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Portrayals of the past or of distant worlds are common in fantasy, Gothic, or science fiction, but the use of contemporary and terrestrial settings is an important commonality between modernism and the grotesque. While modernism implies

contemporary settings by its very title, the long history of the grotesque has the potential to influence a reader to think of the genre as an antiquated form. However, grotesque

fiction is, by nature, a literature of contemporary cultural criticism.37 Works of the grotesque that may seem antiquated to contemporary readers, like Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein, are set in the writer’s own time and world, as opposed to being set in a

previous century or in another plane of existence. As William Van O’Connor explains in

The Grotesque: An American Genre and Other Essays (1962), the grotesque (like

modernism) reflects and comments on the writer’s contemporary culture, reacting against the trends and traditions that may be irrational or harmful. Similarly, Harpham

characterizes the grotesque as an art of radical change and rebellion against outdated paradigms: “It is one characteristic of revolutions, whether literary, political, or scientific” (Harpham 20). The grotesque’s focus on modern social commentary

necessitates a grounding in modern, familiar settings rather than antiquated or fantastical ones.

The importance of contemporary, terrestrial settings in grotesque literature is made clear when those settings are considered with relation to alienation. It is important to understand that the estranged or alienated world is not the same as an “alien” world, as Clayborough explains in The Grotesque in English Literature:

in genuinely grotesque art the everyday world is suddenly changed into a strange and unpleasant place, into a world in which we do not wish to live. The grotesque arouses in us not fear of death but anxiety about life. A merely alien world, one which is completely strange to us from the outset, as in the fairy-tales, is not grotesque. (Clayborough 64)38

37

The idea of the grotesque as a fundamentally modern form, as explained in Chapter One, deserves review with reference to the discussion of contemporary settings in the portrayal of alienation. 38

Schneider echoes Clayborough’s ideas about the necessity of contemporary settings for conceptually insightful “weird tales” in Horror and the Holy (1993):

If the setting is unfathomable from the outset, as are most fairy tales and some works of science fiction, then the story is not likely to generate much horror. If, on the other hand, the setting is credible at its inception and unexpectedly becomes otherworldly, the story’s shock-value mounts significantly. We are reminded once again of the role played by deviation: the more an experience

On the subject of the estranged world in the grotesque, Thomson adds that “if a literary text ‘takes place’ in a fantasy-world created by the author, with no pretensions to a connection with reality, the grotesque is almost out of the question” (23). The idea of the “alienated” as opposed to the “alien” world is important to the understanding of the grotesque because it serves to distinguish the grotesque weird tale from stories in which the settings are antiquated (as in most Gothic tales), futuristic or extra-terrestrial (as in much of science fiction), or entirely otherworldly (as in fantasy or “swords-and-sorcery” fiction). An understanding of the importance of contemporary settings also develops a better understanding of the connection of the modern grotesque to modernism, and their shared aim of “diagnosing” maladies of the writer’s own time and culture.39

Modernism tends to depict alienation as an ever-present, if largely unrecognized, universal state. As mentioned in Chapter One, Galloway’s explanation of the idea of alienation as a persistent condition that “man does not become alienated (the word itself ceases to have connotations of ‘progress’): alienation is his birthright, the modern, psychologically colored equivalent of original sin” (14) is important to the discussion of alienation in grotesque modernism. Kayser addresses the idea of alienation as modern birthright when he notes that in the works of Kafka “there are no ‘encounters’ and no sudden eruptions or actual estrangements, simply because the world is strange from the beginning. We do not lose our foothold on the world, because we have never had it, although we did not realize the fact” (148). The persistent alienation discussed by

deviates from and ultimately contradicts our accustomed outlook, the more intimidating it

becomes. (Schneider 8) 39

Chapter One reviewed Pound’s idea of the experimental writers of his time (who are now called modernists) representing the “art of diagnosis” as part of their “cult of ugliness.”

Galloway and Kayser is applicable to much of modernism, for the modernist paradigm crisis, the radical and disturbing shift in perspective, is the realization of one’s

“birthright” of alienation.40

The development of a perception of inherent alienation is a paradigm shift, which can instill a fear associated not with a physical threat but with the threat of an intellectual abyss. The “crisis of reality” that defines the modernist impulse is a cataclysmic,

widespread, and multi-faceted “paradigm crisis” on a universal level that also surfaces in the grotesque:

...confusion lies at the heart of all scientific discoveries of a revolutionary character.... This pregnant moment is a ‘paradigm crisis,’ when enough

anomalies have emerged to discredit an old explanatory paradigm or model, and to make it impossible to continue adhering to it, but before the general acceptance of a new paradigm. The paradigm crisis is the interval of the grotesque writ large. (Harpham 17)

One might also say that the “paradigm crisis” is the “interval” of modernism “writ large.” For the intellectual, the paradigm crisis can be the greatest alienating, even terrifying experience. In the light of disquieting but irrefutable evidence, the “rational” mind is forced to change its entire mental framework, thereby estranging the individual from the intellectual community and culture, and even from his or her own sense of identity and sanity.41 In effect, the acquisition of revolutionary knowledge can be the ultimate alienating experience.

40

Galloway’s description applies to a number of noteworthy modernist characters, including Eliot’s Prufrock, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Beckett’s Murphy, and Lewis’s Tarr.

41

One need only look at Galileo or Darwin to see the alienating effect of unaccepted knowledge and its tangible alienating consequences.