Routledge Revivals: Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (1999)

Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow, David Amigoni, Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow, David Amigoni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351044455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Originally published in 1999, Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque is the first fully interdisciplinary study of the subject and examines a wide range of sources and materials to provide new readings between 'style' and 'concept'. The book provides an original analysis of key articulations of the Grotesque in the literary culture of Ruskin, Browning and Dickens, where represents the eruptions, intensities, confusions and disturbed vitality of modern cultural experience such as the scientific revolution associated with Darwin and the nature of industrial society.

1
'Borrowing Gargantua's mouth': biography, Bakhtin and grotesque discourse - James Boswell, Thomas Carlyle and Leslie Stephen on Samuel Johnson

David Amigoni

I

'"Why, Sir"', says Samuel Johnson to Boswell and the architect Gwyn in Boswell's Life of Johnson during a discourse which 'satyrised statuary', '"you would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot."'¹ Johnson's sense of values suggests a distaste for the grotesque and the discordances that this aesthetic generates. Frances K. Barasch has argued that 'in eighteenth-century England, ... the new "Augustans" waged their most powerful campaign against the grotesque'.² One of the sources legitimating this campaign was the Augustan architect Vitruvius's original judgement on the grotesque in his De Architectura, which reminds us of the very origins of the term.³ Commenting on the emergent Roman fashion of hybrid arabesque patterns which mixed human and plant forms, Vitruvius demanded to know 'how can a tender shoot carry a human figure, and how can bastard forms composed of flowers and human bodies grow out of roots and tendrils? ... Such things ... never existed, do not now exist, and shall never come into being.'⁴ Vitruvius's criteria for questioning the probity of the grotesque in the field of visual ornamentation are analogous to Samuel Johnson's later and well-known neo-Augustan complaints against the metaphysical conceit in the field of poetry as set out in his biography of Abraham Cowley (Lives of the Poets, 1781).⁵

And yet, as Barasch admits, there is another story to tell about the neo-Augustan period, in which the origins of the Victorian grotesque become visible:

The eighteenth century was certainly a period of polished wit and refined taste, and native Gothic tendencies were eschewed to make way for Palladian grandeur, Horatian decorum, and Longinian sublimity. But this era was also a way station between two romantic periods, and the native English appetite for forms that were 'unregulated' and 'unnatural' to a handful of critics survived in popular taste as a kind of underground railroad running from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.⁶

It could even be said that aspects of Johnson's own criticism played a part in keeping the grotesque train on the tracks. The 'Preface' to his edition of Shakespeare (1765) defends the 'serious and ludicrous' irregularity of Shakespeare's dramaturgy.⁷ Moreover, if we focus on Barasch's sense of the Augustan age as an epoch sandwiched between two Romanticisms, then we should remember that the most powerful monument to Johnson's life and reputation, James Boswell's Life of Johnson, appeared at the point (1791) at which the later Romantic movement was coming into being.

The point of this chapter will be to explore the presence of grotesque discourses in Boswell's Life of Johnson, and to trace their transmission to and refashioning within Victorian representations of Johnson. First, which canons of grotesque discourse am I referring to? A good starting point is Boswell's image of Johnson's table manners:

When at a table, he was totally absorbed in the business of the moment; his looks seemed rivetted to his plate; nor would he, unless when in very high company, say one word, or even pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible. To those whose sensations were delicate, this could not but be disgusting; and it was doubtless not very suitable to the character of a philosopher, who should be distinguished by self-command.⁸

Boswell presents us with a body absorbed in a Gargantuan act of consumption. This is a body which makes the secrets of its interior systems of circulation visible, even in polite company, with veins protruding from the forehead. Rather than keeping its secrets to itself, this body secretes. Indeed, the necessity of bodily excretion – and so the dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside – is apparent in copious amounts of perspiration. Conversation is suspended while Johnson stuffs food into himself. Boswell rehearses 'disgust' on behalf of the reader: yet the energy of the description suggests that repulsion and attraction are contending against one another in equal strength.

The canon of grotesque discourse that is encountered here, with its emphasis on the earthy body of exaggerated proportions and its excessive appetites, takes us back to the Renaissance as reconstructed by M. Bakhtin in his seminal work Rabelais and His World (1965). This 'grotesque realist' body – a key image of Medieval European popular culture which Rabelais textualized in the sixteenth century – broke out of its 'underground' habitat, and coupled itself to Romantic main-line inflections of the grotesque. Together they transported an image of Johnson to Victorian critics and biographers.

