1 the language of the grotesque le langage du grotesque el lenguaje de lo grotesco die spräche des grotesken 2-1997 iMitteraria Tartu Ülikooli maailmakirjanduse õppetooli ja Eesti Võrdleva Kirjandusteaduse Assotsiatsiooni aastakiri. Annual edition o f the Chair of Comparative Literature of Tartu University and the Estonian Association o f Comparative Literature. Edition annuelle de la Chaire de Litterature Comparee de l'Universite de Tartu et de TAssociation Estonienne de Litterature Comparee. Jahrbuch des Lehrstuhls Jiir Weltliteratur an der Universität Tartu und der Assoziation der Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft in Estland. Ediciön anual de la Cätedra de Literatura Comparada de la Universidad de Tartu у de la Asociaciön Estonia de Literatura Comparada. Toimetuskolleegium/Editorial Board: Jiiri Talvet (toimetaja/editor), Kerttu Metsar-Parhomenko, Tiina Aunin (abitoimetajad/ assistant editors), Kersti Unt, Reet Sool, Marina Grišakova Aadress/Address: INTERLITTERARIA, Tartu Ülikool, maailmakirjanduse õppetool, EE2400 Tartu, Estonia tel./fax: +372 7 441 542 (until Aug. 31, 1997); +372 7 465 350 (from Sept. 1, 1997), e-mail: talvet@admin. ut. ee Kirjastaja ja levitaja/Publisher and Distributor: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus/Tartu University Press, Tiigi 78, Tartu EE2400, Eesli/Estonia tel.: +372 7 430 061, 430 851, fax: +372 7 430 061, e-mail: [email protected] Kujundaja/Designer: Lemmi Koni © 1997 by Tartu University Press Printed and bound by Tartu University Press. Order No. 146 inMitteraria м и / the language of the grotesque le langage du grotesque el lenguaje de lo grotesco die spräche des grotesken TARTU ÜLIKOOLI KIRJASTUS Contents ■ Matieres ■ Inhalt ■ Contenido JÜRI TALVET ■ 5 Introductory Note YURIBOREV ■ 11 The Grotesque DOROTHEA SCHOLL ■ 15 Zur Genealogie, Phänomenologie und Theorie des Grotesken INGEMAR HAAG ■ 40 The Modem Grotesque — the Mystery of Body and Language JÜRI TALVET ■ 51 The Polyglot Grotesque ANNELILL ■ 64 Characters, Situations and the Grotesque: Interpreting Apuleius’ Metamorphoses ÜLAR PLOOM ■ 84 Grotesque Images in Dante’s Inferno: the Problem of the Grotesque Overcome MADELEINE LAZARD ■ 103 Rabelais mäitre du grotesque JUAN CARLOS PUEO -114 La doctrina humanista de la risa у el lenguaje del realismo grotesco KRZYSZTOF BILINSKI -131 Secondary Modelling Systems in the Grotesque — the Problem of the Language SUSANA G. ARTAL ■ 137 Rabelais, Quevedo у el cuerpo grotesco: notas para un estudio comparativo JOSE MARJA BALCELLS * 147 Lo grotesco en la epopeya burlesca espanola MARINA GRISHAKOVA • 155 Virtuality and the Grotesque in Cervantes’ Don Quixote FELIX KARLINGER ■ 165 Fragmente zum Grotesken in der italienischen Literatur des Seicento ÄNGEL GARCIA GALIANO ■ 173 Parodia de lo neoplatönico en la poesla burlesca de Quevedo Ma CARMEN DI AZ DE ALDA HEIKKILÄ ■ 190 La mitologfa grecolatina у su tratamiento grotesco en el Barroco espanol GIUSEPPINA RESTIVO ■ 208 The Grotesque and History in Swift and Vonnegut TIINA AUNIN ■ 226 On Realistic and Grotesque Discourse: E. A. Poe, J. C. Oates, Fr. Tuglas REIJO VIRTANEN ■ 231 Satire On Religion — the Grotesque Mixture of Sacred and Profane VICENTE J. BENET ■ 250 Horror and the Grotesque: Corporeal Landscapes of Violence ALESSANDRO BALDI ■ 267 El tratamiento de lo grotesco en la obra de Tommaso Landolfi KERSTI TARIEN • 283 Naming the Unnamable: Black Humour in Beckett’s and Orton’s Plays JULIETA HAIDAR MARIA DE LA LUZ SEVILLA GONZÄLEZ ■ 294 El füncionamiento de lo grotesco en la literatura mexicana REIN TOOTMAA -313 Fixing Anti-Values and Creating Alienated Illusions A l v a r o r a m ir e z -o s p in a • 327 The Camivalesque and Colombian Television Comedy Series About Authors "335 Introductory Note The preparation of the manuscript of Interlitteraria 2 sadly coincided with the death of Pent Nurmekund, the most celebrated polyglot of Estonia. During his long lifespan (1906-1996) he managed to learn to speak nearly all major languages of the world, both Occidental and Oriental (including Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Japanese, etc.). On the eve of his 90th birthday (and, more sadly, scarcely two weeks before his death) he could see published his first book of poems, written in the language of his South Estonian birthplace. Although he was not, literally, a “literary man”, he was one of these great personalities who in the dull closure of the Soviet years silently prepared Estonia’s openness and dialogue with other cultures and nations. He was also a man of good humour who liked to tell his numerous students at Tartu University jokes and laugh with them at the grotesques the Soviet reality abundantly provided. To give an example, at the beginning of the 60s, coinciding with the much claimed “eternal friendship” between the USSR and the