Goya's grotesque : abjection in los Caprichos, Desastres de la Guerra, and los Disparates

[摘要] My basic premise in this study is, if abjection is a psychosocial phenomenon, evena kind of waste category and mechanism, it should be discernible and analysable asan underlying structure in the form, iconography and purpose of works of art. Certainmodes of art will manifest or express it more lucidly and abundantly thanothers. Satire and the Grotesque, which Goya adopts in his graphic Work, are especiallyfruitful in this regard. In both, one can find processes and states of degradationand vitiation that accord with the two facets of abjection Hal Foster (1996) sopragmatically terms the operation to abject and the condition to be abject. Satire, withits inclination to criticise political, social and ecclesiastical figures, can chiefly beinterpreted in terms of the operation to abject (to lower, cast down, depose, sideline),while the Grotesque, displaying the distorted, monstrous, 'freakish', hybrid, impossible,relates more to tire condition to be abject.This conjunction between satire/the Grotesque and abjection guides my interpretationof Los Caprichos and Los Disparates. Los Caprichos, in which Goya took itupon himself to censure and ridicule human errors and vices, are marked bya quite strict use of satire to criticise, mock and marginalise certain social groups(prostitutes, nobles and corrupt clerics, in particular). Since society, or the Symbolicthat undergirds it, cannot do without the abject, either in its role as midden or asoppositional determinant or defining other, the satirical project cannot banish ordestroy the abject; it can, however, bid and lobby for some degree of social reclamationand rejuvenation. The satirist depicts the grotesque, sordid, obscene, deviant,abandoned and licentious to indicate to the viewer/reader what s/h e must laughoff to live a decent, obedient, constructive and law-fearing life. Goya takes this aapproachin Los Caprichos. After all, in at least one letter to his friend Martin Zapater hehinted that he feared the witches, goblins, phantoms, arrogant giants, knavesand scoundrels of his society, and evidently felt a need to part from them. Howdeep this need ran one cannot say; many of his images suggest a degree of equivocation(he vacillates between being on the side of the law and on the side of Msown more incorruptible conscience, from which he upbraids the law) and ambivalence(on the one hand, he scolds his objects of attack and appears to be repelled bythem; on the other, he seems to relish depicting them in grotesque and blightedshapes, as if the satirical purpose is secondary to the opportunity his art provides toinvent forms and get close to the forbidden, the anti-social, the rotten, the abject).In Los Disparates equivocation and ambivalence come more to the fore. Goya often appears most aggressively satirical in the Disparates when he questions corruptionin social institutions such as tire Church and the law. Some images, notablyFolhj of the Mass, juxtapose a wrathful figure with a mass of social ills, foibles anddepravities, and seem characteristically satirical, but the majority of the etchingsare striking in their lack of closure, as if a state of unresolved tension, to quoteMichael Steig, adequately rewarded Goya for the labour of production. Man xoanderingamong Phantoms, for example, is ambiguous and seems to sum up Goya's relationsMpto the abject toward the end of his life: through the surrogate of an old man,Goya appears to have struck a deal with the abject; submerged in it, corrupted by it,impure, but nevertheless sufficiently single-minded to find an identity separate fromit. Complicit, but differentiated: all subjects stand in this way to the abject.In Los Desastres, especially given that I do not deal with the Caprichos Enfdticossection of the series, my interpretation is determined less by satire than by the question of how an antagonistic nation uses war as a mechanism of conclusive abjectionto extend military, political and, ultimately. Symbolic influence - by meansof sanctioned murder, execution, even rape - over another nation, w ith the aim ofmaking that nation succumb to the abjection of surrender and the imposition of aforeign Symbolic. War also produces heaps of corpses and, in the occupied cities, illand starving destitutes: those reduced to conditions of permanent or near-permanentabjection by war's ballistic exacerbation of the operation to abject.Contact with abjection through art strengthens, weakens and expands the self.It carries the threat of immersion in the repressed and the promise of risque pleasure- both from the diminution of unpleasure through the making or viewing ofart, and the more positive pleasure of jouissance. Contact with abjection allows,further, for the complicated experience of being liminal, grotesque and abject oneselfwhile caught between the poles of the Symbolic and tire abject. Whether we, asmakers an d /o r viewers, criticise or joy in it, abjection holds out the alluring prospectof catharsis and temporary relief both from its own hazards and the rigoursand inhibitions of social life. Goya, it would appear, found this intervenient conditioncompelling enough to return to it - if he ever truly left it - over a period ofalmost three decades through the medium of the three graphic series I explore inthis dissertation.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand