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Contemporary GrotesQueries: the multifaceted Grotesque as an aesthetic and political strategy of resistance 1968-2008

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Contemporary GrotesQueries: the multifaceted Grotesque as an aesthetic and political strategy of resistance 1968-2008

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Content CONTEMPORARY GROTESQUERIES:

THE MULTIFACETED GROTESQUE AS AN AESTHETIC

AND POLITICAL STRATEGY OF RESISTANCE 1968-2008

by

Gabriela Jauregui

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

August 2010

Copyright 2010 Gabriela Jauregui
ii
Table of Contents
Epigraph iii
Dedication iv
List of Figures v
Abstract vi

I. Introduction: Synaesthesias 1
I.1. Preface (Origins of a definition of the grotesque) 4
I.2. Surface (Aesthetic definitions of the grotesque) 7
I.2.1: Monstrous/Wondrous 8
I.2.2: Pleasurable/Horrible 9
I.2.3: Tragic/Comic 12
I.2.4: The Grotesque Outside the Laws of Aesthetics 15
I.3. Deface (Political Definitions of the Grotesque) 17
I.3.1 Exclusion and Desire 17
I.3.2 Gender and the Grotesque 19
I.4. Efface (Psychoanalysis and the Grotesque) 22
I.4.1 The Uncanny 23
I.4.2 The Abject 24
I.5 Postface 27
I.5.1.Grotesque as Supplement 27
I.5.2. The (neo)Baroque and the Grotesque 29
I.5.3. Grotesque as Contradiction 30
I.5.4. Grotesque as Becoming 31

Chapter 1: Severo Sarduy’s Tra(ns)vestied Grotesque in
De donde son los cantantes 37

Chapter 2: Kathy Acker’s Parasitical Grotesque in Empire of the Senseless 81

Chapter 3: Teresa Margolles Necrophilic Grotesque 137

(In)conclusion: Margin of Error 165

Bibliography 173
iii
Epigraph

“Ce livre est donc voué à la bizarrerie”
(Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie)

iv
Dedication

To my family (of choice and blood): thinking and thanking…

v
Table of Figures
Figure 1:
Teresa Margolles “In the Air,” installation view (2003), courtesy of the artist. 146

Figure 2:
Teresa Margolles “Cards to Cut Cocaine,”
installartion view (1997-1999), courtesy of the artist. 151

Figure 3:
Teresa Margolles “21 Ajustes de Cuentas,” installation view (2008),
courtesy of Salvador Díaz Gallery. 155

Figure 4:
Teresa Margolles “Ajuste de Cuentas #13,” detail (2008),
courtesy of Salvador Díaz Gallery. 158
vi
Abstract
A comparative analysis of the Grotesque as an aesthetic and political strategy of
resistance from 1968-2008 in selected works by Severo Sarduy, Kathy Acker and
Teresa Margolles.

1

Introduction: Synaesthesias
“C'est de la féconde union du type grotesque au type sublime que naît le génie
moderne.” (“it is of the fecund union of the grotesque type and the sublime type that
modern genius is born”), writes Victor Hugo in his preface to Cromwell. He presents
the opposition of the grotesque and the sublime in terms of the contrast between body
and soul, matter with spirit. Thus springs modern genius: from the union of matter
and spirit, body and soul. This analysis is then focused on the first and most material
aspect of Victor Hugo’s ingredients: the body and the matter, i.e. the grotesque as it is
manifested in my selection of contemporary works (dare I call them works of modern
genius?). Through a tracing and a redefinition of the grotesque this multifaceted
analysis of selected literary, visual and theoretical texts focuses on works that have
been described by critics as “experimental.” It would seem that, by their very
polymorphous natures, the works I analyze have not been contained or labeled as
anything else. The visual and literary texts that are the subject of this study were
created within a specific forty-year time frame: between 1968 and 2008. This choice
of years is not coincidental, because this forty year interval is filled with moments of
socio-political crises specifically surrounding the authors I am concerned with and, as
Bakhtin explains, the grotesque (and the carnivalesque) springs or appears
specifically during “moments of crisis, of breaking points in the cycle of nature or in
the life of society and man.” (10): Severo Sarduy started writing De donde son los
cantantes in 1967 and published it in 1968, while living in France, in a time period
2
that has been studied, historicized, and thought about from many different
perspectives but suffice to say that the context was one of social crisis (which resulted
in May 1968) at the same time as it was one in which French intellectuals were
particularly prolific and put forth theories that would change the world as we see it. It
is also important to mention that it was published in the context of a young and
fervent post-revolutionnary Cuba. Twenty years after this, in 1988, Kathy Acker
publishes Empire of the Senseless, at a time when neoconservatism and Reaganism
were in full force in the United States, alongside the AIDS crisis (which had
particularly grim implications in Acker’s New York) Finally, another twenty years
after this, Teresa Margolles exhibits her work 21 Ajustes de Cuentas at a gallery
during Miami Basel and the context for her works is the ongoing Mexican bloody
drug war, which to this day has claimed more victims than the war in Iraq, as well as
the economic crisis which has affected Mexico for several years now. All these
works were created in the specific context of what is called American literature and
art. Here, it is important to note that I expand the notion of American to the whole
continent, or it could be more openly labeled trans-Atlantic, since for example, both
Sarduy and Acker lived on both sides of the Atlantic and maintained a dialogue
across it, and Margolles’ career has bloomed in Europe as well. I have specifically
chosen to contextualize these works in the open category of the grotesque and put
them in polyphonic dialogue with each other. I hope that this dialogue will show how,
contrary to what Mikhail Bakhtin claims, the grotesque aspect of the carnival is alive
and well, and is still functioning as an aesthetic and political strategy of resistance.
3
As Geoffrey Harhpam explains in his study on the grotesque, “The grotesque
is that sort of thing in the presence of which we experience methodological
problems.” (xxi) Therefore, the grotesque demands a promiscuous strategy so I will
be using various methodologies for,
in the absence of a “field,” one’s first and giddy impression is that
nothing is irrelevant, and that all methodologies are justified, from
depth psychology to communication theory, from the history of visual
perception to cultural history. Even if we confine the study [of the
grotesque] to aesthetic problems and methodologies, we still confront
a dizzying variety of possibilities: the decadent, the baroque, the
metaphysical, the absurd, the surreal, the primitive; irony, satire,
caricature, parody; the Feast of Fools, Carnival, the Dance of Death—
all tributary ideas funneling into a center at once infinitely accessible
and infinitely obscure. (Harpham, xvii)

But in an attempt to not give in to the giddiness, and to attempt to shed light on a
topic that is as apparently accessible as it can be obscure and hard to pin down, my
work will then be in close dialogue with New Criticism—in the sense that I will
provide close readings of every text in each chapter— but also with aesthetics,
psychoanalysis, structuralism (particularly semiotics), relational aesthetics
1
and post-
structuralism. I will combine these methodologies pertinently in each chapter to use
them as lenses of analysis.

1
I employ the methodology of relational aesthetics as defined by Nicolas Bourriaud as “a set
of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole
of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private
space."(13) For according to Bourriaud, "the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary
and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the
existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist." (13) These modes of aesthetic practice are
specifically present, I believe, in Acker and Margolles and, to a lesser degree, in Sarduy’s
work as well.
4
Severo Sarduy’s and Kathy Acker’s novels and Teresa Margolles’
installations do not only break the boundaries of genre and classification, they break
down notions of cultural (ethnic, national, gendered) and bodily identity as well: they
break down or open up cultural identity for their characters are hybrid: male-female,
of hyphenated ethnic backgrounds, with identities that imagine and prefigure the post-
national; the subjects of all these works have bodies that break open into the world in
various ways and that also put into question the body politic and even our bodies as
readers. Thus these texts are not just aesthetically singular, but ethically relevant as
well: because in these works, which provide the perspective of the experiment, the
marginal, the peripheric, the piratical—the perceived Other, who is feminized,
colonized, racialized— the grotesque offers a potentially liberating re-imagining not
only of the body, psyche and identity, but also of the post-national body politic.
Through my analysis of these works the grotesque can therefore be read as an
aesthetics and an ethics of transformative, radical difference today.

1.preface
Attempting a definition of the grotesque is a contradiction in terms, as we shall
further see, yet the emergence and (non-linear) evolution of the term is quite
traceable. From the Renaissance on, the grotesque, once deemed an aesthetic sub-
category of ornament and later allowed its own category in relation and contrast to the
beautiful, and the sublime, has its own history. And its history is not only tied to a
particular kind of “western” art, for it also emerges as a category to discuss Japanese
5
shunga artists, as well as depictions of Aztec or Hindu deities, or pre-historic cave
paintings, to mention only a few examples. And whatever its geographic origin may
be, its history is linked to passions such as horror, disgust, and playfulness—passions
or emotions which have changed throughout time as well— the domain of the
grotesque has extended from places as various and disparate as the carnival, princely
loggias and cabinets of wonder, the morgue and the prison.
The OED’s definition of the grotesque is mostly an aesthetic one that harbors
some interesting contradictions. On the one hand, the grotesque is constituted by
natural elements, defined as “A kind of decorative painting or sculpture, consisting of
representations of portions of human and animal forms, fantastically combined and
interwoven with foliage and flowers,” thus it is described as a combination that could
be seen as a sort of natural hybrid. On the other hand, in the same definition, the
grotesque is characterized as a type of monster or chimera, which in its deformity or
exaggeration is “Characterized by distortion or unnatural combinations” and, citing
Shaftesbury’s 1711 observation, it “keep[s] as far from nature as possible.” (quoted in
the OED) The grotesque would thus seem to be a paradox: removed from nature and
a part of it at the same time.
In Sebastián de Covarrubias’ 1611, Tesoro de la lengua española, the first
dictionary of the Spanish language, the adjective grotesque (“grutesco”—actually
closer to grotto-esque) is principally related to a style of painting that is rough or
coarse like the inside of a cave, also including “creatures of the night” and half-
human half serpent hybrids, minotaurs etc. “in the style of painting of the famous
6
Hieronymus Bosch”. It also adds some polemic as to whether the term grotesque
originated as that which is related to the Goths, then drops it to come back to the
original definition.
The OED’s first definition probably finds its origin in the 1
st
Century B.C.E.,
in the work of Roman architect Marcus Vitrivius Pullio. In his Ten Books on
Architecture, Vitrivius condemns the style of frescoes that include “grotesque”
figures in the margins as framing “decoration” precisely because instead of being
“real” and imitating nature, these figures are “sometimes stalks having only half-
length figures, some with human heads, others with the heads of animals.” (211)
2
He
continues: “A picture is, in fact, a representation of a thing which really exists or
which can exist […] from whose definite and actual structure, copies resembling it
can be taken,” whereas the figures in these marginal frescoes “do not exist and cannot
exist and never have existed.” (210-211) Here, Vitrivius defines the grotesque in the
negative (contra-natura and therefore “not good”). Yet his reading can be read
recuperatively, as something actually liberating: if the grotesque is which does not
“really” exist, it intimates pure possibility.

2
It is interesting to contrast this description of the frescoes with the one found in Bakhtin’s
Rabelais and his World: “These forms seemed to be interwoven as if giving birth to each
other. […] the inner movement of being itself was expressed in the passing of one form into
the other, in the ever incompleted character of being.” (32) Here then these grotesque figures
reflect “the inner movement of being.”
7
2.surface
We begin, then, with Vitrivius’ antique definition of the Grotesque—one that still
resonates in today’s dictionary definition and that situates the grotesque squarely in
aesthetics and its relation to “reality.” Yet another definitions of the grotesque
anchored in the aesthetic is found in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. In it, we find this
single entry:
English taste in gardens and fantastic taste in furniture, push the
freedom of imagination to the verge of what is grotesque—the idea
being that in this divorce from all constraints of rules the precise
instance is being afforded where taste can exhibit its perfection in
projects of the imagination to its fullest extent. (88, my emphasis)

This is Kant’s only mention of the grotesque. Comically enough, Kant’s Teutonic
sensibility finds “English” taste (in gardens) and “fantastic” taste in furniture,
grotesque. It is important to note here the association of the fantastic with the
grotesque, something which becomes more common later on. But the brevity of this
excerpt belies its significance, for here, even though Kant does not afford a precise
definition of what the grotesque is, he does add the following two elements that are
essential to my working definition: 1) the idea that the grotesque constitutes a
“divorce from all constraints and rules.” In other words, he implies a certain
freedom, a near sovereignty, of the grotesque. And 2) a perfection of taste through
the imagination. Another definition that allies the grotesque with abundance of
imagination is John Ruskin’s observation of the existence of the grotesque in art,
“[…] wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in
imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or
8
hardened preeminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist
in full energy.” (The Stones of Venice, Vol. 3, 158)

I.2.1 Monstrous/Wondrous
When mentioning the imagination, it is important to return once more to the OED
definition of the Grotesque where the grotesque is linked to the imagination through
the monstrous (monsters and chimeras are mentioned). This monstrous component of
the grotesque, as the peripheric monstrous creatures –probably stems from Vitrivius’
own definition. But it is specifically during the Renaissance, where the grotesque
also begins to coalesce in the idea of wonder and the monstrous. At this time, the
grotesque is seen as a combination of something wonderful and something terrible.
Note the similarity between our previous definitions of the grotesque in the
description of “wonder” as defined by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park in
Wonders and the Order of Nature: “Wonders tended to cluster at the margins rather
than at the center of the known world […]. To register wonder was to register a
breached boundary, a classification subverted. The making and breaking of
categories—sacred and profane; natural and artificial; animal, vegetable and mineral;
sublunar and celestial—is the Ur-act of cognition, underpinning all pursuit of
regularities, and discoveries of causes.” (14, my emphases). Thus, the wondrous, is
similar to the grotesque as we have been defining it, not only due to its very marginal
quality, but also because it is a breaking and subverting of the categories of vegetable,
mineral, animal. Wonder and the grotesque transgress limits.
9

I.2.2. Pleasurable/Horrible
This brings me to my next important point: in this breaching, wonder is not only
something that causes pleasure, as Daston and Park explain, it moves from it toward
fear and repugnance too, toward the monstrous. “This horror,” they further continue,
“did not spring simply from the confusion of categories—animal and human, for
example, or male and female—that anthropologists have placed at the heart of ideas
of pollution; its roots lay rather in the perceived violation of moral norms.” (181)
Further, this violation, this transgressive nature of wonder and its concomitant horror
and pleasure is also that of the grotesque specifically, as Ruskin explains, there is an
uneven mix of two elements:
First, then, it seems to me that the grotesque is, in almost all cases, composed
of two elements, one ludicrous, the other fearful; that, as one or other of these
elements prevails, the grotesque falls into two branches, sportive grotesque,
and terrible grotesque; but what we cannot legitimately consider it under these
two aspects, because there are hardly any examples which do not in some
degree combine both elements; there are few grotesques so utterly playful as
to be overcast with no shade of fearfulness, and few so fearful as absolutely to
exclude all ideas of jest. (126)

In the grotesque then, horror and fear touch with jest and pleasure as delight and
playful creativity (as sport of Nature in wonders, as jest of humans in grotesque art).
Here, it is also important to note that the grotesque, as I mentioned earlier, is often
linked to passions and feelings which in turn change throughout the ages: from a
feeling of horror or fear, to that of pleasure, wonder, playfulness and excitement; the
grotesque is as a shudder which can be felt and interpreted positively or negatively,
depending on ceratin characteristics but also on the time period.
10
Here also, Ruskin is determined to clarify that within jest there can be two
further specifications: “There is jest –perpetual, careless, and not unfrequently
obscene—in the most noble work of the Gothic periods; and it becomes, therefore, of
the greatest possible importance to examine into the nature and essence of the
Grotesque itself, and to ascertain in what respect it is that the jesting of art in its
highest flight, differs from its jesting in its utmost degradation.” (113) Thus there is a
subdivision within the single category of playful grotesque: degrading, and “that of
art in its highest flight.” And he further clarifies that this degraded art of lowly jest,
originating in idle minds, is
Incapable of true imagination [and] will seek to supply its place by
exaggerations, incoherencies and monstrosities; and the form of the
grotesque to which it gives rise will be an incongruous chain of
hackneyed graces, idly thrown together,—prettinesses or sublimities,
not of its own invention, associated in forms which will be absurd
without being fantastic, and monstrous without being terrible. […]
there will be small hilarity, but much malice, in this grotesque; yet a
weak malice, incapable of expressing its own bitterness, not having
grasp of enough truth to be forcible, and exhausting itself in impotent
or disgusting caricature. (135)

Here, Ruskin likens this weak grotesque to that of the “enervated” Romans who made
the frescoes (described by Vitrivius in our first definition) and he also likens it to
Raphael’s Renaissance arabesques. Ruskin claims this kind of grotesque “[…] may be
generally described as an elaborate and luscious form of nonsense.” (136) It is
interesting to contrast this description of the grotesque as nonsensical in Ruskin with
L.E. Pinsky’s descriptions of the same Raphaelite frescoes, found in Mikhail
Bakthin’s Rabelais and his World:
11
In the grotesque, life passes through all the degrees, from the lowest,
inert and primitive, to the highest most mobile and spiritualized; the
garland of various forms bears witness to their oneness, brings
together that which is removed, combines elements which exclude
each other, contradicts all current conceptions. Grotesque art is related
to the paradox in logic. At first glance, the grotesque is merely witty
and amusing, but it contains great potentialities. (32)

So while Ruskin finds this particular example to be a lowly or degraded
grotesque, Pinsky (and Bakhtin) find it to be open to the greatest potentiality. And
again, I would like to underscore the link between the grotesque and a sense of
possibility.
In a different moment, however, Ruskin does find there is the grotesque of art
in its highest flight, or the “noble” grotesque, whereby “[…] The master of the noble
grotesque knows the depth of all at which he seems to mock, and would feel it at
another time, or feels it in a certain undercurrent of thought even while he jests with
it; but the workman of the ignoble grotesque can feel and understand nothing, and
mocks at all things with the laughter of the idiot and the cretin.” (140) Thus the noble
grotesque can become food for thought, and can be considered a “high” form of art,
and the ignoble grotesque. It is interesting to note here that the categories Ruskin
creates already speak, sociopolitically, of class (high/low). And it will be interesting
to note this in relation not only to Bakhtin’s own analysis of the grotesque, which is
perceived as low but good (not low and bad, as with Ruskin), but also as another way
of reading the grotesque in each of the works I analyze.
But let me go back to the Renaissance and to jest (without subdividing it into
Ruskin’s high and low jest, but simply leaving jest as sport and pleasure). It is
12
important to underscore that, up to the Renaissance, monsters (and therefore
grotesques, if we follow our OED definition) were sources of delight and pleasure. In
his Religio medici Thomas Brown declares, rather paradoxically, that: “There are no
Grotesques in nature,” for even in monsters “there is a kind of beauty, Nature so
ingeniously contriving the irregular parts, as they become sometimes more
remarkable than the principal Fabrick” (in Dalton and Park, 201). Here, Brown
creates a peculiar distinction between what is natural: monsters, and what is
unnatural: grotesques. This creates another discrepancy from our common OED
definition of grotesques which equates them with monsters. Here I would like to
insert my own intervention, while bringing us back to the pleasure and horror
principles, by saying that rather than the “Natural” distinction (“there are no
Grotesques in nature…”) mentioned by Brown, another possible distinction between
the horror or pleasure caused by grotesques could also be the distinction that comes
with imagination: if the grotesques or monsters are real, then they are terrible and can
cause fear and fascination (as in freak shows, but also as in Teresa Margolles’ work
as perhaps the limits of the grotesque) and perhaps, if they are imagined, then they
can be fascinating and wonderful (as in all the other works of art present in this
analysis).

I.2.3. Tragic/Comic
In her introduction to Seriously Weird: Papers on the Grotesque, Alice Mills suggests
an alternate definition of the grotesque embedded in a brief exchange between
13
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. In conversation, Watson ambiguously mentions
the grotesque and calls it “strange” and “remarkable.” To this, Holmes adds that it is
also “tragic” and “terrible.” Mills further elaborates: “A fuller definition of the
grotesque, then, […] should include elements of desire and resistance.” (2)
Interestingly, these elements of desire and resistance can be linked both to the comic
and the tragic aspects of the grotesque, further adding to the grotesque’s ambivalence
or polyvalence. In this same passage and its analysis, the grotesque is perceived to be
both tragic and comic (no longer just high or low jest, as with Ruskin)—and thus
completely indefinable: Mills further states that “Like nonsense, like humor, the
grotesque is annihilated by definition.” (2) Here, Mills, like Bakhtin before her,
associates the grotesque with humor and comedy. For Bakhtin, the grotesque is
specifically related to the outer world of the carnival and therefore to the communal
and the social, as opposed to the private world of the individual. As Bakhtin further
specifies, the “peculiar aesthetic concept which is characteristic of this folk culture” is
the concept of “grotesque realism” where:
The material bodily principle in grotesque realism is offered in its all-popular
festive and utopian aspect. The cosmic, social and bodily elements are given
here as an indivisible whole. And this whole is gay and gracious […] In
grotesque realism therefore, the bodily element is deeply positive. It is
presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of
life, but as something universal, representing all the people. (19)

Thus, for Bakhtin the comic aspect of the grotesque is essential, for it is a crucial part
of his political an aesthetic argument. Again, he explains that in comedy the body is
not individualized but rather becomes cosmic (and we shall see how this language
also relates to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming” as well), thus in
14
grotesque realism, the body is “not contained in the biological individual, not in the
bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed.
This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immesureable.”(19)
Thus this degradation of the body is comic, but rather than finding this to be a
negative thing, as Ruskin does, for Bakthin this materializes the body and is therefore
positive, regenerative and politically essential.
Whereas the comic seems to pertain to the public, the tragic elements of the
grotesque manifest in private then, as in the inner world of the psyche, specifically
through the Freudian uncanny, as Wolfgang Kayser notes in his own study of the
Grotesque. And both the comic and tragic aspects of the grotesque are mediated and
manifest in different levels in the visual and literary works of Sarduy, Acker, and
Margolles. We shall see if and how the grotesque in these works moves through
these binary distinctions I have pointed out and then transcends them.
In all, what brings together these approximative and contradictory definitions
of the grotesque is mediation through art. And yet, here this attempt to limit the
grotesque fails again for, Alice Mills continues, “Both Bakhtin and [Sherlock]
Holmes theorize the grotesque in terms of art mediating life, but their actual analyses
take a semiotic form, attempting to place the grotesque within a system of signs
whose application is not restricted to works of art.” (4) Thus it is crucial to include
the sociopolitical aspects of the grotesque that these works reflect as well, as we shall
further see in section II. But it is also interesting that even within the restricted realm
of the aesthetic, the grotesque already troubles all categories and definite descriptions
15
as its aesthetic definition and even its very name originates in the margins, in the
underground realm of the grotto.

I.2.4: The Grotesque Outside the Laws of Aesthetics
It is important to remark that the monsters Brown mentions in his De Religio are not
only on the margins or periphery of the “principal Fabrick,”
3
this marginality is also
mentioned before in Vitrivius and in the OED as well: the monstrous, the grotesque is
always outside and might even be more “remarkable” than what is at the center, than
what is “normal.” Thus, Brown claims that in monsters Nature outdoes itself,
supercedes itself in its own invention and artfulness. And in the same line, Bakhtin
claims that with the grotesque writings, we enter a “ completely new order of things:”
“[In all these writings…] the carnival-grotesque exercises the same function: to
consecrate inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different
elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the
world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is
humdrum and universally accepted.” (34)

3
It is also interesting to note the use of pictorial language in Browne: it is almost, again, as if
these monsters were the adornments of Nature, which it put on the margins of the principal
fabric or canvas, but which can nonetheless often be more interesting than what’s at the
center itself, as with Raphael’s frescoes or the Roman frescoes found in the grottos. It is also
interesting to note that in the Renaissance, all objects of curiosity were either stored in
wunderkammern and cabinets of curiosity or inside grottoes made especially for such
purposes (see the Grotto of Palissy at the Tuileries, or of Perseus at St. Germain-en-Laye
amongst other examples). As Daston and Park explain, the grottoes and wunderkammern
were “prime sites for artificial nature.” (282)
16
Finally, therefore, this is the grotesque’s aesthetic and political power: a
liberation from conventions and established truths and the status quo, and when in his
own definition Kant adds the word rules (laws), we must mention a configuration of
the grotesque as sovereign (and isn’t Hobbes’s Leviathan a gargantuan grotesque of
sorts?) i.e. above, below, beyond, always outside the law (that governs aesthetics but
also perhaps outside of the law that rules over us all, as we shall see in the next
section). To bring Ruskin back as well: “The terrible Grotesque” unites “some
expression of vice and danger, but regarded with a peculiar temper; sometimes (A) of
predetermined or involuntary apathy, sometimes (B) of mockery, sometimes (C) of
diseased and ungoverned imaginativeness” (140)” this “diseased or ungoverned
imaginativeness” is similar to the sense that Kant has of superceding of limits: the
grotesque is ungoverned by any law and thus in its very marginality and
marginalization we find the possibility for the rogue grotesque to find freedom. Like
Vitrivius’ before them, Kant’s (in)definition and Ruskin’s (hyper)definition –not to
mention Bakhtin’s— of the grotesque can be read as liberating and open many
avenues to explore in terms of the arts but also in terms of the political implications of
art. As Bakhtin writes, it “is by no means a purely artistic form nor a spectacle and
does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline
between art and life […].” (7, my emphases)

17
3.deface
Since the grotesque is an aesthetic category, it also becomes a bodily one, and a
sociopolitical one, most prominently defined as such by Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s
notion of the grotesque –antithesis to the clean “classical body,”—rests primarily on a
concept of the body and the “material bodily stratum” which is open/closed: “images
of the human body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life.” (18) So, the
grotesque body is cavernous, grotto-esque and ambivalently Uncanny
4
, porous,
contaminating and pertains, almost exclusively, to a feminine (if not just female)
body
5
.

1.3.1. Exclusion and Desire
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White also add to their analysis of Bakhtin by reading his
carnivalesque grotesque not only in the female body but also in the body politic and
psyche. These authors contend that grotesque inversion and “lowliness” is what
continuously “define[s] and re-defines” bourgeois subjecthood, precisely through its
“very act of exclusion.” (Stallybrass and White 191, my emphasis). It is interesting to
join this element of exclusion (and its relationship to desire) with Michel Foucault’s
own thoughts on a whole “Vegetation” of “peripheric sexualities” (Histoire de la
sexualité I, 54, and note the use of the word peripheric and its echoes of our previous

4
I use the term uncanny in its Freudian sense of Unheimlich: something which is both
familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I further develop this in the section on the
Grotesque as Uncanny.
5
I further explain my distinction between feminine and female in section 4, and of course,
adhere to the distinction made by Cixous and many others before me.
18
grotesque rhetoric, as well as the use of vegetation). In his seminal analysis of
repression and the discourse of sexuality he mentions that these “peripheric
sexualities” (or the sexualities of criminals, mentally ill people, children,
hermaphrodites and gays) were in the extreme of “against the law” because they were
classified as “against nature” and therefore, if we follow our previous definitions of
the grotesque as anti-natural too, we could align these sexualities with the grotesque,
since both question the laws of nature and therefore the laws of “man.”
In this analysis it is my intention to show that my selection of visual and
literary texts actively do just that: question and redefine that status quo because these
works (and even the authors themselves) have often been excluded from official
canon and “mainstream” subjecthood in various ways. The next chapters analyze the
ways in which they do so, and also, in Foucault’s words the “vegetation of disparate
sexualities” they present (and here, let me quickly note Foucault’s use of the word
vegetation, which alludes back to the human-vegetable hybrids ever present as
marginal ornaments in grotesque frescoes).
This exclusion through disgust (another feeling/passion to add to our list),
which Stallybrass and White view as an essential part of the grotesque, is again linked
to desire: “disgust [as the reason for exclusion] always bears the imprint of desire.”
(191) In this sense then, exclusion, including concomitant nostalgia, longing and
fascination, can be read, not just politically but also psychoanalytically, as
repression—here Foucault is essential as well, because, as he explains, these
19
“peripheric sexualities” are “exclu[ded] from the real” (57) i.e. they take on the form
of the invisible, the unreal, the imaginary, the grotesque.

I.3.2 Gender and the Grotesque
When speaking of sexuality, desire and repression in relation to the grotesque it is
also relevant to bring up the issue of gender, the body and the limits of its control.
The gendering of the grotesque in Bakhtin’s writings on carnival is made clear by
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, where they explain that, just as the body of the
Other, the female body is “naturally grotesque” (The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression, 126). Indeed for Bakhtin, the basic ambivalence of the “material
bodily lower stratum, which destroys and generates, swallows and is swallowed”
(Bakhtin 163) is specifically a feminine ambivalence: for him the positive
degradation and materialization brought about by grotesque realism “relates to acts
of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy and birth. Degradation digs a
bodily grave for a new birth.” (21) His study is full with images of pregnant bellies
and wombs and birth-giving. He continues: “To degrade an object does not imply
merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it
down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth
take place. Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and
the womb. It is always conceiving.” (21, my emphases)
This language has brought on a study on The Female Grotesque by Mary Russo. In
her gendered analysis of the grotesque is a productive feminist reading, but I find she
20
limits the scope of her grotesque by describing its gendering as female specifically. I
would like to expand on her reading, make it more open while at the same time more
precise, by calling the grotesque a feminine ambivalence.
6
In this sense, the grotesque
is not only exclusively female (Bakhtin’s favorite example of the pregnant old hags is
one of Russo’s starting points) but it is also open to other feminized subjects: males
who are feminine, and transvestites for example, as we shall see in Sarduy and
Acker’s work (and this again echoes Foucault’s notion of “peripheric sexualities”)
Expanding on Russo’s “female” by using the term feminine, I also invite a
rapprochement with the notion of Cixous’ écriture feminine (which can include the
male-gendered writer, of course). Cixous argues that writing is always marked (by an
oppressive/repressive libidinal and cultural economy) and that it is also the place for
the “very possibility of change” (311) Écriture, for her, is a non-lack, it is therefore a
fullness, an overflowing and her essay The Laugh of Medusa is pregnant with words
of excess: breaking through, exuding, flowing, extending (310-311). This is the
transgressing of the closed (body/mouth/text/meaning) that écriture feminine does (“I,
too overflow”, 309; “our naphta will spread”, 312) and, in a most important sense,
these examples of écriture feminine as excessive, transgressive and baroquely layered
become écriture grotesque, as with Acker and Sarduy. Furthermore, for Cixous,
women are birds and écriture is flight (already in itself a grotesque hybridity): flight-
writing is a line of escape that breaks open the closed-off grammar of

6
In her book Russo oscillates between the words female and feminine but the title uses the
word female specifically.
21
phallogocentrism, and as we shall see, Sarduy’s and Acker’s novels are full of the
figures of birds, metamorphoses into birds and birds as stand-ins for writing.
This notion of the feminine grotesque is a crucial point for this entire project. I
am interested in analyzing the works I have chosen through the lens of feminist
discourse as it relates to the grotesque not as Russo has done, but rather with Cixous,
and also in Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” where the “cyborg is resolutely
committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” (9)—words which could just
as well describe characteristics of the grotesque. In her description of the cyborg as a
liberating, revolutionary social and fictional construct she also uses the words hybrid,
chimera and monster as synonyms, words which also belong to the realm of the
grotesque. Moreover, she claims the cyborgs’ hybrid existence is a border war, and
as such, it also echoes the friction that the grotesque, as marginal and hybrid, enacts
on the borders of the “center” and also on borders between animal/human/inorganic
and self/world. Her cyborg manifesto “is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of
boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.” (8) it is therefore an essay on
the political power of liminality, of breached boundaries, which inserts the cyborg as
a figure for the grotesque in the brief history I trace here.
7

When read as theories or potential definitions of the grotesque, these texts
contribute to my attempt at tracing a possible definition of it. And then, in my

7
This is particularly relevant to Acker’s writing, as we shall see (the cyborg manifesto is
contemporary to Acker’s novel). But interestingly, in her essay, she also mentions that the
cyborg “sex” “restores some of the lovely replicatively baroque of ferns and invertebrates
(such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism” (8) and thus, in a different way could
also be read as an echo of Sarduy’s politics of the baroque and its possibility of resistance.
22
analysis, these feminist critical theory texts prove useful lenses, in turn, through
which to look at the literary and visual texts.
8

In my expanded definition of the grotesque as feminine I also stress references
to the grotesque as an oozing, contaminating body (which according to Bakhtin is, of
course, the female body), for “Grotesque realism uses the material body—flesh
conceptualized as corpulent excess—to represent cosmic, social, topographical and
linguistic elements of the world.” (Stallybrass and White, 9) Thus these transcodings
and displacements between high and low, inside and outside take place in a threefold
way: in the bodies described in the work (content: characters etc), in the body of the
work (its form) and affect the body politic as it becomes a contamination present in
these works as post-national, post-identity hospitality and openness to alterity.
9

I.4. efface
Desire and exclusion in the grotesque are not just present in a gendered reading of the
grotesque, but also in a psychoanalytic one, brought together in Freud’s Uncanny and,
in a different sense, in Kristeva’s abject. If for Kristeva the abject functions as a
transformative myth of origin, for Freud, the Uncanny or Unheimlich is rather a
“process of recurrence” (6). Still, both the Uncanny and the abject are liminal states:
the Unheimlich places are the nether regions of the body: at once familiar and

8
It is important to note that within feminism, most of the theory I mention, is considered to
be part of sex-positive feminism, and Acker’s work is as well.
9
And, tragically, this contamination also bleeds into some of the authors lives: as disease
Cancer in Acker’s case and AIDS in Sarduy’s.
23
forbidden/forbidding, The Unheimlich is a process of alienation and estrangement in a
world that should be familiar but is no longer. And the word itself is ambivalent: at
once homely and un-homely, as Freud explains and hard to define except as a
contradiction, just as we have seen with the grotesque.
I.4.1 The Uncanny
When mentioning the Uncanny in relation to the grotesque, we must also look to
Wolfgang Kayser’s study, The Grotesque in Art and Literature. He defines the
grotesque as alienation or a sense of being-other-in-the-world-which-becomes-
strange. Kayser says the grotesque is an “expression of our failure to orient ourselves
in the physical universe.” (185) This description is very much in tune with Freud’s
definition of the Unheimlich, which is home and not-home at the same time and “in
which one does not know where one is” (Freud 370) Thus, disorientation (dare I
already say deterritorialization?) is another constitutive element of the grotesque. And
Bakhtin also unconsciously echoes topographical similarities between the degradation
of grotesque realism and the Uncanny: “Degradation here means coming down to
earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the
same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, on order to
bring forth something better. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the
lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs.” (21)
Thus, both the Uncanny and the grotesque are concerned with very similar issues
about the body, its representation, and also its political and psychic consequences.
24
Here, it is important to bring up a new contradiction in our analysis of the
multifaceted grotesque: this sense of strangeness, otherness, alienation and exclusion
present in the psychoanalytic reading of the grotesque, or Uncanny grotesque, is in
direct contrast with Bakhtin’s sacred, public and comic grotesque. And even though
all are concerned with certain bodily regions, functions and limits, Bakhtin still reads
all of it as cosmic and generative while the Uncanny in Kayser and others is a source
of dread. Mills reads the movement or oscillation from the carnivalesque grotesque
to the uncanny grotesque as follows: “once numinous, now a source of fascinated
dread in a secular world, [the grotesque] is subsumed into the category of the
monstrous.” (7) Therefore the grotesque can be both sacred and secular; and in its
secularization we are reminded of a previous aspect of grotesque: that of the
monstrous. But whereas the monstrous was seen, during the Renaissance, as a source
of near-sacred wonder, here it is completely secularized, turned inwardly toward the
private, in the realm of the psyche. Also the monstrous grotesque here
simultaneously echoes Vitrivius’ sense of the “unnatural” architectural marginalia,
Bakhtin’s larger-than-life feminine grotesque and the profane/mundane abjected from
the sacred/numinous.

