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The grotesque in either literature or art has often been critiqued in terms of deformation, disfiguration, and decenterment by various critics and scholars in the past. I notice that all these attributes that describe the grotesque in fact expose exactly the nature of the Lacanian subject. Within this context, I argue that the grotesque is central to the structure of the Lacanian subject because its very de/formation initiates a process toward the grotesque: ex-centric, split, and decentered. It seems that the Lacanian subject is established in such a way as to disembody itself, demonstrating the symptoms of the hysteria: impossibility of a unified being. This proposed return of and to the grotesque, as a way to uncover the unconscious of Lacan's discourse on the subject, is configured in terms of symbolic desires and the cultural unconscious. In the present critique, Lacanian psychoanalysis is conceived as both a critical approach to and the subject matter of the grotesque. That is to say, Lacanian discourse informs a site of dialogue between theory of the grotesque and practice of the grotesque.
After examining the disfiguration of the Lacanian subject, I will situate the discourse of the grotesque within the context of the Lacanian model of symbolic signification. Specifically, I will explore the issues pertinent to the grotesque desires and subject de/formation of Quentin Compson in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Hazel Motes in Flannery O'Connor's “Wise Blood.” By interrogating the dialectic interactions between social violation and personal aggressivity, I expose the “unconscious” of the grotesque in terms of Narcissistic desires within the oedipal principle as a return to the repressed.