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What is grotesque in simple terms. What is grotesque

What is grotesque in simple terms. What is grotesque

01.07.2019

Unusual styles in art attract the attention of equally unusual people. And also the eccentric grotesque 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 on various holidays.

A bit of history

The grotesque has a rather ancient origin.. Its roots go back to ancient Rome from the time of Nero. Once upon a time, the emperor, who had incredible imagination and artistic taste, wished that the walls of his palace were decorated with views and images that did not exist in nature.

But fate is not too favorable and subsequently the palace was destroyed by the emperor Trojan. Time passed and soon, the ruins and underground structures were accidentally found during the Renaissance.

The underground ruins found were called grottoes, which is translated from Italian as a grotto or dungeon. The painting that adorned these ruins was later called the 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 - it's terrible and funny, sublime and disgusting.

Grotesque on Wikipedia means a combination of reality and fantasy, as a combination of truth and caricature, as a combination of hyperbole and alogism. Grotesque is from French whimsical. In contrast to the same irony, the fact that in this style funny and funny images are both terrible and frightening. It's like two sides of the same coin.

In literature, the grotesque and satire go hand in hand.. But it's not the same. Under the mask of implausibility and fantasticness lies a kind of generalizing view of the artist on the world and important events in it.

Based on this whimsical style, plays, decor and costumes are created. He struggles with the ordinary and allows authors and artists to discover the unlimited possibilities of their talent. Style will help to expand the inner boundaries of a person's worldview.

Grotesque style examples

A striking example of application is fairy tales. If you remember, then the image of Koshchei the Immortal pops up. Having been created, this figure combined both human nature and unknown forces, mystical possibilities, making him practically invincible. In fairy tales, reality and fantasy are often intertwined, but still the boundaries remain obvious. Grotesque images at first glance appear as absurd, devoid of any meaning. The enhancer of this image is a combination of everyday occurrences.
The story "The Nose" by Gogol is also considered a prime example of the use of style in the plot. The protagonist's nose acquires an independent life and is separated from the owner.

In painting

In the Middle Ages, it was characteristic of folk culture, which expressed an original way of thinking. The style reached its peak of popularity during the Renaissance. He endows the work of the great artists of that time with drama and inconsistency.

Don't Miss: Artistic Reception in Literature and the Russian Language.

Satire

This is a manifestation of the comic style in art in its sharpest sense. With the help of irony, grotesque, a share of hyperbole, she reveals humiliating and terrible phenomena, giving her poetic form. Many poets use this artistic style to ridicule any phenomena.

Characteristic 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 turns. . Exaggeration is combined with and comparison giving them an unusual coloration. Hyperbole can be found in a variety of artistic styles such as oratory, romance, and many others to enhance sensory perception.

Irony

A technique that is used to oppose the hidden meaning to the explicit one. When using this artistic figure, there is a feeling that the subject of irony is not what it seems in reality.

Forms of irony

Straight. It is used to belittle and enhance the negative features of the subject of discussion;
Anti-irony. Used to show that an object is undervalued;
Self-irony. Ridicules own person;
ironic outlook. Rejection to heart of social values and stereotypes;
Socratic irony. The subject of discussion must himself come to the hidden meaning of the statement, considering all the information of the subject said.

Grotesque is a literary artistic device that is born at the intersection of reality and fantasy. Wanting to emphasize some features or phenomena, the authors change, deform them, striving for an implausible increase, expansion.

The grotesque is used in literature to immerse the reader in an absurd, sometimes crazy world and thereby help him realize the absurdity and destructiveness of the ideas and phenomena depicted. What happens in the works often resembles narcoleptic delirium, the dreams of a madman or an alien.

The definition of the grotesque includes the relationship of the image with reality in order to emphasize the obvious, conspicuous fantasticality and absurdity.

There is also deliberate comedy or tragic farce, designed to reduce sympathy for the characters and ridicule them even in their distress. The reader struggles and wants to wake up, but the author's goal is to capture attention so much that after reading, only an understanding of the veiled idea of the work remains.

