Carlyle's Grotesque Symbols and Symbolical Grotesques
In the course of interpreting contemporary phenomena, the sage makes extensive use of elaborate symbolical set pieces, some of which he finds in contemporary phenomena and others that he creates from his own imagination. In either case, his practice of relying on complex, often grotesque emblems derives ultimately from both Old Testament prophecy and Victorian biblical interpretation.
Carlyle's citation of the death of a malnourished Irish widow in Past and Present exemplifies the way the sage's act of interpretation transforms an apparently insignificant event into a grotesque emblem of the condition of the age. Drawing upon William P. Alison's Observations on the Management of the Poor in Scotland (1840), Carlyle cites the case of the poor woman who could prove her common humanity to the citizens of a modem city only by infecting them fatally with disease:
A poor Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of that City. At this Charitable Establishment and then at that she was refused; referred from one to the other, helped by none; — till she had exhausted them all; till her strength and heart failed her: she sank down in typhus-fever; died, and infected her Lane with fever, so that "seventeen other persons" died of fever there in consequence. The humane Physician asks thereupon, as with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have been economy to help this poor Widow? She took typhus-fever, and killed seventeen of you! — Very curious. (10.149)
Then, continuing to provide a voice for inarticulate fact, Carlyle speaks the meaning contained in the widow's act — indeed, in her very existence. She demands of her fellow creatures that they give her their help and asserts that she deserves it because "I am your sister, bone of your bone; one God made us: ye must help me!" The inhabitants of Edinburgh responded by denying her appeal — "No, impossible; thou art no sister of ours," but as Carlyle emphasizes, she "proves" her sisterhood when her typhus kills them: "They actually were her brothers, though denying it! Had human creature ever to go lower for a proof?" (10.149). In thus demonstrating the relevance of such contemporary phenomena, in thus thrusting upon the audience its need to see deeper into such apparently trivial events, Carlyle becomes a Victorian prophet who reveals that the event to which he directs our attention is a grotesque emblem of the spiritual, moral, and political condition of the age. His citation of the grotesque, a term that we employ to describe the jarringly unnatural, is completely appropriate for the sage, since his enterprise involves diagnosing instances of disorder.
The History of the Grotesque
Like other terms in aesthetics and criticism, the grotesque evolved by extrapolating an aesthetic category from what had originally been a stylistic or rhetorical term. Wolfgang Kayser, the leading modern student of grotesque, explains: "By the word grottesco the Renaissance, which used it to designate a specific ornamental style suggested by antiquity, understood not only something playfully gay and carelessly fantastic, but also something ominous and sinister in the face of a world totally different from the familiar one, a world in which the realm of inanimate things is no longer separated from those of plants, animals, and human beings, and where the laws of statics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid.
This second, more threatening form of the grotesque seems to have taken shape during the sixteenth century, and although, as Ruskin asserts, the grotesque has often assumed playful forms during the past two centuries, the more common, darker kind has commanded most attention in art, literature, and criticism. In varying degrees all the sages emphasize that certain monstrous quality of the grotesque "constituted by the fusion of different realms as well as by a definite lack of proportion and organization" (24), for their acts of interpretation, diagnosis, and warning reveal the presence of disorder in the midst of apparent order. As Kayser points out, "The grotesque world is — and is not — our own world. The ambiguous way in which we are affected by it results from our awareness that the familiar and apparently harmonious world is alienated under the impact of abysmal forces, which break it up and shatter its coherence" (37). Within the writings of the sage, the powerful emphasis upon the grotesque, which in other forms may appear random, uncaused, or intrinsic to existence, is shown to derive from the flaws of one's contemporaries: their fusions — or rather confusions — of moral, political, social, and spiritual order have rendered reality grotesque.
Carlyle's French Revolution, which we may take as a type of such a claim, devotes three volumes to demonstrating how such confusions of order released abysmal forces, and a large part of the writings of Mailer, Didion, and Wolfe consists of demonstrations that falling away from the true path has rendered the age grotesque.
Kayser urges that the "encounter with madness is one of the basic experiences of the grotesque which life forces upon us" (184), and this encounter, which estranges our world from us, affects us so much because it makes us feel our world is unreliable. Nonetheless, despite all the
helplessness and horror inspired by the dark forces which lurk in and behind our world and have power to estrange it, the truly artistic portrayal effects a secret liberation. The darkness has been sighted, the ominous powers discovered, the incomprehensible forces challenged. And thus we arrive at a final interpretation of the grotesque: An attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world" (188).
The sage, who transforms contemporary reality into a grotesque version of itself, or rather who reveals those grotesque aspects of it which his contemporaries fail or refuse to see, thus both summons and triumphs over such demonic forces. He summons them into the presence of his contemporaries by pointing to their existence in one of two ways. Either he shows that some aspect of contemporary reality when seen accurately turns out to be grotesque or he creates a grotesque image or analogy of the age to make its moral and spiritual grotesqueness easier to perceive. Likewise, the sage triumphs over the demonic forces of the grotesque in two ways. First, by explaining its underlying meaning, he makes this threatening disorder a part of greater order. Second, offering his audience a way out of such grotesqueness in the form of visionary promises or positive programs, he similarly controls it.
Last modified 19 March 2008