Sherwood Anderson and grotesque fiction

Winesburg, Ohio (1919) – Sherwood Anderson
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In fiction, a character is usually considered a grotesque if he induces both empathy and disgust. (A character that inspires disgust alone is simply a villain or a monster.) Obvious examples would include the physically deformed and the mentally deficient, but people with cringe-worthy social traits are also included. The reader becomes piqued by the grotesque’s positive side, and continues reading to see if the character can conquer his darker side.

In European literature, Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of the most celebrated grotesques.

In American literature, one often cites Sherwood Anderson’s short story collection Winesburg, Ohio.

The most recent literary theory on the grotesque has been by two American scholars: Philip Thomson (1972) and David Lavery (a continuing online contribution).

I’ve cleaned up my own pages on the grotesque somewhat and transcribed some lists to Wikipedia. Please follow the links.

A final question, the beautiful cover painting on Anderson’s novel (a larger picture here), is it by Edward Hopper, that architect of American loneliness who recently guided me through chapter two of de Botton’s The Art of Travel?

Blind Beast

Blind Beast (1969) – Yasuzo Masumura

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Dadanoias has a video excerpt of the 1969 film Blind Beast, which I recently had the pleasure of seeing at the Brussels Arenberg cinemas.

I cannot recommend the whole film, but the first 15 minutes are beautiful (the gallery scene, the first scene in the warehouse with the sculptures of the body parts). The entire middle sequence is boring. The final scene is hilariously and grotesquely entertaining. The scene that Dadanoias has found (via El Blog Rarito) is from the end of the first 15 minutes, where the blind sculptor is trying to catch the girl in vain). Note the music by Hikaru Hayashi. The film is based on a novel by Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo.

I love moss

Detail of a photograph of some mossy stones, at Kylen, nr. Osby.

Detail of a photograph of mossy fallen branches, at Kylen, nr. Osby.

I love moss, my daughters know this well. Il Giornale Nuovo posted some photos of mossy trunks of which he writes:

Unlike the woods around Aickman’s Kurhus, these were clearly seldom traversed, being crossed here and there by old, low stone walls, by felled, mossy trunks, or blocked with thickets. Even so, it wasn’t hard for me to feel a faint something of that transcendence he hints at, as I stopped to admire a sunlit clearing after squeezing through mushroomy, spiderwebbed undergrowth.

I also love ferns. When I was reading Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard a couple of weeks ago I learned that if you burn the fronds of ferns and dissolve its ashes in water and let that water evaporate, you get a pattern of ferns at the bottom of the glass. I picked some ferns three weeks ago and burnt them two weeks ago. The water is evaporating but it is still too early to say whether the experiment will succeed.

To round this post off, an illustration of mosses by Ernst Haeckel:

Muscinae from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature) of 1904.

Ron Mueck’s body art

 Ron Mueck’s work is currently on display at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

While Ron Mueck’s work may not be body art in the strict sense of contemporary art terminology (that category is reserved for artists such as Orlan), his work is body art in a grotesquely metaphorical sense.

Eyeless in Gaza

Apart from being the name of a British post punk band and a line of poetry in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Eyeless in Gaza is a 1936 novel by Aldous Huxley .

In the most notorious passage of Huxley’s novel a live dog is dropped from an airplane and hits the flat rooftop where Anthony and his partner Helen are lying naked in the sun. It bursts spraying them with its blood. –Cedric Watts via 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006) – Peter Dr Boxall

Unreliable multiple narrators

Absalom, Absalom! (1936) – William Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom! (1936) – William Faulkner [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

For multiple and unreliable narrators, see:

The Rashomon effect is the effect of the subjectivity of perception on recollection, by which observers of an event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it.

It is named for Akira Kurosawa‘s film Rashomon, in which a crime witnessed by four individuals is described in four mutually contradictory ways. The film is based on two short stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke.

Does anyone know who did the cover illustration of Faulkner’s novel?

see also: 1936 – narrator