FICTION OF THE MODERN GROTESQUE Also by Bernard Me Elroy SHAKESPEARE'S MATURE TRAGEDIES Fiction of the Modern Grotesque Bernard Me Elroy Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-20096-2 ISBN 978-1-349-20094-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20094-8 © Bernard Me Elroy 1989 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1989 ISBN 978-0-312-01340-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Me Elroy, Bernard. Fiction of the modem grotesque I by Bernard Me Elroy. P- em. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-01340-0 (est.) L Grotesque in literature. L Title. PN56.G7M36 1989 809'.91-dc19 87-27866 OP The door opened and what entered the room, fat and succulent, its sides voluptuously swelling, footless, pushing itself along on its entire underside, was the green dragon. Formal salutation. I asked him to come right in. He regretted that he could not do that, as he was too long. This meant that the door had to remain open, which was rather awkward. He smiled, half in embarrassment, half cunningly, and began: 'Drawn hither by your longing, I come pushing myself from afar off, and underneath am now quite sore. But I am glad to do it. Gladly do I come, gladly do I offer myself to you.' Kafka's Journals Contents Preface ix 1 The Grotesque and the Modern Grotesque 1 2 The Paranoid Vision 30 3 Bloomsb ody 70 4 Insanity as a Point of View 94 5 The Art of Decadence 129 Postscript 182 Notes 186 Index 204 vii Preface What follows is a traditional approach to an impossible subject. The approach is traditional in that my interest is primarily in the works considered rather than in theories of language and criticism. As a phenomenon in art, the grotesque is physical, predominantly visual; its true home is in painting and sculpture, the media studied by John Ruskin in his classic treatise on the subject, The Stones of Venice. In literature, it exists in precisely those works that use language to evoke for the reader a vivid visual image which is perceived as grotesque. I am more interested in the image evoked than in the process of the evocation. Primarily, I will be asking what is the source of the grotesque. Why does it make its riotous appearance again and again in the work of so many writers who seem to speak with most urgency and power to the modern imagination? Considering the diversity of the works I am to discuss, the answer to that question will not be simple, or, more exactly, I hope it will not be simplistic. In my opening chapter, I attempt to expand upon and, by way of Freud, to update the basic idea of Ruskin's argument, that the grotesque arises from a peculiar attitude or stance of mind toward the fearsome. But what a particular group of people or what individuals within that group find fearsome will vary greatly from culture to culture and individual to individual. Certainly, there are common concerns in the literature of the modern grotesque that make it characteristically modern, and in the second part of the opening chapter, I attempt to identify them as they emerge in Feodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, a work that brings us to the threshold of our topic. But in the chapters that follow, the most striking thing is that the grotesque arises from a different source in the case of each writer considered. The source of the grotesque in Franz Kafka is a comprehensive view of reality itself, a view that I have characterised as the paranoid vision, for it shares much in common with the clinical descriptions given of the world experienced in paranoia. In James Joyce's Ulysses, the assemblage of grotesques that haunt the world of Nighttown all arise from the ambivalent love, hate, shame, fear, and laughter simultaneously directed toward the human body. ix Preface X Here, as at so many junctures, the grotesque is used to expose in magical, exaggerated terms what has been implicit all along in the 'real' strata of the novel. In a whole group of works, the narrative has been delivered over to a speaker who is either insane or probably insane. The grotesque arises from the deranged fantasies and delusions which he mingles freely with the 'reality' of his story. But even within this category, there is a wide range of difference among authors. For both Gunter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov, the narrator's insanity becomes a way of coping with a world that is otherwise intolerable, and a sense of manic gaiety overlies the basic desper ation of his predicament. For Samuel Beckett, however, schizo phrenia becomes the embodiment of the bleakest limits of isolation and incoherence. For both Flannery O'Connor and Nathanael West, the departure of religion and myth from the modern world and the inability of secular culture to supply any comparable conviction on which to base meaning or value is the situation that gives rise to the grotesque. But in West's fiction, the grotesques are the victims; in O'Connor's, they are more likely to be the heroes and saints. Thomas Pynchon uses the grotesque as a symptom of massive failure in the entire enterprise of culture itself. In V., he locates the source of this demise in atrophy of the emotions and the cultivation of illusion to mask the psyche from its own innate cruelty. In Gravity's Rainbow, the hallucinating mind of the narrator provides a kind of palimpsest through which the conclusion of World War II is viewed, with the novel's principal grotesque, Captain Blicero, becoming its principal spokesman on the subject of the terminal infection from which Western civilisation is expiring. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez' masterpiece, it is the very nature of man's endeavour to impose culture on a riotous natural world that inevitably turns him into a grotesque. If there is such diversity, then why try to gather such a disparate group of writers under one heading? The common element among them is their use of the grotesque as a crucial and powerful force in their work. Naturally, an important purpose of this book is to provide a model of the grotesque itself, drawing where possible on previous studies, but attempting to go beyond them in essential respects. I hope to show how the grotesque is a perennial strain in the human imagination, present in the art and literature of diverse cultures, and to demonstrate what the works of a variety Preface xi of twentieth-century authors share in common with earlier manifes tations of the grotesque. At the same time, I hope to suggest fundamental ways in which they differ from those manifestations and are characteristically modem. A few words are in order about the scope of this study. Exhaustive comprehensiveness was not a possible or desirable goal; a comprehensive book on the grotesque in modem literature would be longer than The Anatomy of Melancholy. The present work is largely a study of Kafka, Joyce, Grass, and Pynchon, a selection justified, I believe, by their preeminence in the kind of literature I am discussing. But the final two chapters are organised topically rather than being built exclusively around an individual author. Given the conspicuous use in fiction of the modem grotesque of first person narrators who are possibly insane, and the preoccupa tion with decline and decadence in Western civilisation, it seemed warranted to include several examples handling the same concerns but with important differences. Other critics might have included other writers, but the objective here has been to strike a balance between offering a representative, if selective, set of examples and rendering the whole undertaking so broad as to be virtually impossible. A generous grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation made it possible for me to go on leave to complete the writing of this book. Earlier, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled me to get the project started. Loyola University of Chicago provided several grants and other assistance. I would like to express my gratitude to the following institutions for the use of their resources and much help from their staffs: the British Library, the University of London and its Institute for Germanic Studies, the libraries of Loyola University of Chicago and its Rome Center of Liberal Arts, the Newberry Library of Chicago, and the libraries of Cornell University, Northwestern University, and Rice University. Portions of this book in somewhat different form have appeared as articles in Modern Fiction Studies, and Forum for Modern Language Studies. Support of a less material but no less valued kind came from the many friends and colleagues who were generous with their time, ideas, and encouragement. In particular, I wish to thank Eileen Baldeshwiler, Kathleen Burke, Anne Callahan, Thomas Gorman, Alan Grob, Joyce Markle, Gene Phillips, Linda Revere, and Eliza beth Wally. Great also is my gratitude to my students, both