Many great artworks include elements of ugliness: repugnant content, disproportionate forms, unresolved dissonance, and unintegrated parts. Mark William Roche’s authoritative monograph Beautiful Ugliness: Christianity, Modernity, and the Arts challenges current practices of the dominant aesthetic schools by exploring the role of ugliness in art and literature. Roche offers a comprehensive and unique framework that integrates philosophical and theological reflection, intellectual-historical analysis, and interpretations of a large number of works from the arts.
In the Western tradition this kind of joyous and affirmative embrace of what might otherwise seem repugnant is visible in what Mikhail Bakhtin calls grotesque realism, which he explores in the medieval and Renaissance carnival spirit in general and in François Rabelais in particular. The grotesque as it has developed in modernity tends to be a negative category. Bakhtin, however, views the concept differently. The emphasis on the body, in particular the exaggerated body, on flesh, on bodily parts, particularly the lower stratum, which we find in the grotesque, becomes for Bakhtin a site of laughter and hilarity, fearlessness and gaiety. The degradation of the intellectual to the material world is embraced. Bakhtin celebrates the joy of the clown and jester against cold rationalism and utilitarianism, against serious and self important authoritarianism. He lauds an inverted world in which what usually has standing is knocked down and what normally appears base is affirmed. Freedom from restraint, prohibition, and stilted ceremony make possible a reveling in the body and the material world–even if that freedom is only temporary.
Being on the receiving end of slung excrement or being drenched in urine is in the carnivalesque spirit, but such debasing gestures, which lead us to the lower stratum of the body, are ambivalent, as this debased area is also “the area of the genital organs, the fertilizing and generating stratum.” Bakhtin continues: “Therefore, in the images of urine and excrement is preserved the essential link with birth, fertility, renewal, welfare.” Carnivalesque revelry is able to withstand ugliness because its spirit is oriented toward the whole, toward death and birth, destruction and regeneration. It does not isolate poles within the realm of becoming, does not insist on propriety. Indeed, in the bowels and the phallus, even the boundaries between body and world or between body and body are overcome. One can linger in excrement and urine, in profanities and curses because they degrade even the most exalted, and so contribute to the inverted world of the carnivalesque, to a whole beyond distinction.
Bakhtin focuses on turning an ossified Christian hierarchy upside down. Paradoxically the very idea that what has traditionally been degraded is now celebrated, that we need a disorientation from, and a reorientation away from, the status quo, from the traditional hierarchy of society is, formally, not radically different from the revolution of Christianity itself. This is one reason why Bulgakov turns to the carnivalesque in his Christian novel The Master and Margarita (1928-40), which interweaves the medieval mystery play with the carnivalesque. As a result, we see an unusual combination of grotesque realism and spiritual victory (Milne). Immersed in negativity, the work, like Goethe’s Faust, nonetheless pushes toward a transcendence of tragedy, which it finds in its embrace of striving and its evocation of love. Even as the novel outstrips beauty dwelling in ugliness, its integration of the grotesque and the carnivalesque ensures that the work does not move beyond ugliness too quickly.
In his analysis of the carnivalesque Bakhtin does not cite Nietzsche, but to see in the carnivalesque overcoming of boundaries a process akin to the Dionysian dissolution of Apollonian distinctions would not be unwarranted. Although the early Nietzsche opens a window onto ugliness via a tragic, as opposed to comic, mode, his philosophy of tragedy is as intoxicating as Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. The ugly in the form of the vulgar and obscene also surfaces in the ancient Greek satyr play, which was performed after a series of three tragedies. The satyr play is not to be negated or organically overcome; instead, it is present as its own end.