When I decided to take this course, I spent some time to get myself prepared for cultural conflict. Due to my own cultural background, in which people have a strong sense of shame and even fear of grotesque bodies, I had not seen many movies or books relating to grotesqueness. Most of the grotesque bodies in Chinese culture appear in mythology and ancient novels, and because of some censorship issues, grotesqueness as a topic is always hidden and neglected. So the first thing that struck me was that humans can have grotesque bodies(it might sound stupid but it was true). When I look back to grotesque literature I have read like A Journey to the West, I found that Chinese grotesqueness has been limited to non-human creatures or dehumanized creatures. And I still have not found any Chinese literature or artworks depicting human grotesque bodies.
And when I first started reading Rabelais, I went through some texts back and forth several times because the descriptions of human bodies in this book were far beyond my imagination. Both the characters and the plot of this book were incredible to me because species based on human forms, such as giants and dwarves, do not usually appear in Chinese literature. By reading Rabelais, for the first time, I understood the Chinese insistence on the human image: People can have different physical forms, but they cannot have any grotesque element or behavior beyond human ability. So, if Pantagruel is a character in Chinese literature, he can only be a god, a ghost, or a monster. Later, when I was reading Bakhtin, I became even more aware of the fear and resistance of the Chinese people when facing distorted bodies, since neither carnivalesque nor grotesque can be applied to humans in Chinese literature.
Most of the works in this course let me understand grotesque and simultaneously examine my culture through a new perspective. As American comics became popular in China in this decade, people on social media often discuss and wonder why that Chinese people cannot create comic characters as interesting as those of Marvel. Now I think this has to do with people’s fear of grotesqueness and resistance to breakthroughs in human physical capabilities. I myself am also deeply influenced by Chinese culture, but I think the creative writing I posted last week was my first step in breaking through this cultural restriction.
I hesitated for a long time as I was deciding what to focus in this reflection since I learned countless interesting things in this course. Then I suddenly realized that at the beginning of the semester, I wrote in the plan of study that I hope I can approach a better comprehension of my own culture through this class, so I chose to go back to my original expectation and talk about this cultural conflict. And in the future, I will be sure to spread out the ways to understand and appreciate grotesqueness as a human thing in my society.
