Reliable Images of Definite Things
on grotesque transformation, laughter, and escapism
I get frustrated when a definition turns into a domino-fall of references, but sometimes, when I’m in a good mood, the tumbling feels like flirtation and the quickening cascade of points to be made feels like falling in love, and maybe it’s just because April is the cruelest month and March is the second cruelest and I haven’t published anything in three and I just want to meander and never get anywhere, I invite you to meander with me, toward nothing, in pursuit of my definition of the grotesque.
The word grotesque comes from grotto, cave in Italian, in reference to the ruins of an ancient Roman palace excavated in the 16th century. Its walls were decorated with plant-people and people-animals, architecture-people and architecture-plants. Today we may call this fusion of forms magical realism, or simply imaginative, but in classical Rome and religious medieval Rome, it is a transgression of the natural order. The ancients love logic and the christians love to be made in god’s image, so portraying human bodies as they’re not-supposed-to-be is at best, ugly, and at worst, evil.
So, in a way, grotesque can signify the counter-cultural. In his 25 BC treatise De Architectura, Vitruvius comments on this ancient aesthetic, saying “[…] monsters are now painted in frescoes rather than reliable images of definite things. Reeds are set up in place of columns, […] several tender shoots, sprouting in coils from roots, have little statues nestled in them for no reason, or shoots split in half, some holding little statues with human heads, some with the heads of beasts. Now these things do not exist nor can they exist nor have they ever existed.”
He continues, “Minds beclouded by feeble standards of judgment are unable to recognize what exists in accordance with authority and the principles of correctness.” Across millennia, especially where human bodies are concerned, the “principles of correctness” are constantly defended as if principles are stone pillars that never become ruins.
In the book Rabelais and his World, critical theorist Mikhail Bakhtin explores the medieval folk context in which the grotesque aesthetic catches on after those frescoes are discovered. The trend leaps from wall art and garden ornaments to literature, theater and painting. The grotesque body is the main character of all these, marked by exaggerated features that emphasize the “lower stratum,” the places where the body’s borders are crossed by other bodies and other things: protruding bellies - pregnant bellies and beer bellies alike - reify hedonism and procreation, we see enlarged ears and noses for the phallus of it all, comically wide mouths to celebrate swallowing and licking and vomiting and spitting and singing and slurping the world up.
Each feature is a playful synecdoche representing the cycle of degradation and renewal that is human life. The grotesque body is a celebration of the big stinky mess that is human community. The hilarity of it, the power of hilarity to banish fear. Bakhtin writes, “Folk culture brought the world close to man, gave it a bodily form, and established a link through the body and bodily life, in contrast to the abstract and spiritual mastery sought by Romanticism.”
My favorite image that Bakhtin points to as a strong expression of the grotesque in Rabelais’ fiction is the “pregnant hags,” senile old women with swollen bellies, which he calls “death that gives birth.” Their bodies contain the two contradictory processes of human existence, both decay and regeneration. The sight would be terrifying, the violation of “nature” would cause abjection, alarm, disgust, and yet the figures laugh. They laugh as if aware of how their bodies shock the beholder. They laugh because, as imagined things, their impossible existence is possible. Their bodies are chaos, both exploding and imploding at the same time, and yet their laughter dispels all horror.
The grotesque body in folk medieval culture was open, its boundaries were porous, it manifested the drama of human society and made it real, but the centuries closed it down. Images of bodily life were robbed of their regenerative potential. The body and what it does is now vulgar, dirty, ugly; institutional culture has closed its mouth and cut off its laughter, it closed its legs, told it to police its boundaries and not let anything in or out.
Don’t let anyone see the tampon in your purse, don’t go in the same bathroom as my precious daughter, don’t admit to enjoying McDonalds, don’t use birth control but also don’t get an abortion, don’t talk about your sexuality in the workplace, don’t let menopause be an excuse to gain weight, lay on your back and drape a cloth over your knees when you give birth so nobody sees all the blood and shit when you post the video on Instagram.
I’ve been developing a sort of grotesque theory that hinges on the grotesque body being open and anarchic, chafing against the bodily alienation of contemporary beauty standards, modern medicine, reproductive politics and so on. I think this project has held me for so long because one of the central tenets of the grotesque is laughter, and sometimes it feels like nobody is laughing on this entire planet.
