ACL 2007 |
Lecture 5 |
Realism and the grotesque: 1 Realism has a concern with �historical particularity'. Roland Barthes describes �the reality effect' in art as working primarily through the use of effectively placed detail drawn from everyday experience. It is also concerned with the ways in which individual characters behave idiosyncratically but also as �a locus of social forces' (Morris, p.87). The �grotesque' challenges many of the central characteristics of realism. The Grotesque as a genre �The grotesque' has been categorised in opposition not only to �realism' but also to ideas of �classicism' The �classical' ideal was for simple forms and clarity: it became associated with
�The grotesque' was typified by ornamentation, confusion and profusion, imagination and the non-rational, the blurring of boundaries Historically, it was associated with the �Gothic': gargoyles; ornament without logical purpose; excess, the past rather than present/future The Grotesque: Wolfgang Kayser Kayser (20 th century critic) explains grotesque as: �the most obvious and pronounced contradictions of any kind of rationalism and any systematic use of thought' ( The Grotesque in Art and Literature ) He suggests that �The grotesque instills fear of life rather than death.' He discusses the grotesque in 4 main categories:
1. The alienated world A vision of the world in which the viewer feels at a distance (otherness) from the people and events and things around them. The world, as perceived, may not be actively hostile but it has a dreamlike quality It is unpredictable: commonsense expectations are not reliable predictors of what will/can happen. The shift in vision comes suddenly as a break with �reality' It is a world in which �we do not want to live' and which creates anxiety 2. The uncanny An aspect of the alienation is to feel �away from home' �Uncanny' suggests things that cannot be known but are more likely to be felt or sensed It is associated with the supernatural: more than/in excess of the natural everyday world. 3. The absurd Part of the irrational is the comic �Absurd' in this sense is less a jolly laugh and more a kind of �black humour' that may include irony. �Absurd' includes notions of excess and contradiction: the opposite of rationality and control. 4. The exorcism of the demonic The demonic is the part of the supernatural or uncanny related to �evil' and uncontrollable psychic forces (in psychoanalysis: the Id). �Exorcism' is the expulsion of those forces from the human. In terms of �the grotesque', Kayser suggests that the artistic expression of these forces serves an important psychological release. Arcimboldo: examples of grotesque The 17 th century painter Arcimboldo and his followers exemplify some of the aspects of the grotesque in their paintings:
19 th century grotesque The use of the grotesque in the 19 th century is strongly connected to the challenge to rationalism. One of its most famous literary exponents is Edgar Allan Poe: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Literary grotesque was associated with
19 th century Illustration The engraver Dore has some visual similarities to Dickens' literary depiction of urban society and street scenes. His engravings in the series �London' are not exactly grotesque but have a similarly heightened effect They make use of chiaroscuro: shadow to heighten depth and produce a feeling that goes beyond literal realism Great Expectations and the Grotesque Dickens wrote to his friend that he had �a very fine, new and grotesque idea' for a novel Contemporary less complimentary critics of Dickens, for example Lewes, commented on the degree of �unreality to the point of madness' in the novels and �the non-rational' depiction of the �life of the guilty'. A more enthusiastic reception from 20 th C. critic David Cecil (1957):� in the violent chiaroscuro of his fancy, London and its butchers and bakers show transformed and distorted, so that eyes gleam from black caverns, noses depend enormous and legs stretch to grotesque spindles'. Realism and the grotesque Dickens defended his �fancy' in the relation of the literary to the real:
Dickens and fetish The fetish is strongly related to ideas of grotesque. The fetish objectifies people and events into things so that they appear to be removed from the natural processes of time and change. Examples of fetish-like objects are masks, puppets, waxworks, and automata: things that look like people but are not. They are often invested with a capacity for horror or comedy (or sometimes a mixture of both) because they lack an essential human quality. Fetishisation and GE Miss Havisham attempts to arrest time and to create Estella as a kind of puppet to destroy men. Money/property is fetishised as people are dehumanised in the pursuit of money. Orlick creates a kind of automaton out of Mrs. Joe: after the assault she lacks the range of normal responses Mr. Wemmick in a more benign way fetishises the Aged Parent in a kind of dolls house of domesticity Many of the characters are described in ways which accentuate their likeness to things rather than people. Examples
