
to the Church of Santa Maria Formosa as exemplary of the ignoble
grotesquerie of 'The Grotesque Renaissance'. A mix of 1490s and 1604
architectural styles, the church includes many grotesque elements,
including a 'grotesque head' so 'grossly debased' Ruskin can barely
tolerate to discuss it, let alone allow illustrations of such grotesques to
'pollute this volume' (ibid.: 123-26). According to Ruskin, none ofthese
omaments serve any religious purpose. Whereas the symbolic potential
of the true grotesque can move us into a spiritual realm, ignoble
grotesques like these can only serve to debase what should in fact be a
sacred building, hence they are to be equated with 'the laughter of the
idiot and the cretin' (ibid.: 141). Horrible as this may seem to Ruskin, he
nevertheless finds the example of Venice instructive. For when we visit
Venice today, we see set in such stone the sentiment of an entire era, of a
decadence that would eventually eclipse what had once been a 'true
Gothic grotesque' and instead devolve into an offensive and degraded
form (ibid.: 144). This is, Ruskin tells us, a waming to the present of the
'depth to which the human mind can be debased' (ibid.: 136).
This taxonomy is an early description of how grotesque in
architecture, art and literature includes a set of features that move from
symbolism to materialism, anthropomorphism to humanity, satire to
terror, and caricature to disgust. Yet Ruskin does not simply define
grotesque in aesthetic terms; he bases his theory on a social and not
psychological analysis in that he views mental states as being influenced
by cultural conditions. As a result, his vision of grotesque as proliferated
through juxtapositions, combining opposites, idiosyncratic formulations
is not, according to the literary critic Isobel Armstrong, 'a romanticised
and anachronistic analysis of estranged labour' (Armstrong, 240).
Rather, the mode is

uncompromising in its understanding that the cultural production of a

whole society and its consciousness will be formed by the nature of
its dominant form of work. It does not see art in terms of progression
or cultural continuity or a disinterested ethical tradition.
(ibid.: 240)

Venice proves a unique example of this, Ruskin claims, in that the

'development of that grotesque took place under different laws from
those which regulate it in any other European city' (Ruskin, [1853] 1894:
161). This is however not to say that he defines grotesque as being
confined to a particular historical European context; instead, it can be
differentiated in terms of periodization: the 'Renaissance Grotesque' that
he describes in Venice can be distinguished from the 'terrible grotesque'
of a 'modem' form ofthe mode in nineteenth-century London.
Consequently, grotesque is at one and the sarne time symbolic and
reflects a specific culture and society. Its symbolic nature enables us to
see things we cannot fully grasp, but points to a 'noble' truth that is
beyond the limits of normative human thought. ln this, it may
approximate the aesthetic ecstasies of the sublime, which is to say an
expression of the magnificence of feelings too great to express in words.
ln Fhe Stones ef renice, for instance, he argues that human limitations
require grotesque, which is both the result of man's 'fallen nature' anda
divine accommodation to it:

The fallen human soul, at its best, must be as a diminishing glass, and
that a broken one, to the mighty truths of the universe round it; and
the wider the scope of its glance, and the vaster the truths into which
it obtains an insight, the more fantastic their distortion is likely to be,
as the winds and vapours trouble the field of the telescope most when
it reaches farthest.
(ibid.: 153)

If, for Ruskin, grotesque is noble and symbolic when it gestures to the
'fallen nature' of man and the symbolic realm beyond physicality, then
the Russian literary and cultural critic Mikhail Bakhtin associates
grotesquerie with the materiality of the camivalesque, particularly the
camival's potential for disrupting established social and political
hierarchies.

MIKIIAIL BAKHTIN: CARNIVALESQUE

GROTESQUE
Mikhail Bakhtin is best known as a theorist of the novel, a reputation he
gained through the four influential essays collected in Fhe Dialogic
Imagina/km (1981) and his study Rabelais and His World (1941).
According to the literary critic Michael Holquist, who is also a translator
ofhis work, Bakhtin was a man driven by 'an almost Manichean sense of
opposition and struggle at the heart of existence, a ceaseless battle
between centrifugai forces that seek to keep things apart, and centripetal
forces that strive to make things cohere'. Despite his considerable
contributions to linguistics, philosophy and political theory, it is not
surprising that his work on the 'militantly protean' form of the novel was
most influential; for 'Bakhtin', Holquist writes, 'loves novels because he
is a baggy monster' (Holquist, xviii).
This description- 'a baggy monster' - marks Bakhtin out as a kind
of grotesque, a 'supreme eccentric' whose life and critical emphasis on
the novel grew out of his ideas about disharmony, monstrosity and
deviation (ibid.: xvi). As a literary mode, the novel is, he argues,
different from other literary genres because it is characterized by a
plethora of competing speech pattems and registers; it does not conform
to one tone of voice, structure or pre-existing expectation. ln developing
his theory of the novel, Bakhtin uses the term 'heteroglossia' to describe
the basic condition goveming the production of meaning in discourse.
Meanings and utterances in novels are, in other words, heteroglot
because the novel includes a multiplicity of social voices and their
individual expressions. A single narrative voice might give the
impression of authority, unity and closure, but no authoritative voice can
stifle the competing voices in a novel where a variety of meanings that
stem from social interactions in dialogue are constantly produced. This
plenitude of voices and meanings undermines the integrity of the
dominant narrative voice, for, in these conditions, monologue is not
really possible. Describing this dissonance and lack of unity, Bakhtin
asserts that the novel 'never enters into the whole, it does not participate
in the harmony of the genres' and it is, as a result, an 'ever-developing
genre' (Bakhtin, [1981] 1998: 3-5). The novel is a mutant form; it is
transgressive and fluid.
The Dialogic Imagina/km identifies the mixture of categories
characteristic of grotesquerie, but it is in Rabelais and His World that
Bakhtin engages directly with the term. Here, he extends the notion of
the grotesque to include historical and cultural practices with the result
that 'the grotesque' cannot be defined in ahistorical isolation. ln this, he
coins various expressions such as grotesque realism, the grotesque body,
as well as the camivalesque, to denote distinctions across periods, from
the medieval to the modem. ln this, the Early Modem period is a focal
point for Bakhtin and, as such, Rabelais and His World reassesses the
sixteenth-century French author François Rabelais, particularly his
Gargantua andPantagruel (1532-65), in the light of a contextual world-
view that stresses the cultural and ideological significance of festivais,
laughter and grotesquerie. He writes,

The fact is that the tradition of the popular-festive laughter that

informed Rabelais' work began to decline. It ceased to be a living and
common interpretation of Rabelaisian images. The authentic aesthetic
and ideological key to these images was lost. And so the
commentators began to look for false keys.
(Bakhtin, [1965] 1984: 115)

As far as Bakhtin is concemed, other literary critics have overlooked the

significance of grotesque forms in Rabelais's work. To illustrate this, he
calls attention to Lucien Febvre's The Prob/em ef Unbelief in the
Sixteenth Century: The .Heligion ef .Habelais (1942), which Bakhtin
believes is flawed because the argument is anachronistic. While Febvre's
intention to study Rabelais 'with the eyes of his [sixteenth-century]
contemporaries' is, for Bakhtin, admirable, the study fails because the
critic does not understand Rabelais's position on laughter (Bakhtin, ibid.:
131). Thus a vital error is made at the outset, since by only examining the
'official framework' of the 'serious level of thought and culture', he
'sees and appreciates in Rabelais' novel only that which can be
understood and interpreted on that serious level. That which is essential,
the true Rabelais, remains outside his scope of vision (ibid.: 132-33).
As a corrective, Bakhtin examines the 'unofficial' world of
grotesquerie in Gargantua andPantagruel ln this tale of two giants who
roam the French countryside, Bakhtin calls attention to a text that
overflows with farts, faeces, piss, gluttonous feasts, adultery, geese used
as toilet paper, sex, cannibalism, cannon balls made from hair, as well as
other passages that rely on modes of exaggeration, silliness, crudeness
and indecency. Bakhtin points out that the orthodox criticai tendency has
been to dismiss these sections as 'low material' or 'inappropriate' or
'absurd'. ln their sixteenth-century context, however, they occupy a
prominent place: 'in grotesque realism', Bakhtin writes,

the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private,

egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as
something universal, representing all the people. As such it is
 opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world.
(ibid.: 19)

The body and grotesquerie must, in other words, be read historically, and
this is exemplified in the 'grotesque bodies', the monstrous size of
Gargantua and Pantagruel, as well as what comes out of these bodies
(excrement, urine, pus, laughter). lndeed, these are grotesque bodies
because they cannot be clearly delineated from the world around them.
'Contrary to modem canons', Bakhtin continues, 'the grotesque body is
not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, complete unit;
it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits' as the
'apertures' of the body, 'the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts,
the phallus', emit fluids that flow in and out, to and from other bodies
(ibid.: 26).
ln depicting Gargantua and Pantagruel as defecating, burping,
urinating, copulating, eating, Rabelais portrays a life cycle devoid of the
hierarchies dividing low from high, where there are no clear boundaries
between body and world, no difference between birth and death.
Gargantua's and Pantagruel's bodies, always devouring, always
producing waste, are, like the cosmos they are part of and are, always 'in
the act of becoming' (ibid.: 317). ln this, a grotesque body is not to be
viewed as a sideshow within the context of the rest of Rabelais's
canonical work but as the world itsef/. 'Such a body, composed of fertile
depths and procreative convexities is never clearly differentiated from
the world but is transferred, merged, and fused with it' (ibid.: 339).
The difference between then and now is a distinction between
universality versus hierarchies. For the grotesque in the time of Rabelais
was a way of seeing the world in its entirety, instead of focussing on that
which is exceptional. ln this, Bakhtin distinguishes between grotesque
forms in different historical periods, suggesting that grotesquerie shifts as
perceptions of monstrosity, laughter and the body change over time. For
example, he marks out the differences between the Renaissance and the
Romantic grotesque: 'The transformation of the principie of laughter
which permeates the grotesque, that is the loss of its regenerating power,
leads to a series of other essential differences between Romantic
grotesque and medieval and Renaissance grotesque' (Bakhtin, [ 1941]
1984: 38). Here, the Romantic grotesque leads to the construction of 'a
terrifying world, alien to man', whereas the 'medieval and Renaissance
folk culture was familiar with the element of terror only as represented
by comic monsters, who were defeated by laughter' (ibid.: 38-39).
Rather than view the grotesque as a source of terror, or, altematively, as
a simple source of mindless laughter, Bakhtin saw in Rabelais's
grotesque a philosophy, a way of life that could not only manage terror,
but act as a means to attain political autonomy.
Central to Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque is the camivalesque. We
will return to this in Chapter 6, but it is important to note here that he
uses the notion and cultural practice of the camival to circumvent the
hierarchies of low and high, folk culture and canonical art, vulgarity and
refinement. Camival, Bakhtin claims,

does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art ... Camival
is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone
participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While
camival lasts, there is no other life outside of it. During camival time
life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of freedom.
(Bakhtin, ibid.: 7)

It is in the camival, Bakthin argues, that there is a release from social

mores, a divergence from everyday life that provides a space wherein
conventions are overturned or eradicated.

The camivalesque is not just an aspect of a celebration, but, like the

grotesque, it is a factor in texts and art, a liminal space where 'the
law' is overturned. More than just parody, the camivalesque is
genuine transgression, an aspect of the semiotic/grotesque, a space
where nonexclusive oppositions collide.
(Fanning, 258)

The camivalesque is an effective critique of society's norms, Bakhtin

claims, in that it is, like the novel, the source of dialogics in which no
one voice, no one authority, is able to impose its supremacy upon
another.
MICBELFOUCAULT:AB/NORMAL
GROTESQUE
The French philosopher and cultural critic Michel Foucault was
particularly interested in the regulation and normalization of bodies
within European institutions. Central to Foucault's writing is the notion
that aberrant bodily forms and behaviours expose the social construction
of 'normality' and, as a result, challenge essentialism. ln examinations of
the shifting roles of a range of institutions like the asylum (Madness and
Civilization, 1961), the hospital (Fhe Birth efthe Clinic, 1963, and The
History ef Sexuality, Vol. I, 1978), and the prison (Discipline and
Punish, 1975), Foucault reveals how power is wielded by the disciplinary
measures of institutions to regulate that which is deemed 'abnormal'.
These institutions, Foucault shows, contain, alter or monitor that which is
labelled deviant and 'unnatural' by employing 'the tactics and strategies
of the power of normalization' in attempting to contain, alter and
regulate that which does not conform to accepted norms laid down by
dominant power structures (Davidson 2003: xx). Yet, as Foucault argues,
power is a relation not an essence, hence any discourse of power will
inevitably pave the way for a counter-discourse that challenges the
hegemony of those in power.
Foucault's examinations of the asylum, the hospital and the prison
present analyses that are extremely useful for understanding the complex
workings of institutions. But what is so influential in Foucault's writing
is how he identifies a model of power as a force in and of itself. For in
examining forms of the 'abnormal' and how European society regulates
anomalies, Foucault demonstrates how power can be found in the
mechanics of power, not just in the individuais who brandish it, e.g.
doctors, soldiers, police officers, generais, kings, presidents. Indeed,
Foucault's insights into the history of systems are tied to the
dissemination of knowledge and power in discourse: power-knowledge
matrices are founded in the vast network of conflicting and inter-
validating discursive practices that constitute reality. Discursive
practices, integral to institutional structures, produce qualified members
or normalized production procedures, assign subject positions for their
practitioners and determine their objects of knowledge. These power-
knowledge matrices can determine those who are relegated to the
margins or classified in specific ways, such as the insane, the criminal or
the pervert. The dominant discourses that determine subjects in this way
are thus part of the processes of normalization. Yet these very processes
of normalization can also open up spaces for resistance. For where there
is a dominant discourse, there is also a counter-discourse; where there is
classification of subjects, there is also the potential for the formation of a
community that can resist the dominant discourses of power.
Power is, then, govemed by a logic that is not only wielded by the
executive, judiciary or legislative powers. Power is fluid. As such, it is
itself a sort of monster, an organism that can exceed the control of
individuais or groups of individuais. Power is a force that eludes
boundaries and controls as regularly as the deviants it is meant to
regulate. ln this, power is often grotesque. Its grotesquerie operates
through the faceless mechanics of the state, in the anonymous
bureaucracies of asylums, hospitais and prisons, and in a more
personalized image: the power of the 'strong man', the dictator. For it is
in renegade and 'arbitrary' sovereignty operating outside the standards of
law and reason, Foucault claims, that we can most readily discem a
grotesque form of power:

The grotesque is one of the essential processes of arbitrary

sovereignty. But you know also that the grotesque is a process
inherent to assiduous bureaucracy. Since the nineteenth century, an
essential feature of big Westem bureaucracies has been that the
administrative machine, with its unavoidable effects of power, works
by using the medíocre, useless, imbecilic, superficial, ridiculous,
wom-out, poor, and powerless functionary.
(Foucault, 2003: 12)

As an example of 'assiduous bureaucracy', Foucault refers to grotesque

images found in the work of Franz Kafka, whose fiction often depicts an
'administrative machine' that seems to be fuelled by human functionaries
like Willem and Franz, the officers of Jne Triai (1925), who robotically
carry out inexplicable and inhuman orders. Refusing to offer any
explanation of the administrative machine's verdicts, a character like K is
a hapless victim of a system that eradicates personality and free will. But
Kafka's writing also exposes the absurdity of the goveming system's
verdicts, for these are a by-product of a horrible discrepancy between the
trivial, or perhaps imaginary, transgression and the severity of the
punishment. The execution of this punishment is an example of
grotesque power: the relationship between cause and effect is excessive,
bizarre and disproportionate.
'This grotesque mechanism of power', Foucault writes, 'this grotesque
cog in the mechanism of power, has a long history in the structures and
political functioning of our societies' (Foucault, 2003: 12). ln this
context, the word 'grotesque' is not used as a term of abuse or as an
insulting epithet, but to refer to a precise category of 'historico-political
analysis' that can encapsulate the 'grotesque sovereignty' or the
dissemination of terror by a dictator. Here, Foucault points to the
'grotesque character' of Mussolini, a ruler who was 'absolutely inherent
to the mechanism of power'; or, as he explains, 'power provided itself
with an image in which power derived from someone who was
theatrically got up and depicted as a clown or a buffoon' (ibid.: 13).
Within this frame of reference, Mussolini is a grotesque figure in that he
mixes the extremes of the comic and the cruel to form an absurd and
ludicrous projection of power. This figure of the 'vile sovereign' has a
long history dating back to the Roman Empire and it characterizes a type
of leader whose grotesque attributes deform both his mind and body: 'in
his person, his character, and his physical reality, in his costume, his
gestures, his body, his sexuality and his way of life, [he is] a despicable,
grotesque, and ridiculous individual' (ibid.: 12).
As a figurehead of state, the 'vile sovereign' might seem the very
opposite of the seemingly 'powerless functionaries' of bureaucratic
administration, as in Kafka's depictions of Willem and Franz. Upon
closer inspection, however, the 'vile sovereign' and the 'powerless
functionaries' offer a series of analogous characteristics of the 'grotesque
mechanics of power' so typical of arbitrary dominion (Foucault, 2003:
12). The absurdity of K's execution, decreed by a faceless bureaucratic
system, mirrors the ruthless calls for brutality, violence and murder
pronounced by dictators like Mussolini; it is in this cruelty and the
incongruity of their ridiculous looks, that we discem the grotesquerie of
rule. ln this, the facelessness of the Kafkaesque administrative system
that arbitrarily punishes or redeems the person caught in its web is
reflected in the society led by a strong leader, an 'absolute sovereign'
who, for all his power, is no more than a puppet of the system itself, a
'clown ora buffoon' who, like Charlie Chaplin's autocrat in the film, The
Great Dictator (1940), dances to a tune played by the 'grotesque
mechanism of power', not to a melody of his own. Consequently, as
Foucault suggests, such 'strong' men prove a dictum about power itself
in that 'the maximization of effects of power [relies] on the basis of the
disqualification ofthe one who produces them' (ibid.: 12-13).
The body of a person, and not just the sovereign body or the body
politic, is also subject to the socio-political attempts to regulate and
control that which is considered abnormal. Power and the body, in the
form of the flesh and blood of the subject who is subjected to the acts of
power, are often inextricably related to one another. For it is precisely on
and in the body that we see the inscriptions and effects of power: these
are manifested in the classification and medicalization of the body (The
Order ef Things and Jne Birth ef the Clinic), the incarceration and
monitoring of the body (Discipline and Punish and Madness and
Civilization), the sexualisation of the body (The History efSexuality) and
the ways in which modem states control bodies through 'biopower' (The
Birth efBiopolitics: Lectures at the College du France 1978-1979).
The regulation of a person's body, and, by extension, the populace,
exerts control over the 'quantity' and 'quality' of citizens. This leads
Foucault to examine those bodies that are outside the official sanction of
the state: the aberrant, the monstrous, the abnormal body, those bodies
that challenge the normative categorical structures of nature, law, reason
and sanity. ln Madness and Civiliza/km, for instance, he explores the
shifting significance of fantastic creatures of 'hermetic, demented forms'
that embody 'the impossible, the fantastic, the inhuman, all that suggests
the unnatural, the writhing of an insane presence on the earth's surface'
(Foucault, [1961] 2001: 18-19). lnvestigating historical depictions of
bestiality, Foucault illustrates how European perceptions of madness
have changed over the centuries. He writes,

ln the thought of the Middle Ages, the legions of animais, named

 once and for all by Adam, symbolically bear the value of humanity,
[but] at the beginning of the Renaissance, the relations with animality
are reversed; the beast is set free; it escapes the world of legend and
moral illustration to acquire a fantastic nature of its own. And, by an
astonishing reversai, it is now the animal that will stalk man, capture
him, and reveal to him his own truth. Impossible animais, issuing
from a demented imagination, become the secret nature of man; and
when on the Last Day sinful man appears in his hideous nakedness,
we see that he has the monstrous shape of a delirious animal.
(ibid.: 18)

Foucault found this tendency particularly vividly illustrated in the

paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the fifteenth-century Dutch painter
whose works would later inspire, among many others, the Surrealists.
This is evident in Bosch's hybrids of man and monster, but it is
particularly noticeable in his depiction of the 'Ship of Fools', a 'literary
composition' with a long history in Westem mythology, but also a
phenomenon with 'a real existence - for they did exist, these boats that
conveyed their insane cargo from town to town' (ibid.: 6). ln his readings
of the Ship of Fools within the artistic history and geographical map of
Europe, Foucault demonstrates how this once spectacular image
eventually peters out and disappears. Or rather, as Foucault observes, it
casts its anchor and is transmuted into something else, something more
earthbound and ordinary than the horrible, though impressive, imagery of
the floating ship filled with raving madmen. 'Behold it moored now',
Foucault writes, 'made fast among things and men. Retained and
maintained. No longer a ship but a hospital' (ibid.: 31).
Moving from the sea-bound Ship of Fools to the earth-bound hospital,
the 'co'!finement has succeeded embarlcation' (ibid.: 32). No longer in
motion or on display, the marginalization and conceptualization of the
mentally ill in the hospital is the sign of a transferral: madness, once a
force exterior to man yet also a sign of the presence of the divine, is
subsumed and intemalized, a process through which it loses 'its tragic
reality [and] the absolute laceration that gives it access to the other
world' (ibid.: 29). This intemalization of madness strips the subject of
his divine countenance, and social conceptions of mental illness are
displaced from the divine onto the outcast. No longer on display as
portents of a world of wonder beyond this one, the mad figure 'now takes
part in the measure of reason and in the labor of truth' and, as a result,
the person suffering madness would either have to be cured through
hospitalization or 'corrected' through imprisonment. Either way, he is
removed from public view (ibid.: 32). Abnormal bodies and behaviours
must be normalized or, failing that, forgotten.
Echoing Bakhtin, Foucault identifies a partitioning off of the various
manifestations of grotesque figures, such as the grotesque body,
grotesque behavior, the monstrous, the abnormal from the realm of
dominant ideologies. While Foucault's process of classification involves
an imposition of 'reason' that is itself an attempt to control and define, he
also highlights how grotesquerie threatens to shatter the imagined unity
of modem consciousness and, thus, institutions arise in order to dissect,
classify and reason away the abnormal in the name of 'truth'. Or, as
Foucault asserts in The Order efThings: An Archaeology efthe Human
Sciences, it was accepted that the 'monster ensure the emergence of
difference' but this difference 'without law and without any well-defined
structure' still needs to be distinguished from the brave new world of
science and reason, a world sharply divided into normal and abnormal,
pure and impure, man and beast, civilized and savage (Foucault, [1963]
1994b: 156).
The Enlightenment principies of logic and rationality as well as the
rise of eighteenth-century taxonomies were, for Foucault, responsible for
establishing and maintaining boundaries through the classification of
meaning and normative behaviour. Science, then, used the abnormal as a
means of illustrating the process leading to the creation of harmonious,
typical and regular forms: 'The visible species that now present
themselves for our analysis have been separated out from the ceaseless
background of monstrosities that appear, glimmer, sink into the abyss,
and occasionally survive' (ibid.: 154). Here, Foucault invokes traces of
what Bakhtin identifies as a moment when 'The very pattem ofthe world
was changed. Next to the general the singular remains, acquiring its
meaning only as a specimen of the general, only so far as it is typical,
average, and can be generalized' (Bakhtin, [1941] 1984: 115). With the
rise of modemity, the abnormal and the grotesque function not as
expressions of the universal coherence of a world always 'in the act of
becoming', but as a way to define and fix normality through a range of
legitimate, rigid and authoritative norms (ibid.: 317). If, for Foucault, the
abnormal is the ever present yet peripheral challenge to normality, then
the French feminist philosopher Julie Kristeva locates the destabilizing
power of the grotesque closer to home, namely with the supposedly
'normal' body itself.

JULIA KRISTEVA: ABJECT GROTESQUE

If the 'perfect' woman's body is a product of the male gaze and its
related power dynamics, then the affirmation and display of material
bodies in all their diversity (shapes, contours, sizes, dimensions) and
bodily functions (ingestions, excretions, menstruation, pregnancy, aging,
sickness) have the potential to subvert patriarchal gender codes related to
corporeality. Grotesque bodies can, in other words, resist absorption into
the objectifying gaze that seeks to contain them. Having said that, it is
not always clear how grotesque categories might be used positively to
subvert the veneration of existing normative gender-based conceptions of
beauty or to realign the mechanisms of desire.
ln Powers ef Horror: An Essay on Alyection (1982), Julia Kristeva
describes the process of abjection as a form of expulsion and rejection of
the Other, which she ties to the historical exclusion of women. Neither
subject nor object, the abject, or the state of abjection, is articulated in,
and through, grotesque language and imagery. The process of abjection
is, then, associated with deformed bodies and oozing bodily fluids:
blood, pus, bile, faeces, sweat and vomit break down the borders
separating the inside from outside, the contained from the released.
Abjection is a state of flux, where 'meaning collapses', and the body is
open and irregular, sprouting or protruding internai and external forms to
link abjection to grotesquerie (ibid.: 2).
Horror, pathos and laughter all come together in Kristeva's theory of
the 'monstrous-feminine'. This notion is related to the female grotesque,
for within her account the maternal body is a corporeal manifestation of
horror, a feeling emanating from the fear of reincorporation into the
mother, as well as in the fear of the mother's generative power. ln this,
Kristeva employs a psychoanalytical approach, according to which our
conscious and rational perception of the everyday is at all times informed
by the far more primal impulses of our unconscious. While we may not
be aware of this, Kristeva argues, the female body therefore becomes
'abject': 'We may call it a border' she writes, but 'abjection is above all
ambiguity' (ibid.: 9). Kristeva explains this experience of abjection in the
'improper' and 'unclean' language of grotesque images:

Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste or dung. The spasms

and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that
thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage,
and muck. . . . I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther
down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up
the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead
and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea
makes me balk.
(ibid.: 2-3)

Within the psychoanalytic paradigm that underpins this passage, the

inversion sometimes associated with grotesque figures transforms into
aversion: the feeling of revulsion and disgust arises out of something
unpleasant or offensive. Here, the leakages of the inside and the outside
indicate fluid boundaries that inspire repugnance and abhorrence. The
uncertainty that arises from this ambiguity, and that is the result of the
destabilization of borders, inspires an anxiety that is evident in the
separation of the child from the body of the mother. For the creation of
the subject comes out of a body that is porous, open and in flux, and thus
there is always an anxiety, even a terror, that reincorporation into that
body threatens the loss of self and the negation of a clearly defined
subjectivity.
The language Kristeva uses to define the 'monstrous-feminine'
describes a state of abjection that breaks down the binary oppositions
between subject and object and, in so doing, she challenges the 'well-
known construction of virgin/whore dichotomy' that counterposes the
'pure' woman, the pristine body, to the slut, 'the grotesque female body'
(Wolf, 419). ln this, Kristeva is in a sense reminiscent of Bakhtin's
overflowing body, of the lower bodily stratum evicting a steady stream
of piss and excrement, but with a distinct feminist twist. This raises a
significant question: is an abject body a potential site of transgression?
Or, to put this another way, can the 'monstrous-feminine' offer a
potential source for theorizing a feminist political position? ln answering
these questions, it is vital to note that Kristeva's theory potentially
provides a progressive politics that requires a revision of gender-based
dichotomies. But we must also place this theory in the context of the
dominant patriarchal discourses that continuously work to determine,
define and situate the body within limits in order to contain it.
To illustrate her theory of abjection, Kristeva tums to the fiction of
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and in particular to his novel Journey to the End
ef the Night (1932). For Kristeva, this novel is crucial because in it
Céline 'speaks' horror and generates laughter. His writing, she argues,
brings horror into view in camivalesque fashion, and reveals the
repressed faces of humanity. Horror and fascination are entwined, and
the rugged violent beauty of horrified, destructive laughter is fascinating
and mysterious in that it is 'liberating by means of laughter without
complacency yet complicitous' (Kristeva, 1982: 133). This is unpacked
in her reading of the text, which in true grotesque fashion brings together
horror, mockery, satire and laughter:

He [Céline] believes that death and horror are what being is. But
suddenly, and without waming, the open sore of his very suffering,
through the contrivance of a word, becomes haloed, as he puts it,
with 'a ridiculous little infinite' as tender and packed full of love and
cheerful laughter as it is with bittemess, relentless mockery, and a
sense ofthe morrow's impossibility.
(ibid.: 134)

The 'affirmative ambivalence' that Kristeva identifies in her reading of

Céline's novel (horror and cheer, death and laughter, petite and infinite)
echo the Bakhtinian theory of the camivalesque-grotesque in which the
two aspects of seriousness and laughter coexist and reflect one another.
Yet for Kristeva the 'renascent mirth of Rabelais' and the potential
liberation of the camival give way to a dark side in Céline, and the
darkness of the journey into night stands in for the darkness of the
carnivalesque (ibid.: 205). Here, laughter erupts as a 'horrified and
fascinated exclamation,' an 'apocalyptic laughter' that bursts out in 'a
flow of cataclysms, catastrophes, deaths, and ends of the world'. The
result is indeterminacy and ambivalence, 'being fluid', so that excitement
and disgust, joy and repulsion come together in descriptions of
'absurdity, stupidity, violence, sorrow, moral and physical degeneracy'
(ibid.: 204-5). Here, at the end of the world, the end of night, Kristeva
finds an 'interface between abjection and fascination' or, to put this
another way, an attraction to and repulsion from that which is grotesque.
 3
MONSTROUS AND
GROTESQUE

