CONCEPT
The Grotesque Body of the Text
Bakhtin’s distinction between the sealed, finished classical body and the open, excessive, unfinished grotesque body—applied to AI-generated text, where the smooth individual output conceals a radically open, porous, borrowed corpus that reveals its grotesque character under pressure and invites creative engagement rather than aesthetic contemplation.
The classical body, as Bakhtin described it in his study of Rabelais and medieval carnival, is sealed: its surfaces smooth and unbroken, presenting itself as complete and self-sufficient, containing no trace of the processes by which it was made. The grotesque body, by contrast, is open: porous, emphasizing precisely those features the classical body conceals—the mouth that eats and speaks and vomits, the belly that swells, the boundaries that connect one body to another—alive in a way the classical body’s sealed surfaces deny. The distinction is not between the beautiful and the ugly but between the finished and the in-process, the self-contained and the participatory. Applied to AI-generated text, the concept reveals a tension at the heart of how these systems are used: the individual paragraph from a
large language model presents itself as a classical body—smooth, coherent, syntactically complete, apparently the product of a unified mind—while