Bécquer and the Romantic Grotesque

Abstract

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's grotesque involves a bizarre distortion which is neither tragic nor comic but disquieting. He conceives of the imagination as having an abnormal region that produces absurdities and monstrous forms. Grotesque motifs draw upon two spheres of reality: a nether-world coexistent with Nature, and the everyday historical world. The “other side” of Nature, uncanny and capricious, is inhabited by deformed beings governed by different laws of harmony and dissonance. There, non-Ovidian metamorphoses produce admixtures of satanic beauty and monstrosity, with Becquer's description of them eschewing Dantesque moralism and approaching gratuitous estheticism. In contrast, the historical world attracts the imagination by means of architecture and its fantastic motifs. Other links to social reality appear in the detached sensibility of the grotesque. For example, the carnival is described by a mood of hollow gaiety atypical of the ebullient Romantic carnival. Mannequin images also express disillusion and the advent of an anti-Roman tic reaction, as does the presence of gratuitously induced incongruities. Thus, Becquer stands between the Romantic grotesque, with its healthy distortions, and the self-destructive grotesquerie of the twentieth century.