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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:03.374)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Mark Roach, the Reverend Edmund P. Joyce Professor of German Language and Literature and Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame. We're talking about his book today, Beautiful Ugliness, Christianity, Modernity, and the Arts. Dr. Roach, wonderful to have you on today.
Mark Roche (00:24.211)
Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm pleased to be here.
PJ (00:28.482)
So first question, why this book? What prompted you to start this project, and where did the project take you?
Mark Roche (00:36.591)
Yeah, well, there were several reasons. One is I view ugliness as one of three signature elements of modern art and literature. Another signature element is self-reflection. You see it in the obsession with art about art, whether it's German Romanticism, Pirandello, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Fellini, Woody Allen, et cetera.
And the second is technology and industrialization, which become prominent themes in modernity, and of course also affected various art forms. The invention of photography and film come out of technology. And the third is ugliness. There is a dominant thread in modernity where artists are obsessed with either repugnant content.
dissonant forms, clashes between form and content, parts and holes that don't integrate, using shock as a strategy to attract and simultaneously upset viewers. So ugliness was for me a signature element of modernity, but I was surprised how little analysis there is of ugliness. There is really only one monograph on ugliness.
And it's from the 19th century from a follower of Hegel called Karl Rosencrantz, who in 1853 wrote an Aesthetics of Ugliness, and he tries to analyze the different forms of ugliness. And this work, while translated into many languages over time, was not translated into English until 2015. So there isn't a lot of literature on the topic. And when I wrote a book about
PJ (02:22.893)
Wow.
Mark Roche (02:28.459)
comedy and tragedy. I was reading the theories of comedy by Hegel's followers and I noticed something that surprised me at the time that the dominant two categories for the followers of Hegel were the ugly and the comic and they were related. It was one thinker after another. These are forgotten thinkers, Arnold Ruga, Friedrich Theodor Fischer, Christian Weiser,
Mark Schassler, and of course Rosencrantz. And I realized they had some interesting insights and my field, as you said at the outset, is German. The German tradition is rich in reflection on ugliness and the literary and artistic tradition is steeped in ugliness. So there was a certain fit there that made sense. And I have always been attracted to what I call great questions. That is questions that are...
big in the sense of expansive, interdisciplinary, but also great in the sense that they're important, significant questions. And beauty is clearly a significant question and it's relation to ugliness even more so. And I saw it as a fit for my interest and I didn't quite know where I would go when I started. And it took me some time to complete the book. I wrote some other books in the interim while I was working on it, but I'm very happy with the.
the result, which looks at conceptual issues one needs to understand before approaching the topic of ugliness, and then the history of ugliness in art and literature, which really hasn't been done outside of modernity. And finally, the most original part is an analysis of forms of beautiful ugliness. How does ugliness contribute to the expressivity of art in a positive way?
PJ (04:22.998)
Hmm. One, thank you. And I have to confess, I did duet acting in high school. And so every time you say Rosencrantz, I want to follow up with Rosencrantz and Gilder Cern are dead. But not that I knew who Tom Stoppard was in high school. Yeah. Yes, that's true. So even as I look at this.
Mark Roche (04:40.283)
There's a lot of ugliness in Shakespeare.
PJ (04:51.59)
One of the things you mention, and it's kind of coming up here, you have this not very analyzed concept, this very important concept of ugliness, and one of the things you mention is that we really don't have a vocabulary to deal with the expanse of what ugliness covers. Can you talk a little bit about what may be a way forward to increasing that vocabulary, and why is that vocabulary important?
Mark Roche (05:19.707)
Yeah, so for example, when I look at types of beautiful ugliness, one type which is very common throughout the ages and was implicitly thematized already by Aristotle is the idea of taking as the subject matter something that is repugnant, ugly, etc. But crafting a beautiful work where the properties of the work are beautiful.
So it is a beautiful rendition of an ugly subject. And I call that repugnant beauty. That is something that does repel some viewers because of the extent of the ugliness of the content. If you imagine some brutal scenes from war or from other intersubjective encounters, you can imagine people being turned away. Another form I call fractured beauty. This is the opposite.
A fractured beauty is when you have content that is innocuous or even positive, and yet the formal rendition of that is disjointed, distorted, in some way not harmonic. And if you think of Picasso's various renditions of Head of a Woman, whether it's in sculpture or painting, you have a woman who clearly does not look quite realistic.