What is the relationship between monstrosity and grotesque? ln his

preface to the drama Cromwell (1827), Victor Hugo writes that 'the
aesthetics of the grotesque are to a certain extent the aesthetics of the
monstrous' (Hugo, 41). Hugo's cautious caveat ('to a certain extent') is
superfluous in many early texts and visual culture, as grotesquerie and
monstrosity often converge, and become synonymous. Indeed, monsters
from classical and medieval texts are often depicted as having grotesque
bodies composed of different elements, usually hybrids. During the
Middle Ages, for instance, the word 'chimera' was used to describe
bizarre creatures with the body parts of different animais, but the word
derives from a specific monstrous form in Greek mythology: the fire-
breathing monster with a lion's head, goat's body and serpentine tail.
Such monstrous figures are often unnatural combinations of animal
species, and still others, such as human-headed locusts or sphinxes,
combine human characteristics with animalistic body parts and even
plant forms. ln this, grotesque physical figures arise out of the
combination of human and non-human, so that what is inscribed on the
body can be, at least within an early Christian ontology, interpreted as
unnatural and, as such, a potential sign of inner corruption. But these
hybridized, grotesque-monsters can also be, as we will see, comically
absurd or ludicrous.
MONSTROUS FORMS
Grotesque art is, according to Webster's New Wor/d Dictionary,
'characterized by distortions or striking incongruities in appearance,
shape, manner, etc.; fantastic; bizarre'. This gestures toward the forms
where the monstrous and grotesque come together, and the definition is
also consistent with Wolfgang Kayser's assertion that grotesque includes
'a world in which the realm of inanimate things is no longer separated
from those of plants, animais, and human beings, and where the laws of
statics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid' (Kayser, 21).
Human figures merge with other forms of life, so grotesque figures
'represent something abnormal or normally impossible such as a
Centaur', a creature in Greek mythology with the head, arms and torso of
a man and the body and legs of a horse (Sheridan and Ross, 9). The
world of grotesque imagery is not always the ordinary world of human
beings, but nor does it necessarily signal a realm of unadulterated
monstrosity. The human attributes of grotesque figures are combined
with the distorted and disproportionate qualities of forms that incorporate
animalistic or, in some cases, vegetative life forms. ln this, the grotesque
lies in juxtaposition to the common conceptions of classical aesthetics,
which focus on symmetrical representations of bodies and figures that
are unified, harmonious and well-proportioned.
Ancient Greek writers, including Aristotle, Herodotus and Homer
often describe monstrous creatures with grotesque humanoid features
that inhabit distant and foreign regions. Deformed figures, many with
human attributes, were said to populate faraway lands such as North-East
Africa and the Indian subcontinent. For instance, Herodotus, writing c.
450 BC, describes foreign people who dwell on mountains and have the
feet of goats. ln other accounts, he depicts people with a single eye who
battle griffins, thus anticipating the writings of Ctesias, a Greek
physician and author who, about fifty years later, went on distant
journeys and wrote richly detailed descriptions of the wondrous creatures
living in what is modem-day India.
Monsters in classical mythology are part animal, part human and can
be a collection of human-animal graftings. As creatures made up of half
man and half horse, Centaurs are a typical example of this. Residing on
mountains or in dark forests, they eat raw flesh and are described as
lawless and bestial. ln some myths, centaurs are known for violence,
savagery, drunkenness and lust; they are sometimes associated with
Dionysus, the god of wine and a figure of excessive consumption.
Centaurs are known for their battling against Heracles and are sometimes
included in myths about abductions. These creatures appear in
Metamorphoses (8 AD) by the Roman poet Ovid, particularly in the
'Centauromachy' and the 'Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs', which
depict the centaurs as drunk and disorderly, prone to violence, sexual
savagery and possibly rape. ln this, their grotesque bodies, combining
man and beast, are used by Ovid to explore a series of transformations
and changes, hybrid forms that depict the animal within the human
figure. For the body of the centaur mirrors the conflict between the
animal appetites of the beast and the 'civilized' behavior of humanity:
the physical appetites and animal passions combine in a depiction of
fluid transformations from 'civilization' to 'barbarism'.
Another monstrous-grotesque creature in classical writing is the
Cyclops, a lawless, savage and cannibalistic giant who threatens classical
heroes such as Perseus, Oedipus, Odysseus and Theseus. These monsters
have massive human bodies with an enormous eye in the middle of their
foreheads. ln Homer's Odyssey (e. eighth century BC), for instance, the
Cyclops is a brutal and unruly creature who does not fear humans or
gods. T. E. Lawrence's translation of Homer's text describes Odysseus
and his fellow voyagers trapped in the cave, the grotto, of the Cyclops
Polyphemus, a son of Poseidon, who is 'a giant, a monstrous creature'
and 'a solitary infidel thing', 'an ogre, and fearfully made' (Homer, 125).
He is gigantic and inspires 'dread' through his 'booming voice and his
hugeness', as well as his 'pitiless heart' (ibid.: 127). Polyphemus'
abnormally large body, his distorted face and his single eye, are
described as repulsively ugly: when confronted with his appearance,
Odysseus and his men tremble and shudder, they are repulsed by his
body, and they experience fear mixed with disgust. ln fact, Polyphemus'
physical deformity reflects an inner monstrosity that is inscribed upon his
body, and his booming voice and overwhelming strength reflect an
internai savagery. The surface of his body, his appearance, corresponds
to an inner depth of brutality and ferocity. Indeed, his physical
appearance foreshadows Polyphemus' shocking attack on Homer's
fellow voyagers, resulting in decapitations and mutilations as he rips into
their bodies and consumes their limbs, organs and blood. This scene is
described with hideous detail:

The brains burst out from their skulls and were spattered over the
cave's floor, while he broke them up, limb from limb, and supped off
them to the last shred, eating ravenously like a mountain lion,
everything - bowels and flesh and bones, even to the marrow in the
bones. We wept and raised our hands to Zeus in horror.... Wherefore
the Cyclops, unhindered, filled his great gut with human flesh.
(ibid.: 128)

This outlandish description of blood, gore and camage is an example of

the inhuman grotesque. For the scene of violence and destruction depicts
the human body as meat and, as such, it includes a form of grotesque that
has the power to shock readers, bewildering and disorientating us by
questioning the relationship between the human and animal, the
camivorous and the cannibal. ln this scene, the human body is something
to be consumed: flesh and body parts are eaten and the bones discarded,
thus depicting the body as mere organic matter that can be devoured by
another humanoid life-form, even one who is ultimately blinded by
Odysseus and left 'groaning in his extremity of torment' (ibid.: 131).

HYBRIDITY, MONSTROSITY, GROTESQUERIE

Monstrosity and grotesquerie merge in the hybrid forms that disrupt the
borders separating what is acceptable within the categories of 'human'
and 'non-human'. Many early depictions of monstrous forms take the
literal forms of hybrids, mixtures of man and animal: minotaurs have the
body of a man and the head of a bull, harpies are birds with the heads of
women, Egyptian gods are sometimes portrayed as combining a human
body and a bird-head or a cat-head. Such figures foreground the limits of
the human body, policing the margins of human classification, but they
can also engender fear, rather than stability, through frightening
depictions of what happens when the boundaries of classification give
way to monstrous hybrid figures.
lnterestingly, some of these hybridized creatures, these grotesques,
find their way into medieval architecture, particularly in European
cathedrals. One of the most common architectural forms of grotesque can
be found in medieval gargoyles, effigies and figureheads that are
sometimes outside, but can also be inside, a church or religious building.
A gargoyle, for instance, is a grotesque figure carved from stone with a
human or animal face that projects from the gutter of a building,
typically acting as a waterspout. When placed inside a church, the carved
grotesque figure often bites or devours objects or animais or human
forms and, in medieval visual iconography, the creatures sometimes bite
inanimate objects, often columns or other parts of the church itself
(Sheridan and Ross, 62). For instance, a roof boss in the cloisters at
Canterbury Cathedral is composed of a head with human-like teeth that
are locked firmly on to a column. ln other examples, when a grotesque
beast eats another creature, it is usually portrayed as first devouring the
head, resulting in the sculpture of a creature with legs protruding from its
mouth, as exemplified in a carved beam end at Amesbury in Wiltshire. ln
some cases, the devouring creature uses its hands or paws to stuff its
victim into its mouth. Still other biting creatures include open-mouthed
beasts that sit next to their victims as though about to bite them.
A common grotesque image in early Christian buildings is the severed
head. The historians Ronald Sheridan and Anne Ross note that
'Hundreds of extremely interesting examples of the severed head motif
are to be seen in churches and cathedrals all over Europe' (ibid.: 52). The
heads are human, perhaps continuations of the human head motif which
pervades ancient Celtic art. ln several cases, the sculptures consist of
three severed heads that blend together. At one time, this triple image
was used in Christian iconography to symbolize the Trinity, but it was
later banned from this usage in religious buildings (ibid.: 52). An
example of this triple-headed figure exists in Selby Abbey in North
Yorkshire as a roof boss: the faces are human and expressionless, and the
two outer faces are turned slightly away from the middle face in order to
achieve a three-dimensional effect. Each of the outer faces share one eye
and part of a cheek with the central face. The result is a distorted figure
that resembles human features, but is marked by disunity.
 The category of motifs termed 'fantastic creatures' includes beings
such as dragons and sea monsters, life forms that are treated as both
'real' and symbolic of ethical or religious transgressions. Within a
medieval Christian context, the common use of reptilian creatures in
buildings gestures toward the stories of the serpent's temptation of Eve in
Genesis as well as the story of Saint George's battle with the dragon.
Some of these reptilian creatures include fantastic biting organisms, such
as dragons biting their own tails. ln the west archway at Kilpeck Church
in Herefordshire, for instance, a dragon is curved to tum backwards,
grasping its tail in its mouth. Such images are sometimes placed
alongside another common figure: the foliate head. These sculptures
consist of heads covered with leaves, stems, and vines, or heads that have
foliage emerging from their mouths, ears, nostrils, or eyes. The heads are
sometimes human, sometimes animal, and sometimes fantastic or of an
indefinite species. ln many cases, the foliage seems to grow from the
head, while in other instances the face seems to emerge from a tree trunk
or from among a cluster of leaves and vines. These can be seen in
medieval religious architecture throughout England, but a striking
example appears in a roof boss in the cloisters at Norwich Cathedral and
consists of a face barely emerging from behind leaves that sprout from its
cheeks and forehead. Another illustration of this visual iconography
appears at Winchester Cathedral wherein a roof boss in the nave aisle
includes a visible face with large branches and leaves growing from its
mouth and nose.
Several historians of grotesque iconography have tried to explain the
presence of these forms in religious buildings from the medieval period
in England. Geoffrey Harpham, for instance, writes that these grotesques
disturb aesthetic sensibilities so that the viewer tums to 'images that are
more ennobling' (Harpham, 37). While this is an interesting assertion, it
denies the fact that the grotesques in buildings such as Selby Abbey or
Winchester Cathedral are not just repulsive to the eye, for they also
attract the viewer's gaze and invite the visitor to linger on the distorted
figure. Harpham is more convincing when he argues that gargoyles and
other grotesques 'represent the human element', thus reminding the
viewer that cathedrals, however magnificent, are constructed by human
labour (ibid.: 37). Yet what is so compelling about these grotesques is
that the human features are combined with distorted and non-human
elements associated with animais, vegetation or monstrous forms. Some
cultural critics suggest that these grotesques are contrasted with the
holiest of Christian art inside the holy space, and that the gargoyles and
grotesques on the exterior of a cathedral emphasize the contrast between
the secular, evil outside of the church and the safe, holy inside. But as
Sheridan and Ross point out, this does not account for the large number
of grotesques that appear inside holy buildings (Sheridan and Ross, 12).
One of the more convincing explanations is that these grotesques
represent demonic figures from scripture, such as Satan, and convey a
sense of evil, even though these figures are not usually portrayed as
demonic or are not generally presented in an allegorical or instructive
style (ibid.: 7).
Another explanation for the presence of these images in religious
buildings is that medieval grotesques are residues of Classical mythology
and pagan imagery from pre-Christian times. Historians have traced
some medieval grotesque images to pagan origins. The severed head is,
as noted on p. 41, commonly associated with Celtic art and mythology,
and such continuations of pagan iconography are, according to M. F.
Hearn, deliberate: 'The more distinct the identity of the motif and the
clearer its form', he writes, the more this resembles 'images that existed
earlier in other media'. This leads Heam to conclude that 'the more
impressive ones were probably adapted from preexisting images' (Hearn,
53). ln this, the lucidity of the imagery and the remarkable resemblance
of motifs indicates that the images were well-established in medieval
ontology across Europe and can be traced back to pre-Christian belief
systems.

'fHE GROTESQUE AND OTHERNESS

Creatures from classical antiquity such as centaurs, sciopods and giants
find their way into the Middle Ages through travellers' narratives of
foreign places and books of beasts. ln fact, medieval prayer books from
the 1300s often include traces of monsters from classical mythology, and
grotesque creatures are abundant in illuminated manuscripts, in which
images of dragons decorate the margins and are woven into the letter
designs of the text. ln a fascinating study of monsters and grotesques in
medieval manuscripts, Alixe Bovey illustrates how in these texts are
included depictions of 'commonplace animais' that are fused together 'in
impossible combinations: human bodies merge with animal forms in
ways that are often both comic and grotesque' (Bovey, 5). For medieval
people, Bovey continues, 'these humorous and hideous creatures were a
tantalizing suggestion of unknown worlds and unthinkable dangers, at
once entertaining and electrifying, funny and frightening' (ibid.: 5).
Bovey identifies several common monstrous-grotesque images in
medieval manuscripts and visual art, such as deformed giants, biting
creatures, severed heads, fantastic creatures, foliate heads, cannibals,
gryphons, dragons and sciopods. lndeed, in medieval texts such as
Beowu(í(eighth to eleventh century), Wonders efthe East (e. l 000 ad),
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century) and
Mandevil/e's Traveis (mid-fourteenth century), Bovey identifies links
between the monstrous-grotesque in writing and visual imagery.
Travellers of the Middle Ages who journeyed beyond Europe often
retumed with stories of monstrous creatures and grotesque humanoid
races. One of the most influential of these writers was the Roman
historian Pliny the Elder (23-79 ad), whose Natural History (e. 77-79
ad) was considered to be a significant source of information about the
'monstrous races' during the Middle Ages. ln Book VII, 'Of the
Wonderous Shapes of Men', for example, Pliny describes the Scythians
who feed on man's flesh, and in Philemon Holland's 1601 translation of
Pliny's text, we find that

in the very middle and heart of the world, even in Sicilie and Italie,
here hard by, there have been such monsters of men, namely, the
Cyclopes and Lystrigones: nay, if wee were not credibly enformed,
that even of late daies, and goe no farther than to the other side of the
Alpes, there be those that kill men for sacrifice after the maner of
those Scythian people; and that wants not much of chewing and
eating their flesh.
(Pliny the Elder, 132)

Pliny's accounts of the 'monstrous races' of regions in North Africa and

South Asia were indebted to earlier Greek writers, and his text was
subsequently edited and abridged by Solinus in the third century A. D. ln
fact, the stories of the monstrous races written about by Ctesias, Pliny
and Solinus were reshaped in the tenth century in the Anglo-Saxon text
known today as the Wonders efthe East.
Comprised of three manuscripts (Tiberius, Bodley, and Vitellius), Fhe
Wonders ef the East combines textual descriptions of non-European
'wonders' in Latin and Old English alongside detailed illustrations. The
illustrations are central to the text, for the images tel1 us what the writing
describes: wondrous creatures and strange places. The beings represented
here are anomalies, bodies of interest, grotesque figures and monstrous
forms that would have been highly exotic to an Anglo-Saxon audience.
The manuscript tak:es the viewer, and reader, on a journey through
strange lands and foreign parts, thus arresting the reader with images of
bizarre animais, wondrous places and, at times, grotesque people.
Marvellous creatures and strange races of humans inhabit distant
continents, Wonders tells us, including the dog-headed men called
cynocephali, ants as large as sheep, deformed giants, 150-foot dragons,
men with heads in their chests called blemmyae, polyglot man-eaters
called donestre, and griffins with eagle heads, bovine tails and lions' feet.
Such monstrous grotesques would have posed significant questions in
the Christian context of medieval Europe. Did they really exist? Were
they humans? Did they have souls? Answers to these questions often
pivoted on the complex relations between actions, appearances, and
effects, all of which are evident in the bodies of the creatures. ln
Wonders ef the East, the monstrous-grotesque body invokes fears and
anxieties surrounding taboos such as cannibalism and transgressive
sexual desire. Here, the grotesque appearance of the creature functions
aggressively to invoke the monstrous effect. Yet the grotesques of Old
English literature are not monstrous because of their actions, but because
of their bodies. Actions might be temporary, and offenders have the
possibility to repent and change. However, a grotesquely monstrous body
is permanent and, in Anglo-Saxon writing and imagery, is incapable of
change. Monstrous action, therefore, is only supplementary to the
monstrous physical form. Grotesque appearance, particularly when it is
presented in an aggressive manner, such as violence, sexuality or
consumption, is never passive, so that which is transcribed on the body
functions actively, inspiring the monstrous effect in the audience. ln this,
grotesque bodies reveal the principal significance of the body's
appearance to identity.
Grotesque bodies, then, act as a nexus of cultural anxieties about
human bodies, for any action against monstrosity suggests a similar
response to humanity and reveals an explicit threat to the person.
Therefore, monstrous identity is not constructed solely in terms of
actions, but rather through the permanent nature of the body.
Furthermore, to possess a grotesquely monstrous body is to require
regulation, restraint and containment. If this is true for the monstrous
human form, then might it not also be true for those bodies that are not
monstrous? Human identity in Anglo-Saxon writing may perhaps be said
to derive not simply from the actions performed by people or the
decisions that they mak:e but, more vitally, from the bodies they possess.
ln this context, grotesque bodies are also used as demarcations of
othemess and difference. Christian artists often invoked grotesque and
monstrous imagery to demonize foreigners and those of different
religions. According to John Block Friedman in Fhe Monstrous Roces in
Medieval Art and Fhought (2000), the grotesquely deformed figures of
medieval manuscripts were not conceived of as truly human. ln 'The
Human Status of the Monstrous Races', for instance, he recounts
medieval scholastic arguments conceming these monsters and concludes
that

it was not possible to grant full and equal humanity to an alien race
.... As longas the definition of 'man' was based upon a Westem
model, the monstrous races could only be assigned a subordinate
place in the Chain of Being.'
(Friedman, 196)

Friedman goes on to suggest that the medieval leamed vision of monsters

remained largely unchanged from Greek and Roman thought, which held
that 'the sense of the alien or "other" in the marvelous races of the East
was so great as to disqualify them [... ] from the epithet "men"' (ibid.:
34). The literary critic Kim Hall confirms this by claiming that a
monster's fantastically grotesque body signals 'absolute difference
between the reader and the subject' (Hall, quoted in Fleck, 383).
Likewise, Andrew Fleck asserts that monstrous-grotesque creatures 'are
included in Christian cosmography because they provide an aesthetic
contrast, as a clearly sub-human other, to the reader's sense of self (ibid.:
385). This suggests that monstrosity in medieval learned thought was
defined in terms of complete as well as constitutive difference, the
creature existing outside the category of humanity, but with more
popular representations, particularly those that represent transformative
bodies, suggesting a different understanding of the monstrous body as
recognizably human.
ln the Middle English travel narrative, Fhe Traveis ef Sir John
Mandeville, the narrator, Sir John Mandeville, defines the term 'monster'
for his readers: Sir John tells us that 'a monster is a thing deformed
against kind, both of man or of beast or of anything else, and that is
called a monster' (Mandeville, 30). ln accordance with Mandeville's
statement, monstrosity and grotesquerie combine in a primarily physical
category: in order to be monstrous, one must manifest a clear and usually
visible physical difference from that which is 'normal'. During this
period, there are, generally speaking, three types of grotesque monsters
that exist in humanoid form: the monster of excess, the monster of lack,
and the hybrid monster. Monsters of excess include the giants of Middle
English romance, whose bodies are excessively large, excessively hairy,
and usually excessively violent. The sciopods (one-footed men) and
blemmyae featured in both Wonders ef the East and Mandeville's
Traveis, are monsters of lack, for they do not have all the body parts
expected of normal human beings. Finally, monsters ofhybridity may be
gender hybrids, like the hermaphrodites in Mandeville's Traveis or the
huntresses in Wonders, but most often they combine animal and human
body parts, like the tusked, hooved, and tailed women of Wonders, or the
horse-footed and fanged men of Mandeville's Traveis.
While physical irregularity is the primary attribute of monstrosity,
deviant behavior can serve to emphasize or exaggerate monstrosity.
Abnormal behavior helps to mark the monster as a cultural as well as a
physical other. Some such behaviors include habits of eating, grooming,
and dressing, reactions to human approach, relations to human language,
and transgressing gender roles. ln some cases, female monsters, in
addition to tak:ing on masculine physical traits, such as beards, become
violent and fierce: these women hunt, tak:e revenge, or simply kill men.
While these behaviours transgress social norms, they do not make
women into monsters unless they are accompanied by a physically
different body. Behaviour holds the possibility for reform, whereas a
monstrous body allows less possibility for modification.
The travel writing critic Mary Campbell points out that Mandeville
attempts to naturalize the monsters in his narrative. 'The Elsewhere of
sub- or supemature,' she writes, 'into which the West had so long
projected the other halves of its divided self, is no/ accessible to the
earthly traveler, and Mandeville has rendered the places and peoples that
once belonged to it as "part of nature, part of us"' (Campbell, 160-61).
While these monsters are rendered as living in the sarne natural world as
humans, the visibly monstrous creatures are depicted as inferior to man.
It is when the monstrous becomes less visible, or less permanent, that the
relation of the monstrous to the human must change. If a monster can
pass as a human, then this changes what it means to be human. Thus, the
author of Mandevi//e's Traveis lists more than twenty different kinds of
human monsters in his pilgrimage through the Holy Land and the
'marvellous East', including the daughter of Hippocrates, who turns from
a woman into a dragon, the impregnated dead woman who gives birth to
a monstrous head, cannibalistic giants and blemmyae.
ln the images that accompany a manuscript (c. 1430) of Mandeville's
Traveis the illustrator pictures three nak:ed cannibals, one of whom is
seated on the ground as it devours a human leg (BL, Harley MS 3954,
f.42.r). Such images of cannibalism are accompanied by text in which the
traveller describes what he sees. ln Chapter 7, for example, Mandeville
states the following:

At the deserts of Egypt was a worthy man, that was an holy hermit,
and there met with him a monster (that is to say, a monster is a thing
deformed against kind both of man or of beast or of anything else,
and that is clept a monster). And this monster, that met with this holy
hermit, was as it had been a man, that had two homs trenchant on his
forehead; and he had a body like a man unto the navel, and beneath
 he had the body like a goat. And the hermit asked him what he was.
And the monster answered him, and said he was a deadly creature,
such as God had formed, and dwelt in those deserts in purchasing his
sustenance. And [he] besought the hermit, that he would pray God
for him, the which that carne from heaven for to save all mankind,
and was bom of a maiden and suffered passion and death (as we well
know) and by whom we live and be. And yet is the head with the two
homs of that monster at Alexandria for a marvel.
(Mandeville, 26)

Here, monstrosity and the grotesque are not mutually exclusive. On the
one hand, Mandeville's Egyptian cannibal is monstrous and could, as
such, be read as included in the Christian cosmography as a contrast to
humanity, a sub-human other, in relation to the reader's sense of self.
This creature does provide a contrast. But, on the other hand, his
deformed body combines the torso of a man and the legs of a goat, as
well as a human head with protruding homs. This combination of the
human and non-human could just as easily force readers to reconsider
their own sense of self, their own distance from monstrosity. ln this,
Mandeville's text pushes his European readers to question the stable
limits ofhumanity, bodies, and communities.
Mandeville's creatures are not totally Other: they are hybrids of human
and non-human. Hybridity relates to the medieval grotesque in that the
deformed body is visibly multiple, where something has the parts of
more than one creature: part man, part goat. Indeed, in this context,
hybridity is about a dual nature that exists simultaneously and this can, in
some cases, produce grotesques. Mandeville's blemmyae are, for
instance, pictured as grinning or smiling from the grotesque faces in their
chests or bellies. ln other images, demonic-looking monsters grin and
laugh as they torment their victims. Mandeville also describes a series of
ludicrous monsters that are more funny than terrifying. The hybrid
monster can be absurdly comical, making people laugh at ridiculous
creatures whose physical deformities are entertaining and thrilling to
viewers through the electric frisson of comic nonsensicality. This is
consistent with Alixe Bovey's comments on the links between
monstrosity and grotesquerie in the medieval period:
 Sometimes the contrast between solemn religious texts and the
playful and provocative monsters in the margins beside them is
startlingly subversive. What is the cheeky monster doing kneeling
over the Psalms in the Gorleston Psalter? ... These creatures were
clearly intended to be shocking and funny, but more eamest
intentions may have been at work as well. These comical and cruel
hybrids, and their monstrous behaviour, belong to the world of the
body and its basest functions. . . . Medieval viewers might have
laughed at grotesques, but far from promoting the kind of sexualized
and corporeal monstrosity they portray, these marginal images might
well have served to condemn it with ridicule
(Bovey, 44--45)

Descriptions of grotesque creatures in narratives of foreign lands are

not limited to medieval texts. Representations of the so-called monstrous
races in antiquity and the Middle Ages cross over into the Early Modem
period: Prospero and Miranda's foreign home in Shakespeare's Fhe
Fempest, for instance, is inhabited by the 'native' Caliban, a savage and
deformed creature who is relegated to the margins of humanity. The
beast-like slave who is taught to speak, Caliban displays a hybrid mix of
human, animal and monstrous qualities. He is referred to as a 'moon-calf
{11.2.107), a 'bom devil' {IV.1.188) anda 'thing of darkness' (V.1.275).
He is often motivated by animal instincts, particularly in his plot to
murder Prospero and his attempted rape of Miranda. Indeed, his very
name is an anagram of 'canibal', a seventeenth-century spelling of
'cannibal', and this signals his baseness, challenging idealized depictions
of primitivism or the 'noble savage'. Miranda, for example, declares him
to be 'savage' and 'brutish' and proclaims that he descends from a 'vile
race' (1.2.156-59). Despite Prospero's threats of physical intimidation
and his attempts to educate Caliban, the island's native remains,

A devil, a bom devil, on whose nature

Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost.
And as with age his body uglier grows,
 So his mind cankers.
{IV.1.188-92)

Sometimes readas a representation of 'savage' man, the other characters

also associate Caliban with animalistic features, from 'tortoise' to 'horse-
piss', and at other times he is simply called 'monster' or 'goblin'. A
combination of humanoid, animal and demon, Caliban's body is
misshapen and ugly, inspiring disgust and repulsion.
But, as a grotesque figure, Caliban is also a source of laughter and
mirth. When Stephano and Trinculo feed him wine, for instance, the
monster becomes laughable: 'I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-
headed monster. A most scurvy monster!' {11.2.151-52). And, Trinculo
continues, 'A most ridiculous monster, to make a wonder of a poor
drunkard!' (11.2.162-63). Although his enslavement is one with which
the audience instinctively sympathizes, particularly in light of his
impressively lyrical language, his revolt is ineffectual, laughable and
even repulsive. The revelation of his attempted sexual violence and
murder also casts a shadow over the more sympathetic aspects of his
character, and Caliban's elaborate complaint of Prospero's harassment
{11.2.1-14) is undermined by the comical and infectious enthusiasm for
'Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom, freedom, high-day, freedom!'
{11.2.186-87).
 4
GROTESQUE BODIES

'deformed, unfinish'd sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up'
Shakespeare, ..RichardIII(I.2.20-2 l)

This passage from Shakespeare's ..Richard III captures the physically

repellent hunchback of legend. A corrupt and violent character, Richard's
body is deformed and incomplete, and he rationalizes his rejection of
human loyalties by speculating that his abnormal body has displaced him
from human relationships: 'since the heavens have shap'd my body so, /
Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it' (V.6.78-79). His physical
deformity, then, becomes an outer sign of his inner blood-thirstiness and
his disfigurement engenders an ability to smile as he murders his way to
the throne, viciously killing his brother, his young nephews, his wife and
his political opponents. Richard is a spectacular villain: he comments
humorously on his atrocities, even cracking a joke as he plots to murder
his brother (1.1.118-20). ln Shakespeare's treatment, Richard's twisted
physique conveys disharmony and aberration, a deformed body that is a
readable text on which is inscribed his deviant character.
Richard is, among other things, grotesque. Descriptions of his
malformed body combine with the comments of his various enemies,
who identify him with a range of animalistic qualities: his escutcheon is
that of the boar's head, he is called camivorously vicious, and he is
pronounced as repulsive as spiders, toads and reptiles. He is perceived by
other characters to be both inhuman and inhumane, existing in physical,
emotional and psychological isolation. But within this anguish of exile
he asserts a depraved and diabolical sadism, a form of grotesque power
that is written on his body and projected outward. As Queen Margaret
puts it, Richard's physical deformity is a sign that 'Sin, death, and hell
have set their marks on him' (1.3.293). ln this chapter, we examine a
series of texts that foreground grotesque bodies. Sometimes these bodies
are malformed at birth, as in ..Richard III, others are created from a
variety of body parts, as in Frankenstein, still others are by-products of
road accidents, as in ..Rabid, or surgical operations that create new
grotesque beings, as in Fhe Human Centípede.

