Unusual styles in art attract the attention of the same unusual people. And also eccentric grotesquery attracts special people. But what is the essence of this genre and how is the grotesque reflected in literature? Let's figure it out. Grotesque is an ugly comic image of something or someone based on contrast and exaggeration. In everyday life, many perceive the grotesque as something ugly and eccentric. Nowadays, it is widely used in carnival images at various holidays.
A little history
The grotesque has quite ancient origins. Its roots go to Ancient Rome the time of Nero. Once upon a time, an emperor with incredible imagination and artistic taste wanted the walls of his palace to be decorated with views and images that did not exist in nature.
But fate was not too favorable and the palace was subsequently destroyed by Emperor Troyan. Time passed and soon, ruins and underground structures were accidentally discovered during the Renaissance.
The underground ruins found were called grottoes, which translates from Italian as grotto or dungeon. The painting that decorated these ruins later came to be called grotesque.
Literature
In an effort to immerse the reader in a world full of fantasy and incredible phenomena, the author uses many techniques and styles. One of them is the grotesque. It combines seemingly incompatible things - the terrible and the funny, the sublime and the disgusting.
Grotesque in Wikipedia means a combination of reality and fantasy, as a combination of truth and caricature, as a plexus of hyperbole and alogism. Grotesque from French fancy. In contrast to the same irony, in that in this style funny and humorous images that are both horrific and frightening. These are like two sides of the same coin.
In literature, grotesque and satire go hand in hand.. But it's not the same thing. Under the mask of improbability and fantasticness lies the artist’s unique generalized view of the world and important events in him.
Plays, decor and costumes are created based on this whimsical style. He fights the ordinary and allows authors and artists to discover the unlimited possibilities of their talent. Style will help expand the internal boundaries of a person’s worldview.
Grotesque style examples
- A striking example of its application is fairy tales. If you remember, the image of Koshchei the Immortal pops up. When created, this figure combined human nature, and unknown forces, mystical capabilities, making him practically invincible. In fairy tales, reality and fantasy are often intertwined, but still the boundaries remain obvious. Grotesque images at first glance they appear as absurd, devoid of any meaning. The intensifier of this image is a combination of everyday phenomena.
- The story "The Nose" by Gogol is also considered a shining example use of style in the plot. The main character's nose acquires independent life and separates from the owner.
In painting
In the Middle Ages it was typical for folk culture, expressing an original way of thinking. The style reached the peak of its popularity during the Renaissance. He imbues the works of the great artists of the time with drama and contradiction.
Do not miss: artistic technique in literature and Russian language.
Satire
This is a manifestation of the comic style in art in its sharpest sense. With the help of irony, grotesque, and a bit of hyperbole, she reveals humiliating and terrible phenomena, giving her own poetic form. Many poets use this artistic style to ridicule certain phenomena.
A characteristic feature of satire will be a negative attitude towards the subject of ridicule.
Hyperbola
An element used by many authors and poets for exaggeration. An artistic figure helps to enhance the eloquence of thoughts. This technique can be successfully combined with other stylistic expressions . Exaggeration combined with and comparison, giving them an unusual color. Hyperbole can be found in different artistic styles, such as oratorical, romantic and many others to enhance sensory perception.
Irony
A technique that is used to contrast the hidden meaning with the explicit one. When using this artistic figure, there is a feeling that the subject of irony is not what it really seems.
Forms of irony
- Straight. Used to belittle and enhance negative traits subject of discussion;
- Anti-irony. Used to show that an object is undervalued;
- Self-irony. One's own person is ridiculed;
- Ironic worldview. Rejection takes to heart public values and stereotypes;
- Socratic irony. The subject of discussion itself must come to hidden meaning utterances, reflecting on all the information said by the subject.
Unlike a life-like image, a conventional image either deforms the outlines of reality, violating its proportions, sharply colliding the real and the fantastic, or forms an image in such a way that what is depicted (be it a natural phenomenon, creatures of the animal kingdom, or attributes of material reality) implies an implied, second semantic image plan. In the first case we have a grotesque, in the second - an allegory and a symbol.
In a grotesque image, the real and the fantastic are not simply combined, because both can be dispersed across different figurative structures. In many works, real and fantastic characters coexist, but there is nothing grotesque here. The grotesque in literature occurs when the real and the fantastic collide in a single image (most often this is a grotesque character).
