Andrew Tatusko
Seton Hall University
Abstract
The
grotesque is often viewed as a subversive element injected
into the fabric of social and religious structures for subversive
and offensive purposes intended to garner increased market
share and media exposure. As such it has been seen as
barbaric or even demonic. However, other theories of
the grotesque show that it is often a combination of social
and aesthetic criticism that disrupts the ordered structure
of experience in terms of boundaries and categories that compose
that structure often in terms of explicit traditions, but also
in terms of hidden assumptions and values that compose this
structure. To this end, there is a connection of the
grotesque to the sublime and the ambiguous. There is
thus an element of the grotesque that lays claim to mystery
and so, can act as a vehicle for understanding crucial concepts
in studying divinity. Examples of religious ambiguity
and the grotesque in popular culture disclose both aspects
of the grotesque and also offer a fructuous medium from which
the critical engagement of tradition, boundaries, and the grotesque
itself can emerge. The grotesque aesthetic and explicitly
religious quoting of the Nine Inch Nails provides a clear medium
through which the tentative structure of boundaries is expressed
creating creative space for the mystery of the sacred to emerge.
Introduction
[1] In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas (2002) describes
that which pollutes in terms of power. Pollution and
impurity are elicited by disorder and run as a counter discourse
to social order, reinforcing that order and sometimes destroying
it. Either way, order is reified if impurity is either
disposed of or introduced into a defined context. The
issue here has less to do with impure elements in society per
se than with the drawing and blurring of boundaries that
maintain a coherent and ordered experience. The dualism
of order and disorder is inscribed on the relationship between
pure and impure. In between the two polarities is an
ambiguous region that is neither disordered nor structured. In
this “formless” region the greatest danger exists
where power can be harnessed to reinforce order, or act as
an agent to destroy it. It is this untamed power that
reinforces boundaries by those who would draw them and can
simultaneously destroy these boundaries if left unchecked.
[2] Douglas notes that power is often described in terms of
witchcraft or sorcery in some instances or as an animus in
others. Power along these lines is relegated to the boundaries
of the disclosed and accepted order of experience. There
is thus a risk involved in allowing the ambiguous to maintain
its formless character. When ambiguity gains momentum,
it threatens ordered experience, and threatens the boundaries
that shape identity socially, psychologically and spiritually. Ambiguity
is then marginalized by the accepted order.
[3] Douglas’s work deals specifically with the relationship
between primitive and modern culture in an effort to restore
the currency of that distinction in anthropology. Her
argument in concert with current thought about the notion of
boundaries is a rich description that would greatly assist
the current climate about what is acceptable and decent versus
what is unacceptable and indecent in the terms stipulated by
the FCC and Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2004 (H.R.
3717). Moreover, the current debate regarding same-sex
marriage, and the grotesque portrayal of the crucifixion of
Jesus and the debate of how the Jews were portrayed in Mel
Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ (2004)
are each speaking to the issue of boundaries in their own way. The
issue is where these boundaries have been drawn, how they were
drawn, and how they are maintained. The challenge leveled
against boundaries such as these is a normal re-negotiation
of cultural language and norms. The problem seems to
be in the response of actors who level protective and often
exclusionary responses to any threat to established order and
interpretation.
[4] Ambiguity in the midst of such boundaries is revealed in
the debate and in so doing discloses the conditions and powers
that create them. In theological rather than anthropological
terms, ambiguity can be both a power that distorts the relationship
between the human and sacred and a power that clarifies the
difference between the human and sacred. What I argue
in what follows is that an intentional blurring of boundaries,
while offensive to an ordered experience, and while it distorts
the boundary between the human and the sacred, can also be
used to clarify the difference between the human and the sacred
and allow for the sublime mystery of the sacred to flourish
in less bounded conditions. In Mark C. Taylor’s
terms this would seem to be an “a/theological” task “where
fixed boundaries disintegrate” and remain “undeniably
ambiguous” (1984, 12-13). Indeed this task does
call into question and critically engage existing boundary
conditions and so, the inquiry into the grotesque and its relation
knowledge of the sacred is a task that is in itself “erring.” However,
I do not merely “seek to solicit the inherent instability
and covert contradictions” in modern discourse and thereby
deconstruct and reconstruct them in a postmodern cast (Taylor,
13). Indeed engaging the grotesque is an exercise in
erring as such, but it explores how the sacred can be engaged
through the disruption of boundary conditions by the grotesque. The
disruption of boundaries such as the human and sacred, among
others, can be seen in the work of popular industrial musician
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. The offensive and grotesque
images in his work can be used to reveal and critically engage
assumptions about experience in order to disclose the sacred
as that which transcends the boundaries of human experience
and reinscribes them as sublime mystery.
Borders, the Structure of Experience,
and the Grotesque
[5] The notion of boundary is as closely tied to social structuring
as it is to the structure of personal experience. Boundary,
in this sense, is not so much a static and reified structure
as it is a negotiation of limits and categories. At the heart
of the behaviour is the inclusion of elements into categories
that order and define experience–a behaviour that also
requires an act of exclusion. Exemplifying such a boundary
are the categories of tradition which are normative to what
is acceptable and deemed as “good” for a social
structure. But what may be overlooked in even the hardest
reification of traditional boundaries is the renegotiation
of those traditional boundaries and categories. In this
sense, as we will see below in the work of Delwin Brown, the
categories and boundaries of tradition are not completely static,
but undergo a constant renegotiation from internal and external
elements that call into question the entire structure of experience
in terms of established borders that define it. The definition
of terms either in support of or in contradiction to a given
order is given in relation to that structure. The structure
of experience ordered through a system of differentiated borders
thus creates opposing terms, as these terms reinforce and sustain
the structure.
