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

phenomenon; (b) the minstrel grotesque as a subliterary or popular cultural ideology, and (c) the minstrel grotesque as world view or philosophy of culture and society. (A) THE MINSTREL GROTESQUE AS A LITERARY PHENOMENON Minstrelsy can be perceived as a component of the American literary culture, thus minstrel lyrics, characters, themes and the style it established can all be investigated along predominantly aesthetic lines. The minstrel grotesque in this basically aesthetic analysis is to signify all grotesque elements, features and characteristics which appear in early blackface minstrelsy, and which show striking similarities with several earlier-mentioned grotesques (in terms of style, character, technique, quality and mode) that occurred throughout pre-minstrel literary history. This is, however, not to claim that the minstrel grotesque was in any way directly indebted to these earlier representations, besides, of course, the quite distinct and historically ascertained commedia roots. On the more general level, the category of the minstrel grotesque as a predominantly aesthetic quality is to signify all the literary minstrel phenomena in which a unique variation from the normal can be perceived. Thus, formal distortions of the natural are present in it as (1) ambiguous or ambivalent elements, features, characteristics, concepts, ideologies such as the ugly and laughable, the distorted/deformed and the attractive, the pleasure-giving and disgusting are combined in it for comic purposes; (2) it links with the bizarre, strange and unusual, fearsome and demonic aspect of the grotesque (an aspect that leads back to the terminology and phenomena of the gothic-grotesqué)

3 (3) the technique of "exaggeration beyond caricature [is] carried [in it] to fantastic extremes" (a concept of Schneegans described in Makaryk 3 See Wolfgang Kayser on the "gothic-grotesque," a cultural as well as literary theory, where he sees the grotesque as "a structure of the estranged world," the primary purpose of which is "to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world" (Makaryk 88). 92