And these are disjointed forms. And we see some examples of it earlier. The 16th century, Giuseppe Acombaldo, a Viennese court painter, has a number of works where he gives renditions usually of human figures, but also other themes such as landscapes and seasons. And he makes it entirely out of objects from nature. So for example, fruits and flowers.
or frogs or chicken legs or fish. And they're really quite funny. There is a playfulness in Fractured Beauty where the artist is experimenting and trying to create something new and innovative and interesting. Another example of this distortion arises with Hans Holbein the Younger. He has a painting, The Ambassadors from...
Mark Roche (07:45.739)
around 1533 I think it is. And in this painting you have two figures, one of whom paid for the painting, and a number of objects that represent their scientific pursuits, their traveling around the globe, et cetera. And in the middle front of the painting is a blob. It simply looks ugly and distorted. You can't quite make out what it is. Well,
Once perspective is discovered, you can also play with the perspective and make it interesting. And you can only understand what is represented if you move to the side of the painting and look at it from that angle and you see a beautiful rendition of a skull. That is a kind of fractured beauty. The object is not necessarily negative. There are many beautiful renditions of a skull. But if you say...
Well, I can fracture any kind of object and be playful in my representation of it, then you're a fractured beauty. The third form that I want to bring into play here, and I won't bore the audience with many more forms right now, but just to give you an example of a language for understanding beautiful ugliness, I call it ice-crick beauty. Ice-gross is the Greek word for ugliness.
And what's interesting about it is that it's an ugliness of form and of content. So ice-brick beauty is when you have an object that is ugly and the form itself is also disjointed and ugly in some way. A couple of examples. Think of, if you know it, Christoph Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. The subject is clearly horrific. But the work.
is also formally horrific. You can find it in YouTube and play it and you won't last very long unless you have great stamina because it's unbearable to listen to. And he was thinking, he's not alone in this, that some objects are so ugly, so despicable, that to render them with beautiful form would be inappropriate. And one wants to...
Mark Roche (10:06.235)
find a formal language, whether it's in music, whether it's with words or with paint, that does justice to the ugliness of the object. Another example that many viewers and listeners would know is Picasso's Guernica. That was painted, I think, around 37, after the Germans had bombed the city of Guernica on Markete.
in the afternoon, horrific devastation of civilians, completely unwarranted attack. And the subject is clearly horrific, but the form is disjointed as well. So you have fragments of figures. It's not even clear what some of the figures are. It looks like Picasso couldn't, in some ways, paint, couldn't...
draw, couldn't put his figures together, but he is trying to find a formal language that captures that ugliness. So you have, even though many thinkers will say the organic harmony of form and content disappears from modernity, here you have on a meta level, a higher level, a harmony of form and content because the ugly content is captured through a distortion of form, a fragmentation of form that is a...
appropriate to the ugliness of the content. And that's what I call ice-quick beauty. So these are three different terms that allow you to understand ugliness in the complex way in which form and content come together.
PJ (11:48.206)
There's this really easy mistake to make of attaching interest to beauty. Anything that's beautiful is naturally interesting. What role does recognition play in interest? And what role does attraction play?
in the ugliness.
Mark Roche (12:19.811)
Yeah, that is a good question. Plato was the first philosopher to reflect on ugliness. And it may seem surprising because he is the philosopher of beauty. In the symposium, for example, Diotima preaches beauty as that which attracts us, that which reveals truth. And here already you have the harmony of truth, beauty, and goodness. But he also, go ahead. Do you want to say something?
PJ (12:48.234)
Well, I was going to say, I was going to say, but to be fair, his teacher was Socrates, who was famously ugly. So it was right in front of him, right? That's... Ha ha
Mark Roche (12:55.015)
Yeah, and that is another insight of Plato's that there is not always a harmony of physical and spiritual. And that is thematized already in the symposium, but elsewhere as well, that we have an ugly figure, as ugly as a satyr, Socrates, but he is spiritually beautiful. And that spiritual beauty is far more important than the physical. So it is creating a hierarchy of the spiritual.
PJ (13:04.845)
Mm.
Mark Roche (13:22.843)
and the physical that very much matches Plato's idealism. Another very rich insight of Plato's that has a certain contemporary relevance is that he distinguishes between an ugliness that is weak, which he calls the ridiculous, and Aristotle then uses that to say comedy is ugliness without pain, and an ugliness that is powerful, and that is horrific.