It is necessary for a “crack,” as it were, to pass through the character’s artistic fabric, cracking open his real nature, and fantasy flows into this gap. It is necessary that Gogol’s Major Kovalev’s nose suddenly disappear for some unknown reason, so that he puts on a general’s uniform and begins to walk along the avenue of “our northern capital.” Or so that the well-behaved obedient cat of Hoffmann’s musician Kreisler, as if partly parodying the actions of his owner, begins to go crazy in a love frenzy, exactly as the studious and burshi of Hoffmann’s times did, and even fill the waste paper sheets of Kreisler’s manuscript with samples of his “cat” prose.
On the other hand, the grotesque is conventional not only because it demonstratively destroys the life-like logic of reality. It is also conventional due to the special nature of its fiction. The fantastic, contained in the grotesque, should not seriously claim to represent another, transcendental “reality.” This is why the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch are not grotesque. The eschatological horror poured out on them no longer belongs to reality: it is from the world of apocalyptic prophecies. Likewise, they do not belong to the sphere of the grotesque fantastic images medieval chivalric romance, its spirits, fairies, wizards and doubles (blond Isolde and dark-haired Isolde in Tristan and Isolde) - behind them is a naively living feeling of a “second” existence. Hoffmann’s completely prosaic archivist Lindgorst (“The Golden Pot”) in his fantastic incarnation may turn out to be an all-powerful wizard, but this second face of his is conditional exactly as much as the ironically dual nature of Hoffmann’s golden pot is conventional: either it is an attribute from the dreamland of “Djinnistan”, or or just a piquant detail of burgher life.
In a word, the grotesque opens up space for irony, extending to the “beyond.” The grotesque does not at all seek to pass itself off as a phenomenon of “other being.” In Hoffmann, however, he seems to oscillate between two worlds, but this oscillation is most often thoroughly ironic. Where Hoffmann actually has dips into the “other world” (“Majorat”), he no longer has time for grotesque gaiety (even if inseparable from latent tragedy) - there (as, for example, in his “night” short stories) The romantically terrible reigns, and it is completely homogeneous, that is, it is precisely of an “exorbitant” nature.
Refusing life-like logic, the grotesque naturally refuses any externally life-like motivations. In the draft version of Gogol’s story “The Nose” we find the following explanation: “However, all this, no matter what is described here, was seen by the major in a dream.” Gogol removed this phrase in the final autograph, removed it, obeying an unmistakable sense of artistic truth. If he had left this explanation in the text of the story, its entire phantasmagoria would have been motivated in a completely life-like, psychologically natural, albeit illogical, “logic” of a dream. Meanwhile, it was important for Gogol to preserve the sense of the absurdity of the depicted reality, the absurdity that penetrates all its “cells” and constitutes the general background of life in which anything is possible. The fantastic convention of the grotesque here cannot be questioned by any psychological motivations: Gogol needs it in order to emphasize the essence, the law of reality, by virtue of which it is, so to speak, immanently insane.
The convention of the grotesque is always aimed precisely at the essence, in its name it explodes the logic of life-likeness. Kafka needed to turn his hero Gregor Samsa into a fantastic insect (the story “The Metamorphosis”) in order to further emphasize the absoluteness of alienation, the inescapability of which is all the more obvious because it extends to the family clan, seemingly designed to resist the disunity that is splitting the world. “Nothing separates people like everyday life,” Kafka wrote in his diary.
Grotesque presupposes a special, perhaps maximum, degree of artistic freedom in handling the material of reality. It seems that this freedom is already on the verge of self-will, and it seems that it could result in a cheerful feeling of complete dominance over a constraining and often tragically absurd reality. In fact, boldly colliding heterogeneous things, shaking the cause-and-effect relationships of existence and encroaching on the dominance of necessity, playing with chance, doesn’t the creator of the grotesque have the right to feel like a demiurge in this world of cheerful artistic “willfulness”, redrawing the map of the universe anew?
