Le Sublime et le Grotesque

Jan Miernowski (ed.). Le Sublime et le Grotesque. Geneva: Droz, 2014. Pp. 344. This book gathers contributions from a conference that took place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012 about the sublime and the grotesque or rather, to be more precise, about certain problematic moments at which these two notions collide or collapse. The volume builds indirectly on Hugo's comment in the "Preface de Cromwell," quoted by Baldine Saint Girons as an epigraph to her chapter, that in modern poetry "le sublime representee l'ame," while "[le grotesque] jouera le role de la bete humaine" (42). It is this oscillation (to take up Christian Biet's term [122-24]) that the book's eleven extremely rich chapters explore, animated across the centuries by authors as different as Longinus, Montaigne, Flaubert, Nothomb, and (briefly) Zizek. Although summarizing such a book is always a risk and destined to be unfairly uneven in its selections, the best way to signal this volume's value is to highlight some of its key twists and turns. In the first chapter, "Au-dela du beau: le sublime et le grotesque," the volume's editor defines--without limiting--the scope of the question being asked by studying, in some depth, what the two notions mean for Kant and Baudelaire. He is careful to point out that if "le voyage au-dela du beau, vers les regions ou le sublime et le grotesque se frolent et s'unissent, est une entreprise tentante, mais risquee," the two notions "ne partagent point les memes racines" (22), which is a good indication of the value of a conference and a book that bring together specialists of different periods. The second chapter, by Baldine Saint Girons, studies different modes (combat, alliance, fusion intime) by which the grotesque might be thought of as a "risque du sublime." Her analysis emphasizes how both notions imply a becoming or a morphing, such that the focus is shifted to two processes captured by neologisms that deserve to stick around: la sublimisation (specifically not la sublimation) and la grotesquisation (and accompanying verb grotesquiser). From this point on, the chapters are organized more or less chronologically from the sixteenth century to the present day. In his chapter on Montaigne's Essais, Michel Magnien helpfully begins by reviewing contemporary uses of the term crotesque, first used in French by Rabelais's "blason des couillons" in the Tiers Livre ("couillon de stuc, couillon de crotesque, etc."), and which took on, as in Etienne Pasquier, an increasingly metaphorical sense. Magnien then develops a close and highly productive reading of Montaigne's Socrates as a figure at once sublime and grotesque, before turning to the key mention of crotesques at the start of "De l'amitie," to show "comment la grotesque [...] devient comme l'embleme anti-classique de Montaigne" (83). Building on his previous--and indeed canon-redefining--work about the bloodiest and bloodiness of early modern texts, Christian Biet next argues that we should read early modern tragedy as both sublime (after Jacques Peletier du Mans) and grotesque, suggesting (after Wolfgang Kayser) that the stage be seen as a site for the return of the repressed. To explore these notions, he offers brief readings of the More cruel, wherein the grotesque Maure's character is also (as he dies) momentarily sublime, and of Titus Andronicus. Biet's reading of the latter can be complemented by, and compared with, many recent studies in the Anglophone world (Rowe, Cunningham, Anderson, Tempera, Casey, etc.). The chapter will be of particular interest to students and scholars of either tradition who are unfamiliar with, and interested in, seeing just how similar--and bodily--the two traditions are. …