So if you could imagine an authoritarian figure who wants to be powerful but comes across in many ways as unappealing, ridiculous, stupid, you might laugh at that figure. But once the authoritarian has access to power, it's no longer ridiculous, it's horrific. The consequences could be really brutal. So even though Plato doesn't reflect deeply on ugliness, he has these various insights. And
Even though he says in the symposium that we are deeply attracted to beauty and that beauty, in a sense, pulls us even out of our consciousness, he recognizes in a Republic II there is a character, Leontius, I think is his name, who is walking by some corpses.
and contemporary analogy would be you're driving and you see an accident. Most of the drivers will slow down to see what's wrong. What is this disaster? Well, Leontas says, my conscious brain knows that I should not be attracted to something that's ugly, that is by definition unattractive, and yet his eyes take over his body.
And even against his conscious attention, his eyes are drawn to the corpses. And a corpse is, of course, a perfect embodiment of physical ugliness. So even against his conscious attention, he's attracted. There is a fascination that continues through the ages. In Paris, there were long lines to go through to see corpses, and take a look at those various bodies. And...
Mark Roche (15:40.347)
It's something that is certainly evident in a horror film. We are attracted to the suspense to really understand the ways in which ugliness manifests itself, especially moral ugliness. But also a kind of emotional ugliness, when there is some sadness, when there's some agony, when there's some rage. That involves tension. And tension is attractive.
PJ (16:06.978)
Hmm. It's interesting as you even start off by shocking because it attracts and upsets. I was reminded Stephen King, who's probably the most published author...
living author in our time in his book or in his writing on writing talks about he always tried for what he called the three types of terror and He wanted like the highest psychological one where he didn't have to rely on any physical ugliness per se and then there's horror but then the last one and
from what people know of Stephen King, he apparently did not achieve his high goals as much as he wanted, but he said, if I can't achieve the two higher versions of terror or horror, I always went at least for the gross out, right? And that definitely, you're like, when you said shocking, because it attracts and upsets, I mean, we definitely see the pull of that, right? Like it's very, very popular.
I wanted to ask you, when you say the title of the book, Beautiful Ugliness, Christianity, Modernity, and Art, what do you mean by modernity in the title?
Mark Roche (17:21.799)
Yeah, so I take modernity in the arts to be a movement that begins in the early 19th century and takes us through a transition to contemporary. So what is current now is perhaps not easily absorbed under modernity, but is congruent with it. And...
German Romanticism would be one example where you have that attraction to the horror, the horrific, Etio Hoffmann would be a good example. And at the same time that Rosenkrantz was writing his Aesthetics of Ugliness, Baudelaire was writing his poetry about carcasses and negative subjects. He's a great example of repugnant beauty. Beautiful form, but horrific subjects. And it took a long time for viewers to be comfortable.
with this kind of ugliness. Gottfried Ben is one of the more famous German poets. And in 1912, he published a series of poems, Morgue and other poems. And these are about dead bodies in the morgue. Very beautiful poems on the formal level, but he dwells in the ugliness of the corpses and what is seen in the corpses. And the...
reaction was that persons were grossed out. They found them, the critics found it absolutely horrific. Today we say, no, that's a signature element of modernity. That's just part of modernity. So it is a long period where there is more and more ugliness and an eventual acceptance of ugliness. The impressionists were described as ugly when they first exhibited their works. Why? Because they weren't realistic.
in a traditional sense. They were deformed. We of course take them as beacons of beauty. If you go to the Art Institute in Chicago, there are many more persons viewing the Impressionists because they appear to them to be light-filled and beautiful and fewer in some of the contemporary areas or with someone like Ivan Albright who had very, very dark paintings. So it is ambiguous this attraction to us.
Mark Roche (19:50.019)
It's there, but we're also attracted to beauty.
PJ (19:55.502)
How much of this ugliness then, because I mean, there's a historical process at work here when you talk about the impressionists, because they're some of my favorite painters and I would call them extremely beautiful, but they're considered ugly at first. How much of this ugliness is the evolution of taste and artists pushing boundaries that we come to accept? And how much of it is, and what's the distinction between this kind of evolution of taste and
for lack of a better term, but philosophically problematic, true ugliness.
