This
paper reads the grotesque in Katherine Dunn's (1989) popular
novel, Geek Love, as a reconfiguration of agency. The `grotesque,'
as defined by Geoffrey Galt Harpham (1982), refers to beings
that cannot be contained by any appropriate noun—a `species of confusion.' Geek Love tells the story of a family of such `grotesqueries'—genetically engineered `freak' children that are bred by their `norm' parents—to revive the declining profits of their traveling carnival. The children are `illegitimate couplings' of animal and human characteristics, and Dunn's theme of physical deformity explores Harpham's `species of confusion.' The grotesque body in Dunn is a means for the individual's agency and at once a site for `external' agency. And this paper locates it at three levels: the individual (the `freak' bodies require and offer care); family (they necessitate responsibility, generate income, and are also exposed to relationships outside the carnival, where they are exhibited); and community (they constitute a spectacle for society, and exhibit correspondingly different `levels' of agency). This paper thus demonstrates how Dunn calls into question the idea of the normal body by showing alternative forms of agency and identity that are at once corporeal but not restricted to it.
This paper reads the aesthetics of the grotesque in Katherine Dunn's (1989) popular and controversial novel, Geek Love, as a political aesthetic— one that serves the purpose of agency. The
`grotesque,' as defined by Harpham (1982, p. 15), signifies
beings that cannot be contained by any appropriate noun—a
`species of confusion.' Geek Love tells the story of
a family of such `grotesqueries'—genetically engineered
`freak' children that are `illegitimate couplings' of animal
and human characteristics. While Dunn's theme of physical
deformity explores Harpham's `species of confusion,' her grotesque
body reconfigures the means for the individual's agency, which
is at once a site for `external' agency.
Agency
is the faculty for action, signifying the power to act, and
a sense of the self, of the world and other actors. The faculty
of agency is always exercised in relation to a structure.
Lois McNay attempts to reconfigure the agency in terms of
creativity of action. She uncovers this `creative or imaginative
substrate to action' to illuminate how action transcends its
social, economic, cultural, corporeal and material context
(McNay, 2000). McNay's postulation of creativity of action
and Emirbayer and Mische's reconfiguration of agency provide
the theoretical framework of this paper, informed by the premise
that agency can not only be physical, but also creative (unanticipated
modes of behavior) and multiple (existing at several temporal
levels). |