But given the seemingly obvious omnipotence, the freedom of the grotesque is not unlimited, and the “willfulness” of the artist is nothing more than a semblance. The daring of fantasy is combined in the grotesque with the tenacious vigilance of thought. After all, both are aimed here at exposing the law of life. Hoffmann's Little Tsakhes (“Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober”) is just a funny freak, endowed with the ability to transfer other people's virtues, talent and beauty through the efforts of the compassionate fairy Rosabelweide. His tricks are insidious, he brings grief and confusion into the world of lovers, in which dignity and goodness are still alive. But it’s as if the machinations of Hoffmann’s fantastic degenerate are not limitless, and at the will of the author, he completes his tricks in the most comical way, drowning in a jar of milk. But isn’t this, it seems, a confirmation that the free spirit of grotesque fantasy, thickening the atmosphere of life’s absurdity, is always able to defuse it, for the spirits of evil it calls to life seem to be always in its power. If only... If not for the “composition” of the vital soil in which Hoffmann’s image is deeply rooted. This soil is the “iron age,” the “merchant age,” as Pushkin put it, and it cannot be abolished by a capricious impulse of imagination. The desire to devalue everything that is marked by the life of the spirit, replacing and compensating for the lack of one’s own spiritual powers with a leveling equivalent of wealth (“Zinnober’s golden hair” is a sign of this predatory and leveling force); insolence and pressure of insignificance, sweeping away truth, goodness and beauty in its path - all this that will be established in bourgeois attitude to the world, was captured by Hoffmann at the very origins of birth.
The ironic joy of the grotesque not only does not exclude tragedy, but even presupposes it. In this sense, the grotesque is located in aesthetic area seriously funny. The grotesque is full of surprises, quick transitions from funny to serious (and vice versa). The very line between the comic and the tragic is erased here, one imperceptibly flows into the other. “Laughter through tears” and tears through laughter. A comprehensive tragicomedy of existence. The triumph of soulless civilization over culture has created an inexhaustible breeding ground for the grotesque. The displacement from life of everything that owes the fullness of its flowering to the organic principles of existence, the multiplication of impersonal mechanical forms in everything, including in human psychology, the predominance of his herd instincts over individual ones, ethical relativism, blurring the boundary between good and evil - this is the reality , feeding the diversity of grotesque forms in the literature of the 20th century. Under these conditions, the grotesque increasingly takes on a tragic overtones. In Kafka's novel The Castle, the deadening bureaucratic automation of life, like a plague, spreads around the castle, this nest of absurdity, acquiring demonic strength and power over people. Power is all the more inevitable because, according to Kafka, “a subconscious desire to renounce freedom lives in man.” The grotesque of the 20th century is no longer able to triumph over the absurd through the purifying power of laughter alone.
The grotesque, put forward by the artist at the center of the work, creates a kind of “infecting” radiation, capturing almost all areas of the image and, above all, style. The grotesque style is often filled with ironic grimaces of words, demonstratively illogical “constructions,” and the author’s comic pretense. This is Gogol’s style in the story “The Nose,” a style over which the thick “shadow” of a grotesque character falls. Imitation of indescribable frivolity, naked inconsistency of judgments, comic delights over trifles - this all seems to come from the character. This psychological “field” of his is reflected in Gogol’s narrative, and the author’s very syllable turns into a mirror reflecting a grotesque object. Consequently, the absurdity of the world and man penetrates into the style at the will of Gogol. The grotesque initiates a special fluidity of style: quick transitions from pathos to irony, the inclusion of the imitated voice and intonation of the character, and sometimes the reader, into the author’s speech fabric (the narrative passage that concludes the story “The Nose”).
The logic of the grotesque pushes the author to such plot moves that naturally follow from the “semi-fantastic” nature of the character. If one of the Shchedrin mayors (“The History of a City”) stuffed head, exuding a seductive gastronomic aroma, it is not surprising that one day they attack it with knives and forks and devour it. If Hoffmann's ugly Zinnober is a pitiful dwarf, then it is not incredible that he ends up in a jar and drowns in milk.
In ordinary conversation, many perceive the grotesque as something strange, ugly, eccentric, fantastic. In modern times, the embodiment of this concept for many is represented as carnival masks that are used on Halloween, or images of gargoyles.
What the grotesque actually is and where it is used, you will find out from the article.
Meaning of the concept
There are two translations of the word “grotesque” - French and Italian, but they are similar to each other. From French the word is translated as “comical”, from Italian - “bizarre”, also “grotto”.
What is grotesque in general outline? The term means a type of artistic imagery. It is based on fantasy, contrast, laughter, which is intertwined with reality. In addition, the grotesque is characterized by caricature, alogisms, and hyperboles.
Etymology of the concept
The word, like its definition (grotesque), came into Russian from France, although its original translation is associated with Italy. It meant “grotto” and appeared after archaeological excavations in the 15th century. At this time, in Italy, plant paintings with fancy patterns. These were at one time the rooms and corridors of Nero's house.