Mark Roche (20:30.759)
Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. And there are really two prominent definitions of ugliness. One is that ugliness is the opposite of beauty. That is the most frequent one you hear. And it makes some, it's common sensical. On the other hand, if beauty and ugliness can be brought together, then it's not easy simply to see it as the opposite of beauty. The other common definition is that ugliness
is what we find repellent. Now, that also has some common sensical appeal, but the problem with that, one of the problems with that definition is that as you noted in your question, what is repugnant to us shifts over time. So Picasso's Granica was rejected for exhibition at a World Fair in 1937. Something else was substituted, a fairly kitschy work.
was substituted for it because it seemed too shocking and grotesque. Now people have Picasso as screen savers on their computers. It is accepted. There is an obvious shift over time. And it's not only over time. Simultaneously, you have different receptions of objects that might or might not be defined as ugly. An example would be photographs of lynchings.
In the South, these were viewed as wonderful rituals and spectacles, representations of white nationalism and black inferiority. In the North, they were found to be, rightly so, abject, ugly, horrific, outrageous, and they motivated.
PJ (21:58.85)
Hmm.
Mark Roche (22:28.891)
those who wanted to eradicate injustice in the South. And then the question arises, is, if ugly is what we find repellent, is the same object ugly and beautiful, depending on the reception? I would say no. I would say what we subsume under ugliness might shift, but ugliness is a concept.
that can be defined conceptually. So that what we subsume under ugliness shifts, but ugliness is stable. Concepts don't change over time, but what we subsume under the concept might change. And I view ugliness as, and this is a third definition that's not really that popular yet, but I view ugliness as, in a certain sense, a representation of something that contradicts
the normative concept that belongs to that particular object. So I'll give you an example.
We say it belongs to our normative expectations for the human mind, what the human mind should be. It should be listening, as you elevate in this podcast. It should be curious, which would apply to the listeners and viewers of your podcast and your show. And to the extent that information has been gleaned from such shows, the human mind should be knowledgeable.
And that is a beautiful mind, to get away from the film title. That is, the mind corresponds to the way the mind should be. Knowledgeable, curious, humble, in embodying the virtue of good listening, and certainly eager to learn more and thus curious. Now, a figure who is, shall we say, arrogant.
Mark Roche (24:32.487)
and so arrogant that they don't listen to others and therefore end up being stupid and are not at all curious, that is a form of intellectual ugliness. A particular example, since you mentioned Plato earlier, take the early dialogue of Plato on piety, Plato's Uthofro. Socrates encounters Uthofro, who's on his way to a court to try his father for
injustice and impiety. Socrates is quite surprised, that's a rather radical decision on his part. Is Uthofro confident that he has a good definition of piety? Uthofro then goes through four different definitions of piety, each of which is refuted easily by Socrates. But Uthofro doesn't recognize that he's wrong. And he flees the conversation because he doesn't want to be
to use a word that others might not use in this context, but Plato would, he doesn't want to be punished for having the wrong views, by having those ideas exposed as wrong. And so, Uther Froh flees, he's not interested in the truth of piety, he's interested in holding on to his position, he's arrogant, he thinks he knows it still. That is intellectual ugliness. And part of defining ugliness, in the first third of my book, I look at different.
spheres in which we find ugliness. Physical ugliness is fairly obvious. Emotional ugliness is not talked about much, but depression, rage, hostility that is unwarranted would be emotional ugliness. Then intellectual ugliness and of course moral ugliness. And all of these can be subjects of artworks.
PJ (26:20.81)
Even as you talk there, and this is to make sure I'm tracking with you, when you say that rage and depression are ugly forms of emotional ugliness, you would say that's generally speaking because your definition of ugliness is that it doesn't match the normative. So in response to, say, a horrific incident, if someone weren't to show rage or depression, that would actually be ugly, right? Am I understanding that correctly?
Mark Roche (26:45.496)
Absolutely.
Yeah, that is absolutely correct. If you have lost your spouse and you are walking around joyfully, that is clearly, yeah, that is ugly. That is not how you should be reacting. And therefore, in this case, depression is absolutely appropriate. You have lost someone that you supposedly love. And so, one needs a certain nuance to understand what should or should not be ugly. And...
PJ (26:58.396)
grinning
PJ (27:01.899)
Yeah.
