4 - The Magical Body and the Grotesque Body

Summary

In Chapter 3, I discussed two representations of the female body and the way by which they contribute to the construction of war narratives. I examined the evil female body: a metaphoric body that by its silence spreads calamity and feeds the already existing violence among the protagonists. I also examined the ill female body in a war-torn environment, an illness resulting from an abusive mother–daughter relationship and from conservative patriarchal values.

In Chapter 4, I focus on the grotesque female body as represented in Hyam Yared's and Vénus Khoury-Ghata's writings and study the way by which the carnivalesque body and the magical body build war stories.

Mary Russo says that to live with the grotesque is to live a ‘claustrophobic experience’ (Russo 1994: 1) as the grotesque references the cave, the grotto. Historically, the grotesque has been associated with the female body as both are perceived as sharing similar traits. They are dark, obscure, hidden and earthly. For Russo, the association of the grotesque to the female body reveals a long misogynistic approach to the female body; it is an abject body that produces bodily fluids such as blood, vomit and excrement and is governed by its lower stratum. However, the grotesque has also been used in other contexts. As Bakhtin shows in Rabelais and His World, the term ‘grotesque’ was used to describe strange Roman ornaments that were discovered in the fifteenth century during the excavation of Titus’ baths. These ornaments playfully combined ‘plant, animal, and human forms. These forms seemed to be interwoven as if giving birth to each other. The borderlines that divide the kingdoms of nature in the usual picture of the world were boldly infringed’ (Bakhtin 1984: 32). For Bakhtin, although the term grotesque first appeared in the discovery context in Rome, it actually existed throughout different periods of time from antiquity to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

As Russo (1994) demonstrates, the grotesque is visible in Christian art – Raphael's designs in the Vatican for instance – where the grotesque sits side by side with the sacred. This juxtaposition of the sacred and the grotesque allows us, as Russo argues, to highlight the perfection of the first and the monstrosity of the latter.