The grotesque interface: Deformity, debasement, and dissolution

This dissertation proposes a model for studying the grotesque as a mediating principle in the conflict between order and non-order. Chapter one lays the theoretical foundation for the textual analyses that will follow. Its primary claim is that the grotesque is both the product of this conflict and the process that impels it. The conflictual paradigm on which this thesis is based is drawn from an examination of the mural art which lent its name to the broader phenomenon of the grotesque. These frescoes are characterized by the frenzied play of an ornamental fringe, which displaces the central representation as the center of focus and meaning. It is precisely this constant displacement of focus and meaning that are most characteristic of the grotesque in all of its manifestations.; Chapter two examines dialectic of sanity and insanity as it appears in Gunter Grass's Die Blechtrommel. This problem is made acute in the opening of the novel, when its first person narrator announces that he is writing from the refuge of a madhouse. This admission casts the pall of madness over the narrative and brings its more fantastic features into conflict with the realistic prose of the work. Chapter three considers the role madness in Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit. One of the primary results of the confrontation with madness in Celine's work is the questioning of the parameters of institutionalized order. The narrator of the novel serves as both inmate and keeper in various asylums, however, the true madness is external to the ward and lies in the excesses of the "real" world. Chapter four extends the analysis of delirium to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad, a novel which not only opposes the fantastic to the realistic as an internal dynamic, but also problematizes the very notion of reading as a "meaningful" experience. Chapter five provides a comparative analysis of the human body as an ordering principle in these three works, and it focuses more specifically of the various versions of deformity that undermine the integrity of the body as a principle of order.