A Comparative Study of Grotesque in Bahram Sadeghi and Gholam Hossein Sa'edi’s Stories with an Emphasis on Philip Thomson’s Theory

Grotesque is a pseudo-literary and artistic comic in which the writer or the teller derides abnormalities with an unpleasant and disgusting and funny exaggerated one. Grotesque elements create a dual space in a literary and artistic work and create a structure that combines opposing thoughts. Grotesque both absorbs and repulses, makes laugh and scares at the same time. Grotesque typically depicts human beings in an exaggerated and crafted way and behaves with regular structures such as time, cause and effect, and logic as if they were otherwise possible. Bahram Sadeghi and Gholam Hossein Sa'edi are among the impressive writers of the 1340s in Iran who picture the life of middle class people after the failure of the coup d'état of 1332. Sadeghi and Sa'edi have both studied psychiatry. Sadeghi and Sa'edi’s originality is in displaying and analyzing the distressed mind of man and showing his psychic conflicts and so they create stories with Grotesque atmosphere. In this paper, while addressing the reasons and the grounds for creating the Grotesque space in the works of these two writers, Grotesque elements of Gholam Hossein Sa'edi's fictional works and the collection of the stories named Trench and the Empty Tanks and Heaven, the long story of Bahram Sadeghi, are studied based on Philip Thompson's theory and the similarities and differences of these two authors are depicted. According to this study, Grotesque elements are more frequent in Sa'edi’s works than those of Sadeghi’s as there are 216 elements in Sa'edi’s works and 75 elements in Sadeghi’s.