The Grotesque: First PrinciplesAuthor(s): Geoffrey HarphamSource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 461-468Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/430580 .Accessed: 20/03/2011 09:22

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GEOFFREY HARPHAM

The Grotesque: First Principles

The unformed character of our ideas about the grotesque is in sharp contrast to the highly developed interest shown in it by contemporary artists and critics. How do we arrive at the source? Not by going back: etymology, in this case at least, is little help. Perhaps the germ, the secret of the grotesque, lies not in the origins or derivations of the word, but in the conditions of a particular cultural climate, a particular artist, a particular audience. Perhaps we should approach the grotesque not as a fixed thing....

AN UNANTICIPATED by-product of the Renaissance interest in Antiquity, the gro- tesque wormed its unwelcome way into the European consciousness near the end of the fifteenth century through a series of exca- vations in caves (grotta) near Rome. These excavations unearthed murals dating from the Roman Decadence in which human and animal figures are intertwined with foliage in ways which violate not only the laws of statics and gravity, but common sense and plain observation as well. Al- though the grotesque is now fully certified and licensed, it might seem highly improb- able that that child is father to this man, so radically different from these murals are the forms we now call grotesque.

The grotesque is the slipperiest of aes- thetic categories. The word itself, now applied to the work of di Chirico, Francis Bacon (the painter), Stravinsky, Magritte, Berlioz, Flannery O'Connor, Nathanael West, and Henry Miller, has also been applied to that of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, Poe, Coleridge, Hogarth, Callot, and Bosch-to name only those in the mainstream. If we have further appetite for muddle we can chew on such facts as that the grotesque has become increasingly prominent in recent Dickens scholarship

GEOFFREY HARPHAM is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

and criticism while it was only rarely considered by his contemporaries, or that many nineteenth- and early twentieth-cen- tury critics of Browning saw his work as indisputably-even quintessentially- grotesque while later critics do not stress this element. The novels which seemed to Hazlitt "Gothic and grotesque" hardly seem so to us, who have evolved forms of the grotesque unimaginable to Monk Lewis or Mary Shelley. Add to this the perils of dissociation implied in the fact that the original "grotesque" murals no longer form the center of our definition of the term do not, even, to most modern sensibilities, seem very grotesque-and one is left with a bewildering image of the grotesque as an aesthetic orphan, wandering from form to form, era to era.

All of this implies that, in approaching a definition of the grotesque, we should not always take etymological consistency for conceptual accuracy; the definition of this concept, almost as fluid as that of beauty, is good for one era-even one man-at a time. When dealing with the grotesque, it seems, one must deal either with gross gen- eralizations, arbitrariness, or specific state- ments about specific works. While one can define it in terms of the forms employed by artists who, either consciously or uncon- sciously (in other words, in the critic's judgment) used the grotesque, or in terms

462 of the psychology of such an artist, easily the most crucial and measurable aspect is the effect of the grotesque on the reader, listener, or spectator. This is not to say that the genre of a work depends upon the sang-froid, gullibility or sense of humor of the audience; it is simply to recognize that while the forms of the grotesque have changed remarkably over the centuries, the emotional complex denoted by the word has remained fairly constant.

While consistency of grotesque forms is clearly not to be had, certain elements seem to appear more frequently than others. Wolfgang Kayser, whose The Gro- tesque in Art and Literature is the most exhaustive modern attempt to explore the grotesque, notes that snakes, toads, rep- tiles, nocturnal animals such as spiders, owls, and particularly bats are the favorite animals of the grotesque; and further re- marks that jungle vegetation, "with its ominous vitality, in which nature itself seems to have erased the difference be- tween plants and animals,'1 the mechani- cal object brought to life, the robot, and the mask also recur frequently. But these are given almost incidentally; and no critic recently has seriously tried to define the grotesque exclusively by its forms.