I.4.2 The Abject
If we read Julia Kristeva’s definition of the abject in The Powers of Horror, we find
that it not only echoes the Uncanny, but more specifically, it echoes the grotesque (as
uncanny). Note her use of language of marginality and contradiction:
25
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being,
directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or
inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It
lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries,
fascinates desire, which nonetheless, does not let itself be seduced.
Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects ... But simultaneously,
just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere
as tempting as it is condemned. Unflagging, like an inescapable boomerang, a
vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside
himself." (1)

Thus, for her the Abject is a heightening, “A massive and sudden emergence of
uncanniness, which familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life,
now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not Me. Not That. But not
nothing, either [..] On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if
I acknowledge it, annihilates me.” (2) Here therefore, (like the grotesque in our
previous definitions), abjection is described as an antidote to reality (and we can think
once more of the non-real of Foucault’s peripheric sexualities); it is a liminal state, a
contradictory state of marginality and in-betweenness. All throughout her analysis of
the abject, Kristeva continues to use a rhetoric of marginality which again echoes our
most basic aesthetic definition of the grotesque, as well as language of inversion that
echoes the Bakhtinian definition of the grotesque: “thrusts me to the side” (2), “turns
me inside out” (3), “There I am at the border of my condition as a living being.” (3),
“Beyond the limit” (3) “[abjection is] a border that has encroached upon everything”
(3) Thus, due to this marginal or peripheric state, like the grotesque, abjection stems
fom a disturbance of established nature or order of things: “It is thus not lack of
cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order.
The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” (4) Thus, in Kristeva’s work on
26
abjection we also find contradictory images similar to Bakhtin’s contradictory
descriptions of grotesque images of pregnant death, for example: “Abjection, on the
other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming and shady: a terror that dissembles, a
hatred that smiles.” (4) Thus here, we find a “strategy of contradiction” (as we shall
see in the next section) that is even more violent than uncanniness: the abject is
immoral, outside the laws: “The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor
assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses
them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them.” (15) Just as the grotesque
had been outside the laws of nature and aesthetics, outside the laws of man, the abject
is an outlaw hatred that smiles (a more violent reminder of Bakhtin’s grotesque
laughter), and could be read as another aspect of the grotesque.
Thus, and again, two seemingly contradictory (yet deeply correlated) notions
–the uncanny and the abject— come together when articulated through the
grotesque. It would seem as though by its own liminal nature and by its own
etymological contradictions, the grotesque has room for various methodologies to
enter it, its possible meanings bleed out and it can be therefore used as an umbrella
concept that shelters many different, even differing, methodologies.
27
I. 5.postface
I.5.1 Grotesque as Supplement
When attempting to sur-round, to re-frame or to give yet another face to the many
faces in the grotesque anatomy I trace, I come face to face with the grotesque as
supplement. In his seminal study, De la grammatologie, where he first speaks of the
supplement, it is interesting to note Derrida vows the book to bizarrerie. And one
could wonder if this attention to the bizzarrerie of écriture is already grotesque: “[…]
que ce qui ouvre le sens et le langage, c’est cette écriture comme disparition de la
presence naturelle.” (228)
10
Writing as a disappearance of “the natural presence”
echoes the grotesque as that from which all sense of the natural (or the real) is absent.
Thus this supplemental écriture is doubly grotesque indeed for Derrida’s writing as
supplément completes the picture and also displaces the central figure (speech):
Car le concept de supplément –ce qui determine ici celui d’image
representative—abrite en lui deux significations dont la cohabitation est aussi
étrange que nécessaire. 1) Le supplement s’ajoute, il est un surplus, une
plénitude enrichissant une autre plénitude, le comble de la présence. Il
cumule et accumule la présence. C’est ainsi que l’art, la technè, l’image, la
représentation, la convention etc. viennent en supplément de la nature et sont
riches de toute cette fonction de cumul. […] 2) Mais le supplément supplée. Il
ne s’ajoute que pour remplacer. Il intervient ou s’insinue à-la-place-de […]
Suppléent et vicaire, le supplément est un adjoint, une instance subalterne qui
tient-lieu. […] Quelque part, quelque chose ne peut se remplir de soi même, ne
peut s’accomplir qu’en se laissant combler par signe et procuration. Le signe
est toujours le supplément de la chose même. (208)
11

10
“[…] that which opens sense and language is writing as a disappearance of natural
presence” (my translation)—of note is the use of the word natural, which is also present in the
following quote.
11
“For the concept of supplement –that which determines here a representative image—
harbors two different significations whose cohabitation is as strange as it is necessary. 1)
supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullness of

28

In this way, Derrida’s supplément is related to his notion of the frame and is an
important addition (supplement?) to my excavations of the grotesque, for as we had
initially seen, the first things to be called grotesque were the marginal figures framing
some frescoes. Is the grotesque then a marginal supplement, dangerous, as Derrida
suggests of the supplément, because it supplants at the same time as it frames and
adorns and adds to? Derrida’s descriptions of the supplement and the frame in Truth
in Painting, bear an uncanny resemblance to Vitrivius’ marginal grotesque figures:
they are that which is at the margins yet simultaneously completes the picture. As
Derrida explains, the boundary and all liminal metaphors and tropes serve a
supporting, framing function. This is one of the reasons I am interested in analyzing
certain works of art through the perspective of the grotesque, because, as Derrida
explains, writing of the frame (or in this case the grotesque as a strategy of framing)
is that which, while being largely unread, makes possible the signification of art as
art. The frame as supplement here has an “overflowing insistence” (note again the
use of a language of grotesque uncontainment).
Thus the Parergon (as frame, or passe-partout) is “neither work (ergon) nor outside
the work (hors d’oeuvre), neither inside nor outside… disconcerts any opposition but

presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, tekne, image,
representation, convention etc. come as supplement to nature and are rich in this cumulative
function. […] 2) But the supplement supplants. It only adds itself to replace. It intervenes or
insinuates itself in place of […] substitute and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a
subaltern instance which holds place. […] Somewhere something cannot fill itself [with
itself], it can only be fulfilled by letting itself be filled by sign and by proxy. The sign is
always the supplement of the thing in itself.” (My translation)
29
does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work. It is no longer merely
around the work… it puts in place…” (Truth in Painting, 9) Both inside and outside
at the same time, the grotesque as frame, as supplement, de-centers the center. Again,
the supplement is grotesque for it is exorbitant, leaky, uncontainable: “Le supplément
lui-même est bien, à tous les sens de ce mot, exorbitant.” (De la Grammatologie,
233)
12

I.5.2 The (neo)Baroque and the Grotesque
When speaking of the center, and its displacement (ex-orbitation) with the grotesque,
it is necessary to bring up Severo Sarduy’s notion of the baroque. For him the figure
best representing the baroque is an ellipse (not just because of what it elides, but also
because of what it adds: another center). Thus contrary to the classical period,
represented by the circle –and here again I think aesthetics touch with Bakhtin’s
politics, whereby his classical body is perfectly sealed off, like a circle, and his
grotesque body is multiplying, and could therefore be represented by the ellipse, a
pertubatory figure: “[…] ahora la figura maestra no es el círculo, de centro único,
irradiante, luminoso y paternal, sino la elipse, que opone a ese foco visible otro
igualmente operante, igualmente real, pero obturado, muerto, nocturno, el centro
ciego, reverso del Yang germinador del Sol, el ausente.” (Barroco, 1223)
13
Here the

12
“The supplement itself is clearly in all senses of the word, exorbitant” (My translation)
13
“Now the master figure is not that of the circle, with its only center, radiant luminous and
paternal; but the ellipse, which opposes that visible spotlight with another equally operative,
equally real one—one that is occluded, dead, nocturnal, the blind center, reverse of the sun-
germinating Yang, the absent one.” (My translation)
30
ellipse is darkness and indeterminacy, it is read as absence, erasure of the center and
its mono-meaning. Sarduy is also concerned with the moral repression of the baroque
(and its multiplicity, its hybridity, its grotesqueness), for him there has been a
“represión moral [de lo barroco], ley que manifiesta o no, lo señala como desviación
o anomalía de una forma precedente, equilibrada y pura, representada por lo clásico.”
(1200)
14
Thus the baroque, like the grotesque and carnivalesque for Bakhtin
represents a deviation, an anomaly from the purity of the classic. Thus the grotesque
as baroque –and the baroque as the first style in the history of art which belongs in
hybridity and mestizaje to the Americas—is de-centered in and of itself and has been
marginalized by morals and classical aesthetics.

I.5.3 Grotesque as contradiction
In relation to the margins or frame, Geoffrey Harpham explains that “all grotesque art
threatens the notion of a center by implying coherencies just out of reach, metaphors
or analogies just beyond our grasp.” (On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction…
43) Thus, the marginal is again and already Uncanny. Harpham further defines the
grotesque as a “strategy of contradiction” (as the title to his book evidences). He also
adds “confusion” to the mix, again echoing a sense of disorientation, found in Kayser
as the Uncanny grotesque. And confusion here, as in Bakhtin, is another kind of
contamination as undefined bodies are con-fused together—with each other, the

14
“a moral repression [of the baroque]. A law which manifests or not, which signals it as
deviation or anomaly of a preceding form–balanced and pure—represented by the classical”
(My translation)
31
world, other texts, etc.: Harpham explains that the grotesque, as confusion, occupies a
gap or interval, and that in it we can break through to discovery. Then quoting
George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty, Harpham writes that, “[The grotesque] is
the half-formed, the perplexed, the suggestively monstrous.” (15) and as such, it
opens the possibility for discovery of a new way to perceive the world, contrary to our
expectations or assumptions, and therefore holds the possibility for change.

I.5.4 Grotesque as Becoming
This confusing (in)definition, as perhaps the most defining trait of the grotesque and
made evident by all previous definitions, brings me to the final aspect of the
grotesque that I will address: the grotesque as becoming. Bakhtin mentions that:
“The grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished
metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming.” (24, my emphasis) For
him the grotesque is process and semiosis. And his definition here resonates with
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming in Mille plateaux as rhyzomatic
immanence which is without beginning or end and in constant flux, and which, like
the grotesque, may begin with human/animal/vegetable becomings. In fact, Deleuze
and Guattari even claim that enabling these becomings is the end of the arts,
becoming is always already linked to art, and thus like the grotesque, becoming then
transcends and re-marks the limits of the arts:
Le devenir-animal n’est qu’un cas parmi d’autres. Nous nous trouvons
pris dans des segments de devenir, entre lesquels nous pouvons établir
une espèce d’ordre ou de progression apparente: devenir-femme,
devenir-enfant; devenir-animal, végétal ou mineral; devenirs
32
moleculaires de toutes sortes, devenirs-particules. Des fibres mènent
des unes aux autres, transforment les unes dans les autres, en
traversant les portes et les seuils. Chanter ou composer, peindre, écrire
n’ont peut être pas d’autre but: déchaîner ces devenirs. (333)
15

This description of becoming is one of breached boundaries that echoes every
definition of the grotesque as well. Not to mention that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion
of becoming, echoes Bakhtin’s definition of the grotesque overflowing/permeable
body as cosmic: “Chaque multiplicité est symbiotique et réunit dans son devenir des
animaux, des végetaux, des micro-organismes, des particules folles, toute une
galaxie.” (306)
16
And like the grotesque, becoming puts into play heterogenous terms
or elements: “des combinaisons qui ne sont ni génétiques ni structurales, des inter-
règnes, des participations contre-nature” (295-296)
17
The process of becoming is thus,
like the grotesque, a part of nature—taking from nature, open to nature—but also
counter-natural.
If for Vitrivius the grotesque emerges “only in relation to the norms which it
exceed[s]” (Russo 3), then as a process of becoming (always already a transgression
and excess) the grotesque exemplifies the condition of the margins—to be at the

15
Becoming animal is only one case amongst others. We find ourselves caught in segments
of becoming amongst which we can establish a sort of order or apparent progression:
becoming-woman, becoming-child; becoming-animal, vegetable or mineral; molecular
becomings of all sorts, becoming-particles. Fibers lead from one to another, transforming
one in another, crossing doors and thresholds. Singing or composing, painting, writing have
perhaps no other end: to unleash these becomings.” (My translation)
16
“Each multiplicity is symbiotic and unites animals, vegetables, micro-organisms, free
[crazy] particles—an entire galaxy—in its becoming.” (My translation)
17
“combinations that are neither genetic nor structural, but interregna—participations against
nature.” (my translation)
33
margins and marginless, marginal, written/unwritten in the margins, through marginal
bodies. The grotesque can thus finally be imagined, as a “line of escape” (Deleuze
and Guattari) transgressing itself constantly, and resisting containment, as we shall
see with Acker’s, Margolles’ and Sarduy’s interstitial fog, for example.
This brings us not so straightly yet circumscriptly back to the unbound,
liberating aspect of the grotesque, which we barely glimpsed in Kant and is present in
grotesque readings of Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari. In this study, I want to
show that the grotesque proves indeed an alternative, antidote, even a “divorce” (to
use Kant’s word) from all constraints and rules. In this sense, the grotesque is not just
related to sovereignty’s extra-legality, it is also monstrous, deviant, criminal, abject
and Uncanny. These texts have not been analyzed critically together before, and I
want to show how in them the aesthetics of the grotesque announce the possibility for
different, differant sociocultural relations in multiple realms.

Chapter 1. Severo Sarduy’s Tra(ns)vestied Grotesque
In the 1967 novel De donde son los cantantes, Cuban poet and novelist, Severo
Sarduy introduces a series of characters who are uncannily twinned, grotesquely
doubled, baroquely multiplied: Auxilio and Socorro, Mortal and Dolores. Desire is
the only thing that remains constant in the characters, whereas their stories,
appearance, gender, ethnicity, and sometimes even their names, have multiple
incarnations and perform disappearing acts. This book, and its more traditional world-
34
upside-down carnivalesque and comic grotesque as baroque will serve as the bedrock
of my readings.
As the novel moves from section to section (each section a part of Cuba’s—
and Sarduy’s own— mestiza background: Spanish, African, Chinese), the plot
changes, the characters change function and the polyphonic grotesque shifts shapes
through Sarduy’s use of ornament (monstrous amounts of baroque layering) and
languages as well as through his deconstruction of sexual and national identities. In
this novel je est un autre indeed (to quote Rimbaud). Identities are “tra(ns)vesties”,
radically transgressive, even violent, and yet humorous and transformative as well—
as easily re-moveable as a wig, as tenuous as cigarette smoke.

Chapter 2. Kathy Acker’s Viral Grotesque
One could think of Kathy Acker’s aesthetic as a textually transmitted disease.
Through plagiarism (as systematic textual appropriation), pornography, and
humorous transgression of rules, her work is exemplary of grotesque contamination,
con-fusion, parasitical marginality and proliferation—a possible way of reading
écriture feminine becoming écriture grotesque.
Like most of her novels, Empire of the Senseless (1988) is grotesque in a
variety of ways: it is a hybrid of genres and forms (including drawings, poetry etc). It
also has a “structure” that radically transgresses structure. It is a defacing palimpsest
– a riff or sampling, to use musical terms— on classical mythology (Oedipus,
Antigone, Eurydice, where the body of the mother and can be read as prime example
35
of what Cixous terms écriture feminine and which in this work also becomes écriture
grotesque), on the Algerian struggle for independence, on Oshima’s classic film, Ai
no corrida, as well as on assumptions and basic taboos about patriarchy and the
family. In a similar way to Sarduy’s characters, Acker’s aptly grotesquely named
double-character, Abhor and Thivai, is/are female/male pirate, terrorist and rogue,
and as monstrous wo/man is more than metafictional persona: through her/him,
nationhood, identity-as-one and desire are navigated and questioned—the “answers”
always falling on the no-side of the ambivalent.

Chapter 3. Margolles’ Necrophilic Grotesque
The links between death and femininity (specifically incarnated as the mother’s body
as womb and tomb) have been traced and retraced in texts by Freud, Bakhtin,
Derrida, Elizabeth Bronfen and countless others, but they have never been rendered
as literally, or as concretely as in Mexican visual artist Teresa Margolles’ work.
Through her videos, installations, photographs, and sculptures, Margolles addresses
death through the corpse in a violently direct manner. Her work could be thus seen as
the afterlife of the corpse, specifically in the pieces (mostly installations) which deal
with the disappearance of the body and em-bodiment of the corpse (the contamination
of the living spectators’ bodies by the fog-like interstitial corpses).
Margolles’ work embodies the grotesque in several of its variations. Not only
is the spectators’ own body the incarnate grotesque threshold of life/death, the works
themselves become “the bodily grave of man,” (Bakhtin 240) and point to the
36
transgressive and regenerative potential found in the inorganic body as corpse
(grotesque supplemental antidote) and in the reconfiguration of the body politic in the
morgue (as a grotesque “heterotopia of deviation,” to use Foucault’s term).

If the characteristic of an aesthetics of the “classic” canon is that which is
sharply defined, closed, stopped-up and smoothed out then “it is quite obvious that
from the point of view of these canons the body of grotesque realism,” the body that
is explored in different ways by Sarduy, Acker and Margolles, was perceived as
“hideous and formless. It did not fit the framework of the ‘aesthetics of the beautiful’
[…]” (Bakhtin 29) And yet, paradoxically, for Ruskin, if the grotesque is “noble”
then it does and must fit in the canon (and finding a place for it there was part of his
goal when analyzing the Gothic and within it the grotesque). Is the grotesque the
very index of genius in the Kantian and Ruskinian sense? Or is it the markedly
marginal? Where does one start and the other end and how can a difference, if any, be
established? My analysis is thus concerned with the ambiguous term that is the
grotesque as it can be manifested in various ways in works that are neither tragic nor
comic, beautiful nor ugly—the grotesque as it appears in the many works that attempt
to define ultimately seems to be that which is always and radically other, always
difficult to pin down. Thus, rather than attempt the impossible and define it, for it
resists containment (and therein lies its political power as well), I analyze its various
manifestations—from the carnivalesque to the terrible—in three exemplary works.
37
Chapter 1. Severo Sarduy’s Tra(ns)vestied Grotesque in De donde son los
cantantes
“Parler contre les pouvoirs, dire la vérité et promettre la jouissance; lier l’un à l’autre
l’illumination, l’affranchissement et des voluptés multiplies; tenir un discours où se joignent
l’ardeur du savoir, la volonté de changer la loi, et le jardin éspéré des délices…”
(Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I: la volonté de savoir, 14)

After reading his many works, or even just one of his works, it is undeniable that
Severo Sarduy, author of the novel De donde son los cantantes, possessed a healthy,
vigorous, intellectual, imaginative and emotive mind, as John Ruskin would describe
it in relation to the grotesque: “[…] wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous
in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and
not overborne by an undue or hardened preeminence of the mere reasoning faculties,
there the grotesque will exist in full energy,” (158). And not only is Sarduy’s work a
perfect reflection of this grotesque energy, the author himself could be seen as a
hybrid grotesque of sorts for he could be deemed a novelist/theorist who is a painter
with a musical ear. Already this multi-talented and multi-faceted writer of works of
poetry, plays, novels, theoretical essays, painter and editor is a character worthy of
one of his own novels. And, as we shall see, De donde son los cantantes itself, like
the grotto or the cabinet of wonder, is a “prime site for artificial nature” (Daston and
Park, 282) and thus for the grotesque as I have defined it in the introduction.
The first chapter in my exploration of the grotesque in contemporary works,
deals with perhaps the most musical of our grotesqueries, De donde son los cantantes,
the title of which literally translates to both an affirmation: where the singers are
from, and could also be read as a question: where are the singers from? I say it is
38
most musical, not just because of its rhythm and use of language, but also because the
title itself is a line from a classic Cuban folk song, “Son de la Loma,” composed in
1922 by Miguel Matamoros.
18
The title of the novel in English has been sadly
translated as From Cuba with a Song, but I will keep referring to it in its Spanish
language version
19
.
De donde son los cantantes is in itself a grotesque artifact: as Gustavo
Guerrero writes, Sarduy’s experience of the world is “Voracious, plural and
integrating” an “oblique experience” (and, as “wayside” one could already say that
this is grotesque in and of itself) and his work was not just “un discurso del bricolage
estructuralista sino una sabrosa cocina del ‘ajiaco’.” (xx
20
) Thus we shall see that De
donde is a bricolage, a collage, a baroque pearl: it was written initially in various
versions and later put together as a whole.
Sarduy first started writing this novel as a radioplay, a commision by SDR in
Stuttgart in 1964, which was then titled “La Dolores Rondón.” Later on, several
sections and versions were written in French and Spanish and published also as
individual chapters in magazines in Venezuela, Argentina and Mexico, from 1965 to

18
The lyrics of the entire song are: “Mamá yo quiero saber/De donde son los cantantes/Que
los encuentro galantes/y los quiero conocer/Son sus trovas fascinante/que me las quiero
aprender // De donde serán, Ay mamá/Serán de La Habana/Serán de Santiago/Tierra
soberana/Son de la Loma/y cantan en llano/ya tu ves, tu verás... // Mamá ellos son de la
loma/Mamá ellos cantan en llano/Mamá ellos son de la loma/Mamá ellos cantan en llano.”
19
All the quotes from the novel are in the original Spanish, excepting for a few brief
expressions, which are in English and are my own translations.
20
It is not just “a discourse on structuralist bricolage but also a delicious cuisine of ajiaco
[i.e. of a traditional spicy dish]” (my translation)
39
1967. It is important to note that all of Sarduy’s novels (perhaps even the first one he
published, Gestos, though to a lesser extent) contain grotesque elements or could be
read as grotesque artifacts themselves, but my interest is precisely in De donde…
because it is a key novel in two senses: it bears (unlike Gestos before it) the strong
imprint of what would later be Sarduy’s singular aesthetic: it is verbal experiment,
rich and multilayered; and yet, unlike his other works, it is also one filled with
chiaroscuro
21
, but always with a penchant towards generative humor (in his later
works this disappears, and there is a penchant toward darker undertones, perhaps for
obvious personal reasons
22
). As François Wahl explains, “De donde son los
cantantes ne marque pas seulement l’avènement definitive du ton sarduysien, il en
constitue aussi la pointe extreme par la surmultiplication—l’invention inouïe—des
metamorphoses et des metaphores, le croisement de la culture savante et l’éclat de
rire, jusqu’à la gravité finale, et la liberation des formes stylistiques.” (1482-1483)
23

De donde… is a grotesque, as we shall see, for many reasons. First and
foremost it is grotesque in the aforementioned surmultiplication, in its excess, and

21
I use the term chiaroscuro because Sarduy’s work is full of tableaux and composed in a
painterly way, with an eye for contrast, for Sarduy was also a painter.
22
Born in Camagüey, Cuba in 1937, Sarduy died due to complications from AIDS in 1993 in
Paris, where he had lived since 1960. The presence of disease and the difficulties
homosexuals face(d) are very present in his later novels, most especially in Los pájaros de la
playa, his final work.
23
“De donde son los cantantes does not only mark the definitive advent of the Sarduysian
tone, it also constitutes its extreme cusp by surmultiplication –his unheard of invention—of
metamorphoses and metaphors, the crossing of savant culture and roaring laughter, until the
final gravitas and the liberation of stylistic forms.” (My translation). It is also relevant to note
that François Wahl and Sarduy were partners for many years.
40
extravagance, for it is exorbitant, oblique and wayside. And here, it is perhaps
relevant to mention that often, in Spanish, homosexual males are referred to
derogatorily, as desviados, or detoured, deviants (or “waysided” to remember
Foucault’s term), but Sarduy takes deviation to make an entire aesthetic from it, as we
shall see. I also say the novel is grotesque and “wayside” quoting Ruskin, for whom
“[…] the art which we may call generally the art of the wayside, as opposed to that
which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word,
Grotesque.”(132)
24
This work takes on the grotesque through its content, for it is pure
artifice, there is nothing in the book which would indicate the “normal” or pedestrian
business of everyday life: the novel’s themes, through which there is also an
exploration of (Cuban) identity, are imagination and extravagance taken to their
utmost political consequences—extravagance as resistance (to commodity-driven,
“useful” capitalism).
Sarduy’s novel is extravagant and doubly exorbitant in its form, firstly,
because, as Derrida would have it, écriture is in and of itself exorbitant supplément.
And secondly, Sarduy takes this to be the basis of the baroque as well for “el lenguaje

24
“And,” he continues, “it is noble or inferior, first, according to the tone of the minds which
have produced it, and in proportion to their knowledge, wit, love of truth, and kindness;
secondly, according to the degree of strength they have been able to give forth; but yet,
however much we may find in it needing to be forgiven, always delightful so long as it is the
work of good and ordinarily intelligent men. And its delightfulness ought mainly to consist
in those very imperfections which mark it for work done in times of rest.” (Ruskin, 132)
Thus, as we shall see, this novel is quite the work of noble grotesque, for it contains
knowledge, wit, love, truth and kindness in abundance, not to mention a narrative strength
that is conscious of its imperfections and has placed them there (as interruptions, dialogue
between the narrator and the reader etc) intentionally for our delight.
41
barroco se complace en el suplemento, en la demasía y en la perdida parcial de su
objeto.” (in Barroco, 1250)
25
And this supplement, as exorbitant, moves toward the
ex-terior which places writing and the entire novel outside of the orbit, or the circle
(which Sarduy argues is the exemplary figure of classical aesthetics vs. the figure of
the ellipse which represents the Baroque) and therefore places the novel in the locus
of the margins, which, as we have seen, from Antiquity on, has been the locus of the
grotesque. Thus it is a” thought […] of the un-centered,” as Sarduy calls the
Baroque
26
. Its poetics are “una retórica, el lenguaje, código autónomo y tautológico,
no admite en su densa red, cargada, la posibilidad de un yo generador, de un
referente individual, centrado, que se exprese –el barroco funciona al vacío—, que
oriente o detenga la crecida de signos.” (1221)
27
Signs, here, multiply: they become a
horde, in the deleuzean sense. And there is no subject to control the multiplication of
these signs, this excess of language. It is unhinged and boundary-less, it is cosmic
(another characteristic of the grotesque mentioned in the introduction).