[6] The grotesque proceeds from an ordered structure of experience
when opposing or differentiated terms are combined in a way
that unifies terms that ought to be differentiated, and differentiates
terms that ought to remain unified. In short, the grotesque
is an often radical disturbance of an ordered structure of
experience. Often popular usage of the term implies “gore” in
film such as the “living dead,” or the insane killer
who reappears in a strange circle of life, death and rebirth,
or in the nightmares of his would-be next victim as in the
cases of Leatherface, Jason and Freddy Krueger. But the
work of Salvador Dali in works such as “Autumn Cannibalism” (1936)
or “Young Auto-Virgin Sodomized by her Own Chastity” (1954),
the re-animations of cadavers in the photography of Joel-Peter
Witkin, or the current “Bodyworlds” exhibit that
seem to ride the border between science and death certainly
retain this quality of a disturbance of an ordered structure
of experience. But it is not enough to address that such
disorder is categorized as something grotesque as it is to
address why this is so.
[7] Mary Douglas’s understanding of dirt “as matter
out of place … implies two conditions: a set of ordered
relations and a contravention of that order” (44). Dirt
as an inappropriate element only exists in relation to a system
that classifies this or that as dirt. The behaviour of
rejecting an object or idea flows from the experience that
the order of experience is disturbed. This she calls “pollution
behavior” (45). In this sense eliminating dirt
is “a positive effort to organize the environment” (2). Organizing
behaviour in this way limits experience, makes it manageable
and helps one to focus and discern reality. “Danger
lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither
one state nor the next, it is undefineable” (120). Danger
is an idea or expression that is ambiguous in relation to a
given structure that can neither be classified as a pollutant,
nor included in any prescribed boundaries. Lack of definition
results in lack of classification and so, the ambiguous is
suspended somewhere outside or along the lines of the system. Fredrik
Barth (2000) notes three characteristics of boundaries along
these lines. Boundaries “divide territories ‘on
the ground’ … set limits that mark social groups
off from each other … and … provide(s) a template
for that which separates distinct categories of the mind” (17). It
is a faculty of human cognition and social order to draw boundaries
and develop a structure in which experience is ordered and
predictable, and the division between human and sacred powers
is clearly demarcated. This division has been
made quite clear in the very design of the Jewish Temple where
the Holy of Holies remained inscrutable and inaccessible to
all but the High Priest or even more clearly in the absolute
distinction between Allah and humankind for Muslims. However,
there is a more fluid understanding of boundary formation that
is rather inclusive of oppositional voices and a spate of different
elements. This becomes part of the Christian understanding
of Jesus as God incarnate as we shall see below. While
Douglas would perhaps characterize these sorts of arrangements
in terms of primitive culture, Delwin Brown argues that this
fluidity of boundaries lies in the negotiation of active participants
in a tradition.
[8] Delwin Brown (1994) offers a reinterpretation of “tradition” in
order “to seek an adequate understanding of tradition
after the advent of modernism” (4). While modernism
may have heightened “the destructive capabilities of
inherited ideas, actions, and structures … humans are
inescapably traditioned and traditional beings” (2). Brown’s
strategy is to redefine tradition in terms of its consistently
renegotiated boundaries and limits and the inherent multiplicity
of voices that give tradition its shape. This more fluid
structure not only makes room for other voices, but actually
generates these voices. Tradition, so conceived, is of
a very different character than the criticism leveled against
its “special character” as “an act of faith
at odds with the evidence” (Brown 1994, 68). “That
is why tradition must be understood as the negotiation between
chaos and order, order and chaos. The dynamic
of tradition requires both. Either alone is impossible,
and either in excess is dangerous” (Brown 1994, 87). The
canon that forms the “galaxy of meaning” for a
tradition should not be deconstructed to an endless play of
meaning, nor should it reify itself into a dogmatic and static
hegemony of this or that meaning. The boundedness of
the canon establishes a limitation on the conditions for the
tradition and in so doing; those within the tradition negotiate
meaning and identity in relation to the canon (Brown 1994,
78). Yet the canon is also curatorial in the midst of “multiple
and conflictual” meaning, and contestable in that it
is a “negotiation or play” (Brown 1994, 80). A
similar view suggests that the individuals within the boundaries
of tradition may use their own schemas in order to construct
their identities relative to those boundaries (Barth 2000,
33). What is at stake is a more flexible and adaptive
view of tradition that allows space for the subversive to co-exist
within its bounds. Moreover, because there are still
boundaries that establish identity, the spaces outside of the
bounds of the tradition are available for inhabitation by the
grotesque. Indeed, “the provocation for change
seems most frequently to come from outside the tradition” (Brown
1994, 87). The grotesque, as we shall see, is liminally
related to constructed boundaries. In itself, the grotesque
is a concept that challenges boundaries and calls for them
to err and be errant. What is the character of the grotesque
that can be so challenging, repugnant, subversive and destructive
of boundary limitations that establish identity, and order
experience?
[9] The word grotesque derives from grottesca which
is the feminine form of grotto, meaning cave. The word
became associated with an ornamental style of painting in Italy
from fifteenth-century excavations. However, through
time, the meaning would take on a new meaning more closely
associated with its contemporary usage. Wilhelm Kayser
(1963) traces the complex history of the term and notes that
Vitruvius, a contemporary of Augustus condemned the style characterizing
it as “barbaric.” Kayser quotes Vitruvius
from De architectura, “For our contemporary artists
decorate the walls with monstrous forms rather than reproducing
clear images of the familiar world” (20). The work
he describes seems to take aspects of different classifications
in the order of the world and combines them in an unnatural
or unfamiliar way. Thus he asks, “For how can the
stem of a flower support a roof, or a candelabrum pedimental
structure? How can a tender shoot carry a human figure,
and how can bastard forms composed of flowers and human bodies
grow out of roots and tendrils?” Kayser’s
connection between the barbaric and the grotesque is an interesting
one because it inscribes a social category on the meaning of
grotesque. The grotesque, in these terms, connotes a
lack of civility. Here the notion is that the very structure
of rationally-based civil order is threatened by these grotesque
representations. “Civilized” is often seen
in contradiction to “barbaric.” According
to Brown “[t]o civilize was to bring humans into
a social organization, and to be civil was to behave
in a way appropriate to that organization, to be orderly, educated,
polite” (59). This meaning was dovetailed with
the meaning of culture through the Eighteenth century.