Rather, the grotesque is a structure, the structure of estrangement.2 Suddenness and surprise, Kayser asserts, are essential elements in this estrangement; the familiar and commonplace must be suddenly sub- verted or undermined by the uncanny or alien: " . . . it is our world which ceases to be reliable, and we feel that we would be unable to live in this changed world. The grotesque instills fear of life rather than fear of death."3 Kafka's "The Metamor- phosis" gives perhaps the perfect example of instant alienation, brilliantly, suddenly literalizing Dostoevsky's metaphor of man-as-beetle, raising the existential to the grotesque. But while the criterion of suddenness might apply to Kafka, I see no need to insist on it as a general rule. Thomas Mann's "realistic" work Death in Venice shows the perceptions of its hero Gustave von Aschenbach always threaten- ing to betray a distortion which might at any moment merge into the grotesque. The grotesque is present as thematic metaphor

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in this work, in the images of decay, of Plague, in the young-old man, the min- strel-in the entire story, in fact. Its ap- pearance, however, is not sudden, but insidious. The familiar world is never wholly absent, but always on notice of dismissal. While most writers do not em- ploy the inherently extreme methods of the grotesque with such tact, that is no argu- ment against subtlety.

The grotesque must begin with, or con- tain within it, certain aesthetic conven- tions which the reader feels are representa- tive of reality as he knows it. The charac- teristic themes of the grotesque-the Plague, the Dance of Death, the masked ball, the Temptations of St. Anthony, the Apocalypse, to name a few-jeopardize or shatter our conventions by opening onto vertiginous new perspectives characterized by the destruction of logic and regression to the unconscious-madness, hysteria, or nightmare. But this threat depends for its effectiveness on the efficacy of the every- day, the partial fulfillment of our usual expectations. We must be believers whose faith has been profoundly shaken but not destroyed; otherwise we lose that fear of life and become resigned to absurdity, fan- tasy, or death. Fairy tales, for example, represent an alien but not an alienated world. The Theater of the Absurd has rules of incongruity which effectively disqualify it from being truly grotesque. When the absurd happens, it must subvert rather than confirm our expectations. The Temp- tations of St. Anthony are much more gro- tesque to St. Anthony than they are to us, who are familiar with the tradition and the didactic point. In fact, Ivan Le Lorrain Albright has recognized this, creating a "Temptations" which is literally that: St. Anthony is nowhere to be seen in the boiling mass of grotesqueries which covers his canvas-which places the burden of St. Anthony on us.

Kafka's metamorphosis from idea to symbol shows us that the grotesque may be latent in an idea or a situation as well as in a physical condition; and common usage supports this. The fact that the radical deformity which is the ground base for the grotesque can be intellectual or moral is largely responsible for the twisting and

The Grotesque: First Principles

shifting in definitions described earlier: the grotesque depends not only on physical conditions the deformity of which most people would recognize, but also on our conventions, our prejudices, our common- places, our banalities, our mediocrities.

As our perceptions of the physical world change-as the world itself is changed by technology, pollution, wars, and ur- banization-some things which had ap- peared as distortions are now perceived as commonplace or seen to obey other, previ- ously unknown laws. Each age redefines the grotesque in terms of what threatens its sense of essential humanity. As good wit is novel truth, Santayana said, good gro- tesque is novel beauty. We see like phe- nomena all around us. Even so moral a man as George Orwell would now hesitate to classify homosexuality with necrophilia, as he did in a 1944 essay on Salvador Dali.4 Blacks, who previously existed in the pub- lic mind as caricatures, have moved, with exposure, beyond this reductive image. One can't be shocked forever; and to the Parisian who strolls by Notre Dame on his way to work, even the gargoyles must seem as comfortable as old slippers. Domesticat- ing our grotesqueries, we pay, applaud, or admire them, and finally pay them the ultimate tribute of ignoring their deform- ity.

Furthermore, a particular situation or object or character or action may acquire the force of the grotesque depending upon the context of expectations. Envision, for example, a picture of "The Papist Devil" as a swine-in-a-mitre. To whom would this be more grotesque-a pious twelfth-cen- tury Italian peasant or Martin Luther? To Luther it would be mere satire-and tepid satire at that. A Griinewald painting per- fectly illustrates this contextuality: an aged, decrepit, withered couple, crawling with toads and spiders, with vipers twist- ing out of festering wounds, and giant flies feasting on fresh sores. The picture is astonishing, disgusting, but it becomes grotesque only in the context of the title- "Pair of Lovers"-which, providing a ste- reotype, also furnishes the radical incon- gruity which intensifies our disgust and coerces us to laugh-a short snort with no smile-in spite of our disgust. For an object

463 to be grotesque, it must arouse three re- sponses. Laughter and astonishment are two; either disgust or horror is the third.

