Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at SynthesisAuthor(s): Michael SteigReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Winter, 1970), pp. 253-260Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/428606 .Accessed: 19/05/2012 11:12

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MICHAEL STEIG

Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt

at Synthesis

HOWEVER CUSTOMARY it once may have been to use the term grotesque disparag- ingly in discussions of art and literature, it seems clear that at present it is generally an honorific. Much of that literature which we now characteristically think of as "mod- ern," whatever its age, can be and often is described as grotesque-Swift, Sterne and Dickens, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Gogol and Dostoevsky, Kafka, Mann, Joyce and Faulkner-and the recent upsurge of "black humor" in American literature seems to be a reflection of the same preoccupations. In the visual arts the prestige of the grotesque can be discerned in the revival of interest in Mannerism, and on another level, in the great caricaturists of the eighteenth and nin- teenth centuries. Inhabiting a world that more and more comes to resemble a night- mare, we find the art that speaks most di- rectly to our situation to be that which evokes a world in which the dreamlike and the real are no longer clearly distinguished. There have been a number of attempts at systematic study and definition of the gro- tesque, but no one study seems adequately to cover the field, nor does any provide suf- ficiently clear methods of distinguishing the grotesque, on the one hand, from the merely horrific and, on the other, from the purely comic. Yet these studies point to the need for a comprehensive psychological def-

MICHAEL STEIG is associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Co- lumbia. He has published articles in several jour- nals and is working on a book tentatively titled Dickens and the Comic-Grotesque.

inition, one, moreover, that centers upon effect; for whatever the theoretical difficul- ties with what Monroe Beardsley calls "affective" definitions,l such an approach appears unavoidable with the grotesque.

The most comprehensive of all studies of the grotesque is Wolfgang Kayser's The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Both a historical survey and an attempt at defini- tion, Kayser's book takes the fundamental attribute of the grotesque to be the power of evoking in audience or reader a sense of the radical alienness of the world, its "es- trangement" from man, its essential absurd- ity. The grotesque effects this by depicting a world at least intermittently under the sway of "demonic" forces. Kayser carefully distinguishes the grotesque from the purely fantastic, as in the fairy tale whose world "is not estranged," for "the elements in it which are familiar and natural to us do not suddenly turn out to be strange and ominous." 2 In other words, in the true gro- tesque we are kept aware of the connections between the alien world and our own. It should be clear from the terms Kayser uses that he finds it impossible to dispense with audience response in defining the gro- tesque; he recognizes this explicitly at one point (p. 181), and his discussion is every- where permeated with the appeal to effect, even when he seems to be attempting objec- tive description. Thus, the notion of aliena- tion would seem to have little meaning without the assumption of a perceiver to be alienated, and similarly the notion of the demonic can have little meaning except as a

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content evoking a particular kind of re- sponse, unless one is willing to posit an objectively existing supernatural realm, as Kayser seemingly is not. The central weak- ness of Kayser's study is that it does not follow through on the psychological impli- cations of his approach, does not attempt to analyze what actually goes on between the work and its perceiver, does not unambigu- ously locate the demonic within man him- self. Further, the role of the comic is left unclear and, if anything, Kayser tends to overemphasize the role of terror, to the ex- tent that it is difficult to determine from his discussion whether the pure ghost or horror story is grotesque or not. He does make a distinction between comedy and the gro- tesque-"In the genuine grotesque the spec- tator becomes directly involved at some point where a specific meaning is attached to events. In the humorous context, on the other hand, a certain distance is maintained throughout and, with it, a feeling of secu- rity and indifference" (p. 118)-but this does not explain the role of the comic in the grotesque. Here again one feels a begin- ning has been made, but that the necessary elaboration is lacking.

