Dickens and the Grotesque (Routledge Revivals)

Michael Hollington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317619703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1984, this title examines the development of a special rhetoric in Dickens' work, which, by using grotesque effects, challenged the complacency of his middle-class Victorian readers. The study begins by exploring definitions of the grotesque and moves on to look at three key aspects that particularly impacted on Dickens' imagination: popular theatre (especially pantomime), caricature, and the tradition of the Gothic novel. Michael Hollington traces the development of Dickens' application of the grotesque from his early work to his late novels, showing how its use becomes more subtle. Hollington's title greatly enhances our appreciation of Dickens' technique, showing the skill with which he used the grotesque to undermine stereotyped responses and encourage his readership to challenge their context.

1 THE GROTESQUE TRADITION, ANCIENT AND MODERN

DOI: 10.4324/9781315752990-1

To write about Dickens and the Grotesque is to approach a quite central feature of the novelist's art, one that has been recognised and commented upon, admiringly or disparagingly, by almost every critic who ever wrote on Dickens.¹ Fundamental originality is therefore not to be expected, nor, perhaps, desired; yet a persistent, concentrated focus upon the grotesque in Dickens may be able to emphasise some relatively neglected aspects of his art and its relationship to other European writing in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Any such undertaking must inevitably commence with a consideration of the meaning of the term ‘grotesque’, and of the usefulness of available theories of its nature. One does not need to read very far into the subject to discover the preeminent contemporary importance and influence of two books - Wolfgang Kayser's Das Groteske: seine gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung, published in 1957 and translated as The Grotesque in Art and Literature in 1963, and Mikhail Bakhtin'sTvorckestvo Fransua Rable, translated as Rabelais and his World in 1968.² In that they also manifest markedly contrasting approaches (Bakhtin's book is in part intended as a criticism of Kayser's), these indispensable starting-points can be seen to dramatise some of the dynamic tensions within the concept - how grotesque art may provisionally be said to be an essentially mixed or hybrid form, like tragicomedy, its elements, in themselves heretogenous (human forms, animal forms, the natural, the supernatural, the comic, the monstrous and misshapen), combining in unstable, conflicting, paradoxical relationships - and to represent poles in relation to which, perhaps, any theory of the grotesque is likely to orient itself.

Kayser's book begins by tracing the origin of the word ‘grotesque’ in the early Mannerist phase of the Renaissance. He relates how the word (deriving from the Italian grotta, cave) refers to what were thought to be underground paintings excavated beneath the baths of Titus in the 1480's; painters like Ghirlandaio, Pinturicchio and Filippino Lippi, came, saw and scratched their names, and the fantastic ornamental style soon became a feature of the borders of their frescoes. He quotes the first recorded use of the term in a commission for the Piccolomini library in Siena dating from 1502, commanding the painter Pinturicchio to decorate its ceilings “with such fantastic forms, colours, and arrangements as are now called grotesques (… che oggi chiamano grottesche).”³

Yet immediately the problematical nature of the concept suggests itself: does the term ‘grotesque’ and its history (since chronicled in exemplary fashion by Frances Barasch⁴) adequately convey the phenomenon it is held to represent? Leo Spitzer argues in an influential review⁵ against Kayser's preoccupation with the mere word, claiming that the grotesque must be seen as a psychic constant with a continuous existence stretching back to remotest antiquity. The temptation to agree is perhaps bolstered by the Piccolomini document itself (nowadays they are called ‘grotesques’, but they have been appreciated for a long while), but may be motivated primarily by the greater relevance of the longer historical perspective for the study of a nineteenth century writer. Dickens, we shall see, did not think of the grotesque merely as a post-Renaissance phenomenon; and Thomas Wright, an important English theorist of the grotesque and contemporary of the novelist, finds his earliest examples, in his History of Caricature and Grotesque of 1865, in ancient Egypt.⁶

Locating such an origin, it is perhaps not surprising that Kayser views the grotesque as an expression of a peculiarly modern angst and alienation, and emphasises its sinister, disturbing features throughout his book. He describes how he first came to think about the grotesque, in Spain, in the Prado, in 1942 - a time and place that may go part of the way to explain Kayser's severity with those who neglect the monstrosity and horror he associates with the concept. The classicizing Goethe is censured for his frivolous approach to Raphael's loggie (he thought they should be regarded as ‘arabesques’): “When describing Raphael's grotesques in this manner. Goethe overlooked the sinister quality inherent in even this playful world”. A definition in Richelet's Dictionnaire français of 1680, characterising the grotesque as “that which has something pleasantly ridiculous”, is dismissed: “Here the grotesque has lost all its sinister overtones and merely elicits a carefree smile”. And it is the loss of “… belief in demonic or mythical attitudes”, the decline of “… a strange, ominous and abysmal quality” in fantastic humour, that “… helps explain why the word ‘grotesque’ has lost its status as a technical term and is currently used in a rather vague and noncommittal manner”.⁷ Bakhtin is certainly able to find some evidence to support his critical view that “Kayser's definitions first of all strike us by the gloomy, terrifying tone of the grotesque world that alone the author sees”.⁸

