Grotesque character. What is grotesque

What is Grotesque?

Grotesque- this is a bizarre mixture in the image of the real and the fantastic, the beautiful and the ugly, the tragic and the comic - for a more impressive expression of the creative idea.

Grotesque - the image of people, objects, details in the visual arts, theater and literature in a fantastically exaggerated, ugly comic form; a peculiar style in art and literature, which emphasizes the distortion of generally accepted norms and at the same time the compatibility of real and fantastic, tragic and comic, sarcasm and harmless gentle humor. The grotesque necessarily violates the boundaries of plausibility, gives the image a certain convention and takes the artistic image beyond the limits of the probable, consciously deforming it. The grotesque style got its name in connection with the ornaments discovered at the end of the 15th century by Raphael and his students during excavations in Rome of ancient underground buildings, grottoes.

These images, strange in their bizarre unnaturalness, freely connected various pictorial elements: human forms turned into animals and plants, human figures grew out of flower cups, plant shoots intertwined with unusual structures. Therefore, at first, distorted images began to be called grotesque, the ugliness of which was explained by the tightness of the square itself, which did not allow making a correct drawing. Subsequently, the grotesque style was based on a complex composition of unexpected contrasts and inconsistencies. The transfer of the term to the field of literature and the true flowering of this type of imagery occurs in the era of romanticism, although the appeal to the methods of satirical grotesque occurs in Western literature much earlier. Eloquent examples of this are the books of F. Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel and J. Swift Gulliver's Travels. In Russian literature, the grotesque was widely used to create bright and unusual artistic images of N.V. Gogol (The Nose, Notes of a Madman), M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (History of one city, Wild landowner and other tales), F.M. Dostoevsky (Double. Adventures of Mr. Golyadkin), F. Sologub (Small Demon), M.A. Bulgakov (Fatal Eggs, Heart of a Dog), A. Bely (Petersburg, Masks), V.V. Mayakovsky (Mystery-buff, Klop, Bathhouse, Prosessed), A.T. Tvardovsky (Terkin in the other world), A.A. Voznesensky (Oza), E.L. Schwartz (Dragon, Naked King).

Along with the satirical, the grotesque can be humorous, when with the help of a fantastic beginning and in the fantastic forms of the appearance and behavior of the characters, qualities are embodied that cause the reader's ironic attitude, and also tragic (in works of tragic content that tell about the attempts and fate of the spiritual definition of personality.

, Lucian, F. Rabelais, L. Stern, E. T. A. Hoffmann, N. V. Gogol, M. Twain, F. Kafka, M. A. Bulgakov, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin).

"Mother nature" surrounded grotesque on a fresco in the Villa d'Este.

Use of the word in conversation grotesque usually means weird, fantastic, eccentric, or ugly, and is thus often used to describe strange or distorted forms, such as Halloween masks or cathedral gargoyles. Incidentally, as regards the visible grotesque forms in Gothic buildings, when not used as drainpipes, they should be called grotesques or chimeras, not gargoyles.

Etymology

Word grotesque came to Russian from French. The Primary Meaning of French grotesgue- literally grotto, pertaining to the grotto or in the grotto, from grotte - grotto(that is, a small cave or depression), goes back to the Latin crypta - hidden, underground, dungeon. The expression appeared after the discovery of ancient Roman decorations in caves and burial sites in the 15th century. These "caves" were actually the rooms and corridors of Nero's Golden House, an unfinished palace complex founded by Nero after a great fire in 64 AD. e.

In architecture

see also

• Rigoletto, Giuseppe Verdi, opera in three acts.

Notes

Music

Grotesque is one of the songs by the fictional death metal band Detroit Metal City.

Literature

• Sheinberg Esti Irony, satire, parody and the grotesque in the music of Shostakovich (in English)). - UK: Ashgate. - P. 378. - ISBN ISBN 0-7546-0226-5
• Kayser, Wolfgang (1957) The grotesque in Art and Literature, New York, Columbia University Press
• Lee Byron Jennings (1963) The ludicrous demon: aspects of the grotesque in German post-Romantic prose, Berkeley, University of California Press
• Bakhtin Mikhail Rabelais and his world. - Bloomington

the image is found in the songs of the group Klimbatika: Indiana University Press, 1941.

