On the Shoulders of Giants

by Umberto Eco

  It was in this climate that physiognomy had caught on. This was a field of study in which, through analogies between the human and the animal face, the outcome being almost always ugliness (except for a few cases such as the lion man and a few others), people tried to understand the character of an individual through analogies with the animal world. But within a few centuries, from physiognomy we come to Cesare Lombroso, the anthropologist behind L’Uomo Delinquente (The Criminal Man), in which we find the following passage:

  Who can know to what point scrofula, arrested development, and rickets may have influenced the cause or the modification of criminal tendencies? We have found 11 hunchbacks out of 832 criminals, almost all thieves or rapists. Virgilio found 3 rickets sufferers and 1 with arrested development of the skeleton out of 266 convicts examined by him, and 6 stutterers, 1 with a hare lip, 5 with strabismus, 45 with scrofula, and 24 with caries. According to him, 143 out of 266 of them carried traces of degenerative physical conditions. Vidocq observed that all the great murderers he had chanced to deal with were bowlegged.… In all criminals, especially thieves and murderers, the development of the genitals is extremely precocious and especially in female thieves, in whom we found a tendency to prostitution as early as six to eight years.

  But long before Lombroso, the physiognomy of the enemy—be he mystical or political or religious—was developed over the centuries. In some Protestant cartoons, for example, the Pope was portrayed as the Antichrist. And in various texts of the early centuries—I will quote the Testamentum Domini, an apocryphal “Testimony of Our Lord” of the fourth to fifth century—the Antichrist has striking features: “his head as a fiery flame, his right eye shot with blood, his left blue-black, and he hath two pupils. His eyelashes are white and his lower lip is large; but his right thigh slender, his feet broad, his great toe is bruised and flat. This is the sickle of desolation.” For Hildegard of Bingen (in the twelfth century) the son of perdition had “a black and monstrous head. It had fiery eyes, and ears like an ass’s, and nostrils and mouth like a lion’s; it opened wide its jowls and terribly clashed its horrible iron-colored teeth.” Racial enemies were also ugly, like the Saracens in Sicilian puppet theatre, and the poor were ugly, too. And out of them all, even though the sculptures have provided nothing truly satisfying, I can offer you the portrait of Franti, from the 1886 children’s novel Cuore (Heart) by Edmondo De Amicis: “I detest that fellow. He is wicked.… There is something beneath that low forehead, in those turbid eyes, which he keeps nearly concealed under the visor of his small cap of waxed cloth … his paper, books, and copy-books are all crushed, torn, dirty, his ruler is jagged, his pens gnawed, his nails bitten, his clothes covered with stains and rents which he has got in his brawls.”

  Finally there is the racial enemy. Think of the black Americans as portrayed by fascist propaganda during World War II. Here is the description of the negro from the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1798:

  Round cheeks, high cheekbones, a forehead somewhat elevated, a short, broad, flat nose, thick lips, small ears, ugliness, and irregularity of shape characterize their external appearance.… Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race: idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness and intemperance are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have reproofs of conscience.

  And, naturally, in a later, presumably more mature society, here is the Jew:

  Those spying, mendaciously pale eyes … that edgy smile … those chops so reminiscent: of a hyena … And then all of a sudden there’s that heavy, leaden, moronic look … the negro blood flowing within. The corners of the nose and mouth forever twitching anxiously, twisted, furrowed, defensive, and then erupting in hatred and disgust. For you! For you, the abject, accursed animal of the enemy race, to be destroyed. Their noses, the “toucan’s beak” of the swindler, of the traitorous, of the treacherous … for all the sleazy schemes, all the betrayals, the nose that hangs down over the mouth, their hideous slots, that rotten banana, their croissant, the foul smirk of the kike, the curving snout that sucks: the Vampire.…

  Cursed damned souls! Drop dead then, you inconceivable animal!

  Whose description is this? Hitler’s? No, this is the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline in his 1937 pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre. Then comes another text, which advises that Jews cannot be either actors or musicians:

  We can conceive no representation of an antique or modern stage-character by a Jew, be it as hero or lover, without feeling instinctively the incongruity of such a notion.…

  By far more weighty, nay, of quite decisive weight for our inquiry, is the effect the Jew produces on us through his speech.…

  The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew’s production of the voice-sounds, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle.… How exceptionally weighty is this circumstance, particularly for explaining the impression made on us by the music-works of modern Jews.…

  … and on any natural hypothesis, we might hold the Jew adapted for every sphere of art, excepting that whose basis lies in Song.

  Who’s this? Céline again? No, it’s Richard Wagner in his Judaism in Music (1850). On the other hand, ugliness is deep rooted, it is in the blood. Consider this:

  Our racism must be that of flesh and muscle … otherwise we’ll end up playing the game of the half-breeds and the Jews, of the Jews who, as they have been able to do in too many cases, change their name and merge with us, so they can—even more easily and without even the need for costly and laborious procedures—feign a change of heart.… There is only one proof with which it is possible to halt interbreeding and Judaism: the proof of blood.

