An exception is Karl Rosenkrantz's The Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853), but he takes the idea far away from opposition to mere beauty: "Flatulence is an ugly business in all circumstances. But since it is a sign that the liberty of man is not always entirely under his control ... it resembles a goblin that ... puts him in an embarrassing situation ... we men ... are all part of this involuntary baseness of nature.' Ugliness is not just what you get when beauty goes wrong; it seems to underlie it, even to expand the idea of beauty itself.
Wrestling with this lack of simplicities, Eco offers an Apollonian/Dionysian distinction, contending that ugliness is more visceral than beauty. When we find things beautiful we do so with a cool, disinterested appreciation of the object in question, he says. Really? Anita Ekberg in that fountain? He dismisses the immediate and obvious objections to this admittedly neat notion, with a creaky sleight of hand. He doesn't count the "vulgar remarks made when a beautiful woman passes by' since these are not "expressions of aesthetic pleasure so much as something similar to the grunts of satisfaction or even the belches emitted in certain cultures in order to express appreciation of a food'. These are merely "ostentatious manifestations of approval'. We have no desire to possess or consume the beautiful. When we consider something ugly, however, we react with "disgust, if not ... violent repulsion, horror or fear'. Ugliness engages us physically and emotionally, while beauty is something we recognise and bend our eyes and mind to with serene approval. We don't want to possess a flower that we judge aesthetically pleasing, Eco says, though the florist whose floral arrangements sell for 170 a pop (according to "The Ten Best Florists' article in the Independent recently) or those who have Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Irises in their vaults, might disagree.
We have a fairly clear idea of what beauty has looked like over time from great painters, writers and theorists. It has been mapped, even if elements of the beautiful change: a larger mouth now, the smallest ears then, Gothic cathedrals, classical temples. Beauty's shape shifts in Western eyes, but it is always in some way recognisable to later viewers, as Eco's quotations show. The relativity of beauty has been recognised, or at least it has been surmised. Socrates: "the most beautiful of monkeys is ugly compared to humankind and the most beautiful pot is ugly compared to the female gender ... If we compare the female gender to that of the gods, will it not be the same as comparing pots to girls? Will not the most beautiful girl seem ugly compared to the gods?' And Gulliver, confronted by the monstrous Brobdingnagian breast, philosophises: "This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass; where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough, and coarse, and ill-coloured.'
But still the question remains: what does ugliness look like? Well, not necessarily ugly, in many cases. Eco tells us that great art, for example, redeems ugliness: even half-dead sunflowers become beautiful by being skillfully rendered in paint, whereas the fancy bouquet, whatever it costs, is binned when the flowers fade. Eco quotes Marx on the power of money in an aesthetic judgment: "I am ugly, but I can buy myself the most beautiful of women. Hence I am not ugly, since the effect of ugliness, its discouraging power, is annulled by money.' And this book on ugliness, elegantly printed on good paper, with copious, varied quotations and fine, intriguing reproductions of great artists is not just a thing of beauty, but desirable with it. Is wanting to look away a definition of ugliness, or at any rate, a way of distinguishing the ugly from the not ugly? If that were the case then why would a coffee-table book of ugliness have been published in the first place? And why do the French celebrate the jolie laide, while the laide jolie does not seem to be an equal and opposite concept?
There are classical descriptions of notable ugliness such as an unsightly Socrates lying chastely next to the beautiful, drunken Alcibiades. And there's Aesop: "repugnant to the sight ... disgusting, fat belly, bulging head, pug nose, gibbous, swarthy and short, with flat feet, short arms, bandy legs, thick lips'. Is this ground-zero ugliness, or does it just tell us in what ways Aesop falls short of the anonymous writer's requirements for beautiful? Did Aesop have the misfortune to possess a particularly bad combination of negative features; would only the full array of a neat head, large nose, straight back, pallor, tallness, arched feet, long arms, parallel legs and thin lips allow a man to be considered beautiful? Were the flat feet fatal? Could his opposite have had short arms yet still have been sightly? Where is the tipping point? If people reeled away at the sight of Aesop, were they offended by Socrates only when his looks were set off by being beside a beautiful boy? Or are these descriptions more to do with contrasting the nature of what they produced?
Eco's chapter headings similarly make the idea of pure ugliness disappear. They include "Passion, Death and Martyrdom'; "The Apocalypse, Hell and the Devil'; "The Devil in the Modern World'; "Witchcraft, Satanism, Sadism'. Ugliness isn't the essence of any of these subjects except by a stretch of language, a use of metaphor, though sometimes ugliness is a way to illustrate the notions of evil they deal with, or a falling away from good that they seem better to belong to. Ugliness, then, is an attempt to depict the horrors awaiting those on the wrong side of Christianity or socially acceptable behavior. When the Devil is portrayed as ugly or monstrous, it is surely to emphasise his alienation from the good, from the God in whose image we were supposedly made and are always falling short of. The meticulously flesh-torn depiction of Christ's wounds in Grà ¼newald's 16th-century altarpiece, or the complex suffering of the martyred apostles in Stefan Lochner's 15th-century panels are ugly mostly in the service of that special sense in which we talk of "an ugly incident'. Christ is deformed by his wounds, but the point is to remind the believer that he has already been deformed by taking on a human form, which is what was required to permit the prophesied wounds in the first place. These uglinesses transform into a terrible beauty in theological terms. Ugliness still does not belong to itself. And the paintings of Bosch which no book on ugliness could avoid, ravish the eye, as ever, with comic-horror torments and frightful beasts painted like jewels. More recently, the awakened creature in John Carpenter's The Thing, and H.R. Giger's alien in the films of the same name are offered only in brief glimpses, to tease the audience, which wants to look long and hard on their strange and extraordinary beauty. Aesthetically as well as practically, it is very hard properly to disentangle ugliness and make it a free-standing category.
The breadth of Eco's search spreads out to include or to gloss disgust, horror, fear, obscenity, misogyny, perversity, bigotry, social exclusiveness, repression, inexplicability, evil, deformation, degradation, heterogeneity. Its exemplars are the varying social anathemas of the West: the diabolical and the exotic; excrement; old age; women; Africans; disease; lesbians; Jews; and for Georges Bataille the big toe and the putrefaction of flowers, which he manages to bind to age and misogyny: "flowers don't age honestly like leaves, which lose none of their beauty even after they are dead; flowers wither like simpering, overly made-up old women.' Beauty isn't put to anything like this range of uses as a metaphor: it does the beautiful, the fiercely beautiful and the good, and that's about it.
The industrial and post-industrial urban landscapes look promisingly unambiguous. Eco quotes Dickens's denunciation in Hard Times: "The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.' But it sounds more as if Dickens is objecting to manufactured sameness than ugliness as such. And in a quote from The Death of Light (1964), Hans Sedlmayr seems to agree and to confirm that there is no such thing as the simply ugly when speaking of the urban landscape of the mid-1960s:
scattered here and there in these deserts of ugliness there are oases of ancient nobility, and ... alongside an ugliness devoid of character there appears, quite often, a characteristically provocative ugliness, which might be preferable to the bland pleasantness of certain buildings today, especially given that ugliness is often allied to a surprising solidity and care in construction ... monotony is often even more pronounced than it was in certain "revamped' streets in the 19th century.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