25
“baroque language takes pleasure in the supplement, in surplus and in the partial loss of its
object” (my translation)
26
And by countering the circle, Sarduy counters everything that is implied in the ideology of
the circle, or of classical aesthetics, for the circle is the most “perfect” form and “The circle is
not merely a shape, but nearly an ideology. […]it is the most ideal form, the shape most ideal.
The idea is Idea itself, total coherence and unity.” (Harpham 8-9) And by positing an
alternative, Sarduy opens the circle, lets it bleed out, makes it ex-centric: he queers it and
makes it grotesque.
27
“a rhetoric, language –autonomous and tautological code—does not admit in its dense,
loaded, net the possibility of a generating I, of an individual referent, centered and who
expresses itself (the Baroque functions towards the void), orients itself or stops the swelling
of signs.” (my translation)
42
And to come back to a different aspect of the “non-generative I” that the
Baroque implies, we shall see that eros and desire in this novel are grotesque on many
levels because they are constantly articulated through arbitrary and artificial gesture.
The economy of desire in this novel is that of the dépense as expenditure and dépense
as loss too (very much in the vein of Genet and Bataille, authors in whom Sarduy was
well-versed). In his essay on the Baroque, Sarduy elaborates on this form of erotic
economy as game and pleasure: “Juego, pérdida, desperdicio y placer: es decir
erotismo en tanto que actividad puramente lúdica, que parodia de la función de
reproducción, trasgresión de lo útil, del diálogo “natural” de los cuerpos.” (1251)
28

Here baroque eroticism is a parody of nature, it is artificial and wasteful, it is useless,
“wayside,” and yet creative in a different sense: grotesque.
Erotic as well as linguistic dépense take on very real political implications, for
“Malgastar, dilapidar, derrochar el lenguaje únicamente en función del placer—y no,
como en el uso domestico, en función de información, es un atentado al buen sentido,
moralista y “natural” […] en que se basa toda la ideología del consumo y la
acumulación.” (1250)
29
This contestatary function of baroque as pure pleasure (and

28
“Game, parody, waste [or loss] and pleasure: that is eroticism as a purely ludic activity,
which parodies the function of reproduction—a transgression of usefulness, of the “natural”
dialogue of bodies.” (my translation)
29
“To squander, dilapidate, and waste language only as a function of pleasure, and not as a
function of information (the domestic use), is an attack [an affront] to the good, moralist and
“natural” sense upon which is based all of the ideology of consumerism and accumulation.”
(my translation) Also not that in both of these quotes Sarduy questions the sense of what is
“natural” by putting it in quotation marks, and therefore is making an argument for that which
is artificial, anti-natural, and therefore always already grotesque (if we follow Vitrivius’
definition of the grotesque as anti-natural).
43
the baroque as grotesque) also echoes Foucault’s analysis in his Histoire de la
sexualité I of the repression of “a vegetation of disparate sexualities” (for example,
specifically, the sexuality of homosexuals but also of children, criminals,
hermaphrodites, or of sex for pleasure’s sake, 53-54) due to lack of usefulness (for
none of these sexualities amount to reproduction, they are decreed “useless” and
wasteful—debauched—; “wayside” and therefore anti-natural and illegal). Thus
capitalist power is always monitoring usefulness and productivity and Sarduy, like
Foucault, questions it and resists it in various ways.
It is also, a grotesque novel because it is, politically, on the margins, because,
as Sarduy claims, like all Baroque, it is a “Dispersion of sanctioned history”
(Baroque, 1197) and it is “the art of un-throning” (1253), which echoes Mikhail
Bakhtin’s sense of the grotesque as “uncrowning” (Bakhtin, 11). Sarduy continues to
explain that the exorbitant Baroque de-centers logocentrism –and here, it might be
pertinent to add that Sarduy’s novel was published right after Derrida’s De la
grammatologie, so it is no coincidence that his concepts and aesthetics are very much
a reflexion and a part of the Parisian zeitgeist. For Derrida, the supplément that is
writing is an “extériorité par rapport à la totalité de l’époque logocentrique. A partir
de ce point d’éxtériorité, une certaine déconstruction pourrait être entamé de cette
totalité, qui est aussi un chemin tracé de cette orbe (orbis) qui est aussi orbitaire
44
(orba)” (231)
30
. Thus, like the grotesque, here the supplément of writing (and could
we say then that writing is therefore always already grotesque?) and the baroque as
the art of supplement decontruct, de-center and pull things out of their orbit. As
Sarduy explains:
Barroco que en su acción de bascular, en su caída, en su lenguaje
pinturero, a veces estridente, abigarrado y caótico, metaforiza la
impugnación de la entidad logocéntrica que hasta entonces lo
estructuraba desde su lejanía y autoridad; barroco que recusa toda
instauración, que metaforiza el órden discutido, al dios juzgado, a la
ley trasgredida. Barroco de la Revolución.
31
(1254)

And we shall see how many times this picturesque and painterly language, which is
gaudy, convoluted and chaotic indeed de-centers all logic and therefore power. It has
the potential for revolution –and it is no wonder Derrida uses the word danger in
relationship to the supplement (and writing) often as well: “Ce recours [écriture] n’est
pas seulement bizarre, il est dangereux. C’est l’addition d’une technique, c’est une
sorte de ruse artificielle et artificieuse pour rendre la parole présente lorqu’elle est en
vérité absente.”
32
(De la grammatologie, 207) Sarduy’s Baroque writing, his

30
“exteriority in relation to the totality of the logocentric epoch. From this point of
exteriority, a certain deconstruction could be undertaken of the totality, which is also the
traced road of this orb (orbis) that is also orbitary (orba)” (My translation)
31
“A Baroque that in its tilting action, in its fall, in its painterly/picturesque language,--
sometimes strident, multicolored, and chaotic—metaphorizes the objection to the logocentric
entity which until then had structured it from its distance and authority; a Baroque that
recuses all instauration, that metaphorizes the challenged order, the judged god, the
transgressed law. A Baroque of Revolution.” (my translation)
32
“This recourse [écriture] is not only bizarre, it is dangerous. It is the addition of a
technique, it is a sort of artificial and artificious ruse to render speech present when it is in
truth absent.” (My translation)
45
aesthetic transgresses –as I had discussed with the grotesque in the introduction— all
laws, it is a ruse, a game that decenters power and brings forth what isn’t there.
33

Here I would like to add, as an aside, that Sarduy’s politics remain quite
interesting, because, even though he lived in exile from Cuba (his passport was
cancelled, and on the same year he published De donde…, he received his French
nationality), Sarduy was still very much a leftist thinker and sympathized with the
left-wing politics of the time, even if he could not agree with many of the
implications such politics had in his own country.
34

These many political and personal tensions are translated into Sarduy’s work
in masterfully insightful ways. To borrow Ruskin’s words,
It is not as the creating, but as the seeing man [or reading woman], that
we are here contemplating the master of the true grotesque. It is
because the dreadfulness of the universe around him weighs upon his

33
In his essay “Severo de la rue Jacob,” François Wahl comments on Derrida’s influence on
Sarduy, not to mention his relation with Bakhtin’s ideas of carnival: “A relire les Ensayos, on
est frappé par l’importance qu’y revêt le premier Derrida, celui de La grammatologie, et de
L’écriture et la différance. Ils ne s’étaient que brievement rencontrés, mais le thème—la
dénonciation—du “logocentrisme” a fourni a Severo un instrument privilégié pour fair a la
tradition classique contrepoint du baroque, du Carnivalesque de Bakhtine, et des categories
extreme-orientales. Il a trouvé là le materiel théorique pour fonder une opposition que sa
pensée et son estéthique requéraient.” (1453)
34
He is also an interesting political figure in relation to other Latin American authors of the
so-called Boom, many of whom saw in Cuba (García Marquez is the perfect example), “the
political plenitude of Latin America” (González Echeverría, 1590). He was friendly with all
of them, but for him, Cuba was always the painful site of origin and exile and perhaps this
automatically distanced him from his confreres. And while his novels were published around
the same time as many of these Boom authors, he was never quite a part of the movement
either. Sadly, this has left his novels outside the (Latin American) canon, even though their
quality makes them more than deserving of critical attention. Furthermore, González
Echeverría also claims that while other Boom novelists works claimed to be “Total novels”,
Sarduy’s De donde… is thhe “total anti-novel” (1596) and therefore the discrepancies
between authors such as Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, etc. and Sarduy are also aesthetic ones.
46
heart, that his work is wild; and therefore through the whole of it we
shall find the evidence of deep insight into nature. His beasts and
birds, however monstrous, will have profound relations with the true.
(142-143)

Ruskin’s mention here of birds serves as a transition into a close reading of De
donde…, for Sarduy’s novel is populated by birds, it contains a multitude of birds, a
flock.
***
In the beginning there was a cascade of feathers make-up, artifice, wigs, and
tears. The novel opens with a tableau of affirmative excess: “Plumas, sí, deliciosas
plumas de azufre, río de plumas arrastrando cabezas de mármol, plumas en la cabeza,
sombrero de plumas, colibríes y frambuesas…” (De donde…, 329) Thus we start off
with feathers (many times repeated) and these feathers, so light and seemingly useless
and innocent, as river and multiplicity are already capable of dragging down marble
heads—an allusion to “high” culture, to serious and powerful figures or busts of
kings. The feathers are already, in their abundance, a contestation of power: they are
a “propagation,” a new form of horde, of pack, or flock in the deleuzean sense, for
any animal (in this case bird) “est d’abord une bande, une meute [in this case a flock
or pack of feathers].” (Mille plateaux, 293)
The opening of the novel reveals a micro version of the novel as a whole, the
feathers provide a “seed image” (image germinale as Wahl calls it, 1539): the
affirmation of feathers becoming an all-swallowing river of feathers, an “albino
cascade” (329) already foretells the novel’s end where the entire city of Havana is
covered in snow. This deluge is not only of feathers, but, as Wahl explains, it also
47
announces a cascade of erudition: “maîtrisé au point de devenir l’arme maîtresse de
l’humour.” (1480)
35
The opening sentence also discloses Sarduy’s singular syntax
and style: his short, speedy phrases, often without a verb, that push against very long
ones full of commas and run-ons.
Feathers and their multiplication also announce the carnival, but also the
transvestite, the lightness and surface-like artificial qualities of the novel’s aesthetic
theatrics. However, this cascade also already breaks into death: ashes. Here begins
the tension: life and death always twinned, always together, always morphing, like
the novel’s main characters, Auxilio and Socorro themselves. And perhaps it is also
no coincidence that at the beginning, Auxilio’s face, covered in makeup, becomes a
mask (again allegory of artifice)—a grotesque one that is humorously described as
being so thick and tough it can only be pierced with “a drill”(329). Moreover, this
mask is not only a somber figure of deception, it is also and simultaneously a mask in
the carnivalesque sense of regeneration, transition and violation of natural boundaries
(Bakhtin, 38-39). Already the tension between life, beauty and death through excess
(of makeup, of adjectives, of repetition, of language and things) announces the
supplemental, baroque economy of the novel. This tension and constant oscillation
between high and low, their topsy-turvy renversements and rapprochements, the
constant bringing down to earth which Auxilio and Socorro do throughout the novel
is, according to Bakhtin, a degradation, which “digs a bodily grave for a new birth”

35
“mastered to the point of becoming the master weapon of humor” (My translation)
48
(21) Throughout the novel, these two characters are reborn again and again,
transformed multiple times.

The prelude or overture for the novel, titled “Curriculum Cubense” (or Cuban
Curriculum), does not only multiply feathers—the main characters are the prime site
of multiplication. One-character-in-two, a desdoblamiento (unfolding), Auxilio and
Socorro’s names are synonyms which could be translated as Help and Aide. Already
one-ness is impossible: there is not one hero on a quest, but rather a double hero(ine):
a two-headed enormously-wigged monster. The bodies of the two heroines become
the site of the grotesque, for theirs “is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link
in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at
the point where they enter into each other. […] From one body a new body always
emerges in some form or other.” (Bakhtin, 26) and it seems this principle of giving
birth to themselves as new and different characters is their modus operandi and a
prime image for the generative grotesque as defined by Bakhtin.
In the novel there is also an excess of verbal cascades, for instance, Socorro’s
first dialogue, a few lines down from the opening is a variation on a theme: “drop
dead” and all its synonyms appear and are elaborated on (in more than one language!)
in crescendo, until we end with: “drown in beer, in frankfurter sauerkraut” and,
finally, ashes (32). Sarduy’s “millionaire side of language” (Wahl, 1469) constantly
enacts a dépense of language that is in itself a grotesque excess. It is important to
note that this is one of Sarduy’s aesthetic marks, one that is in constant tension with
49
his almost spiritual, or paradoxically minimalist concern with the void and
nothingness (again, ashes).
As they continue their banter, Auxilio and Socorro move easily from life to
death: and when they invoke death, they do so again through excess: as the multiply-
named Bald One (330). It is interesting to note that this particular name is again a
very Bakthinian moment of carnival grotesque for the figure of death (with its bald
skull) is humorously associated with life through the penis (and its bald head).
According to Roberto Gonzalez Echeverría, the names Auxilio and Socorro are in
direct relation to destruction (thanathos) and the creation (eros) for, there is a Cuban
childhood rhyme that says: “¡Auxilio! ¡Socorro! […] un Viejo sin gorro” (“Help!
Aide! an old man without a cap,” 1593) thus, the names imply in and of themselves
already a reference to the bald penis and also to the bald skull of death. This is also a
moment of departure from Bakhtin for his figure of death giving birth to life is always
gendered as female (womb/tomb) but in this case, the penis works just as well (not to
mention that Auxilio and Socorro are both male and female). Here ambivalence is
definitely full of regenerative power, we are at “the absolute lower level of grotesque
realism of the gay bodily grave (belly, bowels, earth)” (Bakhtin, 22).
The novel opens with a series of grotesque inversions: when Socorro visits the
Domus Dei while Auxilio waits for her outside, Socorro comes down and out of the
elevator (again we move from the “high” of the “Domus Dei” penthouse apartment of
sorts to the “low”—the ground) and she has become a figure of death herself (“La
Parca,” 331) but one that is ready for a party. She is a beautiful, lively-death:
50
Hay espejos en el hall, y, aunque deshilachada, la Parca no puede
aguantarse: saca su cepillo de cerdas de puerco, su sombra de párpados
anaranjada con brillanticos, su lunar postizo que coloca con esmero
sobre la comisura derecha de los labios para que se desplaze hacia
arriba con cada sonrisa, saca por ultimo sus collares Yoruba y cuando
sale a la calle ya es otra. (331)
36

Here, the minutia of ornament transforms death back into the living Socorro, made-up
and, comically enough, ready for a mango shake. Now we are completely immersed
in what Bakhtin calls “the peculiar logic of the inside-out”, margins are broken and
there is “a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous
parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and
uncrownings” And these comic crownings and uncrownings will continue to happen
to our two heroines but also to every single character throughout the novel.

36
“There are mirrors in the hall, and, though threadbare [or frayed], The Grim Reaper cannot
help herself: she pulls out her boar-bristle brush, her orange and diamond eyeshadow, her
fake beauty mark, which she places with care on the right corner of her lips so that it will
move up and down with every smile, and lastly, pulls out her Yoruba necklaces. And when
she goes out into the street she is another.” (my translation)
51

To come back to Ruskin’s mention of animals and specifically birds in the wild
and noble grotesque, the two main characters, Auxilio and Socorro are also often and
throughout the novel likened to birds (hence, feathers) not just because of their exotic
appearance, wigs, boas and dresses but also because pájaro (or bird) is Cuban slang for
homosexual. This is another interesting grotesque image for here we can begin to weave
the classic figures of human/animal, whereby the borders between species and kind are
erased to create two figures that are all hybrid: larger-than-life, anti-natural, grotesque
(and of course it is also important to note the ironic play Sarduy always gives to the sense
of artifice and counter-nature since homosexuals are often deemed anti-natural by bigots).
But the becoming-animal does not stop there, the sisters have “boquitas de pescado” (fish
mouths, 332), and one of them briefly turns into a squirrel, then a mole, then back to
herself (333). They are moveable characters, whose identity in itself is a grotesque
chimera: between all the feathers, makeup, fake flowers and shimmering adornment, they
are not only hybridly gendered (female/male, transvestites) but also transcend the limits
of the human: they are animal, they are flowering bushes, they are almost mineral or
geometrically abstract—often, in the bizarre tableaux they compose, they become little
squares, like Vasarely images or Picasso demoiselles.
The spectacle of unfixed identity multiplies and becomes more baroquely layered
as the twins begin to show snapshots of themselves as male, dressed as Asian princesses
(now it is their eyes that become little fish, a new grotesquerie as the body parts
disassemble themselves and become other), or as caduveo and cadiveo natives (a clin
52
d’oeuil to Levi-Strauss perhaps) reading Boas and with masks lined in correspondence
with a map of the city: the images here are so layered and baroque as to become
excessive, comic and therefore grotesque. There is an “impossibility of thinking the body
without that which decorates it,” as Wahl explains (1484), and this décor becomes the
body as well, as we shall further see. Finally, as the sisters leave the Self-serve place, the
lively pair again become death again as they almost forget their scythe (334). They are
indeed, “a regenerating and laughing death,” as Bakhtin imagines it (Bakhtin, 22).
At the end of this first section, or prelude, Auxilio has sex with the general, a sex
that “swallowed world” (“chupó mundo,” 335) and absorbs everything that surrounds the
couple. Sex, in Sarduy’s work is always grotesque in that it is cosmic, in the Bakhtinian
sense, for it is all-encompassing, and generative and it involves bodies that are borderless
and bleed into the world, or absorb the world into themselves—no coincidence then that
at this precise moment Auxlio is named “Auxilio Concepción del Universo” (336):
Como un imán debajo de un río los anzuelos, o como un aspirador en un
pollero las plumas, así el binomio Auxilio-General chupó todo lo que
había al rededor, y claro está, chupó a una negra y a una china: así se
completó el curriculum cubense.
37

This grotesque act of sex as swallowing is also the birth of Cuban identity, it becomes a
political moment, in a Foucauldean sense too: Chinese, African and Spanish combine to
create the “Cuban curriculum.” (335) And then immediately after, the narrator mentions
the “fourth element” that is “always the Unnameable Bald One” i.e. death. Here the four

37
“As a magnet under the river does the fishing hooks, or a vacuum in a chicken farm does the
feathers, the Auxilio-General binomial sucked in everything that surrounded them, and of course,
they sucked a black woman and a Chinese woman: this completed the Cuban curriculum.” (my
translation)
53
beings are distinct and are also one, they are a grotesquely multi-headed individual, they
are the bakhtinian figure of the “bodily lower stratum of grotesque realism [which] still
fulfill[s] its unifying, degrading uncrowning, and simultaneously regenerating functions.
However divided, atomized, individualized were the “private bodies, Renaissance realism
[and here, Sarduy’s contemporary baroquerie] did not cut off the umbilical chord which
tied them to the fruitful womb of earth. Bodies could not be considered for themselves;
they represented a material bodily whole and therefore transgressed the limits of their
isolation.” (23). Sarduy’s characters’ bodies do indeed transgress isolation, there is
nothing private about Auxilio and Socorro, as we shall see in throughout the rest of the
novel, they are as generous as they are creative.
***
Section II, titled “Junto Al Río de Cenizas de Rosa” (or Next to the River of Rose Ashes),
again echoes the river of white feathers in its name and is Sarduy’s famous “Orientalist”
Section, where Cuban identity (and Sarduy’s own personal ethnic background) is
explored through its Chinese component. The section begins with a baroque description
of the animal inhabitants of the river—a Chinese tableau, or an almost Rousseau-like
wilderness (and Sarduy’s novel is full of references to paintings), where Cenizas de Rosa,
or Rose Ashes, hides in white pallor, beautiful but also ambiguously grotesque, “like a
salty toad” (337) reciting the Five Books.
Here, she encounters Mortal, the General, also named the Condecorated One, the
Glorious One, the Invincible One, the Bellicose One, el Matarife, the Libidinous One, the
Medalled One or more simply, G. (337-338) It is interesting to note the many names all
54
the characters in this novel have. No one has a single name or a single fixed identity, as
everything is in constant flux: gender, race, being. Flor de Loto (or Cenizas de Rosa—her
full name is Flor de Loto Junto al Río de Cenizas de Rosa, or Lotus Flower Next to the
River of Rose Ashes) immediately metamorphoses/metaphorizes into two animals “como
el pececillo que al saltar fuera del agua se vuelve colibrí,” (as the little fish in jumping out
of the water becomes hummingbird,” 338) she then becomes “a white mask striped by the
cane shadows, barely the flight of a dove, the trace of a rabbit” with a “snake charmer’s
eyes.” (338) Thus as in our definition of the Roman frescoes, the grotesque here has
everything to do with a layering and intermeshing of the human and the animal, the
feminine and the masculine, otherness and sameness: “the inner movement of being
itself,” as Bakhtin writes, “was expressed in the passing of one form into the other, in the
ever incompleted character of being.” (32)
Identity is polyvalent and unhinged. Lotus Flower further becomes other as she is
no longer even animal, but vegetal, mineral, geometric, fog, sound—she de-materializes:
she becomes-imperceptible (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, 304), “una textura –las
placas blancas del tronco de una ceiba—, una flor podrida bajo una palma, una mariposa
estampada de pupilas, es una simetría pura. […] se le vuelve nube, cervatillo, rumor del
río entre las piedras.”
38
(338) Here its is also interesting to note the presence of grotesque
tension in the rotten flower: beauty (life) and ugliness (death) come together in the figure
of Rose Ashes (and in her name as well, of course). And it is also important to note, that

38
“a texture—the white plates in a ceiba tree trunk—, a rotten flower under a palmtree, a
butterfly stamped with pupils, she is a pure symmetry […] she becomes cloud, fawn, rumor of the
river amongst the stones.” (my translation)
55
as Deleuze and Guattari mention, there is no logic order in theses becomings because
“Chaque multiplicité es symbiotique, et réunit dans son devenir des animaux, des
végétaux, des micro-organismes, des particules folles, toute une galaxie.” (Mille
plateaux, 306—and note here the use of the word galaxy, echoing Bakhtin’s cosmos).
Lotus Flower/Rose Ashes is another figure of the grotesque, for, as Bakhtin
explains: “The last thing one can say about the real grotesque is that it is static; on the
contrary, it seeks to grasp in its imagery the very act of becoming and growth, the eternal
incomplete, unfinished nature of being.” (52) And this incomplete character of being this
becoming-animal, becoming-other is also expressed in Deleuze and Guattari’s
aforementioned chapter on becoming as magic, ruse, cosmic witchcraft, and the writer is
thus “un sorcier parce qu’il vit l’animal comme la seule population devant laquelle il est
responsible en droit.” (294) In this book we have characters that become birds, and the
writer as both conjurer of birds and as bird himself—his writing as feather, writing with a
plume or pluma, a feather, as a bringing-forth of animals (and in this case, specifically
birds, also as a reminder or place-holder of the homosexual as bird).
The battle between Lotus Flower and the General, between Ying and Yang,
between Changó and Yemayá (santería figures of war and water) is the erotic quest but
also the battle of opposites that generates the universe, a reminder of Bakhtin’s claim that
the grotesque is also cosmic. Lotus Flower or Rose Ashes, like a mage, throws animals at
the general as if she were pulling them out of her sleeve and she uses every single one of
her theatrical tricks. She becomes subtle, liquid and slips between his hands. She is
bifidous.
56
As this is happening the landscape mutates as well, and the Almendares river
contains the Yang-Tze waters. The Chinese neighborhood in Cuba is as incongruent as
all of Havana, it is a mish-mash, a collage of disparate elements: tea, dog urine, rice, and
also the sounds of mambo and Marlene Dietrich. Here there is a pertinent interruption,
where the Author tells his questioning Reader: “not everything in life can be coherent. A
little disorder in order, no?” (339). Thus the setting is a grotesque and mutable as the
characters themselves: from snow to “Chinese atmosphere” (339) pagodas are made of
smoke, backgrounds made of cock feathers—appearances are nothing but mirror effects.
In this chapter, a new character appears: the Director of the Changai opera—this
name is also an interesting collage: part Changó, part Shanghai—is yet another grotesque
figure in the book: the “mascalzone” “plays on both teams” and is an “amphibian of
conscience” (339) he is well dressed but smells like “poorly digested pork in syrup”
(339). Again the union of opposites here attains a tension of beauty immediately
disrupted by baseness in the most Bakhtinian way.
Now Auxilio and Socorro reappear but they have mimetized with the Chinese
atmosphere as the Culito (Little-Ass) sisters: Auxilio Chong and Socorro Si-Yuen: they
are Siamese twins and butterflies who turn into toads amongst the nenuphar leaves. They
posses the “secret of the seventy eight metamorphoses,” (340) the are the opposite of
what is static. And Sarduy uses these metamorphoses as the union of opposites that
characterizes grotesque figures throughout time, for here we have “Not an individualized
body, but cosmic […] not contained in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego,
57
but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all
that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasureable.” (19)
It seems that all the characters possess this same cosmic secret (except, perhaps,
Mortal the General who is many-named but always the masculine figure of war, machete
in hand, medals scintillating dangerously). In this section, Auxilio and Socorro also
become hummingbirds, flying through the theater, and castrated rabbits with anteater
eyes. They are true chimeras, worthy of being grotesque gargoyles atop Notre Dame
(and in the last section they do become gargoyles, as we shall see). And when they fall
from the wires that hold them up, in a very comic, almost slapstick moment, they fall on
their reddened asses, or culitos (“after which they are named” the narrator reminds us,
341). “Faceba proprio pietà,” as the narrator tells us (341) and the pity actually turns into
a further comic, caricaturesque, grotesque moment, for there is laughter and ambivalence:
laughter of the people, universal (directed at everything and everyone) and ambivalent,
“it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies,
buries and revives.” (Bakhtin, 11-12)
The sisters later transform into the “Baby Faces” as we move to a different café,
full of freckled American sailors in tight pants, and they are obese and blonde and blue-
eyed, also called the Sebaceous ones (349). They are large now, and excessive. As
Stallybrass and White explain of the disproportionate, grotesque body and becoming:
“the complete the image of grotesque realism, one must add that it is always in process,
always becoming; it is a mobile and hybrid creature, disproportionate, exorbitant,
outgrowing all limits, obscenely de-centered and off-balance, a figural and symbolic
58
resource for parodic exaggeration and inversion.” (9—and note the use once again of the
words exorbitant and de-centered). The two sisters are precisely such a figural and
symbolic resource throughout the novel.
In this “American” theater there is a cinematic black-out moment and the sisters
protest, calling themselves luminous, but transformed into absence of light, they are the
grotesque figures of light/dark and life/death in one, they “present simultaneously the two
poles of becoming: that which is receding and dying, and that which is being born.”
(Bakhtin 52)
As they dance a pas-de-deux while the lights go out, they distract the General
from his hunt for María Lotus Flower Next to the Rover of Rose Ashes who has run away
with an American boy, humorously named Johnny (he represents the archetypical gringo,
a male that is the counterpart to the General’s own belligerence). As Lotus Flower and
the boy are having sex, the organs transform into grotesque hybrids of vegetable-
crustacean nature, worthy of the most exquisite wunderkammern: his “glande es un
caracol, o una cúpula rayada en blanco y en el amapola fluorescente de la camisa, como
un caramelo o un reguilete.” (350)
39
Lotus’ breasts are also decorated and she bears a
tattoo, always the mark of the carnivalesque and grotesque figure, for, as Susan Stewart
claims, “the Tattoo represents incorporation just as other carnival grotesque images do”
(On Longing 127), and we shall further see the importance of tattoo as grotesque body
modification in Kathy Acker’s novel as well.

39
“The tip of his penis is a snail, or a cupola striped in white and in the fluorescent poppy of the
shirt, like a caramel or a whirligig” (My translation)
59
Lotus’ tattoo is a miniature of a painting by Li-Sung. This diminutive painting
she bares to her lover contains the world inside of her navel in a grotesque renversement
of proportions: “these forms of projection of the body –the grotesque, the miniature, and
the microcosm—reveal the paradoxical status of the body as both mode and object of
knowing and of the self constituted outside its physical being by its image.” (Stewart,
131) This tattoo therefore allows, though its miniaturization, a paradoxical cosmi-
fication of Lotus’s body, her body as the world, her stomach as the belly that gives birth
to a landscape—to the universe
40
. The miniature is also a grotesque figure for writing
itself, for, as Derrida writes, “La miniature est une forme même de l’écriture.” (398) And
writing (as creation and as ruse) here happens through the body. If these characters have
little psychological depth throughout the novel, they are never lacking in body “un corps
qui est constamment esquissé plutôt que décrit,” as François Wahl explains, “au plus
juste il est lui-même écrit, par où il faut entendre que sur le corps se multiplient les
inscriptions qui sont aussi bien le vêtement que le tatouage ou le travesti.” (1454)
41
Thus,
writing is multiplied through the tattoo as bodily inscription.
The character of the tattoo artist, Carita de Tortura (Little Torture Face, 350-351)
is introduced through the tattoo as well. He is also a grotesque hybrid, A “painted goose”

40
Moreover, this tattoo is full of erotic signification for can also be read, according to Leonor and
Justo Ulloa as a “metáfora de una realidad cósmica en la cual se conjugan constantemente el yin y
el yang. De manera que cuando la lluvia (jugo del cielo) atraviesa las nubes (esencia de la tierra)
se pone de manifiesto la relación entre el elemento masculino y el femenino.” (in “La obsesión
del cuerpo en la obra de Severo Sarduy,” 1636)
41
“A body which is sketched rather than described, in fact it is written in itself. Thus we must
conclude that the inscriptions that are clothing, tattoo or transvestism multiply on the body as
well.” (My translation)
60
(353) and black-belt: a character whose face has “cejas de espada; franjas verdes y
naranja le recorren la frente y le bordean los ojos, negras que se vuelven flores los
pómulos y la nariz; la boca es de tigre.” (351)
42
He is a hybrid hum/animal/plant and
therefore another chaotically grotesque figure for, “an exchange between animal and
human can also be used to effect the grotesque and its corresponding sense of interchange
and disorder.” (Stewart, 105)
At this point of the section we move to the “underworld” (an underground
basement which is a sort of opium den, with hashish and cocaine included) and Auxilio
and Socorro are no longer obese but are back in their “oriental” mode. They are now
called Ophid-Eyes, and they are covered in stuffed hummingbirds, macaws (which in
Spanish is also an expression meaning loud-mouth) and their hair is a confit of pineapples
and rubies. They are called The Biondas (blonde in Italian) and serve tea. A new skinny,
yellow character pontificates on the being of birds: “El ser de los pájaros nos es el timbre
del trino, sino las plumas cayendo a cada muda,”
43
he tells us (353). Here, birds are
artifact, artifice, mutation, imposture, ferocity and confrontation: thus, just as for Deleuze
and Guattari, Virginia Woolf “ne se vit pas comme un singe ou un poisson, mais comme
une charetée de singes, un banc de poisons, suivant un rapport de devenir variable avec

42
“sword eyebrows; green and orange stripes cover his forehead and line his eyes, black stripes
that become flowers cheekbones and nose; the mouth is of a tiger” (my translation)
43
“The being of birds is not the timbre of the trill, but the feathers falling with each shed” (my
translation)
61
les personnes qu’elle approche,” (293)
44
here Sarduy’s characters become a flock of
different birds (and other animals) whose relationship to each other and other characters
in the book is variable, and offers various degrees of resistance and desire. In this way,
when they fight with each other, we have a cockfight, or when they are shaken by the
General, they lose their feathers, and “lice, sequins” (356) until once again they are the
two baldheads: ornate death figures.
The chapter ends on a murderous note: as the narrator says in a sadeian or
bataillean moment: “Pleasure is traversed with pain.” (357) Through the articulation of
pleasure and pain, we can also see how Sarduy is concerned with the body as a site for
the manifestation of rebellion and transgression, for,
Hablar abiertamente de temas censurados es en sí un acto transgresor que
Sarduy efectúa en toda su producción literaria. Su fijación en ciertas
partes situadas predominantemente en las zonas inferiors del cuerpo así
como en el cuerpo en su totalidad recorre una ruta que nos lleva desde una
celebración carnavalesca y carcajeante del mismo como fuente de placer y
de dolor [“pleasure traversed with pain”] hasta momentos melancólicos de
caracter filosófico en que el cuerpo humano se examina o escruta
persistentemente como material corruptible susceptible a la destrucción y
la muerte. Las fases de su obsesión por el cuerpo se pueden recoger y
visualizar, por así decirlo, como una danza macabra medieval en la que se
enlazan los cuerpos de los sanos, de los enfermos, de los privilegiados y
los menos favorecidos, o como una alegoría moderna, paródica o burlesca
del enfrentamiento del gozo de la carne y la negación del placer.
45
(Ulloa
and Ulloa, 1627)

44
“[Virginia Woolf] is not lived as a monkey or as a fish but as a troop of monkeys, a school of
fish following a a variable relationship of becoming depending on whom she approaches” (My
Translation)
45
“Speaking openly about censored themes, which is in and of itself a transgressive act which
Sarduy effects in all his literary production. His fixation on certain parts, situated predominantly
in the inferior zones of the body, as well as on the body in its totality travels on a road that takes
us from a carnivalesque and laughing celebration of the body as a source of pleasure and pain, to
melancholy moments of philosophical character en which the human body in its totality is

62

I might add that the allegorical tension between jouissance and negation of pleasure is the
breeding ground for desire and resistance throughout the novel.
***
Section III, titled “La Dolores Rondón,” changes genres and claims to be a poem, but is
in truth more of a play, each act of the play stemming from an explication or exegesis
(again, we are situated in the ex-the margin, the framing) of the opening poem which
narrates the life of Dolores. It is the section that describes the African history of Cuba,
focusing on another female concubine/actress: Dolores Rondón a “wilfredolamesque
mulatta” (361), the daughter of Ochún, queen of the river and the heaven” (361). The
chapter is full of references to Santería (Elegua, Ochún, cowries and stones, altar
offerings etc) and Sarduy interweaves these references with references to Calderón de la
Barca’s baroque play La vida es sueño, which deals with similar themes of moving up
and down in life, mise-en-abyme framing and with life and mortality.
The “parasitical” structure of the chapter, which stems from a poem and “uses” it
as pre-text for narrative, in and of itself announces the grotesque: it would seem as if the
poem is at the center or core, and the rest of the narrative is marginalia, or commentary
on the poem. In addition, the “stage directions” in italics and parentheses are endlessly
disruptive and so abundant that they also become part of the “whole,” when originally

examined and scrutinized persistently as corruptible matter susceptible to destruction and death.
The phases of his obsession with the body can be taken up and visualized as a medieval danse
macabre where healthy bodies, diseased bodies; the bodies of the privileged and the less favored
are intertwined. Or as a modern allegory, parodic or burlesque of the confrontation between the
pleasure of the flesh and the negation of pleasure.” (my translation)
63
they serve only as framing devices. Thus écriture here interrupts, interweaves its
different registers, displacing action. It is perhaps no coincidence that thematically too,
this section is the most meta-textual. It addresses the codes of language and
communication and discusses discourse while explicating each line of the Dolores poem
(364) In this way, this second section is a Parergon in the derridean sense (Truth in
Painting) and performs an interjection: it includes but exceeds the idea of the frame as
addendum and supplement, and by articulating its narrative it displaces the central figure
of Dolores’ poem.
More spasmodic abeyance also comes from the two narrators who interrupt each
other and the rest of the characters, and who finally start off the chapter by discussing the
use of vomit (360-361)—another base and grotesque moment of abjection where the
body exceeds itself, and “discloses its essence,” as Bakhtin explains, “as a principle of
growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throws
of death, eating, drinking or defecation.” (26) I add vomit to his list because it reveals the
inside of the body, and it is a figure of transgression for it is something which should
remain inside, controlled and contained, but comes out. And, of course, vomit is also a
figure for Sarduy’s overabundant Baroque poetics.
In addition, there is multiplication (no pun intended!) for in this chapter, Auxilio
and Socorro are now accompanied by a third one, Clemencia (another synonym is added
to their names!) as they dance in a brothel, with hair made of flames. As they dance, they
bite their fingers and rip off necklaces made of cartilage, take off their eyebrows, with
pale masks and broken faces (363): they are alive/dead, they are sensual and terrifying at
64
once, but in a completely different way to what we had seen in the prior sections of the
book. Now they are living, dancing death, the ultimate grotesque: Bakhtin’s pregnant
hags.
In a particularly interesting image Auxilio, is transformed into the Seamstress (or
costurera) whose bald head is like a mannequin’s or the Parca’s skull and whose
enormous scissors are an easy replacement for the scythe. Thus “the inner movement of
being itself [is] expressed in the passing of one form into the other, in the ever incomplete
character of being.” (Bakhtin, 32). This image could turn toward a more somber and
uncanny grotesque, were it not for the humor infused in the description (especially in the
bandeau detail!): “En su nueva metamorfosis, la parca trae unas enormes tijeras, la
cabeza rapada, como un maniquí de costura con un bandeau –un centímetro—. Le
recorren el pecho líneas de puntadas negras.” (368)
46
. The dialogue here is also
interesting because the imminent tragic death of actress Dolores keeps slipping through
language and then is hidden again, in a classic comic way (muertos, for example is
replaced by tuertos, 368). This brings about laughter and therefore grotesquery as
something that is “part decaying and part nascent” to use Ruskin’s words (33) and
“jesting of art in its highest flight” is accompanied by “jesting in its utmost degradation”
to borrow from Ruskin again (113). But whereas for Ruskin degradation is negative, for