Mark Roche (27:18.423)
to give even more complexity to the puzzle. As you say in this example, you should experience some ugliness because you are going through something that is very difficult. Well, another example of ugliness that is to some extent often overlooked is the crucifix. The crucifix, which represents a horrific event, the death...
of God, if you will, was initially something that the Christians couldn't even present. There weren't images of the crucifix in the early centuries. You can imagine why. This was a sect trying to gain followers, and so they emphasized the triumph of God, the resurrection of God, etc. But it was only over time, and then especially at the end of the 10th century, beginning of the 11th century, that
Christ was no longer emphasized as the victor who's resurrected, but as a human being. The humanness of Christ was emphasized. This is when the creche was introduced. This is when we begin to emphasize Mary as mother and Christ as child. We have more and more representations of the family. And then...
we see more and more representations of the crucifix. And some of them are absolutely horrific. And justly horrific because Christ became ugly in taking on our sins. So this is an ugliness that is in a certain sense fitting. And there are portrayals of the crucifix. For example, in Cologne, you can find a so-called plague crucifix where Christ looks.
horrific. His ribs are exposed, there is blood coming down his face, over his shoulder, the thorns are in his flesh. This is not the typical crucifix you see, but this was so that the viewers of Christ could identify with him in his suffering. And Christ became ugly not only, according to the Christian thought of the time.
Mark Roche (29:41.183)
because he was taking on the sins of humanity, but because he was the lowliest of the low. And because we could identify with Christ as the lowliest of the low, Christ became humble and that lifted up those who could identify with him. So there's a double movement. Christ becomes human and the lowliest of the low, but the lowliest of the low, at the time women, for example, those who were sick, those who were suffering, the poor.
were ennobled, they gained dignity by being one with Christ. So this is a case where the ugliness is absolutely appropriate. And it would be a mistake for Christian art to jump over that and only give us kitschy representations of the Christian narrative.
PJ (30:28.646)
I think this is a great moment, or well, I'm jumping ahead and I could be wrong here, but this seems like the moment to talk about dialectical beauty, right? Even when the few times I've been able to preach, I preached on the valley of dry bones. And it's really interesting how many people did not understand how that passage works. And the ugliness of it is...
Mark Roche (30:37.739)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (30:55.594)
Very obvious. Like when you sit down and think about what is being portrayed, it's clearly some kind of either mass slaughter or battle scene because you have a mass grave, which I think is, in many ways, when you talk about modernity, an important passage that we'd be able to reflect on the horrors that we witnessed through.
and the many genocides, the many world wars, all these sorts of things. And the point at the end is that it is made beautiful through resurrection. But am I on the right track there when you talk about dialectical beauty? And is that kind of that movement with the crucifix?
Mark Roche (31:35.751)
Yeah, it is certainly, certainly the Christian narrative involves an immersion in ugliness, but the Christian has confidence to dwell, to linger in ugliness, because the Christian knows that is not the end of the story. There is yet another moment, there is the resurrection. And in the book, I describe that actually with a different term.
PJ (31:42.153)
Alright.
Mark Roche (32:05.419)
from Hegel. Hegel is not front and center in the book in the sense you have to be a philosopher to read the book and my hope is that simple museum goers would find categories that are useful in the book. But Hegel was my guiding force and he uses the term speculative to describe a tension, a rupture, an ugliness that is gone through
and in the end is left behind as a moment. A moment in the sense, not a temporal moment, but a moment as an element, a part, that we retain in our memory, that we are cognizant of the whole time, but the narrative ends positively. And there was the idea in the earliest reflections on ugliness in modernity by someone whose writings Hegel knew, G.E. Lessing.
wrote on Laocon, the sculpture Laocon, and he argued that it's very difficult to portray ugliness in painting because it's a static art. Whereas in a temporal art like literature, you can present ugliness as a moment and then move beyond it to something else. And an interesting development in modernity is
there is less desire to move beyond it. There is an abandonment of the Christian narrative. And therefore, ugliness becomes even more prominent in painting because you can't get beyond it. So there are artworks that give us ugliness and make us linger in ugliness. We dwell in ugliness, if you will, and don't get beyond it. And then there are artworks at the other extreme, I would say, that give us a moment of ugliness, but sh-
show it as something that can be overcome through forgiveness, through development. Think of comedies that tend to have a happy end. There is some obstacle along the way that can be overcome. In between these two is what I call dialectical beauty.
