Various techniques of exaggeration, which are critically important for some theorists, are closely linked to parody. Podskalsky writes that ‘comic exaggeration, is the key issue in the specific description and realization of a comic character and a comical situation’ (1954, 19). Borev expresses a similar idea: ‘Exaggeration and emphasis in satire are manifestations of a more general rule: the tendentious deformation of the material from life that helps to reveal the most essential flaw of the phenomena deserving satirical ridicule’ (1957, 363). Hartmann also expresses it assertively: ‘The comic always deals with exaggerations’ (1958, 646). These definitions are valid but are inadequate, as an exaggeration is comical only when it reveals a flaw. This can be demonstrated through the examination of three basic forms of exaggeration: caricature, hyperbole, and the grotesque.
Caricature has been defined convincingly and accurately a number of times. One particular feature or detail is taken and exaggerated, drawing close attention to it, whereas all other qualities of the one being caricatured are ignored. Caricature related to the human body (a big nose, a big belly, a bald patch) is no different from that of a character’s mental phenomena. The comical, caricature-like portrayal of a character consists in taking a person’s quality and depicting it as the only one – in other words, exaggerating it. Pushkin gave the best definition. Gogol states that ‘he [Pushkin] used to tell me that up until now not a single writer had had this gift of exposing the banality of life so vividly, of being able to outline the banality of an ordinary person with such force, so that all those small things that escape our attention would flash by before everybody’s eyes as major ones’ (1974–78, VII:260). Pushkin thus ingeniously anticipated what philosophers stated later. Bergson formulated it as follows: ‘The art of the caricaturist consists in detecting this, at times, imperceptible tendency, and in rendering it visible to all eyes by magnifying it’ (2005, 13). The definition given here is very narrow; more broadly, though, the technique of portraying men using animal images, along with all types of parody, can be subsumed under caricature.
There is no need to give examples of caricature; all one has to do is open any satirical magazine to confirm that Pushkin’s definition is correct and that the object represented is always deformed to some extent (sometimes even substantially). Therefore Belinsky considered Gogol’s characters in The Government Inspector and Dead Souls not caricatures but realistic characters, copied directly from life. He disapproved of caricature, and his negative attitude is valid, but only when facing a crude form of it that is not justified in life and that is, hence, inartistic. Pushkin also did not appreciate it, but for different reasons. Let us turn to On-egin’s appearance at the Larins’ ball: ‘Now, faced with this enormous revel, he’d got annoyed, the tricky devil.’ He dislikes everything. ‘He […] pouted’ and swears to vow vengeance on Lensky for having urged him to come:
Already, in exultant fashion,
he watched the guests and, as he dined,
caricatured them in his mind. (1977, 5: xxxi, 130)
It is inappropriate to caricature what does not deserve to be. Pushkin describes the ball at the Larins’ with good-natured laughter but does not distort the truth so much that it becomes caricature.
Hyperbole is another kind of exaggeration and is actually a type of caricature. A particular feature is exaggerated in caricature, while the whole of the ridiculed object is in hyperbole. Hyperbole is ridiculous only when it emphasizes negative and not positive qualities; this is especially evident in epic folk literature. In the early epics of many peoples, exaggeration was one way of creating heroes. Here is how a hero is described in the Yakut epic: ‘His torso was five sazhens1 around the waist. His burly shoulders were six sazhens across. His hips were three sazhens in girth’ (Bylinas2 2001, 25).
The hero’s appearance is not hyperbolized in Russian epics; rather, his strength in battle is emphasized. Ilya Muromets single-handedly defeats the entire army of his enemy, brandishing his cudgel or taking a Tatar by the legs and using him as a weapon. There is a shade of humour in this form of exaggeration, but it is not comical. Humour is even greater in the description of how Vasily Buslayevich recruits an army for himself. To select the worthiest, he places a huge, forty-barrel vat of wine and a one-and-a-half-bucket cup in the yard. Only those who manage to drink this cup at one go are selected. In addition, Vasily Buslayevich stands near the vat with a huge elm in his hands, and those who want to join his army have to be able to withstand a blow to the head with it. And some brave fellows do turn up. The superhuman strength of a positive character can bring a smile of approval but does not provoke laughter.