• Selected bibliography by Philip Thomson, The Grotesque, Methuen Critical Idiom Series, 1972.
• Dacos, N. La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques à la Renaissance(London) 1969.

• Kort Pamela Comic Grotesque: Wit And Mockery In German Art, 1870-1940. - PRESTEL. - P. 208. - ISBN ISBN 9783791331959
• FS Connelly "Modern art and the grotesque" 2003 assets.cambridge.org
• Video tour of the most vivid examples of medieval Parisian stone carving - the grotesques of Notre Dame

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See what "Grotesque" is in other dictionaries:

ORIGIN OF THE TERM. The term G. is borrowed from painting. This was the name of the ancient wall painting, which was found in the “grottoes” (grotte) of the cellars of Titus. Raphael used it as a model for decorating the lodges of the Vatican, and his students for painting ... ... Literary Encyclopedia

grotesque- a, m. grotesque, German. Grotesk it. grotesca. 1. claim. An image featuring a whimsical, fantastical combination of motifs and details. Sl. 18. Painting, a picturesque thing of many colors and thin figures. DX 1 2 63. The decoration of the rooms is… … Historical Dictionary of Gallicisms of the Russian Language

- (French grotesque, from Italian grotta cave). 1) originally meant the wall painting of the Romans, which consisted of a fantastic combination of people, animals, plants, buildings, etc.; similar paintings were found in the buried buildings of antiquity, under the arches ... Dictionary of foreign words of the Russian language

Grotesque- GROTESQUE (Italian grottesca) in its basic sense means arabesques like those found in ancient buildings buried underground. Usually the word is used to denote a funny, strange or exceptional phenomenon ... Dictionary of literary terms

- (French grotesque, Italian grottesco bizarre, from grotta grotto), 1) a type of ornament that includes pictorial and decorative motifs in bizarre, fantastic combinations (plant and animal forms, figures of people, masks, ... ... Art Encyclopedia

Caricature, caricature, parody Dictionary of Russian synonyms. grotesque see caricature Dictionary of synonyms of the Russian language. Practical guide. M.: Russian language. Z. E. Alexandrova. 2011 ... Synonym dictionary

- (French grotesque letters. bizarre; comical), 1) an ornament in which decorative and pictorial motifs (plants, animals, human forms, masks) are bizarrely, fantastically combined. 2) A type of artistic imagery that generalizes and ... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

GROTESQUE, grotesque, male. (Italian grottesco). 1. A work of art executed in a bizarrely fantastic, ugly comic style (claim; originally the name of wall painting in Roman grottoes). 2. in value unchanged adj. The same as grotesque ... ... Explanatory Dictionary of Ushakov

- (French grotesque, literally bizarre; comical), 1) an ornament in which decorative and pictorial motifs (plants, animals, human forms, masks) are bizarrely, fantastically combined. 2) Type of artistic imagery, ... ... Modern Encyclopedia

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. Fiction successfully uses the techniques and means that originated in the depths of other types of art: music, painting, architecture.

What is grotesque and the history of this term

The grotesque is a means of artistic expression that combines simple and complex, high and low, comic and tragic in bizarre, amazing images. The basis of the grotesque is contrast.

Several opposite beginnings give rise to curious forms and representations, such as, for example, images of talking dolls or little freaks, like Little Tsakhes in the fairy tales of E. T. Hoffmann.

There is nothing traditionally puppet about these characters. They do not touch, do not cause a desire to take care of themselves, but, on the contrary, inspire horror, disgust or bewilderment, only after a while giving way to warmer feelings.

The word "grotesque" comes from the French "grotesque" (" bizarre, funny"). According to the etymological dictionary of M. Fasmer, it is based on the Italian "grotta" ("cave").

In the 15th century, there was a definition of "grotto", referring to painting and architecture with bizarre elements of animal and floral ornament. Similar decorative fragments have been found in Roman catacombs. It is assumed that by the time of creation they belong to the era of the reign of Emperor Nero.

The amazing painting of underground caves gave rise to a fashion for a combination of strange characters and figures in the decoration of dwellings, furniture, dishes, and jewelry. A dragon holding a vine in its teeth, a griffin with an apple in its paw, a two-headed lion entwined with ivy are typical images of grotesque art.

