Not a Pretty Sight

Jenny Diski

On Ugliness edited by Umberto Eco
Harvill Secker, 455 pp, £30.00, October 2007, ISBN 978 1 84655 122 2

It seems perfectly clear at first glance: beautiful and ugly are straightforward opposites. Beautiful Cinders, ugly sisters. Beauty, the Beast. Dorian, his portrait. So it’s not surprising, having commissioned Umberto Eco to write an essay and compile a book of pictures and quotations called On Beauty in 2004, that by 2007 the publishers thought it was time for On Ugliness. (Don’t tell me that publishing isn’t as easy as falling off a log.) Eco made the beauty book look grand, beginning it with a triumphal line-up of comparative tables picturing thumbnails of Western beauty along a historical timeline. Venus Nude (from Venus of Willendorf 13 BC to Monica Belucci in the Pirelli calendar, 1997); Venus Clothed (Auxerre Lady from Crete, seventh century BC, to Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, 1960); Adonis Nude (a sixth-century Greek statue to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, 1985); Adonis Clothed (2000 BC silver statuette from Aleppo to George Clooney, 2002); Portraits of Adonis (bronze head of Sargon from Akkad 2500-2000 BC to Denis Rodman c.1998 – no, I don’t know who he is either). In the pages that followed, Eco found an array of pictures to please, excite and rest the eye, and gave a fairly elementary run through of aesthetic theory, chronicling the changing assumptions about what has constituted the beautiful over time. It was a personal take, but there wasn’t much to argue with. Schwarzenegger may not be your cup of tea, but you see what Eco means – and I suppose Arnie’s better than Steven Seagal if a hunk is a must.

You are not Logged In

If you have already registered login here
If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

Vol. 30 No. 2 · 24 January 2008 » Jenny Diski » Not a Pretty Sight (print version)
Pages 7-8 | 3127 words

Letters

From Augustus Young

Jenny Diski’s review of On Ugliness does not mention ugliness as a political issue (LRB, 24 January). Ireland almost conducted a national campaign against it. Erskine Childers, minister of health in the late 1960s, was obsessed by the hypothesis that ugly people were more likely to develop mental illness. He ordered his department to investigate. Research money would be found, he said, no expense would be spared. Civil servants dissuaded him with some difficulty: no objective criteria could be established to define ugliness (or beauty); a scientific study would be impossible. He reluctantly dropped the idea and went on to be president of Ireland.

Augustus Young
Port Vendres, France

From Karon Monaghan

Jenny Diski says of Dennis Rodman: ‘no, I don’t know who he is either’ (LRB, 24 January). For her, and perhaps others’, information, Dennis Rodman is a very famous American basketball player. He’s hard to miss because he is 6’7” and has a variety of piercings, rings and tattoos. He also dated Madonna (a singer/celebrity) and, in 2006, appeared in Celebrity Big Brother (a TV show). He was the fifth housemate voted out – on the same day as George Galloway, who came fourth (he is the Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow; ex-Labour, now Respect, now famous also for his imitation of a cat on Big Brother, during which he pretended to lap cream from the hands of Rula Lenska, an actor who used to be married to Dennis Waterman, also an actor). Perhaps Jenny Diski should get out more (or stay in and watch a bit more telly).

Karon Monaghan
London WC1

From Jenny Diski

If anyone could make me feel ashamed of my ignorance of Dennis Rodman (tall basketball player) then it would be Karon Monaghan, whose cultural nous and strict prose show me up for the know-nothing that I’ve turned out to be (Letters, 21 February). Going out more wouldn’t help – I would be sure to go to the wrong places. As for staying in and watching TV, I can’t fit any more into my already small-screen-crowded existence. I could, if she wanted, actually recite the words of Dennis Waterman’s theme song to New Tricks (very few shows on TV that contain a detective – even when not American – get past me). And there aren’t many people I respect enough to reveal that to.

Even so, in any longish life there comes a point when one quite shamelessly says: this far and no further. Dennis Rodman the tall basketball player is that point. But I do thank her for trying to help me.

Jenny Diski
Cambridge