46
“In her new metamorphosis, the grim reaper has enormous scissors, a shaved head, like a
sewing mannequin’s with a bandeau (one centimeter-wide). Her breast is traversed with a line of
black stitches.” (my translation) Thus here the body becomes inanimate/animate: both a
mannequin and a sort of corpse, where the stitches also echo autopsy stitches in a corpse.
65
Bakhtin, and for Sarduy, degradation materializes, and reverses the power dynamic of
status quo.
***
One of the longest sections in the novel, is The Entrance of Christ in Havana. This is the
“Spanish” section of the Novel, corresponding to the third component of Cuban identity.
Arguably, it is the most grotesque of all sections in the deepest Bakhtinian sense for in it
we have endless throning and de-throning, crowning and un-crowning (as we shall see,
the presence of Christ as a character fuels this further). In addition, it is also interesting
to note that, being the Spanish section, Sarduy has also included Moorish elements
(which are in turn an essential component of Spanish identity as well), so the
multilayered identity he weaves has sub-layers and is yet another figure of the Baroque.
But also, these arabesques are a characteristic of the Grotesque aesthetic, according to
Ruskin, who claims that “Grossness, of one kind or another, is indeed, an unfailing
characteristic of the style; either latent, as in the refined sensuality of the more graceful
arabesques, or, in the worst examples, manifested in every species of obscene conception
and abominable detail.” (136) Thus the ornamental, or marginal nature of arabesques
makes them by definition gross or grotesque (and there is much to say about Ruskin’s
Orientalist and colonial perception of these, but that is the subject an entirely different
essay, since Sarduy’s use of them is recuperative and baroquely revolutionary in a post-
colonial sense). And Sarduy definitely deploys an abundance of Arabesque details as part
of his baroque aesthetic—and it is important to note that, as early as 1587 the terms
grotesque and arabesque were used interchangeably in relationship to art, as Lomazzo, a
66
Milanese painter and writer declared that “the grotesque had evolved not in contrast but
alongside of the arabesque.” (Kayser, 23).
47

As with the other sections, this one opens with a tableau: Socorro imagines
herself carrying Mortal’s breast on a platter and dreams to have her face “desfigurado por
el churrigueresco, por las maderas provincianas, por un jardín de piedra reflejado en la
concha de un minrabo.” (380) This baroque masque she gives herself is grotesque to the
point of defacement, deformation of the face through excess of ornament
(churrigueresque)—the mask is both uncanny and poetic. This is followed by a
description of scent: “el olor cercano del azúcar prieta, el del sudor negro que gustaba con
la punta del dedo, experta catadora, el del aguardiente y las orquídeas podridas.” (380)
48
This scent of rotten orchids and “black sweat” is that of beauty and death which
characterizes the grotesque as well. Everything is thus degraded and brought down to the
“lower bodily stratum” which is that of reproduction and transgression of bodily limits as
sweat and smell surpass the body.
Thus the bodies are multiplied through writing and soon after all the gold and
baroque objects presented are reduced to the stench of two plates: One holds the dry and
bald heads of Auxilio and Socorro crowning the crowns that once adorned them, in a very

47
The grotesque and the arabesque were used synonymously, as in the title of Poe’s Tales of the
Grotesque and the Arabesque, for example. Also of note is Kant’s analysis on the arabesque, as
well as Winfried Menninghaus’ reading of it, after Kant, as well. Yet, after the nineteenth
century, the arabesque remained a term exclusively applied to ornament while the grotesque
became a term that went beyond ornament and took on several other meanings, as we have seen.
I further discuss the relationship between the grotesque and the arabesque in my following
chapter on Kathy Acker as well.
48
“The neighboring smell of dark sugar, of black sweat that she tasted with the tip of her finger—
expert sampler— and the smell of eau-de-vie and rotten orchids.” (My translation)
67
carnival-like grotesque moment of inversion (specifically with the use of crowns, which
Bakhtin constantly alludes to). And there is another plate: it holds their bibles with their
viscera on top (381). The body is now dis-membered into top and bottom, divided so that
“this scattering and redistribution of bodily parts is the antithesis of the body as
functional tool [or the closed “classical body,” I might add] and of the body as still life,
as classical nude. […] the grotesque presents a jumbling of this order [of the medieval
rhetoric of “head to foot”], a dismantling and re-presentation of the body.” (Stewart,
105). Thus the grotesque body is turned inside out once again, thought the exposed
viscera, and literally presented on a platter.
And, of course, this doesn’t mean there’s only death and destruction (for this
would no longer be comic grotesque, only tragedy) for Auxilio and Socorro are talking—
not dead—and they are soon after dancing and rolling around with “bitten cheeks” and
arms tattooed with enemy insignia. They are fat, almost pregnant with silks (381), under
their torn clothes: again here they perfectly embody Bakhtin’s pregnant hags and thus
sterility is coupled with abundance.
This section is also populated by a carnival of grotesque figures: hermaphrodites,
prostitutes, concubines, beggars, fortune-tellers and poorly castrated eunuchs—all of
them fat (382). And it must be stressed that fatness (as disproportion) here is a perfect
embodiment of the grotesque as excess, and of the baroque as excess as well. The novel
is a veritable court of miracles, and in their degradation the characters are material and
also full of life, they are the grotesque in the flesh.
68
On a separate note, it is also interesting that the opening of this section contains,
as part of the narrative, an adaptation of poem 175, wafir, nun, by Mutanabbi and later a
poem by Ben Guzmán (383). These inclusions are a different use of arabesque. Here
again then the structure of narration is in and of itself grotesque as well, for it is hybrid
and includes several voices, genres, styles, and histories (in the broadest sense of the
word) in one. This, once again, emphasizes the grotesque hybridity not only of content in
De donde son los cantantes, but inherent to its structure as well.
As the chapter progresses, Auxilio and Socorro wait for Mortal to return, like
figures out of a Beckett play
49
. And they once again morph into grotesques that are part
animal, part vegetable, part architecture: “de esas simetrías estrelladas desciende un
follaje negrísimo –las greñas de las Moritas—entorchando a las columnas de mármol de
sus cuerpos.” (382-383) They are marble bodies with foliage, they wait like ruins
amongst ruins, and snakes crawl on their cracked bodies: they are becoming objects, yet
immediately after, as if “infected” by the reptiles, they are salamanders (383). They are
then “stucco ruins,” and they crumble when some diggers point to them, yet from the
rubble, two bible saleswomen who also sell wild cats in baskets arise. They are Auxilio
and Socorro again. And this absurd scenario (selling bibles and wildcats) is one of the
many great comic grotesque moments of the chapter.
Auxilio and Socorro here are also called the Dog-Headed Ones and soon after are
transformed into two cranes nailed to a platter with laurels and grapes in a new still-life

49
But unlike Beckett’s characters who rarely change throughout a play or never age, these two
characters are ever-changing.
69
tableau. The are truly the “two poles of becoming: that which receding and dying, and
that which is being born.” (Bakhtin, 52) The figure of the still-life is also a particularly
grotesque one in a double sense: like the grotesque, the art of still life has always been
considered to be “minor” and of course these pictures, often as vanitas represent the
tension between life and death: still-life//still, life.
As Auxilio and Socorro continue to morph even their laughter has grotesque and
multilayered undertones as it becomes pure mineral sound: Auxilio’s laughter is like
“huesecillos en un cubilete, arena que arrastra el río” (385). The river returns once more,
as does death through the image of the little bones, or huesecillos, which also remind us
of games (as dice).
In this section there is a particularly interesting grotesque moment: that of the
analysis of the tapestry given to the sisters by Mortal. This tapestry seems baroque
enough in its description, but, when seeking a hidden message the twins rip open the
backing, the reverse of its beautiful image is revealed to be an island of knots, and
another banquet (invisible) that is “the mockery of the visible one” (386): it is dirty,
dusty, and things that appear to be lively and bright on one side are rotten on the other.
For example, the beautiful feasters are, on the reverse “cross-eyed marionettes”—a very
grotesque image (and marionettes in the nineteenth century, as we shall later see, become
prime images of the uncanny grotesque). The tapestry functions rhetorically as an
allegory, and this can be seen a grotesque recourse in and of itself as well for, according
to Sarduy, anamorphosis and allegory are “the degradation of natural narration.”
(Barroco, 1220) And as such, they are condemned by Galileo, who is for order, neatness,
70
center and circle. What he condemns is not only the “marginal allusion to something
else” again, its grotesqueness vs. the cleanliness and straightforwardness of other figures;
he also especially condemns the fact that in order to perceive allegory, the spectator’s or
reader’s mind “has to be displaced to a certain point.” (1220)
This is precisely the moment of double allegory in this section of the novel: firstly
as the straightforward allegory of the original tapestry, where Faith and Praxis are
represented by a young and an old woman etc. but also secondly as the reverse of the
tapestry where meaning is obscured, rendered illegible. According to Sarduy, allegory
obligates spontaneous narration, which is “originally visible and made to be seen from
the front” (1219) to adapt to a meaning that must be faced obliquely: we are again in the
art of the “wayside.” And this slant is also a very important political move, for in this
forcible displacement, in this art of the wayside, in this grotesquery, the reader is
implicated, becomes active in the search for the obscure meaning, and this implication is
radical and dangerous. Thus, Sarduy explains that to be baroque today means to
amenazar, juzgar y parodiar la economía burguesa [and I might add, its
classical aesthetics], basada en la administración tacaña de los bienes, en
su centro y fundamento mismo: el espacio de los signos, el lenguaje.
Soporte simbólico de la sociedad, garantía de su funcionamiento, de su
comunicación. […] El barroco subvierte el orden supuestamente normal
de las cosas, como la elipse [o la alegoría] –ese suplemento de valor—
subvierte y deforma el trazo, que la tradición idealista supone perfecto
entre todos, el círculo.
50
(1250)

50
“To threaten, judge and parody bourgeois economy, which is based on the stingy
administration of goods, at its center [core] and foundations, the space of signs: language –the
symbolic support of society and guarantee of its functioning, of its communication. […] The
Baroque subverts the supposedly normal order of things, like ellipsis [or allegory]—that
supplement of value—subverts and deforms the trace, that the idealist tradition supposes to be the
most perfect of all: the circle.” (my translation)
71

For Sarduy, therefore the baroque is a threat to normativity and status quo (represented
by the clsed and perfect circle), just as the Grotesque was for Bakhtin. And Sarduy’s
conception of this contestation is exemplified through the opposition of the circle and the
ellipse (while Bakhtin uses the example of the oozing, excessive grotesque body vs. the
closed off classical body). For Sarduy then the circle is the epitome of classicism, of the
perfectly closed figure whereas the ellipse is the figure for doubling, for baroque
multiplication and can thus be read as the figure of grotesque excess as well. The ellipse
is grotesque, it is monstrous in the sense Bataille mentions in “The Deviations of Nature,”
for, “Monsters [are] the dialectical opposites of geometric regularity.” (55) And it is
therefore no coincidence that there isn’t one heroine in the novel but always two
irregularly mutable monstrous ones (sometimes even three, when María or Clemencia
appear, breaking with all symmetry!).
Eventually, Auxilio and Socorro incarnate two of the figures in the tapestry, Faith
and Praxis, and they traverse the landscape searching for Mortal. Then they become
Flamencas, Corzas and The Tadpoles, until they reach Cádiz (392). During their long
search they become like hermits or saints in the deserts of Spain (no coincidence, since
Sarduy was a consummate reader of John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila), and their
bodily transformations and mutilations echo grotesque moments in those of the saints as
well. But their narrative isn’t just mock-hagiography, it also mimics that of Christopher
Columbus’ relations of his “discovery” journey, and are written as “fragments” of their
logbook very much imitating Columbus’ own words and also subverting them ironically
(393-395). Their text includes sirens, tritons, monsters and all sorts of wondrous
72
creatures and even contains direct quotes from Columbus’ diaries as they travel from
Cádiz to Santiago de Cuba.
When Auxilio and Socorro finally arrive in Cuba they become über-cuban: in
their speech and expressions, in their body language and here, they begin to sing the song
that gives the novel its title, Son del Llano, amidst grotesque imagery of landscape and
place: under the cockroach-like sky and dust that is “asteriscos de oro, pulgas y piojos”
51

(397) as everywhere else in this novel the coexistence of the beautiful and the abject
creates grotesque comedy. In this particular passage Sarduy even calls them a pair of
gargoyles as they pee over the east gardens (397).
This leads to the culmination of grotesquery: the apparition of Christ. He is found
in a dusty corner of the church where Auxilio and Socorro work, near a piece of white
wood inscribed, in English with “Handle With Care” (a replacement for the traditional
INRI perhaps). Here, Christ is deformed, maimed and full of holes and protruding
screws. From this low grotesque of deformity Auxilio, Socorro and El Bruno (whose
name echoes Giordano Bruno, but also the Bruno in Italian or Brun in French meaning
the brown one, for he is a black musician) tend to the Christ and fix him up into a new
form of happy grotesque: “resurrecto en su trono de aluminio […] apenas la sangre le
manchaba la náriz y los párpados. ¡Si parecía que iba a reirse!” (403)
52
. This degradation
of Christ is the ultimate un-crowning of grotesque realism for, as Bakhtin explains, “the

51
“Gold asterisks, fleas and lice” (my translation)
52
“Resurrected in his throne of aluminum […] blood barely stained his nose and eyelids. It even
seemed like he was going to laugh!” (my translation)
73
essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is
high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth
and body in their indissoluble unity.” (19) And if Christ is always already the “word
made flesh” and “god as man,” brought down to earth then he is already a grotesque
figure in the Bakhtinian sense, yet always abstractly constructed as such. But in the
novel, Christ comes to life not as miraculous flesh but as a marionette of wood, a
Pinocchio figure (let’s not forget both fathers were carpenters!) and his Pathos is
transformed into joy and laughter.
Jesus’ blood is almost invisible as he sits in his throne made of aluminum, and
this simple image creates a particularly interesting reversal: instead of being silver or
gold, antique wood or some “high” material, the throne is nothing but base aluminum and
Christ’s tragic wounds seem more like makeup (he wears it on the nose, like a clown and
on the eyelids, like a woman or a transvestite). Furthermore, from his oxidized wounds
bloom “flowers of tetanus” and the stains on his face are like the “glow of rotten fish”
(403). The light enveloping him is bright and white but the simile is to “milk curd” (402).
These are again particularly grotesque images for they articulate something beautiful
(glow and light) through that which is dying, disintegrating (rotten fish and curdled
milk—decay).
Throughout the chapter, Christ continues to rot and yet bloom forth in unexpected
ways, with a green foot full of eczema and a milky flower of fungus (409). And when
Auxilio and Socorro want to douse him in alcohol Bruno throws him some rum with
ice—again the irreverence of the situation creates grotesque humor, it is “[not] parody in
74
its narrow sense, but [another form] of grotesque realism [that] degrades, bring[s] down
to earth, turn[s] [its] subject into flesh. This is the peculiar trait of this genre[:] the
people’s laughter which characterized all the forms of grotesque realism from
immemorial times was linked with the bodily lower stratum. Laughter degrades and
materializes.” (Bakhtin, 20) Here laughter materializes and is materialized to the point of
making the flesh into wood, but animated wood or wood that paradoxically acts like flesh
(with eczema, pus etc). Furthermore, in the next few pages Christ is degraded to the
point where He is referred to as El Podrido (the Rotten One, 409) or El Apestoso (the
Pestilent One, 410). This brings forth not only the laughter of the reader, an endearing
sympathetic and regenerative laugher, but also that of the people Christ, Bruno and
Auxilio and Socorro encounter throughout their “pilgrimage.”
As they continue to travel throughout Cuba (in a parcours that seems like a
situationist dérive but also remaps Castro’s guerrilla’s fight towards victory), Christ is
rotting at every turn. The pilgrims mistreated in Camagüey, escape the helicopters that
pursue them through the jungle by entering down a “SUBWAY” ramp and finally are
blocked by tanks before arriving to Havana (again, it is possible to read this as an allusion
to Castro’s voyage and war through Cuba). Never to be one for full on heroic antics,
Sarduy degrades everyone and everything bringing all the action playfully to a mock-
heroic level: helicopters are “mosquitoes” and pilots peek out of them like “a cuckoo out
of a clock” (413), even the description of the tanks adds to the grotesquery of the entire
chapter for they are “geen sponges” or “giant chunks of mint” (414). Thus in the
75
traditional reversal move which characterizes the comic grotesque, that which is large
and fearful is caricaturized as something tiny and pedestrian.
Again in mock-heroic manner, in absolute folk humor, Christ enters Havana like
Paul Anka (416) and he is asked for autographs, smothered, admired, emulated, while He
is horrified and cannot help His bodily movements, which include His body dancing rock
n’ roll without Him wanting to. He is still decaying, rotting, disintegrating into the world
(His body is not classically contained, but rather grotesquely porous)
Snow begins to fall over Havana, like the breadcrumbs falling from a heavenly
table (which also appeared the beginning of the novel), the city is completely and
absurdly buried in snow. Grotesquery is finally (or almost finally, I should add) erased
into whiteness, into minimalism, washed out. And yet, as Christ dies, the great moment
of potential tragedy, the grotesque humor and comedy comes back as he begins to dance
mambo in the afterlife (according to the narrator, that is what awaits us all on the other
side of life: a mambo orchestra). This chapter is full of “transcodings and displacements
between high and low,” (Stallybrass and White, 9) which reflect and subvert the social
order. And, beautifully, the novel ends with comedy and melody, in an ultimate moment
of union of death and life through music.
***
“Through that magnificent condition of fantastic imagination,” as Ruskin puts it,
Sarduy’s novel is a grotesquery on many levels, as we have seen: it is populated by
grotesque characters, and it is built in a structure that is in and of itself frames-within-
frames, a baroque excess of form and also of language. It represents everything Mikhail
76
Bakhtin claims is grotesque realism, even as Bakhtin claims such a form of the grotesque
ended in the Renaissance.
Stylistically, Sarduy is grotesque on many levels, his tone is full of ironic humor,
but an irony mixed with tenderness and “drôlerie affectueuse,” that is his “sa marque
propre: son insigne.” (Wahl, 1470) And perhaps this stylistic insignia is partly a result of
Sarduy’s preoccupation with the Baroque or perhaps it is also a result of his commitment
to polyvocality: as the title suggests there are many singers. And not only many singers
and many voices but also many languages. A quick semantic analysis of the novel reveals
an abundance of expressions in other languages (never italicized, it should be noted):
English (“drop dead,” 329 “roof garden” and “Milk Bar,” 331 “cheek to cheek,” 335 “the
show must go on,” 341, etc. ), Italian (“Faceba proprio pieta” and also “il povero,” 355 or
the Biondas, etc.), German (“Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestelt,” 332 “Ich
bin die fesche Lola,” 349) French (“tu me casses les cothurnes! (en français dans le
texte)”, 329, “pitoyable” 356, “à la page” 356 “on sait très bien à quel saint se vouer”
365), Latin “Canis hydrofobus, ¡Dominus Tecum!” 365) etc. Rather than creating a sense
of high culture, the tone of most of these irruptions creates comedy and also creates a
sense of mutability of language, of borderlessness between one tongue and the next.
Language here then is also open to otherness, it becomes another grotesque body.
Polyglossia and heteroglossia also undermine any concept of master narrative in
the novel, and here perhaps it is interesting to mention yet other contacts between high
and low that are also proper of the grotesque. The novel is riddled with pop culture
references, to an almost kitschy or campy extent: there are references to Self-service
77
joints (332); to Max Factor (329), walls of Coca-Cola bottles (334); Kleenex (333); the
song at the beginning of the section “en un bosque de la china” is a folkloric classic (“an
homage to the shanghai burlesque of Havana,” 337) as well as the song that gives the
novel its title; the logo animals of Shell and Greyhound (348), Camel (350) and Bacardi
(335); Chesterfield and Elizabeth Arden (363); Jabón Candado (364); Old Spice (365);
Simmons mattress (369); Beauty Sunfluid by Helena Rubinstein (370); Schiaparelli,
Chanel and Christian Dior (379) etc. but all these references are interwoven seamlessly
with references to the “High” culture of Ming empresses, Vasarely, Quevedo,
Hemingway, Klimt, Lam, Cranach, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt and may
other jazz singers and musicians etc. creating a leveling and equalizing carnivalesque
coherence between disparate elements, which constructs and levels hierarchies of what is
deemed high and low in culture (and therefore in society in general).
Thus it is very clear that Sarduy deploys all of the rhetorical elements
purposefully to build a cathedral-like structure for his complex novel on being and
identity, as Ruskin would say, he is a master of the noble grotesque for “he knows the
depth of all which he seems to mock, and would feel it at another time, or feels it in a
certain undercurrent of thought even while he jests with it.” (140)
53
These alternations
and ambivalences fill the novel with regenerative –revolutionary—potential, which is the

53
Again, much could be said about Ruskin’s classist and racist classifications of the grotesque as
“noble” or “ignoble” (or “savage”! Or “barbarous”!) but this should be addressed in an entirely
separate analysis all together. It is nonetheless important to note that those “high” and “low”
distinctions even within the grotesque, are an obsession that fill his pages. I take the liberty to use
his references with a bit of disregard for what he might deem high or low and simply concern
myself with his definition of the grotesque in all its broadness.
78
potential of the grotesque. According to Alain Badiou, Sarduy’s work is a “monument
inachevable où vient à la littérature quelque chose comme un cosmos où s’indistinguent
le désir des hommes et le grouillement végétal.” (in “Vide, séries, clairière”, 1619)
54
The
language Badiou uses to describe Sarduy’s work, specifically a cosmos in which the
desire of men becomes indistinguishable from that of vegetable abundance and life, is
very much therefore within our definition of the grotesque as hybrid (Vitrivius OED etc.)
and regenerative (Bakhtin).
Thus, not only is the body of the work grotesque, the bodies contained within the
work are grotesque on many levels as well and this links them to art, and techné on a
different level. As his characters morph Sarduy transforms their bodies into works of art
through feathers, tattoos, masks, and artifice, as this analysis has shown and, as Susan
Stewart further elaborates,
We must also consider these images of the grotesque body precisely as
images or representations […] Yet to make from the body a work of art
involves the creation of a supplement or extension. The work of art as
costume, mask and disguise differs significantly from the work of art as
external object. The body is paraded, put on display in time as well as
space […] The distance between the artwork the artist and the audience is
thereby collapsed double; the body is the work, and there is reciprocity
between individuals/works rather than unilinear distance between work
and observer. (107)

This is exactly what Sarduy’s baroque aesthetics do: implicate the reader through a
displacing maze of artifice, engage in reciprocity, incorporate the author, interpellate and
challenge the reader for, as Badiou claims, “lire Severo Sarduy est toujours

54
“to read Severo Sarduy is always simultaneously—bifidous reading, cleaved reading—to let
oneself be caught in the feint and to foil it [to evade it]” (My translation)
79
simultanément (lecture bifide, lecture refendue) se laisser prendre a la feinte et la
déjouer.”(1620)
Thus the “clean” or neat and closed boundaries between the work and the world
are perturbed. This novel creates discomfort (and requires the reader to displace herself),
questions ease and streamlined economies. Here the baroque as grotesque is game and
wonder, and opposed to a classical definition of “work.” And the grotesque is always
regenerative in the Bakhtinean sense because, the characters are never judged, “le texte
s’en amuse sur fond de complicité,” as Wahl explains in his introduction to all of
Sarduy’s works (1456). And it is regenerative too because “drôlerie s’en suit par la
tendresse,” (1458) the tenderness of desire and in its multiplicity and abundance and
diversity, his work becomes a sort of “joyous Heterotopia.” (Wahl 1471)
In the Baroque, as in my definition and analysis of the grotesque in De donde son
los cantantes, desire, reproduction and excess address otherness and that which is abject
in relationship to the subject. As Sarduy explains, “el objeto del barroco es el objeto
racial: seno materno y excremento, oro, Mirada, voz, cosa extranjera a todo lo que el
hombre puede asimilar(se) del otro y de sí mismo.”
55
(Barroco, 1251) De donde son los
cantantes addresses, sings to and dresses otherness through the erotic game of excess and
Sarduy’s “conviction que l’écriture a pour vocation, en se déroutant elle-même, de

55
“The object of the Baroque is the racial object: maternal breast and excrement, gold, Gaze,
voice, everything that is foreign to that which man can assimilate of others and of himself.” (my
translation)
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dérouter le sens et que, pour y réussir, elle doit être traverse par le désir.” (Wahl, 1449)
56

Thus writing for Sarduy becomes the locus for desire, resistance and opposition and his
baroque grotesque becomes a radical transgression of logocentrism, authority and its
bodily, gendered, racial, national, species boundaries.

56
“belief that writing has as its goal, as it deviates itself, to deviate meaning and that in order to
succeed, it must be traversed by desire” (My translation)
81

Chapter 2: Kathy Acker’s Parasitical Grotesque in Empire of the Senseless
“The more I write my own novels, the more it seems to me that to write is to read”
(Kathy Acker “The Words to Say It,” Bodies of Work, 65)
Twenty years after Severo Sarduy’s De donde son los cantantes was released, Kathy
Acker published her 1988 novel The Empire of the Senseless. At a crucial moment in the
middle of the novel, she writes a passage that provides a key to the meaning of the title
and to her work in general:
Ten years ago it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to
destroy language which cuts and normalizes and controls by cutting that
language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire
of language, the prisons of meaning. But this nonsense, since it depended
on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions. What is the
language of the ‘unconscious’? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom
doesn’t exist: pretend it does, use fiction for the sake of survival, all of our
survival.) Its primary language must be taboo, all that is forbidden. Thus
an attack on the institutions of prisons via language would demand a use
of a language or languages which aren’t acceptable, which are forbidden.
(134)
This notion forms an interesting contrast to Sarduy’s use (and baroque dépense) of
language to counter capitalism and the discourse of power. Here, Acker argues that the
only way effective way to oppose normalizing institutions is through fiction and the
forbidden. Acker’s work, which is filled innumerable variations of excess through
transgression, whether sexual, racial, or even aesthetic, relies on the language of taboo: it
is grotesque. (Similarly, her narrative in this work cannot be called a “story” per se;
rather, text is exceeded, resulting in the grotesque surfeit of a multiplicity of narratives.)
Empire of the Senseless is grotesque in the sense referred to by Bakhtin, who claims that
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“No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with
Rabelaisian [or Ackerian] images; these images are opposed to all that is finished and
polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and
world outlook.” (3) In this chapter, I analyze how Acker’s images, her language, her
characters, and her novel work to undermine “all that is finished and polished” by
working instead with what is crass, rough, dirty, forbidden, and degraded.
Through degradation, Acker’s novels treat sexuality as a political reality. As a
result, the author/criminal is already an always-grotesque figure from the margins; as
Acker declares, “This society’s equation of mouth and anus has as one of its sub-clauses
the following statement: if acts involving the anus, when sexual, are crimes, so are acts of
the mouth, expressions that refer to sex and sexuality. […] Once only marginalized, art
and artists are slowly becoming criminalized by a government whose real heads are just
heads, invisible, without bodies.” (Bodies of Work, 82) Acker’s work was in fact
criminalized (in 1986 The Federal Office for the Monitoring Publications Harmful to
Juveniles in Bonn, Germany, declared her work to be ”Harmful to Youth”
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), and Acker
was called a “terrorist” by many (both fans and detractors). The position of the artist as a
marginalized or criminal figure is interesting, especially when considered in relation to
the grotesque, with its political contestation of what is “natural” and its

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This happened specifically in reference to the German translation of Blood and Guts in High
School. For more on this incident please see Barbara Caspar’s documentary Who’s Afraid of
Kathy Acker?
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leaky/indeterminate borders. Acker is both marginalized and concerned with notions of
margins and borders, for:
[She] wrote at the borders of a metaphysical tradition, ever negotiating the
limits, without for a second thinking that she could bail. There was no
outside or mystified Elsewhere to our literary inheritance. […] She didn’t
turn her back on a very determined history of thought or on the literary
tradition; she just turned them on their backs, that is, by reinscribing,
regendering, profaning, desecrating, shattering the source and adjusting
reference in a constant, loyal, determined way. (Ronell, 24)
As Avital Ronell explains, Acker’s marginalized (self) positioning enabled her to turn
things “on their backs” (note the use of Bakhtinian topology here), thus making it
possible for her to transgress the “rules” of aesthetics, of society – of normativity in
language and thought – through piracy, through écriture feminine becoming grotesque,
through taboo.
Acker’s determined transgressions took place through the coupling of words with
sex and the body (specifically not the head without organs). Her novel deals with all that
is forbidden and therefore grotesque, mostly as regards the “Lower Bodily Stratum”
(always taboo) and the lack of property (and delimitations of property) that is also akin to
the carnivalesque grotesque. Ronnel continues, “[Acker] practiced literary depropriation,
in her exhibitionistic way renouncing property, the proper—any claim to her ownmost
inventiveness, “originality”—propriety.” (“Kathy Goes to Hell…,” 23
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) This kind of
aesthetics differs in its understanding of the grotesque from what we saw in Sarduy’s

58
And note that the word Ronell uses is not appropriation, but rather depropriation, which seems
a more radical form for it is a complete renunciation of property as opposed to taking someone’s
property and making it one’s own. I will continue to use this term throughout my chapter.
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work: Acker’s –if we could even call it hers— is more sexually transgressive, more
radical (and perhaps, less “regenerative” in the Bakhtinian sense). One could say that her
smile is not necessarily (or always) that of the carnival feathered bird, as in Sarduy, but
rather the Bataillean smile of the ass-crack, of the vagina, of the human-bird grotesque
hybrid dying with an erection.
Foucault writes of Bataille’s philosophical and transgressive language that it
“proceeds to the limit and to this opening where being surges forth, but where it is
already lost, completely overflowing itself, emptied of itself to the point where it
becomes an absolute void […]. This play of transgression and being is fundamental for
the constitution of philosophical language, which reproduces and undoubtedly produces
it.” (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 43-44) The same could be said of Acker’s
work, which was heavily influenced by Bataille: throughout her oeuvre, the language of a
taboo void is constantly referred to as nothing – that is, the Shakespearean “nothing” that
is the female sex, as well as sexuality and the sexual act in general.
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Her writing thus

