Edward Lear's Grotesque Ornithology, Anti-Colonial Bestiary

Reading Vivien Noakes's biography of nonsense poet and illustrator Edward Lear (1812-1888), I was struck by his fascination with birds.

and insects

He earned his living in his early years drawing birds in the Zoological Gardens. His Illustrations of the Family of of Psittacidae, or Parrots, was an example of his early work in 1830-1.

"he did not first kill the animal and draw the gradually decaying carcass; instead he drew the live, moving screaming bird." (Noakes: 30)

"Sitting in the parrot house he was obviously regarded as something of a curiosity himself, for the visitors came and stared at him and his work, and as a change from drawing birds he would make indignant, Doyle-like sketches of the bonneted ladies and startled gentlemen who peered at him." (Noakes: 30)

He was at his best when he was drawing majestic, unpretty birds like ravens and owls; he endowed them with sagacious personalities and it is tempting to wonder if Lear found a common bond with the birds, for they too were at the mercy of unscrupulous men. 'Comme il est charmant ce monsieur avec ses beaux yeux de verre!' a small girl said of him years later. 'Ah, que vos grand lunettes vous donnent tout /a fait l'air d'un grand hibou!'

In another line of enquiry, I recently came across further examples of the bird/human double in several shadow pictures from Japan. Are they examples of a grotesque visual ingenuity? Or simply, and wonderfully, the monstrous art of looking sideways?

Blog No. 10/1000

Further Reading

Ann C. Colley. "Edward Lear's Anti-Colonial Bestiary."  Victorian Poetry 30.2 (Summer 1992): p109-120.  

Dr Ian McCormick is the author of The Art of Connection: the Social Life of Sentences (2013) ... 
also available on Kindle, or to download. 

Eight Aspects of grotesque kitsch and freaky metamorphosis

I am grateful to An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense by Wim Tigges for making the link between kitsch and the grotesque.

The grotesque typically combines heterogeneous categories: in this case an animal and inanimate object.

Contrary to the notion of the lack of utility of such combinations it is clear that the example of the ashtray is functional.

The kitsch combination is grotesque on several other levels:

1. A creature 'low' in the scale of being - associated with earth and water (Compare Shakespeare's Caliban in The Tempest)
2. A figure of evil; Satan, in Milton's Paradise Lost shifts shapes accordingly.
3. Open-mouthed is the popular form of the open-body identified by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World.
4. A figure of metamorphosis, in its life-cycle, mirrors the unstable nature of the grotesque world
5. Elements of play, humour, and the ridiculous
6. Body-part exaggeration of size - mouth / tongue.
7. A reminder of death - this is, finally, an ash-tray. The grotesque, finally, is the decomposition of bodies
8. But laughter asserts life against death.