If you caught last week’s blog – a book review of Child of God by Cormac McCarthy – you may have noticed that the one element I didn’t touch on was McCarthy’s use of Gothic tropes. I explained why his themes are Gothic, but left his tropes unmentioned.
That was intentional.
In the Southern Gothic genre, old decaying plantations and ghosts and other traditionally Gothic tropes may be employed, but not always. And except for isolation, traditional Gothic tropes weren’t used in the case of Child of God. Rather, the one trope that McCarthy uses most of all is the grotesque. This is a largely Southern Gothic trope and one that may seem confusing to readers of traditional English Gothic works.
This week, I’d like to take a look at what the grotesque really means and some ways in which it has been used.
The Grotesque – Origin
I owe The Gothic Library thanks for shedding light on the origins of this word. It turns out that the word grotesque stems from the Italian word for grotto (cave). When in the sixteenth century, underground rooms, covered with artwork, were uncovered, the public began to refer to this style of art as grotesque – referring to its source.
The art itself included a number of elements, including fanciful human and animal forms. As time progressed, the word grotesque shifted and was used to reflect only these strangely formed humans and animals.
Gothic architecture used some of these – such as gargoyles and other fanciful creatures – to adorn its cathedrals. Gothic literature then borrowed this understanding of the grotesque to refer to “… the monstrous, the malformed, the frightening, and the outright strange.”1
Uses of the Grotesque
As I said before, the grotesque is most often employed in the Southern Gothic genre. But not exclusively. The monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is certainly grotesque, as is the Gothic use of creatures such as vampires and werewolves. All of these feature some human-like entity that is monstrous, malformed, frightening, or strange.
Note that this is also a means of blending reality with unreality. In that sense, it is similar to the uncanny which we’ll discuss in a future post. However, for now, note that the uncanny refers to incidents in which the expected acts in very unexpected ways. So, for instance, if a mirror were to suddenly speak or swallow those who gaze into it for too long, that would be uncanny. If static objects were to suddenly gain the capacity for movement, that would be uncanny. The uncanny blends what we know with what is unexpected creating an eerie sense of unease in the reader (for very intentional purposes which we’ll cover in the future.) For now, my purpose in mentioning the uncanny is simply to point out that the grotesque plays a similar role in distorting our perception of reality.
In Southern Gothic writing, the grotesque is sometimes a very specific physical malformity and sometimes a symbolic deformity. For example, in McCarthy’s Child of God, he describes Lester Ballard as “small, unclean and unshaven.” (p 4) As the book progresses, he gives Lester an almost animal-like nature. He cannot resist his physical and sexual urges. He speaks without a filter or any adherence to social niceties. He’s crass, vulgar, brutal. In this way, McCarthy portrays Lester as grotesque partly physically, as an unkempt man, but primarily as a social and psychological abnormality.
In Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, she portrays the grandmother in ways that we would refer to as grotesque, but which are neither physical nor interpersonal (although she is certainly abrasive). Rather, it’s the grandmother’s outdated way of dress, her “big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus” (p 353), and her constant attempts in general to cling to an Old South that is long dead that makes her grotesque.
The Grotesque Married to Theme
Of course, as in all Gothic writing, the tropes are used to make Gothic themes clear to the reader. The grotesque is no exception.
In Child of God, McCarthy uses Lester as an exaggerated character to point out his theme: that all people (children of God) have a dark and evil nature. He uses many characters to say as much, but I particularly enjoyed the deputy’s conversation with an old-timer in Sevier County:
You think people was meaner then than they are now? The deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don’t. I think people are the same from the day God first made one. (p 168)
Likewise in O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. One of the dominant themes used in Southern Gothic writing is a focus on the idyllic South versus the reality. Here, O’Connor shows the ugly nature of the grandmother with her Old Southern ways as a means of pointing to the ugliness – racism being one of the dominant examples – that lies under much of the history of the South. The grotesque serves as a symbol of that history.
How to Use the Grotesque
If you are a writer, how do you go about using the grotesque in your writing? Especially if you’re not writing in the Southern Gothic tradition?
Remember that the grotesque is always employed to point to a larger truth – some ugliness whether it is in a specific region or in humanity as a whole. To work with the grotesque, you will need a theme that speaks to something along those lines.
For example, let’s say that you want to work with vampires or werewolves, which are generally more modern applications of the grotesque. You could use a werewolf to represent the inner rage and capacity for violence that all (or some specific group of) people have. You could use a vampire to represent the human tendency to use other people as nothing but tools to serve ourselves. Notice that, in either of these examples, both of these monstrous forms of humanity are used to represent an inner truth. The tropes make the themes more tangible to the reader.
Conclusion
We could spend a lifetime picking apart the works of other Southern writers such as Faulkner, Welty, Capote and McCullers and analyzing the use of the grotesque. It is a brilliantly employed symbol of the wide division between perceived truth and reality. That what on the surface appears to be a picturesque ideal may in fact hide an ugly character.
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1 Gothic Vocab: The Grotesque. The Gothic Library. https://www.thegothiclibrary.com/gothic-vocab-the-grotesque/. Accessed January 2022