L'identité de l'esthétique du grotesque chez Arghezi

Abstract

Arghezi is a poeta faber for whom innate talent acts on the creative personality through the person's hard and conscious work. He calls his art « trade » or « technique » as, beyond his artistic talent, there is an everlasting toil on the matter composing the language, namely the words. Always looking for the essence of our world, Arghezi possesses a Cyclops eye able to find and see the enormous, the monstrous and the oversize. His reality is swollen, exaggerated, a true caricature, thus slipping into « unreality », into the fantastic. The excess of ugliness appears through the horrible, the monstrous and the hideous, these three aspects composing the grotesque. In Arghezi's work, the grotesque arises from the movement between two irreconciliable extremes: from the angelic to the monstrous, from the charming to the horrible, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the tragic to the trivial, from the beautiful to the hideous.