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Shakespeare uses nothing in several works to pun on sex, perhaps one of the quotes which
could be most directly linked to Acker’s work is Cordelia’s exchange with her father, King Lear:
KING LEAR:
[…] Speak. (90)
CORDELIA:
Nothing, my lord.
KING LEAR:
Nothing!
CORDELIA:
Nothing.
KING LEAR:
Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.
(in King Lear I, i. 90-94)
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manifests the grotesque in much the same way that Bataille’s does. That is, the only
possible rhetoric that could be used to analyze it is the rhetoric of limits (the margin, the
marginal) and of their overflow (excess). It is also essential to keep in mind that Acker’s
use of “abusive language” is not unconnected from the “erotic vital connotations”
(Bakhtin, 28) that Bakhtin critiques many contemporary authors as lacking. In my
analysis of the novel, I shall show how the grotesque being “surges forth” time and time
again through Acker’s use of the forbidden – sex, rape, incest, pornography, violence and
terrorism. Through its engagement with the forbidden, Acker’s writings offer both
mediation and desire in ways that both differ from and resemble Sarduy’s work.
As a writer, Acker, like Sarduy, also straddled multiple labels and could be
therefore deemed a grotesque hybrid herself: while David Antin and Liz Kotz constantly
refer to her as a poet, others, such as Barrett Watten, think of her as a novelist. Artists
think of her as a conceptual artist or a performance artist, but she was also a body builder
(she even had her own exercise tape). Perhaps this interdisicplinarity was also due to the
influence of her New York friends and colleagues—Patti Smith, Diamanda Galas, Robert
Mapplethorpe, Laurie Anderson, Carolee Schneeman, Martha Rossler, Avital Ronell,
and, of course, Andy Warhol and William Burroughs, among others—many of whom
also straddled several worlds at once. It was in the context of the New York arts scene of
the eighties on the one hand, and the Neo-Conservatism of the Reagan era on the other,
that Empire of the Senseless comes into being.
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The influence of people such as Antin, Burroughs and Warhol (the conceptual
king of thieves and appropriators) is particularly relevant to Acker’s aesthetics, for it was
through her analysis and reworking of techniques ranging from appropriation to cut-ups
to situationist détournement to conceptual writing that she found her particular piratical,
parasitical grotesque aesthetics and politics. Détournement in particular is relevant to
Acker’s writing methods, for it relates directly to piracy and terrorism: détournement
“translates as a misappropriation (of funds), hijacking (of a plane or a ship), or diversion
(of a road or a river). The idea that meaning itself can be hijacked in an act of what used
to be known as ‘cultural terrorism’ is central […]” (Dick, 112) And it is no coincidence
then that Acker herself was often labeled a terrorist.
The equation of Acker’s writing with her politics happens precisely because of
her aesthetics. As Peter Wollen explains, “Burroughs’ cut-up technique provided Acker
not only with a methodology but also an example of how a literary technique could be
given a political twist as a mode of resistance, envisaged as a way of subverting the
control system inherent in verbal discourse, expanding the possibilities of writing,
ceaselessly creating the new out of the old.” (Wollen, 4)
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In her work, Acker takes the

60
Specifically, one of the works that influenced Acker the most was the most extremely
experimental: The Third Mind, a collaborative work between Burroughs and Brion Gysin, which
used cut-ups and collages. No coincidence then that The Empire of the Senseless also includes
Arabic script and drawings in addition to the cut-up texts cutting into the narrative.
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Poundean maxim, “Make it New”
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to a new level: she doesn’t write something “new”
per se, for she claims that the concept of creativity/originality is a market-driven one: “I
suspect that the ideology of creativity started when the bourgeoisie –when they rose up in
all their splendor, as history books put it—made a capitalistic marketplace for books.” (in
Bodies of Work, 9)
Rather than participating in this capitalist marketplace or book industry, she takes
from old canonical texts (written by male authors) and reworks them, or makes them
newly her own. As she explains: “the world is always making itself. When you make
fiction, you dip into this process […] you can make but you don’t create. Only incredible
egotism that resulted from the belief in phallic centrism could have come up with this
notion of creativity.” (10) And by “making” and plagiarizing, she is already entering the
politics and aesthetics of a grotesque that displaces the center (or the “canonical” text).
Acker counters phallogocentrism with what I call her piratical or parasitical
grotesque: her writing is a constant search for freedom. As Cynthia Carr mentions in her
afterword to Bodies of Work: “The task in each novel was to work her way free. She
plagiarized simply to establish a relationship to the older text, as with a parent. Soon
whatever she stole became so unrecognizable it seems more accurate to say the original
texts were Ackerized.” (178) This “ackerization” (no coincidence perhaps that Acker
sounds a bit like hacker) brings about a parasitical relationship to the “original text” and a

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“I make up nothing: I am a reader and take notes on what I read. […] What is, simply as it is.
Of course I am interested in learning, in what I don’t know, understanding, and if this is the
“MAKE IT NEW” that Pound meant, then I subscribe to that tradition.” (Bodies, 13)
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transgression of a sense of authority and authorship: “Once you get rid of the idea of the
original artwork created by the unique artist, you are left with subjectivity, sexuality
(subjectivity’s sister), and the copy. […] Everything [Acker] wrote raised questions of
truth and fiction, property and theft, and the relations of power that determine value and
meaning.” (Dick, 111) It is also what Cixous terms éciture feminine in practice, for
through its cyclical, non-linear structure, through its relationship to sex, the body and
taboo, Acker demeans meaning, and puts the unthought/unthinkable/unthinking into
words. Thus, Acker’s work is doubly grotesque: not only does it subvert the
property/propriety of what is “proper” through taboo subject matter, the very structure of
her work also challenges property as copyright or originality. Her work is the epitome of
the grotesque supplément, to use Derrida’s figure for writing, for it is nothing if not a
work of “addition extérieure”(Derrida, 208). I call her aesthetics the parasitical
grotesque, for in it, to echo Ruskin’s terms, there is “parasitical sublimity” (Stones, 133).
Acker’s work displaces the center; it displaces the one-ness of meaning and
replaces it with a plurality, a polyvocality of meaning(s). As she writes, “Every
phenomenon, every act, is a text and all texts refer to all other texts. Meaning is a
network, not a centralized icon.” (in Bodies of Work, 83) The novel, a text that reflects,
subverts, and incorporates other texts into its grotesquely open body, is pure piracy—and
in it, the pirates themselves (i.e. the author as pirate and the many pirate characters who
populate her work) are always grotesque, marginalized figures as well.
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Moreover, as is the case with all grotesque aesthetics, that which is on the outside
becomes more relevant than that which is on the center or inside. That is, her parasitical
texts invade the “host” texts (Dickens, Pasolini, Twain, etc) and become in turn host texts
themselves (Great Expectations, My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empire of
The Senseless).
***
“Everything becomes something else. In blood and change my childhood began,”
declares Abhor-speaking-through-Thivai (6). And so begins, continues and ends the
novel itself: it exists through becoming; it takes place in blood and change. The presence
of blood and change is already grotesque, for, as Bakhtin claims, this “double, tense,
contradictory life lies [in] the power and realism of these [grotesque] images.” Blood is a
trope for the tension between self and other, self and world, for disease and its
propagation—it is the tension implied in the unceasing transformation and becoming of
Acker’s characters who “[c]onstantly rejected being for becoming.” (Wollen, 2)
“Becoming” is yet another essential element of Acker’s grotesque aesthetics; this is no
coincidence, given that Deleuze and Guattari very much influenced Acker’s work, theory
and politics. Moreover, Acker’s novel moves from an oedipal world to the imagination of
a post-oedipal world. According to her, the first part of this novel is “a description of the
society which is defined by the oedipal taboo.” (in Bodies, 12)
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62
Again, no coincidence that Thivai is an echo of Thebes, the setting for the oedipal myth.
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The two main characters in Empire both are and are not pirates and terrorists, the
“scum of the earth.” Named Abhor and Thivai, the two echo mythical places in literature
(Mount Abora and Thebes) and alternate narrating chapters. They also narrate through
each other, and other narrators, voices, and texts are interspersed throughout their
narratives as well. In the first part, titled “Elegy for the World of the Fathers,” Chapter 1
opens, most “appropriately,” with the title “The Rape by the Father.” In this chapter,
Abhor, who is “part robot, and part black” (3) speaks through Thivai about her childhood.
Abhor, like Haraway’s cyborg is “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and
organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (7). As cyborg,
throughout the novel she appears as “oppositional, utopian, and completely without
innocence” (Haraway, 9). And through her, as we shall see, there is a possibility for the
novel to transcend an “Oedipal calendar” (8) And her hybrid grotesque figure then opens
the possibility for a subversion of teleology.
Abhor the cyborg, then speaks through Thivai, and speaking through another
character already sets up a grotesque structure of framing and mirroring: as Acker writes,
“Mirror on mirror on mirror, is how language works.” (19) In this novel, there are thus
many-narrators-in-one; the storytelling structure used here, a mise-en-abyme, is as old as
Sheherezade in the Arabian Nights. Every time there is a new chapter, there is a
parenthetical statement below the chapter title letting the reader know (or rather
misleading us into believing) who speaks—Thivai or Abhor. But within these “speech
acts,” several other speakers come through. The dozens of speeches within speeches that
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result means that there is not a single, central narrator, but rather several different
narrators, each displacing the next in a grotesque re-enactment of marginalization.
The novel is, among many other things, a viral re-telling of Mark Twain’s The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; it also echoes other novels by Twain that tell a story
about one character that is narrated by another. The novel alludes to Huck Finn’s voyage
down the river and to the presence of abusive parents. (Like Pap in Huckleberry Finn, the
parental figures in this novel are, as in other Acker novels, questionable to say the least).
The gang represented by Abhor and Thivai are echoes or transformations of Tom
Sawyer’s gang of adventurous “criminals.” Also, like Twain’s novel, this text satirizes
attitudes of its time, and like Genet’s novels (which also greatly influenced Acker and
from which she also “steals” to make Empire), this novel is full of petty criminals,
thieves, rogues, confidence men, drunkards, whores, and pimps—all grotesque marginal
figures.
One such figure in the first chapter is a young boy, Alexander, who is in love with
Abhor’s grandmother. He is a pimp and also described as a traditional grotesque (part
human-part animal): “He looked like a shy fox; his eyes almost came together while a
thin mouth stretched from huge ear to floppy ear. This boy, almost as beautiful as a strand
of my grandmother’s cunt hair […]” was “as open as a wild animal. This was why
Alexander resembled a young fox whose I’s are permanently crossed.” (Empire, 4) Nana
and the boy, her pimp, are then described as “terrorists.” (4) Much like all the rest of the
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novel’s cast of grotesques, these “terrorists” will reappear throughout the novel under
various guises.
This opening chapter is full of grotesque imagery: the night of Alexander’s
execution is filled with “pink chair light green violet violent flesh” (6), reminding us of
one of Andy Warhol’s electric chair paintings. The execution takes place inside a prison
that is akin to Foucault’s panopticon, with walls that “reached up to the centers of god’s
eyes. If there are gods where there are poor people. Beneath the walls, the crippled and
the mentally crippled, the lonely, shuffled their huge feet.” (6) It is important to note that
monstrosity and poverty here are very different from Bakhtin’s generative Folk comedy:
we have here a much more sinister form of the grotesque. We are at the heart of what I
call the uncanny grotesque, which I link to Wolgang Kayser’s definition of the grotesque
as an “awareness that the familiar and apparently harmonious world is alienated under the
impact of abysmal forces, which break it up and shatter its coherence.” (37) In Empire,
the familiar world that is supposedly kept harmonious by forces such as the police breaks
apart and reveals itself to be terrifying: “[C]ops sit on monstrous black horses […and]
neither black beast nor human beast could break through the throng of human filth.” (6).
This apparition of human beasts will continue throughout the novel, as humans and
animals are constantly interspeciated as grotesque hybrids, much as they are in the hellish
visions of darkly grotesque painters such as Bosch and Brueghel.
The grotesque is also emphasized in this passage in a different way as the narrator
mentions we are in “one of the final nineteenth century revolts” (6) but then also
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mentions television. The time and setting of the novel are in this way abstracted and con-
fused; readers are placed squarely in that place “in which one does not know where one
is.” (Freud, 370) that is the grotesque according to Kayser, who echoes Freud’s definition
of the uncanny as pure uncertainty, “the grotesque is the estranged world […] it is our
world which ceases to be reliable.” (185) And so, the world we know (Detroit, Paris,
Algeria, etc), is completely estranged and unreliably uncanny in this novel. Grotesque.
Enacting uncanny repetition, the novel starts anew (though with a slight
difference in the repetition) in a section of the chapter called “Daddy.” Throughout the
novel, things are always becoming something else, as the narrator had announced from
the outset. Thus the novel is set in an indeterminate place of grotesque becoming—that is,
a place where “rock became sky” (7) and “haze resembled human nausea and then the
tops of the water, as if they were and there were waves, but there weren’t, were light. […]
The tops of the water were valueless jewels. In the distance the risen rock was haze. All
was hazy and resembled human nausea.” (7-8) Here high (jewels) and low (nausea) are
interconnected, bringing the passage closer to Bakhtin’s regenerative grotesque.
Moreover, haze, which will become a recurring trope throughout the novel, and could
also be seen as the figure for the diffusion of écriture féminine as defined by Cixous and
Irigaray and is not unconnected to Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of becoming-fog, as we
shall see. The narrator (Abhor through Thivai) further informs us that: “In the beginning,
there were no animals. That is, no wild animals. Oh, there were cats and dogs who are
somewhere between humans and real animals. The cats were so thin they looked like
knives. Predatory knives ran down the streets. Just like in Detroit. No human could walk
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on the street without blood covering her limbs.”(7) The simile “as if” then becomes fact:
things transform into other things, cats are in fact knives, grotesque and deadly. We are
given a concrete location—Detroit—but it is placed outside of time, because this is “the
beginning” when, of course there was no Detroit.
This strange, nightmarish genesis-place is populated by an almost cartoon-like
cast of characters: “There were several large black worms and their feet were white. They
crawled into the holes at the oceans floor’s bottom. In the full late sun, a burro had fallen
asleep. His large sleeping head lay next to a dog’s larger head. The bees were bigger than
horses.” (7) This re-telling of genesis is indeed a world of disproportion, of topsy turvy,
where size and the relationship of things as we know them have lost all meaning.
Everything is out of its “natural” order and proportion; everything is grotesque.
Abhor is born into this universe from a father who loves her and a mother who
hates her. Her father teaches Abhor how to write, how to inscribe her body onto the
world, how to “make:” “He taught me a final trick. He showed me how to insert a razor
blade into my wrist just for fun. Not for any other reason. Thus I learned how to approach
and understand nature, how to make gargantuan red flowers, like roses, blooming drops
of blood, so full and dripping the earth under them, my body, shook for hours afterwards.
During those afterhours, I fantasized my blood pouring outwards.” (9-10) Here, an act of
(self) destruction becomes, for the first time in the book, beautiful. Blood is likened to
blooming flowers – and not just any giant flowers, but gargantuan red roses, thus echoing
another aspect of the Bakhtinian grotesque.
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Blood comes back in a different guise soon thereafter. Raped by her father, Abhor
dreams that “the blood lying over the ocean in front of my eyes was light. The light by
which I could see. The fishing boats sink or stink.” (11) The absurd superimposition of
boats that sink or “stink” through a game of words creates a bit of humor in a serious
scene in which violence (blood) transforms into light and vision. In these two passages,
blood pours forth from the body, which, unlike the closed-off classical body, is
grotesque. Blood gushes into the world and is transformed into beauty, into roses and
light/vision.
In this same dream, Abhor becomes a bird that flies into the ocean, whereupon a
beam of light shoots up and awakens the city: “Angels sat on its head. Everything burst.
Carolled. There is only glory. Because I know there are angels and visions, there is
freedom. […] This is what the people said to the sky. ‘Now the mad bird has won. Now
even criminals can fly.’” (13) This mad bird that is Abhor echoes both Bataille’s bird-
man from the Lascaux caves, as well as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who is also bird-like.
Abhor is not just part robot/part black, she is always already marginal, a criminal abject
jettisoned from society. It is perhaps no coincidence that her becomings throughout the
novel include numerous animal-human hybrids, for, according to Deleuze and Guattari,
the politic of becoming-animal, “s’élabore dans des agencements qui ne sont ni ceux de
de la famille, ni ceux de la religion, ni ceux de l’Etat. Ils exprimeraient plutôt des groupes
minoritaires, ou opprimés, ou interdits, our évoltés, ou toujours en bordure des
institutions reconnues […]” (302). Abhor belongs precisely in the realm of such
becomings.
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Other creatures in the novel are in grotesque transformation as well. For example,
fish are sperm-like worms: “thousands of tiny fish were translucent and looked like
worms. They leapt, with their tiny sharp teeth, out of the water at me. The teeth bit
through the thin feathers into my flesh. From me the little teeth were red. One baby fish
leaped so high, he bit through my rotting teeth with his teeth. Then through my tongue
tip. Many fish tore my wings off of me out of hunger. […] My wings were more torn than
dishrags, they were sick, and the tongue was so torn it couldn’t speak.” (13) The use of a
mixed metaphor –wings that are torn dish rags–further extends the grotesque effect. This
passage is also a good example of Acker’s particular diction and syntax, which work to
further the effect of estrangement in her work.
Syntax is also used to accentuate an aesthetics of the grotesque in Empire.
Punctuation marks abound, creating small visual adornments: when Abhor’s father is
having sex with her, he exclaims: “I don’t even recognize my own body!!!...[…] My
tongue is fucking enormous!!! …feel it!!!... it’s reaching down to my waist!!!” (15) The
section continues on in this way, invaded by a multiplicity of exclamation marks and
ellipses. These grotesque markers are interruptions in both rhythm and narration. The
grotesque is also present here through disproportion: the father’s body is unrecognizable
to himself and oozing forth through his giant tongue, for “the grotesque body can thus be
effected by the exaggeration of its internal elements, the turning of the ‘inside out,’ the
display of interpenetration of the exterior and interior of the body.” (Stewart, On
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Longing, 105) In this moment, there is a further element of grotesque materialization and
degradation: Abhor becomes God to her father, and he claims he is fucking God.
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The father’s giant-tongue-as-language also becomes other, materializing into
another parasitic irruption of the grotesque: the narrator tells us that: “Lack of meaning
appeared as linguistic degradation.” (17) It is interesting to note the use of the word
“degradation,” which once again resembles Bakhtin’s usage. Furthermore, this degraded
language is derived from fragments of a “stolen” text in Spanish that Acker has erased
and incorporated. For example, “y . el c . . . se h . . . hombre. origen e. jeroglíficos e . . . y
m . . . Es e mas r . . . . para d. . . de l. . . comidas” (17) and so on. Here we have grotesque
polyvocality through the inclusion of “found” texts that are being used differently from
the way Sarduy uses them. Rather than incorporating these “found” texts as quotes,
Acker incorporates them as parasites that slowly invade the body of her own written text,
using them to put into question whether or not there ever was a text that could be
considered “hers” to begin with. It is interesting then to note that parasites literally appear
right below this dialogue as “vermin, fleas and crabs” (17). Also essential to this
parasitical presence and to the grotesque animal becomings of this chapter is the fact that
Abhor’s father does not reproduce or procreate; rather, he “propagates,” much like a virus
(9). The figure of contagion and propagation is essential to the grotesque becomings

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Throughout these passages, which are difficult at best, Acker maintains a great sense of humor.
For example, stating that when a man marries he becomes like “a bad actor acting the part of
President Reagan” (15) or Abhor’s grandmother, who lives in a red and black “clown study,”
confronting her father by asking “What’s this shit about you not letting my granddaughter fuck
for money? I mean, get married?”(16) These moments provide comic relief and also a
counterpoint to the violent tone, making room for (re)generative laughter.
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exemplified by Acker’s characters; as Deleuze and Guattari state, contagion “est à la fois
le peuplement animal et propagation du peuplement animal de l’homme.” (296)
While the entire first chapter deals with the degeneration and degradation of sex
as filth, through which the degeneration of language (underscored by the word “slut,”18)
comes about, in chapter 2, Thivai speaks, and sex and language that comes from a male
are already different. Thivai is a pirate (echoing Twain’s Huck, who becomes a sort of
pirate of the Mississippi river), and as mentioned earlier, pirates are essential figures of
the grotesque because they “transcend all norms” and laws and are marginal figures or
parasites of sorts. Their subjectivity is that of abject beings, for they are outside society;
that is, they constitute the outside for the subject and do not enjoy the status of a subject.
If for Kristeva, the abject is more a place than a subject, pirates as tropes (from, tropos, or
places) are necessarily abject: i.e. “what disturbs identity, system, order […] the in-
between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva, 4) As such, we can say that pirates are
grotesque as well.
The second chapter begins with “three pirates squatting on the deck just like fat
cunts or pigs.” (20) And who are these three “fat cunts” if not an echo of Macbeth’s three
bearded hags? Nothing in this novel is new, its contents are all familiar yet distorted,
another manifestation of the uncanny: that which is both heimisch (homely, familiar) and
unheimlisch (foreign, strange). Appropriation thus contributes to the uncanny, becoming
uncanny itself.
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Since pirates are appropriators and thieves, as I mentioned earlier, they are also an
essential figure for the writer herself. As Avital Ronell explains, “Ever dispossessed,
[Acker] would take from the works of others and claim them momentarily as her own.
The effect was to show the dispossession inherent in any text, no matter how familiar,
intact, or confidently signed by a prestigious signature. She ran with the wolves of
literary ownership.” (Ronell, 23) This quote is doubly interesting in its rhetoric for it
underscores Acker’s taking of something that is familiar to make it something else. It also
posits her as a wolf amongst other wolves, outlaws, pirates. The implication is thus that
the dispossessed, the grotesque, and the marginalized can create their own utopia through
transgression.
Thivai’s pirate ship could be read as just such a utopia; Fatty, one of the pirates,
humorously calls it “a philanthropic association.” The ship echoes Schlaraffenland or
Land of Cockaigne (the Eden of all excess), which is always a place of carnivalesque
grotesque.
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There, pirates find themselves “gnawing and gorging themselves on
Nestlé’s almonds, Cadbury chocolate flakes, barbequed tortilla chips, green beans,
toffeed vanilla, Lucozade, and Mars bars. They guzzled down can after can of swill.” (21)
There are also “showers of Coca-Cola mixed with beer.” (22) This pirate ship or “shit” is
a floating land of surfeit—not just of food ingestion, but also of sex (especially sodomy).
Here, piracy appears once more as a form of the grotesque; piracy is “anarchic” and “in

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One of the many representations of this in painting is Brueghel The Elder’s Schlarraffenland.
Brueghel’s work has been one of the prime historical examples of the grotesque in painting.
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anarchic times, when anyone could become any one and thing, corsairs, free enterprisers
roamed everywhere more and more…” (26) Moreover, piracy (and later terrorism) also
includes “the sailors the soldiers the poor people the disenfranchised the sexually
different [who] waged wars on land and sea […] War, you mirror of our sexuality.” (26)
It is a community of the marginal(ized); it is, therefore, a wayside community. It is also a
community of warriors whose war is a reflection of sexuality—i.e. of the struggles with
sex, pornography, homosexuality and eros in general that are present throughout the
novel.
At a later point in the chapter, when Thivai and Abhor meet, she takes him to Dr.
Schreber, who is described as “fat and ugly” and who is a sort of psychoanalyst (named
after one of Freud’s patients), even though he humorously claims that psychoanalysis is
passé. To cure Thivai from his “disease” or “damage,” he wants to “inject a certain
enzyme into [his] bloodstream and then enable [him] to receive a full blood transfusion.”
(32) This injection, as supplément, is a figure not only for drugs (antidotes), but also for
contamination (always an element of the grotesque) and for the penetration of open
bodies, something that happens constantly throughout the novel. The enzyme is also a
microscopic figure for the parasitical nature of the entire novel; that is, a “foreign” or
marginal body that enters the “main” body (of the text, the stolen text) and
transforms/cures it.
Schreber subsequently calls Thivai a flea; he too is becoming a parasite. And
Thivai refers to his own tail, which drags through unknown territory as he becomes
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animal. Thus “I whoever I was, was going to be a construct,” he declares (33). As
construct, he is a grotesque hybrid character—part something and part something else: an
artifice. And as artifice, he will undergo different voices and transformations throughout
the novel. As Harryman points out, “Thivai, a principal figure in Empire of the Senseless,
is, for instance, at different points a vessel through which the novel in Empire pours
Abhor’s biography, a bi-gendered monster, a hooligan or Tom Sawyer’s replacement, the
name of modern day Thebes, a figure that performs the same function as a character in
Neuromancer, the narratological voice of William Burroughs—and well, one could go
on, which is one of the traps Acker’s novels lay for anyone who tries to write about
them.” (Harryman, “Acker Unformed,” 36). To trace Thivai’s transformations is indeed
like tracing lines in the desert sand, they are so many and so random that analyzing them
or even keeping track of them seems almost futile, albeit important. The same goes for
Abhor, who, as was mentioned earlier is a cyborg (a contemporary form of the
grotesque):
A transparent cast ran from her knee to a few millimeters below her
crotch, the skin mottled by blue purple and green patches which looked
like bruises but weren’t. Black spots on the nails, fingers and toe shaded
into gold. Eight derms, each a different colour size and form, ran in a neat
line down her right wrist and down the vein of her right upper thigh. A
transdermal unit, separated from her body, connected to the input trodes
under the cast by means of thin red leads. A construct. (34)
The description of Abhor as cyborg is further made grotesque by the fact that she is not
simply a perfect, shining machine (as such figures often seem to be). Instead, she
alternates between putrefaction (mottled skin) and beauty (shaded into gold). Here, as we
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enter the terrain of the medical (derms, transdermal unit etc), we enter a new form of the
grotesque as science-fiction (a hybrid genre in and of itself).
This leads to the revelation of the text as construct and cut-in, done by the Big
boss, also a construct: “and her name’s Kathy” (34). Thus as radical depropriation, as cut-
in, as hack, the text is a Frankenstein-like creation, a monster. “Kathy” is both Dr.
Frankenstein and a construct herself: the construct of a narrator. As the characters
mention this, a “pulsing red then black cursor crept through the outline of the doorway.”
(34) The “reality” of the computer (on which the author might be typing and creating
these characters) bleeds into the “reality” of the narration which is open and porous, itself
a grotesque. At this moment, descriptions become particularly uncanny and bizarre. For
example: “[T]he road […] had been straight like neat incisions into the open body of the
city. Poverty was writhing in pink. I had watched, here and there a machine glide by,
bound by fog and grey.” (34) This strangeness moves from of the uncanny of science
fiction into that of cyberpunk, another genre that enters the construct of the novel itself.
“In such a world which was non-reality, terrorism made a lot of sense.” (35)
One such terrorist, Smiley, works in a record shop. He is “a boy, or rather, a skull,
whose teeth were pointed red, as if skulls can eat meat […]” (35) This skull character, is
a new figure in the grotesque cast of characters: the figure of laughing death. He is also a
“serious,” politically involved character, and through him, Acker inserts some more
found text: “Among the American international corporations the practice of setting up
mixed affiliates is most widespread in chemicals and petrochemicals […] Du Pont and
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Union Carbide, Goodyear and Uniroyal, Exxon and Kaiser, for example, organize the
supply of semi-finished products from overseas enterprises to others on a wide scale, gain
access to sources of raw…” (35) Thivai interrupts Smiley’s tirade, which seems straight
out of a television infomercial on the petrochemical industry, and thus the interruption of
a different register in the novel is in turn interrupted. “Their talk or rhetoric, was blab:
they didn’t care who heard them; they would happily explain anything to the tiny parrots
who shitted on the record discs as they flew around […]” (36)
Here again, the “high” register of this rhetoric (blab) is brought down to earth by
Thivai, who doesn’t take this talk seriously. Just then, birds are reintroduced, transformed
this time into tiny parrots who shit on everything. The proliferation of birds in this novel
is another interesting similarity with Sarduy: here birds are the figures for freedom, for
the plume that is writing, for the song that is writing, for the singer who is the author
shitting on the world of blab who is becoming bird (or rat, or wolf, as Ronnel mentioned
earlier). Deleuze and Guattari associate just such instances of becoming in writing with
the act of magic or witchcraft (witches are also always marginal, grotesque figures): “Si
l’écrivain est un sorcier, c’est parce-qu’écrire est un devenir, écrire est traversé d’étranges
devenirs qui ne sont pas des devenirs-écrivain, mais des devenirs-rat, des devenir-insecte,
des devenir-loup, etc.” (293)
The narration continues as the Moderns, the terrorist organization to which
Smiley belongs, hack into the CIA’s computer. The action ends in white noise, war
ensues, and missiles “swam like dolphins.” (37) Here, even the horror of warfare is
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momentarily paired with beauty, ending in a grotesque image. As the “world” falls apart
around him, Abhor finds the code that reads, “GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND
IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.”
(38) Through the figure of cannibalism (already grotesque), one is shown as becoming
free from meaning (and therefore from the phallocentric institutions that hold power) by
eating one’s mind (and therefore becoming stupid): “[Stupidity] is at once unassailable
and the object of terrific violence, which is why it drew Kathy’s fire—her signifier.”
(Ronell, 22) This notion of the end of the mind echoes Acker’s desire to counter a certain
kind of sense-making and constraining language with the senselessness of taboo. The
constraints of meaning, not least the constraints of the political discourse that creates
meaning, are being transgressed throughout the narrative of The Empire of the Senseless
(hence the title). This is the liberation that the aesthetics of the grotesque bring from their
marginality: that which has been deprived of meaning (and importance) by the center can
now find freedom in this supposed meaninglessness. The mind no longer matters; what
exists is the body: “Language, if it is not nihilism or media blab, is the body; with such
language lies are not possible.” (Bodies of Work, 12) For Acker, truth can be found in the
language that is the body, and in languages inscribed through and on the body. (The
tattoo, as we shall see, is an essential form of this.) After the code has been found, the
body comes forth: “Since the world has disappeared: rather than objects, there exists a
smoldering within time where and when subject meets object. This voluptuousness of
your thighs. Odours seeping out of cunt juice and semen.” (39) From death and
destruction (of the mind, of the upper part of the body) comes rebirth. And within this
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sense of dark grotesque can also be found a carnivalesque moment of affirmation—
rebirth through the body, one that oozes its essence through voluptuous thighs, through
sex and its liquids.
Abhor appears to be dead and, in despair, Thivai turns for help to a character
called Mommy, another terrorist who is a New York art dealer. (Here once again the
context of the novel, which happens at the height of the eighties art bubble in Manhattan,
comes through once again.) The art dealer has a supplier, also known as “burglar,” who is
a rat called Ratso. Rats proliferate throughout the novel, appearing under different lights
and guises, sometimes violent and abject, sometimes friendly, sometimes cunning:
Since rats are very intelligent, Ratso has a craving for art objects. The rat
craves art. His latest work-of-art, his newest find, find-and-keep so-to-
speak is a head. Not any head. It’s a dead head and death is done up in
pearls. Despite the obvious value of this work of art, its humanity, not
being a humanist, I advised Ratso to get rid of it. (40)
This passage is grotesque on many levels: firstly, because of the presence of a human-
animal hybrid, Ratso, then also in words that are becoming, through hyphenation,
grotesque hybrids of addition upon addition. Finally, the presence of death as a jeweled
head serves as fuel for the “degraded” punning that ensues when a rich man, also called
“A gulag […] a block, a dunderhead, a lump of cement, a lobotomized mongoloid” (40)
—(here the agglutination and accumulation of names for the man creates both humor and
horror in what Susan Stewart describes as a “hallucination of detail”)—comes to buy an
art object from Mommy: “The weight-lifter carefully explained he had come for his head.
I explained I don’t give head. He explained he thought I might be able to give it to him.”
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(40) So this double-entendre, along with the figure of the jeweled death creates a sort of
Bakhtinian moment of degraded folk humor. After this exchange, Thivai returns home to
find that his lover-sister (incest is another recurring taboo), Abhor, is not dead, but rather
has become a red piece of meat on St Valentine’s day.
The third chapter, titled “In Honor of the Arabs” (45) begins with Arabic script
that goes from left to right, following the English text (almost as if they were subtitles of
one another).
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In this chapter, Abhor speaks. She has arrived in Algeria (where Dr.
Schreber now lives) and speaks in verse, another genre that enters the “main” prose
narration. She relates her “memories” and “personal history” in numbered sections that
are (misleadingly) titled as such. In them, she describes remembering Thivai as “the
scarlet pigeon nibbling at the blood seeping out of my cunt.” (48) This further
metamorphosis of Thivai is a reappearance of the bird-human grotesque in the novel. As
with other sections of the novel, where Paris is New York and Detroit is a Jurassic
landscape, here, Algeria is and isn’t Algeria per se, it’s “a cunt” (48) as well as a
grotesque amalgamation of places. For example, the visitor mentions an address on

