Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis

Author(s): Michael Steig

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Winter, 1970), pp. 253-
260
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 MICHAEL
Defining the Grotesque:
at
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-
MICHAELSTEIGis 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.
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STEIG
An Attempt
Synthesis
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
 254
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-
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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-
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255
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
 256
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,
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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' "),o10in 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- canny may evoke aggressive, sexual, or
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 craft's ur-world mythology.
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 Thomas Cramer classifies it as one of Hoff-
257
how different he looked! His gentle features
seemed to be drawn up by some dreadful con-
vulsive pain into an ugly, repulsive Satanicmask.
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-
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-
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

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 258
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
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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.16There 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-
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259
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
 260
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).
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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.
"aTrans. 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.
20See 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.