The word
“grotesque†comes from the same root as “grottoâ€, and is thus linguistically
connected with the rites of deities that were worshiped in underground temples.
even today some of this subterranean connotation is attached to grotesque art.
Though we acknowledge them less freely, we are still plagued with many of the
primitive fears that afflicted our cave-dwelling ancestors. We have spread the
light of our knowledge a little wider, but the outer darkness still swarms with
dimly visioned shapes of dread. Grotesque art is a very human gesture of
defiance, making faces at the great dark, thumbing the nose at the unknown.
There is a definite fascination in that which we fear. and in representing or
contemplating the object of our fear in art forms we are able to obtain a
release from its domination. even the most determinedly healthy-minded of us are
susceptible to the lure of the morbid: the unceasing demand for mystery stories
proves this. the Grand Guignol Theatre in Paris for years provided a steady diet
of morbid shockers. numerous modern artists have frequently expressed themselves
in terms of the grotesque — Hogarth, Daumier, and Goya. in the field of
black-and-white, beardsley and alastair found the grotesque their most natural
and effective vein.
A powerful esthetic category involving disruption and distortion of hierarchical or canonical assumptions. The notion combines ugliness and ornament, the bizarre and the ridiculous, the excessive and the unreal. The term derives from the Italian term for grottos (grotteschi), i.e., the ruins in which statuettes of distorted figures were found in the XV and XVI centuries. The Romantic era, with its interest in the dispossessed, in all those who before the age of Revolution had been nameless and invisible, made the grotesque its indispensable adjunct. Victor Hugo, for whom the grotesque was indispensable opposite the sublime, aptly indulged his penchant for antithesis when he claimes that the grotesque is "the richest source nature can offer art." M. Bahktin placed the grotesque at the heart of the carnivalesque spirit.
With its insistence on ironic reversals, on fluent and fertile opposites, the grotesque also resembles the topos of The World Upside-Down, that topsy-turvy universe where things are no longer in their place, where order is disrupted, where hierarchies tumble, and the Fool is king. Both the Grotesque and The World Upside-Down possess a darkly comic portent, that the fantastic uncovers and explores; both serve the key function of revealing the constructed nature of rationality, of the mandate that everything be in its place. The surface relationships by which daily life is governed are anything but ordained and stable; indeed, they can be understood as absolute only by dint of a sustained illusion.