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As one of Acker’s greatest influences was Burroughs, it could possible that Acker’s choice of
setting parts of the novel in Algeria, and her choice of having Arabs in this novel, in addition to
being a political choice about radical otherness, could also be linked to Naked Lunch, where the
“Interzone” is much like Tangiers, where Burroughs wrote most of that book. Algeria is also a
recurring theme in Acker’s work (cf. Blood and Guts in High School, for example).
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Küchuk Gülhane Djaddesi, which is Turkish, though later there is a mention of Persian
(53).
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Abhor goes to the bazaar where a “shriveled cashew nut” (an old man, who
grotesquely becomes a nut, much as, later in the novel, an old woman is “an old dish who
was a bit cracked” 101) appears, addresses Abhor, and takes her down to an old
alleyway: “[I]n this alleyway of so many centuries piled on so many centuries, I was
time-less, immortal. I, the opposite of time, had become a child, innocent […] The old
cashew nut could do with me what he liked, in this alley. […] I didn’t know so I didn’t
regret this architectural degradation […]” (49-50) Here, then, degradation—sex with the
cashew nut (a humorous and perverse image in itself— is degradation that becomes
architectural, that is connected to the limestone of the alleyway and by extension to
Abhor’s dérive through memory and childhood. This becoming timeless, becoming the
opposite of time, places her in direct contrast with the old cashew nut, and therefore, as
death and childhood coupling, they become a singular figure for the grotesque body,
which in turn “may become a primary highly-charged intersection of social and political
forces, a sort of intensifier and displacer in the making of identity.” (Stallybrass and
White, 25)

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Turkish script (which is roman), and language is, of course separate from Persian and Arabic,
and though Arabic and Persian share the same script, the languages are different. And although
Algerians speak Arabic and not Persian, it is unclear which one of the two languages Acker uses
in her textual cut-ins of “Arabic” script.
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This combination of the life/death grotesque ambivalence and displacement of
identity comes to a head when Abhor, who has been walking through the alleyways of
her childhood with Baudelaire in the Monge section of Paris and rowing on a small
rowboat, almost like Rimbaud, then picks up the phone and is named death: “‘That’s not
my name.’ Alive I protested. ‘It’s your code […] For the living, winter is death.’”(52)
This paradoxical logic brings us once more to the world-upside-down (or WUD, as
Stallybrass and White call it) of this novel: if, for the living, winter is death, logic has it
that for death, winter would be life. However, all of this takes place in Algeria, which is
constantly referred to as hot, so everything is reduced to senselessness.
The section of this chapter titled “Chinese Bosses Never Die” addresses, parodies
and turns Orientalism on its head. The inclusion of what could be read as present-day
ornaments, Arabesques and Chinoiseries, exemplifies a grotesque aesthetics since, as
Kayser explains, “the meaning of the word [Arabesques] was somewhat extended by its
application to certain Chinoiseries, which the eighteenth century related to the grotesque
because of the fusion of the spheres, the monstrous nature of ingredients, and the
subversion of order and proportion that characterizes them.” (29)
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The chapter contains

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It is significant to note that the definition that the grotesque no longer as a quality of painting
specifically but as a literary one, yet still linked to the arabesque, stems from Walter Scott, when
he is describing the grotesque in E.T.A. Hoffman for the Foreign Review, in 1827: “In fact, the
grotesque in his compositions partly resembles the arabesque in painting, in which are introduced
the most strange and complicated monsters […] dazzling the beholder as it were by the unbound
fertility of the author’s imagination, and sating it by the rich contrast of all the varieties of shape
and colouring, while there is in reality nothing to satisfy the understanding or inform the
judgment.” (74) This disinformation of judgment, which Scott views negatively, is of course one
of the most vital aspects of Acker’s novel but also of Sarduy’s and Margolles’s works.
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several passages in Arabic script (also, as I mentioned, confused with Persian, 53). They
are signs, but also seem to be graffiti found on the street. They interrupt the dialogue
between Abhor and Thivai, providing a nonsensical subtext. For example, after the
Arabic sentence, there is a parenthetical “translation” (“Ali is pretty”), followed by
dialogue—“I want to kill you”—then more Arabic (“Anarchy always kills a kid off”) and
dialogue: “I want to kill” and so on (54). This creates a sense of comic confusion and
misunderstanding. When the Arabic “graffiti” becomes more and more lewd (“Malignant
lunatic lust is wonderful”), it also becomes an absurd parody of “Western” perceptions of
otherness: “The natives fuck like animals” etc. (54) These irruptions also work as forms
of appropriated/appropriating parasitical narrative, or marginalia that contributes to my
reading of Acker’s aesthetics of the grotesque. They are a different manifestation of what
Ruskin has called Arabesques (which, as we have seen, are part of the grotesque as
well).
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The depropriated text that follows is a modified version of Yukio Mishima’s
seppuku. However, whereas Mishima commited ritual suicide, the officer here commits
suicide, then tells his orderly that he can take possession of his corpse, the result of which
is that the orderly eats the officer’s body. This Orientalist satire recalls Acker’s title for
the novel, Empire of the Senseless, which echoes another Japanese story: that of Nagisa
Oshima’s 1976 masterpiece film, Ai no Korīda (translated to French as L’ Empire des

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Another nineteenth century link between the notions of grotesque and arabesque is also present
in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque as well as in Goethe’s Von
Arabesken, which describes Raphael’s grotesque frescoes in the Papal Loggias.
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sens), a story that was likewise about love, passion, power, eroticism, and death. This is
no coincidence; Abhor later mentions that “I remembered it’s now a cliché that the West
is going Japanese. ‘A double suicide?’[…]” (69) This alludes once again to the film, in
which both lovers die. (In Acker’s novel, however, the genders are inverted.) This
jumbling together of everything that is “oriental” serves the purpose of critiquing the
Western point of view vis-à-vis the supposed “margins.” This critique of Western vs.
Oriental is made even more clear when, following the next “interruption”—and irruption
or rather “cut-in” of Arabic—Abhor mentions ancient Greek mythology (the basis of all
“Western” thought, which is placed here to be evidenced as not-so “Western” after all.
(55)
“My body is open to all people,” (53) Abhor declares in an ultimate Bakhtinian
moment of bodily grotesquery. Now that the mother— who, according to Kristeva, is the
controller and closer-off of body, where “maternal authority is the trustee of that mapping
of the self’s clean and proper body” (Kristeva, 73)—is dead, the body opens and is open
to the other. But then, in an ultimate irreverence, this openness isn’t quite the folk
regeneration in community expected. Rather, it becomes a degenerate form of
“democratic capitalism” exchanged in blood (56).
Abhor, who wants a new codeword that isn’t death calls up the boss, now called
Wu Tao-tzu and speaks to him in Arabic—again a cut-in of further Orientalism where the
“Orient” is a grotesque composite. This moment where speech is, for the Western/English
reader, rendered illegible and therefore senselessness is also grotesque. That is, it is
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unseen (or unreadable). Abhor then decides to go to Berne, which is the “Hollywood set
for Death.” Her character adapts to this as another grotesque bird hybrid appears and
there is a further becoming-inorganic (sheet, pencil): “[D]ark came down on my eyes.
The wings of a bird or a sheet. My spine was a sharp pencil piercing into nothing like
herpes gone mad.” (58). Nevertheless, in the mode of Bakhtinian grotesque, rebirth
comes from this death; and so the sub-section ends with “Start again from nowhere: dead
heart.” (58)
In this grotesque interpenetration of the inside and outside of the body, of the
public and the private, of thoughts and the world, Death tells Abhor: “You’ve got inside
and outside mixed up. You’re all mixed up.” In other words, she is the ultimate
grotesque: not only is she part-human and part-robot, both black and a woman—in other
words, multiply marginalized from the “normal” subject—she has also confused the
limits of inside and outside. She then murders her boss/doctor/father-figure, Dr. Schreber.
The chapter ends on senselessness again, and on a critique of the Western world: after
announcing factually that there is gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes or AIDS in Western Europe
and Africa and reflecting on her murder of Dr. Schreber, Abhor declares “To me it was
all Chinese. I once tried to learn Chinese, but it was too difficult.” (60) This leaves her
(and us, the readers) in a place of nothing, of supidity, senselessness.
Chapter Five is titled “Let the Algerians Take Over Paris,” and Abhor speaks
again. This is an inverse (and therefore grotesque) moment of colonization, where the
colonized take over the metropolis. Abhor finds herself “in a place which I neither knew
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nor found alien.” (63) This is the ultimate uncanny, unheimlisch space, for it is familiar
and yet utterly unknown: “[S]everal contradictory feelings are aroused by the grotesque;
we smile at the deformations but are appalled by the horrible and monstrous elements as
such. The basic feeling, however […] is one of surprise and horror, an agonizing fear in
the presence of a world which breaks apart and remains inaccessible.” (Kayser, 31) The
destruction of the (oedipal) world brings about the unknown and the unfamiliar. The
feelings of fear that Kayser associates with the grotesque speak to the fact that the
grotesque, in Acker as in certain writers and artists before her (though not the ones
Bakhtin is concerned with), has elements of truth, though no verisimilitude.
Even though an uncanny feeling of strangeness exists throughout the work, this is
the chapter where these feelings are materialized into the body in a very Bakhtinian way,
for this chapter is set at a moment in time when people have stopped having sex: “[M]ost
sexual activity now caused physical illness and even death,” Acker writes (another
reference to AIDS and disease). So “in those old days, those days of death, of a political
turn towards the right-wing when the only saviours seemed to be anything and anyone
who was not white… it seemed to be that the body, the material, must matter.” (64) It is
at this crucial political moment of AIDS and Reaganism that the grotesque body comes
forth in its celebration of life and resistance
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. As Bakhtin asserts, grotesque realism is
related to “moments of crisis, of breaking points in the cycle of nature or in the life of

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Here, Acker is very aware of how sex and history are bound up together, as when Angela
Carter declares that “[…] Our flesh arrives to us out of history, like everything else does. We
may believe that we fuck stripped of social artifice; in bed we even feel we touch the bedrock of
human nature itself. But we are deceived.” (Sadeian Woman, 9)
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society and man.” (9) Here, history has disturbed identity once more, and in fact identity
(of the characters, of the author, of the text as original) in Acker’s novels is no
longer/ever possible. What comes forth instead is sex and writing. As Barrett Watten
explains:
Acker’s interest in literary pastiche and repetition begins here: with the
disturbance of identity occasioned by a historical event. In the event,
identity is dissociated and revealed; Acker continues to write the event.
More precisely, Acker continues to look at writing as the dissolution of an
event within a structure that can heal it. (Watten, 73)
Thus Abhor finds in confusion a “cure” or antidote for this traumatic event: “I’ve never
been sure what parts of my body have to do with what parts of my body, including my
mind heart and cunt.” (81) Abhor’s body is a grotesque mix-up of low and high, it is
openness and porosity. And for this reason, Abhor celebrates life and degradation through
sex. “My sexuality was the crossroads not only of my mind and body but of my life and
death. My sexuality was ecstasy.” (65)
Sexuality and abjection also come through as regenerative grotesque surfeit, for
Abhor claims, “I would kill the city of perfection. My tears were the tears of whores. I
would have Mary Magdalene tear Virgin Mary’s flesh to shreds. My cunt juice and piss,
red, would drop out of her eyes. I who am only gentle.” (65) In this debasement of the
high and holy, specific materialization takes place through bodily fluids dropping out of
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the virgin’s eyes, an grotesque moment of porosity and openness, of a strange generosity
even in destruction.
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As mentioned before, resistance in Acker’s work takes place through grotesque
language, through taboo; it derives from marginalization and oppression. This is the
resistance of a new language of senselessness, of the beyond-sense, of the body which
Acker strives for at every turn:
Languages of wonder, not of judgement. The eye (I) is continuously
seeing new phenomena, for, like sailors, we travel through the world,
through our selves, through worlds. […] Above all: the languages of
intensity. Since the body’s, our, end isn’t transcendence but excrement, the
life of the body exists as pure intensity. The sexual and emotive languages.
[…] Let these be the languages […]: to scream, to forget, to do anything
except reduce radical difference, through representation, to identity,
singularity calculable and controllable. (92)
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Thus identity is shattered and out of control; it is not identity but plurality (and it’s no
wonder then that her characters are constantly shape-shifting). The pages of this novel are
filled with images of the body as pure intensity, languages of the body transcoded as
excretion and excess.

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And soon after, there is a reversal of the word made flesh with a chair as flesh: chair in French
is flesh (66). The objectification of flesh through the chair (the object). This brief moment, this
brief reflection on transformative grotesque language and materialization—of one thing becoming
another—is also later taken up and echoed by French-Norwegian poet Caroline Bergvall in her
piece Flèsh à Coeur (2000), which is partly dedicated to Kathy Acker.
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The declarations Acker makes here in relation to language were specifically written in the
context of the language of art criticism, but these are the kinds of languages she strives for and
uses and works with in every one of her novels.
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In this novel, Acker also presents another link between the languages of
excrement and intensity and transformation: despite the inability to speak, despite having
been silenced, action and violence pour forth through the language of the (other/Algerian)
body through revolution: “Though the whites had cut out their tongues, though they had
neither been allowed nor been able to speak for themselves even as children, though only
drool and vomit had ever dropped out of their mouths: from out of these mouths of these
old women whose cunts were now caves, the banners of war emerged.” (68) In a very
Bakhtinean moment, war, resistance, and revolution stem from mouths equated with
vaginas, which are in turn figured as caves. We are situated squarely in the land of the
grotto-esque.
The closed body (what Bakhtin calls the “classical body”) has “closed down
shop.” Algerians are now free from the white men that once ruled the earth with slavery
ships. This marks the end of the closed and controlled body (of slavery, of identity-
reduced-to-one): “No longer will you work in our muscles and our nerves creating herpes
and AIDS, by doing so controlling all union, one and forever: being indivisible and
narcissistic to the point of fascism, you have now closed down shop.” (71) It has reached
the point of entropy. The novel therefore continues with the breaking point moment of
the grotesque nothing that is pure possibility (and sex), the moment of carnival: “Death is
on holiday! This nothing society this nothing, being every possibility, heralds total
carnival!” (71) Thus from the destruction of the closed-off and controlled spurts forth
(through blood) openness, rebellion, revolution.
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At this moment, “the Algerians, in their carnivals, embraced nonsense, such as
Voodoo and noise.” (73) This purposefully absurd statement is comic in its enactment of
carnivalesque confusion and nonsense: the bodies and subjectivity of Algerians are
linked, no in fact are the same as the bodies of slaves, of Haitians (they are a trope for
oppressed and marginalized people, for terrorists, for pirates and artists, as we shall
further see). And this revolution also happens in a grotesquely hazy indeterminate time in
the future, where Algerians and blacks must carry “a computerized identity card” (75)
and in the past, for the leader is Mackandal (François Mackandal, the Haitian
revolutionary who died in 1758). The inclusion of this historical figure, a master
poisoner, also allows for an interesting reversal of the grotesque body: as all the whites
are poisoned by their Algerian slaves, it is now the white “body that is deserting the
body” through “nausea; vomiting; diarrhoea.” (77)
“We looked at Paris which was now a third world.” (82) Thus the city becomes
the carnivalesque and grotesque space of revolution where things that pertain to the lower
bodily stratum abound and overflow:
Pale blue and pink condom boxes cluttered up the brown river. Diseased
and non-diseased sperm flowed down the Champs-Elysées. Empty needles
lay under bushes north of the Ted Lapidus store on the Rue du Four.
Drunk with animal blood and whatever else they had been pouring into
their mouths, these sailors, black white and other, who couldn’t speak a
word of French, began breaking into shops […]. (78)
In such a grotesque city, “death and life are fucking each other […] The ghoul was right
that in this Paris death and life were fucking. […] In Paris, death smelled like life and
vice-versa, especially in human beings.” (82)
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There is much grotesque crossing-over and regeneration in this section: “Bridge is
escape pod, lifeboat. Bridge of life to death. Vice-versa.” (83) This bridge is a line of
escape, a zone of indeterminacy which is itself grotesque in that it brings together life and
death, and therefore change. Thus Paris becomes desert sand. Becomes Algeria. (85) At
the end of this chapter, which ends the entire section dedicated to the oedipal taboo,
Abhor and Thivai decide to get tattooed with roses that are “carved” into their backs.
These tattoos become yet another zone of grotesque indeterminacy where the world
comes into contact with the open body, and where the parts of the body that “should
remain hidden” to use Freud’s words, become exposed re-represented (roses throughout
the novel are equated with vaginas).
“Alone,” the second section of the novel begins with a chapter titled “Child Sex.”
Here Acker explains that she “tried to describe a society not defined by the oedipal taboo.
That is, by phallic centricity […] some of my texts for this section were ones by Jean
Genet and Pierre Guyotat […] I thought, as I wrote this section, that today, only the
Muslim world resists. […] I thought for Westerners today, for us, the other is now
Muslim. In my book, when the Algerians take over Paris, I have a society not defined by
the oedipal taboo.” (Bodies, 12)
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The images in this opening chapter are very much
grotesque hybrids, but not dark ones, as some of the images from past sections have been.
Here, a “ray of sun, like a pigeon, walk[s] up and down the tiles…” (89) The simile here

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It is interesting to note Acker had observed this in 1988 already, and this is perhaps even more
true today, in a post-9/11 world.
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hews closer Renaissance notions of the grotesque, which mixes up images of two
different things from nature into a hybrid creation. A young woman sleeping is described
as having legs that are “two pillars of fat” Again we have a grotesque mixture of
inorganic (architectural columns or pillars) with the organic (fat). The two legs are then
described as having “chafed each other into a heat that resembles the sun’s.” (89)
Something that is grotesque in its excess (of fatness) becomes cosmic, grandiose and
regenerating in a very Bakhtinean moment.
Although Thivai speaks in this chapter, the first “story” is about Audry, Abhor’s
sister, who is in bed with St. Bubu. Their touching of one another activates a grotesque
moment of transformation, of becoming-animal: “The hand discovered a small breast.
Touched it. Held the animal. It awoke it.” (90) This same kind of transformation and
liberation through debasement is declared when Audry says: “We’re gonna be free, Bubu,
when we shit on [our dead heart], on ourselves.” Like the eating of the mind in the prior
section, this statement is a key to the entire grotesquerie of Empire of the Senseless: the
novel seeks freedom through the most radical debasement of the body, the self, and the
mind—that is, through the most radical and eschatological transgression (shitting on
one’s heart, on one’s self). This story also provides a mirroring and doubling (and thus
grotesque) structure wherein the “relationship” (if one can call it that) between Audry and
St. Bubu mirrors that of Abhor and Thivai. The narratives here feed off one another and
become yet another plagiarism within a plagiarism—a representation of the parasitical
structure of the novel. These characters live “in the section of Paris of the rats” (93) in a
novel in which rats appear as Deleuzean figures of becoming-plague.
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Thivai reappears here as well, and while he is having sex with a girl-whore and a
Dinosaur stuffed animal, he declares that “we must use force to annihilate erase eradicate
terminate destroy slaughter slay nullify neutralize break down get rid of obliterate move
out destruct end all the representations which exist for purposes other than enjoyment.”
(94-95) This statement doubly echoes Sarduy’s notion of (textual/sexual) jouissance;
first, because it provokes enjoyment and pleasure through the grotesque excess of
language and synonyms; and secondly, because the declaration is itself a sort of
manifesto about what the novel purports to do through the radical excesses it portrays.
Thivai continues, “Ridicule’ll be our best tool.” (95) The aesthetics of the grotesque (and
the possibility for radical change inherent therein) are ever present in the novel through
comedy as ridicule and absurd humor—and through sex. As with Audry and St. Bubu,
sex here is the catalyst for change. After making this declaration, Thivai has sex with the
whore, and she is herself transformed into a grotesque hybrid: “As her head rose out of
the white fur, her mouth opened: monstrous scarlet. Tiny white shells appeared in that
monster sea. ‘My little dead shark. Better than a dead fish.’ I whispered to her while I
fucked her in the asshole.” (95) Here, the whore is part-human, part-animal, part ocean
and seashell. Like all grotesque bodies, her body contains multitudes. No wonder then
that her vagina turns into an abundance of petals, which Thivai turns back so that “the
middle, which was becoming her, opened towards the world. Her physical center was too
sensitive to be touched. It revealed itself to every part that was outside it. Was raw, was
pollen, was touching everything and then wanting to touch nothing.” (97) The body here
is blurry-edged, ambiguous and hybrid: it is part flower, but also becoming
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imperceptible, becoming pollen, open to the world as revelation. It is the “unfinished and
open body (dying, bringing forth, and being born) [and it] is not separated from the world
by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects.”
(Bakhtin, 27)
In a meta-fictional moment, Thivai mentions that “reality must simultaneously be
ordered and chaotic or simultaneously knowable and unknowable by humans.” (102-103)
This passage comments on the way Empire is structured: that is, it describes simultaneous
comprehensibility and incomprehensibility. For example, soon after this scene, a realist
description of a whore finishing up her work for the evening is immediately followed by
a nonsensical science fictional image of “cockroaches, who had become Kamakaze pilots
in their frenzy for Jap fashions, humanoid, were banging themselves to smithereens
against blue windows.” (103) This simultaneity of order and chaos through possible and
impossible things makes Ackers novel absurd, a reflection of the world that surrounds
her. As the narrator claims, “in an unreasonable world, reason isn’t reasonable.” (169)
Empire is a scathing critique, but one that never lacks humor, even in its moments of total
debasement and abjection. Perhaps this is why, a few pages later, Carnival begins. With it
comes even more transformation—the whores, who “squawked like the parrots of New
Orleans,” are transformed into birds. (105)
In the chapter that follows, the recurring image is that of fog “as thick as left-over
sperm”; and again, “Fog hides everything like sperm.” (126) This is again a grotesquely
hybrid image that also emphasizes pollution, contagion, and propagation; sperm and fog
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are equated in a Deleuzean moment of becoming molecular, of becoming imperceptible.
The images also underscore the virus-like quality of Acker’s narrative. Another one of
the leitmotivs in this section is that of the fortune-teller and the dirty cards: first Abhor
encounters the Crag, a female fortune teller; then Agone, the sailor (Abhor’s male-mirror
double, or foil, in this chapter) enters the tattoo parlor where the tattoo artist is also a
fortune-teller/fortune-maker. The tattoo artist as fortune teller/maker (as a figure for the
artist/the author/the criminal) underscores this key section of the novel, for the tattoo is a
symbol for writing (and the novel is dedicated to Acker’s tattooist). As the narrator
explains, “In Tahitian, writing is ‘ta-tau’; the Tahitians write directly on human flesh.”
(130) The Tattoo is thus marked as the ambiguous border-zone of the grotesque body:
one with unclear delimitations between inside and outside. The tattoo, as mentioned
earlier regarding Sarduy, is at once a miniature figure for the world and an inscription of
the world onto the body; in its dis-proportion, it is in itself a grotesque figure. In this
novel, the tattoo also serves as a marker of marginalized tribes (ones that are either
chosen or born into): i.e. criminals, heretics etc. (130) and is therefore grotesque in that
sense as well.
Structurally or formally speaking, the tattoo appears to be another of the
irruptions or cut-ins of grotesquery that can be found throughout the novel. In addition to
the written text of the novel itself, tattoos appear in several drawings that seem to
illustrate—and therefore seem to be marginal additions or suppléments to—the writing.
However, they are perhaps as central to the novel as the narrative itself. The first
illustrative “tattoo” is a skull with roses and an inscription on an unfurled scroll that reads
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“MY FAMILY FORTUNE.” (This corresponds to the first, or “oedipal,” section). The
second tattoo, which corresponds to the second part of the novel, is a Corsair or pirate
ship, floating in fog or waves or seaweed that take the form of dragon (or is everything at
the same time) with an inscription reading “THE DEEP.” Both could be said to be more
traditional “Western”-style sailor tattoos. The third tattoo or illustration, corresponding to
the third section of the book, is a pair of carps (similar to one that Acker had inscribed on
her back) in more traditional Japanese style, with the inscription “DEAD FISH FUCK.”
A fourth tattoo/illustration that closes the book, almost as a coda, will be discussed when
I address that section.
First, let me go back to the tattoo parlor scene where Agon, who has become a foil
for Abhor, explores his own homosexuality and has sex with the old tattoo artist. The
scene paints a tableau echoing Caravaggio’s The Gypsy Fortune Teller, which Acker has
described using grotesque rhetoric: “[H]ere human mirrors plant life. Such abundance
such sexuality is questionable because it’s almost unbearable […] I am this: this
nonstagnant always burgeoning almost hideous and comic overgrowth.” (Bodies, 22) The
Tattoo Artist/Fortune teller coupled with and coupling with Agone’s sexuality, enacts
precisely this questionable abundance and sexuality, which in turn becomes transgressive
through its near-unbearability:
The tattooer, bending down, opened his lips over the boy’s tip. His lips
were waves which had parted to let the kid walk safely through the
monstrous ocean. The father parted himself, all of His world, all of being,
to let the child walk in safety. The as-yet-hairless child ran his hands
through his father’s hair as if the hairs were nets which had caught the fish
of dreams. The dreams of criminals became alive. (137)
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This parting open, through the grotesque image of lips becoming waves and hairs
becoming fishnets, of the father breaking open being (not only parting the waves as a
reference to God and the Red Sea) is the ultimate grotesque gesture of hospitality, of
becoming-other. This parting open is both the sexual act, and also the act of inserting the
needle in the body to write, to make the body one with the world: in other words, the act
of tattooing. In the tattoo, as in Acker’s writing, “ the distance between the artwork, the
artist and the audience [who is being tattooed] is thereby collapsed doubly; the body is
the work, and there is reciprocity between individuals/works rather than distance between
work and observer.” (Stewart, 107) Through the tattoo, “the grotesque body of carnival
engages in this structure of democratic reciprocity,” as Stewart argues (107). I am unsure
whether or not Acker would agree with or use or believe in the concept of “democracy”
(it is still too closely allied to structures of power), but reciprocity is certainly part of the
importance ascribed to tattooing in this novel. It is not spectacular (there is no possibility
of distance). Rather, it is both intimate and transgressive. It is also essential to remember
that the tattoo is its own grotesque form of marginal art; it exists both on the outskirts of
the laws of “classical” aesthetics (as defined by Bakhtin) and outside those laws. Despite
having once been a sacred form, “In decadent phases, the tattoo became associated with
the criminal—literally the outlaw—and the power of the tattoo became intertwined with
the power of those who chose to live beyond the norms of society.” (Empire, 140) This is
yet another taboo addressed by Empire; as common as tattoos appear to be today (even
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though they are still sometimes thought of as the stigma of the “outlaw”), tattoos were
illegal in New York State until the mid-1990’s.
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The next chapter in this section of the novel is titled “Becoming Algerian.” Not
only does it echo becoming (and becoming’s links to the grotesque) in Deleuze and
Guattari’s famous chapter on becoming, it also enacts a certain grotesquery through its
formal structure. This time, Arabic-script cut-ins are accompanied by quotes from Henry
Kissinger and also appropriations from, for example, Ginsberg’s Howl, albeit with some
variations: “I saw my friends in that brothel destroyed by madness starving hysterical
naked dragging themselves through the whitey’s streets at dawn looking for an angry fix I
saw myself fucked-up nothing purposeless collaborating over and over again with those I
hated old collaborating with my own death—all of us collaborating with Death.” (145)
The narration, which is in the voice of Thivai, then becomes Arabic, which is multiply
interrupted by English translations. The story being told is that of Sinbad the Weary
telling the story of Sinbad the Sailor who tells the story of Scheherazade, who ends
patriarchy by telling stories. This both underscores the mise-en-abyme structure of the
novel, and of writing itself. As Derrida explains: “Le concept de supplément et la théorie
de l’écriture désignent, comme on dit souvent aujourd’hui, en abyme, la textualité elle-
même […] Toute une théorie de la necessité structurelle de l’abîme se constituera peu à

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The bill to legalize tattoos in New York State passed in February 1997. In the seventies, as a
protest, tattoo artist Spider Webb tattooed porn star Annie Sprinkle on the steps on the
Metropolitan Museum and got arrested and charged with a health misdemeanor. It wasn’t until
1985 that tattoos were more “openly” acknowledged as an art form when the New York Tattoo
Society started in a Sixth Street gallery.
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peu dans notre lecture; le procès indéfini de la supplementarité a toujours déjà entamé la
presence, y a toujours déjà incrit l’espace de la repetition et du dédoublement de soi.”
(Grammatologie, 233) The self (and writing itself) unfolds in writing; it is leaky, oozing,
and grotesque, and the power Acker gives to storytelling, to fiction (and specifically a
fiction of the taboo/the tattoo), stems from this. And for her, as for Cixous, writing is a
way of fighting against phallogocentrism: “I, too, overflow” (Cixous, 309). And in this
overflowing is writing. And this overflowing is precisely grotesque uncontainment, now
manifested through storytelling. As one of the “shitloads” (163) of Arab prisoners, an
“arab female” declares: “It’s against you, Death, that I am writing down or inventing this
memory. It’s against you that I’m writing down or inventing memory.” (163)
Another prisoner, an “arab male,” tells us the Koran is “a manual for fucking.”
(165) In a near-Deleuzean passage—one that also echoes Derrida’s notion of the
inscription of the space of repetition—the prisoner likens the Koran to:
a cocktail, a road which leads to the drunkenness of fucking. Like a
drunken bird. Like a bewitched lovebird. Like a mad lovebird maddened,
the Koran’s verbal turbulence—the thousand and one verbal variations,
the thousand and one and more variations, similitudes within
dissimilitudes and dissimilitudes within likenesses—all transform into
something beyond, about to move into flight. (165-166)
Here, words are birds, through the union of image and signifier in calligraphy and in
arabesques (always already a grotesque). Language becomes animal, and soon after,
Thivai—or rather, Sinbad, Thivai’s foil in this chapter—escapes the prison and flies,
becoming a bird-motorcycle (and as Deleuze and Guattari state, “le devenir-animal de
l’homme est réel sans que soit réel l’animal qu’il devient,” 291): “I was flying in order to
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fly; I was a motorcycle. Instinctively, I chose an isolated, narrow alleyway where my
body became only a streak in another’s perception, and a streak in the window of my own
memory.” (170) The body becomes a streak, becomes molecular, color, pure movement
and speed. We move briefly into a grotesque micro-perception.
Just before the ending of “Pirate Night,” Acker embeds, in smaller font, a tiny
poem that once again (and under a different guise) echoes transformation and grotesque
regeneration: “We who have hearts, we relax in the image of the person we really love, /
in our emotions’ sun, / in the dark shadows of the cave.” (172) This cave is not Plato’s
cave, but rather the grotto-esque cave of the body that is life/death: the vagina. In this
way, the chapter, and the section, returns to where it started: the rose, the cunt. As Acker
herself would later point out, “I found myself at the end of the second part of a dialectical
argument. I was back to my original question: In a society defined by phallic centricism
or by prison, how is it possible to be happy?” (Bodies, 13).
Happiness can be equated with freedom and therefore, the third and final section
of the book opens with the most direct de-propriation of Twain’s novel, Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, which Acker describes as “one of the main texts about freedom in
American culture […] Twain was obsessed with racism; me, with sexism.” (Bodies, 13)
The fish tattoo mentioned previously opens this section; the chapter begins with Thivai
speaking. Like Huck and Jim, he and Abhor are reunited on a boat on the Seine. Thivai,
in a direct echo of Twain’s novel, is dressed in girl’s clothes (like Sarah Williams) and
goes to get food for them. S/he meets Mr. and Mrs. Williams (just like Huck), then runs
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from them to float down the river with Abhor. Thivai wants the two of them to become
pirates, but Abhor doesn’t want to do so. Thivai is in love with Abhor, but Abhor doesn’t
want him; and Thivai, much like Huck in Twain’s novel, tells the CIA that Abhor is the
“runaway nigger” they had been looking for since the Revolution. (192) Abhor is
imprisoned, but Thivai and his new friend Mark (a homosexual motorcyclist) rescue her
and teach her how to write; they slice into her fingers, and she learns calligraphy (to
write/draw), which is likened to the tattoo. Thivai also writes, revealing the title of the
novel on a scroll that surrounds three hearts. (204) In the following (and final) chapter,
Abhor speaks (and writes and reads). It seems that writing and reading are the closest one
can get to freedom. She becomes a motorcycle rider and, in typical Ackerian viral
fashion, the chapter is constantly interrupted by numerous sections from “The Highway
Code.” Abhor’s motorcycle becomes an Arabian Steed, and in a moment of grotesque
regeneration and revolution through death/life, she declares, “Let the anger of the
Arabian steeds be changed through that beauty which is blood into beauty” (221).
The narration now additionally contains drawings and signs from the motorcycle
code, and finally, a tattoo with a rose pierced by a sword and with a scroll reading
“DISCIPLINE AND ANARCHY” (220-221) (this tattoo reappears later, printed at a
larger size, at the very end of the book): “Then I thought about how a sword pierces a
cunt. Only my cunt is also me. The sword pierces me and my blood comes out. It doesn’t
matter who has handled and shoved in this sword. Once this sword is in me, it’s me. I’m
the piercer and the pierced. […] Discipline creates endurance. All is blood.” (224) I read
the “sword” as the word—the discipline—that traverses the body/sexuality/the
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rose/cunt—in other words, anarchy. This is not an arbitrary attribution; Acker, when
writing, was enormously disciplined. According to several of her friends and critics, she
re-wrote the same text eight times: “[O]nce for sound, once for meaning, once for
‘beauty’, once for structure, once in the mirror for performativity, etc.” (Dick, 111) Thus,
in the novel, Discipline and Anarchy aren’t mere antonyms, they actually coexist in the
grotesque hybridity that is Acker’s writing.
The novel ends as Abhor realizes she doesn’t want to be in a motorcycle gang;
she knows what she doesn’t want and what and whom she hates, even if she doesn’t
know what she wants. “And then I thought that, one day, maybe, there’d be a human
society in a world which is beautiful, a society which wasn’t just disgust.” (227) The end
is the ultimate moment of regeneration, of the possibility of rebirth through decay. As
Acker explains, “Empire ended with the hints of a possibility or beginning: the body, the
actual flesh, almost wordless, romance, the beginning of a movement from no to yes,
from nihilism to myth.” (Acker, Bodies of Work 13)
***
According to John Ruskin, within the many distinctions of the grotesque, the “Terrible
Grotesque” unites “some expression of vice and danger, but regarded with a peculiar
temper; sometimes (A) of predetermined or involuntary apathy, sometimes (B) of
mockery, sometimes (C) of diseased and ungoverned imaginativeness.” (140) This union
of all three characteristics in one is precisely what Acker manages to achieve in this
novel. In a sense, the adjective “terrible” is applicable here (as opposed to noble or
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ignoble, say) because the grotesque in Empire of the Senseless is different from the
grotesque in Sarduy, as we have seen. It is often darker, and both more violently
transgressive and subversive. It is closer to what Bakhtin called the Romantic Grotesque,
for “The world of Romantic Grotesque is to a certain extent a terrifying world, alien to
man.” (38) Acker’s world is indeed alien to man to the extent that it is alien to the
customs and society of man; after all, the text exhibits the alienation of taboo. Through
this alienation, which comes about through blood, excretion, rape, terrorism, Acker finds
a way to “Make it (language) new.” As she states, “I wanted radical change, however it
had to come.” (Bodies, 7) Acker manages to create using radical transgression and
reflection as well as implicit and explicit critiques of the terrifying phallogocentric,
capitalistic world that surrounded her. Regeneration is accomplished through the word,
through the absolute breaking (up/forth/through) of taboo in words, as well as on the
body of her characters and in the body of the text itself.
Resistance as a breaking of taboos comes forth in the text as a kind of
polyvocality and heteroglossia that is accomplished through the de-propriation and
inclusion of several texts, as well as the registering of the text into the body. As Acker
declares, “By using each other, each other’s texts, we keep on living, imagining, making,
fucking, and we fight this society to death.” (Bodies, 7) Thus, as I have shown, there are
numerous sections throughout the novel which are like interruptions or non-sequiturs of
“high” register (for example, “serious” journalism or theory) mixed-in with the degraded
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“low” register of slang.
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As Acker has stated, “Art is the production of imagination and
theory” (Bodies, 41); both are combined effectively through her juxtaposition of “high”
and “low.”
This juxtaposition in the novel also activates a constant changing of genres:
Empire opens as a science-fiction novel (with a character who is a cyborg), then moves
through the genres of adventure, autobiography (and much could be said of the influence
of Gertrude Stein’s work and Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas on Acker’s work
75
),
cyberpunk, noir
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and even bildungsroman. All of these disparate elements are carefully
incorporated. This is a formal element of the grotesque: the ability of one text to
incorporate other texts, ornaments (always already a form of the grotesque), and images
(the tattoo as ornament) evidences the fact that the body of the text is not closed-off, but
rather porous—a grotesque, unstable body.

