Art In Theory: Victor Hugo on the Grotesque

"The distinguishing character of modern culture, he argues, is its preoccupation with the grotesque, by which he means the comic, the eccentric, the anomalous, the monsterous, the vernacular-everything i fact, that the classical is not"-45

The modern muse: "It will acknowledge that not everything in creation is beautiful to the human eye, that the ugly co-exist side by side with the beautiful, the deformed beside the gracious, the grotesque beside the sublime. good hand in hand with evil, and shadow with light"

wonder: whether nature mutilated will be more beautiful than nature portrayed whole, whether art has the right to misrepresent man, life, and creations

Category: Grotesque. Form: Comedy

"The Grotesque is closer to the world around us than anything ideal, yet it is filled with endless parodies of mankind.

From imagination sprang creation

"one is forced to admit that the Greek Furies are far less frightening, and hence far less true than the witches of MacBeth. Pluto is not match for the devil"

"....For one needs a certain period of respite from everything, even from beauty. The Grotesque, on the other hand, by its nature, marks a sort of pause, and forms a point of comparison refreshing and sharpening or faculties, from which we can rise up towards the beautiful"

"...For an art that contains ALL things will surely being us closer to our ideal"

"...its transplantation from pagan epics to the more fertile ground of the modern era..."

"We shall look to the grotesque for all passion, vice and crime; the grotesque shall be lascivious and base, greedy, avaricious, and perfidious, hypocritical, and confused" "For beauty has only one type, whilst ugliness has thousands as its disposal. Beauty, on the human scale, is but form considered in its most simple manifestation, in its more absolute symmetry, or in its most intimate harmony with our own constitution. Hence it offers us a complete whole, but one which is limited like ourselves. by contrast, the things that we term ugly are but the details of a grand design which surpasses our understanding, harmonizing not with man himself, but with the whole of creation. And for this reason ugliness constantly presents itself in new forms, which merely have the appearance of incompletion" -48