Modern American Grotesque

Modern American Grotesque Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 1 7/31/2009 11:14:21 AM Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 2 7/31/2009 11:14:26 AM Modern American Grotesque LITERATURE AND PHOTOGRAPHY James Goodwin THEOHI O S T A T EUNIVER S I T YPRE ss / C O L U MB us Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 3 7/31/2009 11:14:27 AM Copyright © 2009 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goodwin, James, 1945– Modern American grotesque : Literature and photography / James Goodwin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 : 978-0-8142-1108-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10 : 0-8142-1108-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13 : 978-0-8142-9205-1 (cd-rom) 1. American fiction—20th century—Histroy and criticism. 2. Grotesque in literature. 3. Grotesque in art. 4. Photography—United States—20th century. I. Title. PS374.G78G66 2009 813.009'1—dc22 2009004573 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1108-3) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9205-1) Cover design by Dan O’Dair Text design by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe Typeset in Adobe Palatino Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 4 7/31/2009 11:14:28 AM For my children Christopher and Kathleen, who already possess a fine sense of irony and for whom I wish in time stoic wisdom as well Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 5 7/31/2009 11:14:28 AM Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 6 7/31/2009 11:14:28 AM CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi CHAPTER 1 The Grotesque 1 CHAPTER 2 American Traditions of the Grotesque 17 CHAPTER 3 The Modern: Depiction and Description 38 CHAPTER 4 Grotesques in Modern America: Sherwood Anderson 57 CHAPTER 5 “Elephantine Close-Ups”: Nathanael West 74 CHAPTER 6 All God’s Grotesques: Flannery O’Connor 97 CHAPTER 7 New York Sights: Weegee 119 CHAPTER 8 Creatural Realism: Diane Arbus 146 CONCLUSION Grotesque to Monstrous 172 Notes 189 Works Cited 207 Index 219 Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 7 7/31/2009 11:14:28 AM Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 8 7/31/2009 11:14:28 AM ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURE 1.1 Detail from the Domus Aurea, Rome (later first century CE) 4 FIGURE 1.2 Albrecht Dürer, Coat of Arms for Maximilian I as Roman King (1500) 6 FIGURE 1.3 Leonardo da Vinci, A Grotesque Head (c1504) 12 FIGURE 1.4 Honoré Daumier, Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834 (1834) 14 FIGURE 2.1 Eadweard Muybridge, The Heathen Chinese Giant (c1869) 27 FIGURE 2.2 Marion Post Wolcott, Dolly Dimples: Personality Fat Girl (1939) 34 FIGURE 2.3 Ben Shahn, Medicine Show, Huntingdon, Tennessee (1935) 35 FIGURE 2.4 Walker Evans, Minstrel Poster, Alabama (1936) 37 FIGURE 5.1 Francisco de Goya, El sueño de la razon produce monstruos, from Los Caprichos (1799) 89 FIGURE 5.2 George Grosz, Maul halten und weiter dienen (1928) 92 FIGURE 5.3 George Grosz, Proven Proverbs, from Americana (1932) 93 FIGURE 7.1 Weegee, Gunman Killed by Off Duty Cop at 344 Broome St., February 3, 1942 126 FIGURE 7.2 Weegee, Joy of Living, April 17, 1942 128 FIGURE 7.3 Weegee, Auto Accident Victim, 1938 131 [ix ] Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 9 7/31/2009 11:14:28 AM IllUSTRATIONS FIGURE 7.4 Weegee, Their First Murder, October 9, 1941 136 FIGURE 7.5 Weegee, “Here is the actual birth of a riot in Harlem,” in Naked City (1945) 139 [ ] Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 10 7/31/2009 11:14:28 AM AcKNOWLEDGMENTS The purpose of the present study is to restore full meaning to cultural categories of the grotesque and to demonstrate their prominence and influence within modern American literature and photography. Over the years of research and writing spent on this subject I have benefited from the support of several institutions and individuals. Research and travel grants were provided by the Council on Research of the Academic Senate at UCLA. A summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities funded research at the Library of Congress. The librar- ians and staff at the following institutions assisted with many research inquiries and requests: the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress; the Young Research Library and its Special Collections at UCLA; the Getty Research Institute; the Huntington Library; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the International Center of Photography in New York; the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University; and the Ina Dillard Russell Library at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville. Like many researchers in American culture, I am particularly appreciative of materials in public domain made available online by the Library of Congress. I am grateful to colleagues who have provided advice and encourage- ment along the