Examples of the grotesque in literature

Images that appear before consciousness in an exaggerated form are most often designed to influence the subconscious, thus giving out secret thoughts and secret throwing. Typical examples that allow us to understand what the grotesque is in literature can be considered:

The interweaving of dream and reality, and the dream is necessarily full of terrible details, dangerous and huge images, such as Tatyana's dream in which the beloved becomes a bear surrounded by monsters or Raskolnikov's dream, in which great Evil appears in the image of an old woman.
The transformation of a part into a whole, as, for example, in the novel "The Nose" by Gogol, the nose of an official leaves and becomes an independent citizen.
Complete change of personality, as in the story "The Metamorphosis" by Kafka, in which the hero becomes a disgusting insect and dies.
The resurrection of the dead and its active and often destructive actions, an example of Hoffmann's Sandman.
Forcing a comic or tragicomic effect, the scene in which the hero stabs himself with a cucumber in Saltykov-Shchedrin's History of a City.

Sometimes whole novels are a unique combination of grotesque images:

"The Master and Margarita" by M. Bulgakov (Bezdomny's pursuit of Woland and his retinue, the meeting of the Master and Margarita, a description of Woland's ball),
"Dead Souls" by N. Gogol (images of heroes whom Chichikov meets),
"Castle" Kafka,
Mayakovsky's poetry (corporeality of the earth, working halves of people, weapons coming to life).

a type of imagery based on a contrasting, bizarre combination of fantasy and reality, the beautiful and the ugly, the tragic and the comic. The sphere of the grotesque in art includes multi-valued images created by the artist's fantasy, in which life receives a complex and contradictory refraction. Grotesque images do not allow either their literal interpretation or their unambiguous decoding, retaining the features of mystery and incomprehensibility. The element of the grotesque was most vividly embodied in the art of the Middle Ages (ornaments of the animal style, chimeras of cathedrals, drawings on the margins of manuscripts). The masters of the Renaissance, who preserved the medieval predilection for the grotesque (Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Brueghel, Albrecht Dürer), made the grotesque a means of expressing the moral and social views of their turning point. Jacques Collot, Francisco Goya, Honore Damier in the 17th-19th centuries. used the grotesque as a means of dramatic embodiment of the sinister symbols of modern social forces. Wars, revolutions and political cataclysms of the XX century. caused a new wave of grotesque satire in denouncing the "terrible world" (for example, Kukryniksy in the USSR). Source: Apollo. Fine and decorative arts. Architecture: Thematic Dictionary. M., 1997.

