ABSTRACT
Like most other influential concepts in literary criticism, “the grotesque” has as many different definitions and adaptations as it has strong critics. To take only two sharply contrasting examples, the social optimist Mikhail Bakhtin describes it in terms of inclusivity, as an ebullient, carnivalesque, liberating, many-voiced crowd scene, whereas the social pessimist Wolfgang Kayser characterizes it as a mode of sinister exclusivity, as an alienated, uncanny, fantastic world that leaves little room for the comic (cf. Peyrache-Leborgne, 13-21). Albert Halsall steps in to explain how the concept seems to apply to Hugo’s work: “Hugo never clearly defines the word ‘grotesque’ … by it he means anything ridiculous, comical, distorted, physically and morally ugly, strange or monstrous” (66). But he thus leaves us with a static vision that omits the dynamic progressions evoked by Bakhtin and Kayser and that does not engage the clear implicatures of Hugo’s texts. All three definitions, however, can be subsumed under the sociolinguistic concept of the “marked choice,” which provides a valuable way of analyzing literary phenomena at every level. In terms of reader-response theory as applied to the grotesque, a marked choice would involve a violation of formal or social expectations through the inappropriateness or deformity of a represented person, image, word, or object; the incongruous juxtaposition of clashing elements; or both. Observing the behavior of a foreigner or a child, we cannot always tell whether they are making marked choices on purpose; but for the literary critic, a convenient default position is to assume that an author’s marked choices were deliberate until proven otherwise.