DEFORMED BODIES
Even those who have not read it are familiar with the story of Mary
Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein,· or, Jne Modern Prometheus.
Enacted and re-enacted in films, plays, novels, even in advertising, the
story of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant young scientist who creates a
nameless monster, is deeply embedded in popular culture. Literary and
cultural critics have also embraced the myth of Frankenstein's monster,
for Shelley's story has inspired an impressive range of criticai analyses,
spanning subjects such as gender and sex, science and ethics, race and
ethnicity, capitalism and class.
The legacy of Shelley's monster, then, is not unlike the monster itself:
unruly. 'Frankenstein's monster is bursting out ofhis skin-he is indeed
filled to bursting point with flesh and meaning both' (Halberstam, 21). It
is a novel that has proven difficult for the critics to come to grips with
precisely because it carries 'within it all the ambivalences of life ... , of
the mind and the body, of the self and society' (Levine, 30).
Consequently, in the two centuries since Shelley first conceived of the
torturous relationship between Frankenstein and his creature, a
substantial body of criticism has arisen in Frankenstein s wake. Our
reference to it in this book is yet another, albeit minor, appendage to the
always mutating, ever-growing and many-tentacled body of Frankenstein
criticism.
Assembled through a variety of body parts from human corpses, the
monster cannot be controlled by his creator. Nor can the doctor fully
comprehend his creation. ln the moment when the monster comes to life,
Dr Frankenstein is overwhelmed with disgust, and he is bewildered by an
array of forms, shapes and motives he cannot categorize. He states,

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the

instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being
into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the
moming; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle
was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished
light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard,
and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how
delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had
endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had
selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow
skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his
hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly
whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast
with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the sarne colour as the
dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion
and straight black lips.
(Shelley, 57-58)

Although the individual components of his creation, Frankenstein

maintains, are 'beautiful', the combination of the parts engender horror.
Instead of creating something 'beautiful', a being whose 'limbs were in
proportion', he creates a grotesque, a mishmash of disparate elements
made terrible by 'horrific contrast' between the beautiful and the vile.
Frankenstein offers severa! examples of grotesque bodies. We leam,
for example, that Dr Frankenstein decides to make his monster
excessively big, 'gigantic', and how this raises practical concems about
how best to construct the body: 'As the minuteness of the parts formed a
great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to
make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in
height, and proportion-ably large' (ibid.: 55). Gradually, though, as the
doctor becomes increasingly enthusiastic over his scientific advances, he
develops an obsession with making the monster excessively large in
order to make it super-human, larger than life. For Dr Frankenstein, it is
not sufficient to create new life. He seeks to break down the boundaries
between life and death, and to make the transition between life and death
reversible. 'Life and death', he states, 'appeared to me ideal bounds,
which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our
dark world' (ibid.).
Frankenstein soon leams that the transgression of these 'bounds' is not
'ideal' and, as a result, the boundaries between creator and created break
down. ln this, it is not just the monster that is grotesque, for the doctor's
obsessive desire to transgress life and death eventually tums him into a
grotesque figure. He states,

1 collected bones from chamel-houses and disturbed, with profane

fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. ln a solitary
chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all
the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, 1 kept my workshop
of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in
attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and
the slaughter-house furnished many of my materiais; and often did
my human nature tum with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still
urged on by an eagemess which perpetually increased, 1 brought my
work near to a conclusion.
(ibid.: 56)

As a 'Modem Prometheus', a God, Dr Frankenstein adopts a monstrous

form, embodying the grotesque reversai of nature's order by engaging in
a 'filthy creation' whereby he contravenes the borders of mortality and
immortality, beast and human, secular and divine.
It is not surprising, then, that Frankenstein 'disturbs' and confounds
'the tremendous secrets ofthe human frame'. ln fact, the structure ofthe
'frame' is highlighted in the doctor's instinctual repugnance for the
monster. For the monster's lack of symmetry, the failure of the individual
components to form a cohesive whole, forces Frankenstein to admit that
his creation is far from perfect. An assemblage of dismembered body
parts, the creature's monstrous corpse embodies the idiom that 'the sum
is more than its parts'. But the monster also suggests that the totality of
its make-up, the sum, does not provide coherence. 'There is no real
question about the status of the creature: monster ~ writes the critic Ruth
Waterhouse, but the ontological status of 'the creature' stops here
(Waterhouse, 30). What is this monster? What does it mean apart from
being 'monstrous'? These questions have inspired critics to respond with
a plethora of complex answers. Indeed, because the creature is assembled
through the disposed parts of other bodies, the sum total of the monster is
both more and less than its parts. The significance of this convergence of
body parts is not the simple equation of 2 + 2 = 4. Nor is it the illogical
equation of 2 + 2 = 5. Rather, it is a case of 2 + 2 = 3 and 5. For the
monster is a creature ofuncertainty, and it is because of this state that the
monster can never find peace, or fit in; thus, he is rejected by everyone
with eyes to see, including his maker.
A consideration of 'form', 'shape' and 'frame' are vital when
considering the grotesque aspects of Frankenstein. For as the doctor
describes it, coming upon the monster in a storm in the Swiss Alps, 'A
flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly
to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect more hideous
than belongs to humanity' (Shelley, 72). The monster is gigantic, out of
proportion to humanity, and its 'aspect' is hideous. Yet Frankenstein is
not only disgusted by the creature's d!fference from humanity; he is also
repelled by its lilceness. It is the shadow of himself. Instead of embodying
some absolute evil or absolute other, the monster is repugnant and vile
because he is a reflection of his creator:

I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and

endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror ...
nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose Jrom
the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.
(ibid.: 73, emphasis added).

The monster, then, is not simply a 'fallen angel' ora being whose 'form'
is disproportionate to the human condition, for while Frankenstein's
creation is monstrous he is also, in part, a man (ibid.: 90). As a
compilation of human body parts, the creature is quite literally a man 'of
sorts', different sorts of men. But in a more figural sense the monster is
also a man of sorts precisely because he is a new sort, a new type and a
new form of man who has been created in a larger 'frame'. This form, for
all its monstrosity, is eerily familiar. From this perspective, the monster's
'solicitation of fratemité' with humanity is reasonable, for he is made by
man and efman (Hirsch, 118). Yet the ardent and continued pleas of the
monster 'to belong' do not invoke sympathy in 'the master'; his pleas
only make him more repugnant to his maker. After all, his claims to
humanity remind Frankenstein just how closely his creature resembles
the human form from which he has been created. The monster wishes
nothing so much as 'to make them [humans] overlook the deformity of
my figure' (Shelley, 101). Yet the creature's appeal to his maker to
overlook his physical deformities, his deformed body, amplifies his
grotesque qualities. For his deformity is familiar and unfamiliar, and this
makes his plea for companionship all the more horrific, as he will always
be exiled from humanity. ln this, the creature enters the realm of the
uncanny, of 'something long known to us, once very familiar' (Freud,
[1919] 1985: 336), yet forever at a remove from the human form it so
mockingly resembles.

BODYHORROR
David Cronenberg's cinematic oeuvre scrutinizes two principal anxieties
regarding the grotesque body. The first is a fear of grotesque bodily
mutation, what some film critics identify as Cronenberg's 'Body Horror',
in which the 'human body [is] defamiliarized, rendered other' by a series
of alterations, corruptions, erosions or de/evolutions from within, thus
breaking down the borders separating the human from the not-human
(Hurley, 203). Body horror is, for Philip Brophy, not so much concemed
with death, but with an anxiety about the body's degeneration or
mutation, 'a fear of one's own body, ofhow one controls and relates to it'
(Brophy, 8). ln Cronenberg's Jne Brood(l979), for instance, the seeds of
bodily mutation are contained deep within the individual, as Nola
incubates so many seeds that only death can cure her; in Scanners(l980)
the telepaths are not created by a deformation of the brain but by an
ability to tap into an unused cerebral region that is part of human
physiology; and in The Fly (1986) the body of Seth Brundle takes on a
transformation of its own, a human-fly hybrid, that he initiates but which
he is unable to influence or control. The second principie of anxiety
explored by Cronenberg is the fear of being subsumed by an
overwhelmingly powerful system such as commoditization,
technoscience or hegemony that transforms the body into a grotesque site
of human-technological hybrids. Here, characters are manipulated,
sometimes rendered powerless, by a techno-medical-capitalist system
that is sanctioned by the dominant cultural and financial economies. ln
//ideodrome (1983), for example, television transmissions subsume the
individual, transforming Max Renn's mind and body; in Dead ..Ringers
(1988) the 'authoritative' biomedical science practised by the twin
gynaecologists leads to a powerful form of modem science that
engenders de-humanization; and in eXistenZ (1999) the effect of
ubiquitous virtual reality and the 'bio-ports' of cybemetic game consoles
deform perceptions of reality.
These two principal anxieties are not mutually exclusive. ln the
former, the pus, bile, blood and vomit that oozes out of the grotesque
body is an extemalized manifestation of an internai abjection. ln the
latter, the powerful ubiquities of the media, medicine, telepathy,
cybemetics and new technologies are intemalized, often penetrating,
from the outside. ln both cases, the boundaries between the internai and
externa!, the inside and outside, the private and the public spheres are
porous and fluidly transformative, generating fears about the potential
violation of borders between the inner and the outer. Fixed territories,
then, fall away and they are replaced by a continuing and inescapable
series of deterritorializations and reterritorializations. We are left with
grotesque cultural distortions, a deformed body politic, that are the
metaphors for individual, social and political contamination. And this
coupling produces a visual iconography of the foreign body, of host and
parasite, and the invasive presence of an externa! power that transforms
the body into an inhuman state.
ln Cronenberg's first feature film Shivers (1975), for example, Dr
Hobbes breeds a parasite that can, he believes, cure man's over-
rationality. Acting as an aphrodisiac, Hobbes's bug is sexually
transmitted and, once released, spreads from body to body in the
confines of the luxurious island-bound Starliner Towers apartment
complex. Here, the spectacle of the grotesque body is exhibited in close-
up and middle shots of the parasite that, quite literally, gets under one's
skin. Interestingly, though, Cronenberg does not depict the occupants of
the apartment as victims; instead, he invokes the perspective of the
inhuman, as the critic Murray Smith argues, by dispelling the audience's
sympathy for the targets of the parasite (Smith, 69-72). The human body
is not only grotesque; it is also distanced and defamiliarized into an
inhuman condition.
ln many ways, Cronenberg's second feature film ..Rabid (1977) picks
up where Shivers ends. 'I was drawn to making ..Rabid, says Cronenberg,
'because I was now [after Shivers] showing an entire city in thrall to
rabid maniacs: army trucks, martial law in Montreal and so on' (Rodley,
53). ln addition, the sexual themes of Shivers are carried over into ..Rabid:
the main character, Rose, undergoes radical plastic surgery following a
motorcycle accident, only to fmd that, following the operation, she has
developed a penis-like organ in her armpit. This phallic appendage is
used to penetrate others and extract their blood (human blood being the
only food she can digest) and now, as a vampire, she consumes her
fellow patients before terrorising the streets of Montreal.
It is interesting to note that ..Rabúlbegan as a script called 'Mosquito'
about 'a strange kind of modem-day vampire, a biologically correct
vampire - that's to say, nothing to do with the supernatural' (Rodley,
ibid. ). From this project ..Rabidemerged, a vampire film without the usual
trappings of the vampire, and grew into a realistic treatment of a city in
crisis. Approaching the material in a realistic way, Rose's penetrating
body infects those from whom she extracts blood: her hosts contract a
form of rabies that transforms them into violent and grotesque zombie-
like beings. These rabid creatures are grotesques: they vomit the pus of
their decaying insides over their decayed outsides. ln this, ..Rabid divides
its characters, all of whom are victims of different forms of terror, into
three categories: the d/evolved vampire, the walking un/dead and the
unbitten human. True to folkloric tradition, Cronenberg's 'realistic'
vampire comes back from the dead not to renew or reanimate life, but to
suck the life out of others and spread, at first unknowingly, the
animalistic illness of a new strain of rabies. Thus, the film not only
incorporates the popularity of representations of vampires and zombies,
but it also represents a series of grotesque bodies that are marked by
decomposition, decay and disgust.
ln J?abid, Rose is played by Marilyn Chambers, the pom star best
known for her role in the adult film Behind the Green Door(1972). ln a
highly playful scene in which Rose cruises past St. Catherine Street's
notorious strip clubs in search of human blood, she enters a pom theatre.
Here, she takes a seat and watches the movie (is Chambers in this film
too?), knowing that most of the men in the audience are gazing at her,
not the screen. When one of these men takes the seat beside her and
makes physical contact, she penetrates his flesh with her penis-like
appendage and sucks his blood. His skin is neither boundary nor surface
contact, but it is permeable and, as such, does not act as a barrier to
infection or contamination.
This 'skin flick' scene is significant for understanding the grotesque
body because it harps back to the earlier scenes of skin grafting. If, as
many cultural critics suggest, skin functions as a significant physical and
conceptual border separating self and other, then the removal and
transfer of the skin invokes the fantasy of multiple border crossings (see
Connor, 147-55; Benthien, 81-89). lndeed, the lack of fixity associated
with skin-as-boundary in /?abidtransforms the skin's specific identity, Dr
Keloid explains, and challenges the notion that skin is a source of
identity that reveals individuation. ln this, Rose's skin graft functions as a
cloth garment, a veil, that generates and hides her vampirism and
functions as a separating layer surrounding her inner body space. ln the
move from the human body to the grotesque body, then, the skin is the
façade, the surface that is meant to contain and protect the homely site of
identity. But the grotesque site that arises out of Rose's skin graft bears
witness to a destruction of the homely space that is linked to the terror of
infection that has contaminated the body politic. Thus, the underarm
appendage emerging from within her skin is, in a metaphoric sense, the
removal of her veil, for it reveals what is inside and simultaneously
displaces her from what we would generally recognize as human. Yet
because this revealing is done by the vampire herself, it moves from a
singular act of destroying the individual to a conscious and transforming
act of will; it is semantically recoded from a final act into a transitory
moment. This transitory moment rests on the bodily metaphor of the
naked truth, which rests on the mechanism of a moment of complete
uncovering that must end in another veiling. For after penetrating the
skin of her victims, Rose's appendage returns to be concealed within the
fleshy garment of her skin. This is significant for Cronenberg's
representation of the grotesque body in that the skin begins by gesturing
to its surface as a possible site of enunciation, a surface upon which
identity is inscribed and can be read by the observer. But the removal and
transfer of the skin, through grafting, resists the notion of the body's
surface as a place where knowledge about identity is formed or assigned.

BODYPARTS
Grafting is also a central trope in the infamous horror film Fhe Human
Centípede (2009) directed by Tom Six. More known for its
controversially grotesque premise than its content, Jne Human Centípede
has a ludicrous premise: an insane German doctor acts on his perverse
desire, his fetish, for grafting living creatures together from mouth to
anus. ln his initial experiment, he stitches together three Rottweilers,
transforming them into a canine centipede. After this successful
operation, he decides to carry out the technique on living people in order
to create a 'human centipede'. For cryptic reasons, the doctor conceives
of these new creatures as harmonious; in fact, he sees the human
centipede as an improvement on what he conceives to be the disharmony
of the single human form. This bizarre obsession derives from the fact
that the doctor is a skilled surgeon who, during his career, became an
intemational expert in separating Siamese twins. But now retired, and
instead of detaching bodies, he decides to reverse the procedure,
devoting his time and expertise to attaching bodies so he can create 'a
Siamese triplet, connected via the gastric system ... the human centipede
□ the sequence'.

Commenting on the notion of the 'anatomical theater', a forum that

dates from the Early Modem period, the literary critic Mary Russo
explains how 'dissection and surgery dis-organized the body into many
possible systems and components', hence setting 'off the anatomical
specimen as spectacle open to stylization (a comic or tragic scene of
weird juxtaposition of parts)' (Russo, 116). ln The Human Centípede,
this 'weird juxtaposition of parts' is taken to its extreme, as the stitching
of mouth to anus moves beyond the bounds of bad taste and provokes
physical disgust at the indignity of being force fed the faeces of another
person. From this perspective, The Human Centípede is filled with
grotesquerie, for the suturing of mouth to anus is a disruption of basic
bodily functions, namely the ability to rid the body of natural waste. But
by stitching these orifices together, the entry to one body is connected to
the exit point of another, breaking down the boundaries separating
entrance from exit, mouth from anus. This engenders an extreme
example ofKristeva's 'abjection' as that which 'disturbs identity, system,
order'; refusing to 'respect borders, positions', Kristeva writes, abjection
is typically evoked by that which is 'composite' and 'in-between'
(Kristeva, (1982: 4). lndeed, the 'position' of being 'in-between' in the
'system' of the human centipede is a focal point of the film. ln what is
arguably the most grotesque scene, the doctor instructs the first third of
his 'Siamese triplet' to 'feed her', demanding that the first third of the
human centipede force his faeces into the mouth of the second and
middle part, who will eventually feed her faeces to the third part of the
sequence. The 'meal' is digested three times before it is expunged as
waste.
By short-circuiting the gastric system of the subjects in this three-part
'sequence', the doctor turns the inside and outside of the body inside-out.
Normally, the gastric system is hidden from the outside world: it is
private. Unlike other body parts such as eyes, feet, hands and arms, the
stomach, intestines and other internai organs are hidden from view. But
by making three gastric systems into one, the doctor creates a communal
system whereby the borders between inside and outside, the private and
communal body, become confused. This conjunction of private gastric
systems is a grotesque violation because it subverts the proper function
of these organs, to rid the organism of waste, and removes their status as
internai, private and hidden.
Throughout the film, grotesque images are conveyed through the
appearance of the human centipede. But this visual dynamic, which
focusses on the surface of the body, combines with what is happening on
the inside, the deformed, yet non-visual, gastric system. For the doctor's
experiment is, like Victor Frankenstein's, an act of creation that results in
a grotesquely monstrous body that is excessive, disharmonious and
'filthy', not 'right and proper' (Clayborough, 8). Just as Frankenstein's
creation does not fit the human 'frame', the human centipede challenges
our conceptions of the human body and, by extension, humanity itself.
After all, this human-insect form defamiliarizes the human condition
through its four extra feet and its recycling of human faeces. This speaks
to definitions of the grotesque that pair human and animal features. But it
also gestures to the disorder associated with the grotesque body, for the
tripartite 'single' body of the man-centipede is always on the verge of
collapse. The individual components cannot be contained or stabilized
within the frame.
The human centipede, then, includes a range of grotesque attributes: it
lacks unity, it is disproportionate, it is excessive and it is revolting. The
doctor's creation is a body of unstable borders: inside and outside,
apparent and concealed, self and other, subject and object. ln this, the
body comprises a confusing triple 'sequence' that is difficult to fathom.
But The Human Centípede also engenders laughter. The absurd conceit
of the film is laughable, and the extreme bad taste of the film is
sensational and bound to shock audiences of more sophisticated tastes.
Yet there is also a deeper satiric vein to The Human Centípede, for it has
succeeded in offending people in a market where audiences are
inundated with, and desensitized by, images intended to shock. Thus,
Tom Six's depiction ofthe grotesque body, his 'Siamese triplets', can be
read as a humorous reflection on the horror geme itself, a geme that is
often dependent on clichés related to the grotesque body and body
horror. The Human Centípede includes an ironic awareness of these
clichés: the film begins with two sexually promiscuous women who are
lost in the woods and discover an isolated cabin where they fall victim to
the deranged doctor. lndeed, the film invokes and subverts clichés; after
all, the Siamese triplet, the human centipede, is a meta-commentary on
the geme's dependence on audience expectations and a cannibalistic
dependence on the 'body' of work in the geme. The thrice digested meal
is, among other things, a playful commentary on the history of horror
movies, as well as the film's own cannibalistic debt to such conventions.
ln the end, the grotesque body horror of the human centipede offers a
humorous release, making our own bodies convulse and contort in
laughter, as well as evincing terror and disgust.
After the film was released, and sick-bags were issued along with box-
office tickets, the film was parodied in an episode of the animated TV
comedy South Parle. Titled 'The Human CentiPad' (Parker, 2011), the
episode draws on key features of Fhe Human Centípede and combines
them with a parody of the excessive consumption of Apple products,
such as iPods, iPhones and iPads. ln the show, Steve Jobs, the CEO of
Apple, comes up with an ingenious idea: he decides to add a 'human
element' to the standard edition of the iPad, making it 'almost perfect'.
The only flaw is that the iPad is unable 'to read'. The absurdity of this
scenario includes the suturing together of three human beings but with an
added component: an iPod is attached to the first mouth and the last anus
of this new and improved creation. This 'human centipede 2.0'
humanizes the iPad through its attachment to the three interconnected
bodies. During the episode, it is revealed that these human bodies have
been joined together because they have failed to read Apple's Terms and
Conditions. The people are there because oftheir 'inability to read'.
South Parle, then, parodies Apple's Terms and Conditions: 'Apple and
its subsidiaries may also, if necessary, sew yet another person's mouth
onto your butthole, making you a being that shares one gastric tract'.
This clause is grotesque. But it also provokes a form of carnivalesque-
grotesque laughter, for the design logic of the mad scientist (Steve Jobs)
produces a body that is even more grotesque than the human centipede in
Tom Six's film. For the grotesquerie is heightened because the scientist's
creation is inordinately flawed and lacks intelligence, thus mocking those
who celebrate Steve Jobs as a genius and a visionary. By selecting
people whose main flaws are their inability to read, the spurious logic of
creating a perfect machine in all ways but its ability to read foregrounds
that which is dubious, defective, inconsistent and absurd. From this
perspective, the Steve Jobs character mirrors the mad doctor of Fhe
Human Centípede and the deranged figure of Dr Frankenstein.
'The Human CentiPad' is also criticai ofthose consumers who have an
insatiable appetite for Apple products. The programme's obese character
Cartman, for example, will do anything to obtain the latest Apple
product. He sacrifices Kyle, one of his closest friends, who becomes the
middle section of the CentiPad and, once Kyle's body is given up, there
is no escape from the accepted Terms and Conditions. 'You agreed to
this!' says the Steve Jobs character,

Mouth to anus so that the feces so that the gastric tract from one will
enter the mouth of the little boy, and he agreed this was okay, enter
the mouth of the little boy, leading through his anus to the mouth of
the female, who completely agreed; they all agreed.

ln this grotesquely funny scene, it is clear that there can be no escape

from the legal conditions of the contract; it does not matter how perverse,
irrational, brutal or grotesque the consequences might be.
 5
DISHARMONY AND
TRANSGRESSION

Transgression and disharmony take on many forms. We have already

seen in Chapter 3 how monstrosity contests 'natural' attributes through
the combination of hybrid forms and disparate parts, particularly in the
mixing of human with non-human attributes. ln this, transgression arises
through the insertion of incongruent elements into an already existing
frame, thereby creating hybrid figures such as the satyr's combination of
human and animal qualities. We have also seen how grotesque forms can
contest the category of 'the natural' through the invention of fantastic
images or imaginary creatures such as gargoyles. ln both cases,
transgressive depictions of the subject matter challenge the normative
standards of 'natural' and closed systems either by combination or
invention: the hybrid merges elements from different categories, whereas
the monstrously fantastic invents categories that operate entirely outside
the 'natural' frame.
This chapter explores how two of the defining features of the
grotesque, disharmony and transgression, arise thematically and
structurally out of a mix of conflicts and clashes of forms. Disharmony is
found, for instance, in the mixture of the heterogeneous and/or the
conflation of disparate images; as a result, disharmony is present in the
work of art and in the reaction the work provokes in its audience.
Disharmony is dependent on a conception of harmony and a sense of
symmetry and balance. This is where transgression becomes important,
for disharmony in a grotesque work can be a form of transgression
through disorientation and confusion. The status quo is transgressed, and
the transgressive aspects of the work violate accepted, imposed or
harmonious boundaries. ln this, the grotesque can be transgressive by
challenging the limits of conventional aesthetics through disharmony or
experimental forms. To transgress is to infringe, or go beyond, the
bounds of an aesthetic, ethical or established form of behaviour.
Paradoxically, though, a transgressive work can also reaffirm the very
borders it transgresses. 'To transgress', writes the sociologist Chris
Jencks,

is to go beyond the bounds or limits set by a commandment or law or

convention, it is to violate or infringe. But to transgress is also more
than this .... Transgression is a deeply reflexive act of denial and
affirmation.
(Jencks, 2)

Transgression is not only a violation of a rule; it is also a vital component

in defining the rule that is being transgressed: the boundaries, limits and
laws of conventional aesthetics or behaviours depend on transgression to
reinforce their borders. 'Transgressive behaviour', Jencks concludes,
'does not deny limits or boundaries, rather it exceeds them and thus
completes them .... The transgression is a component ofthe rule' (ibid.:
7).
ln this chapter, we explore three vital components of disharmony and
transgression in grotesque forms: exaggeration, extravagance and excess.
These three modes of expression often contribute to grotesquerie by
expanding upon existing conventions; they are not engendered by an
extemal disruption or an assault on harmony from the outside. Rather,
exaggeration, extravagance and excess emerge from within the very
boundaries, limits, laws and conventions meant to resist disharmony.

EXAGGERATION
To exaggerate is to represent something as bigger, greater, better or
worse than it really is. Exaggeration might enlarge or alter something
beyond its normal or due proportions and, as such, it expands upon that
which is already present. The individual constituents of a given structure
can be, for instance, exaggerated in relation to other constituent parts
within a normal-sized frame. Or, the totality of the frame itself might be
exaggerated, thus offering a depiction of a figure that is oversized in
relation to a standard type. It is therefore possible to perceive of
transgressive forms that retain the basic constituents of one singular
particular species (unlike the satyr) or are considered to be natural
phenomena (unlike the gargoyle). An ant, for instance, might be a
perfectly harmonious and natural creature, but if this insect is rendered
the size of a house then this distorts our perception of it, regardless of
how perfectly proportioned and harmonious its individual parts might be.
Similarly, a six-foot tall man weighing 175 pounds may not exceed our
expectations but if his right arm were rendered much larger than his left
arm this would disrupt our harmonious perception of him. Thus,
exaggeration can be split into two main categories: individual parts might
be exaggerated, such as a huge nose or an enormous belly, or the entire
frame, the whole body, might be rendered disproportionate, as in the
giant or the miniature.
It is in the former category, the exaggeration of individual body parts,
that grotesque depictions sometimes merge with caricature. Caricature
has a long history and continues to be popular in newspaper cartoons,
tourist sites and political websites. These pictures, descriptions or
imitations of a person exaggerate certain striking characteristics in order
to create a comic, ludicrous or grotesque effect. As a representational
mode, caricature often exaggerates a single body part, such as a nose or
an ear, out of proportion, exceeding the limits of harmony and
transgressing the aesthetic principies of realism. Yet caricature also relies
on a metonymic relationship to its subject, for it takes parts of the whole
in order to stand in for the totality. The expanded nose or ear might be
used to symbolize the character, the core or totality, of the person being
depicted. Likewise, the exaggeration of an already oversized body part
can produce a caricature that will be far more grotesque than the person
being represented.
Another category of exaggeration that is related to grotesque forms of
representation relies on the transgression and disharmony of the entire
frame, not just its parts. ln the enormous body of Homer's Cyclops or the
gigantism of Rabelais' Gargantua, the whole body is an exaggerated
representation of the human form. The bodies of these giants correspond
to their excessively voracious appetites, so that a massive body often
symbolizes the 'violation of natural boundaries' (Bakhtin, [1941] 1984:
40). This is, according to Bakhtin, one of the central characteristics of the
grotesque. Yet the exaggeration of the whole, rather than of specific
body parts, relies on a different sort of disharmony, for its dissymmetry
often retains a harmonious proportion of its individual constituents in
relation to one another. Hence, this kind of exaggeration must be placed
in a particular context; it is not, as with the exaggeration of parts,
understood simply through scrutiny of a specific feature.
These two types of exaggeration have attracted criticai attention. But
the exaggerated dissymmetry of the whole has a particular resonance
with scholars of the grotesque. The literary critic Leslie Fiedler suggests,
for instance, that exaggerated bodily grotesques can be organized into
three major body types: the exaggeratedly tall, the exaggeratedly strong
and the exaggeratedly overweight (or, in his words, 'the Giants', 'the
Strongs' and 'the Fats'). Of these types, the Giants differ from the
Strongs and the Fats because extreme height is 'an irreversible fate'.
Strongs and Fats are, on the other hand, not necessarily trapped within
their bodies; rather, they are imbued with 'a tendency, a possibility of
attaining monstrous size, which they can fight or feed or merely endure'
(Fiedler, 1978: 125). A more clear-cut divide separates, for Fiedler, the
Fats from the Giants and the Strongs because height and strength are far
less likely to elicit derision, whereas fatness is often met with ridicule or
disgust. Indeed, in the edited volume Bodt"es Out efBounds. •Fatness and
Transgression (Le Besco and Braziel, 2001 ), the contributors
demonstrate how over the last two centuries there has been an increasing
tendency to demonize overweight bodies 'as repulsive, funny, ugly,
unclean, obscene, and above all as something to lose'. They also
demonstrate that in contemporary society fat 'equals reckless excess,
prodigality, indulgence, lack of restraint, violation of order and space,
transgression of boundary'. We are, they conclude, experiencing a
'hostility toward fat' that goes far beyond schoolyard bullying, for it has
become widespread and acceptable to branda fat person as being 'out of
control, outside the social, a monster, a grotesque' (ibid.: 2, 3 and 8;
Kuppers, in ibid.: 277).
A salient example of this appears in Frank Herbert's sci-fi novel .Dune
(1965). Here, the exaggerated girth of the character Baron Harkonnen is
a sign of depravity, and his grotesque fatness provokes disgust and
distain in the reader. Baron Harkonnen is described in the following
passage like so:

As he emerged from the shadows, his figure took on dimension -

grossly and immensely fat. And with subtle bulges beneath folds of
his dark robes to reveal that all this flesh was sustained partly by
portable suspensors hamessed to his flesh. He might weigh two
hundred standard kilos in actuality, but his feet would carry no more
than fifty of them.
(Herbert, 20)

Baron Harkonnen is, in other words, so excessively overweight that his

legs can no longer support his body. He has to be propped up by anti-
gravity devices, 'suspensors', that make his legs redundant, mere
appendages. He has, in effect, transgressed normalcy and natural bodily
states, and lives outside the bounds ofthe normal (natural) human body.
The discrepancy between his obese body and his meagre legs is not just
described as unattractive: he is revolting, disgusting and repugnant. Like
Shakespeare's Richard III, his deformed body mirrors a deformity of
character, as the deterioration ofhis 'grossly and immensely fat' body
signals an ethical decrepitude and lack of empathy. This moves him
outside the human condition: he is inhuman and inhumane.
This grotesque portrait of Baron Harkonnen is accentuated in David
Lynch's 1984 cinematic adaptation of the novel. Constantly sweating,
spitting and drooling, his face is covered in pustules and sores about to
ooze with the fluidic discharges of pus and blood. The body of
Harkonnen threatens to burst, disintegrate and collapse. A link is made,
then, between his exaggerated size and his excessive lifestyle and hence
to his prima,y transgression: his insatiable lust for power. For his
excessively voracious appetites reflect his desire for excessive power
and, as a result, Harkonnen can barely contain himself, physically or
socially. ln this, we are reminded of the many perversely excessive
pleasures of Foucault's 'vile sovereign' (see Chapter 2), particularly
when Harkonnen violently destroys and consumes other bodies by, in
one instance, pulling the 'heart plugs' of his servants. ln fact, the very
thought of 'pulling the plug' on another person excites him to the point
of rapture, and the figurative consumption of human flesh reflects his
tyrannical character and signals his consuming desire for power.
A very different example of the exaggerated body is Angela Carter's
Nights at the Circus (1984), which suggests that being fat is not
necessarily repulsive. Here, the protagonist of the novel, Walser, falls in
love with Fevvers, a celebrated 'aerialiste' who is described as half bird,
half human and blessed with a 'Rubenesque form' (Carter, 15).
Throughout the novel, the allure of Fevvers is based on the hybridity of
her appearance and the exaggeration of her frame. She is said to be
attractive precisely because she is so large: her oversized bosom and
bottom draw the lurid gazes of the characters and spark their sexual
desires. ln fact, her erotic appeal arises out of the topsy-turvy
disharmony of her body and her ability to take flight, despite her
considerable size. Her upper body is, for example, defined by 'her
humps' and 'her lumps, big as if she bore a bosom fore and aft'; by
contrast, her legs are 'admirably long and lean' and, from a functional
perspective, 'flimsy little underpinnings' inappropriate to support the
'top-heavy distribution ofweight' (ibid.: 18, 44). While her allure comes
from her exaggerated voluptuousness, the asymmetry and dissonance of
her form also becomes part of the exotic 'paradox' that defines her body
and character: 'wings without arms is one impossible thing', says the
narrator, ofher upper body, 'but wings with arms is the impossible made
doubly unlikely' (ibid.: 13). Whatever the case may be, her 'wings' are
reminiscent of 'an eagle, a condor, an albatross fed to excess' and, as a
result, she is an 'extraordinary woman', a 'marvellous monster' (ibid.:
13, 188).