  Who’s this? Still Wagner? No, it’s Giorgio Almirante [founder and leader of Italy’s major postwar neofascist party], speaking out against the little lost sheep of ideological pseudo-racism.

  At a certain point in the course of history—leaving aside ugliness in the comic and the obscene, which runs through all periods, the rustic epics and so on—mannerism marks a move toward a greater attention to more interesting things, and texts begin to appear that reveal understanding and sympathy for ugliness. Just think of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Then, too, there is praise for fine silver hair in the poetry of Joachim du Bellay, praise for flaccid breasts in Marot, praise for lame women in Montaigne, and the exploration of old age in Leonardesque caricature, which at a certain point almost makes us think of Michelangelo, who describes himself as an old man, saying: “spent, faded eyes, teeth like the keys of an instrument.… My face is a fright.”

  Alongside understanding through compassion, we find an engrossment in the decomposition of once beautiful bodies, which has nothing to do with the educational benefit that medieval representations of hell and its torments intended to provide. This is corruption for corruption’s sake, without moral teachings. The German lyric poet, Andreas Gryphius, wrote in the seventeenth century “On the Skeleton of Filosette Exhumed”:

  Horrid sight! Where is the golden hair,

  The snowy brow, the splendor of the cheeks,

  Her cheeks suffused with blood and lilies?

  Her pinkish red mouth, and where are her teeth?

  Where did the stars end, where are the eyes

  With which love plays? Now black serpents

  Coil around the gaping mouth, the nose

  Once whiter than ivory is now gone.

  Who with sound heart and without horror

  Observes the desert of the ears, the caverns of the eyes,

  Who may not shudder at this brow?

  Also in the seventeenth century we find the ugliness of Cyrano de Bergerac, whom Edmond Rostand would later give to us not with a long nose but one like a beak. Moreover, we know the actual Cyrano de Bergerac was not a generous man, because he had exploited his father; and he did not love Roxane because he was homosexual and a syphilitic. This takes nothing away from the fact that
he was a poet. But this is not the Cyrano of the tradition, who confides in his friend Le Bret:

  Look me in the face, and tell me what hope

  This protuberance of mine might permit me!

  I don’t fool myself, not me. At times I, too, chance

  To soften on a serene night

  And, if I enter some garden, breathing in May

  With my poor wretch of a nose, beneath a silvery beam

  I see some woman strolling arm in arm

  With a gallant, and my heart leaps in my breast,

  And I think, alas, that I too would like

  To stroll with a woman in the moonlight.

  And I get carried away, and forget myself …

  When suddenly I see the shadow of my profile on the wall!

  As time went by, there arose the decadent sense of the beauty of illness, from Violetta Valéry, who dies of consumption, to the various dying Ophelias, with poetic pieces such as Barbey d’Aurevilly’s description of Léa. Then we come to the fellow who was made ugly by wickedness and bad by ugliness. Hear the lament of the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “Believe me, Frankenstein, I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow creatures.… They spurn and hate me.”

  The moment in which we become truly aware of the centrality of ugliness to the history of art comes with the beginning of the pre-Romantic sensibility of the sublime, in which the sublime is the grandeur of the horrendous, the storm and ruins. The one who perhaps expressed best this Romantic sentiment was Victor Hugo in his preface to Cromwell (1827): “Man, withdrawing within himself in presence of these imposing vicissitudes, began to take pity upon mankind, to reflect upon the bitter disillusionments of life.… Until then, the purely epic muse of the ancients had studied nature in only a single aspect, casting aside without pity almost everything in art which, in the world subjected to its imitation, had no relation to a certain type of beauty.”

  Even more significant, regarding the representation of ugliness, is Hugo’s The Man who Laughs (1869):

  Nature had been prodigal of her kindness to Gwynplaine. She had bestowed on him a mouth opening to his ears, ears folding over to his eyes, a shapeless nose to support the spectacles of the grimace maker, and a face that no one could look upon without laughing.

  We have just said that nature had loaded Gwynplaine with her gifts. But was it nature? Had she not been assisted? …

  According to all appearance, industrious manipulators of children had worked upon his face. It seemed evident that a mysterious and probably occult science … had chiselled his flesh … skilled in obtusions and ligatures, had enlarged the mouth, cut away the lips, laid bare the gums, distended the ears, cut the cartilages, displaced the eyelids and the cheeks, enlarged the zygomatic muscle, pressed the scars and cicatrices to a level, turned back the skin over the lesions whilst the face was thus stretched, from all which resulted that powerful and profound piece of sculpture, the mask, Gwynplaine.

  It seems like the description of many gentlemen today. But precisely because he is so ugly, Gwynplaine triggers the erotic passion of such a corrupt and decadent woman as Lady Josiana—who, when she comes to know that, in reality, Gwynplaine is Lord Clancharlie, wants him to be her lover:

  I love you not only because you are deformed, but because you are low.… A lover humiliated, cuffed, grotesque, hideous, exposed to jeers … has an extraordinary savor. Tis biting into the forbidden fruit of the abyss. An ignominious lover is exquisite. What tempts me is to have between my teeth the apple, not of paradise but of hell. I have that hunger and that thirst. I am that Eve—the Eve of the gulf.…

  Gwynplaine, I am the throne, you are the stool. Let us place ourselves on a level.… You are not ugly, you are deformed. The ugly is petty, the deformed is grand. The ugly is the devil’s grimace behind the beautiful. The deformed is the opposite of the sublime.… You are Titan … I love you!