[10] Freud echoes this sentiment with his less than inclusive
view of taboo. Freud draws a parallel between
restrictive taboos in primitive culture and “obsessional
neurosis” (1950, 45 ff.) more akin to the view of the
savages in Huxley’s Brave New World than in the
way we have been looking at the notion of boundary so far. The
fascinating piece of Brave New World for this discussion
is that what is deemed barbaric or savage in the context is
finally revealed as a relative category in keeping with social
control and order that is disrupted by The Visiting Savage
(John) who finds himself among the technocracy of the Brave
New World leading ultimately to his suicide. Nonconformity
to the social order is simply unthinkable and must be eliminated–even
in the paradoxical free act of taking one’s own life
as John does following an act of conformity to a dancing crowd
crying “orgy porgy.” Thus, in the end, the
Brave New World appears to be as much or more savage than the
culture of savagery that was sequestered from the technocratic
order. The very notions of savagery and barbarity are
hence called into question.
[11] For Leszek Kolakowski (1990), barbarity, as relative to Eurocentrism,
is a result of the loss of tradition through fanatical skepticism
or cultural universalism. Either of these options contradicts
a fundamental European characteristic which is self-criticism
that exists within boundaries (25). Hence tradition can
be preserved without morphing into totalitarianism. Radical
acceptance of all elements on an equal plane ultimately reduces
a culture’s identity into such fanatical regimes. Further,
Kolakowski argues the notion of complete and utter sameness
under the umbrella of the word utopia is a contradictory
notion: “A feasible utopian world must presuppose
that people have lost their creativity and freedom, that the
variety of human life forms and thus personal life have been
destroyed, and that all people have achieved perfect satisfaction
of their needs and accepted a perpetual deadly stagnation as
their normal condition” (Kolakowski 1990, 138). Difference
must run parallel to and intersect with what seems to be normalized
and defined within boundaries. Resting not within boundary
conditions but on the margins of social, aesthetic and epistemological
conditions is precisely how Geoffrey Harpham understands the
grotesque. Viewing the ambiguous and non-defined character
of that which is called grotesque is his way of splitting the
difference between Kayser’s negative cast on the grotesque
as barbaric and demonic and Bakhtin’s more optimistic
view of the grotesque as a potential for liberation (Yates
1997, 31). The homogeneity structured through technocracy
in Brave New World seems to be an apt illustration of
these concepts.
[12] Bakhtin (1981) argues that “the disunification of
what had traditionally been linked, and the bringing-together
of that which had traditionally been kept distant and disunified,
is achieved in Rabelais via the construction of series [rjady]
of the most varied types, which are at times parallel to each
other and at times intersect each other” (Bakhtin
1981, 170). In Rabelais’ use of the body, exaggerations
run parallel and intersect with precise anatomical descriptions. It
is thus a strategy to renegotiate the boundaries of tradition
in the sense that Brown defines it, but through that which
escapes category because it has blurred the boundaries that
construct these categories. However, this negotiation
first must re-establish where cultural boundaries are, who
is responsible for upholding them, and the assumptions that
govern their existence. Re-negotiation from this view
is not without its significant challenges and re-establishes
what is profane and indecent. For Bakhtin, the concept
is the carnival in which those in authority are mocked and
parodied. A similar play is wrought by Monty Python who
take liberties with their notions of authority and God, portraying
priests and kings as buffoons, the laws of the land as absurdities,
and the incapacity of high-order philosophical thought to deal
with real-world problems, as in a soccer match between Greek
and German philosophers who can’t seem to get out of
the individual mode of reflection until Archimedes has a moment
of “eureka” in order to set up a play at the end. The
issue is what is left after these boundaries become blurred
and seemingly relative.
[13] One angle of understanding the profanity of blurred boundaries
is through the relationship of the subversive to cultural norms. What
is subversive runs against norms to reveal oppressive regimes
of power, and discloses assumptions in order to generate a
more authentic notion of self. However, the prevailing
cultural structure can assimilate this level of the grotesque
and package it in a likeness to consumers in the guise of “cutting-edge
style.” This movement provides fertile ground for a new
subversive element to replace the former counter or subculture
that becomes the mainstream. One example of this is so-called “alternative” music. The
moment Nirvana struck the chord of American youth in 1991,
the alternative was repackaged in dozens of look-alike and
sound-alike forms to mimic Nirvana and the “Seattle sound” of
so-called “grunge.” This “feedback
loop” is documented in the Frontline program “Merchants
of Cool.” As Douglas Rushkoff (Dretzin and Goodman
2001) notes, “The media watches kids and then sells them
an image of themselves. Then kids watch those images and aspire
to be that mook or midriff in the TV set. And the media is
there watching them do that in order to craft new images for
them, and so on.” Even those who believe that they
have escaped this cycle through the grotesque (e.g., the band
the Insane Clown Posse and others) are soon sold the grotesque
as a part of the mainstream. It is perhaps this re-imaging
of the grotesque that no longer seems grotesque in the sense
we have seen thus far. Art can here be seen as a confusion
with perversity–the grotesque without any referent or
boundary other than its own unboundedness and disruptiveness
to traditional forms.
[14] Without a vigorous tradition to oppose, the avant-garde
declines into a series of narcissistic soliloquies, raging
against an illusory enemy that is only too happy to subsidize
its tantrums. In fact, we are living today in the aftermath
of the avant-garde, a time when its gestures have become ubiquitous
but also aesthetically impotent. The obsession with novelty,
the addiction to extreme gestures, the desire to marry art
and radical politics: These common features of avant-garde
culture live on now as a species of caricature (Kimball 1997).