Great Definition

Incomplete definition ↓

GROTESQUE

French grotesque, from Italian. grottesco) is a term of aesthetics, denoting the combination in the art of the comic and the tragic, the funny and the terrible in the fantastic. and hyperbolic. form. Originally the term "G." was used to designate a special type of ornament, discovered at the end of the 14th - beginning. 15th century during excavations of underground premises - grottoes in Rome (hence the name) and representing a fantastic. a pattern of bizarre weaves of ribbons, masks, caricature figures of people and animals. During the Renaissance, gauze was widely used to decorate architectural ensembles: the paintings by Pinturicchio in the Borgia Palace in the Vatican (1492–1495), the Vatican loggias of Raphael (1515–19), and others. Subsequently, the term "g." began to be used as a special aesthetic. categories along with the categories of the beautiful, the tragic, the comic. Of particular importance G. received in the aesthetic. theory and art. Romantic practice. The aesthetics of romanticism, developing the dialectic of the comic and the tragic as the basis of the romantic. irony, gave a deep characterization of the grotesque. Schelling in lectures on the philosophy of art (1803), F. Schlegel in "Conversations on Poetry" (1800), A. Schlegel in "Readings on Dramatic Art and Literature" (1809–11) considered G. as an expression of the necessary internal. connections between the comic and the tragic and the transition from the low to the high, considering it a sign of the genius of the arts. works (see F. W. Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, Werke, Bd. 3,1907, 359-60). The most significant in the history of art, according to the romantics, are the works of Aristophanes and Shakespeare, in which a synthesis of tragedy and comedy, great and low, is carried out. In France, V. Hugo made propaganda for G.. In the "Preface to" Cromwell "" he considered G. as the center. the concept of all post-antique art, considering G. aesthetically more expressive than the beautiful (V. Hugo, Sobr. soch., v. 14, M., 1956). In the 2nd floor. 19 - beg. 20th century an extensive formalistic lit-ra about G., to-heaven for the definition of G. took its external formal features: sharpening of the image, exaggeration, fantasy, etc. So F. T. Fischer (F. T. Vischer,? sthetik, oder Wissenschaft des Sch?nen, TI 1, 1854, S. 400-09), K. Flegel (K. Fl?gel, Geschichte des Grotesk-komischen, 1788) and others, considering G. only from the side of its form, in fact identified it with hyperbole, caricature, buffoonery. Aesthetics Russian. roar. Democrats extensively explored the sphere of the birth of H. - the dialectic of the tragic and the comic (see N. G. Chernyshevsky, The Sublime and the Comic, 1854), discovering the realist. ways in the art of depicting the transitions of high and low, terrible and funny, tragic and comic, evil and human. “Evil,” Chernyshevsky wrote, “is always so terrible that it ceases to be funny, despite all its ugliness” (Izbr. filos. soch., vol. 1, 1950, p. 288). In drama, the comic and the tragic interpenetrate each other, organically linked into a single whole, so that one turns into the other. In G., the terrible and sinister reveals funny and insignificant features (for example, in the painting of Brueghel), and the funny and insignificant - terrible and inhuman. essence (for example, in the stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Gogol, Shchedrin). What at first glance is perceived only as funny and amusing, reveals in G. its real, deeply tragic. and dramatic meaning. The tragic is G. only insofar as it accepts the ironic. or comic. shape. Modern bourgeois Aesthetics identifies G. with the ugly, considers it a characteristic feature of the art of the 20th century. along with eroticism and psychopathology ("Revue d'esthetique", P., 1954, v. 7, No2, p. 211–13). Burzh. aesthetics and art assert anti-humanistic. G., depicting him as an eternal disgrace and tragic. the absurdity of the world. In the owls claim-ve realistic. G. is widely used in works of poetry (Mayakovsky), cinema (Eisenstein) and music (Prokofiev, Shostakovich) as a means of satire. criticism of the ugly in society. life and affirmation will put. aesthetic ideals. Lit.: Zundelovich Ya., Poetics of the grotesque, in Sat. – Problems of Poetics, ed. V. Ya. Bryusova, Moscow–Leningrad, 1925; Efimova Z. S., The problem of the grotesque in the work of Dostoevsky, "Scientific. Zap. N.-I. Department of the History of European Culture", [Kharkov], 1927, [issue] 2, p. 145–70; Adeline, Les sculptures grotesques et symboliques, Rouen-Aug?, 1878; Heilbrunner P. M., Grotesque art, "Apollo", L.–N. Y., 1938, v. 28, No. 167, November; M?ser J., Harlequin, oder Vertheidigung des Groteske-Komischen, in his book: S?mtliche Werke, Tl 9, B., 1843; Michel W., Das Teuflische und Groteske in der Kunst, 11 Aufl., Müncth, 1911; Kayser W., Das Groteske. Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung, 1957. V. Shestakov. Moscow.

Unlike the lifelike image, the conditional image either deforms the outlines of reality, violating its proportions, sharply colliding the real and the fantastic, or forms the image in such a way that behind the image (be it a natural phenomenon, creatures of the animal kingdom, or attributes of material reality), the implied, second semantic image plan. In the first case, we have a grotesque, in the second - an allegory and a symbol.

In the grotesque image, the real and the fantastic are not simply mated, because both can be dispersed over different figurative structures. In many works, real and fantastic characters coexist, but there is nothing grotesque in sight. The grotesque in literature arises when the real and the fantastic collide in a single image (most often it is a grotesque character).