Mark Roche (34:25.299)
but in such a way that we recognize the ugly as ugly. What do I mean by that? Think of satire as a form.
The best theory of satire comes from Goethe's friend Schiller. Schiller says in satire, there was a break between the real and the ideal. And the artist, knowing that the real is not what it should be, not ideal, dwells on the real in order to show its inadequacies vis-a-vis the ideal. That is ugliness. And so satire dwells on ugliness, but it doesn't just show it.
It criticizes it. It exaggerates it. It rebels against it. It revolts against it. It wants to show the ugliness as ugly. And it's interesting that satire is not a genre that exists in ancient Greece.
It is invented in Imperial Rome. Why is it invented then? Because there is a movement away. The Greeks certainly had ugly moments. The monsters that are portrayed in Hesiod and Homer, the suitors who are morally ugly, whom Odysseus must overcome. Various elements of ugliness are prominent in antiquity. But as you, Oedipus Rex.
PJ (35:35.701)
Right.
PJ (35:47.79)
Oedipus Rex.
Mark Roche (35:50.719)
Think about the blood coming from the eyes or the stench from Philoketides' wound. There is much ugliness in ancient Greece, but it is also balanced by ideal moments of beauty. And it would be wrong to neglect those ugly moments, but it would also be wrong to say ugliness was the dominant motif in ancient Greece. But as we become more and more realistic in imperial Rome and then take it even further,
PJ (35:51.107)
Yes.
Yeah.
Mark Roche (36:19.407)
and are obsessed with the moral depravity and ugliness of the world, satire becomes an entirely new form. And satire wants to present ugliness and criticize ugliness. It is dialectical in the sense that it doesn't give us the harmony, but it recognizes the inadequacy of the first moment, the ugliness. So dialectical beauty is a portrayal of the ugliness of the ugly. And we see much of that in modernity too.
think of artists like George Gross or Otto Dix, who portray the ugliness of the Germans in a movement that follows expressionism, new objectivity or new matter-of-factness. And this is, I think, a common motif in modernity, and satire captures a certain kind of ugliness.
PJ (37:09.814)
Um, well, there's a couple of directions I want to go. I mean, first is, I mean, if I understand correctly, like satires, like as a genre is really invented with juvenile, correct? Which is of course.
Mark Roche (37:20.635)
Yeah, Juvenal is the third prominent Roman satirist, but it is absolutely true that Juvenal has mainly been called, often been called the greatest of the satirists. And he is certainly the most brutal in portraying the depravity of his age, and indignation is the dominant motif of most of his works. And...
PJ (37:24.551)
Okay.
PJ (37:31.985)
Got it.
Mark Roche (37:49.759)
That is in fact, I would say, one of the dominant motivations for ugliness, to be obsessed with the negativity of one's own age, to want to criticize it and attack it. So you could imagine Goya on war or some of the narratives of World War I, Ray Marx, all quite on the Western Front. These are examples of dialectic.
beauty with the ugliness of the ugly is shown. And so that satire becomes not just a written form, but a broader concept that captures this critique of ugliness. And that is the dominant mode of dealing with ugliness for the Hegelians. Rosencrantz, for example, elevates the idea of overcoming ugliness.
through comedy, making fun of that which is ugly. And satire does the same thing. So you're absolutely right, juvenile is a great satirist, and it was in Rome that satire becomes prominent. So this particular form of ugliness and moral revolt is the dominant motif. You could say Guernica is not a satire because it's not focused on the perpetrators of violence. But you could say...
It is a reverse image of satire. It is dwelling on the victims of horror. And so the perpetrators are implicit, but the motivation here doesn't seem to be only moral revolt, it's also empathy with those who suffer. And empathy with those who suffer is another kind of ugliness. It is trying to draw us in.
to see what is lost from war, from horror, from moral ugliness. And that dwelling on the victims is another lens onto ugliness.
PJ (39:59.818)
I'm immediately reminded, I don't know if you've seen Grave of the Fireflies, but I believe Roger Ebert called it one of the greatest anti-war films. It's animated, but it's World War II, it follows two orphans through the firebombing of the cities there. And so it does not dwell on the perpetrators really at all on either side, but just follows the two orphans and just...