[15] The grotesque and the avant-garde become simulacra (Baudrillard
1994), and cease to mean nothing more than shock value in order
to increase market share. The issue here brings us back
to recent controversy over decency and order in society with
regard to FCC regulations, same-sex marriage, The Passion and
even ClearChannel’s removal of Howard Stern’s radio
show from six markets in order to protect its “listeners
from indecent content” (ClearChannel 2004). What
is clear from these current debates is that, whether perceived
or real, the grotesque has a dangerous element to it. In
terms of boundary formation, identity and tradition, these
debates are part of a larger complex of behaviour in which
boundaries are constantly renegotiated and redefined by those
from within the tradition and from the outside of the tradition. In
this way those within the tradition and its galaxy of meaning
redefine who they are and legitimate or refigure the canon
that shapes their galaxy of shared meaning.
The Grotesque as a Medium for the Sublime
[16] The other side of formlessness points to another set of
categories that have little to do with corporeal restructuring
and repackaging. This is more in tune with the idea of
the holy or with mystery–the sublime. As Connelly
(2003) notes, “The boundlessness of the sublime, dynamical
or numerical, overwhelms reason and exceeds its powers to contain
and define” (4). For her, this is an important
distinction with the grotesque. The grotesque rather, “is
in constant struggle with the boundaries of the known, the
conventional, the understood” (5). For Chaouli,
it is a question of scale. The sublime, is “absolutely–that
is to say, beyond any comparison–exceed[s] the
human scale. For only then will our power of imagination
feel its own limits, leading to a momentary sense of failure
that in turn becomes the negative pleasure we feel when we
realize the even greater extension of our reason. In
order to experience the infinite range of our reason we need
to confront something that is not finite, something beyond
the human scale” (Chaouli, 55). The grotesque is
also a refiguration of categories that are the material of
the middle-class worldview, but are radically recombined and
altered in a way that challenges that worldview (Kayser). In
one sense, this perspective leads to a freeing notion of the
grotesque since structure is viewed as tentative and a less
structured and bounded notion of self and the sublime is possible. The
formless has been slipped into two categories, “the loathsome
disgusting” and the “sublime sublime.” The
grotesque as that which is formless can thus take two directions–both
of which subvert boundaries: that which is rejected as foul
or Douglas’s “dirt,” and a sublime disruption
of existing categories. The former falls into the category
of “profane,” while the latter is “holy”– both
are potent sources that disrupt existing boundaries, structure
and categories.
[17] In contrast to Chaouli’s affirmation of how far
reason can extend to comprehend the sublime, Christian spiritual
writings have stressed the idea of God’s unbounded nature
that escapes any formative categories that human reason is
able to construct in order to comprehend it. This seems
to be in concert with Connelly’s understanding of the
sublime in relation to the grotesque. The basis for the Cloud
of Unknowing, for example is knowledge of God via negativa,
that is, knowing God by rejecting all positive statements about
the divine due to the inability of the senses to conceive thereof. That
the finitude of the senses and the mind to perceive and conceive
of God are likened to “a cloud of darkness” reinforces
that the being of God is ultimately a mystery: “The
darkness we enter is the other side of what is known. It
is not an unqualified darkness of unknowing, but the other
side of what can be spoken of” (Allen 1998, 30). The
holy and the sublime, in this sense, is something that escapes
human categorization and is unbounded by human reason and the
ability to accurately articulate the habitual presence of the
sacred.
[18] Sacred presence is that which human categories can at
best partially understand. The beauty of the world or “the
book of nature” can give one only a partial reflection
of the beauty of God. Moreover, in Christianity, Jesus
as God incarnate upholds the mystery of God for, according
to Barth (1955), Jesus only reflects God through an analogy
of relationship rather than an analogy of being (Barth 1955,
III/2, 220-221, 323-324). Since the being of God escapes
all categories, including “being” itself (Marion
1991), the closest category to which we can ascribe to God
is that God escapes all categories. However, this way
of looking at the holy as a sublime, unbounded formlessness
does not adequately pinpoint the issue of the grotesque as
such. In contrast, the subject of the grotesque is the
corporeal and the material and has form, even as a form that
destabilizes structure as such. But even if we locate
the grotesque here, there is room for the grotesque to open
a space for the sacred precisely because it challenges boundaries
and the categories that structure experience. This challenge
reveals the limitedness of human cognition to grasp all of
reality from not only a transcendent, numinous level, but even
on a material, observable level. Such is the challenge
of mystery. As Roger Hazelton writes, “Theology
and grotesque art, … find a certain affinity in a common
persuasion that mystery remains a real and radical feature
of our existing in the world–something not reducible
to the aims and methods of technical expertise and control,
and thus compelling other kinds of human response and acknowledgement” (1997,
76). Such “other human response” in the renegotiation
of errant boundaries in order to experience the knowledge of
the sacred.
[19] Douglas also offers a very brief proposal that leaves
space for the grotesque to be a creative rather than a destructive
force and hence as a possible medium to experience the mystery
of the sacred. The category of the profane behaves in
a cycle from formlessness to form and a return to formlessness. “Dirt
was created by the differentiating activity of mind, it was
a by-product of the creation of order. So it started
from a state of non-differentiation; all through the process
of differentiating its role was to threaten the distinctions
made; finally it returns to its true indiscriminable character” (Douglas
2002 198). This is certainly the case in Genesis where “the
LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Gen
2:7, NRSV). This verse itself is an indication of the
Yahwist tradition in which the experience of God is not limited
to the cult of the Temple, but is also outside of those boundaries: “In
a word the chief importance of God’s activity suddenly
lies outside the sacred institutions. It is thereby perhaps
more concealed from the natural eye because the entire profane
sphere is also the domain of God’s activity; but it is
nevertheless looked at more inclusively, not intermittently,
but much more continually” (von Rad 1972, 30). This
perspective echoes the notion of via positiva through
the book of nature. Dirt is not only formless and a way
of understanding the grotesque, but dirt is also the potential
for order and can disclose beauty and even the likeness of
God! Here, dirt offers a creative rather than destructive
quality, or a “creative formlessness” (Douglas
2002 199). This is part of the constructive side of what
the grotesque as formlessness can offer–insofar as it
exists outside or tangential to normative or traditional structures. Note
that formlessness in the grotesque’s relationship to
the sacred is somewhat loose. Here I would not go so
far as so say that the grotesque as a form is formless. Rather,
the calling into question of traditional boundaries–both
cognitive and social–renders the structures in which
the sacred can be revealed to be more open to renegotiation
and even a radical restructuring rendering a certain formless
character to those structures once they are revealed as tentative
and not final structures to comprehend the sacred. The issue
is that the grotesque can be a creative medium for boundary
renegotiation among participants in a traditional dialogue
inasmuch as dirt was a creative medium for God.