The belief that Kayser's approach is im- plicitly a psychological one, which yet stops short of psychological analysis, is the initial contention of Arthur Clayborough's The Grotesque in English Literature: "Unless one is prepared to accept the idea that gro- tesqueness is objectively real, and that the grotesque in art is a simple reflection of actual phenomena ... there is no practica- ble alternative to the attempt to find a psy- chological explanation of grotesque art." 3

But Clayborough's Jungian study does not really follow in the direction pointed to by Kayser's emphasis upon psychological ef- fect; instead, the approach is almost en- tirely genetic. Clayborough argues that Swift, Coleridge, and Dickens produced gro- tesque art because of the conflicts within them between regressive (religious, or "nu- minous") and progressive (rationalistic) trends. Whether or not the Jungian catego- ries are valid, it seems doubtful that a ge- netic explanation of the grotesque can yield a broadly applicable definition, since the necessary biographical facts are often lack-

MICHAEL STEIG

ing or are, in any case, open to varying interpretations. Besides, the Jungian uncon- scious seems far more abstract than the Freudian, and consequently Clayborough's psychological analysis of the grotesque fre- quently lacks concreteness. Nowhere is this more evident than in his willingness to be satisfied to state that "it is human nature to regard some things-physical deformity for instance, or creatures which in some way suggest deformity like the ape and the snake-as being more deeply or abidingly grotesque than others" (p. 109). This im- plies a recognition of the importance of re- sponse, but it is at the same time an evasion of the problem of how we respond to the grotesque and why.

Ruskin, writing more than a century ear- lier, actually came closer to providing a psy- chological explanation of the grotesque. His initial premise, expressed in the "Gro- tesque Renaissance" chapter of The Stones of Venice, is that there are two main kinds of grotesque, "sportive" and "terrible," which are composed, respectively, of "ludi- crous" and "fearful" elements; but neither of these two kinds is often found in isola- tion-they are usually combined in some way.4 Rather than summarize the elaborate fourfold description of the grotesque that Ruskin here develops, it will be more con- venient to make use of the later, threefold scheme in Modern Painters, part IV, chap- ter 8. There Ruskin lists three basic psycho- logical processes from which grotesque art arises: "healthful but irrational play of the imagination in times of rest"$; "irregular and accidental contemplation of terrible things; or evil in general"; and "the confu- sion of the imagination by the presence of truths which it cannot wholly grasp." But the succeeding paragraphs suggest that these distinctions are far from mutually ex- clusive, because "the imagination, when at play, is curiously like bad children, and likes to play with fire," and thus "it is hardly ever free from some slight taint of the inclination to evil; still more rarely is it, when so free, natural to the mind; for the moment we begin to contemplate sinless beauty we are apt to get serious; and moral fairy tales .., are hardly ever... naturally imaginative.... The moment any real vital-

Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis

ity enters them, they are nearly sure to ... connect themselves with the evil-enjoying branch." 5 This seems a remarkable fore- shadowing of the psychoanalytic view of the sources of artistic imagination, if we take Ruskin's "evil" to be equivalent to the un- conscious, or more specifically, the id. For while Ruskin wishes to believe that there is a kind of grotesque art that is healthy and free from evil, and another which is "noble" and expresses otherwise inexpressi- ble truths, he is at the same time aware that the grotesque usually involves itself with the forbidden. Although Ruskin's terms are almost invariably genetic, he never ties down the grotesque to particular conflicts in the author; he is trying rather to dis- cover universal qualities, and terms like lu- dicrous and fearful refer as much to effect as to cause. And while Ruskin explicitly locates both evil and the inexpressible in the supernatural realm, this is not as crucial to his argument as it is to his religious posi- tion; for what emerges from his discussion is that the grotesque is an imaginative play- ing with the forbidden or the inexpressible (and perhaps that which is inexpressible is so because it is forbidden?). In extending his theory, we may choose to locate these qualities within man himself.

The first modern theorist, in my opinion, to approach the required concreteness of analysis takes as his starting point Ruskin's view of the grotesque as a combination of the fearful and the ludicrous. Having col- lected various modern uses of grotesque, Lee Byron Jennings notes that they empha- size either horrible or ridiculous qualities; the reality, he concludes, must be some- where in between. The central principles that Jennings6 develops are (my number- ing): 1. "The grotesque object always dis- plays a combination of fearsome and ludi- crous qualities [his italics]-or, to be more precise, it simultaneously arouses reactions of fear and amusement in the observer" (p. 10). 2. "These seemingly contradictory tend- encies are combined in the phenomenon it- self and ..- the mechanism of their combi- nation is the key to its understanding" (p. 11). 3. "In view of the disturbing nature of the fear current and the well-known capac- ity of the playful, comic tendency for pro-