EXTRAVAGANCE
To be extravagant is to be wasteful and excessive. To be extravagant is to
show off and to lack in moderation. To call someone or something
extravagant can be a critique. To be extravagant is, as its etymology
implies, to stray from the beaten path, to wander ('vagant') outside the
limits of what is normal ('extra'). It is to transgress the norm. Yet the
extravagant can also be something delightful and enviable, particularly
when it is associated with glamour and sophistication.
The excessive pursuit of pleasure and sophistication characterizes the
life of the decadent aesthete Jean Des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans'
novel Against Nature (A .Hebours; 1884). This text is littered with
examples of extravagant grotesquerie: Des Esseintes, for example,
constructs a 'mouth organ', a contraption of pipes full of flavours
designed to induce 'upon his tongue silent melodies and mute funeral
marches; to hear inside his mouth creme-de-menthe solos and rum-and-
vespetro duets' (Huysmans, 59). Even more spectacularly extravagant
and peculiar is his decision 'to have his tortoise's buckler glazed with
gold'. At first delighted by this opportunity to tum an animal into a
mineral, Des Esseintes soon realizes that gold is not extravagant enough,
for 'this gigantic jewel was only half-finished and ... it would not be
really complete until it had been encrusted with precious stones'. But
which jewels to choose? Diamonds are, he decides, 'terribly vulgar' and
emeralds and rubies are 'too reminiscent of the green and red eyes of
certain Paris buses fitted with headlamps in the selfsame colours'.
Topazes, amethysts and sapphires are 'all too civilized, too familiar', so
he settles on a selection of 'bizarre stones' that produce a 'disconcerting
harmony' (ibid.: 54-55). What Des Esseintes creates is something
supposedly 'complete' and harmonious, but this harmony is, like the
'symphony' ofhis mouth organ, 'disconcerting'.
Des Esseintes's decadence is often associated with the end of an era, a
fin-de-siecle decadence in which something once natural and vigorous is
in the process ofwithering away. From this perspective, the decadence of
the late nineteenth century includes aesthetic forms that indulge in the
disharmony associated with the grotesque. The literary critic Bernard
McElroy articulates this quite clearly when he states that 'decadence and
the grotesque have long been at home in each other's company, a
compatibility that suggests a number of interesting questions. Is
grotesque art itself decadent? Is it the product of a decadent society?'
(McElroy, 129). The answers to these questions are not mutually
exclusive, for grotesque texts can be, like decadence, preoccupied with
spectacle and extreme extravagance that is 'decadent' because it is
'unnatural', 'artificial' and 'superfluous'. Like the 'solos ofmint, duos of
ratafia and rum' composed on his mouth organ, Des Esseintes's gem-
encrusted tortoise is disconcerting because it is extravagant and
superfluous. It serves no purpose: it is an unnatural thing that is sickly
and revolting. Indeed, the extravagance symbolized in the bejewelled
tortoise leads to destruction: the animal is unable 'to bear the dazzling
luxury imposed on it' and his once robust body begins to decline and he
eventually dies (Huysmans, 62). ln this, the disharmony of a life intended
to be spent in a 'humble carapace' proves too much of a shock, too
strong a contrast to its natural role as 'a modest existence' (ibid.). Thus,
the death of Des Esseintes's tortoise exemplifies the decadent
sophistication ofthe aesthete who becomes depraved and unhealthy. Like
Herbert's Baron Harkonnen, whose environment is so lavishly decadent
that it transforms him into a grotesque creature, Des Esseintes's view of
life corrupts him and his surroundings, making him unhealthy, abnormal
and unnatural. His decadence becomes debasement, and he is corrupted
by effluence and impurities, vice and degradation.
At a glance, it would seem that extravagance and sophistication are
diametrically opposed: extravagance is often associated with excess and
sophistication with restraint. Yet in Sophistication: A Literary and
Cultural History (2010) Faye Hamill shows how the contemporary use
of the word 'sophistication' is far more flexible than in previous decades.
Hamill refers to advertising as a good example of this: sophistication
covers a wide range of products (and meanings) that extend 'from
"elegant" and "select" (handbags, hotels), to "advanced" and "cutting-
edge" (cars, mobile phones)' (Hamill, 8). Thus, the person who displays
his luxury car or his new mobile phone might be described as
'sophisticated' and 'extravagant'. Nevertheless, there is a fine balance
between the two. Does he really need a sports car that can exceed 250
mph? Does he really need to stay in Dubai's Burj Al Arab Hotel (the only
seven star hotel in the world)? Answers to these questions return us to
the clash between extravagance and sophistication. For to engage in
extreme displays of wealth and consumption might seem vulgar or 'in
bad taste', which is sometimes seen to be the antithesis of sophistication.
Yet for Hamill the boundary between sophistication and bad taste is
not impermeable. ln fact, bad taste can be so bad, so excessively
extravagant, that it can transform itself into sophistication. This requires
awareness and refinement on behalf of the transgressor. For in order to
convert the base into the refined, the crude into the exquisite, the
individual must be disceming about his transgressions. This is
exemplified, for instance, in the notion ofbeing 'camp', a sensibility first
theorized by Susan Sontag in her essay 'Notes on Camp' (1964): 'Camp
asserts that good taste is not simply good taste, that there exists, indeed, a
good taste of bad taste' (Sontag, 291). Camp is thus dependent on
vulgarity, on the extravagance of excess but an excess that is,
paradoxically, restricted. This is because the awareness of one's
transgression into bad taste arises only when one can relish the finer
nuances of excess by restricting oneselfto the rightmanners ofbad taste.
There is, in other words, a kind of bad taste that makes one stylish, not
unsophisticated. 'Style is everything' for the person who appreciates
camp, Sontag adds, for although 'pure examples of Camp are
unintentional', the person who appreciates camp, the one who 'plays at
being campy', is 'wholly conscious'. To intentionally engage in camp
behaviour is to be intensely aware of style, however crassly extravagant
the style might be. Camp, Sontag continues, is characterized by the
'spirit of extravagance': the campy drag queen who 'plays' at being a
diva is so excessive that s/he becomes something else (ibid.: 282-83).
Neither woman nor diva, the extravagance of performing the role to
exaggerated excess moves the performer into another space, a camp
space that is characterized by 'love of the exaggerated, the "off', of
things-being-what-they-are-not' (ibid.: 279).
Sontag links twentieth-century camp aesthetes to nineteenth-century
dandies. 'Camp is the modem dandyism', she writes, 'Camp is the
answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture'
(ibid.: 288). Likewise, Hamill asserts that although camp and dandyism
operate on two very different levels in terms of mass-produced objects,
they share 'one of the central dynamics of sophistication, that between
excess and restraint' (Hamill, 18). This is so because 'to be camp' is to
be excessive. But it must be excessive in a select, and thus sophisticated,
manner so as to construct the vulgar 'in a rare way' and thereby
transcend the dandy's 'nausea of the replica' (Sontag, 289). Camp and
dandyism meet on the terrain of sophistication: to be sophisticated is,
above all, to resist that which is 'natural'. Thus, these two sensibilities
share a distaste for the 'natural': the dandy's celebration of the extremely
exquisite or the excessive crassness of camp performativity.

EXCESS
Excess is everywhere. Although this speaks to the very nature of excess
(to overflow, to invade, to transgress, to exceed limits), the cultural
criticism of the last two decades suggests that the past century has been
particularly excessive. 'It has become', writes Jencks, 'commonplace to
regard contemporary society through the metaphor of excess' (Jencks, 3).
Indeed, on a daily basis, we are confronted with excessive consumption,
excessive crimes, and even excessive weather. But what does it mean to
be excessive? And how does excess relate to the grotesque?
Nalced Lunch (1959) by William S. Burroughs offers insights into, if
not answers to, these questions. According to some literary critics, the
text is so excessive that, upon publication, it made some 'people throw
up' (Miles, 115). An excessive 'meal' of a text, Nalced Lunch is at times
repulsive in its relentless descriptions of disgusting scenes and obscene
material: it is a text 'so powerful' that it can 'create a physical reaction'
in its readers (ibid.). Burroughs' novel is about the life of William Lee,
the pen name of Burroughs, chronicling his loosely connected adventures
across the Americas, Africa, as well as the bizarre and mysterious place
called the 'Interzone'. William Lee, an excessive consumer of drugs and
illegal substances, is the text's only unifying feature: 'This book spills in
all directions', says the narrator, for like 'The Word' the book's
subsections are 'divided into units which be all in one piece and should
be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order' (Burroughs [1959]
1993: 180). Nalced Lunch is not limited in the way it can be read. It
textually embodies excess, hence some critics have argued it should not
be classified as 'a novel', but 'more of a how-to manual, a way of seeing'
(Miles, 120). The book is, like the Interzone, 'a single, vast building' in
which the 'rooms are made of a plastic cement that bulges to
accommodate people, but when too many crowd into one room there is a
soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall right into the next
house' (Burroughs [1959] 1993: 143). Faced with excess, with quantities
larger than its frame, it expands outward.
The literary critic Robert Holton writes that 'NalcedLunch is hardly to
everyone's taste'. This is because it depicts 'scenes of graphic violence
and transgressive sexuality [which] exceeded anything that had been
published at that point' and it is 'not immediately clear why so many
would venture into a space offering immersion in waste and filth, the
deviant and the abject' (Holton, 27). Yet this is precisely why it appeals
to some readers: it injects harmony with disharmony, and it destabilizes
what is 'acceptable' and 'normal' through an overdose, an excess, of the
abnormal, the deviant, abject. 'The grotesque', explains Bernard
McElroy, 'does not address the rationalist in us or the scientist in us, but
the vestigial primitive in us, the child in us, the potential psychotic in us',
hence Nalced Lunch is a text that 'induces fascination' through 'perverse
glee [which] lures even as it repels' (McElroy, 5, 16). ln this, it is
characteristic of the 'modem grotesque'. For it is 'an assault upon the
idea of a rational world; it is an assault upon the reader himself, upon his
sensibilities' (ibid.: 27). It is, then, in the relentless excess of Burroughs'
grotesques that the excessive can be both destructive and revelatory
because it exposes the boundary.
Building on this, the literary critic R. B. Morris writes that 'Nalced
Lunch made a mockery of all borders, physical, social and psychic'
(Morris, 108). From this perspective, the text is best viewed 'as "excess"
in the sense that Georges Bataille might suggest, as a means of
transgression', a 'transgression [which] exposes the limits'
(Schneiderman, 190). After all, Nalced Lunch is so excessive that it
confounds structure or attempts to control it or impose interpretation
upon it. 'NalcedLunclls structure is impossible to grasp because it is ... a
moving mosaic reconstituted in variant form by every reader through an
endless "piecing together," a continuai reassembling of a text without
limit' (Macfadyen, 209). Nalced Lunch is grotesque, then, because it
eludes and transgresses limits; it exists in a state of constant flux through
excess, and produces waste that is disgusting and yet strangely alluring.
If the societies of twentieth-century N orth America and Europe are
characterized by excess, then the United States is a central site of
excessive behaviour. As the French philosopher and cultural critic Jean
Baudrillard states in America ([1986] 1999), the US is a place where
architecture is 'beyond the measure of man', a society of 'nai've
extravagance' and the home of 'hyperreality', a reality so excessive that
it becomes a dream independent of all other realities, a 'simulation' so
effective that it transcends and overwhelms reality (Baudrillard, 17, 23,
28). The excess of America, Baudrillard claims, distances people and
places from the everyday, the ordinary and the average, so that 'the real'
is meaningless. After all, at the core of the 'American Dream' is
precisely the desire to be free from restraints, free from limitations, and
to lead a life that is govemed by 'freedom'. This can, in some cases, lead
to a life of excess, a life defined by the concept of 'excess': America's
problem', Baudrillard declares, is that 'everything is available' (ibid.:
30). Yet excess in the United States has produced a void through
paradox. For America is a place where 'everything can be equal and
shine out in the sarne supernatural form', but it is also a place that refuses
to be restrained (ibid.: 126). If America is the future, Baudrillard asserts,
the place where we are all headed, then resistance is futile. Instead, it is
best just to 'smile, smile, smile' in the face of excess; after all, excess is,
by definition, too much (ibid.: 34).
Yet overindulging in something acceptable is very different from
engaging in prohibited acts. Our best friend might be too fond of alcohol
or fatty foods and we might look the other way. But if she starts using
hard drugs, we might feel the need to intervene. There is a difference, in
other words, a difference between the transgressions ef acess and the
transgressions eflaw. Indeed, the excessive intake of alcohol or food is,
in some cases, condonable. But other excessive transgressions such as
cannibalism or incest speak to what in Totem and Faboo (1913) Sigmund
Freud identifies as primordial transgressions. An extreme example of
grotesque excess is the almost unfathomable transgression of Josef Fritzl
(1935-), the Austrian man who kept his daughter locked up in the cellar
for over 20 years, repeatedly raping her and having seven children with
her. While Fritzl transgressed social, sexual and cultural taboos to the
point of incomprehension, the cultural critic Slavoj Zizek analyses the
case as 'a realized kitch life'. ln fact, in a self-consciously grotesque
reading of the media reports, Zizek likens Fritzl's story to a real life
version of 'the ultimate kitch phenomenon', the 1965 musical Fhe Sound
efMusic (Zizek, 319). However absurd, Zizek's comparison is helpful in
understanding what makes the Fritzl case one of the most grotesque real
life stories of the early twenty-first century. Like kitch, the obscene
allure and the extreme horror of the Fritzl case derives from the seeming
perplexity of Fritzl himself: what has made him a monster? As Zizek
points out, Fritzl's transgressions were compounded, excessively
transgressive, because as a father he saw his acts of rape, incest and
incarceration as reasonable. According to his twisted logic, Zizek argues,
Fritzl was carrying out his paternal duty: he was protecting his child from
the evils of the world even if it meant 'destroying her' (ibid.: 318). Of
course the one thing his daughter needed protection from more than
anything else was her father. Like Sontag's 'pure camp', Fritzl is 'pure
kitch' because heis unaware ofthe excessive nature ofhis transgression.
Thus, Fritzl's ridiculously absurd logic makes him all the more terrifying
and strange, all the more grotesque, because he appears in his own eyes
to have been in eamest.
 6
ATTRACTION/REPULSION

The grotesque provokes conflicting responses: fascination and

repugnance, compassion and disgust, sympathy and confusion.
Grotesque bodies might rouse disgust and/or attraction insofar as they
offer insights into the limits of the body and human experience. Authors,
artists and filmmakers have long celebrated the strange body as a site of
production: its repulsive qualities can be attractive to those seeking
modes of transgression that challenge normative forms and behaviours.
ln this, the grotesque is disturbing because it incites seemingly
incompatible emotions through its representations of abjection and
possibility, limitations and becomings, compassion and rejection,
attraction and repulsion.

FREAKS AND MISFITS

Freaks and misfits populate the fiction of the American author Flannery
O'Connor. One of the most consistent practitioners of twentieth-century
grotesque fiction, her short story 'A Good Man is Hard to Find' (1955)
includes a band of roving highwaymen who spontaneously execute a
family during a chance encounter. Grotesque descriptions also appear in
her novels such as Wise Blood (1952), in which the narrator recounts,
among other grotesque scenes, the theft of a mummified dwarf who is
mistaken for a baby. O'Connor's fiction includes many grotesque
qualities related to characterization, setting and plot, but her essay 'Some
Aspects of the Grotesque in Southem Fiction' (1960) provides a
particular insight into her reflections on grotesque fiction. As a Southem
American writer, O'Connor partially objected to 'grotesque' as a blanket
term, because she thought it too reductive to classify Southem fiction as
defined by degeneration, deterioration and weirdness. Despite her
reservations about labelling the American South weird, corrupt or in
decay, O'Connor argues that 'the Southem grotesque' is an appropriate
expression for certain types of regional U. S. fiction. Texts that include
an aura of 'mystery' are particularly apt. She writes,

ln these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some
experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or
which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life.
We find that connections which we would expect in the customary
kind of realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and
gaps which anyone trying to describe manners and customs would
certainly not have left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if
not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional
qualities lean away from typical social pattems, toward mystery and
the unexpected.
(ibid.: 40)

Circumventing the 'grotesque' as a pejorative term, O'Connor suggests

that the time has come to re-evaluate grotesquerie as a literary mode. Far
from being a crude and sensationalist mode, O'Connor argues for the
potential of something more significant in grotesque characters, settings
and actions.
Influenced by a Catholic ontology, the sense of 'mystery' she
identifies in grotesquerie exists in a tension between extemal appearance
and inner meaning. Seeing as 'our life is and will remain essentially
mysterious', O'Connor privileges writing that is 'wild', 'violent and
comic' in relation to the 'discrepancies that it seeks to combine'. Rather
than focus on how grotesque fiction depicts the out-of-the-ordinary,
O'Connor appreciates how fiction can push 'its own limits outward
toward the limit of mystery'. This is, for her, a 'truer' mode of writing,
and it is more realist than the 'realism of fact', for the latter 'may, in the
end, limit rather than broaden the novel's scope'. Grotesque realism,
though, opens outward, and offers the potential to have the fiction 'come
alive' with 'some experience which we are not accustomed to observe
every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his
ordinary life' (ibid.: 39--43).
O'Connor was a practitioner and advocate of grotesque fiction for two
primary reasons. First, because the writer can only attempt 'truth' by
making herself 'a realist of distances' in a world that is generally
mysterious, illogical and nonsensical. Second, because this 'way of
distortion' can lead to redemption, even if this 'way' might also be
destructive. The literary critic Marshall Bruce Gentry puts this quite
clearly when he asserts that O'Connor's characters often undergo 'a
redemptive experience that they perceive as physical annihilation'
(Gentry, 4). The freaks and misfits, the 'distorted' characters populating
O'Connor's texts, suffer a range of experiences that end in degradation
and, in some cases, annihilation. A salient example of this is the
slaughter of innocents in 'A Good Man is Hard to Find', in which the
chain of causality is largely unexplained and inexplicable. ln this, the
murders are grotesque not only because of the unexpected violence, but
also because of the mystery surrounding their occurrence. Within this
enigma, O'Connor distorts everyday life to reveal darkness and brutality.
However, her texts also suggest the possibility of grace through
redemption by erasing individuality, particularly individual desires,
flaws, and 'freakishness'; 'as they join the community ofthe redeemed',
writes Gentry, 'most O'Connor characters give up their selfhood, thus
freeing themselves from what has oppressed them' (ibid.: 5). ln her texts
about 'maimed souls', then, O'Connor relates life in all its 'grotesque
realism', for she sees in the 'freak . . . a figure for our essential
displacement', nota state of exception. The grotesque is, then, 'a descent
through the darkness of the familiar' that can 'distort without destroying'
and show the possibility as well as the cost of redemption.

GEEKS AND FREAKS

ln Sixteen Candles (1984), like so many American high school movies,
the female protagonist, Samantha, is infatuated with the most popular
and handsome boy in school, Jake. The only boy she can attract, though,
is a homely freshman known as 'the Geek', whom she pushes off the bus
as she yells 'Go to hell!' Here, the figure of the geek is an outcast, a
social pariah, and he is represented in relation to the popular students in
school: the pretty girl, the jock, the handsome preppy, the cheerleader.
Unlike the popular students, who are considered exceptionally normal,
the geek is quite literally 'exceptional' because he is 'extraordinary'. ln
the context of Sixteen Candles, his namelessness makes him exceptional,
and he is extraordinary because he lives in constant exception to the
codes of normalcy within the limited confines of beautiful or ugly, fit or
fat, cool or uncool, exceptional or ordinary. He is off the scale; he is not
'other people'. He is nameless because he is worthless, even disposable.
To quote Beck's song lyrics, 'I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill
me?'
The word 'geek' did not always imply weirdness or social ineptitude.
Nor did it always refer to someone who was too uncool for school. As
the literary critic Leslie Fiedler writes in Freah: .Myths and .lmages ef
theSecretSeij"(1978), the word 'geek' once had a very specific meaning.
It referred to a freak show performer who ate 'repulsive forms of lower
animal life, chiefly chickens and rats - biting off their heads before they
are dead and slobbering his chin with their fetid blood' (Fiedler, 1978:
342). Here, the freak show geek, unlike the high school geek, performs
his abnormality, makes a show of it. If the high school geek seeks
assimilation or invisibility, the freak show geek aspires to be as geeky as
possible by performing his freakish behavior on the carnivalesque stage
of the circus sideshow.
Katherine Dunn's novel Geelc Love (1989) charts the rise and fall of a
travelling camival. This freak show is run by the Binewskis, a family of
freaks who are physically deformed and, as such, they do not need to
perform their freakishness. Instead, it is inscribed on their bodies.
Despite its title, the novel is about freaks, not geeks, and this distinction
is made explicit in the text, for the Binewskis do not like side-show
geeks. Geeks are, from their perspective, not weird enough. For the
geek's freakish behaviour does not make him physically discemible from
other people. Once a sideshow geek steps off the stage, once he finishes
'biting off the heads of living chickens or rats and bolting them down
raw', he can blend into the crowd (Fiedler, 1978: 162). The 'true freak'
is, by contrast, doomed to go through life as one of the 'mistakes God
made' (ibid.: 18). Like the monster who is the freak's mythological
counterpart, the freak's difference is not an act.
The Binewskis are, we are told, freaky to the bone. So freaky, in fact,
that the geeks are, by comparison, quite ordinary. The geeks are 'normal
with a big N': people 'whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and
stultifying that they strive to escape it [through] flamboyant behavior'
(Dunn, 314--15). Yet Lil Binewski, the mother figure, begins her career
as a successful geek. The narrator describes Lil's show in the following
passage:

There never was such a snap and twist of the wrist, such a vampire
flick of the jaws over a neck or such a champagne approach to the
blood. She'd shake her star-white hair and the bitten-off chicken head
would skew off into a comer while she dug her rosy little fingemails
in and lifted the flopping, jittering carcass like a golden goblet, and
sipped! Absolutely sipped at the wriggling guts! She was
magnificent, a princess, a Cleopatra, an elfin queen!
(ibid.: 6)

But Lil soon stops performing, for she believes that her real calling in life
is to produce offspring that transcend the mere performance of eating
live rats and chickens, and she adopts the mantra 'a true freak cannot be
made. A true freak must be bom' (ibid.: 23). Thus, Lil and her husband,
Aloysius, begin 'experimenting with illicit and prescription drugs,
insecticides, and eventually radioisotopes' to produce a range of children
with an 'inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves' (ibid.:
8).
Not all of the experiments are successful. ln fact, Olympia, the
narrator of the story, is reminded of this every time she looks in the
mirror. Despite the fact that Lil 'had been liberally dosed with cocaine,
amphetamines and arsenic' during her pregnancy, Olympia is 'a
disappointment', a relatively normal version of a child who displays
nothing but 'commonplace deformities' (ibid.: 9). An albino dwarfwith a
hunched back, she is more 'normal' than her brother, Arturo, whose
'hands and feet were in the form of flippers that sprouted directly from
his torso'. Nor is she as freakish as her sisters Electra and Iphigenia,
'Siamese twins with perfect upper bodies joined at their waist and
sharing one set of hips and legs' (ibid.: 8-9). Olympia's only consolation
is that she is not like her younger 'normal' brother, Fortuno, whose
ordinariness so disappoints Lil and Aloysius they 'immediately prepared
to abandon him on the doorstep of a closed service station' (ibid.: 9).
The Binewskis' lives are, in a sense, dependent on the normal world.
But they are also detached from it. After all, the family relies on the
money that 'normais' pay to view their freakish bodies, yet they are
strangely distant from the world around them. Olympia, for instance,
repeatedly says that she never knows where she is in the world: 'It may
seem odd that I have no idea what town we were in, but when the show
was alive and functioning . . . it felt like the whole world and it always
looked the sarne no matter where we were' (ibid.: 246). For her and her
family, the only real world is the freak show. Everything else is a
backdrop, a source of revenue that funds the central drama, the freak
show, where even geeks are outsiders, wannabe freaks, who are 'purely,
from tip to toe, from nose to tail, absolutely ... normal' (ibid.: 314).
The Binewskis are grotesques. This is, in part, because they
deliberately attempt to create grotesque bodies that are 'physically
abnormal, but also because Lil thinks that 'matemity itself is
monstrous' (Thomson, 9, Thomson's italics; Makela, 196). Moreover,
they invert the social hierarchy between normal and abnormal, and the
hegemony of everyday life is replaced by the excessive life of the
carnival: the carnival is their everyday life, and the ordinary, the
everyday, is the exception. ln this, Olympia and her family do not use the
word 'grotesque' 'to express disapproval' (Clayborough, 6). 'I've wished
I had two heads' Olympia confesses, 'Or that I was invisible. I've wished
for a fish's tail instead of legs. I've wished to be more special (Dunn, 40,
emphasis added). For the Binewskis there is no love without
freakishness, no intimacy without difference, no harmony without
discord. To be grotesque, to be special, is to partake in the community,
not to be excluded from it.