The laughter associated with the gro- tesque is reductive or ambiguous, innocent or satanic, depending upon point of view. To the artist, the grotesque represents a partial liberation from representational- ism, a chance to create his own forms-a prerogative usually reserved for others. The opportunity to fashion new Adams, monstrous to the multitude merely for their novelty, can be a cause of what Baudelaire analyzed as "pure joy" to the artist. According to Baudelaire, other forms of comic expression appeal to man's satanic impulse to rise superior over others, to laugh at their misfortunes. We laugh at the grotesque, however, in astonishment at the artist's boldness, daring or ingenuity. The grotesque, he says, is easily the more primitive form, expressing not one man's superiority over his fellows, but the artist's superiority over nature.

This view of course presupposes the exclusively subjective nature of the gro- tesque, a view which, as I will suggest later, many artists soon came implicitly to ques- tion. The artist who creates the pure grotesque-who does not lard his creations with non-grotesque elements-is man in his primal pointlessness, innocent of moral ideas.

While the laughter of the grotesque might be radically innocent for the creator, it is never innocuous. And the less sophis- ticated the response of the audience, the more ambiguous, confused or fringed with hesitations that laughter will be. In a naive reading, the corruption of the natural order is likely to be associated with a satanic intrusion of pandemonium into the world. Such naive laughter, which might arise on the comic or caricatural fringe of the gro- tesque as a superiority-response to the ugly, deformed or distorted, becomes com- plex, withdrawn in confusion as the reader senses, according to his degree of sophisti- cation, either that the artist is mocking him or that the familiar world is being mocked and subverted by the abysmal, the nocturnal, the irrational, the satanic.

The laughter of the grotesque can be an involuntary response to situations which

464 cannot be handled any other way, regard- less of the sophistication of the audi- ence-why else do we gasp with laughter at Goya's Desastres De La Guerre? In such cases, laughter serves to diminish the hor- ror or perplexity and make the nightmare seem more bearable. Such ambiguity is itself central to the response to the gro- tesque, which opens into a realm of contra- diction and ambiguity, frequently through the fusion of forms or realms we know to be separate. This element was characteristic of the grotesque even during the Renais- sance in the incongruous medleys of the monstrous and natural, human and ani- mal, of the decorative grotesque of that period. The Viennese court painter Arcim- boldo worked in this tradition, creating assemblages of animal or vegetable figures which, if one takes a step backward, infalli- bly suggest a human face. The point needs no further elaboration; even so accessible an author as Kurt Vonnegut has availed himself of this aspect of the grotesque in his depiction of man as a machine made out of meat.

To help settle some of the problems of classification posed by this ambiguity both of form and response, we need at least two major divisions of the grotesque, based on whether the comic or terrible predomi- nates. This is not news: Ruskin dis- criminated between the ludicrous and ter- rible grotesque; Kayser, between the satiric and fantastic. Whether a work falls into either category depends upon whether the middle ingredient is closer to the disgust- ing, the repulsive, the obscene, or to the nocturnal, the horrifying or the macabre. The subdivisions can be represented, albeit crudely, as follows:

a) caricature b) comic grotesque, (ludicrous or satiric) c) fantastic grotesque (terrible) d) Gothic-macabre

A perfect formula for most grotesque satire or comedy is Goethe's dictum, "Looked at from the height of reason, life as a whole seems like a grave disease, and the world a madhouse." There are several methods for achieving this "height of reason" perspec- tive. For example, Mark Spilka, in his book on Dickens and Kafka, maintains that the

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effect of the grotesque is attained through the infantile perspective:

For one thing, the child's view of the world is literally oblique; he stands below the sight-line of adult activity, for which the man made scene is built. For another, his view is often animistic.... He also lacks control of inner promptings, and projects them into the scene before him, as we do in dreams. Finally, his affective innocence . . . proves reassuring as the world around him cracks and topples.5

Perhaps the most famous examples of the child's-eye, height of reason indictment of the adult madhouse are Lewis Carroll's Alice books, the grotesqueness of which is marred only-but seriously-by the read- er's acceptance of the fantastic as a com- monplace of Wonderland and Looking- Glass Land. But even here, the child's "affective innocence" is threatened and the child almost engulfed by the universal insanity of the world around her. This is much more the case in Kafka and the later Dickens. When even innocence is no pro- tector, the comedy is likely to turn bitter.

