“Sam, the World’s Ugliest Dog,”
by Flickr user spierzchala
I told my husband this morning that I thought I’d post a little piece on ugliness. “Go ahead and use my picture,” he said. I chuckled, but then thought how unlikely it would be for anyone who truly thought he were ugly to find much fun in such a joke.
Ugliness, I’m learning, is now a trendy topic. On the popular-culture side, there’s the TV show Ugly Betty, as well as a host of ugly critters, monsters, and villains popping up all over the movie world. On the serious side, sociologists and psychologists are studying “uglyism” (should we even be using the word “ugly”?) and in On Ugliness, published earlier this year, the writer Umberto Eco tackles ugliness in art and literature.
To the modern mind, beauty has always been a bit of a yawn, even if beautiful people continue to attract our stares. As artists and writers began to delve into the subjective experience of being a human being, art moved away from ideal beauty toward sincere expression. Surrealism, and the dark workings of the hidden parts of the mind, beckoned artists and novelists. Beauty was ignominiously shoved out of the way.
Umberto Eco is a great writer, and I suspect his book on ugliness is terrific (I haven’t yet read it). And clearly psychologists and sociologists are conducting studies that result in interesting conclusions about beauty and ugliness — how ugliness hurts self-esteem and the prospects for economic success, how most of us are prejudiced against people we think are ugly, and how much our perception of ugliness is a mere social construct that ought to be corrected.
But for deeply penetrating insights into the human experience of ugliness and beauty, no one compares with the German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. I’ve mentioned him on a few occasions in this blog, and had always hoped to have a chance to talk about him in a little more detail. This, readers, is the moment.
Lessing’s brilliant treatise on the nature of the different art forms — Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (published in 1766) — prompted Goethe to say, “One must be a young man to understand the effect which Lessing’s Laocoön produced upon us, by transporting us out of the region of scanty perceptions into the open fields of thought.”
Lessing devotes whole chapters of the Laocoön to beauty and ugliness. He argued that painters ought to stick to beauty and stay away from depicting ugliness because the audience for a painting that depicts something too revolting will want to turn away from it. Poets, on the other hand, can use ugliness to great effect. Because of the sequential nature of words, the impact of descriptions of the ugly is never as harsh as an image of something that’s ugly. Moreover, Lessing argued, ugliness, when used by a good poet, lends increased power to expression and can evoke in an audience feelings of intensified pity, ridiculousness or abject terror and even awe.
Not living in a P.C. age (Enlightenment thinkers seem to have said whatever they thought), Lessing seemed to take enormous pleasure in exercising his reason as he pondered the idea of an ugly human form or face. For example, he calmly states that no matter how you cut it, a running nose and a harelip are both disgusting, even though both are clearly natural and completely harmless.
One of the great achievements of modern art was to expand our notions of what could be considered beautiful — broadening and deepening the beautiful to the point where many people now include Picasso’s funky deformations and de Kooning’s rather horrifying, crazy women in their idea of what’s beautiful.
Future generations will have to figure out how far they’re willing to go in their quest to broaden and deepen what they consider beautiful, or at least not ugly. Will human beings ever arrive at a point where a running nose and a harelip are considered beautiful, or at least not ugly? And if they do, will they still experience the beautiful? I ask because if we destroy the hierarchy that ranks things from the ugly to the beautiful, and flatten it into no more than a horizontal display, how, exactly, will human beings continue to experience beauty?
Although Lessing didn’t answer this question, or even pose it, he clearly thought human nature had its limits.