OPPOSITES ATTRACT
Geelc Love is also a love story: the story of a family united and then tom
apart by love. The Binewskis' love for each other is intensely passionate,
dangerously volatile and explosively violent. ln the novel's gory and fatal
climax, the freak show is incinerated by 'a current of love', an emotion
so powerful and overwhelming that 'they died - my roses - Arty and
Al and Chick and the twins - gone dustwards' as a telepathic wave
emanating from one of the Binewski children tears the family,
figuratively and literally, to pieces (Dunn, 357).
Love that ends in destruction is also present in Tod Browning's 1932
film Freaks. Another story of a travelling freak show, the harmonious
lives and childish innocence of the freaks are tom apart when Hans, a
midget, falls in love with Cleopatra, a beautiful trapeze artist. Frieda,
Hans's former girlfriend and fellow midget, wams him that his attraction
will have dire consequences. But Hans does not listen, for he believes
that Cleopatra is in love with him. ln a key scene in which Hans and
Cleopatra are married, the freaks welcome the bride as one of their own,
chanting the phrase 'One ofus! One ofus!' But Cleopatra responds with
open disgust, distancing herself from the community of freaks and
screaming, 'You dirty slimy freaks! Freaks! Freaks! Get out of here!'
After the marriage, Hans soon realizes that Cleopatra and her lover, the
strongman Hercules, have orchestrated this union so they will have
access to the midget's considerable fortune. ln the end, though, the freaks
take their revenge: they kill Hercules and mysteriously transform
Cleopatra into a grotesque parody of her former beauty. Metamorphosed
into a creature who is half bird, half human, she too becomes 'one of us',
a freak.
The desire to hide, 'cure' or make freaks invisible is a relatively recent
social and cultural phenomenon. Echoing Foucault's arguments about
mental illness in Madness and Civilization, Fiedler asserts that by the
twentieth century 'the reigning figures in politics had begun to break off
the dialogue with the Freaks which had lasted for millennia' (Fiedler,
1978: 15). Writers like Dunn and filmmakers like Browning, in many
ways, attempt to re-establish this 'dialogue' with freaks, since they do
not try to change these people or hide them from the world. Instead, they
recognize that those who live outside the norm have a right to live
unchanged lives, and they reveal the hypocrisy of a hegemonic normalcy
that is simultaneously fascinated by and repulsed from that which is
freakish.
There is, however, a dark side to this dialogue. 'There have always
been', writes Fiedler, 'some who suspected that the appeal of the Freak
show was not unlike pomography', for the gaze of the audience at that
which is freakish replicates the power dynamics of the peep show. 'You
know what the norms really want to ask?' says Electra, one half of the
Siamese twins in Geelc Love, 'What they want to know, all of them but
never do unless they're drunk or simple, is How do we fuck?' (Fiedler,
1978: 232). Whether this is true or not, Browning's film transforms its
audience into voyeurs: the appeal of Freaks is the private view, the peek,
into a world that is not usually accessible. Thus, while Browning reveals
how 'normais' exploit freaks, he and his audience are complicit in the
sarne act of exploitation that is being exposed in the film.
Geelc Love is somewhat different. ln fact, the literary critic Catherine
Spooner argues that 'while the pleasure it provides is partially dependent
on the perception of the difference of that world, and its shocking nature,
there is also a sense in which Olympia invites the reader to share that
world, to become, in the words of Browning's freaks, "one of us"'
(Spooner, 73, emphasis added). Dunn might exploit the twilight zone
between fear and fascination, attraction and repulsion, but she does so in
a very different way than Browning does in Freaks. For there is a
fundamental difference between standing outside, looking in on the
freaks, and partalcing in the experience, thus widening the audience's
perception ofwhat 'us' is meant to be.
The 'us' is important. For if the audience is repulsed by the freaks
because of a sense of extreme othemess, then the 'normal' also finds the
performers alluring precisely because they are in some ways fiice 'us'. ln
this, the freak displays a grotesque and perverse nature that is associated
with a normalizing community that distinguishes 'us' from 'them'. Or, as
Arturo remarks to Olympia, 'do you know what the monsters and
demons and rancid spirits are? Us, that's what. You and me. We are the
things that come to the norms in nightmares' (Dunn, 52). Always
haunted by its other, the normal can never truly escape the lingering
shadow of the abnormal, the freak, the grotesque.
'fHE INHUMAN
As we have seen, the grotesque is about the transgression of limits and
boundaries. 'The grotesque', argues the art critic Kirsten Hoving 'exists
in opposition to things that have clear identities' and 'undoes form'.
Grotesque works are often signposted, she continues, by 'parasitic
prefixes [sucking] life from what it is not, becoming müshapen,
deformed, unfocused, indistinct, tbsintegrated, and anttthetical' (Hoving,
220). It is in this context that grotesquerie can negate the human and
simultaneously highlight the inhuman; after all, grotesque literature is a
discourse that is, perhaps more than any other, concemed with
questioning and unsettling assumptions about what is human and what is
not human. Such questioning and unsettling is especially characteristic of
writing related to grotesque in works of Shakespeare, Poe and Kafka in
that they present a disquieting, irresolvable mixture of what it means to
be human and what it means to be inhuman. At times the inhuman is
demonized. At other times it is celebrated in what is called a 'posthuman
condition' in which inhuman technologies are integrated into the self.
But often the inhuman relation to the grotesque presents a space in which
the notion of humanity itself, and the distinctions between the human and
the inhuman, are fundamentally unsettled, thrown into question,
discombobulated.
The word 'inhuman' has often been seen as pejorative. It has been
used to denote 'a lack of humanity and great cruelty'. It has referred to
'coldness and unfeeling' or 'not seeming to be human, or not typical of
human beings'. Such definitions place the inhuman in direct opposition
to humanity, situating it at the opposing pole of a continuum. To
circumvent this binary, grotesquerie represents the inhuman as
simultaneously 'inside' and 'outside', for the inhuman is always 'in
humanity': it is in-human or 'in the human'. As such, grotesque forms
complicate, but also complement, theories of the 'non-human' and the
'post-human'. The inhuman is, then, the othemess that always inhabits
the human from the inside. This othemess cannot be accounted for or
rationalized, or in any way reassimilated into ordinary life, though it is a
permanent part of that ordinary life. The inhuman is the other side of the
human or cohabitant with humanity. 'Inhumanity', nevertheless, is not
the proper name for this companion of the human, as if it were an
allegorical meaning identified at last. 'Inhumanity' is a catachresis for
what can never be properly named.
ln China Miéville's novel Perdido Street Station (2000)., the presence
of the inhuman transgresses the borders between desire and disgust,
attraction and repulsion. As in Geelc Love and Freah, the plot of
Miéville's text revolves around the attraction of species that are not
usually allowed to mix. Isaac, who is human, falls in love with Lin, who
is a khepri: she belongs to a species of insectlike beings with humanoid
bodies and insect heads. As lovers, Isaac and Lin try to overcome the
in/human gap even in the most intimate of settings. For instance, in a
post-coital breakfast scene, Isaac watches the 'huge iridescent scarab that
was his lover's head devour her breakfast', and although he admits that
'when she ate Lin was most alien', he does not express disgust in his
observation. Rather, as Isaac readily acknowledges, her alien nature, her
bizarre mix of human and non-human qualities, is attractive to him: 'He
smiled at her. She undulated her headlegs at him and signed, A&
monster. Iam a pervert, thought Isaac, andsois she' (Miéville, 13).
Perversion is that which is considered aberrant in relation to the
standards of normalcy. Perversion is 'abnormal'; it is 'deviant'. ln this,
there is a link between perversion and the grotesque, and yet because
perversion is closely linked to desire and pleasure the pervert does not
necessarily see his acts as repulsive or grotesque. Indeed, disgust and
repulsion do not figure in Miéville's description of Isaac and Lin's sex
life. Even though these passages include grotesque qualities and an
objectionable strangeness, they are erotically charged. The narrator
states,

She angled up on one elbow and, as he watched, the dark ruby of her
carapace opened slowly while her headlegs splayed. The two halves
of her headshell quivered slightly, held as wide as they would go.
From beneath their shade she spread her beautiful, useless little
wmgs.
She pulled his hands towards them gently, invited him to stroke the
fragile things, totally vulnerable, an expression of trust and love
unparalleled for the khepri.
 The air between them charged. Isaac's cock stiffened.
(ibid.: 18)

As in Geelc Love, the audience is invited to gaze at and enjoy the 'geek
love' of Miéville's characters. Descriptions of human-insect sex run the
risk of repelling the reader. But the sensual depictions of the sex and the
sympathetic expressions of physical desire are more akin to alien
eroticism, for the focus is on pleasure, not disgust. ln this, Miéville's
descriptions are caught up in the complex matrix of attraction/repulsion
in representations of sexual acts: 'one of the enigmas of disgust lies in
the fact that the emotion can also attract; therefore the occasions when it
beckons and fascinates are especially intriguing' (Korsmeyer, 19-20).
Isaac is not always tolerant of hybrid human-animal life forms. His
world includes a variety of inhuman figures, from the cactacae (giant
plant people resembling cacti) to garudas (avian creatures part humanoid,
part bird) to constructs (mechanical automatons that occasionally evolve
into artificial intelligence). Perdido Street Station is crawling with many
inhuman figures, some of which are biological while others are
mechanical. Most intriguing of all are the Remades, creatures that, unlike
the cactacea, garudas and khepri, were not bom into an inhuman state.
On the contrary, Remades are, as their name suggests, by-products of
forced alterations; they are bioengineered creatures, once human, that
have been transformed into inhuman beings. The Remades are not
artificial monsters created from scratch; rather, they are retrofitted human
beings that have become something e/se. Exactly what they have become
is difficult to establish, for they are defined by metamorphosis, their
Remaldng, rather than the blurred state ofbeing in/human.
It is this uncertainty, this indistinctness, which Isaac finds repulsive.
For him, the Remades exemplify a form of the 'combinatory grotesque'
which is, according to Frances S. Connelly, 'the aberration from ideal
form or from accepted convention' that 'combine[s] unlike things in
order to challenge established realities or construct new ones' (Connelly,
2). But while Isaac is attracted to the 'combinatory grotesque' of his
lover Lin, the Remades' mix of human and inhuman attributes provokes
disgust. Isaac's sympathy for the garudas and his admiration for the
cactacae do not extend to the Remades, who only inspire his 'pity and
anger and disgust' (Miéville, 111 ). When he tries to procure a garuda, for
instance, he is 'crushingly disappointed' when he discovers it is a
Remade altered to look like a garuda, and he is outraged by the
'disgusting charade [of] something as grotesque as this' (ibid.: 113).
The distinction between these hybrid forms is that of birth and retrofit,
nature and artifice. Although the love between Isaac and Lin is pure and
natural, the Remades are considered to be impure and unnatural
creatures. The non-human should not be, the narrative suggests, grafted
onto the human. While a union of human and inhuman can be perversely
attractive in terms of interspecies love, the altered state of the Remade
elicits disgust: the machinery and animal parts that replace human limbs
and organs are seen to create deformed versions of what was once
properly human. To become Remade is the ultimate travesty, an
unacceptable pollution of the human, for abjection lacks boundaries, and
the confusion ofthe subject's body excites the power ofhorror.

TERRIFYING AND COMIC

ln his short story 'The Metamorphosis' (1915), Franz Kafka offers
similar depictions of attraction and repulsion, alongside the human and
the inhuman. Like Miéville's Remades, Kafka's protagonist Gregor
Samsa is transformed into a freakishly inhuman figure. Unlike the
Remades, though, Gregor's body is not just a conglomerate of human,
machine and animal; rather, he awakes one moming to find his entire
body has been distorted into something distinctly inhuman. ln fact, he is
so inhuman that it is difficult to determine exactly what Gregor has
become. No longer a man, he is an 'ungeheueres Ungerziefer (in the
original text), a vague German term that refers to what he is no longer
rather than what he has become. English translations often lack the
subtlety or fail to convey the rich ambiguity of the German expression.
As Marina Wamer notes,

Variously seen by his several antagonists as a cockroach, a dung

beetle, and a monstrous vermin (' ungeheueres Ungerziefer), Gregor
has lost his humanity and, with it, his human appetites and habits: he
is UN-done, and several of the words used in German begin with this
 prefix, UN-, to denote his passage into an uncanny state of non-
being.
(Warner, 114)

Gregor's physical disharmony engenders a breakdown in the terminology

of classification. He is a 'non-being': he exists somewhere in a void
between the human and the inhuman, normal and freakish. 'Gregor is a
human being', writes Philip Thomson, 'but at the same time a monstrous
insect' and this leads to a confusion of human/inhuman that is terrifying
for Gregor and his family (Thomson, 7, emphasis added). This
dehumanization inflames a sense of abject horror in that if it can happen
to Gregor, then it can happen to anyone. This is compounded by the fact
that the ruin of Gregor's 'humanity' is also the ruin of his family, for he
is their only means of financial support.
But Kafka's text is also comic. Gregor shuffles around his bedroom
like a human insect, while remonstrating that his new condition is
nothing more than a 'slight indisposition, a dizzy spell' (Kafka, 84). The
absurdity of Gregor's situation includes comic elements based on the
ludicrous combination of the scenario and the character's dismissive
reaction to his utterly surreal circumstances. ln this, we see how 'several
contradictory feelings are aroused by the grotesque; we smile at the
deformations but are appalled by the horrible and monstrous elements as
such' (Kayser, 31). Kafka's story, then, is comically grotesque precisely
because it moves from the horror of Gregor's insect/beetle/vermin state
to his 'banal worries about everyday matters' (Thomson, 7). Here,
Kafka's use of grotesque imagery includes 'a co-presence of the
ludicruous with the monstrous, the disgusting or the horrifying' (ibid.:
14, Thomson's emphasis). Gregor's inexplicable transformation is a
nightmare scenario. Yet the narrator's lack of explanation also makes the
story absurdly comical andterrifying. Indeed, Gregor's state of denial in
the face of physical evidence is humorous because it contrasts with the
gravity of the situation. This is grotesquely disproportionate and, as such,
it invites laughter. But this laughter is not without discomfort because the
reader remains unclear as to whether or not this is a joke: 'Kafka's
grotesques are cold grotesques', Wolfgang Kayser asserts, for we never
know when 'we are supposed to smile ... and when we are supposed to
shudder' (Kayser, 148-49).
By contrast, Nikolai Gogol's short story 'The Nose' (1836) includes
sincere grotesques. This is because the comic elements in Gogol's text
are much less ambiguous than those found in 'The Metamorphosis'. ln
'The Nose', the official Kovaloff wakes up one moming and finds that
his nose has disappeared: 'instead of his nose', the narrator states, 'he
had a perfectly smooth vacancy in his face' (Gogol, 60). At the sarne
time, on the other side of the city, Kovaloff s barber, Ivan, cuts into the
loaf of bread he is having for breakfast. He finds that,

After he had cut the loaf in two halves, he looked, and to his great
astonishment saw something whitish sticking in it. He carefully
poked round it with his knife, and felt it with his finger. [ ... ] He put
in his finger, and drew out - a nose ! Ivan Jakovlevitch at first let
his hands fall from sheer astonishment; then he rubbed his eyes and
began to feel it. A nose, an actual nose; and, moreover, it seemed to
be the nose of an acquaintance! Alarm and terror were depicted in
Ivan's face; but these feelings were slight in comparison with the
disgust which took possession ofhis wife.
(ibid.: 58)

Alarmed by discovering a nose in his meal, Ivan throws the displaced

appendage into the river. But this does not end the matter. For the nose
retums, dressed in full regalia and is placed atop a carriage that coiffeurs
it around the city. Eventually, and equally inexplicably, the nose is
retumed to Kovaloff. But how is he meant to reattach his nose to his
face? ln the end, all is well: the nose resumes its former place, and
Kovaloff resumes his normal life.
Gogol's text is 'a remarkable tale about the ordinary', but it has been
read as a 'satire on social climbers' (Hardy and Stanton, 128; Spycher,
361). Whatever the case may be, the absurdity of the text provokes
laughter and terror, moving fluidly from the terrifying to the comic, from
horror to laughter. Yet the ludicrous exaggeration of Gogol's narrative
provides clear-cut cues for those occasions when the reader is meant to
laugh or tremble. To awake without a nose is no laughing matter. Nor is
it funny to find a body part in a loaf of bread. But the absurdity of the
nose then living a life of its own, dressing up and riding about town, is so
exceptionally strange that the ridiculous eclipses the terrifying. Unlike
Kafka's 'cold grotesques', the grotesquerie of Gogol's story offers
readers a clear sense of when to smile and when to shudder.
 7
LAUGH'I'ER AND
GROTESQUE

The grotesque could be described as an embodiment of abject. A

form of humorous monstrosity devised for satiric purposes, the
grotesque marries the repulsive and the comic
Andrew Stott, Comedy (2005: 87)

The humorous, the satiric and the comic are all associated with grotesque
texts and all of these forms can, at least potentially, provoke the emotive
and physical response of laughter. Laughter can be light-hearted,
cathartic, regenerative, liberatory or good-humoured; it can signal
hilarity and excitement. But it can also have a dark side: laughter can be
ridiculing, alienating, inclusive/ exclusive and hierarchical; it is
sometimes associated with intoxication or even madness, as in hysterical
laughter; and it can include scathing wit, the politically-charged weapon
of irony, the blatant attack or merely condescension. At one extreme,
laughter can be a response to horror and a means of survival deeply
rooted in a literary and visual culture preoccupied with terror and
surmounting its effects. Even the metaphors we live by signal the 'Janus
face' of laughter; after all, we speak of something being 'dead funny',
laughing ourselves to tears, or even laughing ourselves to death. Such
expressions highlight the relentless shift from life to death and back
again, as well as the multi-vocal, multi-political and multi-emotive
complexities of laughter. ln this sense, laughter is a serious business,
particularly when serious content and the physical response of laughter
coexist with, and reflect, one another.
How does laughter relate to grotesque? ln the above quotation, the
literary critic Andrew Stott points to some of the ways we might
conceive of how the repulsive and the comic, the humorous and the
monstrous, can merge in certain representations of gro-tesquerie. What
Stott identifies is how the defamiliarization of the human body can erupt
in a form of grotesque laughter that is roused by juxtapositions,
disjunctions, ambiguities, deformities, hybridities, exaggerations,
caricatures or disorders. This incitement to laughter is, in part, linked to
the movement between the real, the grotesque realism of the body, and
the unreal, the bizarre distortions of the 'real' body through exaggeration
and caricature. This intersection of laughter and the grotesque is also
explored by the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, whose book
Laughter (1900) suggests that 'certain deformities undoubtedly possess
over others the sorry privilege of causing some persons to laugh; some
hunchbacks, for instance, will excite laughter' (Bergson, 75). Physical
deformities, he continues, provoke a particularly grotesque form of
laughter when they can be successfully imitated. ln this, the caricaturist
and the grotesque artist often imitate and exaggerate deformed bodies so
that, for example, the paintings of fifteenth-century Dutch artist
Hieronymus Bosch and German painter Matthias Grünewald or the
comedy found in Rabelais' texts often include potbellied monsters and
gargantuan creatures, figures with bodies that are exaggerated, absurd or
out of control.

LAUGHfE.ll AND GROTESQUE BODIES

Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Miller's Tale' offers an early literary example of the
complex relationship between laughter and grotesque bodies. Described
variously as a vulgar, ribald, bawdy, humorous, comic, repulsive and
satirical fabliau, this tale is told by the drunken miller, Robyn, who
recounts the narrative of the amorous student, Nicholas. The student
tricks his landlord, John, into believing that a flood of Biblical
proportions is imminent in order to distract him so that Nicholas can
sleep with John's young wife, Alison. An absurd character, Absalon, also
fancies Alison and once John is sidelined, and his wife is enjoying a
night with Nicholas, Absalon appears at her window and asks for a kiss.
She agrees. But instead of offering him her lips she puts her bare
posterior out the window and, in the dark, Absalon kisses her arse.
Humiliated by the ruse, Absalon returns with a hot poker and when
Nicholas tries to repeat the joke and adom it with a rip-roaring fart, the
scorching instrument is thrust into his anus.
Wit and mockery are, in Chaucer's text, part of a comic form of a
grotesque mode that invites the reader to laugh at the bawdy images of
bodies that are debased by farts, arse-kissing and hot pokers. Crude
content, then, speaks to the degradation associated with the grotesque as
a 'lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to
the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble
unity' (Bakhtin, [1941] 1984: 20). ln this, the comic joins with the
grotesque to generate laughter, and this response is based on prohibitions
related to sexual transgression, religious hypocrisy, ridicule and deceit.
The impact of Chaucer's text would be considerably less without the
comic depictions of bodily functions and the painful outcomes that those
bodies must endure. The comic grotesque, the source of laughter, is thus
linked to that which is simultaneously attractive, the funny and humorous
representations of the body, and the repulsive, appalling images of the
body suffering pain. ln this case, laughter arises from the absurdity of the
bawdy comedy alongside the cruel outcomes, thus inciting a potentially
conflicting response in readers, one in which we are pulled between the
liberation of the camivalesque body and another in which we are
disturbed by the suffering of physical pain, as well as the designation of
John as a madman who is made the subject of communal laughter.
ln his essay on Shakespeare's King Lear, 'King Lear and the Comedy
of the Grotesque', G. Wilson Knight points to the juxtaposition of Lear's
madness and the Fool's piercing laughter. Indeed, the maniacal laughter
that is sometimes associated with insanity is often grotesque because it is
disturbing and abnormal and can ignite a range of emotions from humour
to fear to pity. ln 'The Miller's Tale', madness and laughter come
together after the carpenter, who is convinced the flood has arrived after
hearing Nicholas's cries for water to cool his scorched arse, cuts the
cords that hold him and his mini ark to the roof beams. He crashes to the
ground and the joke is on him:
 All starting laughing at his lunacy
And streamed upstairs to gape and pry and poke,
And treated all his suffering as a joke.
No matter what the carpenter asserted
It went for nothing, no one was converted;
With powerful oaths they swore the fellow down
And he was held for mad by all the town;
The students all ganged up with one another
Saying: 'The fellow's crazy, my dear brother!'
And every one among them laughed and joked.
And so the carpenter's wife was truly poked,
As ifhis jealousy to justify,
And Absalon has kissed her nether eye
And Nicholas is branded on the bum
And God bring all ofus to Kingdom Come.
(Chaucer, 106)

This passage (quoted from Nevill Coghill's modem English translation of

the text) combines the comic and the serious. For the humour advanced
by the joke played on the carpenter intersects with the seriousness of his
being abused, cuckolded and pronounced insane. Here, the laughter of
the students is a response to another's humiliation, degradation and
suffering and, as a result, it distinguishes between the categories of
superiority and inferiority: those who are in a position to laugh are
superior to those who are laughed at. ln this, grotesque laughter can be
brutal, tormenting, perverse and cruel, particularly when it manifests
itself in a collective form that marginalizes a group or displaces an
individual from the majority.
The grotesque and laughter also intersect in the absurdity of the action,
the sense of the ludicrous at the heart of Chaucer's tale. The complicated
and involved trick played on John and his nonsensical belief that the
world is ending beggars belief and, as such, the irrational responses are
linked to the grotesque in its manifestations of the distorted body. The
contortions and distortions of the body, burning bums, arse-kissing and
John's quite literal fall from a great height, ground the absurdity of the
text in corporality and inspire laughter among both the characters in the
tale and readers. ln a formal fashion, the descriptions of absurdity,
cruelty and physical decadence gesture toward Julia Kristeva's notion of
the 'laughter of the apocalypse' in which 'absurdity, stupidity, violence,
sorrow, moral and physical degeneracy locate them ... in that interspace
between abjection and fascination' (Kristeva, 1982: 204). This is a
'horrified laughter', the comedy of abjection, whereby the apocalypse
engenders 'a horror close to ecstacy', and the laughter here is a horrified
and fascinated exclamation, 'an apocalyptic laughter' (ibid.: 204).
One of the masters of grotesque laughter is Jonathan Swift, whose
essay 'A Modest Proposal' ( 1729) is a complex mixture of parody, irony
and satire. A parody of the genre of the political treatise and pamphlet,
Swift uses a form of narratorial irony that revolves around the
disjunction of a 'rational' genre of persuasion and the absurdity of the
content that is 'modestly' proposed to attack the gluttony and hypocrisy
of the ruling class over lreland. Here, the voice of the narrator uses a
serious tone to put forward an outrageous plan: the social problems of
poverty and hunger in lreland can be resolved by selling Irish babies as
delicacies to be eaten by the wealthy and privileged citizens who
comprise the ruling elite. The result would be beneficial, the narrator
maintains, because lrish children would no longer be a burden on their
parents; rather, they would provide a valuable source of income for Irish
families in need. ln this text, Juvenalian satire provokes laughter through
a tone of bitter indignation, calling attention to an appalling situation
through exaggeration and the double voicing of irony. The seriousness of
the tone of the first-person narrative voice is disrupted by an 'implied
author' who is making a political point about grotesque power and the
corrupt, unethical behaviour of the English government in its suppression
and exploitation of Ireland under colonial rule.
A far more politically problematic form of grotesque laughter is
present in the various styles of irony used in Swift's poem, 'The Lady's
Dressing Room' (1732). Here, he offers an obscene and scatological
satire directed at women, and particularly women's bodies. Sometimes
read as an example of misogynistic discourse, the text describes the
character Strephon, who ventures through the vacant dressing room of
'lady' Celia. Beginning with an ideal image of her, the poetic speaker
looks through the eyes of Stre-phon and compiles a meticulous list of the
contents of the room. What he discovers are objects that repulse him: he
finds sweaty smocks, dirt-filled combs, oily cloths, grimy towels, snot
encrusted handkerchiefs, jars of spit, cosmetics derived from dog urine,
anda mucky, rancid clothes chest. The exposure of this bodily waste is
articulated through ironic layers of a poetic voice that moves from
mockery to ridicule and identifies the 'lady' as a ludicrous and grotesque
figure.
This view into the dressing room emphasizes the distinctions between
Celia's private and public personae. Indeed, the opening line of the poem,
'Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)', scoffs at the time-consuming
acts she indulges in to prepare herself for public presentation, and the
speaker's tone suggests that this metamorphosis, from a smelly
unattractive creature to a 'sweet and cleanly' 'beautiful self, is unnatural
and nonsensical. The poetic voice itemizes what Strephon sees in the
following stanza:

And first a dirty smock appeared,

Beneath the armpits well besmeared.
Strephon, the rogue, displayed it wide,
And turned it round on every side.
On such a point few words are best,
And Strephon bids us guess the rest,
But swears how damnably the men lie,
ln calling Celia sweet and cleanly.
Now listen while he next produces
The various combs for various uses,
 Filled up with dirt so closely fixt,
No brush could force a way betwixt.
A paste of composition rare,
Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead and hair;
A forehead cloth with oil upon't
To smooth the wrinkles on her front;
Here alum flower to stop the steams,
Exhaled from sour unsavory streams,
There night-gloves made of Tripsy's hide,
Bequeathed by Tripsy when she died,
With puppy water, beauty's help
Distilled from Tripsy's darling whelp;
Here gallypots and vials placed,
Some filled with washes, some with paste,
Some with pomatum, paints and slops,
And ointments good for scabby chops.
Hard by a filthy basin stands,
Fouled with the scouring ofher hands;
The basin takes whatever comes
The scrapings ofher teeth and gums,
A nasty compound of all hues,
For here she spits, and here she spews.

Through this list of obscene images, the speaker uses hyperbole as a

deliberate tactic of exaggeration for laughable effect. But the laughter is
not benign. For the exposure is vicious and designed to deride what the
speaker views as disgusting, ghastly and repulsive. ln fact, the grotesque
imagery of this extract arises both from the exaggeration of the
description and its attention to physical details (sweat, dandruff, scabs
and scrapings from the mouth) so that Celia is magnificently mocked
and, by extension, the voice disseminates an offensive attitude towards
women that is provocative. ln fact, this emphasis on facial features and
body parts culminates in the horrifying representation of her excrement.
Upon discovering her chamber pot, Strephon is overcome by fits: 'Oh!
Celia, Celia, Celia shits !'

LAUGHfE.ll AND THE CARNIVAL

Grotesque laughter is also theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin, who writes that
'the bodily element is deeply positive' in laughter, particularly when it is
'presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres
of life, but as something universal, representing all the people. As such it
is opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world'
(Bakhtin, [1914] 1984: 19). Laughter is, in other words, intimately
connected to the individual's body, but it can also be part of a communal
celebratory experience within the body politic. The problem, Bakhtin
suggests, is that views of the body and laughter change over time, and in
his reading of Gargantua and Pantagruel he views laughter historically.
Bakhtin writes,

The Renaissance conception of laughter can be roughly described as

follows: Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning, it is one of the
essential forms of the truth conceming the world as a whole,
conceming history and man; it is a peculiar point of view relative to
the world; the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more)
profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint.
(ibid.: 66)

This stands in stark contrast to

the attitude toward laughter of the seventeenth century and of the

years that followed [which] can be characterized in the following
manner. Laughter is nota universal, philosophical form. It can refer
only to individual, and individually typical, phenomena of social life.
 (ibid.: 67)