The formula for this darker, fantastic grotesque is Goya's motto, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters." Macabre dream worlds abounding in rattling skele- tons, creeping, root-like creatures, frightful monsters or the like characterize the fan- tastic grotesque, a category into which would fall naturally the work of Bosch, Bruegel, Odilon Redon, some of Poe, and some of Goya. However, where we cease altogether to laugh, we cease altogether to have the grotesque.

Real and apparent contradictions abound in discussions of the grotesque; it is an extremely flexible category. Kayser, noting the "absurdity" of the tragic nucleus-a mother killing her children, a son murdering his father, etc.,6 aligns the grotesque with tragedy. Others, as we have seen, align it with comedy. But the gro- tesque is ultimately of neither of these categories, but defies the notion of categor- ization altogether. The term tragicomedy approaches it. Thomas Mann strikes this note on the grotesque in one of his essays in Past Masters:

For I feel that, broadly and essentially, the striking feature of modern art is that it has ceased to

The Grotesque: First Principles recognize the categories of tragic and comic. ... It sees life as tragicomedy, with the result that the grotesque is its most genuine style. ...

As one critic put it,17 tragedy demands a moral universe, comedy a rational one; we believe in neither, and the grotesque, where one category erupts within another, satisfies our need for a more flexible order- ing.

But now we come to a point where the strong brew of our definition must be diluted. The most common use of the grotesque is not by artists who quaff hogs- heads of the stuff, but those who sip and nibble-not by those who employ the gro- tesque unadulterated, but those who use it as an element in a larger, non-grotesque structure. In such a larger context, where the norm is truly a norm and not just bait for the grotesque, the grotesque might have the effect of raising the specter of insanity or of introducing chaos, even if momentar- ily, into a world or a work which does not wholly embrace it. And this is the point where a flexible definition serves us best. For the assertion that a particular perspec- tive-infantile or otherwise-is a signpost to the grotesque cannot fully account for the fact that some works are more gro- tesque than others, that in some works- Djuna Barnes' Nightwood?-the grotesque seems to have run riot and enslaved its creator while in others-Huxley's Point Counter Point?-the author, regardless of his point of view, is fully in control, manip- ulating grotesque effects. The grotesque cannot serve as structural basis for a work of any great length; it remains primarily a pictorial form, with its greatest impact in moments of sudden insight. Prolonged, it loses its force; most instances in literary art are merely instances.

One of the most frequent ways for an artist to use the grotesque in this limited way is through the creation of grotesque characters. And one of the most obvious ways to effect this alienation is through physical deformity. Ugliness has a long and respectable tradition dating from, in West- ern culture, at least the late medieval period, when sin, linked with bestiality, was commonly portrayed in grotesque im- ages. Since then, artists who equated the

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flesh with evil have distorted its form. Misshaped form can be read forward to indicate spiritual or intellectual perversity, or backward, Quasimodo-wise, to indicate triumphant inner beauty, life where life can scarcely flourish.

Another kind of grotesque character is the product of a reductive vision which produces what E. M. Forster calls flatness. Forster was speaking of Dickens, many of whose characters-Fagin, Quilp, Cuttle, Gradgrind-seem to expend a perpetual energy which points not to a "rounded" personality but to an impersonal, mechani- cal driving force behind them. Victims of obsession particularly lend themselves to grotesque characterization; V.S. Pritchett has noted that many of Dickens's charac- ters "live or speak as if they were the only self in the world." On this point, Spilka says that the grotesque "displays the power of the human spirit in regression."8 This is in part true for nearly all reductive grotesques. Sherwood Anderson's psychic cripples, for example, still enlist our sym- pathies in their pathetic attempts to take parts of the truth for the whole truth: "It was his notion," Anderson says in "The Book of the Grotesque," that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth and tried to live by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood. The rigidity which for Anderson was manifested in an inner sense of entrapment derives from impersonal forces (broadly, Puritan- ism, and the Machine) rather than from a flexible, complete human spirit. In gro- tesque comedy we might even be reassured at the spirit dancing in the psychic cage of its own making, but if the work is not comic, we might be suddenly confronted with the fixed brilliant stare of the mono- maniac, the fanatic, the madman. The victimized innocents of Winesburg, Ohio, clutching a single moment of revelation, distort the truth of that moment by taking it out of the flow of experience, just as, for example, a fixed smile when not counter- balanced or framed by other expressions will seem terrifying, mocking, or satanic.