Are gargoyles grotesque?
Many people mistakenly attribute grotesqueness to gargoyles. They are really fancy, but the purpose of these carvings is to drain rainwater so that it does not fall on the walls of the building. Stone carving in the grotesque style does not have such purposes. It is worth noting that gargoyles are chimeras, not grotesques.
Literature and the grotesque
This concept is presented most clearly in the literature; it is a variety comic device, combines in the form of fantasy the funny and the terrible, the sublime and the ugly. In the grotesque, the fictional is intertwined with the real, and the contradictions of reality are revealed.
The grotesque cannot be called simply comic. It contains humor and irony, but they are inseparably connected with something sinister and tragic. At the same time, behind everything implausible and fantastic lies a deep life meaning. Grotesque always implies deviation from the norm; it is widely used for satirical purposes.
Examples in the literature
In order to understand what grotesque is, you need to consider its examples presented in the literature.
Examples of grotesque in the works of world writers:
- Francois Rabelais, "Gargantua and Pantagruel". In the work, the main characters are of enormous size; they live with ordinary people. The scene in which one of the confidants ends up in the mouth of his master looks grotesque. There he discovers villages and towns.
- Erasmus of Rotterdam, "In Praise of Folly". The work was written in a comic form during the author's travels. The grotesque, examples of which are described above, is expressed from the very beginning, when Folly introduces himself to the audience, communicating the theme of his speech.
- Nikolai Gogol, "The Nose".Here the disappearance of the Nose is intertwined with the everyday reality of St. Petersburg. The absurdity is that the nose, having disappeared from the face, became a 5th class official. Everyone treats him like he's an ordinary person. Even the hero of the incident, who lost his nose, is not concerned about what he will breathe, but how he will look in society with the ladies. A nose in the position of an official does not raise any unnecessary questions for anyone. The absurdity of the idea itself is grotesque.
- Ernst Hoffmann, Little Tsakhes. Describes the life of an ugly dwarf who Kind fairy enchanted and made it different for everyone. Grotesqueness (this is in literature) is manifested in the very appearance of the hero. His real appearance is seen only by Balthasar, a student in love with the heroine Candida. In the end, Tsakhes, denounced by everyone, drowns in a chamber pot of sewage.
- Franz Kafka, "Metamorphosis". It stuns from the very first line, from which it becomes clear what grotesque is. Main character woke up to insects. The implausibility of the situation is complemented by the feeling of disgust that most people experience towards insects. Relatives continue to live their lives ordinary life, despite the absurdity of the situation. In the end, the insect dies, and his family, as if nothing had happened, goes for a walk.
- Mikhail Bulgakov, "The Master and Margarita". In the novel, the real and the fantastic collide. The characters find themselves in many grotesque situations that allow them to be exposed inner world. The grotesque includes the appearance of the human-sized cat Hippopotamus, Woland’s performance at the Variety Theater, and the backstory of the “bad apartment.” The grotesque runs through not only this work of Mikhail Bulgakov. No less interesting are his " dog's heart», « Fatal eggs».
"The Story of a City" as a grotesque novel
The author was able to embody the concept of socio-political satire through the grotesque in “The History of a City.” The name of the fictional city says a lot. Foolov's story begins with the "Inventory of Mayors". The first mayor's name was Amadeus Manuilovich, who received this position “for his skillful preparation of pasta.” The whole horror of this grotesque is that for more than a hundred years the Foolovites chose their mayors for their knowledge of foreign chatter, an exotic surname, and the like.
The absurdity of many situations is intended to expose the deep immorality of the autocracy. Thus, one of the heroes was eaten by the leader of the nobility because he was wearing a real stuffed head on his shoulders.
Behind Foolov's comically absurd picture there are real pressing problems of autocratic and serf-owning Russia. The grotesque, examples of which are presented above, was able to expose the ugly realities of modern life for the authors.
GROTESQUE(from French - whimsical, intricate; funny, comic, from Italian - grotto) - an image of people, objects, details in fine arts, theater and literature in a fantastically exaggerated, ugly-comic form; a unique style in art and literature, which emphasizes the distortion of generally accepted norms and at the same time the compatibility of the real and the fantastic, the tragic and the comic, sarcasm and harmless gentle humor. The grotesque necessarily violates the boundaries of plausibility, gives the image a certain conventionality and takes the artistic image beyond the limits of the probable, deliberately deforming it. The grotesque style received its name in connection with the ornaments discovered at the end of the 15th century by Raphael and his students during excavations of ancient underground buildings and grottoes in Rome.
