Grotesques et arabesques dans le récit romantique: De Jean Paul à Victor Hugo by Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne (review)

This learned, ingenious study integrates the aesthetic theory and textual practice of the arabesque, or curving line, with the grotesque, creating a surprising synthesis of the misshapen and the shapely. As in an old-fashioned French doctorat d’état dissertation, much of this enormous, well-documented book consists of plot description and thematic paraphrase, the record rather than the results of research. Peyrache-Leborgne’s organization (1: The Visual Image; 2 and 3: Carnival; 4: Aesthetic Theory; 5: Narrative Form; 6: The Grotesque Idiot; 7: The Grotesque Fool; 8: The Utopian Fusion of Grotesque and Arabesque) obliges her to return to and to reintroduce the same texts repeatedly. This inefficient method of presentation does, however, impose an overall arabesque form on the critical work itself, which thus mirrors its subject.

Peyrache-Leborgne is especially strong on Cervantes, Friedrich Schlegel (notably including his experimental novel Lucinde), Jean-Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Gogol, and Hugo’s L’Homme qui rit. Her study provides an indispensable supplement to René Wellek’s dry, humorless overview of the history of literary theory. She brings out the full importance of Schlegel’s seminal role—often acknowledged only glancingly elsewhere—extremely well. She cogently draws on the visual arts, music, philosophy, literature from ancient Rome to the twentieth century, and from Russia and the United States as well as Europe. She understands that romanticism was Janus-faced: both a revival and a departure from tradition. She also possesses an impressive gallery of mental images from the visual arts, which she invokes richly and informatively at appropriate moments.

Desirable improvements to this book would have been, first, to make a separate book from the sections treating modes of expansive excess: the gaudy, the hyperactive, and the hyperbolic (the burlesque, the comic, and the heroï-comique) on the one hand, and the mode of the unnarratable (“it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon”) on the other. Namely, chapters 2 and 3, on the medieval and romantic carnivals centered on the Fool (120–243), and an enlightening analysis of the praise of mediocrity in the idylls of Jean-Paul (470–539). Second, there should have been more detailed discussions of the two key terms at the outset. The grotesque, Peyrache-Leborgne rightly observes, transcends genres and periods. As a critical notion, she says, it began to be applied to texts only in 1761, notably to German popular theater and the Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. But what is the grotesque exactly? I would say that it involves a violation of formal expectations through the deformity of a represented person, image, or object; the incongruous juxtaposition of clashing elements (kitsch); or both. Peyrache-Leborgne does indeed address the issue of definition by contrasting two leading critics of the grotesque: Bakhtin, who depicts it as ebullient and carnivalesque, and Wolfgang Kayser, who characterizes it as the alienated, uncanny world of the fantastic, leaving less room (I would say, hardly any) for the comic (13–21). The grotesque is often juxtaposed with the sublime, as in the symbolic image of a hero standing astride a vanquished devil or monster. The early medieval theater of northern Europe, once it moved outside the church and into the public square, was often staged as two simultaneous dramas on separate levels: clownish devils below, and a majestic tableau of heaven above. Peyrache-Leborgne defines the grotesque globally as “ce montage particulier d’images hétéroclites mêlant le monstrueux et le comique, l’humain et le non-humain” (37).

In the realm of character depictions, the grotesque proves to be an empty signifier whose tenor varies according to the author’s interpretations of existence (see 27–38). Some realistic fictions, such as Flaubert’s, are pessimistic: then the grotesque, as exemplified in the character Homais, will triumph. Dickens’s grotesque figures, in contrast, are treated optimistically—whether as harmlessly comical, foredoomed...