Dickens's work is proof enough of the potential for terror in such reductive gro-

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tesque. In a passage written in 1850 in which he discusses his first toys, Dickens gives a perfect metaphor not only for his use of this kind of grotesque, but for his work in general. The passage begins mer- rily enough, but gradually a note of terror creeps in, almost unnoticed, struggles briefly with the spirit of play, then domi- nates altogether: the frog with cobbler's wax on his tail was "horrible"; the card- board man "was ghastly, and not a crea- ture to be alone with." Most terrifying, however, was the Mask:

When did that dreadful Mask first look at me? Who put it on, and why was I so frightened that the sight of it is an era in my life? It is not a hideous visage in itself; it is even meant to be droll; why then were its stolid features so intolerable? . . . Was it the immovability of the Mask? . . . Perhaps that fixed and set change coming over a real face, infused into my quickened heart some remote suggestion and dread of the universal change that is to come on every face, and make it still? . . . The mere recollection of that fixed face, the mere knowledge of its existence anywhere, was sufficient to awaken me in the night all perspiration and horror, with, 'O! I know it's coming! O! the Mask!'9

The child who experienced this was in the presence of the grotesque: the ambiguous mixture of hilarity and terror, the anxiety, the bewilderment, the merging of Mask and face, the shadow of death passing over the sunny world of children at play, the sudden alienation, the vision into the abyss.

At this point we must differentiate be- tween caricature which is grotesque and caricature which is not. The pure carica- turist portrays what nature almost pre- sented, emphasizing latent tendencies rather than creating novel distortions. The human figure, even the most Hellenic, offers innumerable opportunities for an imaginative caricaturist, who must, how- ever, present characteristic rather than arbitrary or perverse deformations. Typi- cally, the caricaturist will offer a posture or an expression which a healthy man could imitate with some effort, and this spirit of pantomime makes it funny. A posture or an expression which a healthy man could not produce betrays a spirit of pandemon- ium rather than pantomime, and the feel- ings evoked are closer to those associated with the grotesque than those associated

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with pure comedy. According to Bergson, rigidity is comic; Dickens's Mask, however, suggests not the rigidity of awkwardness but of death, nor does it serve any correc- tive Bergsonian purpose.

If the self is not congealed beyond correc- tion, it may be shattered beyond repair. Hyperbole can be applied not only to rigidity, but also to the opposite extreme, that of the disrupted, centerless self, blasted beyond schizophrenia to a random anarchy, a polity of conflicting selves. The neurotic, diseased, fragmented self, torn by conflicting, perverted, or involuted drives, trying to achieve a sense of significant being through conduct which on the sur- face seems perverse is an old story in these our modern times, and scarcely needs retelling-except to point out that the gro- tesque is most kin, among human condi- tions, to madness, in its loss of controls and regression to the (particularly sexual) unconscious-the Nietzschean, Dionysian, or the Freudian id.

Another way of incorporating the gro- tesque into non-grotesque structures is by the use of certain themes which almost inherently involve the grotesque. Some of these are predominantly literary, such as the masked ball, the Carnival, and the double. Some are predominantly pictorial, such as the Danse Macabre. And some seem to lend themselves to both literary and pictorial representation, such as The Temptations of St. Anthony and the Apo- calypse. In works with such themes, the grotesque can serve as a thematic meta- phor for confusion, chaos, insanity, loss of perspective, social collapse, or disintegra- tion, or angst. The plain assumption of the grotesque is that the rules of order have collapsed; for this reason it is strongest in eras of upheaval or crisis, when old beliefs in old orders are threatened or crumbling.

In the relatively stable 1890s, for exam- ple, most of the energy of the grotesque was decorative-Beardsley, for example, par- ticularly in a work such as the baroque tale The Story of Venus and Tannhduser. But the grotesque acquired new force after the beginning of the twentieth century, when, following the fall of Decadence, both popu- lar and literary culture turned to the next phase of the Roman/Apocalyptic topos, the

The Grotesque: First Principles destruction of the old, rotten order. Partic- ularly up to 1920 or so, the work of such di- verse artists as Lawrence, Hesse, Wells, and Yeats is greatly occupied with Apoc- alypse; the sense that things are falling apart, nor can the center hold accounts for the sense of estrangement, aimless- ness and dark anarchy, reflecting the ter- rors and grotesqueries of Revelation.