Thus Kayser's “final interpretation of the grotesque” as “AN ATTEMPT TO INVOKE AND SUBDUE THE DEMONIC ASPECTS OF THE WORLD”⁹ is challenged by attempts (by Bakhtin and others) to construct an alternative tradition of the grotesque, at once more ancient and more benign. Their argument tends to dissolve the category “demonic” altogether, treating it as a function of the Christian campaign against the lingering remains of pre-Christian beliefs in medieval Europe, exemplified for instance in Bernard of Clairvaux's diatribe against grotesque art.¹⁰ The devils are not in themselves sinister and terrifying, according to this argument, until Christianity declared them so: “Die hybriden Zwischenformen, die antiker Spieltrieb und Formensinn geschaffen (Ovid, der im Mittelalter ‘moralisiert’ wird), sind von der christlichen Spekulation zu Damonen umgebildet worden, bei denen Menschen ‘das Lachen vergeht’, die den Menschen zu schrecken bestimmt sind - sie steigen auf aus dem Abgrund des Ungeformten oder Missbildeten.”¹¹ And they live on in popular tradition as attractive images of subversive power, according to Bakhtin: … “in the parodical legends and the -fabliaux the devil is the gay ambivalent figure expressing the unofficial point of view.”¹²

Implicit in this approach is a theory of the origins of the grotesque essentially drawn from Fraserian anthropology. Invoking in Greco-Roman antiquity an alternative strand that contrasts with the classical ethos of calm, heroic repose, “… un monde des êtres fantastiques aux origines complexes, venus souvent de très loin, mêlant des corps et des natures hètèrogénes”, Jurgis Baltrusaitis emphasises its fundamental preoccupation with matter in metamorphosis, and hence with a vegetal cycle of growth and decay;¹³ declaring their belief that “medieval grotesque art stems directly from earlier pagan beliefs, that the representations are pagan deities dear to the people which the Church was unable to eradicate”, Ronald Sheridan and Anne Ross perceive Celtic influence everywhere in medieval church grotesques, “memories of human sacrifice and tree worship” and traces of “divine power - prophecy, fertility, speech, song and hospitality” in the monstrous heads and members they disport.¹⁴

At the same time, many of these large historical constructs display unmistakeable symptoms of ideological assumptions. An interesting case in point is Dickens's contemporary, Thomas Wright; his view of the grotesque as the expression of a fundamental “need for laughter which was human and natural”,¹⁵ forever exercising itself in history despite repression and prohibition, betrays a version of bourgeois radicalism that bears a number of similarities to Dickens's own. For Wright, art originates in caricature - mocking one's enemies, drawing them on rock; irreverence is part of the essential nature of the art of antiquity (“It is astonishing with how much boldness the Greeks parodied and ridiculed sacred subjects” (17)). The best grotesque art is thus political: whereas Greek new comedy, forbidden to express controversy, seems to be in decline, Roman art is distinguished by its irreverent “readiness to turn into burlesque the most sacred and popular legends of the Roman mythology.(15)”¹⁶

Wright also displays the rudiments of a sociology of the grotesque, lacking in Kayser but later to be one of the most noticeable features of Bakhtin's theory. Because of its irreverence, grotesque art is fundamentally social in character: “caricature and burlesque are naturally intended to be heard and seen publicly.”(51)¹⁷ Because of its broad popular appeal, it has a long and tenacious history: “The popular institutions of the Romans were more generally preserved to the middle ages than those of a higher and more refined character” (106; elsewhere Wright comments on “… the pertinacity with which the popular stories descend along with peoples through generations from the remotest ages of antiquity” (111)). And because of its historical nature, it expresses the particular class relationships of succeeding social structures. Under feudalism, according to Wright, grotesque art dealt only on personal satire and individual vendetta. But with the dawn of bourgeois democracy in the later middle ages the grotesque emerges in more developed, consciously political guises; in Piers Plowman, for instance, a nascent English radicalism can be felt: “Political satire in the middle ages appeared chiefly in the form of poetry and song, and it was especially in England that it flourished, a sure sign that there was in our country a more advanced feeling of popular independence, and a greater freedom of speech, than in France or Germany.” (183)

Wright is thus the apologist of liberal England and its superior democratic institutions - freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc., and their significance for grotesque art. Yet with his continual awareness of how, for instance, medieval carnivals like the Festival of Fools are “… political, and … constantly directed against the ecclesiastical order” (207), Wright undoubtedly anticipates Bakhtin, for whom the essential social matrices of the Rabelaisian grotesque are the carnival and the market-place. Bakhtin shows Rabelais as “closely and essentially linked to popular sources”,¹⁸ and grotesque art is for him a popular anti-classical tradition, “ambivalent and contradictory … ugly, monstrous, hideous from the point of view of ‘classic’ aesthetics, that is, the aesthetics of the ready-made and the completed”.(...