viding relief... it seems reasonable to sup- pose that...there is a disarming mecha- nism at work [his italics]. The formation of fear images is intercepted, at its very onset, by the comic tendency, and the resulting object reflects this interaction of opposing forces" (pp. 14-15). Jennings's application of these principles is precise and yet flexi- ble, enabling him to distinguish different sorts of balance between the fearsome and ludicrous-in Heine, the sense of the disso- lution of the world is central, and yet a "buoyant humor" implies the possibility of a new order; while in other writers (Lud- wig, Stifter), the disarming mechanism of humor is applied directly to the fearsome forces, which are thus ostensibly defeated, though in fact "the playfulness is constantly on the verge of collapsing and giving way to the concealed horror" (p. 16).

Jennings's concept of a disarming mecha- nism seems parallel to the kinds of intra- psychic process described by psychoanalytic ego psychology. Theorists in that field would surely call this mechanism a de- fense, functioning to protect the ego from the guilt or fear-producing fantasies arising from the unconscious, by means of distor- tion of these fantasies through denial, con- densation, splitting, projection, sublima- tion, and so on.7 It would be ungrateful to criticize Jennings for not having pursued the psychoanalytic implications of his theory, but valuable as his basic model is, its key terms are left rather abstract; for instance, the sources of fear as it is aroused by the grotesque are left unspecified, be- yond repeated references to the fear of death, to anxiety or "negative" qualities. It is not at all clear how the disarming mecha- nism of the comic actually operates in the grotesque, and the central terms, fearsome and ludicrous, are questionably adequate to account for all artistic phenomena whose grotesqueness seems evident. Take, for ex- ample, two very different Dickensian char- acters whom I would, intuitively, call gro- tesque. Mrs. Gamp (Martin Chuzzlewit) seems to have little of the fearsome, while Mrs. Clennam (Little Dorrit), who is unquestionably sinister, has little of the lu- dicrous and certainly nothing of the laugha- ble about her; and yet I do not think that

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Mrs. Gamp is simply comic, nor Mrs. Clen- nam simply evil, though it appears that if we follow Jennings's definition we must ei- ther exile them from the company of the grotesque, or find some way of expanding his central terms.

One attempt that has been made to am- plify Kayser by way of psychoanalytic ego psychology seems to bear upon Jennings's theory, although the critic has apparently not read Jennings. Lewis A. Lawson sees one of Faulkner's basic techniques as "gro- tesque-comic," which he defines as the use of comedy as a "defense against anxiety." 8 Thus Faulkner defends himself (and presumably the reader) against the threatening aspects of Flem Snopes by giv- ing him characteristics that make him less than human by transforming him into something animal or thing-like. This seems a logical extension in psychoanalytic terms of Jennings's concept of comedy as a disarm- ing mechanism against anxiety, but it is questionable whether Lawson's particular use of the principle can apply to any but a limited area of the grotesque, namely to that in which threatening figures are in- volved. Furthermore, Lawson's emphasis seems to be upon the tendency of the de- fense to create a feeling of security, and yet we must ask if Flem Snopes would really be less threatening if he were less grotesque. In this regard, Thomas Cramer has enunciated a principle which is crucial to the definition of the grotesque I wish to develop here: "the grotesque is the feeling of anxiety aroused by means of the comic pushed to an extreme," but conversely, "the grotesque is the defeat, by means of the comic, of anxiety in the face of the inexplicable." 9 This formulation of the complementarity of the fearsome and the comic allows us to move beyond the rather mechanical notion of the comic as solely a defensive measure against anxiety: in the grotesque they are more complexly related, in that the extrava- gant use of the comic can create anxiety, as well as relieve it. We can easily illustrate this in Flem Snopes, for it seems clear that the anxiety aroused by Flem is at least in part due to the "comic" distortions to which Faulkner subjects him. By being made something less or other than human,

