Grotesque A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF GROTESQUE

2. A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF GROTESQUE

2.1 Grotesque

Grotesque is a decorative style in which animal, human, and vegetative forms are interwoven and deformed to the point of absurdity Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature: 495. This nonliterary sense of the word first entered the English language as a noun. The word comes ultimately from 16 th -century Italian grottesea, deriving from grotta cave, in allusion to certain caves under Rome in which painting in such a style were found. It came to be used as an adjective describing something in this style and hence to mean bizarre, incongruous, or unnatural, or anything outside the normal. The extension of the word grotesque to literature and to non-artistic things took place in France as early as the sixteenth-century, but in England and Germany only in the eighteenth century. With this extension grotesque took on a broader meaning. In literature the style is often used for comedy or satire to show the contradictions and inconsistencies of life. The word grotesque thus come to be applied in a more general fashion during the age of Reason and of Neo-Classicism, when the characteristics of the grotesque style in art, such as extravagance, fantasy, individual taste, and the rejection of the natural conditions of organization are the object of ridicule and disapproval. The most general sense which it has developed by the early eighteenth century is therefore that of “ridiculous, distorted, unnatural, and absurd.”http:davidlavery.netGrotesqueMajor_Artist_Theoriststheoriststhoms onthomson2.html Universitas Sumatera Utara For the modern critics, the “grotesque” refers to special types of writing, to kinds of characters, and to subject matters Harmon William, 2000: 240. The interest in the grotesque is usually considered an outgrowth of interest in the irrational, distrust of any cosmic order, and frustration at humankind’s lot in the universe. In this sense, grotesque is the merging of the comic and tragic, resulting from our loss of faith in the moral universe essential to tragedy and in rational social order essential to comedy. For the nineteenth-century critics, grotesque is a deplorable variation from the normal. Thomas Mann 1875-1955 sees it as the “most genuine style” for the modern world and the “only guise in which the sublime may appear” now. Flannery O’Connor 1925-1964 seems to mean the same thing when she calls the grotesque character “man forced to meet the extremes of his own nature.” William Van O’Connor 1915-1966 calls the grotesque as an American genre. Sherwood Anderson defines a grotesque character as a person who takes one of many truths to himself and calls it as his truth, then tries to live by it. The person becomes a grotesque and the truth he embraces a falsehood. A work can be called grotesque whenever the fictional character performs abnormal actions and is physically or spiritually deformed. It may be used for the allegorical statement, as Flannery O’Connor uses it. It may exist for comic purposes, as in Eudora Welty’s works. It may be the expression of a deep moral seriousness, as it is in the works of William Faulkner. It may be a basis for social commentary, as it is in the works of Erskine Caldwell. It may make a comment on human beings as animals, as in Frank Norris’s works. It may partake of satire, as in Nathanael West’s novels. Clearly, the grotesque suits the spirit of the century. Example of the Universitas Sumatera Utara grotesque can be found in the characters and situations in the works of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849, Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Eugene Ionesco, Mervyn Peake, and Joseph Heller, among many others.

2.2 Grotesque Characteristics