way, particularly the two anonymous readers at the Press, Miles Barth, Paul Boyer, Richard Cross, Ronald Gottesman, and Cécile Whiting. Matt Dubord provided technical expertise in assistance with the illustrations. Sandy Crooms, Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe, and Eugene O’Connor at the Press have greatly facilitated the editorial and produc- tion process. And, as always, I am thankful to my wife, Andrea, and our children, Christopher and Kathleen, for our lives together during my years of work. [xi ] Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 11 7/31/2009 11:14:28 AM Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 12 7/31/2009 11:14:28 AM CHAPTER 1 The Grotesque SK PEOPLE WHAT THEY FIND GROTESQUE in American life and A many will readily offer examples from popular culture and its venues of tabloid journalism, talk shows, celebrity gossip, network reality pro- grams, Internet Websites, and extreme movie genres. What Flannery O’Connor said in the 1950s of American mass culture—that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is “one of finding something that is not grotesque”—is incalculably truer today.1 In making her assessment O’Connor acknowledges a familiar idiomatic sense of the grotesque that touches only the surface of the long cultural tradition designated by the term. This conversational sense commonly refers to an event or appear- ance noteworthy only for its bizarre or perverse qualities and only for its effects of shock or scandal. As contemporary culture is increasingly given over to these superficial senses of the grotesque, it is an appropriate time to understand the deeper, modern meanings the grotesque has in American culture. Over the course of the twentieth century, a powerful cultural lineage of the modern grotesque evolved in the fiction of American writers Sher- wood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O’Connor and in the images of American photographers Weegee and Diane Arbus. In their work the grotesque deploys a willfully oblique, partial, deforming, and contentious perspective that yields a comprehension of society and culture not otherwise possible. Their work presents by way of the grotesque an attitude toward history, to adapt a concept from the social thinker and literary critic Kenneth Burke. For all the excesses in imagination and [1 ] Goodwin_Final4Print.indb 1 7/31/2009 11:14:28 AM CHAPTER 1 form manifest in the grotesque, at a latent level the mode can be pro- foundly reductive. The grotesque figure and its meanings are designed to be detected and understood in terms of pronounced, and often absolute, contrasts. Much modern American literature and photography of the grotesque depends upon iconographic processes that enlarge awareness of the social sphere through delimiting one’s perspective on it to antith- eses such as perception/obscurity and light/dark. Contrastive structure is not only a formal property but a persistent theme of the grotesque as well in modes of both literary description and graphic depiction. The reductiveness one can associate with the grotesque is not in the end a matter of oversimplification but rather a radical procedure intended to disclose meanings otherwise obscured from apprehension in the phenom- enal senses of this word: presentiment, perception, and comprehension. Writing in the mid-1930s, Kenneth Burke asserted that the grotesque had persisted at least since the Renaissance as a common strain within cultures of the West to the point where it presently functioned as one of the underlying “attitudes toward history” evident in contemporary life. Along with tragedy, comedy, the elegy, satire, and didacticism, the grotesque operates, in Burke’s estimation, as a primary poetic and symbolic mode and configures “the mental equipment (meanings, attitudes, character) by which one handles the significant factors of his time.”2 While its categories reiterate canons of literature, Burke’s discussion is as concerned with “ideological architecture” and questions of belief in mat- ters of politics and religion as it is with poems or novels (Attitudes, 58). His account of specific attitudes toward history derives from a general principle that guides much in Burke’s work, namely that mind, in being “formed by language, is formed by a public grammar” (Attitudes, 341). And thus linguistic and symbolic modes or “actions,” no matter how seemingly individualized in their expression, are always to be understood within larger frames of shared consciousness. The grotesque gains insight into the historical meaning of a current situation whether in politics or culture, according to Burke’s definition, through a perspective animated by incongruity. As distinct from the genre of comedy, however, the grotesque is a “cult of incongruity without the laughter” (Attitudes, 58). In using this idea, the present study does not claim that the grotesque is without comedy.

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