Demimonde

The grotesque is a wonderfully ambiguous term, or it used to be. Not straightforwardly unseemly, it referred to a kind of secret interiority, the grotto-esque, the wild yet still encultured cave wall decoration of ancient civilisations that the renaissance humanists and early modern proto-romantics were so in awe of. It came to designate a kind of hinterland and sometimes arabesque, vaguely orientalist and certainly exoticised ethos that the later Victorians were to eroticise so much. It crossed so many conceptual borders and spanned so many boundaries (which classicism had held strictly apart) that the grotesque became in itself a ‘contact boundary’, a place where one culture or style or genre could imagine itself at the limit condition, at that place where its claws punctured the skin of another species and drew strange and (from a classical perspective) unnatural blood. That it existed in itself, that it became for a while a style in its own right, an orphaned hybrid or bastard with its own feisty attitude, tells us something of how fertile and rich for experimentation was the grotesque.

I was reminded of the darkly scintillating world of grotesque art, in its proper noncontemporary sense, while roleplaying in Final Fantasy XIV with Charlotte recently. I’ve really been enjoying this until-now unexplored aspect of the game, which actually lightens the load of the day-to-day grind (which can quickly become too tedious for a filthy casual gamer like myself). We tend to avoid ERP because it has a tendency to become ridiculous, unpleasant and uncomfortable very quickly. We much prefer to walk that line between romance and spice, making sure they never lose their kinship. Which brings me back to the liminal world of the threshold again, where light is never clinical or glaring but still embraces its sister, the dark. This is the grotesque, the demimonde: our lurking haunt.