Grotesque Comic Visions The fetishising of people is sometimes used for comic effect but usually as a �black comedy' which has an underlying comment. The comparisons of many of the minor characters to wooden dolls or puppets consistently position them as taken over by avarice: they are desiccated, dried out; their strings are pulled only by the promise of money.. Another comic effect that Dickens often uses is the absurd detail: a realism drawn to excess. A good example of this is Joe's description of Pumblechook's fate at the hands of Orlick:
Nightmare landscapes. 1 Alienation is one of Kayser's central definitions of the grotesque In the early chapters, Dickens offers an alienated landscape through the remembered, distorted, vision of the child Pip The marsh country is misty, populated by indistinct shapes; it is also characterised by death and decay: �the hulks'. Out of this hallucinatory landscape looms the Frankenstein's monster figure of the convict. From this, Pip goes first to the tomblike �Satis House' and then enters the labyrinthine London of the Inns of Court and Jaggers' legal system. Nightmare landscapes. 2 The early chapters are the most obviously �hallucinatory', largely because of the child's perspective, but throughout the novel there is a running parallel imaginary landscape of prison, execution and punishment. In case the reader misses it, Pip comments: �How strange it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime.' Closely associated with this are allusions to cannibalism and the metaphorical consumption of one human being by another. Miss Havisham and her house, like the marshlands and graveyard, are settings for the �undead'. Both the social and imaginative landscape are ones of alienation : separation from others and from any sense of a firm �reality' and constant set of values. Doubles A frequent device of the grotesque (and the gothic) is the doppelganger or double. While many forms of literature use a kind of doubling whereby minor characters parallel or emphasise aspects of the protagonists, in the grotesque this doubling has a supernatural and often demonic aspect. Possibly the most famous example of this is Stevenson's �Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'. Pip's doubles GE is particularly rich in this kind of double which operates as a psychological extension of the protagonist. Pip is presented as a child, and young man, under constant surveillance by authority figures. As a small child and adolescent he has very few resources to defend himself. As the adult narrator he presents a childhood full of deprivation and psychological, if not physical, abuse from his sister and her friends and, later, from Miss Havisham. In psychoanalytical terms, Pip is forced to repress a great deal of his feelings and, in particular, the primitive fears associated with the Id. Orlick 1 The blacksmith's apprentice Orlick can be interpreted as the grotesque manifestation of Pip's Id. The realistic aspects of an uneducated and brutish rural labourer are less well-developed than the more literary functions of his character. Orlick is bigger, stronger and tougher, and he acts out violent punishment on people that have hurt Pip as a child: Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook. He also strangely �dances' at Biddy, indicating a more passionate attachment than Pip ever demonstrates. He crops up repeatedly at key moments in Pip's development, often without a plausible realistic reason. He is characterised as a kind of animal that �slouches' . He often refers to himself in the third person Orlick 2 Orlick is strongly associated with ideas of the demonic. There are constant links of him with the furnace and �hellish' aspects of the forge He is outcast , like the first murderer Cain, and he � gave me to understand that the Devil lived in the lack corner of the forge, and that he knew the fiend very well: also that it was necessary to make up the fire, once in seven years, with a live boy, and that I might consider myself fuel.' Conclusions: GE and the Grotesque Dickens was well aware of the ways in which his novels combined elements of realism and romance. He considered the use of �fancy' to be the key to engaging popular imagination and as a crucial ingredient of being human In this he was strongly aligned to the Romantic Movement His frequent use of the grotesque is an extension of this alignment: part of the high value he gave to the imaginative and irrational in engaging with issues of the real and everyday It is usually closely connected with a sense of the absurd: an underlying scepticism about the possibility of neat and definitive explanations In GE the realist basis of the novel with its concerns for social issues and contemporary society is constantly being nudged and extended by the grotesque embellishments and imaginative excesses. In one sense, this element of the grotesque calls attention to the limits of conventional realism in a way that anticipates some of the �magic realist' and other developments in late 20th and 21 st century fictions. |