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Among the multiple slang words Acker deploys throughout Empire of the Senseless, cunt, is
perhaps one of the most oft-repeated (with its origin found in the norse kunte and middle English
cunte). This is particularly interesting when thinking of about transgression and taboo for,
according to the OED, “its currency is restricted in the manner of other taboo words.” Other
dictionary definitions suggest a link with the Latin cuneus "wedge," others to the Proto-Indo-
European base *geu- "hollow place,” i.e the cave. It is also related to the words “slit, gash and to
conceal or hide,” and thus related to notions of the grotesque and the uncanny.
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As countercultural terrorist of sorts, Acker’s success, or lack thereof, her repudiation of
mainstream narrative and mainstream language could be traced to Stein’s own reflections on such
matters. Additionally, Acker often quotes Stein’s ideas on writing.
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In the second part of the second chapter of the first section, Thivai is being chased by femmes
fatales and lives in a drug and prostitution underworld, while a “person” named RAM is looking
for him to kill him. (28) This is the situation he’s in when he first encounters Abhor, who is a
“free woman” and works for no one. (29)
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In Kathy’s work, no one genre or mode of representation remains stable
for long enough to find its feet, to dominate. In the landscape mapped out
in her writing, the interzone between words and things, she uses every
literary structure and trope, emphasizing poetic structures, translation,
rhythm and sound to insist on the materiality of the signifier—because if
language is a thing in the world, then it cannot ever be merely transparent,
a stepping-stone to meaning. (Dick, 116)
This questioning of transparency of language through the grotesque openness or
hospitality of Acker’s texts is not only porous to other texts, but also to the presence of
the author through de-propriation and piracy, as I have shown in my analysis. In fact,
“Leslie Dick once remarked that Kathy Acker’s writing was an extension of her reading,
or re-reading, appropriating and customizing what she read, writing herself, so to speak,
into the fabric of the original text.” (Peter Wollen, 1)
It is no coincidence, then, that recurring figures in the novel include rats and
pirates and birds, which appear as both animals in and of themselves, but also as tropes
for the author. A quick survey of the entire novel reveals several mentions of rats in
addition to the ones I have already discussed. One—“The rat hole, the home of all rats,
our home” (99)—envisions the hole as grotto and home to rats; it is doubly grotesque.
But perhaps the best and most ambivalent description of a rat is one that, in addition to
providing us with another example of grotesquely con-fused bodies, reveals the
importance of the presence of rats throughout Empire. It is uttered in the voice of Thivai,
who says:
One rat looked at me. I saw honey hanging, like an earring made out of
drool, from her ear. Her neck was a Rembrandt made out of filth. Blood
the same colour as the nailpolish of the hooker I was about to meet painted
her teeth and claws. Her nose had the same red, but crusts of white and
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brown came out of her eyes. Her mouth was a bruise. The bruise, I knew,
was going to be me. It was definitely proven that in the urban environment
the species of the rat has more chance of survival than that of human.
(103).
Here the rat is almost human, but also abjectly beautiful (earring of honey, Rembrandts of
filth are inscribed on her body). The trope of the rat is that of grotesque abjection,
especially as Thivai becomes the bruise that is the mouth of the rat. As Kristeva points
out, “the abject confronts us […] with those fragile states where man strays on the
territories of the animal.” (12)
Rats are an essential rhyzomatic figure of propagation for Deleuze and Guattari,
and their presence in Acker’s novel, as in Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on Becoming
(which opens with rats as well) reveals the potential for deterritorialization and revolution
in becoming animal, becoming-pack. Becoming-pack, as Deleuze and Guattari state, is
“est à la fois réalité animale, et réalité du devenir-animal de l’homme.” (296) The packs
of human-rats that populate this novel are figures of viral contagion; they propagate. This
is the opposite of oedipal filiation; Audry, Abhor’s sister, is pregnant with a half-human
half-rat baby: “She’s the last-born of this old world. Rats made her.” (108)
Throughout the novel, rats traverse Acker’s characters’ selves so that (as Deleuze
and Guattari remark about Hoffmanstahl), “[…]‘l’âme de l’animal montre les dents au
destin monstrueux: non pas pitié mais particupation contre-nature.” (293) This counter-
nature participation is an expression of the breaking of taboo; it is, at the same time, an
expression of the grotesque (as I mentioned in my introduction, the grotesque is contra-
natura as well). This conflation of rat and human, of writer as rat (and as pirate, too, as
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we have seen) is another instance of the comic violence of the grotesque. As Carla
Harryman explains, “In the realm of Acker’s confusionism, human and rat are conflated.
Typical ideological couplings, for instance the female and male of the species, or the
reproductive institution of the novel, are violated, often with comic violence.” (40) This
is the violence of becoming, of the grotesque human-animal. Moreover, “Certain animals
are especially suitable to the grotesque […] the nocturnal and creeping animals which
inhabit realms apart from and inaccessible to man. Partly for the same reason (to which
their uncertain origin is added) the same observation applies to vermin.” (Kayser, 182)
Thus rats are particularly effective figures for the grotesque.
Acker is a perfect example of writing like a rat, because writing like a rat, as rat,
“écrire est traverse d’étranges devenirs qui ne sont pas des devenirs écrivain, mais des
devenirs-rat…” (293-194) And like a rat, Acker steals and propagates through her
parasitical narrative and through the population of rats she conjures in her novel. As one
of her character states: “I think rats have aristocratic thoughts,” (180) and elsewhere,
“what is true of rats is true of humans.” (182)
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Her metaphors are metamorphors.
Thus another figure for the human-rat in this novel is the pirate and the sailor
“Though a sailor longs for a home, his or her real love is change. Stability in change,
change in stability occurs only imaginarily. [… Sailors] were those humans whom no
other human would dare to touch.” (114) They are abject and abjected from society, for

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A listing of all the references to rats in the novel could continue, for example, with “corners of
rats,” (13) “the cities are full of rats; the rats are bored,” (160) etc.
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no one dares touch them; they are taboo, “wayside” figures, and therefore grotesque.
Sailors and pirates are also stand-ins for the figure of the writer; as Acker explains, “A
sailor is a human who has traded poverty for the riches of imaginative reality.” (114)
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“Sailor” and “pirate” and “terrorist”: three words for humans who are on the
margins of society, and/or who, like parasites, feed off it, constantly irritating and
contesting it. Yet another figure of the becoming-animal of the human in this novel is the
bird, which is specifically allied to the sailor and the pirate: “[T]he sailor felt that joy free
of fear which birds must feel when they sing. Birds of prey sing since they live at night
and need to see each other, like ships whose sails are tipped with ruby, ebony and ivory,
draped over masts in the wet dripping scrappy enough to be the seaweed that traces paths
through oceans upon oceans.” (133). In this passage, “in the passing of one form into the
other,” to use Bakhtin’s words, we find a poetic expression of the grotesque. Another link
between sailors or pirates and birds and the author is expressed by Peter Wollen, for
whom, “Parrot of course goes with pirate—parroting texts, pirating texts two ways of
speaking about plagiarism or appropriation, as it is more discreetly known.
Détournement, perhaps, to use the situationist term, or re-functioning, to use Brecht’s, re-
functioning by recontextualizing, by making strange.” (2) Acker’s re-functioning and
détournement, are acts of piracy, and her re-functioning of meaning is not only brought
about through the leitmotivs of pirates, rats, and parrots (and their multiple

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Sailors are also very present in the works of those who greatly influenced Acker, from Andy
Warhol, to Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean Genet, and even the fashion designs of Jean Paul Gaultier
(who dressed Acker).
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transformations), but also through the identical repetition of certain passages. For
instance, “Outside the night was red and purple blood. All the sailors were looking to
fuck each other” is repeated verbatim several times on the same page. (117) Another
example would be the recurring mutation of certain figures (suicide, roses, cunts,
dinosaurs, skeletons, etc). In this way, for Acker, “Every word or image is related to
every other through metaphor, myth and history and these relations announce and define
meaning.” (Bodies, 51) Not only does this repetition enact a questioning of meaning, but
also through that repetition, Acker manages to create a sense of uncanny grotesque and
dis-orientation/(de)familiarization. Thus “Acker creates a reader who is lost in
strangeness. She pitches the reader into a welter of contradictions that do not resolve
themselves, but replace each other continuously: a text that hates itself but wants me to
love it, sex that dissolves and amalgamates, a disempowered self that tops its heated
bottom-act with cold manipulations, a confession that is therapeutic without the
possibility for health.” (Glück, 46) Acker’s reader is confronted with the breaking open
of taboos that brings forth grotesque hybridity and contradiction. (Note that Glück’s use
of topological language—“tops its…bottom-act”—echoes Bakhtin’s as well.) The final
level of transgression happens as the reader is also incorporated into the text: “The reader
of an Acker work suspends her own interpretive coherence; self-identity in reading
multiplies, expands, pixelates, contracts, is undone: the reader becomes to herself a
multisensory/sensibility of the text, a further anarchic layer of the text and/or obstruction.
Reading further crowds the text. “I” am interference.” (Harryman, 36) The reader as
interference and noise in the text is a further political and aesthetic moment of
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transgression and grotesque openness, for once again, what should be on the margins is at
the center: the reader becomes an extension of the parasitical pululation of the text. And
though the reader, the anarchy that inhabits Acker’s novels bleeds out into the world.
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Chapter 3: Teresa Margolles’ Necrophilic Grotesque

Il y a là cendre.
Jacques Derrida

In 2008, twenty years after Kathy Acker published Empire of the Senseless, Mexican
visual artist, Teresa Margolles exhibited a series of sculptures titled 21 Ajustes de
Cuentas (or 21 Score Settlements), a piece that is a blood-curdling, as it is beautiful: a
perfect contemporary grotesque. My exploration of the grotesque in contemporary works
ends in the twenty first century, and with a visual artist as a return to the origin of the
word grotesque and as a way to explore what it can mean today. During the Renaissance,
the term grotesque was born in relation to the visual arts, and it is within that realm that
its definition was forged. The grotesque was synonymous with the term sogni dei pittori,
or dreams of painters, and was used in relation to the Roman frescoes, to Raphael’s own
frescoes, to the works of Hieronymus Bosch, of Brueghel the Elder, and later on in
relation to the works of Goya, and Velazquez, to mention only a few artists. But as the
term’s application progressed from the decorative or ornamental grotesque of the frescoes
to an aesthetic quality, its definition also changed and became more nuanced. As I
mentioned in my introduction, the first grotesques were synonymous with both a
hybridity that stemmed from nature yet was perceived as anti-natural, and with a sense of
wonder and playfulness within its monstrosity. But as it relates to later works in visual
arts, the grotesque becomes more complex. According to Kayser, with the apparition of
Brueghel’s paintings, in addition to the caricaturesque and the hybrid, “Brueghel seems to
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have added a third perspective: that of the terror inspired by the unfathomable, that is the
grotesque.” (Kayser, 35) Hence, an ominous sense of fear, of the void, absent from the
early Renaissance grotesque is present in the definition of the term as well. This sense of
terror, this dark element, as we have seen, was absent from Bakhtin’s notion of the
grotesque as as it was more closely allied to the Renaissance notion of caricature and
therefore (Folk) humor. But the “dreams of painters” can also be nightmarish. If on one
end of the grotesque spectrum, we have Bakhtin and the carnival, embodied in my
analysis of contemporary literature by Sarduy, in the middle point of the spectrum, Acker
is the perfect embodiment of the grotesque in all of its chiaroscuro complexity, and on
the other end—on the side of terror, edged with sublimity— we have Teresa Margolles’
work.
And yet, even at this end of the spectrum, with a grotesque that seems to have lost
all sense of humor, and have nothing but horror left, there is still an ludic element, for
according to Ruskin, it is still difficult to distinguish the playful from the terrible because
in the grotesque “the mind plays with terror” (140, my emphasis) so both elements are
always present. Teresa Margolles’ installations most certainly play with terror for they
deal with death and the after-life of the corpse in the work of art itself; they are interstitial
and therefore grotesque: they eliminate the boundaries between what is alive and dead,
what is proper and improper, where crime ends and art begins, as I shall further show. As
Ruskin explains, “The grotesque we are examining arises out of that condition of mind
which appears to follow naturally upon the contemplation of death, and in which the
fancy is brought into morbid action by terror […].” (157) As a contemplation of death,
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Margolles’ work crosses the line dividing the sacred from the abject, transcending the
limits of legality and what is acceptable to the viewer. In these works, as Kristeva writes,
“the abject is edged with the sublime.” (11) This is already the locus for the grotesque for
even Kristeva’s word use (“edged”) reveals the language of the limit, of the border, of the
margin which is always the locus of the grotesque for, as Geoffrey Harpham explains,
“all grotesque art threatens the notion of a center by implying coherencies just out of
reach, metaphors and analogies just beyond our grasp.” (43), Margolles work enacts
precisely this de-centering function, for death is always just beyond our grasp, or when
we grasp it, we no longer have the consciousness to realize it—therein lies its paradox, its
threat, its lawlessness. Margolles’ works inhabit precisely this taboo space.
In this sense too, her gaze violates the body and the senses and desires of the
viewer, it is transgressive, aggressive, terrible, and yet this terror is always pointing
toward the sublime. Her work is the endpoint (yet not a dead-end) where the grotesque
meets the sublime, for “To Friedrich Schlegel the ominous aspect of the grotesque reveals
the innermost secret of existence” (Kayser, 52) and through its ominous subject matter
her work reveals this secret (death as the secret encrypted in existence), in all its
unfathomable tremendous nature, so touching on the sublime. Thus, like all the
grotesques I have examined, Margolles work reveals a phenomenon of bordering, of the
interstitial, especially since it is predominantly concerned with death (and the specific
socio-political conditions of death in Margolles’ native Mexico), and death is the ultimate
limit. Her work comes into being at a particularly critical moment in Mexican politics
and history for the 1990’s proved to be yet another one of Mexican history’s bloody
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decades, with the signing of NAFTA, the massacres at Acteal and Aguas Blancas, the
murder of a presidential candidate, the emergence of the Zapatista resistance and the
daily violence of a third world megalopolis. And the dawn of the twenty-first century in
Mexico has become one of the deadliest periods in its history with daily deaths in the
dozens due to drug-related violence: to this day 610 children have been murdered as
“collateral” damage in the drug wars not to mention an estimated death-toll of 23,000
people killed since President Felipe Calderón started his “crackdown” only three years
ago.
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All of this informs Margolles’ work. Also Margolles herself, as the two other
artists I have analyzed in this dissertation, is a hybrid figure: she is not only a visual artist
born in Culiacán, Mexico (one of the drug capitals of the world, an element which
informs two of the works I analyze here), she is also a Forensic Doctor, member of the
Mexican forensic medical service.
Her work, described thus as interstitial, liminal, grotesque is a work of mourning,
existing between life and death; as life and death. Margolles’ work, and the radical
destruction of boundaries made explicit in it, is simultaneously abject and sublime—and
what else could it be then if not grotesque, always the in-between aesthetic category? As
we participate in her installations, her work penetrates us physically and mentally,
effectively blurring and transgressing the borders between art object and spectator. And
we, as viewers, are turned into objects as well. Her installations, videos and photos have

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From an April, 14
th
, 2010 article by Ken Ellingwood in the Los Angeles times:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/14/world/la-fg-mexico-toll14-2010apr14
For further details of an historical account of the context from which Margolles’ work emerges,
please see Federico Navarrete’s article, “SEMEFO” (24).
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the power to physically affect us (causing nausea and other discomfort) because they
show and envelop us in the improper body, the grotesque body (as opposed to Bakhtin’s
notion of a “classical” or closed-off body, the “proper” body of middle-class culture): the
anonymous body of the maginalized, for all of her installations deal with or use the
unclaimed bodies of the Mexican morgues (and whose bodies are these if not the bodies
of the most marginalized people in society? The most grotesque bodies within the body
politic?). At the same time, by revealing the viewer as object (as we become-inorganic
while viewing her works and therefore absorbing them), they reveal our own bodies as
improper and violated as well. And in 21 Rendición de Cuentas, as we shall see, the
objet d’art is itself violated, turned into a commodity to be consumed by the same
middle-class that labeled the body in/of the work of art as “improper,” or grotesque:
Margolles’ work questions, addresses and transgresses the ultimate taboo that is death on
three levels: the death of the subjects she includes, of the viewer and of the work of art
itself.
Margolles’ minimal installations can be considered grotesquely sublime on many
levels. The more beautiful they are, the more perverse they become. Thus they are the
locus of creation for a “social sublime: a window onto a mentally unfathomable visual
and cultural chaos, the respectful and distant approach to spontaneous social structures or
powers, whose scope lay far beyond any mechanism of apprehension, modernization
transfigured into aesthetic sophistication.”(Medina, 40) For all their aesthetic
sophistication, however, they remain a violent attack on the organic body of the subject
(as live viewer, or as corpse in the work). They also posit a violent questioning of the
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body politic by reducing the bodies to their essence: death, as embodied in the corpse.
“For the corpse is at once a thing, materially present yet marked by the absolute absence
of subjectivity –and no-thing, a signifier severed from its referent, its ‘owner’.”(Coddon,
125) By inhabiting and articulating the contradiction between the materiality of the
corpse and its simultaneous nothingness Margolles’ work points out the co-optation of
the body and the colonization of contemporary subjects by neoliberalism. Thus what
could be seen as “improper” violence in Teresa Margolles’ work is no longer
inappropriate: rather, it shows the impropriety inherent to all those who profane and
torture, from the arrogance of the executioner to neoliberalist bureaucracy and state
violence.
To the destructive implications of capitalism, Margolles’ work responds with
creative entropy. By representing the poverty, social unrest, crime, overpopulation,
pollution, and the violence of the capitalist metropolis, it transforms that metropolis into a
necropolis. Thus, as grotesquery, the death of the organic body also represents death in
the body politic. Her work literalizes this metaphor—“death, after all, represents the
absolute change of state (change in the State).” (Downing, 39) Ultimately, this change of
state, both organic and politic, is an “interruption in the course of the world,” as Walter
Benjamin says of the work of Baudelaire. He explains that,
From this intention [to interrupt the course of the world] sprang [Baudelaire’s]
violence, his impatience and his anger; from it, too, sprang the ever renewed
attempts to cut the world to the heart (or sing it to sleep). In this intention he
provided death with an accompaniment: his encouragement of its work. (The
Arcades Project, 318)

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Today, one could say the same about Teresa Margolles: the violence of her pieces, their
renewed attempts to cut the world to the heart and sing it to sleep, provide death with an
encouraging accompaniment: life. However, an important change of status occurs if the
body in question is the work of art. In other words, the very objecthood of Margolles’
installations violently requires that the spectator acknowledge them as the most
grotesque, the most radical of Others: the Other as art object made by a human and
containing the human, but which has nevertheless been made inhuman because of its
exchangeability within the art market and its recontextualization from the morgue into the
gallery or museum. This also transforms the museum or gallery into what Michel
Foucault has called “heterotopias of deviation” where the morgue and the cemetery, are
now joined by the museum and gallery, now posited as wayside, deviated, grotesque
spaces. The museum and gallery also become grotto-esque spaces for the presence of
corpses renders them into tombs, crypts, reminders of ancient burial caves.
***
As preambles to 21… I would first like to analyze three other pieces by Teresa
Margolles that also exemplify this grotesque play with terror: Vaporización/Vaporization
(2001), En el aire/In the Air (2003), and Tarjetas para picar coca/ Cards to Cut Cocaine
(1997-1999). These pieces exemplify grotesque ambivalence for Margolles’ work hinges
on a constant tension between beauty and utter disgust, between the smile of satiric
humor and the rictus of rigor mortis. For Vaporización, Margolles filled an entire room
of P.S.1-MoMA with vapor made from water used to cleanse corpses in the Mexico City
morgue. In this piece, Margolles creates an unnatural space between life and death by
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enveloping spectators in a dense fog and in doing so creates a dream-like space of the
grotesque, as Ruskin describes: “It is the trembling of the human soul in the presence of
death which most of all disturbs the images on the intellectual mirror and invests them
with the fitfulness and ghastliness of dreams.” (156) And this is precisely the kind of
disorientation that happens to the viewer when confronting death as traces of the corpse
in Vaporización.
This liminal space of becoming, a grotesque space of mourning, for this
installation “examines the life of the corpse and the rituals performed on and for the dead
body, such as the ceremonious washing and the sacred burial,”(Biesenbach, 36) and these
rituals of mourning bring the dead back to life for the duration of these rituals. In so
doing, we could call them grotesque for they bring together life and death in a spirit of
community much akin to Bakhtin’s carnival grotesquery does. For this reason, one of
mourning’s most characteristic aspects is its liminal and transgressive nature as it places
the dead with the living and the living with the dead: “In general, the mourning process
involves an identification between living mourners and the newly deceased in that both
are situated ‘between the world of the living and the world of the dead’.” (Van Gennep,
106) This inbetweenness is doubly present in this work, for the fog itself is interstitial,
uncontainable and grotesquely cosmic as it contains hundreds of thousands of particles of
bodies (of the corpses and of the viewers who are breathing them in and out) and by
doing so inscribes or imbibes the body into the space. And it is grotesquely interstitial to
the point of uncannyness: the installation is tremendously disorienting for the viewer, one
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can easily get lost, disoriented, and as Kayser claims, the grotesque “is primarily the
expression of our failure to orient ourselves in the physical universe.” (185)
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And as with all grotesque elements analyzed in the past chapters, here the corpse-
water is a constant state of becoming. For En el aire, first shown as part of a group show
at the X-Teresa Contemporary Art Museum in Mexico City, Margolles again takes water
from the lavatio corporis, but now puts it into bubble-making machines similar to those
used at dance clubs: the results are entirely different from those of Vaporización.
In the first incarnation of the piece, the machines were installed on the ceiling of
the X-Teresa church, so that bubbles floated down on spectators as they walked around
the space looking at other works. The aptly-named X-Teresa is a baroque church
transformed into a museum, and the setting for this piece, in conjunction with the ethereal
uncanniness of the corpse-bubbles, made En el aire one of Margolles’ most grotesque
pieces: the work was a literal and simultaneous bringing-down-to earth, degradation and
materialization of the holiness of the church space, as the downward motion of the
bubbles cascades and disintegrates on the floor, and it is also a sublimation of the
grotesque for the bubbles, made with corpse-water, float in translucent beauty.
For the version shown at the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art, Margolles
transforms the piece into a cascade of bubbles in the center of the building:

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Her video “El Agua en la Ciudad” (“The Water in the City” 2001) gives the spectator access to
the means by which this water, and thus the piece, was produced. In it, we witness the ritual
washing of a stiff corpse: we see the vapor slowly rising from the hot water on the body; we see
the hands of the forensic technician washing and carefully scrubbing the horizontal body,
reminding us of a sculptor polishing the final details of his dead Christ sculpture.
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Figure 1: Teresa Margolles “En el aire” Installation view (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt,
2003). Photo, courtesy of the artist
Here, the bubbles, dramatically illuminated by a couple of spotlights, fall from the
ceiling, landing delicately on our bodies where they disappear, absorbed through our
pores. As we inhale and absorb the inhuman particles, and the dead skin floating in the
bubbles of En el aire, we can sense the violent history of those bodies: we incorporate
their life and their death. It could be said that the grotesque body presented in this work
is stripped of its “erotic vital connotations,” as Bakhtin mentions (28)—but perhaps it
would be more precise to say it is stripped of erotic connotations but not entirely stripped
of certain vital ones: the body here is pure thanatos and yet not quite dead either for as
we come into contact with the subjected bodies as traces in Margolles’ work, they
become subjects through us, reflecting our future deaths and our present lives back at us.
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And this tension between what is simultaneously alive and dead, natural and anti-natural,
is precisely grotesque as well. Furthermore, the installation could be deemed to be part
of the “grotesque realism of the gay bodily grave” to use Bakhtin’s words (22), for it
plays on both the tension between the bubbles –with their gay connotation of playfulness,
the innocence of children— and the corpses they are made of, and on the discomfort and
playfulness induced in the spectator. As critic Amanda Coulson describes:
In the museum’s soaring hall children play under bubbles that come from
Teresa Margolles’ piece En el aire (In the Air, 2003). Running, laughing,
catching, they are fascinated by the glistening, delicate forms that float
down from the ceiling and break up on their skin. A common motif in art
history, the bubble has long been used as a memento mori, a reminder of
the transitory nature of life. The children’s parents, meanwhile, studiously
read the captions. Suddenly, with a look of disgust, they come and steer
their offspring away. The moment of naive pleasure turns into one of
knowing repulsion: they have learned that the water comes from the
Mexico City morgue, used to wash corpses before an autopsy. It’s
unimportant that the water is disinfected; the stigma of death turns the
beautiful into the horrific. (Frieze, issue 85)

The tension between the simple beauty of the bubbles, their delicate and fleeting
nature, and the weighty, grave material they are made of, its appalling content is what
makes this work a hybrid grotesque: we cannot call it a work of tragic beauty, we cannot
quite call it sublime, it is the grotesque in all its degrading and materializing aspect. And
this is not only the case because of the tension between the bubbles and what they are
made of, it is also because the work is a different incarnation of Bakhtin’s notion of
laughing death: it is simultaneously alive/dead, simultaneously young and childish, and a
corpse—deadly and regenerating: entirely grotesque.
In addition, in En el aire, Margolles gives life to the water taken from the washing
of corpses by taking (illicitly?) the traces of the corpses from the morgue as water into the
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museum. These washing rituals comprise the after-life of the corpses in the morgue—the
installation, their after-life in the art world. The piece becomes an ultimate work of
grotesque transgression and regeneration, one that enables spectators to literally absorb
the dead through their skins and give them new life.
Margolles is bringing these anonymous dead women, men, children, into
communion with the living: here, the grotesque corpse-becoming-body also calls to mind
the sense of the supplément in two ways. Firstly, as Susan Stewart explains:
We must also consider these images of the grotesque body precisely as
images or representations […] Yet to make from the body a work of art
involves the creation of a supplement or extension. The work of art as
costume, mask and disguise differs significantly from the work of art as
external object. The body is paraded, put on display in time as well as
space […] the distance between the artwork, the artist and the audience is
thereby collapsed double; the body is the work, and there is reciprocity
between individuals/works rather than unilinear distance between work
and observer. (107)

And even though in this particular piece the work is not paraded as a mask or costume
(we shall see how 21 could be seen as such), it does become part of the body. As the
bubbles are absorbed into the body, the body of the viewer becomes part of the work and
the work part of our bodies in time and in space, this is the action of supplementing
which is, as I have mentioned, always already a grotesque aesthetic one.
And secondly, this work not only enacts the corpse-becoming-body, the reverse is
also the case: it enacts the body-becoming-corpse, as death enters the body of the
spectator: death is inscribed (absorbed) into the body. For writing (or in this case
inscribing, representation) as supplément is always already linked, as Derrida, explains,
to death: “Comme toujours, la mort, qui n’est ni un présent à venir ni un présent passé,
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travaille le dedans de la parole comme sa trace, sa reserve, sa différance intérieure et
extérieure: comme son supplément.” (444)
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Thus, if death is the supplément of words,
then death, like writing is already therefore grotesque for it is the external (marginal)
trace that is always at work within it. Death is present (in writing or representation) for it
is the supplément of presence. It is also grotesque supplément for it is that which is
unseen yet “opens and limits visibility.” (“le non-vu qui ouvre et limite la visibilité.”
Derrida, 234) And the bubbles are the perfect figure for the rendering (barely) visible of
that which is invisible (death).
The other piece I would like to analyze as background to 21 is Tarjetas para picar
coca/ Cards to Cut Cocaine (1997-1999). This piece is grotesque on a different level and
plays with terror in a different way, as it deals with death and violence in a much more
direct and overtly visible way. The work consists of twelve cards (the shape, size and
material of a standard credit card) each one imprinted with a different photo of a corpse
on one side, and with a text relating the details of the piece on the other side. The
photograph usually features a horribly bloated and putrid head shot of a cadaver, and the
reverse side informs the user of the card that the corpse belongs to a murder victim who
was assassinated in relation to the drug trade. The twelve cards exist as multiples and the
artist gives them away, often at parties (notorious for the abundance of cocaine, amongst
other things), to many of her colleagues and art-world people to use. The twelve cards
also exist as an installation, accompanied by two large-format photographs which feature

