"This study fills a major gap of Carter’s reception and enters into dialogue with current post-semiotical theories of the embodied subject by virtue of focusing on the dynamics of the meaning-in-process concomitant with the subject-in-process (Kristeva 1985) and the body-in-process. In this, the article ultimately questions what the grotesquely sophisticated can tell us about the transgressions of norms at either end of the scale of the refined and the vulgar. The article also examines Bernard Pomerance’s drama The Elephant Man and David Lynch’s cinematic dramatization of the same name. In particular, the sensation of ‘restrained excess’ is queried, as exhibited by texts like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel Against Nature and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. In an investigation of sophisticated/grotesque phenomena like the exquisiteness of culinary disgust and the attractive revulsion inspired by freakish bodies, this article probes the outer limits of the restrained excess brought on by the paradox that is the sophisticated grotesque. Yet as the notions of camp, decadence and extravagance suggest, there are instances in which the grotesque intersects with sophistication and vice versa.
Sophistication and the grotesque may not at first sight seem to have much in common.
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