[20] In sum, the grotesque offers us a fructuous concept to
understand the conditions under which human boundary formation
exists from the social, cognitive and spiritual dimensions. With
uncategorized formlessness and ambiguity there is a power that
can be subversive or disclose the nature of the sacred. In
the grotesque there is a creative energy and power through
which identity and tradition in relation to the sacred can
be renegotiated and more richly understood. Can that
which is profane and subversive also act as an agent to reveal
the sacred? That is to say, is it possible to combine
the grotesque with the ordered and pure in a way that the nature
of the sacred is revealed? If the grotesque is that which
knocks order and structured experience out of balance, there
is a piece of it that forces experience to renegotiate structure
and order. In short, it sends boundary structures of
experience erring in a way that they must be renegotiated. In
the midst of this renegotiation of boundaries there is a ripe
moment in which human limitedness to know the sacred is disclosed
thus reinforcing the mystery and the ineffable nature of the
sacred. An understanding of why this or that is
grotesque or offensive can thus disclose the otherness of God. A
critical appropriation of the grotesque in its varied forms
yields a constructive medium into apprehending the mystery
of the sacred and its quality of unboundedness. As Carl
Skrade writes, “By speaking to us fiercely of the reality
of the non-rational and of unavoidable death, the grotesque
becomes a call to life and hope” (Skrade 1974, 157). Hence,
there is an analogy of relationship between boundary formation
and the grotesque, and boundary formation and the experience
of God. This point is what we turn to now in Trent Reznor’s
own employment of the grotesque as a refiguration of his own
view of religion and God which then acts as a piece for the
consumer to reveal those boundaries that go unquestioned in
the midst of assumed traditional order that is often not up
for renegotiation in Brown’s sense.
Grotesque Images and Boundary Transgressions
in the Nine Inch Nails
[20] In a 1994 interview, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails says, “What
I am trying to do is challenge the accepted … I’m
fully aware that Nine Inch Nails works within the context of
writing songs with choruses and hooks. This gives it
a certain degree of commerciality and I think that’s
a good platform to slip in some messages that are a bit subversive” (Sprague). The
music and art of the Nine Inch Nails can be characterized as
subversive not just because of the hostile and dark images
and language, but because of how mutually oppositional elements
are grotesquely conjoined. This includes the collusion
of food, sex, death, and religion in the award winning music
video for the song “Closer.” But this instance
is part of a wider pattern for the prominent position that
is given to the grotesque in Nine Inch Nails music and video.
[21] In the film-noir video for “Happiness in Slavery” (1992),
a stream of images pulsates in a calculated flood of the grotesque. The
video begins with Trent Reznor, lead singer, writer, instrumentalist,
label owner and performer for over half of all Nine Inch Nails
music belting out the words “Slave screams” from
the inside of a cage. When he reaches the fourth verse
(“don’t open your eyes you won’t like what
you see”) we are brought inside a dim room with an early
40s white gentleman in a suit carefully lighting a candle,
and methodically removing his clothing. In the middle
of the room is what looks like a reclined dentist’s chair
or a massage table with gadgetry and a hint of machinery all
around it. Weeds grow at the base of this chair/table. The
man walks over to a sink, and while he engages in a ritualistic
washing of his body, the camera pays special attention to his
genitalia. He slowly walks over to the benign looking
chair and lies back in it. The chair swiftly comes to
life, twisting itself to a position suitable for an examination
and his hands and feet are locked in place by restraining devices. The
chair becomes more “alive” than the supposed initiate
as an active participant and leader in a ritualistic transformation
as he becomes a passive object that the machine body of the
chair restrains. At this point he undergoes horrific
torture–his hands are pierced by probes, his chest is
prodded and impaled by claws, his abdomen ripped open by spinning
blades, and his genitalia crushed. At the end, his body
is ground and fed to worms that writhe in the midst of the
weeds at the base of this examination chair or masochistic
altar. His torturous pleasure lubricates the cogs of
the machine and his torture and death sustains the machine
and the weeds. There is thus a disturbing subtext in
which the grotesque combination of machine, man, pleasure,
pain and ritual form a matrix of slavery as a means to freedom. After
the gruesome mutilation and excretion of the man by the machine,
Trent Reznor enters the room and begins the same ritual as
the camera fades to black.
[22] While these images conjure up nightmarish gore and visions
of pain at the whim of technology, the most disturbing aspect
is the intense and even orgasmic pleasure the supposed initiate
to this “happiness” derives from the captivity
and torture of his willful submission to techno-masochistic
slavery. The boundaries between man and machine, life
and death, freedom and captivity, pleasure and pain, sacrificial
cleansing and profane mutilation are all simultaneously breached
in a matter of minutes. This video offers a framework
that illustrates in stark relief the Nine Inch Nails’ thematic–control,
pain, pleasure and embodiment.
[23] Technical control through modernity and the determinism
that masks itself as a condition of liberation is at the fore
of the Nine Inch Nails aesthetic. Reznor transports the
viewer through a blurred boundary or a simulacrum of boundedness
in order to face the possibility of annihilation; and rather
than run away or turn from it, look at it with the perverted
gaze of a rush hour commuter attending to the carnage of a
car crash with the unspoken urge to see the frailty of the
human body encased in a steel automobile body that is at once
an extension of and an amputation of the self and embodied
animus. “Embodied” here means a mechanical
layer on top of the flesh rendering the flesh irrelevant (as
in Marshall McLuhan’s sense of the tool amputating functions
of the body by extending bodily functions–here the automobile
amputates the function of the legs for walking and running).