Grotesque in literature- this is a comic technique necessary to emphasize the absurdity of what is happening, to draw the reader's attention to something important, hiding behind a ridiculous, at first glance, phenomenon.

Unlike, which is also prone to exaggeration, the grotesque takes the situation to the extreme, making the plot absurd. In this absurdity lies the key to understanding the image.

Literature differs from other art forms in that its content cannot be seen or touched, but can be imagined. Therefore, the grotesque scenes of literary works always "work" to ensure that awaken the imagination reader.

Examples of the grotesque in literature

Analyzing experiences from the time of Aristophanes to the present day, we can conclude that the grotesque is a social evil reflected in literature, concluded in a shell of laughter.

In the comedy "The Frogs", owned by the great Greek playwright, serious things are ridiculed: the fate of the soul after death, politics, versification, social mores. The characters enter the realm of the dead, where they observe a dispute between the great Athenian tragedians: Sophocles and the recently deceased Euripides.

Poets scold each other, criticizing the old and the new way of composing poetry, and at the same time the vices of their contemporaries. Instead of the classic antique choir that usually accompanied the characters' lines, Aristophanes has a choir of frogs whose croaking sounds like laughter.

A striking example of the grotesque - story by N. V. Gogol "The Nose". The olfactory organ separates from its owner and begins an independent life: it goes to work, to the cathedral, walks along Nevsky Prospekt.

The most interesting thing is that the Nose is perceived by others as a very serious gentleman, but Major Kovalev, abandoned by him, cannot leave the house. It turns out that it is not a person that is important to society, but his attributes: rank, status, appearance. Grotesque image of a swollen nose

Satirical stories are built on the grotesque. fairy tales by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. For example, the hero of the work of the same name Karas-idealist personifies a philosophizing intellectual, cut off from real life. Crucian preaches universal love and equality, while predatory fish continue to swallow small fish.

Thinking to dissuade the pike from eating his own kind, the idealist perishes. His attempt to go against the laws of nature is comical, but behind it lies a deep sadness from the realization of this truth.

However, not all researchers consider the grotesque to be an exclusively comic device. In works M. A. Bulgakova such powerful and fantastic images collide that it would hardly occur to anyone to laugh at them.

« Fatal eggs" and " dog's heart are devoted to human experiments on nature. Are we allowed to interfere in everything? What are the consequences of scientific experiments? These questions are increasingly relevant in the era of cloning and Creonics. Bulgakov's grotesques frighten, warn, with their ominous authenticity reminiscent of Goya's engravings.

Grotesque in foreign literature

In addition to the already mentioned Aristophanes and Hoffmann, F. Rabelais, S. Brandt, J. Swift used the method of high and low collision among foreign writers. In the twentieth century, a German-speaking writer became an unsurpassed master of the grotesque F. Kafka.

The hero of the novel transformation» Gregor Samsa wakes up and finds that he has become a huge insect. Having tried to roll over to the other side, he realizes that he can no longer do this.

A loving son and brother, Gregor made money for the whole family, and now he is no longer needed. Relatives treat the giant centipede with disgust. They don't go into Gregor's room, only his sister occasionally brings him food.

Gradually, disgust for a strange creature increases. No one guesses how "it" suffers, hearing how mother and father discuss the problems that have arisen in the evenings. One evening, the sister invites the new tenants to play the piano. Attracted by the sounds of music from the living room, the hero crawls out of his hiding place. The merry company is shocked, a scandal comes out.

Tormented by hunger, wounds and loneliness, Gregor slowly dies. The family, relieved, throws the dried body of the insect out of the room. Parents notice that, despite all the hardships, the sister is getting prettier.

Kafka's phantasmagorical fiction continues Gogol's idea of ​​how little a person means when he loses his social functions, how little love remains even in the closest people.

Talking about the grotesque leads to the cherished depths of artistic imagery. This technique succeeds only to those artists whose creations are generated by long years of deliberation. That is why the grotesque in a literary work invariably amazes and remains in memory for a lifetime.

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Grotesque is a literary artistic device that is born at the intersection of reality and fantasy. Wanting to emphasize some features or phenomena, the authors change, deform them, striving for an implausible increase, expansion.