The difference between these two types of laughter is mockery: a form

of laughter that is not inclusive or communal, but which isolates the
mocked individual from the group. ln mocking someone, the person is
individualized and separated through the discursive construction of a
hierarchy: 'The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above
the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it.' By contrast, the form of
laughter found in Rabelais' texts does the opposite in that it 'expresses
the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to
it' (ibid.: 12). Unlike modem laughter, then, pre-modem 'laughter is not
a subjective, individual and biological consciousness of the uninterrupted
flow of time. It is the social consciousness of all the people' (ibid.: 92).
This loss, this replacement of the universal with the individual, is
mirrored in the distinction between a pre-modem and modem conception
of the body. By way of illustrating this shift, Bakhtin tracks the reduced
significance of the once plentiful 'grotesque body', as exemplified in the
monstrous size and excessive appetites of Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Indeed, the bodies of these characters are grotesque because their
corpulence cannot be clearly delineated from the world around them.
'Contrary to modem canons', Bakhtin writes, 'the grotesque body is not
separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, complete unit; it is
unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits' (ibid.: 26). This
is something Rabelais repeats throughout his texts and, in so doing, he
focusses on the 'apertures' of the body, 'the open mouth, the genital
organs, the breasts, the phallus' and the material that flows back and
forth between these body parts and the world (ibid.: 26). For Bakhtin, the
material world is one of decay and regeneration, in the sense that life
itself, undemeath the social hierarchies that seek to control it, is
perceived as an energetic process of constant deformation and renewal.
William Hogarth, the eighteenth-century painter and engraver best
known for his series of 'modem moral subjects' Fhe Harlot's Progress
(1732), Fhe J?alce's Progress (1733-35), and .Marriage à la .Mode (1743-
45), used caricature to inspire laughter by exposing the hypocrisy, desire,
greed, lust and gluttonous appetites associated with grotesque bodies in
the eighteenth century. Using caricature to foreground vice, Hogarth's
work is political in that it often ridicules the ruling elite, similar to
contemporary political cartoonists. ln the sets of cartoons from his
'morality plays', he reveals horrid examples of debauchery and the
'temptations' of the body: a country girl succumbs to the temptations of
fashionable London society; an aristocratic rake continues his ruinous
pleasure by marrying wealthy women of lower status for their fortunes; a
young man at an orgy is consumed by the overindulgence of wine and
sex. All of these scenes are social critiques of those privileged citizens
who will not live by 'solid' middle-class virtues. Laughter is a vital
feature of these works: the faces on some of the painted, or engraved,
figures are laughing, and the audience is also invited to laugh at the
'carryings on' ofthe corrupt members of society.
Hogarth's 1751 print entitled Gin Lane is a striking example of how
his work revolves around grotesque imagery: the misfortunes that beset
the gin drinkers in the picture are horrific and include the atrocious
violence associated with the loss of bodily control and addiction. ln fact,
in this street scene, bodies are brutalized and subject to death. ln the
foreground, for instance, Hogarth shows a baby falling to its death due to
its mother's drunkenness, and subsequent lack of attention, and a ballad
seller sprawls dead from drink at the foot of the steps. ln the middle
right, another baby is impaled on a spit, and in the background we see a
body being buried. A man also dangles from a noose in the upper right,
as the undertaker's sign (the coffin) hangs conspicuously in the centre of
the picture, parallel to the gin seller's emblematic tankard, as if depicting
a line of causation in which gin drinking leads to corruption, bodily
decay and eventual death. The print is full of violence, but the gin
drinkers are not the source of the violence; they are its victims. The
source of violence, rather, comes from the surrounding buildings: the gin
seller's tankards, the undertaker's coffin, the pawnbroker's sign, those
who profit from the ruin of others are the cause of this scene of
debauchery and destruction. Here, the 'reversible' scheme of the comic
operates, implicating those who feel most exempt by their moral and
social distance from the subject, notably Hogarth's middle-class viewers.
ln 1751, Hogarth also issued four printed engravings, The Four Stages
efCruelty, depicting the unsavoury descent of a protagonist, Tom Nero,
from crime and murder to the anatomist's dissecting table. Beginning
with the torture of a dog in the First Stage ef Cruell)l, the young Nero
progresses to beating his horse in the Second Stage of Cruelty and the
narrative progression of grotesque cruelty continues in the third print,
Cruel/)! in Pe,jection, where Nero is seen to have embarked on a life of
crime through highway robbery. ln this print, he is apprehended after
committing a murder in the dead of night. Hogarth emphasizes that the
reality of being a highwayman is far from the glamorous, romantic
existence presented by popular heroes such as Captain Macheath in John
Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). Nero's grotesque appearance conveys
the inherent viciousness of his character and his brutal way of life. His
victim, Ann Gill, his lover and partner-in-crime, lies prostrate on the
floor, her throat slit and her swollen stomach indicates that she died
while pregnant.
Grotesquerie is heightened in the final print, The l?eward efCruel/)!, a
macabre image that was calculated to de-romanticize criminality and its
consequences. Having been tried and found guilty of murder, Nero has
now been hanged and his body is taken for the ignominious process of
public dissection. This image shows the roughness and brutality of
execution and its aftermath: Nero's body is taken from the gallows and
mutilated by surgeons in the anatomical theatre, dissected for the purpose
of studying anatomy. The image is framed by two skeletons, the remains
of previous executions and dissections, who are pointing at one another
and seemingly surveying the scene before them. The dissectors are
shown to have as much feeling for the corpse as Nero had for his victims:
Nero's eye is poked out, a dog feeds on his heart, his stomach has been
sliced open and his entrails spill onto the floor. To heighten the horror of
the scene, the face of the cadaver is contorted and his finger points to the
boiled bones being prepared for display, indicating his ultimate fate.
The J?eward ef Cruell)l lacks the humour of Hogarth's other work. ln
fact, the seriousness of the scene is conveyed through the chief surgeon,
who is presented as sitting in the centre of the scene on a high-backed
chair below the royal coat of arms, thus resembling a high court judge.
This represents the official process of judgment and punishment, which
in the case of hanged criminais could extend beyond death itself through
the refusal of a Christian burial. Yet the men in the theatre express a
bloodthirsty over-enthusiasm at the dissection of the body and the boiling
of the bones in situ. And at least two of the men are laughing: one laughs
as he inserts an instrument into Nero's eye socket, the other as he
watches the dissection while chatting with his colleague. Laughter in the
face of this mutilated corpse is engendered by superiority: the audience is
physically above the dissection, positioned above the cadaver, signifying
their distance and supremacy to the criminal body. Here, the observers in
the anatomical theatre are privy to a spectacle of denigration and, as a
result, their laughter is not just inspired by the capturing of the
transgressor and the administration of punishment; it is also engendered
by the grotesque display of the specimen corpse that is dehumanized by
being carved up like meat on a butcher's table.
Although laughter might be characterized as an emotive response,
there is also an historical dimension to laughter. This is significant
because it speaks to the cultural politics of laughter. The broadly
subversive account of laughter is, as we have seen, expressed by Mikhail
Bakhtin, whose own account arises out of a more general theory that
links the body and laughter with camival and the camivalesque.
Laughter, which he sees as linked to historical contexts, is a response
associated with the popular energies of the camival: the overthrow of
authority, the dismissal of the sacred, the dissemination of counter
discourses and the grotesque realism of the body. The camival is, then, a
popular practice that deflates official seriousness and exposes social
artifice and the monologic language of authority.
The novel Not Without Laughter (1930) by the African-American poet
and prose writer Langston Hughes includes a chapter entitled 'Camival'
that sheds light on the early twentieth-century historical links between
laughter and the grotesque. Here, the camival is a weapon in the battle
between popular cultural energies and the forces of authority associated
with religious practice in a rural African-American community in
Kansas. Set during a week in summer in which a camival and a religious
reviva! meeting rival for the attention of audiences drawn from the
town's population, the text dramatizes the power of a single authority,
notably by the simultaneous co-presence of competing discourses to the
point where 'the mouming songs of the Christians could be heard rising
from the Hickory Woods while the profound syncopation of the minstrel
band blared from Galoway's Lots, strangely intermingling their notes of
praise and joy' (Hughes, 109). Within this social and political context,
the rituais of camival and revival are not so much illustrations of the
camivalesque as a ritual of inversion. Indeed, the world is tumed upside
down when the binaries of the camival's 'sinners' and revival's
'believers' merge together in a cacophony of voices to disrupt
oppositional ideologies.
The 'Carnival' chapter in Not Without Laughter begins with the
grotesque image of the young Sandy hollering and wailing after a rusty
nail penetrates the heel of his foot. To ease his pain, Jimboy takes the
boy, who 'hobbled along on his sore foot, a rag tied about his heel', to
the camival grounds. Once there, Sandy is enthralled by the tents and
booths of the camival, which include, among other things, a Galatea
illusion, a circus sideshow, a minstrel show, a fim house and, the most
popular attraction, a freak-show. Here, bodies are contorted and
manipulated for onlookers who are enthralled by the sword-swallowers,
electric marvels and human glass-eaters. At this exhibit, Sandy sees two
'human abnormalities', a fat woman and a wildman, both of whom are
on a platform, putting their odd bodies on display for the audience (ibid.:
112). These 'creatures' are a conglomeration of abjection and physical
grotesquerie that embodies the light-hearted display of freakish
deformities in the modem camival. ln this, the exaggerated and bizarre
figures have the potential to provoke a form of laughter that is inspired
by various grotesque bodies.
Before Sandy's heel becomes 'swollen purple' and needs to be bound
in bacon rind, he goes to the camival's minstrel-show. Here, the racial
grotesque emerges as the racialized body excites laughter. The show is
set against the backdrop of a Southem American plantation where three
'blacked up' men and two 'women in bandannas' sing nostalgically
about Dixie. Suddenly, 'Sambo and Rastus' appear on the stage shooting
dice until a ghost is conjured up, scaring the men away and leaving the
gambling money behind as they run off (ibid.: 116). The scene is
received with coarse mirth: 'the audience thought it screamingly fimny -
and just like niggers' (ibid.: 116). Throughout the show, blackface
minstrelsy provokes laughter by using their bodies to reinscribe racial
difference by lampooning African-Americans as lazy, buffoonish, dim-
witted, musical and superstitious. Such bodily, and racially, inspired
laughter constructs an inside and outside through discourses of
difference, signaling stereotypes and positions of inclusion and
exclusion: who is at the centre and who is at the periphery? This
positioning is reasserted in Hughes' text when a blues performer sings
what Sandy says is 'the saddest music in the world' while the 'white
people around him laughed' with delight (ibid.: 117).
As we have seen, the site of grotesquerie is often the human body,
particularly how the body is viewed and performed, 'resulting in deeply
ambiguous and divided reactions to the horror of corporeality and oneself
as an organism' (Stott, 87). ln the context of the American racial politics
of the early twentieth century, this raises a significant question: what is
the proximity of humanity to the body? Indeed, it is the unresolved
nature of the scenario of making the human into the non-human that
gives the racial grotesque its particular force. ln his study of race and
grotesque, Leonard Cassuto argues that the preoccupation with 'racial
objectivication' is an attempt to institutionalize racial difference in an
American context and to dehumanize 'blackness', to identify African
Americans as non-human in relation to white citizens (Cassuto, 7). From
this perspective, blackface minstrelsy, as in, for instance, the figure of
Sambo, is a form of grotesque because it attempts to blur the distinctions
between human and non-human. Thus, the minstrel show includes the
reduction of subjectivity to materiality and performance, and the
paralleling of cognitive categories of bodily conceptions of race. This
type of performance, though, indicates how neither performance nor the
body in the racial grotesque is a closed system defined by clear limits.
Rather, performance as well as a body reaches out beyond its boundaries
and interacts with the emotive response of laughter. For in the reduction
of the black subject to a stereotype where the 'face' is used to signify the
'person', the site of the body produced by this inadequate mimesis is
deployed as a possible source of resistance to the containment of a
'white' imitation.
Such a routine does not just reinscribe racial stereotypes in the United
States. It also revolves around particular forms of caricature that isolate
particular features in its subjects, such as the blackened face and the
white gloves, to manipulate certain qualities through grotesque
distortions in order to emphasize racial difference. The racial grotesque,
then, includes the category of confusion: the racialized body is
simultaneously human and non-human. This arises out of the
contradictory imperatives to recognize the humanity of some subjects
and to deny recognition to others, which generates juxtapositions,
tensions and contradictions about a body that is inscribed with racial
difference. The racialized grotesque, then, is always the focus of a
corporeal and in-human conflict, for it revolves around a contradiction in
which person-hood is simultaneously represented and denied. ln the end,
any attempt to tum a person into a thing on the basis of race can never be
truly successful simply because it cannot repress the human energy that it
seeks to efface.
The laughter of the white audience at the minstrel show in Hughes's
text is part of this process. For this laughter can be understood as part of
what the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes calls
the superiority associated with this kind of response: the laughter that
reasserts hierarchical divisions and power relations. Like the racist joke,
it presumes a racial and intellectual advantage on the part of the
performer and the audience. The pleasure of this laughter arises out of
mockery and ridicule, often focusing on physical differences and
distortions that perpetuate humour through grotesque forms. ln these
instances, laughter is not self-consciously subversive, as it is in the
contexts explored by Bakhtin, because it seeks to uphold dominant
discourses of power through conceptions of superiority. 'The passion of
laughter', writes Hobbes, 'is nothing else but sudden glory arising from
some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison
with the infirmity of others' (Hobbes, 46). This 'sudden glory' is based
on the knowledge that the laughing subject or audience holds a position
of supremacy. We laugh, according to this theory, because of the
inferiority of others, and this response provides a sense of individual or
communal pre-eminence over those who are more 'stupid' or 'lazy' or
'superstitious' or 'irrational' or even those who might be ideologically
and discursively defined as 'non-human'.
 8
QUEERLY GROTESQUE

The Book of the Grotesque' suggests that the grotesques are victims
of their wilful fanaticism, while in the stories themselves grotesque-
ness is the result of an essentially valid resistance to forces extemal
to its victims.
Irving Howe, SherwoodAnderson (1951: 206)

ln his study of Sherwood Anderson's short fiction, 'The Book of the

Grotesque', the literary critic Irving Howe examines the gro-tesquerie of
Anderson's representation of small-town, rural life in early twentieth-
century America. Howe points out that these grotesques are victims of
harsh environments, subjected to abuse, estrangement and alienation
within a depressed landscape where 'ghosts fumble erratically and
romance is reduced to mere fugitive brushings at night; a landscape eerie
with the cracked echoes of village queers rambling in their lonely
eccentricity' (Howe, 199-200). Here, the use of the word 'queer' in
relation to gro-tesquerie is significant. This is because Howe sees
Anderson's grotesques as unable to connect or communicate with other
people dueto, among other things, misogyny, inarticulacy, drunkenness
and homosexuality. A salient example of this arises in Anderson's short
story 'Queer' where the main character, Elmer Cowley, is not physically
deformed but 'condemned togo through life without friends' (Anderson,
118). Attracted to George Willard yet unable to communicate with him,
Elmer seeks out the town's 'halfwit': 'I had to tel1 someone', he explains,
'and you were the only one I could tel1. I hunted out another queer one,
you see' (ibid.: 120).
 ln this passage, queemess is synonymous with that which is odd,
curious and strange: Elmer tries to speak to someone who is defined by
difference, the halfwit. But even after he speaks to 'the freak', Elmer
continues to despair over 'his failure to declare his determination not to
be queer' so he decides to leave Winesburg, Ohio (ibid.: 121). Before
departing, though, he makes another attempt to express himself to
George Willard but again he cannot communicate.

Elmer Cowley danced with fury beside the groaning train in the
darkness on the station platform . . . . Like one struggling for release
from hands that held him he struck, hitting George Willard blow after
blow on the breast, the neck, the mouth.
(ibid.: 122)

It is here that queemess moves into an expression of desire in the context

of a rural town where same-sex relationships are demonized as grotesque
forms of behaviour. The unspeakable nature of Elmer's queemess, the
love that dare not speak its name, is unleashed in a frenzied attack on the
object of his desire. This ending can be read as a homophobic
representation of the threatening beast in the closet, whereby same-sex
desire, or queemess, is a monstrosity that cannot be entirely repressed,
emerging in displaced forms of cruelty, brutality and violence. Yet if, as
Irving Howe suggests, Anderson's grotesques are the victims of an
alienating environment, then Elmer's violent attack on George is his only
outlet of expression: the assault is a symptom of the intemalized
demonization of queemess he despises in himself and, in this context,
violence is the only way he can touch the breast, neck or mouth of
another man, while also demonstrating that he 'ain't so queer' (ibid.:
122).
Queer, as we have seen, means strange or odd. The word was first
used as a derogatory term to mean 'homosexual' in the early part of the
twentieth century, prior to its appropriation by gay and lesbian
communities in the 1990s. ln this chapter, we examine how the word is
used in relation to twentieth- and twenty-first-century traditions of
grotesque cultural production, ranging from the fiction of Carson
McCullers to the paintings of Francis Bacon, to the writing of Dennis
Cooper. ln so doing, we explore the multiple meanings of the term in
various texts and contexts as they move from representations of the queer
body as 'abject-grotesque', as well as representations ofthe grotesque in
queer works that include horrific distortions, dismemberments and
dissections.

FREAKISBLY QUEER
ln the fiction of Carson McCullers, queemess and grotesquerie are
intimately connected. Images of gouged out eyes, nail-pierced hands,
nipple-shom breasts in novels such as Fhe Heart is a Lonely Hunter
(1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and Fhe Member ef the
Wedding ( 1946) appear alongside representations of hermaphrodites,
cross-dressers, androgynous characters and same-sex desire. Lonely,
alienated and introverted characters who are not always able to express
their desires live amongst mutes, dwarfs, giants and deformed figures
whose inconsistencies and excesses exist at the centre of the social order
that imposes normalcy and resists altematives or the possibility of
refashioning. ln this, McCullers is most often located in the literary
tradition of the Southem American grotesque (or Southem gothic).
lndeed, she draws directly from her Georgia origins in her depictions of
'freakish' figures, alienated and deviating, overcharged with underlying
distortions, strangeness and peculiarity. McCullers' novels, and her
aesthetic of Southem grotesquerie, include characters experiencing
existential anguish. But works such as Fhe Heart .Is a Lonely Hunter and
Fhe Member ef the Wedding move beyond the difficult dynamics of
identity construction and accounts of volatile adolescent rebellion, to
explore the very tropes of the freak and the grotesque.
ln his book Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Leslie
Fiedler discusses the plight of the 'freakish' characters of Carson
McCullers' writing, especially their desire to flee, and their feelings of
despair and alienation. Her texts are, he writes, about 'the hope of
breaking through all limits and restraints, of reaching a place of total
freedom where one could with impunity deny the Fall, live as if
innocence rather than guilt were the birthright of all men' (ibid.: 143).
Fiedler locates McCullers more generally within 'the homosexual-gothic
novelists' of the United States, whom he defines according to their
'homosexual sensibility' and queer desires. He argues that McCullers'
young characters are 'like the circus freaks, the deaf and the dumb', for
they serve as symbols of innocence and exclusion: 'They project the
invert's exclusion from the family, his sense of heterosexual passion as a
threat and an offence; and this awareness is easily translated into the
child's bafflement before weddings or honeymoons or copulation itself
(ibid.: 476). Fiedler thus points to how McCullers' fiction is populated by
grotesques who defy the imposition of 'normal' categories of gender,
sexuality and desire. It is this intersection of the freakish and the
grotesque with gender and sexual anomalies, particularly regarding the
body and identity construction, that places her writing at the intersection
between the queer and grotesque.
The words 'queer' and 'queemess' appear throughout McCullers'
fiction. ln fact, the word appears forty-eight times in just two of her
novels (Heart and Member), an average of one recurrence of 'queer' for
every ten pages. This repetition is too frequent to be serendipitous or
coincidental, and yet her use of the word is indistinct and evocative.
According to the literary critic Rachel Adams, McCullers'

invocation of the term queer is frequently associated with her

characters' receptiveness to otherwise unthinkable permutations of
sex and gender, which are defined in opposition to normative
categories of identification and desire. Such a veiled deployment of
the queer is unsurprising at a historical moment when it regularly
functioned as a shaming mechanism to legitimate discrimination and
physical violence against homosexuals.
(Adams, 554)

ln other words, McCullers' texts filter non-normative gender and sexual

identities through 'queer' that is engendered as a means of articulating
the complexities of difference in the context of a dominant culture that is
heteronormative, homophobic and regulates gender roles.
ln Fhe Member ef the Wedding, for example, queemess and gro-
tesquerie appear together in fascinating forms when the characters,
Frankie and John Henry, watch a freak show. Frankie identifies with the
freaks and this inspires fear. John Henry, though, is not afraid; his
sensitivity inspires a love-filled affection and he is drawn to them,
particularly the 'Pin Head girl'. ln one chapter, grotesque images are
foregrounded as the freaks display themselves to the audience:

The Giant was more than eight feet high, with huge loose hands and a
hang-jaw face. The Fat Lady sat in a chair, and the fat on her was like
loose-powdered dough which she kept slapping and working with her
hands .... The little Pin Head skipped and giggled and sassed around,
with a shrunken head no larger than an orange, which was shaved
except for one lock tied with a pink bow.
(McCullers, [1946] 2006: 271-72)

After viewing this scene, John Henry declares the Pin Head 'was the
cutest little girl I ever saw', and he is moved beyond mere acceptance of
the freakish form into a deeper understanding, as well as a sense of
empathy and attraction. It is here that the queer grotesque is mapped onto
the text, for John Henry's attraction to the Pin Head girl is, in part, linked
to his own sense of being different: he is a cross-dresser who delights in
wearing women's clothing. Indeed, John's departure from gender
normativity pushes him toward a form of grotesquerie: the narrator
describes one of his drag outfits as making him look like 'a little old
woman dwarf, wearing the pink hat with the plume, and the high-heel
shoes' (ibid.: 117). Yet cross-dressing is not the only thing that
characterizes his difference, for John often appears both male and
female, and he embraces gender fluidity as offering varied possibilities
that resist fixity and celebrate flexible gender identities. ln this, John
organizes his thoughts not around a determined identity, but rather in
quirky opposition to all that is normal. This can only be sustained for so
long, and in the end, John Henry dies of meningitis before he can fully
develop his sweet, freakish, flexible self.
The indeterminately gendered body resurfaces in McCullers' Ballad ef
the Sad Cq/é (1951). ln this novella, characters such as Cousin Lymon
and Miss Amelia combine qualities of masculine and feminine to suggest
a model of sexuality based on a continuum rather than upon strict binary
oppositions: Cousin Lymon is a small, effeminate hunchback with
sizeable ears, whereas Miss Amelia is a tall, muscular and cross-eyed
women who beats up her groom, Marvin Macy, whenever he tries to
consummate their marriage. Set in a decaying and dreary Southem town,
grotesquerie is fully embodied and signals a queemess that marks out the
characters as androgynous, asexual, bisexual, homosexual or abject.
McCullers' text thus participates in a Southem grotesque aesthetics
associated with aberrance, abnormality and deviance. But McCullers
does not merely pit the abnormal character against a normal world;
rather, she makes abnormality the norm, and her texts tum the irregular
and the strange into the recognizable and the understood. ln Ballad efthe
Sad Cqfe, then, the normal is relegated to the margins and the bizarre and
strange occupy the centre: the deviant and the perverse is recognized and
documented as a part of defining normalcy. Characters such as Miss
Amelia and Cousin Lymon, with his 'hunched queer body', are freaks
who cannot bend to the normative standards of demeanour and physical
appearance (McCullers, [1951] 2002: 76).
Miss Amelia's alienation is manifested visually in her crossed eyes,
disproportionate body, and her queer masculinity. Her devotion to
Cousin Lymon, her alter ego, is contrasted with her hatred for Marvin
Macy. Likewise, Marvin's unrequited love for Amelia is mirrored in
Lymon's unreciprocated devotion to Marvin. This leads to one of the
most grotesque descriptions in the novel, for the hunchback's attraction
to Marvin engenders a freak show-like display in which he uses his
deformed body to attract attention. The narrator states the following,

Cousin Lymon had a very peculiar accomplishment, which he used

whenever he wished to ingratiate himself with someone. He would
stand very still, and, with just a little concentration, he could wiggle
his large pale ears with marvellous quickness and ease .... N ow as he
stood there the hunchback's ears were wiggling furiously on his head,
but it was not Miss Amelia at whom he was looking this time. The
hunchback was smiling at Marvin Macy with an entreaty that was
near to desperation. At first Marvin Macy paid no attention to him,
and when he did finally glance at the hunchback it was without any
appreciation whatsoever.
(ibid.: 59)
ln this passage, the hunchback's performance, the bizarre wiggling of his
ears, gestures back to the 'human curiosities' of the sideshow, in which
the spectacle of the deviant body, often through developmental and
physical disabilities, is intended to reinforce the category of normalcy in
the spectator. Here, though, the intended audience, Marvin Macy, is
indifferent to the 'freak's performance' and, as such, the display fails to
cement the distinction between deviance and normality. Perhaps this is
because Macy's own normality is called into question. Or perhaps it
reminds him of his own lonely, uncomfortable experience of
embodiment. Whatever the reason, Cousin Lymon's desire for Macy, and
Macy's unresponsiveness, includes a form of grotesquerie that neither
erases same-sex desire nor sanctions homophobic responses to
queemess. Rather, the grotesque in this text assumes the status of a
corollary to queemess, questioning the dominant discourses of what is
inherently normal or abnormal.

QUEER BODY PARTS

One of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century,
Francis Bacon, is best known for his large, colourful and grotesque
paintings of the human body. ln works such as Fhree Studiesfor Figures
at the Base ef a Crucifixion (1944), Fhree Studies for a Crucifixion
(1962) and StudyJrom .lnnocent X(l962), the viewer glimpses the inner
world of flesh and blood, and we are simultaneously attracted to and
repulsed by a harsh indistinctness of brutalized flesh that provokes carnal
pleasure through captivating pigments and repugnant pictorial subjects.
As armchair voyeurs, we gaze on what lies beneath the flesh: bones,
organs, muscles, cartilage, blood. The distortions of the bodies breach
boundaries and borders separating the inside from the outside, or, as one
art historian puts it, there is a reversai of 'the operation of Dorian Gray's
magic portrait, which protected the real-life appearance of the hero by
taking his gradual decay entirely upon itself. Indeed, Bacon's portraits, as
if endowed with some prescient power, 'show their models from the
outset as creatures already attacked by decay' (Leiris, 11 ). Through slices
of life and brutality of fact, Bacon's distorted figures, his images of
contorted body parts and corporeal peculiarities, often include
indefinable forms that merge the categories of man, animal and meat. ln
paintings such as Friptych .lnspired by T. S. Eliot's Poem 'J'weeny
Agonistes" (1967), the ambiguous shapes of the figures have lost their
bone structures and have turned into peculiarly fluid forms of skin and
bodily substance. ln other paintings, the treatments contain bodies
besmeared by vicious ferocity, as in the tom up and ravaged flesh of the
butchered body that hangs in Second l7ersion ef "Painting 1946,, (1971 ).
For the philosopher and cultural critic Gilles Deleuze, Bacon's oeuvre
'constitutes a zone of indiscemibility, of undecideability between man
and animal' and the artist

pushes this to the point where even his most isolated figure is already
a coupled figure, man is coupled with his animal in a latent bullfight.
This objective zone of indiscemibility is the entire body, but the body
insofar as it is flesh or meat.
(Deleuze, 16)

Indeed, the humanoid forms in Bacon's paintings often seem half-animal,

or half-reptilian; in other paintings, the body is presented through a
ghostly whiteness that symbolizes the constant presence of death in life.
But Bacon is best known for his rich red canvases in which human body
parts drip with the blood of animalistic butchery. ln this, Bacon merges
human and animal conditions and, as he explained in a 1991 interview
with Francis Giacobetti,

Flesh and meat are life ! If I paint red meat as I paint bodies it is just
because I find it very beautiful. I don't think anyone has ever really
understood that. Ham, pigs, tongues, sides of beef seen in the
butcher's window, all that death, I find it very beautiful. And it's all
for sale - how unbelievably surrealistic! I often imagine that the
accident that made man into the animal he has become also happened
to other animais - lions or hyenas for example - while man
remained a primate .... I imagine men hanging in butcher's shops for
hyenas, who would be dressed in fur coats. The men would be hung
by their feet, or cut up for stew or kebabs.
(Giacobetti, 2003)
A grotesque tradition of man-animal mergers is foregrounded throughout
Bacon's work, but the human body is not only animal, it is also meat.
This symbolic gesture towards the consumption of human flesh reflects
the complexities of a camivorous food chain, as well as the grotesque
possibility of cannibalism. If man's flesh is the meat of an animal, then it
is fair game: it is open for consumption by other animal-men.
Yet, as Bacon tells us in the above quotation, his figures exude beauty,
hunger and desire. Such a position links grotesque aesthetics to queer
desire by maximizing grotesquerie as an instrument of social and
personal transformation. ln Bacon's work, the queer grotesque includes a
representation of othemess and difference that forces the viewer to
experience the juxtapositions of attraction and repulsion, desire and
disgust. This opens up the potential for forms of desire that challenge
normativity through an aesthetics of grotesque queemess that forces us to
see beyond the boundaries of what is inside 'the normal'. The attractive
aspects of deformities and disfigured bodies contest the stability of a
grounded sense of subjectivity, as Classical forms of aesthetic unity are
broken down, split apart and fragmented. But the loss in stability and
unity is not to be lamented; rather, the fluidly disjointed form opens up
new spaces where unique sites of desire can be explored. This is seen in
some of the more figurative queer paintings from Bacon's early period.
For example, in Study Jrom the Human Body (1949) the viewer gazes
upon the back of a naked man behind a transparent curtain. This
voyeuristic setting foregrounds an attractive and alluring figure seen
within a discreet and private scene. Here, the viewer gazes at the man's
muscle-toned shoulder and arm, openly displaying the smooth curves of
his striking buttocks. But if the back and buttocks are available to us,
then the front of the figure is not. Heis tumed away from us: we do not
see the front of his body or his face. He cannot retum our gaze and he is,
as a result, materially and symbolically effaced, passively available to the
viewer in an image that splits front from back, subject from object.
ln contrast to the private, solitary figure in this 1949 Study, Bacon's
1953 painting Two Figures (based on Eadweard Muybridge's photograph
of wrestlers) depicts two naked men on a bed. The men are framed
within symmetrical lines that invoke a double sense of protection and
imprisonment. Their sexual acts are animalistic: the blurring of the image
suggests that they are simultaneously fighting and embracing. The white
symmetry of the lines combines with the whiteness of the sheets, both of
which are offset by the dark background. Within these contrasts, the
focal point is the power of the men's sexual desire, for they are wrapped
up in a physical bond that conveys a closeness based on longing and
battling, affection and violence, frenzy and torment, love and hate. The
queemess of this painting anticipates similar tensions in Fwo Figures in
the Grass (1954), in which two naked men are entwined in an intimate
embrace. They are given over to an overwhelming passion that combines
the strength of muscular contact and the soft warmth of a loving act. The
outdoor setting, in which they are surrounded by grass, gestures to a
desire that is both animalistic and natural: it is closely linked to the
landscape. But the lines of the grass are also a framing device that recalls
the imprisonment, the cage-like structure, of the earlier painting. The
men's bodies are thus conveyed through a series of juxtapositions: free
and caged, outside and inside, animalistic and human.
A self-identified 'faggot' and 'queer' before the advent of queer
theory, the published interviews with Bacon include statements in which
he shuns traditional homoeroticism, embracing and anticipating
transgressive aspects of an emergent queer culture. Such forms of
expression are seen in the overpowering 1982 picture, Study of the
Human Body, which shows a grotesque male form, a solid mass of flesh
that is a body reduced to an armless, headless trunk with 'blatant sexual
attributes and crowned with two hillocks in the form of a pulpy,
skyward-facing rump' (Leiris, 14). The dynamics of dissolution in
Bacon's 1982 Study collapses the male body into an ill-defined form in
that the upper part has been separated from the lower. It is almost as if
the top of the body has dissolved, reducing the figure to its sexual
organs, buttocks and legs. ln this grotesque image of the male body,
queer-ness is inferred through Bacon's rejection of the aesthetic demands
of figurative mimetic form and his reduction of the male body to penis,
buttocks and legs. The queer grotesque, then, allows the artist to subvert
the socially constructed 'norms' of essentialist sexuality and to seek out
new sites for same-sex desire through the sexual unease engendered by
grotesquerie.
The grotesque is a vehicle for displacement and for announcing
Bacon's queemess, whilst never actually having to do so. This 1982
Study of the reduced male form within the shallow representational space
of a canvas is claustrophobically contained by a curtain backdrop and the
aesthetic imperatives of his earlier paintings: the basic presentation of the
male body in its most generic, unadomed and ontologically naked form.
This is an example of Bacon's ongoing articulation of the dynamics of
representing the queer male body through the fragmentation, dissection
and dissolution offered by the aesthetics of grotesquerie. Rather than
displacing the queer dynamics of dissolution into the iconography of his
paintings, grotesque forms offer the potential for highlighting queemess
and same-sex desire, even during a period when same-sex relationships
were illegal in Britain.
Dismembered, and disembodied, bodies are central to queer author
Dennis Cooper, too. Novels such as Sqfe (1984), Closer (1989), Frislc
(1991) and F,y (1994), include an aesthetics of ambiguity and ethical
uncertainty that is revealed in grotesque representations of the queer
body. These novels are stylistically lucid and eloquent, written by a self-
consciously queer writer, and are overflowing with brutally violent sarne-
sexual acts, repulsive and vile scenes of male-male desire. Echoing the
work of the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille and William Burroughs,
Cooper's texts merge desire and death, sex and violence, attraction and
repulsion through representations of bodily extremity and brutally
dismembered bodies. ln his first novel, Sqfe, for example, the young
Mark's anus is detached from the rest ofhis body: his lover is drawn to it,
and desires it, but after photographing it close up, he sees what is inside
and is overwhelmed with disgust as he is reminded that people shit, stink
and die (Cooper, 1984: 55). ln Closer this is pushed even further: the
beautiful, young, and drug-addicted, high-school student George Miles is
viciously attacked when an older man, Tom, wants to see what is 'inside'
the teenager; he drugs George and tries to cut him open through his anus.
Likewise, in F,y the plundering of the homoerotic body is channelled
through the character of Uncle Ken, whose sado-voyeuristic gaze
inspires him to film the thirteen-year-old metalhead, Robin, in a
homemade series of pom films starring underage boys. But when Ken
awakens to find the body of Robin, who has overdosed on heroin, lying
beside him, the cold and stiff corpse fuels Ken's necrophilic fantasies as
he imagines what is inside a young male body 'full of chilled organs,
bones, etc' (Cooper, 1994: 106). Throughout Cooper's oeuvre, attraction
and desire build to a climax in repulsive and disgusting scenes, as the
surface beauty of the body stimulates a desire to see what is on the inside
of the body: organs, blood, gore, shit, etc.
Frislc is a novel of dismemberment and fragmentation. Here, Cooper
uses several structural strategies to undermine the sense of a unified,
linear text; one of the ways in which this is done is through the persistent
use of cinematic techniques of the 'shot', the 'cut' and the 'edit'. For
example, the text begins with a series of shots: a long shot jumps to a
medium shot before moving to a close-up. The narrative continues as if
describing a 'snuff or hard-core pom film. The distant narrator states,