MICHAEL STEIG

he is made more sinister-in Kayser's term, he is made demonic. This need not be con- sidered a flat contradiction of Lawson's the- sis that Flem is made less fearsome if we assume that a basically ambivalent response is involved: on one level, we will respond to the distorted, inhuman qualities of the character with anxiety, because they are strange and alien and yet seem to resemble human qualities; but at the same time, the fact that these qualities are recognizably a denial of humanity to the character allows us to treat him as though he were separate from our own reality, and thus unthreaten- ing. It depends, perhaps, on whether we are responding with our fully adult, "rational" mind, or with the remnants in us of child- hood fears and fantasies. The sensitive reader or spectator of the grotesque re- sponds in both ways simultaneously. A third possibility, that of sympathy for or identification with the grotesque character, I shall take up later with Mrs. Gamp (but cf. Lawson, p. 118).

The basic problems raised thus far seem to be determining the typical sources of the anxiety aroused by the grotesque; analyzing the role of the comic in arousing or allaying anxiety; and deciding how these character- istics distinguish the grotesque from the tale of terror or horror, on the one hand, and from comedy, on the other. Freud pro- vides a possible answer to the first of these questions in his paper, "The 'Uncanny'" ("Das 'Unheimliche' "),o10 in which he poses the question of what accounts for the par- ticular effect that leads us in our language to distinguish an area of the uncanny "within the boundaries of what is 'fearful' " (p. 368). Tracing the adjective "unheim- lich," he finds, surprisingly, that in one of its uses "heimlich," the ostensible antonym, is virtually a synonym. He quotes Grimm's dictionary to this effect: "From the idea of 'homelike,' 'belonging to the house,' the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of others, some- thing concealed, secret..." (p. 376; itali- cized in the original). From this, Freud con- cludes that those things which give us a sense of the uncanny are those which recall repressed infantile fantasies, wishes, or modes of thought, those in general which

Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis

remind us of primary psychic processes. Thus the coincidental granting of a wish is uncanny because it recalls the "omnipo- tence of thoughts" which is believed in in childhood, and thus an epileptic seizure is an uncanny thing to witness because it arouses "the feeling that automatic, me- chanical processes are at work, concealed beneath the ordinary appearances of anima- tion" (p. 378). The distinction Freud makes between the uncanny and the fantastic is parallel to Kayser's distinction between true grotesque and the fairy tale-for example, according to Freud, the ghosts in Shake- speare do not seem uncanny because "we order our judgement to the imaginary real- ity imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spirits and spectres as though their existence had the same validity in their world as our own has in the external world"; but "the situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality" (p. 405).

The uncanny and the grotesque should not be taken as identical, but a basic theo- retical question claims our attention before that problem can be considered. In psy- choanalytic terms, what distinguishes the uncanny from any other kind of literature, since it has been claimed, most notably by Norman Holland in The Dynamics of Lit- erary Response, that literature characteris- tically affects us by mobilizing infantile fan- tasies and impulses, and "managing" them through the various defenses available to form and content. Holland himself suggests the answer when he specifies that the un- canny involves infantile material which is strongly anxiety-producing, and which at the same time is weakly managed.1' We may illustrate this with Freud's own exam- ple of the literary uncanny, Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann." Freud finds Coppelius' threat to Nathanael's eyes to be a thinly disguised castration-fantasy, Coppelius him- self embodying the threatening aspects of the authoritarian father. To realize how close to the surface this identification is, we need only look at the scene in which Na- thanael spies on his father's and Coppelius' mysterious experiments:

Good God! as my father bent down over the fire

how different he looked! His gentle features seemed to be drawn up by some dreadful con- vulsive pain into an ugly, repulsive Satanic mask. He looked like Coppelius.1'

