ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter focuses on the discontent with loose or flexible uses of the term 'grotesque' and to develop a strict approach to the grotesque, an approach that is based on the conception of the grotesque as a corporeal, or flesh-made, metaphor which carries within itself cognitive, emotional, and hermeneutic dissonance. Through the examination of grotesque images in the works of Crashaw, Baudelaire, and Magritte, it has become evident that contradictory physicality and the notion of metaphor are two keys to the understanding of the grotesque and to the construction of its clear identity. The grotesque, as a (bio)logically contradictory body, allows the reader or viewer to play with terror. The chapter demonstrates that both fearfulness and joyfulness — or two antithetical emotions in general — are proper and essential to the grotesque and that when one of them emerges in pronounced form, the other, still present, retreats into the background.
