Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (review)

Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, edited by Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow, and David Amigoni; pp. xiv + 212. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999, £47.50, $76.95.

In a laudable Introduction, the editors of Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque provide a clear and helpful general survey of the ways in which the grotesque in literature and art was perceived especially in nineteenth-century England, but with references back to earlier times in Europe. The only sign of trouble to come is their own explanation of what they perceive the grotesque to be. Here is an example: "As an aesthetic of the irreconcilable, the grotesque here is construed not simply as an aesthetic position or method adopted by writers and artists, but as a means to realize experience which tends to overwhelm, or fundamentally to dismember, representations" (2). But this loose approach to the grotesque would enable a critic to apply it to almost any work of art, since so much of the complexity of fine art rests on just those irreconcilable qualities. Thus the metaphysical poets might all be regarded as practitioners of the grotesque, and the incompatibilities of concepts and practices identifiable in Romantic literature might open it to be reconstrued as grotesque literature. Although the editors cite Philip Thompson's study of the grotesque, they ignore his demand that the grotesque, above all, refer to the physical, and that it combine something laughable with something that is incompatible with laughter. Thompson's traditional view, if not entirely satisfactory to everyone, at least provides an anchor for the term "grotesque," something lacking in the present study, where it drifts free and wanders into strange critical estuaries.

The editors are also quite definite about their own critical program. "Each essay deals with the double identity of the grotesque as imprisonment and liberation, elimination and elaboration; and this recognition that there is no locus of the grotesque enables contributors to examine its paradoxical nature as the movement between, and mingling of opposites" (1-2). Unfortunately, it also allows contributors to create, from works of art that contain opposing qualities or values, unusual perceptions of what is grotesque. In the first essay, for example, David Amigoni argues that Thomas Carlyle and Leslie Stephen inherit a grotesque image of Samuel Johnson from James Boswell's 1791 biography of him, in which, Amigoni argues, "Boswell stresses the complex relationship between Johnson's mind and body" (25). But nowhere does Amigoni show that Carlyle and Stephen themselves had a grotesque image of Johnson in mind (only once does he quote Stephen using the word "grotesque," and only in regard to Johnson's conservatism). What rendering of the grotesque there is comes almost entirely from Amigoni himself or from references to Bakhtin by way of Johnson's reference to a passage in Boswell about Gargantua's mouth. This is a thin string on which to hang an entire argument about the grotesque, and, for me, is unconvincing.

The same kind of strained argument occurs in Colin Trodd's essay on representations of Cromwell by Thomas Carlyle and Ford Madox Brown. "Both Carlyle and Brown associate Cromwell with the unhomely because they see in him a power that operates in the space between historical event and sacramental fact" (64), Trodd avers, and into this crisis of representation he inserts the term "grotesque" to describe what he feels they are doing. But Carlyle and Brown do not use the word "grotesque" in relation to Cromwell, and neither the one's text nor the other's pictures appear grotesque in any of the usual uses of that term. There is a similar labored effect in Paul Barlow's attempt to force Thomas Woolner's sculpture Civilization (1856-66) into the category of the grotesque.

Don't mistake what I am saying here. All of these essays are stimulating and offer truly interesting examinations of their subjects. But they do not constitute a worthwhile...