When Coppelius sees the boy he cries, "Eyes herel Eyes here!" and "Now we've got eyes-eyes-a beautiful pair of chil- dren's eyes." It seems clear, even if one is hesitant to accept the Freudian identifica- tion of eyes with the sexual organ, that the obsessive repetition of "eyes" suggests a meaning beyond the literal. We do not have to push very far to interpret the spying scene as one in which the child fan- tasies himself as being punished for spying upon the forbidden things his father does at night, by the loss of that possession with which he might presume to equal his father. Castration-anxiety is suggested again when Nathanael buys a pocket-telescope from Coppola-who calls it an "eye," and who later turns out to be Coppelius in dis- guise-and then wonders why he feels anx- ious at the possibility of having paid too much money for it; there is a symbolic connection between money and sexual matters well attested in psychoanalytic writings.'3 It can be said, then, that the main plot of "The Sand-Man" is uncanny because it arouses childhood fears in a rela- tively direct, weakly disguised way; but it should be added that in general the un- canny may evoke aggressive, sexual, or other guilt-arousing impulses, as well as fantasies of threat to life or body. Peter Penzoldt has shown how this operates in "ghost" stories, which not only depict di- rectly such basic fears as those of death or dissolution, but may express forbidden wishes-such as masturbation, in Machen's "Novel of the White Powder," or oral ag- gression, as in vampire tales.'4 Such stories contain defenses of a sort, but they are usually just strong enough to make a read- ing of the story possible for most people- as in M. R. James's detached, rational tone, or in the pseudo-significance of H. P. Love- craft's ur-world mythology.

The complexity of the relation between the uncanny and the grotesque is indicated by Kayser's using "The Sand-Man" as a prime example of the pure grotesque, while Thomas Cramer classifies it as one of Hoff-

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mann's "tales of terror without comic quali- ties, in which the suprarational and inex- plicable function as pure uncanniness" (my translation).l5 Although Cramer does not absolutely exclude "The Sand-Man" from the grotesque, he puts it in a different cate- gory from those he considers the most per- fectly grotesque of Hoffmann's tales, which include "Der Goldene Topf," which Kay- ser, by contrast, considers very weakly gro- tesque (p. 72)! The problem may be clari- fied if we return to Jennings's definition of the grotesque as a combination of the fear- some and the ludicrous, and substitute "un- canny" for "fearsome"; further, we may ten- tatively take "ludicrous" to refer to a set of defenses whose presence distinguishes the grotesque from the purely uncanny. "The Sand-Man" will serve once again as an illus- tration. Kayser locates the grotesqueness of this tale in the way it leaves us ultimately in doubt as to the nature of the "dark forces" that destroy Nathanael-are they only projections of his troubled soul, as Clara suggests, or are they real (Kayser, pp. 74-76)? Granted that this uncertainty is present, it seems doubtful that uncertainty by itself can be taken as a hallmark of the grotesque, when it may equally be an at- tribute of the uncanny (compare Penzoldt's discussion of the ghost stories of de la Mare, pp. 203-227, which characteristically rely on uncertainty for their effect). But there is another important quality present in the treatment of the threatening Coppelius- Coppola which brings "The Sand-Man" more closely in line with our tentative mod- ification of Jennings's definition. Coppelius is presented in caricature form (as is Cop- pola); that is, as so extremely monstrous as to seem almost ridiculous:

... a large broad-shouldered man, with an im- mensely big head, a face the colour of yellow ochre, gray bushy eyebrows, from beneath which two piercing, greenish, cat-like eyes glitter, and a prominent Roman nose hanging over his up- per lip. His distorted mouth was often screwed up into a malicious sneer; then two dark-red spots appeared on his cheeks, and a strange hiss- ing noise proceeded from between his tightly clenched teeth.... His little wig scarcely ex- tended beyond the crown of his head, his hair was curled round high up above his big red ears, and plastered to his temples with cosmetic, and a broad closed hair-bag stood out prominently

MICHAEL STEIG

from his neck.... Altogether he was a most dis- agreeable and horribly ugly figure, but what we children detested most of all was his big coarse hairy hands; we could never fancy anything that he had once touched. (pp. 186-87)

This description of Coppelius has the dual effect at once of making him horrible and frightening to the childlike part of us, and of defending our ego, our adult rational consciousness, against the threat by degrad- ing him into something absurd.16 There is a clear parallel to this in several of Dickens's characters, for example Uriah Heep, who is given red hair, fishy hands, and a writhing manner as a way of making him look ridic- ulous and unworthy of the heroine, Agnes, but who at the same time becomes more sinister through these very attributes, as is indicated by David's trying to rub off the clamminess transferred from Uriah's hand to his (David Copperfield, chap. 15).17