The grotesque is used in literature to immerse the reader in an absurd, sometimes crazy world and thereby help him realize the absurdity and perniciousness of the drawn ideas and phenomena. What happens in the works often resembles narcoleptic delirium, the dreams of a madman or an alien.

The definition of the grotesque includes the relationship of the image with reality in order to emphasize the obvious, conspicuous fantasticality and absurdity.

There is also deliberate comedy or tragic farce, designed to reduce sympathy for the characters and ridicule them even in their distress. The reader struggles and wants to wake up, but the author's goal is to capture attention so much that after reading, only an understanding of the veiled idea of ​​​​the work remains.

Examples of the grotesque in literature

Images that appear before consciousness in an exaggerated form are most often designed to influence the subconscious, thus giving out secret thoughts and secret throwing. Typical examples that allow us to understand what the grotesque is in literature can be considered:

1. The interweaving of dream and reality, and the dream is necessarily full of terrible details, dangerous and huge images, such as Tatyana's dream in which the beloved becomes a bear surrounded by monsters or Raskolnikov's dream, in which great Evil appears in the image of an old woman.
2. The transformation of a part into a whole, as, for example, in the novel "The Nose" by Gogol, the nose of an official leaves and becomes an independent citizen.
3. Complete change of personality, as in the story "The Metamorphosis" by Kafka, in which the hero becomes a disgusting insect and dies.
4. The resurrection of the dead and its active and often destructive actions, an example of Hoffmann's Sandman.
5. Forcing a comic or tragicomic effect, the scene in which the hero stabs himself with a cucumber in Saltykov-Shchedrin's History of a City.

Sometimes whole novels are a unique combination of grotesque images:

• "The Master and Margarita" by M. Bulgakov (Bezdomny's pursuit of Woland and his retinue, the meeting of the Master and Margarita, a description of Woland's ball),
• "Dead Souls" by N. Gogol (images of heroes whom Chichikov meets),
• "Castle" Kafka,
• Mayakovsky's poetry (corporeality of the earth, working halves of people, weapons coming to life).

Grotesque (from Italian grottesco - whimsical from grotto - grotto) is a peculiar style in literature that emphasizes the distortion or confusion of the norms of reality and the compatibility of contrasts - comic and tragic, fantastic and real, etc. Entire literary movements denied the grotesque, arguing that there is no fidelity to "nature" in exaggeration, distortion.

Why does the reader need to know that the baby Gargantua, who crawled out of the ear of Gargamel, who ate sixteen large barrels, two small ones and six pots of giblets, cries, as if inviting everyone to drink: “Drink, drink, drink.” And how to believe that 17,913 cows were allocated for feeding the baby, and 1105 cubits of white woolen material were taken for his pants. And, of course, a prudent reader will not find a gram of truth in the story of how, having decided to repay the Parisians for a bad reception, “... Gargantua unfastened his beautiful codpiece and poured them so abundantly from above that he drowned 260,418 people, not counting women and children."

The grotesque world is a world of exaggerations carried to the extreme, often fantastic.

Parts of the human body grow menacingly in it, the scale of phenomena, the size of things and objects change. At the same time, phenomena and objects go beyond their qualitative boundaries, cease to be themselves.

The type of grotesque imagery is also inherent in mythology, archaic art. The term itself appeared much later. During excavations in one of the photos of Ancient Rome, ornaments were found representing strange, bizarre interweaving of plants, animals, and human faces.

A mixture of human and animal forms is the oldest type of grotesque. In the language, the word grotesque has been fixed in the meaning of strange, unnatural, bizarre, illogical, and this is a reflection of the most important side of the aesthetic phenomenon inherent in all kinds of art.

The grotesque in literature can be not only a technique, an element of style, coloring a work in illogical tones, but also a method of typification. Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, Erasmus of Rotterdam's Praise of Stupidity became the pinnacles of his Renaissance art.

Aesthetically, the grotesque in literature is a reaction to the "principle of plausibility", to the art of pedantic fidelity to "nature". Such a reaction to the art of classicism was romanticism. At this time comes the realization of the aesthetic essence of the grotesque.