These images, strange in their bizarre unnaturalness, freely combined various pictorial elements: human forms turned into animals and plants, human figures grew from flower cups, plant shoots intertwined with unusual structures. Therefore, at first they began to call distorted images the ugliness of which was explained by the cramped area itself, which did not allow making a correct drawing. Subsequently, the grotesque style was based on a complex composition of unexpected contrasts and inconsistencies. The transfer of the term to the field of literature and the true flowering of this type of imagery occurs in the era of romanticism, although the appeal to the techniques of satirical grotesque occurs in Western literature much earlier. Eloquent examples of this are the books of F. Rabelais “Gargantua and Pantagruel” and J. Swift “Gulliver’s Travels”. In Russian literature, the grotesque was widely used to create bright and unusual artistic images N.V. Gogol (“The Nose”, “Notes of a Madman”), M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (“The History of a City”, “ Wild landowner"and other tales), F.M. Dostoevsky (“The Double. The Adventures of Mr. Golyadkin”), F. Sologub (“The Little Demon”), M.A. Bulgakov (“Fatal Eggs”, “Heart of a Dog”), A. Bely (“Petersburg”, “Masks”), V.V. Mayakovsky (“Mystery-bouffe”, “Bedbug”, “Bathhouse”, “The Satisfied Ones”), A.T. Tvardovsky (“Terkin in the Next World”), A.A. Voznesensky (“Oza”), E.L. Schwartz (“Dragon”, “The Naked King”).
Along with the satirical, the grotesque can be humorous, when, with the help of a fantastic beginning and in fantastic forms of appearance and behavior of characters, qualities are embodied that evoke an ironic attitude from the reader, and also tragic (in works of tragic content, telling about the attempts and fate of the spiritual determination of personality.
GROTESK - (from fr.- whimsical, intricate; funny, comic, from Italian. - grotto) - an image of people, objects, details in fine arts, theater and literature in a fantastically exaggerated, ugly-comic form; a unique style in art and literature, which emphasizes the distortion of generally accepted norms and at the same time the compatibility of the real and the fantastic, the tragic and the comic, sarcasm and harmless gentle humor. The grotesque necessarily violates the boundaries of plausibility, gives the image a certain conventionality and takes the artistic image beyond the limits of the probable, deliberately deforming it. The grotesque style received its name in connection with the ornaments discovered at the end of the 15th century by Raphael and his students during excavations of ancient underground buildings and grottoes in Rome.
These images, strange in their bizarre unnaturalness, freely combined various pictorial elements: human forms turned into animals and plants, human figures grew from flower cups, plant shoots intertwined with unusual structures. Therefore, at first they began to call distorted images the ugliness of which was explained by the cramped area itself, which did not allow making a correct drawing. Subsequently, the grotesque style was based on a complex composition of unexpected contrasts and inconsistencies. The transfer of the term to the field of literature and the true flowering of this type of imagery occurs in the era of romanticism, although the appeal to the techniques of satirical grotesque occurs in Western literature much earlier. Eloquent examples of this are the books of F. Rabelais “Gargantua and Pantagruel” and J. Swift “Gulliver’s Travels”. In Russian literature, the grotesque was widely used to create bright and unusual artistic images by N.V. Gogol (“The Nose”, “Notes of a Madman”), M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin ("The History of a City", "The Wild Landowner" and other tales), F.M. Dostoevsky ("The Double. The Adventures of Mr. Golyadkin"), F. Sologub ("The Little Demon"), M.A. Bulgakov ("Fatal Eggs", "Heart of a Dog"), A. Bely ("Petersburg", "Masks"), V.V. Mayakovsky (“Mystery-bouffe”, “The Bedbug”, “Bathhouse”, “The Sitting Ones”), A.T. Tvardovsky (“Terkin in the Next World”), A.A. Voznesensky (“Oza”), E.L. Schwartz ("Dragon", "The Naked King").
Along with the satirical, the grotesque can be humorous, when, with the help of a fantastic beginning and in fantastic forms of appearance and behavior of characters, qualities are embodied that evoke an ironic attitude from the reader, and also tragic (in works of tragic content, telling about the attempts and fate of the spiritual determination of personality.