To summarize thus far: the grotesque in- volves the arousing of anxiety by giving ex- pression to infantile fears, fantasies and im- pulses; what distinguishes it from the purely uncanny is that in the latter defenses against anxiety are weak, while in the gro- tesque the threatening material is distorted in the direction of harmlessness without completely attaining it. That is, the defense is still only partially successful, in that it allows some anxiety to remain, and charac- teristically will even contribute to the arousing of some anxiety. This is the basic paradox of the grotesque: it is double- edged, it at once allays and intensifies the effect of the uncanny; in pure comedy, at the other end of the spectrum from the un- canny, the defense is complete, and detach- ment is achieved. It is noteworthy in this regard that a psychoanalytic interpretation of the "grotesque-comic sublimation" in neurotics (the ridiculing of others to alle- viate a sense of personal worthlessness) sug- gests that this defense is unstable, and typi- cally fails of the kind of total ego-mastery achieved by the comic, anxiety repeatedly breaking through.18 This parallels my em- phasis on the paradoxical nature of the gro- tesque, and also recalls Kayser's stress on uncertainty (and cf. Jennings, "the playful- ness is constantly on the verge of collapsing and giving way to the concealed horror," p.

Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis

16). We are now in a position to attempt to answer the question posed earlier about the character of Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit -how can she be grotesque, if there is nothing of the comic about her? The an- swer appears to be that when a character arouses anxiety in a direct way, techniques of degradation or ridicule may be used that are not obviously comic or laughable: thus Coppelius, and thus Mrs. Clennam, a frightening parental figure, whose narrow Calvinism is expressed in her aggression against others, most notably her son Ar- thur. At the same time, she is a paralytic and, in a way, more frightening in her phys- ical distortion, and yet the paralysis is made to seem the result of her psychological con- dition, and thus a kind of fulfillment of an infantile, aggressive wish, the wish that the authority figures of childhood shall be pun- ished for their thwarting of the child's de- sires. And here too, the peculiar ambiva- lence of response to the grotesque can be seen, for while we may feel satisfaction at Mrs. Clennam's punishment, at a deeper level we may feel guilt at our aggressive wishes toward her.

But the threatening figure is no more than half of the problem of the grotesque. The character I originally counter-poised to Mrs. Clennam, Sairey Gamp, appears to contain little that is fearsome; how then are we to adjust the concept of the grotesque to accommodate comic figures of this kind? Mrs. Gamp, I would maintain, does in fact have anxiety-arousing (uncanny) qualities, but with Mrs. Gamp the threat is one of identification. For if Coppelius and Mrs. Clennam arouse infantile fears, Mrs. Gamp embodies those impulses which were officially taboo in Victorian culture, and which are still subject to strong inhibitions in our own "permissive" culture-sex (she is a midwife), unrestrained eating and drinking, and, above all, narcissistic self-ab- sorption. Mrs. Gamp is subjected to carica- ture-like techniques, but here they are una- bashedly comic, though they again function in a dual way. First of all, Mrs. Gamp, through her disconnected speech, immense ugliness, lack of rational intelligence, un- couthness, and selfishness, is made ludi- crous, almost contemptible, so that the pos-

sibility of our conscious identification with the compelling but forbidden drives she embodies is minimized. But at the same time, a contrary process seems to arise from the same attributes; our inhibitions are lulled to sleep by Mrs. Gamp's ludicrous- ness, so that we may be delighted by the childishly playful free associations of her speech, her indulgence in oral pleasures, and her strong assertion of self against the world. In psychoanalytic terms, her comic attributes allow the reader a kind of "vic- tory" over the superego, by making it un- necessary for us to take her seriously on the conscious level, while allowing us to iden- tify with her without being fully aware that we do so.'9 If there is any doubt that we do so identify, it should be resolved by consid- ering that the majority of critics have found Mrs. Gamp attractive rather than re- pulsive.20 The peculiar attractiveness of Mrs. Gamp recalls Ernst Kris's insistence that the comic is liberating, that it is a form of "regression in the service of the ego," by means of which "we can throw off the fet- ters of logical thought and revel in a long- forgotten freedom" (Kris, p. 205). This statement will help us to modify our model of the grotesque, in which caricature and comedy have been seen up to now primarily as defenses against anxiety. To the extent that these techniques disguise the repressed material, they are defensive, but they also allow for the expression of this material, in part by virtue of their being in themselves a reflection of childhood impulses, but pri- marily through their function of allaying anxiety, and hence weakening inhibitions.