It is necessary that a kind of "crack" pass through the artistic fabric of the character, cracking his real nature, and fantasy would pour into this gap. It is necessary that Gogol's major Kovalev suddenly, for some unknown reason, lose his nose, so that he puts on a general's uniform and begins to walk along the avenue of "our northern capital." Or that the benignly obedient cat of the Hoffmannian musician Kreisler, as if partly parodying the actions of his master, began to go mad in a love frenzy, just like the studiouses and burshis of Hoffmann's times did, and even fill the waste sheets of the Kreisler manuscript with samples of his "cat" prose.

On the other hand, the grotesque is conditional not only because it defiantly destroys the life-like logic of reality. It is also conditional due to the special nature of its fantasy. The fantastic, enclosed in the grotesque, should not seriously claim to represent a different, transcendent "reality". That is why the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch are not grotesque. The eschatological horror poured on them no longer belongs to reality: it is from the world of apocalyptic prophecies. In the same way, the fantastic images of the medieval chivalric romance, its spirits, fairies, wizards and doubles (the blond Isolde and the dark-haired Isolde in Tristan and Isolde) do not belong to the sphere of the grotesque - behind them is a naively vivid feeling of a "second" being. The completely prosaic Hoffmannian archivist Lindhorst (“The Golden Pot”) in his fantastic incarnation may turn out to be an omnipotent magician, but this second face of his is just as conditional as the ironically dual nature of the Hoffmannian golden pot is conditional: whether it is an attribute from the land of dreams of “Jinnistan”, then or just a piquant detail of burgher life.

In a word, the grotesque opens up scope for irony, extending to the "beyond". The grotesque does not in the least seek to present itself as a phenomenon of "other being". In Hoffmann, it is true that he seems to vacillate between two worlds, but this vacillation is most often ironic through and through. Where Hoffmann really has dips into the “other world” (“Majorat”), he is no longer up to grotesque gaiety (albeit inseparable from latent tragedy) - there (as, for example, in his “night” short stories) the romantically terrible reigns, and it is quite homogeneous, that is, it is precisely of a “beyond” nature.

In refusing life-like logic, the grotesque naturally renounces any outwardly life-like motivations. In the draft version of Gogol's story "The Nose" we find the following explanation: "However, all this, which is not described here, was seen by the major in a dream." Gogol removed this phrase in the final autograph, removed it, obeying an unerring instinct for artistic truth. If he had left this explanation in the text of the story, all its phantasmagoria would have been motivated by the completely life-like, psychologically natural, albeit illogical "logic" of sleep. Meanwhile, it was important for Gogol to maintain a sense of the absurdity of the depicted reality, the absurdity that penetrates into all its "cells" and constitutes the general background of life, in which anything is possible. The fantastic conventionality 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, so to speak, it is immanently insane.

The conventionality of the grotesque is always aimed precisely at the essence, and in its name it explodes the logic of lifelikeness. 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 inevitability of which is all the more obvious because it extends to the family clan, it would seem, designed to resist the disunity that splits the world. “Nothing divides so much as everyday life,” Kafka wrote in his diary.

The grotesque implies a special, almost the maximum degree of artistic freedom in dealing with 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 domination over the fettering, and often tragically absurd reality. In fact, boldly pushing the heterogeneous, loosening the cause-and-effect relationships of being and encroaching on the dominance of necessity, playing with chances, doesn’t the creator of the grotesque have the right to feel in this world of cheerful artistic “willfulness” a demiurge redrawing the map of the universe anew?