In an act analogous to the archaeological recovery of Roman ornamental grotesques during the Renaissance, Bakhtin's aim in Rabelais and His World was to rescue Rabelais's 'canon' of grotesque body imagery from the layers of cultural re-inscription that had obscured the liberatory potential he claimed for it. But Bakhtin also acknowledged the paradoxically anti-canonical historical dynamics at work in a canon of imagery:

in the art and literature of past ages we observe two such [canons], which we will conditionally call grotesque and classic ... in history's living reality the canon was never fixed and immutable. Moreover, usually the two canons experience various forms of interaction: struggle, mutual influence, crossing and fusion.⁹

Struggle, crossing and fusion. In this chapter, which reflects on an aspect of the movement of grotesque discourses between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary cultures, I shall trace the way in which Victorian critics and biographers such as Thomas Carlyle and Leslie Stephen came to generate a variety of meanings from the grotesque image of Johnson which they inherited from Boswell. It is important to emphasize the variety of meanings: Michael Hollington has stressed that the grotesque is a 'mixed aesthetic ... compounded of opposite and indeed contradictory sensations',¹⁰ and a key aim of this chapter will be to explore the ways in which writers 'borrow' or appropriate canons of representation from one another, crossing and fusing them and generating new oppositions as they deploy them in new contexts. It is for this reason that it is illuminating to explore an aspect of the Victorian grotesque through its late eighteenth-century, proto-Romantic precursor. Moreover, such a focus suggests that Bakhtin's somewhat dismissive attitude to the meanings of the grotesque in the nineteenth century can be challenged from the perspective of a more nuanced cultural history which examines in turn Victorian readings, recyclings and uses of eighteenth-century discourses.

My title – 'Borrowing Gargantua's mouth' – is borrowed from Boswell's Life of Johnson. Boswell borrowed it from Johnson, as Johnson had borrowed it – via an anonymous journalist – from Shakespeare's As You Like It: Shakespeare had, of course, borrowed the figure of Gargantua from Rabelais. In Boswell's text, the idea appears in the context of an account of Johnson in conversation with members of his circle, the subject being a newspaper-led fashion of 1778, whereby public figures were described by means of words from Shakespeare:

Somebody said to Johnson, across the table, that he had not been in those characters. 'Yes (said he,) I have. I should have been sorry to be left out.' He then repeated what had been applied to him,

'I must borrow GARGANTUA'S mouth.'

Miss Reynolds not perceiving at once the meaning of this, he was obliged to explain it to her, which had something of an aukward and ludicrous effect. 'Why, Madam, it has a reference to me, as using big words which require the mouth of a giant to pronounce them. Gargantua is the name of a giant in Rabelais.'¹¹

Immediately raising the cultural and mythic stakes whilst seeking to restore Johnson to the Classical pantheon, Boswell (as a character in the text) attempts to liken Johnson to Neptune and Jove, but Johnson notably refuses: 'There is nothing marked in that. No, Sir, Gargantua is the best.'

There are three points that can be drawn from this which will help to clarify the arguments of this chapter. First, there is an acknowledgement that the representation of biographical identity is subtly interwoven with fictional schemes of representation. Second, a cultural knowledge of Francois Rabelais – which would be recognizable to Bakhtin – is demonstrated (notwithstanding that the 'knowledge' is filtered through Shakespeare).¹² Although, for the purpose of this episode, Boswell plays Classicist stooge and Johnson opts for a Rabelaisian self-identification, Boswell understood very well Rabelais's place on the cultural map. The fact that the ludicrously grotesque Gargantua is defined in opposition to the Classical images of Neptune and Jove suggests that Boswell's understanding of the complex struggle between grotesque and classic canons of representation was similar, if not identical, to that displayed in Bakhtin's account of it.¹³ Drawing upon Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais, I shall argue that this canon of so-called 'grotesque realism', when blended with a so-called 'Romantic grotesque' canon, shaped Boswell's image of Johnson, and in turn the image of Johnson fashioned by the Victorian critics Thomas Carlyle and Leslie Stephen. Third, the connection that Johnson draws between his Gargantuan identity and the size of the words that he utters – a connection crystallized by Shakespeare's line – will be appropriated by Leslie Stephen's late Victorian reading of Johnson, in which the grotesque image of Johnson will be further embedded in physiognomic and biological discourses, and used pathologically to explain cultural history. We shall see that, for Stephen, the grotesque is materialized in the historically mutable signs of language as well as in the economies of the body. And in turn I will explore the ways in which the mutable signs of the grotesque are deployed by Boswell and Stephen as their subjectivities entwine, in some ideological discomfort, with their own historical and cultural situations.

II

Following Samuel Johnson's death in 1784, a contest to be first to press with either a memoir or a biography ensued amongst those closest to him. James Boswell did not bring his biography to press until 1791.¹⁴ The last to appear, it was Boswell's work that became a central and much discussed text in Victorian culture. Why was this so, and what part did Boswell's handling of grotesque discourse contribute to its powers of attraction?

Allan Ingram's study of Boswell's practice of image-construction demonstrates how Boswell's Life of Johnson is a delicate 'balancing act', appropriating and counter-inflecting the field of imagery manufactured by its opponents in an attempt to produce the most multi-faceted portrait of Johnson in which the struggle between Classical and grotesque figured prominently.¹⁵ This strategy enables the reader to perceive' all the shades which mingled in the grand composition', as Boswell put it – notably in the painterly language of portraiture – in his Dedication of the biography to Sir Joshua Reynolds.¹⁶ This helps to explain Boswell's image of a contradictory Johnson whose 'figure was large and well formed', and who possessed a

countenance of the cast of an ancient statue; yet his appearance was rendered strange and somewhat uncouth, by convulsive cramps, by the scars of that distemper which it was once imagined the royal touch could cure, and by a slovenly mode of dress ... He was afflicted with a bodily disease, which made him often restless and fretful; and with a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, a...