[24] This marks a grotesque theme that runs through Reznor’s
art–the union of the technological and the biological. At
the end of “Happiness in Slavery” Reznor invites
our attention to the illusion of freedom that the images of
the video represent “i don’t know what I am i don’t
know where i’ve been / human junk just words and so much
skin / stick my hands thru / the cage of this endless routine
/ just some flesh caught in this big broken machine.” The
body is thus devoid of an “I” that can be free
or happy. Liberation from the machine and the hope it
requires is an illusion and escape is impossible. We
must somehow be content even if we are not happy with this
knowledge. Much like Adam and Eve, perhaps we would be
better off not having this knowledge of good and evil at all,
even as Reznor sings “the blind have been blessed with
security.”
[25] These images and themes bring to stark relief the chord
that runs through the Nine Inch Nails’ EP Broken (1992)
and its follow up LP The Downward Spiral (1994). Broken is
a diatribe against corporate influence and how corporate culture
kills art in order to sustain the market, but communicates
this in terms of perverse and grotesque boundary breaches and
identity confusion. It is as much of an exploration of
subversive elements as it is a declaration that the grotesque
can shatter what is acceptable in an industry driven by certain
norms and expectations. This is as true for Reznor’s
skyrocketing success following the Broken EP as it is
for other examples in the music industry at the time (2 Live
Crew and NWA provide industry success that disrupted market
norms from the hip-hop side at right around the same time). While
this could be drawn into the feedback loop mentioned above,
it never was due to its exaggerated subversive quality. It
can be argued that the over-the-top use of the grotesque is
a just a tool used to subvert corporate influence. However,
there is a more important theme that has to do with what subversive
means rather than why Reznor may or may not have used what
is subversive in this or that instance. Where the latter
album differs is in its inclusion of God in the errant conundrum
presented to the beholder. It does so through an introspective
glance rather than an outward gaze. It is also here that
we find the track “Closer” (1994).
[26] What “Closer” and The Downward Spiral do
is take the entrails spat out from Broken and melancholically
gaze at them with existential passion rather than make a concerted
effort to personal liberation. We are rather faced with
the question of whether or not liberation is indeed possible
given the human condition and the conditions that the modern
technical social structure exact upon embodiment. What
Reznor also brings to the audience is a more critical tone
that at least asks a question of possibility and so, offers
the listener with a degree of openness that his previous work
seemed to destroy. It seems to end as tragically as the
fate of Oedipus who destroys his ability to see, lancing the
gaze from possibility leading ultimately to death. Here
it is a bullet that discloses the frailty of the self and reveals
the anguish of choosing between unsatisfying alternatives.
[27] A more exact look at “Closer” in this framework
lends its images to a more faceted interpretation ripe with
possibility to explore the aspects of religion that it intentionally
blurs. The video is rife with images of death, sadomasochism,
sideshow misfits, animal flesh, seraphim and the crucifix. In
the lyrics there is an oscillation between subject and object–between
the “I” who acts at the permission of an object, “you,” with
desire, control and release all working in a very uneasy tension. Certainly
the pounding chorus of Reznor oscillating his voice between
a whisper and a scream with the lyric “I wanna f*** you
like an animal/ I wanna feel you from the inside/…/you
get me closer to God” reveals this inherent tension and
release. This production is colorful, but given a sepia
treatment that gives it an aged quality from the early twentieth
century. Despite its ability to be internally coherent, “Closer” is
the result of a grotesque combination of equally grotesque
art from the twentieth century.
[28] The images in the video are heavily indebted to photographer
Joel-Peter Witkin who is unique not only due to his careful
crafting and composition, but perhaps more so due to his favorite
subject matter–the corpse: “Witkin, in photographing
the dead, takes what we would ordinarily dismiss as the past,
and enlivens it” (Mann). Witkin’s photography
collapses the boundary between life and death through its reanimation
of the corpse into poses that are surreal images of death that
border on something more timeless and “alive.” The
image seems to suspend the death of the subject and his sepia
and black and white tones and scratched film give the imaged
a timeless character. The boundary between death and
life is blurred rendering the images grotesque.
[29] Witkin thus destabilizes a fundamental boundary at the
foundation of his photography (Schwenger 2000). Looking
at the issue from another side can simply recall the discussion
of the grotesque above. Witkin could be doing all of
this for a reaction–to be subversive for the sake of
being subversive, or even perverted (Wilson 2000). Certainly,
Witkin would describe his art of the former, deeper character. The
issue at stake for what I am arguing is that the sources for
the images in the “Closer” video are a compendium
of pre-existent grotesque elements that are brought together
for a subversive end and in the process reveal boundaries of
pleasure, pain, death and God by subverting them. As
director of the video Mark Romanek writes, the video “was
merely a compendium of original and re-contextualized images
from the last Century of Art and Photography–images that
I felt would resonate with the song’s themes, images
that ‘felt’ right” (Romanek, personal communication,
2003). The entire video is layer on layer of internally
grotesque images brought together in a grotesque chorus where
Reznor proclaims “I want to f*** you like an animal,” while
images of a monkey on a cross, a crucifix attached to the head
of an androgynous masked person dressed in SandM clothing,
and what appear to be angel’s wings behind Reznor but
on further analysis is a hollowed out animal corpse split open
and suspended to form a cherubic background for him. To
put the piece in the context of the rest of The Downward
Spiral, Reznor says, “Thematically I wanted to explore
the idea of somebody who systematically throws or uncovers
every layer of what he’s surrounded with, comfort-wise,
from personal relationships to religion to questioning the
whole situation. Someone dissecting his own ability to
relate to other people or have anything to believe in” (Hammerschmidt
1994). The question here is, what is left after all of
these layers or structures are stripped away? Bakhtin is similar
regarding the liberatory potential of the grotesque, although
his conception is in a very different sense. There
is a sense of creative destruction in which existing structures
and regimes of knowledge that are taken for granted are blurred
to a “formless” character in order to liberate
creative passion and a more authentic identity unbound and
unmediated by boundary conditions. One can become composed
of habitual matrices of experience and become subject
to regimes of knowledge/power. A source of power is found
in the reversal of the accepted order, the bringing-together
of conventionally separate objects and deconstructing these
existing structures and relationships (Bakhtin 1981). Boundaries
are stripped away in order to disclose a more authentic self,
or at least the hope that a self exists that can transcend
the normative boundaries of its existence. That is to
say, there is a hope for some kind of liberation that can confirm
that there is more to the self than a product of traditional
influences and experiences–a self that can self-transcend
its own boundaries. The sublime, or a category of the
sublime, is brought into the boundary of the corporeal rendering
it a grotesque manipulation of religious symbolism. But
even the grotesque manipulation of traditional religious symbols
such as the crucifix reveal that these symbols have a tentative
character as referents to something sacred that ultimately
cannot be held by the boundaries that traditional expressions
of religion hold dear in the symbolic expression of the sacred. While
Reznor certainly does not go this far, it is also clear that
his expression creates a space and a possibility for liberation
even if it is also clear that he comes down not seeing this
or even caring for it.
