Nur über seine Leiche: Knut Faldbakkens Maude danser als phantastische Groteske und Märchentravestie

This essay argues that Knut Faldbakkens novel (1971) can be classified as a text, in which characteristics of the grotesque and the fantastic overlap. The grotesque is based on disproportion, on techniques of distortion, exaggeration, reversal/degradation and the mixture of incompatible elements creating effects of monstrosity and ambivalence. Unreliable and distorted perception, loss of reality and descent into madness constitute the field, in which the grotesque and the fantastic intersect. The analysis combines such important theoretical approaches to the grotesque by Wolfgang Kayser, Michail Bachtin, Peter Fuß and Philip Thomsen as well as Uwe Durst’s extension of Tzvetan Todorov’s and Thomas Wörtche’s concept of the fantastic based on the principle of hesitation between natural and supernatural explanation of events. Furthermore, related to the issue of the grotesque, the essay aims to show how comic reversal and caricature of such fairytales as “The Sleeping Beauty” and “The Frog Prince” turn into a fairytale travesty. The analysis includes psychoanalytical approaches with regard to sexual imagery of flowers, plants and animals and processes of repression.