“The Horror of the Terrifying and the Hilarity of the Grotesque”: Daimonic Spaces—and Emotions—in Ancient Greek Literature

Abstract

The title of this paper quotes a phrase from Jean-Pierre Vernant’s discussion of the Gorgon that focuses on the ways in which representations of the gorgoneion (a Gorgon mask) were depicted as “disrupting the features that make up a human face,” producing “an effect of disconcerting strangeness that expresses a form of the monstrous that oscillates between two extremes: the horror of the terrifying and the hilarity of the grotesque” (1991.113).1 This portrayal ushers the reader into a murky world of concepts of alterity: as Vernant puts it, the Gorgon’s mask “expresses and maintains the radical otherness, the alterity of the world of the dead, which no living person may approach” (1991.121), and his analysis reveals this otherness as comprising a network of ideas that associate not only the realm of the dead, but also night, some particular qualities of the female, and monstrosity.