Following the War, when it was swiftly perceived that holocaust had not purged the times of their corruption and degener- acy (which were, in fact, advancing even more rapidly and spectacularly than be- fore), the energy of the grotesque shifted again, with the major stress falling on the theme of The Temptations of St. Anthony. The theme is old, but its peculiar signifi- cance in this century derives from the cli- mate of the times. The nineteenth century anticipated it; Poe, Hawthorne, Maupas- sant, Stevenson, Wilde, Melville, Twain, Hugo, Keller, Kleist, Gogol, Carlyle, Hoff- man, Dostoevsky-all, in their ways, testify to a sense of inner disruption, to a self rad- ically alienated from a dissolving social structure, an increasingly pointless world. While the grotesque is not quite omnipres- ent in twentieth-century art, almost no ma- jor artist has altogether escaped this theme, some of the mutations of which are the themes of the artist vs. the bourgeoisie, capitalism vs. fascism, and the enlightened soul vs. the benighted mob. And St. An- thony is the hero of contemporary art, beset by terrors as he struggles to preserve his version of sanity in a violently insane world, to keep alive his special light, his besieged vision of the eclipsed All-Holy in the face of inhuman or anti-human forces, the grotesque monstrosities which assault him.

During the Renaissance, the grotesque was regarded as a creation of the unruly imagination: fantastic, unnatural, bizarre -sogni dei pittori (the dreams of paint- ers). Today, just the opposite seems to be the case: no longer is the grotesque a method of portraying only the distorted inner landscapes of the diseased or neurotic imagination; we all know there is still plenty of that, but there are reasons: in a bomb-dominated, anxious time, objective reality, revealed to man by his most reli-

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ably "realistic" methods of observation, provides the stimulus for the grotesque. In addition, the neurotic himself, or at least the outsider, has come to feel himself custodian of the height of reason-the perspective so conducive to the grotesque. So not only has the neurotic asserted himself as the standard of sanity (fre- quently dragging along the grotesque as the standard of beauty: if the mob embraces technological symmetry and efficiency as Beauty, the alienato turns to the gro- tesque), but the world has itself become more and more hallucinatory. With these shifts, the grotesque is being granted an ever larger share in objective reality, as an engine in the hands of the artist of reality without inverted commas.

These shifts are responsible, too, for the critical stretching to which the grotesque is susceptible: it can mean anything from a two-headed toad to a Higher Truth. In moments when, like St. Anthony, we feel assailed, mocked, or subverted, we turn naturally to the grotesque, which subverts not only aesthetic categories, but human virtue, dignity, and pretense. Among rhe- torical modes, the grotesque is most conge- nial to irony, which, rippling up beneath the surface, undercuts and subverts lan- guage itself. So long as we could admire things orderly or harmonious as ideals towards which human beings could strive -ideals which represented essential Man, shorn of his imperfections-then the gro- tesque could be relegated to the greasy underworld. But when we begin to doubt that man is made in the image of God, we begin to reflect differently on distortion and perversity. In such a state of doubt the grotesque may offer itself as a reflection of the higher truths. Hard truths, certainly; but for the time being at least, it seems we are stuck with them.

' Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Lit- erature (New York, 1966), p. 183.

2 Of Kayser's four complementary definitions of the grotesque, the most useful is the first-: the grotesque is the estranged world. The others are: the objectivation of the ghostly "It"; a play with the absurd; and an attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world.

3Kayser, 185. 4 After wondering "why [Dali's] aberrations should

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be the particular ones they were," Orwell adds that "One would still like to know why Dali's leaning was towards necrophilia (and not, say, homosexual- ity)...." Written (but suppressed on grounds of obscenity) in 1944, this essay, "Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali," appeared in the 1946 collection, Dickens, Dali and Others.

6Mark Spilka, Dickens and Kafka (Bloomington, Ind., 1963), p. 64.

6Kayser, 185. Kayser adds, however, that "the tragic does not remain within the sphere of

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incomprehensibility. As an artistic genre, tragedy opens precisely within the sphere of the meaningless and absurd the possibility of a deeper meaning- in fate, which is ordained by the gods, and in the greatness of the tragic hero, which is only revealed through suffering" (185-86).

7William van O'Connor, The Grotesque: An American Genre, (Carbondale, Ill.), 1962.

8Spilka, 71. 9Quoted in Angus Wilson, The World of Charles

Dickens (London, 1970) pp. 9-10.