But with the apparent omnipotence, the freedom of the grotesque is not unlimited, and the “willfulness” of the artist is nothing more than an appearance. The audacity of fantasy is combined in the grotesque with tenacious vigilance of thought. After all, both are aimed here at laying bare the law of life. Hoffmann's Little Tsakhes ("Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober") is just a funny freak, through the efforts of the compassionate fairy Rosabelweide, endowed with the ability to transfer other people's virtues, talent and beauty onto himself. His tricks are insidious, he brings grief and confusion to the world of lovers, in which both dignity and goodness are still alive. But it is as if the intrigues of Hoffmann's fantastic degenerate are not limitless, and, at the behest of the author, he completes his tricks in the most comical way, drowning in a glass of milk. And does this, it seems, not confirm 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 has called to life seem to be always in its power. If only... If it weren't for the "composition" of the soil of life, into which the Hoffmannian image is deeply rooted. This soil is the "Iron Age", "the Huckster Age", as Pushkin puts it, and it cannot be canceled by a capricious outburst of the imagination. The thirst to devalue everything that is marked by the life of the spirit, replacing and compensating for the lack of one's own spiritual forces with the leveling equivalent of wealth (Zinnober's "golden hair" is the sign of this predatory and leveling power); the audacity and pressure of nothingness, sweeping away truth, goodness and beauty in its path - all this, which will be established in the bourgeois attitude to the world, was seized by Hoffmann at the very source of birth.

The ironic gaiety of the grotesque not only does not exclude tragedy, but also presupposes it. In this sense, the grotesque is located in the aesthetic realm of the serious-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. Comprehensive tragicomedy of life. The triumph of a soulless civilization over culture has created an inexhaustible breeding ground for the grotesque. The exclusion from life of everything that owes the fullness of its flowering to the organic principles of being, the multiplication of impersonal mechanical forms in everything, including human psychology, the predominance of his herd instincts over individual ones, ethical relativism, blurring the line between good and evil - such is the reality. that nourishes the variety of grotesque forms in the literature of the 20th century. The grotesque in these conditions increasingly acquires a tragic coloring. In Kafka's novel The Castle, the deadly bureaucratic automation of life, like a plague, spreads around the castle, this nest of absurdity, gaining demonic power and power over people. Power is all the more inevitable because, according to Kafka, “a subconscious attraction to the renunciation of freedom lives in a person.” The grotesque of the 20th century no longer succeeds in triumphing over the absurd with the cleansing power of laughter alone.

The grotesque, put forward by the artist to the center of the work, creates a kind of "infecting" radiation, capturing almost all spheres of the image, and above all style. The grotesque style is often saturated with ironic grimaces of the word, demonstratively illogical "constructions", and the comic pretense of the author. Such is Gogol's style in the story "The Nose", a style on which a thick "shadow" of a grotesque character falls. Imitation of indescribable frivolity, naked inconsistency of judgments, comic delights about trifles - it all seems to come from the character. This psychological "field" of his is reflected in Gogol's narration, and the very style of the author turns into a mirror reflecting the grotesque object. Consequently, the absurdity of the world and man penetrates into the style at the behest of Gogol. The grotesque initiates a special mobility of style: fluent transitions from pathos to irony, the inclusion of the imitated voice and intonation of the character, and sometimes the reader (the narrative passage that ends the story "The Nose") into the author's speech fabric.

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 Shchedrin's mayors (History of a City) has a stuffed head exhaling a seductive gastronomic aroma, then it is not surprising that one day they attack it with knives and forks and devour it. If Hoffmann's ugly Zinnober is a miserable dwarf, then there is nothing incredible about the fact that in the end he falls into a krinka and drowns in milk.

GROTESQUE

- (from Italian grottesco - bizarre) - a kind of comic: an image of people, objects or phenomena that violates the boundaries of plausibility in a fantastically exaggerated, ugly comic form. G. is based on the combination of the real and the unreal, the terrible and the ridiculous, the tragic and the comic, the ugly and the beautiful. G. is close to a farce. It differs from other varieties of the comic (humor, irony, satire, etc. (see irony, satire)) in that the funny in it is not separated from the terrible, which allows the author in a particular picture to show the contradictions of life and create an acutely satirical image. Examples of works in which G. is widely used to create a satirical image are N.V. Gogol, "The History of a City", "How one man fed two generals" by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, "Seated", "Bath," Bedbug "by V. Mayakovsky.

Dictionary of literary terms. 2012