Four's a medium shot. He's facedown, wrists and ankles undone. His
arms are bent into neat, mirror L's. His ass sports a squarish blotch,
resembling ones that hide hard-core sexual acts, but more sloppily
drawn. His back, hips, and legs are pale by contrast. His haircut's a
shambles. His shoulders are dotted with zits.
Five. Close up. The blotch is actually the mouth of a shallow cave,
like the sort ocean waves curve in cliffs. The uneven frame of ass
skin is impeccably smooth. The inside of the cave is gray, chopped
up, mushy.
(Cooper, 1991: 4)

Cutting from one shot to another, the narrative structure splices together
a series of body parts, focussing on the wrists, ankles, hair and buttocks.
This textual-filmic 'editing' disembodies the voice from the conventions
of third- or first-person narration, resulting in a distancing that blurs the
distinctions between textuality and voice, reader and voyeurism, seeing
and the gaze. This opening scene anticipates the rest of the novel, which
entwines voices by blending the narrators' imaginings and the very real
plot of the text, pushing it beyond its limits. ln fact, the narrative tums
itself inside out.
What is on the inside is brought to the surface and exposed to view.
The body of the narrative, then, reflects the effects of desire on the
physical body, as skin is punctured and the bloody realities of what lies
inside the body are dug up, extracted, and revealed to us. Throughout
Frislc, sexual desire for the beauty of the body's exterior turns into a
desire to see the interior: shit, blood, organs. Toward the end of the
novel, for instance, the narrator and two Germans, Jorg and Ferdinand,
tie up a young Dutch punk in an abandoned building. They drug him,
strip him and rape him until the narrator is overwhelmed by a desire to
eat the punk's excrement: 'I'd never wanted to eat shit before', he said,
'but I was starved for the punk's' (ibid.: 99). But consuming that which is
inside the young punk is not enough; it only increases the narrator's
desire to see what is inside the boy. He states,

I told him he was the most extraordinary and beautiful boy I'd ever
seen ....
I took the knife and aimed it at his chest. I shoved the blade about
five inches
into his chest with both hands .... Blood poured around the knife,
downhis
body. I pulled the knife out and made a light horizontal cut across
his stomach,
which dripped more blood. I stretched out his penis and tried to
saw it in
two .... I knelt down beside him and licked his asshole but that
seemed
pointless with him dead, so I stabbed the back of his neck a bunch
oftimes,
kissing and licking his neck as I did.
(ibid.: 100-1)

The corpse of the punk is mutilated and dissected: they kick the corpse
and laugh at the 'fireworks display of blood' before sawing, carving and
hacking his neck to sever the head from the body (ibid.: 101). This scene
of brutal decapitation, violence and gore is described in a matter of fact
style. Wounding, violence and dissection are conveyed with a cool
distance and blankness, thus echoing the character John in Cooper's
novel Closer who describes the body as 'just skin wrapped around some
grotesque-looking stuff (Cooper, 1989: 7). The body is meat, or just
something else to consume, such as pomography, alcohol, food, drugs
and sex.
Dennis Cooper 'sees the male body', writes William S. Burroughs, 'as
a symbol of - what?' As something to dissect, Burroughs continues, for
Cooper 'wants to take it apart, like a boy dismantling a clock, looking for
what makes it talk, eat, move, fuck' (Burroughs, 2006: 80). ln this
process, Cooper's bodies are mutilated and cut up until the 'dismembered
human body doesn't walky, talky, fucky. Neither the dismembered
universe nor the dismembered body function' (ibid.: 82). What
Burroughs points to here is how the themes of dismemberings and
dissections combine with the intensity of Cooper's minimal language and
prose that is taut and chillingly controlled, formally conveying the
cutting-edge and precision of a sharp knife. This leads Burroughs to
describe Frislc as including the 'alarming principie of uncertainty' as
desire disintegrates into an amoral irrationality of obsessive consumption
(ibid.).
The texts explored in this chapter are of interest because of the ways in
which they draw on grotesque imagery to represent various forms of
queemess. It is striking how these writers and artists 'queer' the
grotesque body while also avoiding the pitfalls of a homophobic
representation of the queemess that would demonize it as grotesque,
abnormal or even monstrous. Rather, the characters and figures in these
texts offer depictions of difference that might be imposed by the
community, or question the distinctions between desires and death, or
investigate grotesque bodies as by-products of commodification and
consumption.
 9
POSTCOLONIAL GROTESQUE

The twentieth century was a tirne of upheavals. The first half of the
century was dominated by two world wars, resulting in millions of deaths
and the redrawing of national borders within Europe. The second half of
the century was one of political change in many countries that were
colonies of European nations. The independence of India in 1947 was
followed, in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, by successful independence
movements in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Thus, large territories and
regions experienced rapid political, social and economic change as
former colonies gained national sovereignty.
ln literary movements, this political process has engendered texts that
'write back' to the former colonial powers. Writers and artists of nations
that have recently won their independence have expressed national
identities that are hegemonically distinct and distanced from the imperial
centres of London, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon and elsewhere. This response
to a potential 'post-colonial crisis of identity' has produced postcolonial
writing and other forms of artistic expression that represent and confront
hybridized subjects, fractured selves and split identities (Ashcroft,
Griffiths and Tiffin, 1994: 8-9). Such texts arise because, on the one
hand, the postcolonial subject must challenge the hegemonic authority of
the former imperial centre and find a new sense of home and belonging.
On the other hand, though, the desire to imitate and mimic the colonial
subject can be difficult to overcome. A salient example of this is
represented in V. S. Naipaul's novel The Mimic Men (1967), in which the
main character, Singh, is described as a 'mimic' or imitation of the
British subject. As the periphery becomes the centre and the foreign
power retreats from the colony, new conceptions of space, place, and
identity emerge while others are tom apart.
ln this chapter, we explore several literary and cinematic works that
'write back' to the former colonial centre. Texts by Salman Rushdie,
Alejandro Jodorowsky, Grace Nichols and Shani Mootoo have, we
suggest, used the politically empowering forms of gro-tesquerie to
undermine former colonial ontologies and challenge the power dynamics
of binaries such as 'us' and 'them', foreign and familiar, centre and
periphery. ln this, grotesque forms can be used to rewrite the centre; not
only by writing baclc to it, but also by creating an altemative centre,
another conception of 'normalcy', that contributes to the decolonization
of the indigenous mind. Having said this, we also seek to show how the
postcolonial grotesque sometimes depicts divisions, oppositions and
juxtapositions by stressing disproportionate power relations, and
representing the stark history of subjugation based on discourses of
difference. ln the postcolonial context, grotesquerie can highlight
'difference' by identifying old and new spaces of centrality and
normalcy, if only to transgress the boundaries that have been established
by the forces of a colonial power.

GROTESQUE STATES
Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1981) is a classic in the
canon of postcolonial literature. The focal point of the text, if there is
one, is the creation of a postcolonial nation state; or, to be more specific,
the formation of two new states. For in Midnight's Children, Rushdie
uses the historical Partition of British lndia in 1947, into lndia and
Pakistan, as a literary trope for a more generalized postcolonial
condition: the post-colony is always double, split and hybrid, for while
its 'post' status signals a new beginning, it does not erase the history of
colonization, or its status as a former 'colony'.
The story of the Partition, a territory split in two, is told by, and
through, the character Saleem, who is bom 'at the precise instant of
lndia's arrival at independence'. Thus, Saleem finds himself, as he puts
it, 'mysteriously hand-cuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly
chained to those of my country' (Rushdie, 9). He is split. Not into two
halves, like British India, but into a thousand fragments. For while he is
only one of two children bom at the 'precise instant' of India's birth,
hundreds of children share a similar fate: 'one thousand and one
children' are bom 'during the first hour of August 15th, 1947', the first
hour oflndia's independence (ibid.: 195). It is not, he continues, unusual
to have this many births in India during an hour, but what is surprising,
he says, is that these children are all unique: they are 'endowed with
features, talents or faculties that can only be described as miraculous'
and, for some, these powers are indescribable, undefinable and even
undesirable (ibid.: 195).
Saleem is acutely aware of these ineffable powers. He knows of those
who have the gift of 'healing by the laying-on of hands', as well as a girl
'whose fingers were so green that she could grow prize aubergines in the
Thar desert' (ibid.: 198-99). He knows these things, in part, because of
his own amazing and dreadful ability: Saleem is bom with the power of
telepathy, 'the greatest talent of all - the ability to look into the hearts
and minds of men' (ibid.: 200). Yet because of this talent he cannot
always distinguish his life from others and, as a result, he decides to act
as a telepathic conduit for, and narrator of, the tales of the 1001 children
bom on the hour of India's birth. ln his quest for understanding, Saleem
seeks out the mysteriously gifted offspring of independence, and his
search becomes an epic joumey. But his attempt to contain all of the
stories of these 1001 people threatens to tear him apart at the seams: the
'consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me', Saleem
explains, and he struggles to contain the pressure of multiple identities in
a single body. Moreover, he is running out of time, he tells us, for he
needs, at the very least, 'a thousand nights and a night' to narrate the
mysterious story of 'midnight's children'. Yet unlike 'Scheherazade'
from The Arabian /Vights who seeks to postpone her death by the
incessant telling of stories, time is not on his side, for his body is
'crumbling' and 'over-used', on the verge of breaking down. 'To know
me,' he asserts, 'just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as
well' (ibid.: 9).
Saleem's story is an allegory for India's history in the decades
following Partition. The split and tom-apart narrator mirrors the
fracturing of independent India and, within his timely birth, he is a
conduit for the complex mosaic that makes up the nation, a place often
regarded for its diversity of cultures, languages and religions. To
understand India, Saleem implies, is not to hear or read one story, one
version, of this complex place. Rather, if such knowledge were ever
possible, one would need to, as with 'knowing' Saleem, 'consume
multitudes'. Far from mimics, Saleem and his 1001 'siblings' proudly
proclaim their d!fference, after all, Saleem, like those bom alongside
him, is, in a sense, a 'freak'. ln some cases, difference is inscribed on the
bodies of these 'freaks': their figures are twisted and deformed, making
them look like 'circus freaks' (ibid.: 198). ln other cases, difference is
contained intemally within their bodies: their 'magic' fingers or legs or
mental abilities give them powers, making them extraordinary and
strange, 'the bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind' (ibid.: 200).
Enter the grotesque. For these progenies of midnight, 'the magic
children and assorted freaks' are bom with the nation, and the narrative
presents a succession of grotesques who mirror lndia's very conception,
its political separation from the colonial power, and a body of land, a
body politic, that is split in two (ibid.: 195). These 'freaks' transgress the
borders separating the fantastic from the real, the imaginary from the
historical, the human from the animal, the male from the female, and
these uncertainties are embodied in Saleem, who is the focal point of the
narrative but also a character who is constantly mobile. He refuses to
stay in one particular place: physically, he moves between the new
countries of India and Pakistan; psychically, his telepathic powers move
him between thoughts and mental states. These shifts manifest
themselves throughout the text as his physical movements combine with
a transformative identity that moves him from a highly sophisticated and
gifted person of extreme intelligence to a 'man-dog' who is employed by
the military to track people by using his secondary miraculous ability, his
acute sense of smell (ibid.: 347). ln this, he moves from a state of higher
consciousness in which his mind contains the memories of the
'multitudes' to a state of almost complete amnesia as a 'man-dog'.
The fluidity of Saleem's identity and his dislocation from fixed places
are reflected in his appearance. lndeed, the hybrid form of canine and
man is combined with descriptions of his face, which includes a
vegetative quality: his nose lies like a 'big cucumber' or 'a mad plantain'
in the middle of his face (ibid.: 17, 13). This 'proboscissimus' is 'a
mighty organ', a 'colossal apparatus', that is not only disproportionate
but also astonishingly gigantic (ibid.: 13). His abnormal facial feature
combines the serious political content with comic dimensions, for as
Saleem's grandfather Aadam observes, the nose is 'the place where the
outside world meets the world inside you' (ibid.: 17). This is, as Kristeva
suggests, the case with all 'corporeal orifices' but, as we have seen in
Gogol's text earlier, the nose has the potential to inspire both terror and
laughter (ibid.: 71).
Grotesque power and its accompanying violence pervade Rushdie's
text. The descriptions of street riots, war crimes and a string of atrocities
in the wake of Partition are horrific. But like so many texts that employ
grotesquerie, there is a humorous aspect to the novel that is a vital part of
Rushdie's politico-comical narrative. By repeatedly returning to the
absurd size of Saleem's nose, Rushdie moves his character away from the
normalcy of the human condition and into the hybridized forms of man-
dog and man-vegetable. ln fact, Saleem can be readas a caricature. For
like his nose, he is a conduit, the place where the outside meets the
inside, and a cartoon-like figure that stands in for lndia's exaggerated
proportions (ibid.: 17). Thus, he embodies lndia, and he exemplifies how
'the comic [can be] inexplicably combined with the monstrous', showing
'the interweaving of totally disparate elements' and an 'irregular body
whose open apertures [can] exist in a dynamic give and take with the
world' (Thomson, 1972: 14; Ball, 217). From this perspective, Saleem
projects 'contrasting images of the grotesque body [that result] in an
ambivalent and at times conflicted vision of national history' (Ball, 213).
ln the years immediately preceding Partition, the 1001 can live within
Saleem's body, but over time the multitudes cannot be contained within
his frame. He begins to break apart, his 'bones splitting and breaking
beneath the awful pressure of the crowd', and his body overflows and
then erupts. Within the symbolic logic of the novel, Saleem challenges
the illusions of central cohesion and his body mirrors the body politic of
lndia as an imaginary community, a highly artificial and contested place,
not a 'natural' or 'authentic' entity that is cohesive and unified. ln the
end, Saleem and his alter ego, lndia, cannot be fixed within 'the
annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes' and uncertainty prevails
(Rushdie, 463).

ERUPTING STATES
The body that exceeds its borders is also a source of horror on the Euro-
African stage of Joseph Conrad's novel Heart ef.Darlcness (1899). For it
is here, in the contact zone of the Belgian Congo, that Marlow
experiences 'a sheer blank fright, pure abstract terror', 'something
altogether monstrous', as he glimpses the violent civility of an expansive
empire (Conrad, 80). Indeed, his early reflections on the power dynamics
of imperialism foreshadow his ultimate description of the deformed and
corpse-like Kurtz, a grotesque figure who opens 'his mouth voraciously
as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind' (ibid.: 89). ln his
grotesque form, Kurtz embodies consumption, colonization and
cannibalism in a discursive and symbolic logic wherein the entire globe,
all humanity, is devoured in an all-consuming force that will never be
satisfied.
Depictions of hyper-consumption can be a source of horror but they
can, in some cases, also provoke laughter. A striking example of this is
the disgustingly funny scene in Monty Python's film Fhe Meaning efLife
(1983). Here, the grotesquely obese character, Mr. Creosote, consumes
vast quantities of food that he has served to him in a bucket. His meal is
excessive, a symbol of his privileged gluttony, and his bloated body is a
physical manifestation of wealth and class privilege. But when he has
finished eating and is offered 'a wafer thin mint', Mr. Creosote's body
balloons to a disproportionate size and then explodes. The remains of his
colossal body cover the diners of the restaurant, soiling the lavish room
with half-digested bits of food, blood and ruptured organs. Causing a
chain reaction, the other diners vomit in disgust, ejecting the contents of
their stomachs all over the luxurious establishment. ln this, the diners
mimic Mr. Creosote, for they tum their bodies inside out, and the
physical boundaries between themselves and Mr. Creosote are blurred:
they add their regurgitated food to the scattered remains of his ruptured
stomach and internai organs. As social conventions break down
completely, the abnormal (Mr. Creosote) and the normal (the other
diners) commingle in the chaotic and boundary-less space of the
restaurant-as-vomitorium.
The Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky is also interested in
erupting bodies. A master of the cinematic grotesque, Jodor-owsky's film
E/ Topo (1970) includes a cast of mutants and misfits worthy of Tod
Browning's Freaks, and his 1989 film Santa Sangre includes the burial
of an elephant, complete with an oversized coffin and wailing mourners.
But his most strikingly grotesque film is Fhe Holy Mountain (1973),
which includes a particularly haunting example of the postcolonial
grotesque. ln a tableau in miniature titled 'The Conquest of Mexico', a
group of villagers perform a surreal historical re-enactment of the
Spanish conquest of Central America. As the camera zooms in on the
village square, we see several miniature pyramids and various lizards
dressed up in vibrant, doll-like finery imitating Aztec attire. This bizarre
tableau includes several grotesque images, and these are heightened as a
fleet of small Spanish ships approach the pyramids. The docile lizards
are then invaded by toads that are dressed in the armour of
conquistadores and the religious robes of the Catholic church. As the
toads descend on the passive lizards, the reptilian natives are eaten by the
obese, greedy amphibian Spaniards. The scene concludes with a gory
finale: the villagers pour buckets of blood over the victorious, yet
bloated, toads and the entire tableau, including all of its animais, is
engulfed in a ball of fire.
This carnivalesque-grotesque scene of erupting bodies is politically
charged. For it is a re-conception of conquest and resistance that
foregrounds extreme violence and destructive consumption that ends in
complete bloodshed. ln the case of these erupting bodies, the devastation
of colonial rule and resistance is no laughing matter; if there is laughter,
it can only be the hysterical laughter that is provoked by extreme horror.
ln Fhe Holy Mountain, there is no subtle 'mockery, where the reforming,
civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary
double' (Bhabha, 86). Rather, the film invokes the extreme images of
exaggeration, horror and excess. This engenders an 'ex-centricity', a
resistance to the centre, that is as eccentric as it is grotesque, for its
representation of conquest is expansive, inclusive and highly original,
rather than limited, restricted and imitative.
VIOLATED STATES
Grotesque violations of the body are depicted in Shani Mootoo's Cereus
B/ooms at Mght(1996), a novel that follows the lives of characters living
on the fictional Caribbean island of Lantanaca-mara. The narrative
revolves around a series of incidents relating to conceptions of margin
and centre, normality and abnormality. This relationship between the
centre and the periphery is clearly expressed in the presence of a white
religious family from 'the Shivering Northem Wetlands', but it also
operates in the novel's complex representations of class, race, gender and
sexuality. From this perspective, the narrative attempts to draw new
boundaries, and to permanently unsettle the borders between male and
female, gay and straight, self and other. An example of this is nurse
Tyler, the male narrator of the story, who dresses in women's clothing
and is marginalized by the community because of his queer 'perversion'
(Mootoo, 47). Similarly, the character Otoh is bom a girl, Ambrosia, but
lives her life as a man, transforming herself 'into an angular, hard-bodied
creature' who 'tampered with the flow of whatever hormonal juices
defined him. So flawless was the transformation that even the nurse and
doctor who attended the birth, marvelled at their carelessness in having
him declared a girl' (ibid.: 110). The blossoming love affair between the
gay cross-dressing nurse Tyler and Otoh/Ambrosia, who Tyler believes
is a man, is not consummated in the text. However, within their love,
there is a blurring of clear-cut sexual and gender identities that lies in
sharp contrast to the relatively uncomplicated love affair between Sarah,
the mother of the local Ramchandin family, and Lavinia, the daughter of
the white Reverend Thoroughly. This is not to suggest that the women do
not experience homophobia; they are, after all, forced to leave the island,
becoming 'outcasts'. It is simply to say that their love, their relationship,
carries with it the simultaneously demo-nizing and potentially liberating
identities of homosexuality and lesbianism.
But the aftermath of Sarah and Lavinia's forced departure is not
straightforward. For Chandin, Sarah's husband, has long been in love
with Lavinia, and the revelation of his wife's departure transforms him
from man into monster. His rage drives him to drink, and he imprisons
his daughters in the compound of their house. Then one night, in a
drunken stupor, Chandin mistakes his daughter, Pohpoh, for his wife,
and he brutally rapes her while forcing his hand over her mouth,
silencing her screams. This event leads to years of rape and incest, with
Pohpoh escaping into an altemative identity, Mala, which leads to a split
sense of self and ends in patricide. ln this, Cereus Blooms is fraught with
transgressions and taboos. Identities are mistaken, remade and regained
as love transforms into hate, resulting in the horrific violence of rape,
incest and murder. This destabi-lization and disorientation is summed up
by Otoh's mother toward the end of the novel, when she remarks, 'I does
watch out over the banister and wonder if who I see is really whatl see'
(ibid.: 238).
Uncertainty pervades Cereus Blooms at Mght. This uncertainty is
most opaquely represented in the breakdown of Pohpoh/Mala: she is so
violently assaulted and abused that her traumas, her psychic wounds,
make her 'ex-centric' and she is branded as 'abnormal'. This casting out
of Mala from the categories of normalcy, particularly her act of patricide
and her confinement to a psychiatric hospital, can be understood in
relation to Maria Barrett's introduction to Grotesque Femininities: Evil,
Women and the Feminine (201 O). Here, Barrett explains that,

The bodily metaphor that the grotesque carne to embrace tells us that
it can be connected to a vulgar image of the feminine, as associated
with all things animal-like, primitive and fallen and which
metaphorically casts the feminine down into a dark space,
underground into a cave of abjection. Such a process importantly
literalizes the grotesque woman either romantically as a victim,
neurotically as an offender or sexually as a powerful woman.
(Barrett, ix)

As a checklist of the 'feminine grotesque', this description mirrors the

stages of Mala's reactions to her traumatic experiences. N eglected by a
community that allows the abuse to continue, Mala is ostracized by those
around her, even those who see her as a victim. This abandonment
pushes her toward murder and, after she kills her father in self-defence
and rage, she lives an 'animallike' and 'primitive' life surrounded by
insects, reptiles, and overgrown vegetation in the now decaying and
rotting house. She is reduced to living in a 'cave of abjection', a grotto-
like space, for her basement is filled with rotting flesh, moths, maggots
and putrid vegetable matter. The 'putridity under Mala's house', the
narrator describes, smells like 'the full-bodied foulness of an overflowed
latrine' and it produces a 'miasma' so thick that one has to 'wade
through' it. For Mala, though, this 'stink of decomposition' is no longer
distinctive, for there is no differentiating the subject from the abject, the
interior from the exterior, and life from death (Mootoo, 1999: 153, 129).
ln the end,

the scent of decay was not offensive to her. It was the aroma of life
refusing to end. It was the aroma of transformation. Such odour was
proof that nothing truly ended, and she revelled in it as much as she
did the fragrance of cereus blossoms along the back wall of the
house.
(ibid.: 128)

Like the 'miasma' that rises from the foundations of her home, Mala
exists in an in-between space, an 'inanimate entity that lies somewhere
between the air and the ground' (Thacker, 83). She has, in effect, become
post-grotesque: she is unwilling and unable to discem incongruity,
excess, disproportion or disgust with anyone or anything; everything to
Mala 'simply is'.

EXPANSIVE STATES
If Mala exists quite comfortably in a transitional state between air and
ground, the speaker of Guyanese writer Grace Nichols' Fhe Fat Blaclc
Woman's Poems (1984) is decidedly grounded. For while the expansive
body is certainly a central theme of Nichols' poetry, unlike Rushdie's
character Saleem or Jodorowsky's reptiles, Nichols' 'fat black woman' is
at ease in her skin. She is expansive, but not eruptive. 'lnside this slim
collection', writes one reviewer, 'there is a fat woman not even fighting
to get out' (.lndependenl). Although this woman is not physically
erupting or 'fighting to get out', she is, like Saleem's nose, in our face. ln
the poem 'lnvitation', for example, she states,
 Ifmy fat
was too much for me
I would have told you
I would have lost a stone or two
[ ... ]
But as it is
I'm feeling fine
felt no need
to change my lines
(Nichols, 10)

This re-appropriation of fat (fat is beautiful) rejects the imposition of an

oppressive body image that defines beauty within the limited confines of
particular weights, contours and appearances. Here, her body, her fat and
black body, is a form to be cherished and desired, not ridiculed as
freakish or abnormal. This is voiced in the poem 'The Fat Black Woman
Goes Shopping', which describes an attempt to purchase clothes on a
cold day in London,

Look at the frozen thin mannequins

fixing her with a grin
and de pretty face salesgals
exchanging slimming glances
thinking she don't notice
(ibid.: 8)

It is, she admits, 'aggravating' that 'when it come to fashion / the choice
is lean' (ibid.). But in the end, she knows that 'Beauty / is a fat black
woman', and that a London shopping trip is a minor nuisance because, at
the end ofthe day, 'Fat is/ as fat is/ ... and fat speaks for itself (ibid.: 3,
16-17). 'Heavy as a whale', the fat black woman 'refuses to move' and,
as such, she creates her own centre of gravity, a heavy body in which
others are forced into orbit. Thus, she refuses to 'mimic' an extemally
imposed sense of beauty and, instead, she proudly proclaims her fat
beauty to the world, embracing her difference and rejecting
interpellation. This is clearly stated in the final poem of the collection,
'Afterword', wherein she states that 'male white blindness' might try to
make her invisible but ultimately,

the fat black woman will emerge

and tremblingly fearlessly
stake her claim again
(ibid.: 26)

The poetic voice of Nichols' poem, then, rejects the labels 'freakish' and
'grotesque' by asserting her self-assured normalcy. Thus, the male gaze
that attempts to define her as 'abnormal' is dismissed as 'male white
blindness', and she edits him out of the picture, showing how her size,
gender and race can be powerful forces. She makes herself heard, but she
also makes herself central in its 'refusal to move'.
 CONCLUSION
GLOBAL GROTESQUE

Throughout this book we have seen many examples of grotesque

representations from various periods, regions and forms of cultural
production. We have looked at examples of grotesque depictions that
move from the horrific to the comic, the political to the whimsical, and
we have seen grotesques that exaggerate, embellish, disambiguate,
deform and transform. These characteristics are not, we have suggested,
mutually exclusive, for desire can combine with disgust, laughter can
coexist along with horror, and attraction can be linked to repulsion. This
is why grotesque in the singular, 'the' grotesque, always needs to be
problematized, for grotesquerie is a by-product of 'heterogeneity'; it is 'a
hybrid creature' and thus, 'to talk of "pure grotesque" is virtually a
contradiction in terms' (Rhodes, 7). If anything can encapsulate the
grotesque, it is multiplicity, for it cannot be captured in 'one' definition.
Likewise, any case study of grotesquerie will exhibit grotesque qualities
that often point in different, sometimes juxtaposed or conflicting,
directions.
'The grotesque is revolutionary in its shapelessness' writes the art
historian Kirsten A. Hoving, and it is its shifting potential that empowers
grotesque cultural production (Hoving, 238). For the grotesque cannot be
contained. This is explored by James Goodwin in Modern American
Grotesque (2009), a book which examines what he calls the difference
between 'the grotesque in its traditional senses' and more recent forms of
grotesque (Goodwin, 188). Building on Flannery O'Connor's inability to
locate 'something that is not grotesque' in 1950s America, Goodwin
describes the proliferation of contemporary grotesque as 'gratuitous' and
'utterly ridiculous' and, on occasion, 'monstrous' (ibid.). ln this,
Goodwin contrasts grotesque television programmes such as Fhe
Osbournes, Fear Factor and Jaclcass with the artistry of what he calls
'traditional grotesque' works by Flannery O'Connor, Nathanael West and
Diane Arbus. Traditional grotesque is, for Goodwin, based on social, and
sometimes political, reflections on a particular time and place: the work
is not intended to be sensational or based on the exploitation of 'shock
value'. By contrast, the contemporary TV shows Goodwin cites draw on
the grotesque as a sheer 'stunt [performed] merely in the hope of prize
money' or fleeting moments of media exposure; these texts are made
simply to attract viewers through sensationalism or the absurdity of a
staged reality (ibid.). But perhaps Jaclcass is more in line with the
'traditional' freak show of the carnival and Fear Factor is part of the
sarne historical trajectory as the circus sideshow. Rather than quibble
with Goodwin about what constitutes 'traditional' or inferior examples of
the grotesque, it is more interesting to read Goodwin's text as raising a
more general issue about criticai studies of the grotesque: each
generation has difficulty analyzing its grotesques. This is not so
surprising, as the grotesque is often intended to disrupt the norm of a
particular context, and the 'frame' against which the 'form' of grotesque
takes on its bodily manifestation then becomes shapeless. Each
generation and each cultural formation has its own grotesque.
Given that the grotesque adopts various modes and forms of
representation, the question arises as to whether or not we can ever go
beyond the grotesque: can we speak of certain forms of cultural
production as post-grotesque? Or, to ask this question slightly
differently: has the rise of contemporary globalization, which has been
accused of imposing homogeneity and erasing difference, lead to the
death of the grotesque? One way to address these questions is to look to
what has been called the 'financial crisis' (2008-) and how a globalized
state of Empire has led to the Occupy Movement, a global form of
resistance that has used images associated with the carnivalesque to
challenge the de-territorialized power of capitalism.
Global financial structures and global media networks have had
profound impacts on our lives and influenced our priorities, politics, and
perspectives. ln a world of new media interconnectivity, it is possible
that we are becoming desensitized to digitalized broadcasts of grotesque
atrocities involving human degradation, violent camage and bodily
mutilation. Torture in Abu Ghraib prison, the beheadings of American
soldiers, the charred corpses of the Arab Spring have all been
disseminated on television, intemet websites or magazines. ln some
cases, the pictures of tortured bodies in Abu Ghraib are aestheticized
through colour manipulation and the careful framing of the victim's
bodies. ln other cases, 'shock sites' feed unaltered images of, for
instance, the execution of Saddam Hussein filmed on a mobile phone. ln
this context, has the grotesque lost its edge, or has it become the norm?
One of the ways of thinking about this is in terms of different narrative
modes or representational forms, namely the distinctions between
fantasy, realism and documentary. ln his early work on the grotesque,
Philip Thomson wams against conflating fantasy and grotesquerie:
'There is a further danger here also, that one could be led into associating
the grotesque too closely with the fantastic', for 'the grotesque derives at
least some of its effect from being presented within a realistic
framework, in a realistic way' (Thomson, 7, 8). This is echoed by the
literary critic David K. Danow, whose book Fhe Spint ef Carniva/:
Magicai .Healism and the Grotesque (1995) asserts that the combination
of realism with magicai elements can provide a mode of representation
that speaks to the politics of everyday life. This everyday life might seem
'normal' in some contexts and extraordinary in others. For instance,
Danow argues that in a Latin American context, the

readers of magicai realist works recognize their world and their

experience within that world. They may acknowledge as well that
what is documented is not only remarkable but also, paradoxically,
ordinary; that what is depicted, however imaginatively refracted in
artistic fashion, nonetheless represents the everyday experience of
Latin America.
(Danow, 7)

