Classical and other bodies

[Art | Link | Print]

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (The Politics and Poetics of Transgression) summarize a point from Bakhtin: "Bakhtin was struck by the compelling difference between the human body as represented in popular festivity and the body as represented in classical statuary in the Renaissance. He noticed how the two forms of iconography 'embodied' utterly contrary registers of being. To begin with, the classical statue was always mounted on a plinth which meant that it was elevated, static and monumental. In the one simply face of the plinth or pedestal the classical body signalled a whole different somatic conception from that of the grotesque body which was usually multiple (Bosch, Bruegel), teeming, always already part of a throng. . . .

"By contrast, the classical statue is the radiant centre of a transcendent individualism, 'put on a pedestal,' raised above the viewer and the commonality and anticipating passive admiration from below. We gaze up at the figure and wonder. We are placed by it as spectators to an instant - frozen yet apparently universal - of epic or tragic time. . . . The classical statue has no openings or orifices whereas grotesque costume and masks emphasize the gaping mouth, the protruberant belly and buttocks, the feet and the genitals. In this way the grotesque body stands in opposition to the bourgeois individualist conception of the body, which finds its image and legitimation in the classical. The grotesque body is emphasized as a mobile, split, multiple self, a subject of pleasure in process of exchange; and it is never closed off from either its social or ecosystemic context. The classical body on the other hand keeps its distance."

As the body, so everything else. Classical texts are finished, complete, no orifices or loose ends; classical systems of thought are likewise isolated wholes with no holes. Neither body, it seems to me, quite captures the reality of things, which Chesterton put so well: The human body (texts, systems, etc) is neither classical nor grotesque; it is almost symmetrical.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, September 28, 2006 at 02:57 PM

Permission is given to use material on this site, provided the source is cited, blog entries are republished in full, and the author is notified in advance.