Grotesque in C. Dickens
Résumé
Introduction grotesque " Real and apparent contradictions abound in discussions of the grotesque; it is an extremely flexible category " , as Geoffrey Galt Harpham reminds us (Harpham article 464). Whoever reads into the bulk of criticism attached to the grotesque will see instability as the first striking characteristic of a concept that Baudelaire called " this indefinable element of beauty […] that obscure and mysterious element " (Baudelaire 132). The purpose of this brief introduction is not to provide an exhaustive survey of the many nuances found in the exegesis of the grotesque, which would necessitate to foray deep into historical, architectural, aesthetic and literary approaches, but to sketch in the theories deemed essential to a correct assessment of the prominence and meaning of the grotesque in the European fiction of the 19 th century. The works of 20 th-century literary critics like Kayser, Bakhtin and Harpham (taken together perhaps) provide a reasonably clear insight into the fundamentally ambivalent concept. The grotesque was theorized in the 19 th century notably by Hugo, Ruskin and Baudelaire, who shed light on the significance of grotesque within Romanticism and Victorian realism. The grotesque famously borrows its name from the accident of the discovery around 1480 of the remains of Nero's Domus Aurea and its elaborate ornaments. Its meaning then gradually expanded from the designation of the decorative grotesque of the Renaissance to what may appear as a vague or all-inclusive category. Critics generally agree, however, on the central idea that the grotesque realizes the either harmonious or hair-raising, but always impossible, fusion of heterogeneous elements. The word has come more prosaically to designate an unexpected mixture of comic and horror or of comic and disgust. Laughter is central-distortion, even carried out to extremities, is not grotesque without laughter. " For an object to be grotesque, it must arouse three responses. Laughter and astonishment are two; either disgust or horror is the third " (Harpham article 463). Harpham's 1976 definition puts to the fore the essential idea that the grotesque originates in the subject of the gaze, that it isn't inherent in the grotesque object. This, Baudelaire had underlined as early as 1855: " Indian and Chinese idols are unaware that they are ridiculous; it is in us, Christians, that their comicality resides. " (Baudelaire 142). And to grasp the impact of the viewer's feeling of estrangement, his (at least initial) impossibility to make sense of the grotesque image, one must also remember that the grotesque emerges in a realistic context: " [The grotesque] threat depends for its effectiveness on the efficacy of the everyday, the partial fulfilment of our usual expectations. We must be believers whose faith has been profoundly shaken but not destroyed; otherwise we lose that fear of life and become resigned to absurdity, fantasy, or death " (Harpham 462).
L'article analyse la projection de CD dans son oeuvre comme fantasme de lui-même en citoyen français.
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