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“As always death, which is neither a present to come nor a past present, works the inside of
speech as its trace, its reserve, its inner and outer différance—its supplement” (My translation)
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a disembodied hand cutting a few lines of cocaine on a typical outdoor patio table, its
white metallic curlicues simultaneously echoing and contrasting with the lines of white
powder. The second photograph is of a close-up profile of a man—his nose chin and
mouth, mostly— licking the remaining cocaine off the bottom of the card and the card
itself: the head of a badly mutilated and rotting male corpse on an autopsy table. The
contrast between the horrific dead head and the liveliness of the tongue, its sensuousness
in the act of licking is entirely grotesque in its ambivalence. Its grotesque ambivalence is
enhanced by the artist’s decision to feature the tongue, which is one of the body parts that
is grotesque in and of itself for it is both inside and outside, foreign and familiar, erotic
and strangely comic as it edges and differentiates the body. The tongue, as the tip of the
penis, or the lips, is what Lacan has called an “erotogenic” part and is therefore also
linked to what is “improper,” and more so when it is juxtaposed with the abject image of
a corpse, for it begins to resonate as necrophilia—another ambivalently grotesque taboo
which is ever latent in Margolles’ work.
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Figure 2: Teresa Margolles “Tarjetas para picar coca” Installation view (Gallerie Peter Kilchman,
1997-1999). Photo, courtesy of the artist.
most unexpected is the grotesque humor present in this piece: the irony of its distribution
and purpose contrasts with the terrible images it presents. And yet people use the cards
to cut the cocaine, even as they are looking at the consequences of their consumption:
violence and murder. It is a disturbing piece, and once again one that renders the body
grotesque doubly: first, not only by exhibiting the corpse of a murder victim—always
already a grotesque, that “improper” and violated body which should never be seen,
which is nothing more than a gruesome statistic; an abject, but never an object glorified
to the status of artwork. And secondly, by including once more the bodies of the
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spectators –or fellow drug users—and implicating them visibly as grotesque participants
in the violence. Like pornography, as pornography, this piece obviates the one-on-one
relation to the artwork as it is impossible for the viewer to remain a mere spectator: s/he
is a participant, and a part of the work.
The piece also posits an interesting questioning of critics’ assumptions on the
grotesque. Susan Stewart claims there can be two possible modes for the grotesque body
to exist, either as the grotesque body of carnival, or as the spectacular grotesque, as she
explains: “While the grotesque body of carnival engages in this structure of democratic
reciprocity, the spectacle of the grotesque involves a distancing of the object and a
corresponding “aesthetization” of it.” (107) And yet this piece presents a third version of
the grotesque body: one that is both or neither of the grotesques that Stewart describes.
In this piece, the body in this piece must engage in a structure of reciprocity for the
corpse is in contact with our own body: the image of its abhorrent face being licked by
our live tongues, touched by our fingers, but I wouldn’t call it the “happy” democratic
reciprocity of carnival. At the same time, the body/corpse here is an art object yet it
remains impossible to aestheticize it for it is impossible to create distance between the
observer and death, and the piece further renders this distance impossible by inviting (or
forcing) the viewers to become part of the work: the piece is meant to be used, not only
meant to be seen as spectacle. Tarjetas… includes and involves the corpse, the artist (as
mediator) and the viewer—its grotesque body absorbs our own bodies and, in so doing,
renders them grotesque as well. As a piece concerned with marginalized bodies/corpses,
by bringing them into the gallery, strangely, it does not render them less marginal, as one
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might initially assume. Rather it manages to transform the entire gallery or museum
space into a site of the margins, into a deviant (and deviated) grotesque space.
The obviation of the art space as grotesque is more tenuous, or rather, just as
powerful, but more implicit in 21 because, when entering the exhibition space one is not
immediately confronted with death and corpse. Instead, we see a series of “beautiful”
jewelry pieces and the violence and death, as with En el aire, is present only when we
read what the pieces are made with.
21 Ajustes de cuentas, first exhibited at the Slavador Díaz galler as part of the
Miami Basel art fair in 2008, consists of 21 pieces of gold jewelry, made especially at a
jeweler in Margolles’ native state of Sinaloa who specializes in crafting pieces for drug
lords. But instead of including the typical diamond or other precious stone as a center-
piece Margolles has used shards of glass. From a distance, the pieces seem beautiful, if a
little gaudy. They are simple ornaments, made to be worn, paraded, displayed—and
already in this sense they include the body and they do not permit the spectacular
distance between body and artwork. The jewels are the aspect of this particular piece that
touches on humor and carnivalesque excess. And yet, as soon as we read the piece’s
description, a text on the side of the elegant black display case, we learn that the pieces of
glass have been collected by the artist either from drug execution crime scenes or
extracted from the corpses themselves
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. Thus the high status symbolized by the jewel is
immediately degraded in a grotesque move that hits the viewer like a wet towel. By

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It is common for drug lords to commit assassinations while their targets are in their cars.
Therefore the glass in the jewels comes from the bullet-shattered windows and/or windshield.
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doing so, these twenty one pieces question the work of art and push it to the limit at the
same time. As art critic Teresa Bordons explains:
Lo de Margolles es una instalación que transforma el cubo blanco
mediante la fusión de la joyería con la galería, del territorio del consumo
suntuario con el terreno del arte, de la violencia real con la retórica
política, de la crítica con la contemplación estética… Se instala, de manera
explícita, en los límites del arte […]. (2)
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Thus placed on the limits or margins of art, these pieces are grotesque: they are
ornamental (in the original sense of grotesqueries), and therefore doubly question the
definition of art and transgress its limits. Furthermore, each jewelry piece is accompanied
by a text in a “neutral” scientific tone detailing, as in a police report, the crime scene
where the glass was extracted from. Interestingly, the “neutrality” of the tone, allows for
the readers/viewers to project their own fears and desires onto the text and jewels—the
victims from which the glass was extracted can be read as innocent, or they can be
perceived not to be victims at all (being part of the drug trade). In this ambivalent
reading, stemming from the coldness of the forensic texts, rests some of the piece’s
power as well, not to mention the fact that the objects themselves are exhibited in such a
was as to create desire and coveting. But is coveting them the ultimate act of
degradation? Or would it be possible that when buying and wearing one of these jewelry
pieces one the buyer could speak of it, transmit its story, taking the pieces and their
subject matter beyond the gallery and into other realms?

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“Margolles’ work is an installation that transforms the white cube through the fusion of jewelry
with the gallery space, the fusion of the territory of sumptuary consummerism with the terrain of
art, of real violence with political rhetoric, of criticism with aesthetic contemplation… It is
installed, in an explicit manner, on the limits of art […]” (my translation)
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Figure 3: Teresa Margolles “21 Ajustes de Cuentas” Installation view (Galería Salvador Díaz, 2008).
Photo, courtesy of Salvador Díaz Gallery.
For Score # 1, which is a large gold ring, with a shard of class surrounded by small
diamonds, we read “Preliminary Investigation: Navolato, 17 May, 2007 at 6:15 hours.
Man aged 30 was killed in a car-to-car shooting by persons unknown while on his way to
work. Died as a consequence of gunshot wounds in different parts of the body. Crime
registered by the Navolato Public Prosecutor’s office, while experts from the Public
Prosecutor’s office (PGJ) recovered 28 shell casings from 9mm and 38 mm caliber
firearms.” The victim in Score # 2 was a female and the object stemming from it is a
bracelet, with glass shards, small diamonds forming the shape of a four-leafed clover.
Score # 3 is another, smaller bracelet. The victim was a male, who died from 7 AK47
shots to the thorax. Score # 4 is a gold bracelet with two chains, the incident is reported
as the killing of a man who was driving with his wife. Perhaps the double gold chains
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echo the couple? Score # 5 is an especially beautiful bracelet, reminiscent of ancient
Roman jewelry, classically ornate, and is the outcome of the death of a 34 year-old male.
Score # 6 is a thick snake-like bracelet with several glass shards. The victim here is a 32
year-old male who was driving a “luxury SUV”. Score # 7 is two dainty rings, one for
each of the victims: a 17 and a 19 year-old male killed by AK47 bullets. Score # 8 is yet
another thick bracelet, and the glass comes from a 45 year-old male victim. Score # 9 is a
gold bracelet divided in 7 sections, each with a shard of glass, recovered from a 25 year-
old male victim who died of gunshot wounds to the head. Score # 10 is a pair of earrings
and a ring, there were three male victims. Score # 11 is another very beautiful bracelet,
decorated with foliage which would be characterized as arabesque (or grotesque)
ornament. The glass comes from the murder scene of a 25-year old man. Score # 12 is a
sectioned bracelet, each of the sections has three shards of glass, arranged in such a way
that they almost seem to form faces, grotesque masks of death, tragedy, but also smiling.
The 18 year-old victim died of bullet wounds to the thorax and head. For “Score # 13,”
which is a pendant (see image below) we read “Preliminary investigation: Los Mochis,
June 3 2007, 0:55 AM a 42-year old male was executed at the wheel of a Cheyenne
pickup by persons unknown 300 meters away from a security booth. The crime was
registered by a representative of the public prosecutor specialized in homicide, who then
ordered the corpse be transported to the SEMEFO (Forensic Medical Service) while
federal officers picked up 20 shell casings of 7.62 mm and 39 mm caliber, a black
facemask and a rosary.” Score # 14 is the murder of a woman who was waiting in a
pickup truck in the town of Mazatlán. The glass is arranged in lines on a small bracelet
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in the style that is known in Mexico as an “esclava” (slave) bracelet. Score # 15 is a
pendant with the image of Malverde, the patron saint of drug-dealers, from the region of
Sinaloa, surrounded by four small shards of glass. 30 shell casings were recovered from
the murder scene of a 34 year-old male. Score # 16 contains two rings, one for each of
the two soldiers killed by AK47 gunshots. Score # 17 consists of another, larger, ring
with a diamond horseshoe surrounding glass shards from the murder scene of a 43 year-
old male shot to death with 15 AK47 rounds. There are only 17 display cases, but the
total number of murder victims adds up to 21, hence the title. All the murders recorded
in these incidents took place in different regions of Margolles’ native state of Sinaloa
during the year of 2007 (and it is important to note that, after the State of Chihuahua,
Sinaloa is the second most violent state in Mexico). Does the jewelry speak on behalf of
the victims? On behalf of the murderers? Does it speak of innocence lost—because one
of the questions that arise from these jewels is whether the murder victims were or were
not involved in the drug business, and whether that make their deaths less tragic, or more
“deserved”? These are not blood diamonds and yet, does the jewelry speak of death? For
Death? Or does it speak of survival? (I must confess that even writing out and listing the
deaths as part of the description of the piece was strangely moving, and became a sort of
personal mourning ritual for these victims in the middle of an academic dissertation.)
Here the title of the piece comes into play: these twenty one pieces of jewelry are
traces; what is left-over, what has sur-vived of twenty one different score-settling
incidents between drug cartels. Thus these works are doubly perverse for, on first glance,
they seem polished, and beautiful as works of “classic” beauty, they seem to be
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“attractive” and desirable commodities, and yet, the “crowning jewels,” precisely the
elements that might mark the ultimate value of the work, enact its uncrowning, to borrow
Bakhtin’s language: they are doubly degrading for a) they are not precious stones, but
rather, shattered glass, and b) the glass is imbibed with death: the shards are reminders,
nay monstrous mirrors, of the bloodshed they silently encrypt.

Figure 4: Teresa Margolles “Ajuste de Cuentas # 13” (detail) from the series “21 Ajustes de
Cuentas.” Photo, courtesy of Salvador Díaz Gallery.
Interestingly, according to Bakhtin, grotesqueries, as carnival manifestations, “build a
second world and a second life outside officialdom.” (6) And Margolles’ installations are
precisely this second life: the second life of the corpse in the art gallery and beyond it, its
second life in the body of the viewer. By doing this, the installation’s violence bleeds out
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of its original context (a violent death) and into the art world—potentially transforming
it— and into the worlds of the viewers’ lives. Herein lies the powerful political
implications of their grotesque transgression.

***
Just as nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle grotesque works of decadence which were
much concerned with corpses (I think of Poe, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Baudelaire and
others) revealed the political angst of a generation of artists on the verge of a new
century, Margolles’ art could be said to reveal a similar social and political angst at the
end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twentyfirst.
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Much as David
Wojnarowicz’s work creates transgressive and grotesque images of mourning in the wake
of the AIDS hecatomb, Margolles’ work also responds to her socio-political
surroundings. Both works appear shocking to a twenty-first-century audience
accustomed to a sanitized relationship with death: they deal with the taboo directly, but
rather than shocking or spectacular, I prefer to label them grotesque. In the case of
Margolles, her work mourns the consequences of neoliberalist “progress” and the
inequalities it entails for it mourns its anonymous victims, the impoverished inhabitants

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The 1990’s proved to be yet another one of Mexican history’s bloody decades, with the signing
of NAFTA, the massacres at Acteal and Aguas Blancas, the murder of a presidential candidate,
the emergence of the Zapatista resistance and the daily violence of a third world megalopolis.
And the dawn of the twenty-first century in Mexico has become one of the bloodiest periods in its
history with daily deaths in the dozens due to drug-related violence. All of this informs
Margolles’ work and for a more precise historical account of the context from which Margolles’
work emerges, please see Federico Navarrete’s article, “SEMEFO” (24).
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of an overcrowded megalopolis (Mexico City), in the case of En el aire, and in the case
of Tarjetas and 21 it mourns the victims of drug-related violence.
As forensic art is transformed into art, Margolles’ work denounces the
neocolonialist gesture embodied in the “scientistic paradigm [that] aspires to universalize
the Other as object […].” (Coddon, 126). Her work reveals this universalization of the
other as object to be the ultimate violence that can be done to the other—the other’s
destruction—and instead reveals otherness as abjection. At the same time, her pieces
have complex implications: as works of art, they are fetish commodities of the art market.
This commodification operates doubly in Margolles’ work, which both condemns and is
an exemplar of objectification.
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Her work both denounces and demonstrates that we can
buy traces of death in order to escape our own death, thus enabling us to perpetuate a
vampiric capitalist desire for immortality.
Nevertheless, Margolles’ installations smuggle the anonymous lives of the corpse
into the gallery, making them available to the viewer, this act also extends the lives of the
corpses and becomes the only possible act of resistance left to the dispossessed:
marginalized before death, and as grotesque subjects after it, the corpses in the pieces are
still outside the laws (of society and aesthetics).
In the 1960s, Joseph Beuys extended the definition of the creative act to include
“the whole process of living itself.”(Tisdall, 7) Today, Teresa Margolles’ work extends

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Another interesting discussion on the object’s evil victory over the subject is exemplified in
Jean Baudrillard’ “Fatal Strategies” chapter. He explains that “It is the same with the principle of
Evil. It is expressed in the cunning genius of the object, in the ecstatic form of the pure object,
and its victorious strategy over the subject.” In Selected Writings (188).
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art into the process of dying and the after-life; in her art, dying itself is the creative act.
Her work posits an interesting tension between creation and destruction and, as a
grotesque, blurs the boundaries that distinguish them. “Poetically man dwells”, writes
Hölderlin, but man –and woman— dies poetically as well. This is one of the conclusions
one can draw from Margolles’ work: not only an expression of death, it is a violent poetic
expression of life, of the process of dying and of the after-life of the corpse and the work
of art. If it is true, as Nicolas Bourriaud claims in his Relational Aesthetics, that “The
artist dwells in the circumstances the present offers him, so as to turn the setting of his
life (his links with the physical and conceptual world) into a lasting world,” (13) then we
can say that this lasting world is paradoxically built by Margolles out of death. Her art is
relational for it evidences and weaves ties between her context and builds interactiosn
between the “actors” of this context: the victims of her specific socio-historical context
(the corpses), herself, and the viewers.
Are these cryptic installations in fact artistic monsters that both de-monstrate and
reveal the violently material underpinnings of death and life in society today? Certainly
Margolles’ work is a cathartic detonator, a purge for the spectator. It creates discomfort,
anger, repulsion and horror, but never leaves the art viewer untouched; it forces us to
question ourselves as much as the work of art that being presented to us: its conditions of
production and exhibition. Margolles’ work also bespeaks a sacrificial economy, where
the anonymous lives of marginal city dwellers are violently sacrificed daily to satisfy the
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blood lust of an unjust system. For Margolles, everything on earth speaks of the tomb, of
the crypt, of secret traces of violence.
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By turning the spectators into intimate participants and co-authors of her elaborate
performance rituals, which begin at the morgue and end in the museum or gallery,
Margolles brings the morgue back into the public realm where it was once located. The
moment of death thus has its endpoint in art. The gallery or museum as the morgue
becomes more than just the possibility of an egalitarian space that anyone could walk
into, whether to project fantasies onto or to identify with the corpses, and as such, the art
space can become a carnival-like grotesque space: the location for a contemporary danse
macabre. The logic of the gallery turned to morgue also means that in mourning the dead,
Margolles and the spectators bring them back to life and then kill them, time and time
again. Her transformation of death into art brings about the death of the corpse while at
the same time enacting its after-life as commodity
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. It is also this blurring of boundaries,
this transgression of the moral norms which decide what is proper to do with death—bury
it and memorialize it abstractly— this materialization of death that inform Margolles
ethics and aesthetics of the grotesque.
As Margolles’ work penetrates the viewer, it enacts not only violence against the
body (with its content and subjects) and the senses and desires of the viewer, but also

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As the prehispanic Tezcoco poet and king, Nezahualcoyotl sings: “todo en la tierra es una
sepultura y nada escapa de ella, nada es tan perfecto que no descienda a su tumba.” (“Everything
on earth is a sepulchre, nothing escapes it, nothing is perfect enough to avoid descending to its
tomb.”).
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It is important to note that not all of Margolles’ work is on sale in the art market. Some of her
pieces are only shown in museums but are never up for sale. Generally, Margolles sells her
videos and photographs but not the works that deal more directly with the body/the corpse.
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against the medium itself: in so doing, she pushes installation to the limit. Her work is
grotesque for it oscillates constantly between the sublime and the abject, between
sacredness, violence, and perversion, between death and the possible after-life given to
her subjects by her work. Finally, her art is defined by the tension between thing-ness and
nothingness, a paradox that operates both as a denunciation of capitalist objectification
and as an exemplary fetishization of an art work made to be consumed. Moreover, this
paradox is precisely grotesque for “If the grotesque can be compared to anything, it is to
paradox. Paradox is a way of turning language against itself by asserting both terms of a
contradiction at once. […] pursued for the sake of wordless truth, it can rend veils and
even, like the grotesque, approach the holy.” (Harpham, 20) Thus, Margolles work, in its
inherent contradictions and its contestatary nature—as grotesque paradox— is a
revelation. It is also a contestation of what the ding an sich or thingness and things in
themselves for her works are grotesque no-things. Harpham explains this ambivalence:
“as its particular linguistic status indicates, “grotesque” is another word for non-thing,
especially the strong forms of the ambivalent and the anomalous.” (4) The result of the
paradox of a thing that is nothing, a grotesquery, stems from “a compromise, a taboo, a
non-thing.” (9)
It’s not surprising that few critics have attempted a discussion of Margolles’
work: our ability to create a reading of it, to create metaphors about it, stops dead when
faced with her powerful installations. Her work problematizes the form of encounter with
artwork: as “wayside” or “deviant” art—as monster—it questions the distancing and
abstraction which enable us to produce meaning and metaphor. And perhaps this inability
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to create metaphors –often construed as the defining trait of humans—is the beginning of
a death in the spectator, the penetration of Margolles’ objects into the viewing subject.
The ultimate moment of grotesque sublimity and terror. “For just as the sublime (in
contrast with the beautiful) guides our view towards a loftier, supernatural world, […] the
monstrously horrible ingredients of the grotesque point to an inhuman, nocturnal, and
abysmal realm.”—the realm of death, of the corpse as inorganic, as anti-natural (Kayser
58). Margolles’ work is both relevant and controversial because it infringes upon the
taboos used to regulate our relationship with our bodies and with the bodies of others—
including that of the work of art. And it is precisely for its questioning and pushing of
limits that it can be labeled grotesque: for, “I argue that the grotesque appears to us to
occupy a margin between “art” and something “outside of” or beyond art. In other
words, its serves as a limit to the field of art and can be seen as a figure for a total art that
recognizes its own incongruities and paradoxes.” (Harpham xxii) It is my contension,
that Margolles art is precisely one example of such a grotesque and total art.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Teresa Margolles takes advantage of both
her role as a capitalist bureaucrat and of the system’s very corruption. These are the
conditions that allow her to create both the denunciation of and potential antidote for the
misery engendered by power structures on the bodies of the marginalized, on the body of
the spectator, and on the work of art. The grotesque body of her work contains
multitudes, bodies upon bodies, alive and dead—dying and becoming—it questions and
contradicts itself and our expectations of the work of art. As grotesque monsters, her
works reveal and instigate our own transformation into objects, our becoming inorganic.
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(IN)Conclusion: Margin of Error
“If I am not grotesque, I am nothing”
(Aubrey Beardsley)

“I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations of men, more sure than the
development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque; and no test of comparative
smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque
invention, or incapability of understanding it.” (Ruskin, 158) Is the period between 1968
and 2008 “great”? It is certainly a moment in which grotesque invention has thrived and
one thing these works reveal is that this time-period is greatly troubled, for, as I have
argued throughout this dissertation, the works appear during “moments of crisis, of
breaking points in the cycle of nature or in the life of society and man.” (Bakhtin 10)
Does the grotesque prove itself a mirror that evidences the need for distortion, for
transgression, excess, resistance, and aesthetic as well as political revolution during these
critical times? Does the grotesque reveal the place and moment of the breaking point
itself? If the grotesque is ever-present, despite what Bakhtin has argued, it can also just
as easily disappear. And yet it does not, for it remains non-assimilable, un-co-optable.
Even today, at a point in time when the illusion of democracy (fueled by the internet, and
capitalist consumption, amongst other things) seems to have opened a space for anything
to become a part of the discourse of power, the grotesque continues to shift its shape,
meanings and content. The grotesque today reveals that the “marginal” and the
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“wayside” is indeed distinguishable and remains distinct from the center, and that it
threatens the very idea of a center.
It is essential for me to mention, nevertheless, that the grotesque remains radically
different and different without reproducing the us-them couplet (where us would be me
and my chosen critics and artists). That would be too easy a recuperation and would fall
into the master code that treats difference as if it were one thing. Thankfully, the
grotesque is never one and can therefore prove an antidote to such binary thinking, or at
least provide a conceptual map for the possibility of something else. Stemming from
nature but deemed anti-natural, at once humorous and terrifying, the grotesque is a
paradox, it is an aesthetic and political “strategy of contradiction,” as Harpham has
labeled it—a confusion. If for ages there has been an identification of power and truth
and beauty (which has promoted and normalized a sense of authority and also promotes
and normalizes consumption), I place myself, this text and the works, critics and artists
analyzed within it on the side of the grotesque as a strategy of political and aesthetic
resistance.
Since the grotesque is
a single protean idea that is capable of assuming a multitude of forms, then
the first thing to notice about these forms is that they are not purely
grotesque; rather the grotesque inhabits them as an “element,” a species of
confusion. (Harpham, xv)
Thus I have analyzed the different ways in which the grotesque “element” of con-fusion,
inhabits and permeates the works of Sarduy, Acker and Margolles. In each of the authors
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the grotesque element, as it mixes and fuses itself with other elements in the works, such
as the baroque, the taboo or the sublime, for example, appears as both singular, and
mutable. And these various aspects or facets of the grotesque, its various moments of
(in)definition appear in each of the works I analyze. As I have shown, the grotesque is
nothing if not heterogenous, and indeed, according to Wolfgang Kayser, the essential
ingredients of the grotesque are: “the mixture of heterogenous elements, the confusion,
the fantastic quality […] a kind of alienation of the world [as well as] the abysmal
quality, the insecurity, the terror inspired by the disintegration of the world.” (Kayser 51-
52) This certainly contradicts Bakhtin’s definition of it as a purely regenerative (and
mostly comic) phenomenon, and yet all of these heterogenous elements are present in one
way or another, in varying degrees, in Sarduy’s and Acker’s novels as well as in
Margolles’ installations.
Yet on the evidence of these works, the grotesque’s strongest characteristic could
be the sense of constant becoming, which is why it is a particularly effective aesthetic
strategy not just of contradiction, but also of resistance. As a minor category, as a
marginal concept, it remains radically unassimilable: it is uncontainable and for all its
indefinition it is not easily co-opted by mainstream aesthetics or canonical studies for,
“The perception of the grotesque is never a fixed or stable thing, but always a process
[…]” (Harpham, 14). The grotesque is nothing if not a process of becoming, and this is
perhaps the one aspect of the grotesque that is constantly present in all of the works I
have analyzed here. The grotesque is thus a boundary phenomenon—echoing Deleuze
and Guattari’s notion of the anomal—which is and isn’t part of a system (aesthetic or
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otherwise). It is hard to map, for as soon as an attempt is made, the attempt also fails for
the map can never be comprehensive—borders and border phenomena are especially hard
to map.
Another prime example for the difficulty of the grotesque would be the very
contradictoriness in and among definitions of the grotesque. Bakhtin is contradicted by
Kayser; and even the very definition of it in the OED contradicts itself, for example. As I
quoted in my introduction, “[The grotesque] is the half-formed, the perplexed, the
suggestively monstrous.” (Harpham—quoting Santayana, 15) And, in its very
contradictoriness and paradoxes, it opens the possibility for discovery of a new way to
perceive the world, contrary to our expectations or assumptions, and therefore holds the
possibility for difference and change. When the notion of difference—and, in this case,
the grotesque as difference—is all that is mobilized or deployed to create a sense of
excitement or to breathe life into an old and tired narrative, then difference is
immediately positioned in a fixed conceptual frame out of which it cannot move
(difference is then paradoxically constituted as fixity). Throughout this dissertation, it has
been my intention to show that the grotesque’s own porous, foggy and permeable nature
prevents this from happening. As soon as I had pinned the grotesque under one category,
it slipped into another (different from the beautiful, and/yet different from the ugly,
and/yet different from the humorous, and/yet different from the tragic, etc). There is no
possibility for the grotesque to have a fixed identity or identification. It is a passe-partout,
and, therefore it abolishes any possibility of mastery, authority and power—therein lies
its aesthetic and political danger and therefore its great potentiality.
169
To map that which cannot be mapped is what I have attempted here. The
grotesque, like writing itself, exceeds and exposes the limits of logocentrism on which
are grounded most Western concepts of rationality, order, beauty etc. In fact, I would
like to take back and recant what I said about Margolles’ work being the “perfect
grotesque,” for how could it ever be? To quote Ruskin once again, “The demand for
perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.” (31). So let this
map be imperfect, imprecise, grotesque and (d)effaced. Hic sunt leones.
Where do I stand at the edge of the map where the earth falls off, where the map
is erased or remains to be traced? Reading and placing the grotesque as both a generative
and potentially radical aesthetic and political move is something that both Ruskin and
Bakhtin have done before in their readings of the gothic and the carnivalesque. In their
writings, these two seemingly disparate critics have much to share: they both analyzed
categories that were much out of fashion in their time, categories that were in fact in
direct contrast and resistance to the mainstream discourses of their time. In fact, though
they may initially seem disparate figures, both critics were keen cultural observers and
recuperated similar aesthetic categories, attempting to extricate them from their “minor”
histories, and into the canon. Am I doing the same here with the works I analyze? In a
way, I am. Yet in doing so through the lens of the grotesque I allow them to remain
uncontained. Is it necessary for a work to become part of the canon, to enter it, in order
for it to be taken seriously? It is precisely through my use of the grotesque as a line of
escape that I can circumvent such questions.
170
The one thing that remains clear and can be assessed quite objectively is the
question of labor: through their analyses of the gothic and the carnivalesque—both of
which include important thoughts on the grotesque which I have included and expanded
on here— Ruskin and Bakhtin both recuperated specific aspects of labor. In fact, Sarduy,
as a critic, could be read as the third pillar to this edifice, the third road I trace on this
map. Like Ruskin and Bakhtin before him, he was also a recuperator, a rescuer of an
aesthetic category deemed minor in relation to a “major one” (in this case classicism),
one which also touches upon the grotesque: the baroque. And as is the gothic and the
carnivalesque for Ruskin and Bakhtin, Sarduy’s baroque is a category that is also
concerned with labor, technique, a certain abundance of skill and also with a particular
kind of revolutionary potential (let us never forget the “Barroco de la revolución”!
88
).
Labor is something which concerns these three critics, Grotesques are nothing if not
laborious. And I believe it is quite clear that the three artists I speak of here are
meticulous laborers in their own right: Sarduy, the millionaire of language; Acker who
reworked her texts over and over so as to make the illusion of their imperfection near
perfect; and Margolles, the tireless artist and forensic doctor. To analyze labor for labor’s
sake would be as futile as to speak of art for art’s sake. The fact that these artists work
hard does not therefore validate the fruits of their labor: the artistry has spoken for itself
in these past three chapters, I hope. Yet it is an aspect that can be easily erased and
which I would briefly like to come back to in my conclusion, because all three of them

88
For more on the Baroque of the revolution or revolutionary baroque, please see my chapter on
Sarduy.
171
have political as well as aesthetic concerns that can be articulated through the grotesque,
but also through labor, and labor as an essential part of the grotesque—and yet not any
kind of labor, a labor of love, of play. “The true grotesque being the expression of the
repose or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed to it, which is the
result of the full exertion of a frivolous one.” (Ruskin, 143) I believe it has been amply
shown that the writers and the artist analyzed here possess serious minds which are put
into play in their work. In these works, we have Ludus in all its seriousness—never
solemnity—, Ruskin’s “jesting spirit” which is also very present in Bakhtin, and also
evidently in the two writers I choose to analyze here, and less evident yet no less present
in Margolles’s work as well. As Alphonse Allais once famously said, “les gens qui ne
rient jamais ne sont pas des gens sérieux.” Or, better yet, as D.H. Lawrence would have
it, these authors make a revolution for fun: “Let's abolish labour, let's have done with
labouring! / Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour, / Let's have it so!
Let's make a revolution for fun!” (in “A Sane Revolution”, 195). It is in this sense of a
ludic revolution, or of pleasurable labor that these grotesque works build “ a second
world and a second life outside officialdom,” (Bakhtin, 6) and I would add, outside the
canon, or beside it, wayside it, devant it—beyond it. The three artists I have included in
this analysis produce works which are labor-intensive, yes, but also intense with desire—
a desire for the body, for the letter and for matter, for revolution and change. In these
works, the grotesque as a phenomenon of bordering, as a lining, a taboo ambiguous zone
of exchange between what is inside and what is outside, enacts a “dispersion of
172
sanctioned history” to borrow Sarduy’s words
89
. So, I would like to read the works
analyzed here as dispersions. And yet in reading them, am I limiting their dispersion of
sanctioned history or am I inserting them in just such a history? I hope I have not—or at
least not quite. I hope my reading of these works remains, as I have remained a writer
and an academic both, thoroughly engaged as a passe-partout: neither here nor there;
inside and out; excrement and gold; wayside and peripheric: shape-shifting and
becoming; nothing and everything. To quote one of the most idealistic Mexican thinkers
of all time, José Vasconcelos, in a work so idealistic as to verge on science fiction rather
than social science, La raza cósmica, “nuestros valores están en potencia a tal punto, que
nada somos aún.” (942)
90
We are nothing yet, but the potential for a “cosmic feeling” is
at hand.

89
And it is thus no coincidence that Sarduy’s own writing, as neobaroque, abjures “diachronic
historywhile engaging historical forms of expression […],” as Parkinson-Zamora mentions in her
article on the neobaroque. His stance is also an key countering to the possible essentialism of
posticolonial theory and criticism that comes from Eurocentric discussions, as she points out.
There is much to agree with in her article, as well as much to contradict but that must be left for a
different discussion on the baroque, neo-baroque and Latin American criticism which I cannot
permit myself to engage in here.
90
“Our values are potential to such an extent that we are nothing yet” (My translation). Another
discussion this might bring forth in the future is that of Vasconcelos’ idea of the “cosmic race” as
a grotesquely revolutionary one.
173
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Asset Metadata

Creator Jauregui, Carolina Gabriela (author)

Core Title Contemporary GrotesQueries: the multifaceted Grotesque as an aesthetic and political strategy of resistance 1968-2008

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 08/13/2010

Defense Date 05/06/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American fiction,Comparative Literature,contemporary art,contemporary literature,grotesque,Kathy Acker,Latin American literature,Mexican art,Mexico,OAI-PMH Harvest,Severo Sarduy,Teresa Margolles

Place Name Latin America (region), Mexico (countries), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Diaz, Roberto Ignacio (committee member), Lloyd, David (committee member)

Creator Email gabrielajauregui@gmail.com,jauregui@daviesandjauregui.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3399

Unique identifier UC1478385

Identifier etd-Jauregui-3798 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-390478 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3399 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Jauregui-3798.pdf

Dmrecord 390478

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Jauregui, Carolina Gabriela

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu