A study of grotesque manifestations in the Symphony of the Dead

Grotesque can follow various goals and intentions due to its extensive range of functions including criticizing the prevailing conditions in society and depicting politically forbidden subjects. However, what is of great significance is its effect on its audience and the developed special feeling in the audience. The mentioned feeling is usually accompanied by fear, hatred, disgust, and bitter laughter, which is the main goal of the grotesque that aims at reaching the third meaning that is created in the artist’s conscious or subconscious mind and is reflected in their work and affects the audience. The Symphony of the Dead is a novel that reveals the inner contents of the characters in a modern way, provides recognition of their soul and psyche, and depicts the painful and disgusting situation of the characters, horror and oppression, elements of superstition, ignorance and cultural poverty in society, and the fall of humanity and its plunge into the abyss of annihilation. All the elements in this novel lead the mind to the concept of the grotesque. In the present study, the authors have addressed the grotesque elements in this novel using a library-analytical method and have concluded that this nivel in a twenty-four hour period has depicted the events of the society during 1952-1956 using the grotesque genre -consciously or unconsciously- due to the fusion of reality and fantasy, the desperate, eerie, and hateful atmosphere, intellectual death and stagnation, contradiction, the fusion of human-animal elements, and the expression of strange, exaggerated, and unnatural images.