Spanish Sources of Fernando Arrabal's Theatre of the Grotesque: Goya, Valle-Inclán and Buñuel

This article seeks to demonstrate the central role that the grotesque plays in the theatre of Fernando Arrabal and to consider some of the Spanish artists whose work shaped his use of that aesthetic mode. Francisco de Goya emerges as the pivotal figure whose paintings and etchings provided the impetus for a number of twentieth-century luminaries working in several different media. Goya's work along with the esperpentos of Ramon del Valle-Inclan and the films of Luis Bimuel influenced Arrabal, whose unique form of total theatre in the spirit of Antonin Artaud combined the ideas of that French theorist with the dark humour, scatology and blasphemy of his Spanish predecessors.