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

88). These three broad areas of incongruity within the grotesque are to be remembered in the subsequent discussion of particular manifestations. (B) THE MINSTREL GROTESQUE AS SUBLITERARY PHENOMENON AND IDEOLOGY Minstrelsy in this interpretation is more a phenomenon of the rich store of 19th-century American subliterary culture than a mode of literary expression. However, viewing minstrelsy purely as popular art without any pretense at refinement is, as it were, the traditional "reading" of the phenomenon. A branch of popular entertainment "for the people by the people" was one of the basic slogans upon which the minstrel stage was founded. Karl Friedrich Flögel, the first theoretician to see the grotesque manifested in subliterary forms, found several examples of it in low burlesque and farce over the centuries. His "tea-kettle" theory, according to which "the subliterary grotesque expressed an essential need of mankind to find comic relief from the monotony of work by letting off steam through indulgence in the crude pleasures of carnival festivity" (Makaryk 86), is also applicable to minstrel performances and audiences, although here an important component of institutionalized comic relief was embedded in social tension that grew out of the racial controversies of the day, rather than viewer anxieties created by work. Minstrelsy analyzed along these lines can easily be seen firstly as the minstrel performer's flight from the contemporaneous problems of race and class, and his indulgence in carnivalesque fun through the image of the physically deformed and mentally disfigured darky and, secondly, minstrel stages offered an easy outlet for minstrel audiences, who were also welcome to the fun through the enjoyment of the cruel and often aberrant imagery. Thus in minstrelsy the Flögelean grotesque operates in two channels simultaneously: giving comic relief to the minstrel performer whose escape from the tensions of the time was secured through the 93