Now I want to hold up a piece of contemporary fiction — “The Fruit of My Woman” by Han Kang — next to these ideas and see if anything speaks. The 1997 South Korean short story is about an unnamed, youngish couple living in a city high-rise. The wife asks the husband to examine mysterious bruises blooming all over her body, the first symptom of her transformation into a tree.
“Mother, I keep having the same dream. I dream that I’m growing tall as a poplar. […] My trachea sucks up clear water, so taut it seems it will burst, my chest thrusts up to the sky and I strain to stretch out each branching limb. This I how I escape from this flat. Every night, mother, every night the same dream.”
Her feelings of isolation and stagnation leap out of her dreams and manifest in her body, manifest as her body. This making-real, the way her body wants to burst out of itself, strikes me immediately as grotesque.
Her husband, the speaker of the first half of the story, wonders, “Given that the doctor had said he couldn’t find anything wrong, perhaps, rather than there being some physical problem… it was a simple case of yearning. But what on earth could she be yearning for?”
In real life and plenty of fiction, including Kang’s later novel The Vegetarian, men play the psychosomatic card when women are ill, or insubordinate, or changing. The body is painted as the victim of the mind. The body is treated like a symbol, spoken about in metaphors. The grotesque squashes the mind-body diad back to wholeness. It shows that the body isn’t a container full of you, it is you. And the relief from bodily alienation is followed closely by the question, what happens when you aren’t totally you anymore?
The woman’s skin changes, she stops talking, she loses her appetite, she finds herself on the porch taking her clothes off so the sun can touch her. She knows she’ll die when winter comes. Eventually, “her form retains barely a trace of the biped she once was.” I struggle to imagine what the woman looks like now, and wonder if it even matters. Is it supposed to be terrifying or beautiful?
Ultimately, the woman’s unhappiness with her stationary life in her cramped apartment ends, her painful transformation into a plant ends, her life ends. Her husband waters her, she vomits a final volley of stomach acid and her cellulose lips knit themselves together.
“Now these things do not exist nor can they exist nor have they ever existed.” So, is this short story grotesque? It rejects stagnation, yes; it foregrounds the materiality of the body, the body that transgresses its own boundaries; it honors the life-death cycle of nature, but is there laughter? Is there celebration, is there touch, is there renewal that coincides impossibly with death?
Before she dies, the woman’s human senses give way to plant senses. She thinks, “It’s strange, mother. Even without seeing, listening, smelling and tasting, everything feels fresher, more alive.” There is a quiet joy to this sensation, and she touches her husband with it though she cannot move. He can feel “a hazy sensation that defeats all language, like a minute electric current pulsing out from her body and into mine.”
Her lips that had sealed themselves closed tear open and a handful of hard fruit falls from her mouth as she dies. Her husband feels her death as their vibrational connection suddenly ending, “like a thin thread snapping.” When the thread snaps I realize I’ve been crying. I feel bereft because the grotesque lifecycle I was hoping to see feels more like a suicide except so passive and so quiet and I hate it. The offering of fruit didn’t feel like renewal but like a mother putting dinner on the table before going upstairs and stepping out of her life.
The wife in “Fruit of My Woman” achieves relief from dissatisfaction, the human condition, by leaping out of her humanity entirely. The cure is annihilation. The catharsis here is the purging of human material, but the grotesque isn’t about catharsis, its about confluence. Vitruvius, like Aristotle, like everyone else, from doctors to beauty gurus, think the ugly parts of the human condition need to be cut out. Or at least hidden away. But the grotesque integrates these parts.
What kind of yearning was behind my desire to prove that this story is grotesque, whatever that even means? The body is alienated everywhere and it feels wretched. Even when we talk about how bodies look or feel or behave we seem to be talking about a hundred things that have nothing to do with the wet red nest of flesh that has soul swimming through it on electric currents. Every time I see something that makes my grotesque radar go off I feel relief, I feel embodied and safe and connected.
Deploying the grotesque in art and literature gives us the language to see ourselves, it gives us permission to change and get old and get drunk and get sick and gain weight and have “uneven skin texture” and realize that behind all the work to be pretty and clean and contained is just fear, fear of decay, decay that’s gonna happen anyway no matter what, decay that’s already started, so we might as well laugh.
Really enjoyed it. So much to keep: the "wet red nest;" laughing at/with our change and decay is such a better answer than "rage against the dying of the light;" and how currently relevant is the idea, "reliable images of definite things."