After the appearance of "Preface to "Cromwell"" (1827) by B. Hugo, the popularity of this term increased. Grotesque is often outwardly unpretentious. "Joke", in which "there is so much unexpected, fantastic, funny, original," Pushkin called Gogol's "Nose". Rabelais, in the introduction to the novel, appeals to readers, "good students and other idlers" with a request not to judge by outward cheerfulness, without thinking properly, not to start laughing.

The grotesque image strives for extreme generalization, revealing the quintessence of time, history, phenomenon, human existence. In this, the grotesque image is akin to a symbol. The grotesque "Shagreen leather" was placed by Balzac above the "bottom layer" of the works - "Scenes of Morals". Gogol's "Overcoat" is not only and not so much a defense of the "little man" as the quintessence of the insignificance of his being. According to Saltykov-Shchedrin, The History of a City arose to absorb the very essence of "those characteristic features of Russian life that make it not quite comfortable."

Grotesque in literature is an artistic unity of contrasts: the top and bottom of the human body (in Rabelais), the fabulous and the real (in Hoffmann), fantasy and everyday life (in Gogol). “A grotesque image,” wrote M. Bakhtin, “characterizes a phenomenon in a state of change, an unfinished metamorphosis, in the stage of death and birth, growth and formation.” The scientist showed the ambivalence of the grotesque image of the folk culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in which he simultaneously ridicules and affirms, in contrast to the denying satire of the new time.

In the grotesque of the Renaissance, the contrast of the top and bottom of the human body, their mutual substitution, was of paramount importance. In the realistic grotesque, the contrast is social. In Dostoevsky's story "Bobok" the social top and bottom converge. "Lady" Avdotya Ignatievna is annoyed by the close proximity of the shopkeeper. Comic in the story is the memory of the grave "society" about the past real, "burial" hierarchy. The grotesque contrast penetrates the very fabric of the work, expressed in sharp interruptions of the author's speech and the speech of the characters.

Realistic art brings an unprecedented "psychologization of the grotesque" (J. Mann). In the realistic grotesque, not only the phenomena of the external world are split, but also the human consciousness itself; in literature, the theme of duality arises, begun by Gogol's "The Nose" (after all, the State Councilor Nos is the double of the stupid, vulgar Major Kovalev). The theme is developed by Dostoevsky in the story "The Double" and in the scene of Ivan Karamazov's "meeting" with the devil.

In a grotesque work, the writer in various ways "convinces" the reader of the possibility of the coexistence of the most incredible, fantastic with the real, familiar. The fantastic in it is the most pointed reality. Hence the emphasized plastic authenticity in the description of the nose and the interweaving of the incredible with scenes of ordinary vulgarity in Gogol's story. In the story "Bobok" His Excellency the late Major General Pervoyedov plays preference with the late court adviser Lebezyatnikov. The fantastic crushes and enlarges reality, changes the proportions. Fiction is not an end in itself for the author. She is often "removed" by the writer: in Swift's Gulliver's Travels - an accurate, comically pedantic description of the place and time of action, a scrupulous citation of names and dates, in Dostoevsky's "Double" - a denial of the illusory, fantastic nature of what is happening, which each time accompanies the appearance of a double - Golyadkin -junior. The fantastic is exposed by the writer as an artistic device, which in due time can be abandoned as it is no longer needed. Often the realistic grotesque, examples of which we have given, is built entirely on the play of various image planes. Sometimes a grotesque work is a parody, such as Saltykov-Shchedrin's The History of a City.

The basis of the grotesque can be not only the maximum increase - hyperbole, but also a metaphor. The nature of the grotesque scenes in T. Shevchenko's poem "Dream" is metaphorical, the water of which from the cry of the king, strictly preserving the hierarchy - from the most "pot-bellied" to the "small", - his henchmen fall into the ground. The satirical grotesque of T. Shevchenko's political poetry, which goes back to folklore traditions, the traditions of Gogol, Mickiewicz, was an innovative phenomenon, it preceded the satirical grotesque of Saltykov-Shchedrin.

Art developed the traditions of the romantic and realistic grotesque. So, under the influence of the traditions of Hoffmann, Gogol, Dostoevsky, the grotesque style of F. Kafka was born. Kafka is characterized by a combination in the work of fabulous, fantastic, nightmarish events with a believable depiction of the details of everyday life and "normal" behavior of people in unusual situations. The hero of Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis", a traveling salesman, wakes up and sees himself turned into an insect.