Exaggeration is applied in a different way when negative characters are described. The hero’s huge, clumsy enemy, who snores so loudly that the ground shakes, or who like a glutton puts an entire swan in his mouth or eats a whole loaf of bread at one go, is an example of satirical hyperbole. Hyperbole is used in Russian epics to describe enemies, thus serving as a means of humiliation. For example, in the bylina about Alyosha and Tugarin, the description of Tugarin, a monster sitting at Vladimir’s feast, is hyperbolic:
He, Tugarin, is three fathoms tall,
An oblique fathom between his shoulders,
A tempered arrowhead between his eyes.
(‘Alyosha Popovich,’ in Danilov 1977, 100)
He is so fat that he walks with difficulty, and his head is the size of a beer barrel. He grabs an entire swan or an entire loaf of bread at once during the feast and stores them in his cheeks. Here, hyperbole serves satirical purposes. In any case, hyperbole gradually disappears from nineteenth-century literature. It is sometimes used as a joke, but Gogol, for example, does not employ it for immediate satirical purposes, his style is too realistic for that. Even so, he wields it on occasion to strengthen the comic: ‘Ivan Nikiforovich […] has such wide gathered trousers that, if they were inflated, the whole yard with its barns and outbuildings could be put into them’ (1999, 198). The office scribbler ‘ate nine pies at one go and stuffed the tenth into his pocket’ (228). Hyperbole can occasionally be found in the author’s ornamental prose, as for example in his description of the Dnieper: ‘Rare is the bird that flies to the middle of the Dnieper!’ (90), but this technique is not of great artistic value. Hyperbole, both glorifying and deriding, is revived in Mayakovsky’s poetics, where examples of it are legion.
The grotesque is the most extreme degree of exaggeration.3 Many works have been written on this subject, and numerous attempts have been made to provide highly intricate definitions of it (‘displacement of planes’). There is no justification for introducing such complexity. In the grotesque, exaggeration is at its highest level, which makes the exaggerated object monstrous. It goes completely beyond the limits of reality and passes into the domain of fantasy; in this way it borders on the terrible. Borev gives a simple and accurate definition: ‘The grotesque is the supreme form of exaggeration and emphasis in a comedy. It is an exaggeration that imparts a fantastic character to a given person or literary work’ (1957, 22). Bushmin believes that exaggeration is not obligatory and defines it as follows: ‘The grotesque is the artificial, fantastic arrangement of combinations that are not available in nature and society’ (50).
The boundary between simple hyperbole and the grotesque is unclear. For example, the description of the hero in the Yakut epic analysed above is hyperbolical to the same extent that it is grotesque. Tugarin’s gluttony can also be defined as grotesque. In European literature, Rabelais’ Gar-gantua and Pantagruel, which contain descriptions of various hyperbolical extravagances, are typically grotesque novels. The grotesque has long been a favourite form of the comic in folk art. Masks in ancient Greek comedy are grotesque. The reckless abandon in comedy was opposed to the restraint and the majesty of tragedy. But exaggeration is not the only quality of the grotesque. The grotesque takes us beyond the boundaries of the real world. For example, Gogol’s ‘The Nose’ can be characterized as grotesque because of its plot: the nose freely strolls along Nevsky Prospect. When Akaky Akakievich, the principal character in ‘The Overcoat,’ turns into a ghost, the story itself becomes grotesque.
The grotesque is comical when, like most things comical, it overshadows the mental aspect and exposes flaws. It becomes frightening when a person’s moral side is destroyed, which is why descriptions of mad people can be comical in a frightening way. There is a painting attributed to Shevchenko of a quadrille in a madhouse.4 Several men in underwear and nightcaps are dancing the quadrille in the gangway between beds; they have the happiest look possible and are gesticulating wildly. This painting is remarkable for its high degree of artistry and expressiveness. The impression created is frightening.
Finally, the deliberately terrible can be grotesque without being comical: ‘The Terrible Vengeance’ and the last pages of Gogol’s story ‘Viy,’ in which a coffin in a church takes off and flies in the air, are cases in point. In the domain of painting, Goya’s engravings are examples of what is both grotesque and terrible. In fantastic as well as in completely naturalistic drawings he shows the horrors of the Napoleonic terror in rebellious Spain. The grotesque is possible only in art, not in life. Some kind of aesthetic attitude towards the horrors depicted is an indispensable condition for it. The horrors of war, filmed by a camera for documentary purposes, are not and cannot be grotesque.