We may incorporate this concept in our final definition of the grotesque: The gro- tesque involves the managing of the un- canny by the comic. More specifically: a) When the infantile material is primarily threatening, comic techniques, including caricature, diminish the threat through deg- radation or ridicule; but at the same time, they may also enhance anxiety through their aggressive implications and through the strangeness they lend to the threatening figure. b) In what is usually called the comic-grotesque, the comic in its various forms lessens the threat of identification with infantile drives by means of ridicule; at

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the same time, it lulls inhibitions and makes possible on a preconscious level the same identification that it appears to the con- science or superego to prevent. In short, both extreme types of the grotesque (and there are many instances in between) return us to childhood-the one attempts a libera- tion from fear, while the other attempts a liberation from inhibition; but in both a state of unresolved tension is the most com- mon result, because of the intrapsychic con- flicts involved. This definition may appear cumbersome compared with Jennings's "combination of the fearsome and ludi- crous," and unpoetic compared with Kay- ser's series of aphorisms; but I submit that it is at once more comprehensive and more precise than previous definitions, in that it locates the source of the demonic, specifies the roles of the uncanny, of caricature, and of the comic, and details the processes in- volved in our response to the grotesque. Its ultimate usefulness of course remains to be demonstrated in its application to specific works.

1 Aesthetics (New York, 1958), pp. 61, 74. 2 Trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington, 1963), p.

184. 3 (Oxford, 1965), p. 69. 4 Ruskin, Works, ed. Cook and Wedderburn (Lon-

don, 1903-1912), 11: 151. 6 Ibid., 5: 130, 131. 6 The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Gro-

tesque in Post-Romantic German Prose (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963), p. 10.

'For the application of these principles to art, see Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (London, 1953) and Norman N. Holland, The Dy- namics of Literary Response (New York, 1968).

MICHAEL STEIG

8 "The Grotesque-Comic in the Snopes Trilogy," Literature and Psychology, 15 (1965): 118.

"Grotesk ist das durch uibersteigerte Komik aus- geloste Gefiihl der Angst"; "grotesk ist die durch Komik bekampfte Angst vor dem Unerklarbaren," Das Groteske bei E. T. A. Hoffmann (Munich, 1966), p. 26; my translation.

10"Trans. Alix Strachey, Collected Papers (New York, 1959), 4: 368-407.

11 (New York, 1968), p. 293. "a Trans. J. T. Bealby, in The Best Tales of Hoff-

mann, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York, 1967), p. 188. 18 This connection has been pointed out most re-

cently by M. D. Faber and Alan F. Dilnot in regard to Iago's "Put but money in thy purse," "On a Line of Iago's," American Imago 25 (1968): 86-90.

14 The Supernatural in Fiction (London, 1952), t;p. 3-12, 37-40, 159-63.

15 "Schauergeschichten ohne komischen Zuge, in denen sich das Uberrational-Unerklarliche als reine Unheimlichkeit auswirkt," Das Kroteske bei E. T. A. Hoffmann, p. 29.

1" Cf. Ernst Kris, "The Psychology of Caricature," Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, p. 175.

17"Dickens's apparent repulsion from Uriah has been remarked by George Orwell, "Charles Dickens," A Collection of Essays, (Garden City, 1954), p. 85; and by A. O. J. Cockshut, The Imagination of Charles Dickens (London, 1961), p. 119.

"8Annie Reich, "The Structure of the Grotesque- Comic Sublimation," Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 13 (1949): 161-70.

19 Kris, "Ego Development and the Comic," Psy- choanalytic Explorations in Art, p. 216.

20 See G. K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criti- cisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (London, 1911), p. 101; Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York, 1952), 1: 480-81; A. O. J. Cockshut, The Imagination of Charles Dickens, pp. 19-21; Steven Marcus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (London, 1965), pp. 261-65; Grahame Smith, Dickens, Money and Society (Berke- ley and Los Angeles, 1968), pp. 1-6. A notable dis- senter is J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 120-21.