Here, Danow echoes Thomson's claim that 'the grotesque derives at least
some of its effect from being presented within a realistic framework, in a
realistic way'. However, the combination of realism and magic can also
destabilize 'normalcy', resulting in depictions whereby the normal and
abnormal, the everyday and the extraordinary cannot be distinguished.
This could lead to a state of 'post-grotesque' in which representations of
reality exist beyond 'a realistic framework', thus negating the very
distinctions upon which the grotesque relies. After all, as Wolfgang
Kayser puts it, the grotesque is evoked by an 'awareness that the familiar
and apparently harmonious world is alienated under the impact of
abysmal forces, which break it up and shatter its coherence' (Kayser, 37).
But what happens when there is no coherence to shatter, no harmony to
disrupt?
Exploitation and other aspects of present-day imperialism are taken up
in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000). The contemporary
definition of 'Empire' is, for Hardt and Negri, neither a figure of speech
nora form of imperialism. Rather, it is 'a decentred and deterritorialising
apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm
within its open, expanding frontiers' (Hardt and Negri, xii). This would
seem to be a radicalized version of current understandings of
'globalisation'. Indeed, with a vision of a 'postmodemised global
economy', Hardt and Negri do not believe that any nation-state,
including the U.S., can act as the centre for a contemporary imperialist
project. 'Along with the global market and global circuits ofproduction',
they write,

has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule - in

short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that
effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power
that govems the world .... Imperialism is over. No nation will be
world leader in the way modem European nations were.
(ibid.: xi)

The shift from modemity to postmodemity, or from imperialism to

Empire, has generated an economic system 'composed of a series of
national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule'
(ibid.: xii). As such, sovereignty is made up of regulatory frameworks
that create the transnational figure called 'Empire' out of a new
conception of space. Empire is characterized by a lack of boundaries, and
thus its rule has no limits:
 the spatial divisions of the three Worlds (First, Second, and Third)
have been scrambled so that we continually find the First world in the
Third, the Third in the First, and the Second almost nowhere at ali.
Capital seems to be faced with a smooth world - or really, a world
defined by new and complex regimes of differentiation and homo-
genization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
(ibid.: 42)

For Hardt and Negri, 'the age of globalization is the age of universal
contagion', an age wherein the former 'boundaries [are now] permeable
of all kinds of flows' (ibid.: 136). Invoking Louis-Ferdinand Céline's
novel Journey to the End ef the Night (1932) to exemplify the power
dynamics of contemporary global capitalism, the images of pus, vomit,
blood and gore are not represented as internai fluids that need to be
controlled, contained or repressed. Rather, these fluids, what Kristeva
identifies as signifiers of abjection, are appropriated and disseminated
within the flux and flows of globalized capitalism. If, for Kristeva, the
'fluid' qualities of Céline's writing offer positive forms of 'affirmative
ambivalence' for abjection, then for Hardt and Negri the fluidity in
Journey to the End ef the Night represents the very nature of late
capitalism. ln this, the body politic is no longer symbolized by a giant
man constructed out of other men, as in an enormous human body
organized into discrete bodily limbs depicted in the frontispiece of
Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). Rather, the contemporary body
politic is better represented by 'contagion', by the oozing pus, dripping
blood and the festering blobs of meat that have been infected by the fluid
and grotesque power of the global financial system of a deterritorialized
Empire.
But there is, they suggest, room for optimism. Following Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, they argue that the paradox of this new
power is that while it unifies every element of social life, it engenders
resistance that is no longer marginal but becomes active in the very
centre of a society that opens up in networks. The multitude, their word
for 'the people', can also take advantage of their globalized identity and
fight back:
 The Empire we are faced with wields enormous powers of oppression
and destruction, but ... [t]he passage to Empire and its processes of
globalization offer new possibilities to the force of liberation .... The
creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable
of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an altemative
political organization of global flows and exchanges.
(Hardt and Negri, 218)

Critics of Hardt and Negri suggest that they reproduce a Eurocentric

model of history, narrative and philosophy that reinscribes a colonial
modemist paradigm that locates Europe and Euro-America as 'norm',
'knowable' from the perspective of the European subject who gazes out
on the world. However, it is vital to recognize that 'norms' differ
according to ontologies and worldviews: what is grotesque for some
might, as we have already suggested, be the norm for others. Sensitivity
to cultural specificity and a resistance to universalizing ideas about
reality or normalcy are required when we speak of manifestations of
grotesque in a 'realistic framework'.
Various forms of grotesque arose out of the Occupy Movement. ln one
example, the protests fuelled by the grotesque greed of Wall Street
bankers inspired members of the Occupy Wall Street movement to wear
masks associated with the anonymous anarchist hero V in Alan Moore
and David Lloyd's graphic novel V for Vendetta (1982-89). These
identical masks concealed the faces of the protestors and hindered
criminal prosecutions, but they also linked the protesters to a global
community who were outraged by the greed and corruption of the
financial elite. Doctors and lawyers protested alongside construction
workers and hot dog vendors, thus invoking a form of the camivalesque
in which class, social position and financial status were broken down.
The mask did not negate uniformity and similarity, but it created a sense
ofunity and solidarity: we are all in this together.
But the V masks conveyed other meanings. Vfor Vende/ta is a parable
that is highly criticai of Margaret Thatcher's political and economic
policies in the United Kingdom (1979-90). From this perspective, the
masks symbolize dissent, discord and opposition to the dominant forces
of power in general, although their meaning can be associated with
historically specific situations and events; in fact, the character V tries to
bring down a fascist government through acts of violence, including
plans to blow up the Houses of Parliament. ln this, V gestures back to
Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and tries to accomplish that
which Fawkes failed to complete: exploding the material and symbolic
power base of the nation. ln the American cinematic adaptation of this
graphic novel, the allusions to the Gunpowder plot are replaced by the
post-9/11 homeland security laws in the United States, laws that are often
blamed for limiting personal liberties and curtailing the basic rights of
citizenship.
Despite Hardt and Negri's claim that resistance to contemporary
globalization must use the tools of Empire, there is irony, potentially
even laughter, in the fact that Wamer Brothers, a multinational media
syndicate, owns the licensing rights to the masks wom by the Occupy
protestors. This foregrounds the problem of resistance to Empire in that
opposition from the margins can be easily co-opted by the dominant
forces of power. Late capitalism does not need to battle against dissent,
for the power of contemporary capitalism 'thrives on the creative
energies of cultural resistance', prospering from decentralized behaviour
by being more mobile than the forces from the peripheries (Glass, 185).
Even the potentially camivalesque-grotesque scenes of an Occupy street
protest or the anarchic voices of intemet news reports can be branded,
packaged and sold, 'infecting' everything in its vicinity and pre-empting
any robust challenge to the hegemony of global capitalism.
It might be shapeless and mutable, transformative according to
context, but the grotesque will always appeal to an audience. There will
always be new frames of reference against which grotesque will swirl
and chum, fleetingly take on new bizarre, abnormal and weird forms
before returning to normalcy, whereby a new cycle begins. The return of
the grotesque is, in part, explained by the surrealist Chilean filmmaker,
Alejandro Jodorowsky, referenced in Chapter 9. Jodorowsky recognizes
the bizarre state of our existence: 'I think to be alive is weird', he states.
'To have hands, to have fingers. It's weird.... To have a prick, balls,
asshole, to eat and to shit, it's weird. So weird' (BBC Collective, 2007).
Although he filters his comments through a male-centric perspective, his
point is a good one: existence is strange; or, to put it another way, our
awareness efour existence foregrounds the discrepancy of an awareness
of that which we cannot be aware of, namely the non-thought of
existence. The contemporary artist Damien Hirst calls this 'The Physical
Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (Hirst, 1991 ),
and he recognizes that, in the words of Philip Thomson, the grotesque is
'in some forms at least, ... an appropriate expression of the problematical
nature of existence' (Thomson, 11 ). The awareness of the impossibility ef
awareness of a state of being that is non-being joins existence and the
grotesque. And this is, if nothing else, weird.
 GLOSSARY

Abjection / the abject arises out of the threat of a break:down in

meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and
object or between self and other. The place of the abject is where
meaning collapses and threatens life (such as the figure of the
corpse). Abjection must be relegated to the margins of the living
subject, driven away from the body and consigned to the other side
of an imaginary border separating the self from that which threatens
the self.
The absurd is, like the grotesque, used to describe something that is
ridiculous or eccentric. During the early to mid-twentieth century,
the literary movements of Dadaism, Surrealism and the Theatre of
the Absurd incorporated elements associated with grotesquerie.
Plays by Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Eugene
Ionesco and many others often break down distinctions between the
absurd and the grotesque. Many of the works by these authors could
be renamed theatre of the grotesque.
Blackface minstrelsy includes a performer made up to imitate a person
of African descent in a minstrel or a vaudeville show. The
performer creates a stereotyped caricature of a black person and
perpetuates discourses of racial difference that have played a
significant role in cementing and proliferating racist imagery of the
grotesque.
The bizarre is connected to the grotesque because it often includes
things that are strange, curious and weird. But the bizarre can be
distinguished from the grotesque in terms of scale. For some critics,
such as Wolfgang Kayser, the grotesque incorporates the bizarre,
but it is more dangerous, radical and forceful. From this perspective,
the bizarre can be outlandish or very strange, but it does not include
 the disturbing characteristics found in the extreme forms of
grotesque representations.
Camp is a sensibility that is linked to aesthetics. According to Susan
Sontag, camp is a 'way of seeing the world as an aesthetic
phenomenon ... not in terms of beauty but in terms of the degree of
artifice, of stylization' (2009: 106). Camp has been a significant
phenomenon in the rise of queer theory, and associated with a gay
sensibility. Camp is analogous to kitsch in that it challenges
traditional categories of taste, but camp also includes a performative
dynamic that showcases wit or irony.
Caricature represents or imitates something or someone in an
exaggerated, distorted manner. This can include a grotesque
imitation or misrepresentation, especially pictorial or literary, in
which the subject's distinctive features or peculiarities are
deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect.
Canivalesque the pageantry of the camival, the period of feasting
immediately prior to Lent, has inspired theorists such as Mikhail
Bakhtin to consider a conceptual category that describes popular
cultural and festive forms that disrupt social hierarchies, challenge
the dominant order, voice discord, and offer a structure for the
celebration of transgressive or 'unofficial' modes of being.
Camivalesque refers to texts, events, or practices that epitomize the
spirit of camival, often associated with the gratification of bodily
desires, but also possessing the potential to highlight the artifice of
class-based distinctions.
Comic is a label that can be applied to forms of representation across a
range of styles, from farce and burlesque to pantomime and satire.
The grotesque sometimes appears in comic forms such as
caricatures and satires, and can arise when there is a mixture of
comic with the tragic, as exemplified in some works by William
Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Samuel Beckett.
Decadence is a process, condition or period of deterioration associated
with decline or decay. As a literary and artistic movement,
decadence is associated with late nineteenth-century fin de siecle
France and England, characterized by refined aestheticism, artifice,
 and the quest for new sensations. Some of the main writers and
artists connected with this movement include Oscar Wilde, Aubrey
Beardsley and J.-K. Huysmans.
Defamiliarization presents or renders something familiar in an
unfamiliar artistic form usually to stimulate fresh perception. ln
literary and cultural studies, the term defamiliarization is an English
translation for Viktor Shklovsky's Russian term ostranenie, first
used in 1917, to articulate how writer, poet, or painter can take a
common or everyday object and force the audience to see it from a
strange perspective.
Dialogic is a term used by Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to the 'addressivity'
that structures all uses of language. That is, the word captures the
way in which language is formed in relation to other forms of
utterance. It implies the relationality and sensitivity that speakers
have in terms of positions and perspectives. The concept of
dialogism also has political and ethical connotations because it
suggests openness to positions and perspectives that might
challenge dominant discourses.
Gothic in aesthetics is first used to describe the style of architecture in
Westem Europe in the twelfth to sixteenth centuries (and revived in
the mid- eighteenth to early twentieth centuries), characterized by
pointed arches, rib vaults, and flying buttresses, together with large
windows and elaborate tracery. ln English literature, Gothic arises
in the mid- to late eighteenth century, and is a textual mode that is
designed to engender terror and represent irrational thoughts,
perverse impulses, nightmarish horrors, compulsive obsessions,
transgressions and taboos that lie beneath the surface of
Enlightenment principies.
Heteroglossia / heteroglossic are terms coined by Mikhail Bakhtin and
refer to the multiple 'languages' that appear in a seemingly unified
national language. These include, among others, dialects, slang,
accents and professional jargon. Heteroglossic diversity is, for
Bakhtin, central to the multivocal makeup of the form of the novel,
for linguistic diversity constructs various power relations relating to
prestige, authority and class divisions.
Hybridity refers in its most basic sense to mixture. The term originates
from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in
racial theory in the nineteenth century. The grotesque in visual
culture and literature often includes hybrid forms in which
animalistic characteristics are merged with humanoid forms. The
contemporary use of the term hybridity is scattered across numerous
academic disciplines and has become an important term in criticai
theory, influencing major theoretical discussions in discourses of
postcolonialism, multiculturalism and globalization.
Macabre has death as its subject and can comprise or include a
personalized representation of death. The macabre can dwell on the
gruesome and can produce horror in the audience. It is often
associated with the ghastly and grim.
Queer has long referred to something that is strange or odd. But during
the early twentieth century, the word was first used as a derogatory
term to mean 'homosexual'. ln the late twentieth century, the word
was appropriated by people who were in same-sex relationships or
who experienced same-sex desire. This appropriation was an
attempt to use the word positively and deprive it of its negative
power. The positive use of the term also led to the expressions
'queer nation', 'queer politics' and 'queer theory', the latter of
which theorizes sexuality outside the limitations of hetero- and
homosexual binaries.
Satire is distinguished from other kinds of writing, whether its prevailing
tone is comic or more serious, by the ethical assertions of the
satirist. A satirical text puts forward a view of how people should
behave ethically in a certain context, and contrasts this with
representations of the prevailing unethical behaviors and
hypocrisies of the time.
Surreal is a form of representation that has bizarre qualities and that
often mixes the real and the unreal, actuality and fantasy. The
aesthetics of Surrealism engendered a twentieth-century avant-garde
movement in art and literature that sought to release the potential of
the unconscious mind, including the irrational juxtaposition of
images. The figures associated with Surrealism include, among
 others, André Breton, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Man Ray.
Uncanny describes the experience of seeing something that is
simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. For Sigmund Freud, using
the German word unheimliche, the uncanny mixes the foreign with
the familiar, resulting in an emotive response that is uncomfortable
and disconcerting. The experience is one of an eerie strangeness that
arises out of the cognitive dissonance of the paradoxical nature of
being repulsed by and attracted to that which is both familiar and
peculiar.
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 INDEX

Glossary terms are shown in bold.

Abjection 143; exclusion ofwomen 132; intemal/extemal boundaries 57,
61; and laughter 97; process of 33-35, 139; and the uncanny 6
ah/normal: defined through the grotesque 7-10; institutional criteria
26--27; and normalcy 8, 86, 113-14, 130-33
absurd 143; as comedic 49, 90-91, 92, 95, 97; as narrative device 4-5,
28,62-64
Adams, Rachel 111
aesthetics, grotesque 17, 66
alienation 6, 108-9
American grotesque 12-13, 78-81, 110-14
Anderson, Sherwood 108, 109
anthropomorphization 4-5, 17
apocalyptic laughter 97
Apple Inc. 63-64
architecture 19-21, 39-43
Armstrong, Isobel 20
art, grotesque 37, 114-18
Bacon, Francis 114-18
Bakhtin, Mikhail 21-26, 68, 95, 100-101
Ballad efthe Sad Cefé (McCullers) 113-14
Barrett, Maria 131-32
Baudrillard, Jean 76
bawdiness 95
Beckford, William (17atheR) 4-5
Bergson, Henri 94
bizarre 143
blemmyae 47, 49
bodies, grotesque: boundaries with the world 23-24, 33-34, 115;
creation of 82-84; cultural anxiety over 44--45; defamiliarization 94;
exaggeration of parts 67-68, 70-71; excessive consumption 4,
128-29; fatness 68-69, 70-71, 133-34; fear of mutation 56-60;
forms 2--4, 5, 23; Frankenstein 52-56; gendered 14-15, 111-14;
inner depravity 39, 51-52, 69-70; laughter at 100-101; sexual desire
116-17; social control over 29-30
bodily functions, waste: and body politic 139; The Human Centípede
61-62; intemal/extemal boundaries 23-24, 33-34, 56-58, 101,
120-21, 129; Naked Lunch 75-76; public/private persona 98-99
body politic 58, 100, 126-28, 139,610
Bosch, Hieronymus 30, 94
boundaries: human/non-human 39--40, 55-57; intemal/extemal 23-24,
33-34, 61-62, 101, 119-21, 129; life and death 54; skin 59-60;
transgression 54-55, 66
Bovey, Alixe 43, 49
Browning, Tod (Freah-) 84-85
Burroughs, William S. 74-76, 121
Campbell, Mary 47
campness 73-74, 143--44
cannibalism 7, 48, 50, 116
capitalism 137, 138-139
caricatures67-68,94, 101--4, 106-7, 127-28,144
camival 14-15, 81-84, 85-86, 104-7
camivalesque 23, 25-26, 63-64, 140-41
Carter, Angela (Mghts at the Circus) 70-71
Cassuto, Leonard 106
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (Journey to the End efthe Mghl) 34-35, 139
centaurs 37, 38
Cereus Blooms at Mght(Mootoo) 130-33
Chaucer, Geoffrey ('Millers Tale') 94-95, 96--97
chimeras 36
Christian iconography 40-43
Classical mythology 37-39, 42, 43
comic grotesque 90-91, 95, 144
Conrad, Joseph 128
consciousness, collective 12, 31-32
contemporary grotesque 75, 136--37, 141--42
Cooper, Dennis 118-20
corpses, human 6, 55, 103--4, 119, 121
Cronenberg, David 56--60
cultural anxieties 44--45
Cyclops 38-39, 44, 68
dandyism 74
Danow, David K. 137-38
decadence 71-72
defamiliarization 94, 144
Deleuze, Gilles 115
desire, sexual 87-89, 109, 116--18, 119-21, 131-32
dialogic 26, 145
discourses 22, 26-27, 124
disharmony 66
dismembering 53, 120-21
dragons 41
Dune (Herbert) 69-70, 72
Dunn, Katherine ( Geelc Love) 81-84, 85-86
empire 138--40, 141
exaggeration 66-71, 94
excesses 66, 74--77
existence 142
extravagance 66, 71-74
false grotesque 18-19
Fanning, Leesa 26
Fat Blaclc Woman s Poems, Fhe (Nichols) 133-34
fatness 68-69, 70-71, 133-34
Febvre, Lucien 23
female grotesques 14--15, 132
female monsters 47
Fielder, Leslie 68, 81, 85,111
foliate heads 41
Foucault, Michael 26-32
Four Stages efCruelty, Fhe (Hogarth) 102--4
Frankenstein (Shelley) 52-56
freak:s: carnivalesque 105; creation of 82-84; dialogue with 85; Frealcs
84-85; gender/sexual anomalies 111-14; Midnights Children
125-27; in Southem grotesque 78-81, 113-14
Freah (Browning) 84-85
Freidman, John Block 45-46
Freud, Sigmund 6, 7, 56
Frisk(Cooper) 120-21
Fritzl, Josef 77
Gargantua andPantagruel(Rabelais) 23-25, 100-101
gargoyles 42, 65
Geek Love 81-84, 85-86
geeks 81, 87-88
gender: conceptions ofbeauty 32-33; female grotesques 14-15, 132;
hybrid monsters 47; identity 111-14, 131; monstrous feminine
34-35; transgressive 47; see also women's bodies
giants 23-25, 38-39, 43-44, 67-68, 100-101
Gin Lane(Hogarth) 102
globalization 138-139
Gogol, Nikolai ('The Nose') 91-92
Goodwin, James 13, 136
gothic 145
griffins 17-18
grotesque: classification of23, 31; defined 2, 3, 135-36; as the norm 137
Grotesque, The (McGrath) 1-2, 8-9
grotesque art 37
grotesque realism 23, 24
grotesquerie 61-62, 79-81, 124
grottoes 4-5
Grunenberg, Christoph 6-7
Hamill, Faye 72-73, 74
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 138--40
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 11-12, 42
head motifs 40--41, 42--43
Heam, M.F. 42--43
Heart efDarlcness (Conrad) 128
Herbert, Frank (Dune) 69-70, 72
heteroglossia 22, 145
historical contexts see socio-historical contexts
Hobbes, Thomas 107
Hogarth, William 1O1--4
Holton, Robert 75
HolyMountain, The(Jodorowsky) 129-30
Homer (Odyssey) 38-39
homosexuality 109, 111, 131; see also desire, sexual; queemess
Hoving, Kirsten 86
Howe, Irving 108
Hughes, Langston (Not Without Laughter) 104-7
'Human CentiPad, The' 63-64
Human Centipede, The 60-64
human form: boundaries of39--40, 55-57; exaggeration of 66-71, 94; as
meat 7, 39, 104, 115, 116, 121; structure 54-56, 62; see also hybrid
forms; non-human form
humanity: chaos of 4; essence 3, 56, 62; and human body 106-7; and the
inhuman 39, 86-87
Hume, David 1O
Huysman, Joris-Karl (Against Nature) 71-72
hybrid forms: anthropomorphization 4-5, 17; comedic 49-50; Francis
 Bacon's paintings 115-16; human/animal 36-37, 127; medieval
culture 39--43, 49; Perdido Street Station 87-89; postcolonial identity
125; self/other 6; transgression 65; see also human form; non-human
form
hybrid monsters 46, 47
hybridity 145
identity: and the body 45; gender 111-14, 133-34; mistaken 131;
multiple 125-28; national identity 123-24
ignoble grotesque 19-20
imagination, creative 17, 18-19
imperialism 13 8--40
inferiority/superiority 96, 100, 104, 106-7
inhuman grotesque 39, 86-87
insects 87-89, 89-91
institutions, and normalcy 26-27, 31-32
inversion: grotesque figures 34; natural order 8-9
irony 5, 97-98
is-ought problem 1O
Jencks, Chris 66, 74
Jodorowsky, Alejandro (The Holy Mountain) 129-30, 142
Juvenalian satire 97-98
Kafka, Franz 28, 29, 89-91
Kayser, Wolfgang 10-11, 37, 91, 138
Kristeva, Julia 6, 32-35, 97, 127, 139
laughter: apocalyptic 97; Bakhtin on Rabelais 23, 25, 100-101;
bawdiness 95; bodies, grotesque 100-101; and camival 63-64, 104;
comic grotesque 90-91; function of 93-94; hybrid forms 49-50; and
madness 95-96; mixed with horror 34-35, 62-63;
superiority/inferiority 96, 100, 104, 106-7; and terror 92; seealso
 caricatures
Le Besco, K. and Braziel, J.E. 68-69
Leiris, Michel 115, 118
liminality 6
macabre 145
madness 30-31, 95-96
magicai realism 137-38
Mandeville, Sir John (Mandeville's Traveis) 46--47, 47--49
manuscripts, medieval 43, 49
McCullers, Carson: Bal/ad efthe Sad Cqfes 113-14; The Member efthe
Wedding 112-13; Southem grotesque (USA) 110
McElroy, Bernard 75
McGrath, Patrick (The Grotesque) 1-2, 8-9
MeaningefLtf'e, The(MontyPython) 128-29
medieval grotesque 39--43, 49
Memberefthe Wedding, The(McCullers) 112-13
Midnight's Children (Rushdie) 124-28
Miésville, China (Perdido Street Station) 87-89
'Miller's Tale' 94-95, 96--97
Mimic Men, The (Naipaul) 124
minstrel shows 104-7, 143
mockery 100
'Modest Proposal, A' 97-98
monsters of excess 46--47
monsters of lack 46, 47
monstrous feminine 34-35
monstrous-grotesques 36-37, 40--46
Monty Python (The Meaning efLfíe) 128-29
Moore, A. and Lloyd, D. (V.for Vendetta) 140--41
Mootoo, Shani ( Cereus Blooms at Mghi) 130-33
Mussolini, Benito 28, 29
mutation, bodily 53, 55-56
Naipaul, V.S. (The Mimic Men) 124
NalcedLunch (Burroughs) 74-76
narratives 4, 22, 97-98, 119-20
nation states 124-29, 138-139
national identity 12-13
Nichols, Grace (The Fat Blaclc Woman's Poems) 133-34
Mghts at the Circus(Carter) 70-71
non-human form: boundaries of39--40, 55-57; and human form 106-7;
see also human form; hybrid forms
normalcy: boundaries of 9-1 O; defined by abnormality 8, 86, 113-14,
130-33; gender roles 111-14; institutionalization 26-27, 31-32;
interplay with the grotesque 7-10, 14-15, 137; sexual desire 116-17;
socio-historical contexts 12
'Nose, The' (Gorgol) 91-92
noses 91-92, 127
Not Without Laughter (Langston) 104-7
Occupy Movement 140--41
O'Connor, Flannery 78-81, 136
Ot&ssey(Homer) 38-39
other, the: hybridization 6; race 45--46, 49-50; and the self7
Ovid (Metamo,phoses) 38
pagan imagery 42--43
paradoxology 11
patriarchal discourses 34
Perdido Street Station (Miésville) 87-89
perversion 87-88
pleasure, pursuit of 71-72
Pliny the Elder 43-44
Poe, Edgar Allan 2
politics: cultural politics 104; racial 106-7; ridicule of ruling elite 97-98,
101-2
postcolonialism: identity 123-24; nation states 124-29
post-grotesque 136-38
posthuman condition 86-87
power: as grotesque 27-29; institutional 26-27; relations,
superiority/inferiority 96, 100, 104, 106-7
'Queer' (Anderson) 109
queemess: queerbodies 118-21; sexualdesire 116-17, 130-31; as
transgressive culture 117-18; use ofterm 108-9, 110,146; seea/so
homosexuality
Rabelais, Françis 23-25, 68, 94, 100-101
.Rabid(Cronenberg) 58-60
racial grotesque 45-46, 49-50, 105-7
realism 23, 24, 137-38
religion and monstrous-grotesques 40-43, 44-45
Renaissance, grotesque 19, 20, 21, 25, 100
reptiles 4-5, 129
.RichardIII(Shakespeare) 51-52
Romantic grotesque 25
Rushdie, Salman (Midnight's Children) 124-28
Ruskin, John 16-21
Russo, Mary 14-15, 61
satire 146
sciopods 43, 47
self, the 7, 48
sexual acts see desire, sexual
Shakespeare, William: King Lear95-96; RichardIII5 l-52; The
Tempest49-50
Shelley, Mary (Frankenstein) 52-56
Sheridan, R. and Ross, A. 37, 40--41, 42
Ship efFools (painting) 30-31
Shivers (Cronenberg) 58
Six, Tom 60-64
skin grafting 59-60
socio-historical contexts: audience expectations 11-12; Bakhtin's
distinctions 24-25, 100-101, 104; carnivalesque 23; contemporary
grotesque 136-37, 141--42; 'Grotesque Renaissance' 19, 20, 21, 25,
100; women's bodies 14
Sontag, Susan 73-74
sophistication 71-74
South Par/c(Parker) 63-64
Southem grotesque (USA) 78-81,110-14
Spooner, Katherine 85
Stallybrass, P. and White, A. 6
Stones efVenice, The (Ruskin) 19-21
Stott, Andrew 93, 94, 106
superiority/inferiority 96, 100, 104, 106-7
surreal30,90-91, 129,142,146
Swift, Jonathan 97-99
symbolic grotesque 17-19, 21
Fempest, Fhe(Shakespeare) 49-50
Thomson, Philip 3, 137, 142
transgression: boundaries 54-55, 66; caricatures 67-68; defined 65, 66;
empowerment through 14-15; excess 76-77, 101; gender roles 47;
hybrid forms 65; queer culture 117-18
travel, foreign: Mandeville's Fravels46--47, 47--49; monstrous-
grotesques 37-38, 43--44; the other and race 45--46, 49-50
true grotesque 18-19
uncanny 5-7, 56, 146
'Uncanny, The' (Freud) 6, 56
uncertainty 3--4, 8
rfor 17endetta (Moore and Lloyd) 140--41
vampires 58-59
17athelc (Beckford) 4-5
vile sovereigns 28-29, 69-70
Wamer, Marina 90
Waugh, Evelyn (ri/e Bodies) 2
Wilson Knight, G. 95-96
women's bodies: grotesque 14-15; identity 133-34; monstrous feminine
34-35; satires 98-99; violation of 130-33; see also gender
Zizek, Slavoj 77
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