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So far I'm finding that of the major studies on the grotesque in art and literature, the same all-male cast of writers is wheeled out, with scant attention to women, hence my interest in unearthing this as a topic. Wolfgang Kayser (The Grotesque in Art and Literature, 1957) and Geoffrey Galt Harpham (On the Grotesque, 1982) are perhaps two examples of this.
I opened with Nightwood because it strikes me as infusing a lot of grotesque elements, both in terms of texture, nuance and imagery. Read more about the book in Jeanette Winterson's recent Guardian article here.
There is, for instance, a strong bestial line in the text - the two main characters (a lesbian and separated couple) seem to orbit varying scenes of human/animal blurring, from a Bosch-like scene in the circus to a very strange ending with a dog (something T. S. Eliot wasn't at all sure about when he came to editing Barnes' work at the time). I wonder what other people think of this extraordinary text - like the concept of the grotesque itself, it remains very hard to pin down what Nightwood is, be in a prose-poem, a novella, faux Elizabethan drama, a stream of modernist vignettes, etc.
Barnes herself drew from other authors subsequently heralded as writers of the grotesque, for example E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale 'The Sandman' (in turn the object of Freud's 1919 article on "das unheimliche"/the 'uncanny'), Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel - but more than entering and continuing such a tradition, Barnes evolves the grotesque as a method of writing itself.
Back to theoretical frameworks and it is perhaps Mikhail Bakhtin's study (Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, 1984) which most eloquantly links the grotesque to corporeality. Here's a concise but decent review of the study.
In terms of book-length works, Mary Russo's is perhaps the most prominent criticism on this topic - for anyone wanting to probe further, it is The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (Ldn & NY: Routlede, 1994).
--- Absolutely Kristeva's work is central, and important in this respect. I believe she may have written exclusively on the grotesque, as well as the abjection stuff.
But not to get too bogged down, I think I am pushing at a connection between the female body, the grotesque and its cavern-like and troubling association with the weird or the horrible. Angela Carter is a brilliant example of a writer who plays with this association, her stories are chock-full of the monstrous feminine, as I'm sure is an obvious point. (The Passion of New Eve is a goodun, in fact the novel Carter thought to be her best, and certainly relavent here.)
Moments of the grotesque in women's writing can be read as transgressive, comic, joyous... as well as horrible, unsettling, or haunting. In Barnes, I see it as - paradoxically - both at once. What I wonder is --- who else is running with Barnes' style/type of female grotesque, beyond the (often clunky, certainly well-tramelled) feminist writings of WInterson/Carter/Atwood et al?
Apologies if this thread is a bit OTT - am discombobulating myself!
best, CS. |
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