[30] In the Johnny Cash re-make of the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt” (2003)
we return to the possibility that grotesque disruption of boundaries
may not be a complete deconstruction of the boundaries that
structure and regulate experience–in short, complete
nihilism. It is here that the end may indeed be a beginning,
but Reznor leaves us with that question unanswered. Johnny
Cash clothed the song in intense introspection and retrospection
when he re-recorded it and Mark Romanek produced a video for
the song in 2003. With one change of the song’s
lyrics, Cash turns something corporeal to something somewhat
sacred. In one line, Reznor sings “I wear this
crown of shit,” but Cash turns the lyric into “I
wear this crown of thorns.” The video echoes the
past career of Cash and weaves in scenes of the crucifixion
of Jesus. When Nine Inch Nails perform this song live,
Reznor sings these lines as a silhouette in front of a massive
movie screen that shows scenes of death, decay and torture. As
the chorus goes in both versions, “You can have it all/
my empire of dirt/ I will let you down/ I will make you hurt.” But
the conclusion of the song, that also concludes the album,
is “If I could start again/ a million miles away/ I would
keep myself/ I would find a way.” It is in this
line that Cash shows scenes of the crucified Christ.
[31] In the biblical account of the crucifixion in Mark, the
grotesque body of Christ and the holiness of God are blurred
in the cry of dereliction which is an echo of Psalm 22:2, “My
God, why have you forsaken me?” As Jürgen
Moltmann (1993) interprets this passage, “The abandonment
on the cross which separates the Son from the Father is something
that takes place within God himself; it is stasis within
God–’God against God’ –particularly
if we are to maintain that Jesus bore witness to and lived
out the truth of God” (151-52). Jesus’ transgression
of established boundaries is revealed in his person as fully
human and fully God, in his work that cut against the grain
of accepted traditions, in his speeches that proclaimed the
kingdom of God, and his unique relationship to God as Father,
and in his final crucifixion and death. The crucifixion
becomes a restatement and reification of the boundaries Jesus
transgressed leading to his execution. In this way the
crucifixion is a profoundly grotesque event. It is the
resurrection which renders the grotesque into something sublime
and beautiful in its unity of previously unharmonious combinations
and separations in the person and work of Jesus.
[32] There is thus something of a resolution, however depressing
for Reznor, at the bottom of The Downward Spiral that Broken did
not have. At the end of deconstruction of all boundaries,
there is a new space created for rebirth and recreation of
self in which boundaries constructed to relate the sacred to
humankind are expressed as tentative and inherently flawed
in their complete rendering of the sacred. In relation
to social and spiritual boundaries, God seems to live in the
blur that exists between erring boundaries, as seen from this
view. Even death cannot fully define, inscribe, and so
contain the inscrutable mystery of sacred presence. The
moment a boundary is erected between what is deemed as a sacred
mystery and human living, the character of the sacred as something,
in Chaouli’s (2003) terms of defining the sublime as
that which, “absolutely –that is to say,
beyond any comparison–exceed(s) the human scale” (55). The
ultimate problem is when these very boundaries become the essence
of the sacred reality they are constructed to comprehend. Hence
the boundary and the structure are no longer tentative structures
erected to refer to sacred reality, but become sacred reality
itself. What the grotesque does, as through Reznor’s
expressions, is expose the tentative nature of those structures
again expressing the fundamental flaws and limitedness in human
expressions of sacred reality. While this disruption
does not solve the problem of how to reconstruct those boundaries,
it does leave open the possibility that they can be reconstructed
with the understanding that they are tentative. Hence,
the sublime mystery of the sacred can retain the quality of
mystery in human understanding and the grotesque can act as
a foil against reified structure that can stunt and subsume
the power of the sacred to transform a structured understanding
of it.
[33] What I am arguing is that the encounter with grotesque
art that has captured something of the religious also has the
potential to disclose a more authentic understanding of the
sacred even as it strips away boundaries of that structure. It
creates a forum in which convictions of the observer for or
against the image are extracted and the potential for a restructuring
of belief and identity emerges
[34] So understood, the grotesque ought not to be limited to
an expression that is a simulacrum of shock with no possibility
to enhance the depth of knowledge and personal conviction in
relation to the sacred. Nor ought it to be seen as that
which simply devalues high culture and art in favour of corporate
gain by mocking sacred cultural values in the service of capitalism
at the expense of decency. A deeper analysis discloses
the grotesque as that which forces us to take a hard look at
our unchecked assumptions that often govern but always condition
our understanding of the sacred.
