Enigmas of the Sublime and the Grotesque

This chapter introduces three important concepts liable to help one deal with texts which certainly reject classification and interpretation: the sublime, the grotesque, and, to a lesser extent, the abject. Based on theories by Burke, Lyotard, and Kant among others, the concept of the sublime is used in this book to describe the cognitive failure of the detectives facing the ungraspable nature of human experience. The related concept of the grotesque, apprehended through Bakhtin and Kayser, is studied as a literary mode which emphasizes and further distorts the anxiety and horror that the lack of solutions generates in metacognitive mystery tales. Lastly, the abject, understood in Kristevian terms, appears as the most extreme form of existential and intellectual privation experienced by the detectives.

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Notes

The image of the abyss echoes Den Tandt’s article titled “Invoking the Abyss: The Ideologies of the Postmodern Sublime” (1995).

It is interesting to note here that, for Burke , terror is slightly different from pain because it first affects the mind, before provoking a physical tension, whereas pain first afflicts the body, which results in a mental strain. In the end, both pain and terror have the same impact on the mind: “The only difference between pain and terror, is, that things which cause pain operate on the mind, by the intervention of the body: whereas things that cause terror generally affect the bodily organs by the operation of the mind suggesting the danger; but both agreeing, either primarily, or secondarily, in producing a tension, contraction, or violent emotion of the nerves, they agree likewise in everything else” (Burke 1958, 132).

Jan Miernowski, in his introduction to Le Sublime et le grotesque, sums up Kant ’s distinction between the two “sublimes” explaining that the mathematical sublime “focuses on the objects whose immensity appalls us while [the dynamical sublime] concerns the power of nature that terrifies us because of its magnitude”—a distinction to which Miernowski adds that in both cases “we call sublime what is absolutely great,” an idea that our imagination cannot but fail to represent (2014, 15; my translation).

This mental confusion is also related to Merivale and Sweeney ’s insistence on the theme of “the world, city , or text as labyrinth ” in the metaphysical detective story (1999, 8). For a striking case of grotesque palimpsestic narration, see also Iain Sinclair’s rewriting of Jack the Ripper’s investigation in White Chappell , Scarlet Tracings.

Bakhtin defines a chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (2011, 84).

This gendered distinction is also interesting since Burke and his followers similarly distinguish the sublime from the beautiful perceived as rather feminine. Of course, one of the characteristics of the abject is its extreme degradation of the beautiful and the harmonious.

This “new reality” refers to the “modern” changes which have taken hold of Western cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “industrialization, rapid urbanization, and consumerism ” (Eckhard 2011, 58); transformations that have kept speeding up in the postmodern era, thereby increasing the subjects’ fascination and dread.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. University of Liège, Liège, Belgium Antoine Dechêne

1. Antoine Dechêne