  From the eighteenth century onward, there were the ugly and the damned, and only my natural modesty obliges me to edit out much of the description offered by the Marquis de Sade of his character Monsieur de Courval—the Président de Courval—in The 120 Days of Sodom:

  worn by debauchery to a singular degree, he offered the eye not much more than a skeleton. He was tall, he was dry, thin, had two blue lusterless eyes, a livid and unwholesome mouth, a prominent chin, a long nose. Hairy as a satyr, flat-backed, with slack, drooping buttocks that rather resembled a pair of dirty rags flapping upon his upper thighs; the skin of those buttocks was, thanks to whipstrokes, so deadened and toughened that you could seize up a handful and knead it without his feeling a thing.

  As far as the rest of his person is concerned, it was “just as filthy.” He was “a figure whose rather malodorous vicinity might not have succeeded in pleasing everyone.”

  I cannot show you images of Bond villains because they have been prettified in the films, but in Ian Fleming’s novels the descriptions are far more precise: “It was as if Goldfinger had been put together with bits of other people’s bodies.” That is not how it is in the movies. In print, Rosa Klebb “looked like the oldest and ugliest whore in the world.” And as for Doctor No:

  The head also was elongated and tapered from a round, completely bald skull down to a sharp chin so that the impression was of a reversed raindrop—or rather oildrop, for the skin was of a deep almost translucent yellow.…

  There was something Dali-esque about the eyebrows, which were fine and black and sharply upswept as if they had been painted on as makeup for a conjurer. Below them, slanting jet black eyes stared out of the skull. They were without eyelashes. They looked like the mouths of two small revolvers, direct and unblinking and totally devoid of expression.

  Fleming goes on to write that Doctor No stepped closer and then stopped. “Forgive me for not shaking hands with you,” he said in a deep, flat, and even voice. “I am unable to.” As his sleeves slowly parted and opened, he explained: “I have no hands.” And last, consider Mr. Big:

  It was a great football of a head, twice the normal size and very nearly round. The skin was grey-black, taut and shining like the face of a week-old corpse in the river. It was hairless, except for some grey-brown fluff above the ears. There were no eyebrows and no eyelashes and the eyes were extraordinarily far apart so that one could not focus on them both, but only on one at a time.

  From the seventeenth century at least, and then with the first fabulists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, children’s early years were full of nightmares, from the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood and the terrifying Mangiafuoco in Pinocchio, to uncanny, mysterious woods. And the idea of the uncanny then led naturally in adult literature, so far still for children, to vampires, golems, and ghosts.

  But with the advent of steam power and mechanization, our culture began to dwell on the ugliness of modern cities. The first and most famous text comes from Dickens (Hard Times, 1854):

  Coketown was a triumph of fact.… It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.

  There is an impressive abundance of descriptions portraying the ugliness of the industrialized world, starting with Dickens and extending to Don DeLillo and writers since. And it was in this very period, as a reaction to industrial ugliness, and by way of an escape into pure aestheticism, that a religion of beauty arose that was also a religion of the horrendous. Here is how Baudelaire begins his 1857 poem The Carcass:

  Remember that object we saw, dear soul,

  In the sweetness of a summer morn:

  At a bend of the path a loathsome carrion

  On a bed with pebbles strewn,

  With legs raised like
a lustful woman,

  Burning and sweating poisons,

  It spread open, nonchalant and scornful,

  Its belly, ripe with exhalations.

  The sun shone onto the rotting heap,

  As if to bring it to the boil,

  And tender a hundredfold to vast Nature

  All that together she had joined.

  And in Italy, “The Song of Hate” (1877) by Olindo Guerrini:

  When you sleep forgotten

  Beneath the rich soil

  And the cross of God is planted

  Upright over your coffin

  When your rotting cheeks run

  Into your loose teeth

  And in your stinking, empty eye sockets

  Worms are writhing

  For you the sleep that for others is peace

  Will be a new torment

  And remorse will come cold and tenacious

  To bite at your brain.

  A keen and atrocious remorse

  Will come to your grave

  Despite God, and his cross,

  To gnaw your bones.

  .….….…

  Oh, with what joy will I sink my claws

  Into your shameless belly!

  Squatting on your stinking belly,

  I will sit for eternity.

  Specter of vendetta and sin,

  Terror from hell.

  Praise for mourning shows up in the works of the avant-garde, where it is not important to compare, say, the Futurists with Picasso or the Surrealists with the practitioners of Arte Informale. A decision to go against classicism was made. This begins with the Songs of Maldoror, by Lautréamont (1868):

  I am filthy. I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellowish pus. I know neither the water of rivers nor the dew of clouds. An enormous mushroom with umbelliferous stalks is growing on my nape, as on a dunghill.