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3 Conjugations of the Grotesque In The Place of Dead Roads, William S. Burroughs describes the sex life of the lophiform angler fish: “During intercourse the male gets attached to the body of the female and is slowly absorbed until only the testicles remain protruding from the female body.”1 Simply as natural history, this is not grotesque, merely unusual and non-mammalian; I note with amusement that scientific descriptions of this intimacy refer to the male being parasitic on the female and physically incapable of surviving on his own, which puts a rather different spin on a relationship that horrified and fascinated Burroughs.2 Only when we apply this relationship to our human selves does it create the visceral shiver of uneasiness that accompanies the grotesque. Consider Burroughs’s fantasia on this idea: “A Lophy Woman slithers out [from an underground river], huge mouth gaping to show the incurving teeth fine as hairs. They eat into the victim’s face to block his breathing as they feed in oxygen through their gills. So the lethal mating is consummated. She absorbs first his head and brain, keeping his body alive with her bloodstream” (273–74). By making her a lophy woman, by 78 Chapter 3 referring to her male as a victim and giving him a face and brain, by having her eat his face rather than having him attach to her body, and by using gendered pronouns, Burroughs humanizes this sexual consummation. He even invents a fine vagina dentata transposed upwards, modeled on a lamprey’s mouth. Sophisticated readers pride themselves on being unshockable, but the grotesque depends upon shock, upon visceral response that amounts to an internal shiver or sense of recoil. Critics such as Ewa Kuryluk consider the grotesque impossible in the present day because we no longer have a single dominant culture to react against, yet Istvan Csicsery-Ronay hails the grotesque as “the dominant sensibility of modernism—and of postmodernism.”3 If the grotesque cannot currently exist or is unable to disturb readers, then it cannot be offered as a transgressive technique or means of discomfiting readers. Obviously I think it does still exist, but some questions must be considered. How can it function if we have moved into a decentered world with no master narratives? Should not the fluidity of the new order lower our anxieties about the borders between human and nonhuman, the traditional ground from which the grotesque emerges? Or are some of us not as sophisticated as we would like to think? William S. Burroughs, Katherine Dunn, Chuck Palahniuk, Robert Coover, James Morrow, Donald Antrim, Gerald Vizenor, and Cormac McCarthy all produce grotesque fiction, but by what definitions and to what ends? If I am right that their fictions can trigger that visceral frisson of discomfort—a hallmark of the grotesque mode—then to understand this form of readerunfriendly fiction, we need to understand the ways in which the grotesque can affect even the contemporary reader. Defining the Grotesque Definitions of the grotesque have proliferated in the wake of the very different studies of Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin. A few definitions characterize the grotesque in absolute terms. Several of Kayser’s formulations qualify: “the grotesque is the estranged world”; the grotesque is the manifestation of incomprehensible and impersonal forces; “the grotesque is a play with the absurd”; and the grotesque tries to “subdue the demonic aspects of the world.”4 Most, though, attempt to explain it in bipartite or Conjugations of the Grotesque 79 tripartite metaphors. In the two-part versions, we have the forces for the normal or the ideal, and opposing them are the grotesque, archetypally a human body altered by the addition of animal features. While many definitions set up a binary opposition, they actually function , or can be parsed, in three parts, consisting of the opposed extremes plus the middle space in which they confront each other or merge. This three-part scheme seems the most powerful of the conceptualizations, so I use it to analyze all the definitions.5 In this way of conceptualizing the grotesque, we have two sets of values understood to oppose each other; in the space between grows a third possibility, the grotesque. It arises from tensions between the two value clusters. It may be a hybrid of the two; it may operate by reversing the poles; it may be neither-nor; it may represent a third option in its own right. Somehow, though, it emerges in the gap between the...

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