Peoples Republic of China, an important official Chinese delegation visited Estonia. As one of the few speakers of Chinese in Estonia, Pent Nurmekund was asked to go to the capital Tallinn, to do the job of the interpreter. However, as an intellectual of “bourgeois background”, he was not considered worthy of standing by the Communist Party bosses of Estonia and the Chinese guests but was asked to take his place in the watching crowd, at some distance, and was only from time to time asked to approach the official circle to interpret. The Chinese guests where visibly puzzled: while the Estonian CP bosses could not speak Chinese, a peasant-looking man — Pent Nurmekund used to wear a sheepskin coat in winter — emerged from a crowd of natives, speaking fluent Chinese! This is how the grotesque appears — a camivalesque intrusion of laughter (and life) breaking official norms and ridiculing an artificially built society and its ideology. 6 Introductory Note We would like, thus, Interlitteraria 2 to become a homage to the memory of Pent Nurmekund, the man who made Estonia more open and contributed worthily to Estonia’s interlitteraria. Most of the texts in Interlitteraria 2 have emerged as the harvest of the 1st International Conference of the Estonian Asso­ ciation of Comparative Literature, “The Language of the Gro­ tesque”, held in Tartu between April 1 and 4, 1996. The idea of such a conference was first suggested by the anniversaries of some of the great masters of the literary grotesque (as, by way of coinci­ dence, in 1994, 500 years of Rabelais’s birth, and in 1995, 350 and 250 years, respectively, of Quevedo’s and Swift’s death lapsed). However, life inevitably introduced its amendments to the initial project. The outcome was a lively polylogical conference in the vein of the grotesque itself: without any subject limitations, intended to cast light on the complex phenomenon both from the theoretical and practical point of view, from the ancient times to our postmodern fin-de-siecle. In addition to the papers of the conference, Interlitteraria 2 includes some other valuable contribu­ tions, like by the German scholars Felix Karlinger and Dorothea Scholl, the Italian Alessandro Baldi, the Colombian Alvaro Rarmrez-Ospina and the Estonian Rein Tootmaa. Interlitteraria 2, thus, has turned into a happy polylogue of several generations of scholars: along with merited academicians we hear young “postmodern” voices. Sometimes they contradict each other, but there are also surprising coincidences, making possible a fertile dialogue. In the theoretical preamble, the merited Russian aesthetician Yuri Borev summarizes his long experience in dealing with the grotesque: in his view, the grotesque in art and literature, whatever its ambiguities, is always “laughter over chaos in the name of harmony”. The young German scholar Dorothea Scholl presents a systematic and highly illustrative panorama of how the grotesque has been interpreted since the notion came into existence. Like the Swede Ingemar Haag, she reminds us of the penetrating (and nowadays unjustly forgotten) philosophy of the grotesque emerging already in German romantics, especially in the work of Friedrich Schlegel. Then she goes on to expound Wolfgang Kayser’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s influential theories, concentrated respectively on the alienation and the camivalesque in the Introductory Note 7 grotesque. She refers also to the importance of the grotesque in intercultural dynamics (as accentuated by the Lithuanian Jurgis Baltrušaitis) and in the theatre of the absurd. The grotesque, in her view, is always in the vanguard of modernity, or, as she concludes, it is “an interminable principle of negative dialectics”. Ingemar Haag, on his part, analyzes the complicated relationship between the sublime and the grotesque, and tends to interpret the latter as “the ultimate failure of a language unable to depict the infiniteness of the world” or, in other words, a failure to attain the sublime. As Bakhtin’s concept of the camivalesque and the grotesque has engendered dense polemics and repercussion throughout the postmodern era, in my own article I make an attempt to illuminate some of the aspects of the often overlooked “border situation” in which the great Russian scholar wrote his work. Inspired by the late writing of Yuri Lotman about the “border” and “explosion” in the “semiosphere”, I suggest that the grotesque is essentially a phenomenon of (chrono)cultural “borders” and “peripheries”, being, thus, fully adaptable to our own fin-de-siecle “border”. In the majority of the texts in Interlitteraria 2 some special author, text, or a textual body centred in the grotesque has been dealt with. However, none of these close scrutinies of concrete phenomena overlook theoretical contexts. The Estonian