[35] The assumption that has been at work in the overall construction
of this argument is that there are inherent problems when a
structured understanding of sacred reality becomes so reified
that the very essence of sacred reality as such loses its sense
of mystery as that which lies ultimately outside of the bounds
of human comprehension and exceeds the human scale. When
this occurs, the sacred loses its distinctive character as
that which is other and becomes an image of the structures
that exist to understand it– however limited they may
be. Once those limitations are pushed to an infinite
and absolute degree, the sacred and the structure become one. No
doubt this is true of any image of the grotesque and I would
imagine this is true of Reznor and his employment of the grotesque
leading to ultimate nihilism. If the grotesque exists
as a subversion and disruption of existing norms and boundaries,
once that subversion is complete, and if there is nothing left
for that grotesque expression to refer to, then the grotesque
becomes all that is left–an empty relic of subversion
with seemingly no real purpose left. In one direction
reification of structures to access sacred reality leads to
radical absolutism as expressed in radical sectarian, orthodox
and fundamentalist systems where any breach of the system is
viewed as simply outside of the purview of God’s commands
and the “Truth.” In the other direction,
reification of the grotesque boils from a sense of revolutionary
tumult to relative meaninglessness and nihilism bypassing even
notions that truth is relative or socially constructed. However,
when both sides are placed in tension, enough critical mass
can be achieved so that dissolution to either extreme is at
least complicated and made very difficult to achieve. This
is precisely why religious systems ought not to ignore grotesque
expressions of its norms that reveal the tentative nature of
their structures of belief in order to penetrate the mystery
that is sacred reality. Immediate dismissal and exclusion
of the grotesque–no matter what the degree of that disruption
and destabilization is be it Nine Inch Nails, Monty Python, The
Simpsons, The Daily Show–already reveals the
tendency to reify the system and limit the power of the sacred
to transform it.
Bibliography
New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. 1991. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Allen, Diogenes. 1998. Spiritual Theology: Cowley.
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.
Austin: University of Texas.
Barth, Karl. 1955. Church Dogmatics. New York,: Scribner.
Barth, Fredrik. 2000. Signifying Identities: Anthropological
Perspectives on Boundaries and Contested Values, edited
by A. Cohen. London/New York: Routledge.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, The
Body, in Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Brown, Delwin. 1994. Boundaries of our Habitations: Tradition
and Theological Construction, SUNY Series in Religious
Studies. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Chaouli, M. 2003. “Van Gogh’s Ear: Toward a Theory
of Disgust.” In Modern Art and the Grotesque,
edited by F. S. Connelly. Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge
University Press.
ClearChannel. 2004. Howard Stern show taken off ClearChannel
stations 2004 [cited March 07 2004]. Available from http://www.clearchannel.com/documents/press_releases/20040226_Rad_Stern.pdf.
Connelly, Brian. 1996. “Interpretations of Jürgen
Habermas in Adult Education Writings.” Studies in
the Education of Adults 28, 2: 241 ff.
Connelly, Frances S. 2003. “Introduction.” In Modern
Art and the Grotesque. Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts
of Pollution and Taboo. London/New York: Routledge.
Dretzin, Rachel. 2001. “Merchants of Cool.” In Frontline,
edited by B. Goodman. Boston: PBS.
Fleming, Ted. 2003. Habermas on Civil Society, Lifeworld
and System: Unearthing the Social Transformation Theory 2002
[cited November 18 2003]. Available from http://www.tcrecord.org.
Freud, Sigmund. 1950. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement
between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. New
York: W.W. Norton.
Giroux, Henry. 1988. Teachers as Intellectuals: Bergin
and Garvey.
———. 1988. “Border Pedagogy in the
Age of Postmodernism.” Journal of Education 170,3:162-81.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse
of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, Studies in Contemporary
German Social Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hammerschmidt, Carl. 2003. Down on the Spiral. Hot
Metal Magazine 1994 [cited July 8 2003]. Available from http://www.theninhotline.net/archives/articles/xart49.shtml.
Hazleton, Roger. 1997. “The Grotesque, Theologically
Considered.” In The Grotesque in Art and Literature:
Theological Reflections, edited by J. L. Adams and W. Yates.
Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.
Kayser, Wolfgang Johannes. 1963. The Grotesque in Art and
Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kimball, R. 1997. “Art without Beauty.” Public
Interest 127: 44.
Kolakowski, Leszek. 1990. Modernity on Endless Trial.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lyotard, Jean François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge, Theory and History of Literature. Volume
10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mann, Charles. 2003. The Bone House. Zonezero [cited
July 8 2003]. Available from http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/witkin2/state.html.
Marion, Jean-Luc. 1991. God without Being: hors-texte, Religion
and Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Moltmann, Jürgen. 1993. The Crucified God. Minneapolis:
Fortress.
Reznor, Trent. 1992. Broken EP: Interscope.
———. 1992. Happiness in Slavery, edited by
J. Reiss.
———. 1994. The Downward Spiral: Interscope.
______. 1994. Closer, edited by M. Romanek.
———. 2003. Hurt, edited by M. Romanek.
Romanek, Mark. 2003. Email correspondence, July 14.
Schwenger, Peter. 2000. “Corpsing the Image.” Critical
Inquiry (Spring 2000): 395-413.
Skrade, Carl. 1974. God and the Grotesque. Philadelphia:
Westminster Press.
Sprague, David. 1994. “Nails leader explores pain amid
his spiraling stardom.” Boston Globe.
von Rad, Gerhard. 1972. Genesis: A Commentary. Revised
edn. Philadephia: Westminster Press.
Walsh, James, ed. 1981. The Cloud of Unknowing. The
Classics of Western Spirituality. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.
Wilson, Cintra. 2003. Joel-Peter Witkin: Is his darkly imaginative
photography an intellectually camouflaged freak show or
high art? Salon 2000 [cited July 11 2003]. Available
from http://archive.salon.com.people/bc/2000/05/09/witkin/print.html.
Yates, Wilson. 1997. “An Introduction to the Grotesque:
Theoretical and Theological Considerations.” In The Grotesque
in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, edited by
J. L. Adams and W. Yates
