![]() However, if that same woman began to volubly and intentionally vomit on her fellow passengers while laughing, it would likely be a different and potentially far more grotesque matter. A woman who discretely picks her nose on a train may be deemed offensive to some, but to call her behavior grotesque would by many be considered hyperbole. ![]() After all, we encounter many forms of transgression, exaggerations, and mixing on a daily basis that we would not classify as grotesque. Even so, we almost immediately run into trouble in that hybridities, transgressions, and other kinds of boundary-breaking entities and behaviors are not in and of themselves sufficient to produce grotesque sensations. 3 In short, the grotesque is anything that disrupts whatever is considered to be the norm at a particular place and time. While it is difficult to define the grotesque itself, or even the “relatively positive or negative character of our encounter with the grotesque,” we can at least initially identify a range of traits commonly associated with the grotesque, namely disharmony, hybridity, excess, exaggeration, and transgression. Indeed, the grotesque is perhaps at its most effective not when we enter a world totally different from our own, but when we encounter “extreme incongruity” in a world that otherwise seems congruous. Kayser points to the reverie of dreams and nightmares in which the normal order of things has been subverted as an example of this, yet any kind of experience that disrupts normality has the potential to be deemed grotesque. Likewise, perceptions of the normal and the abnormal vary widely even within the same time period, depending on one’s class, gender, race, profession, sexual orientation, cultural background, and so on.Ī world totally different from the familiar one-a world in which the realm of inanimate objects is no longer separated from those of plants, animals, and human beings, and where the law of statics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid. For instance, as Olli Lagerspetz points out in A Philosophy of Dust (2018), while 16th-century aristocrats in France may routinely have received guests while sitting on their night stools, similar behavior exhibited today would surely be interpreted not only as out of the ordinary, but as grotesque. ![]() Second, since even the most rigid norms and boundaries shift over time, that which is defined in terms of opposition and transgression will naturally change as well, meaning that the term grotesque meant very different things in different historical eras. First, because the grotesque is that which transgresses and challenges what is considered normal, bounded, and stable, meaning that one of the few universal and fundamental qualities of the grotesque is that it is abnormal, unbounded, and unstable. Any attempt to identify specific grotesque characteristics outside of a specific context is therefore challenging for two reasons. When researching the term for his classic study On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (1982), Geoffrey Galt Harpham observed that the grotesque is hard to pin down because it is defined as being in opposition to something rather than possessing any defining quality in and of itself. Defining the grotesque in a concise and objective manner is notoriously difficult.
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