This is another outtake from the first chapter of Darwin’s Wonders, this time on Wolfgang Kayser’s understanding of the grotesque. Getting this section this short took several weeks and a little despair. I’m still pleased with how it turned out.
Kayser offers a striking contrast to Mikhail Bakhtin: his grotesque is dark, threatening, haunted by madness; Bakhtin’s is full of laughter, vitality, and renewal. Together, they could offer a fascinating double lens through which to look at Darwin. But the chapter became too dense, and I felt that this added complexity obscured more than it revealed. Kayser became a footnote.
Still, his unsettling perspective deserves a closer look. I hope you enjoy it.
A world gone weird
Few have dived as deeply into the grotesque as Wolfgang Kayser. The Domus Aurea remains his point of departure, but he traces the same unsettling quality through centuries and across continents — in painting, sculpture, and literature alike.
With such a wide approach, what do grotesque art works have in common?
According to Kayser, the grotesque makes the familiar world strange. It breaks the order we rely on to understand things. Categories collapse: human and animal, person and object, self and other. Suddenly, we no longer know what belongs where. We are caught between laughter and horror, unsure how to feel.
Fantasy and fairy tales may show bizarre or frightening creatures, but their world is neatly separated from ours. We can simply close the book. The grotesque, on the other hand, hits us so hard because it happens right here. “We are so strongly affected and terrified because it is our world which ceases to be reliable,” Kayser writes.1 The grotesque pulls the rug out from under our feet.
Comedy makes us laugh. Tragedy makes us cry. Horror frightens us. The grotesque leaves us alienated in a world we thought we knew.
So, how can the grotesque shake the foundations of our reality so profoundly?
According to Kayser, it undermines the boundaries that our reality relies on. We have already met hybrid creatures that blend human, animal and plant into one. The boundaries between forms dissolve as everything becomes partly something else.
Next, the line between object and person becomes wobbly. Tools and everyday objects escape their functional context and develop an uncanny life of their own.
Or it is the other way around: people become objects. We lose our agency and turn into marionettes in the hands of an “impersonal force, an alien and inhuman spirit.” In this estranged world we are deeply involved but never in control.
Naturally grotesque
For Kayser, the grotesque is not refined to the realm of art and imagination. Nature itself provides an abundance of grotesque motifs. Animals and plants take up considerable space in his inventory.
Animals in particular love to undermine our sense of order. Especially “nocturnal and creeping animals which inhabit realms apart from and inaccessible to man.” Their very existence reminds us that our human perspective is not the only one. The “grotesque animal incarnate“ is the bat, nocturnal and unsettling, a living hybrid between bird and mammal.
But there is more.
“The plant world, too, furnishes numerous motifs, and not only for the ornamental grotesques. The inextricable tangle of the jungle with its ominous vitality, in which nature itself seems to have erased the difference between plants and animals, is so grotesque that no exaggeration is needed. The enlarging microscope or a glance into otherwise hidden organic realms reveals grotesque sceneries as well.“
It is a curious fact that nature itself can disturb the order of things. Once more, it can smear the line separating plant and animal. But at the same time, it seems like the very existence of other “realms” threatens the stability of our own. No exaggeration, no distortion needed. An aquarium or a microscope can be sufficient.
To sum up, Kayser’s grotesque sabotages the way we make sense of the world. It is, quite literally, disturbing. The breakdown of our familiar world leaves us in a sinister place, associated with madness, chaos, fear of life.
Wolfgang Johannes Kayser, The grotesque in art and literature.