Goya's grotesque : abjection in los Caprichos, Desastres de la Guerra, and los Disparates
Date
1999
Authors
Herbst, Michael
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Abstract
My basic premise in this study is, if abjection is a psychosocial phenomenon, even
a kind of waste category and mechanism, it should be discernible and analysable as
an underlying structure in the form, iconography and purpose of works of art. Certain
modes of art will manifest or express it more lucidly and abundantly than
others. Satire and the Grotesque, which Goya adopts in his graphic Work, are especially
fruitful in this regard. In both, one can find processes and states of degradation
and vitiation that accord with the two facets of abjection Hal Foster (1996) so
pragmatically terms the operation to abject and the condition to be abject. Satire, with
its inclination to criticise political, social and ecclesiastical figures, can chiefly be
interpreted 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 interpretation
of Los Caprichos and Los Disparates. Los Caprichos, in which Goya took it
upon himself to "censure" and "ridicule" "human errors and vices", are marked by
a quite strict use of satire to criticise, mock and marginalise certain social groups
(prostitutes, nobles and corrupt clerics, in particular). Since society, or the Symbolic
that undergirds it, cannot do without the abject, either in its role as midden or as
oppositional determinant or defining other, the satirical project cannot banish or
destroy the abject; it can, however, bid and lobby for some degree of social reclamation
and rejuvenation. The satirist depicts the grotesque, sordid, obscene, deviant,
abandoned and licentious to indicate to the viewer/reader what s/h e must laugh
off to live a decent, obedient, constructive and law-fearing life. Goya takes this aapproach
in Los Caprichos. After all, in at least one letter to his friend Martin Zapater he
hinted that he feared the "witches, goblins, phantoms, arrogant giants, knaves"
and "scoundrels" of his society, and evidently felt a need to part from them. How
deep 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 Ms
own 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 by
them; on the other, he seems to relish depicting them in grotesque and blighted
shapes, as if the satirical purpose is secondary to the opportunity his art provides to
invent 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 corruption
in social institutions such as tire Church and the law. Some images, notably
Folhj of the Mass, juxtapose a wrathful figure with a mass of social ills, foibles and
depravities, and seem characteristically satirical, but the majority of the etchings
are striking in their lack of closure, as if a "state of unresolved tension", to quote
Michael Steig, adequately rewarded Goya for the labour of production. Man xoandering
among Phantoms, for example, is ambiguous and seems to sum up Goya's relationsMp
to 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 from
it. 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 Enfdticos
section 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 abjection
to extend military, political and, ultimately. Symbolic influence - by means
of sanctioned murder, execution, even rape - over another nation, w ith the aim of
making that nation succumb to the abjection of surrender and the imposition of a
foreign Symbolic. War also produces heaps of corpses and, in the occupied cities, ill
and starving destitutes: those reduced to conditions of permanent or near-permanent
abjection 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 of
art, and the more positive pleasure of jouissance. Contact with abjection allows,
further, for the complicated experience of being liminal, grotesque and abject oneself
while caught between the poles of the Symbolic and tire abject. Whether we, as
makers an d /o r viewers, criticise or joy in it, abjection holds out the alluring prospect
of catharsis and temporary relief both from its own hazards and the rigours
and inhibitions of social life. Goya, it would appear, found this intervenient condition
compelling enough to return to it - if he ever truly left it - over a period of
almost three decades through the medium of the three graphic series I explore in
this dissertation.
Description
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Arts Faculty (Fine Arts), 1999