This study will engage with the theoretical writings of Julia Kristeva, Georges Bataille, Frances Connelly and Jean-François Lyotard on questions of the abject, the deformed, the grotesque and the sublime. By analyzing the numerous verbal, pictorial, and corporeal distortions present in the short story « “The Chinese Lobster” by A.S. Byatt, I will demonstrate how the narrative mockingly formulates questions of genre – quite in vogue – while also helping us rethink text/image relations in terms of transgression, or precisely of “distortion,” a deliberate one, structured on two pre-existing semiotic codes – the verbal and the visual – in order to produce a new intermedial or iconotextual form. More generally, this short story allows one to reconsider literary representation in terms of an inevitable “distortion” or “skewed representation,” in which every representation essentially contains its own failure.