Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Gabriella Varró: The Theme of Comic Love in Blackface Minstrelsy: The Anatomy of the Grotesque

The aesthetic quality addressed in this paper is the grotesque, which many have identified as instrumental in the production and subsequent proliferation of the minstrel image and stereotypes. The following analysis will highlight some layers and aspects of the minstrel performance where the grotesque played a major role; and for lack of space I will concentrate exclusively on one minstrel theme popularized widely in thousands of minstrel lyrics (one of the most fertile grounds for the analysis of the grotesque)

, that of comic love. 1. THE GROTESQUE IN LITERATURE VERSUS THE MINSTREL GROTESQUE The heart and soul of the grotesque as a universal aesthetic quality is ambivalence, ambiguity or paradox, mostly resulting from distortion of the normal. From its beginnings, the grotesque was understood as a branch of the comic, which conjoined two apparently incongruous and disparate qualities, something threatening and benign at one and the same time. In literature, the grotesque always denotes a "disjunctive image, scene, or larger structure, composed of comic-horrific elements or otherwise irreconcilable parts" (Barasch 560). In literary history this base definition has gone through various shifts and changes and, inevitably, various times and periods interpreted and utilized this core definition in many different ways. The grotesque is claimed to have originated with the Dionysian festivals in ancient Greece, "where celebrants dressed as satyrs ... sang abusive songs in the belief that degradation and destructions would assure birth and renewal" (Barasch 560). These basic destructionrenewal and degeneration-regeneration dichotomies were further expanded in Roman mime theater, where the comic love theme as an endless source of grotesque possibilities already reached the stage. Quite interestingly, this Roman mime theater seems to have possessed almost all the necessary ingredients for grotesque theater which later the minstrels were to incorporate in their expressive repertoire. Besides the grotesque theme (mostly farcical plots dealing with love), 88