Infantile Regression, Violating Taboos and the Grotesque
Infantile Regression, Violating Taboos and the Grotesque

Summary/Abstract: The term grotesque, like so many terms in aesthetics and literary theory (romanticism, irony, tragedy, novel) refers to a fuzzy category, to a wide range of partially overlapping, and, by the same token, partially incompatible notions. It is used to refer to works in which conflicting emotional tendencies occur together, such as the laughable and what is incompatible with it; and to works which display the blurring of the categories human, animal and plant; and to the conspicuous flouting of taboos associated with the excretions, orifices and protrusions of the human body. Philip Thomson speaks of emotional disorientation in relation to the grotesque. Such a multiplicity of uses is a clear indication that the works preceded the term, and that authors and artists did not create their works with the rules of the grotesque in mind. One cannot define the grotesque with reference to necessary and sufficient conditions. In this state of affairs it is most convenient to apply Wittgenstein's (1968) notion of “open concept" (refined by Rosch and Mervis).

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