Mark Roche (40:20.508)
Mmm.
PJ (40:28.174)
their horrific plight throughout. One of the best movies I've ever watched, and on the other hand, it's a movie I never wanna see again. Um, if that's fair. And it's just, there's that mixture of, you can't look away, you also, just appalled.
Mark Roche (40:40.724)
Mm-mm.
Mark Roche (40:50.395)
Yeah, and this is an interesting case where normally we think of the triad of beauty, goodness and truth. But if we really want to understand war, then beauty is not the right form. Ugliness is a witness to truth. And if we want to be truthful, we must dwell on the ugliness. And we cannot, as in previous eras,
let's say before Goya, only focus on the heroes of war. We also have to look at the victims. And here truth becomes a way of motivating ugly content and often ugly forms. And that is a twist. It is a different way of understanding ugliness, that it really contributes to one of the triads. It contributes to truth.
And it of course contributes to goodness by reflecting on moral ugliness.
PJ (41:55.478)
You actually had a line that I want to ask you about at the very beginning of your book, that people flee ugliness because of their unwillingness to confront reality. What are the good parts of…
Mark Roche (42:07.288)
Mmm. Yeah.
PJ (42:20.767)
Do you think that we can be too fascinated with ugliness? And do you think that there's a weakness to being unwilling to face what is real?
Mark Roche (42:24.199)
Yeah, yeah.
Mark Roche (42:30.983)
Yeah, there is clearly a weakness in being unable to face reality. If we have only escapist literature and art, we are truncating the realm of possible art and we are not understanding our age or the moral atrocities of our age. On the other hand, if we have only a dwelling in ugliness without thinking through alternatives, as is the case, say, in speculative beauty,
then we have again truncated the possibilities for art. And in fact, we are limiting the imagination to think through how we might overcome ugliness. What are the virtues that would allow us to combat evil and ugliness? So someone like Hitchcock is always portraying moral ugliness, but he almost always ends with some gesture to a happy end. They are not hitchy.
happy ends in almost all cases, they are simply gestures. How might we combat ugliness? What could help us overcome ugliness? And one of the, you asked one of your first question was about terminology. And ice-crick beauty is a neologism that I think is helpful for people who want to understand beautiful ugliness. Another neologism in the book and I'll tie it together with your last question. If art...
is so obsessed with ugliness and brackets beauty as being a legitimate form of art in any way. One of the problems is if we accept that beauty is almost a human need or is a human need, then viewers who see only ugliness and are repelled or let's say the art is so difficult to comprehend Schoenberg
liked atonal music because dissonance is harder to comprehend. And a lot of ugly art is difficult beauty, it's difficult to comprehend. So if your average person is repelled by ugliness and by difficult beauty, where do they turn? If they have this longing for beauty, they tend to turn to kitsch. Kitsch is ugliness as beauty, as Adorno once says, it is
Mark Roche (44:53.799)
It appears to be beautiful, but it lacks depth. It is sugary, sweet, superficial. We are attracted to kitsch, but kitsch is not true art. It is not beautiful art.
The opposite of kitsch is quatsch, Q-U-A-T-S-C-H. Quatsch like kitsch is a German word and quatsch in German means nonsense or bullshit with regard to spoken language. And I appropriate the concept to refer to art that is ugly but lacks deeper meaning.
And as artists begin to think, well, I'm going to be true to ugliness or true to the formal possibilities of ugliness, I don't care if there's an audience or not. Milton Babbitt, for example, a composer, once wrote an essay on why we don't need an audience. The composer should create a work and it doesn't care if there's an audience. And there are some artists who create works that I would say are often self-reflexive.
usually ugly, that lack aesthetic merit. There's no depth to it, but they want to shock or create something chaotic and call it art. And I say viewers should have the courage to say no that's not art, that's not great art, that's kvatch. Kitsch and kvatch. So one example would be it's a funny story. In 2001 Damien Hirst put together an installation for a gallery in London.
And the installation included a number of half-filled coffee cups, some empty beer bottles, a ladder, some newspapers on the floor, some candy wrappers, a paintbrush, etc. And that evening after it was installed, a cleaning man walked through the gallery and threw it all into trash bins, completely
Mark Roche (47:02.779)
eliminated the exhibit and he was interviewed afterwards and he said well it didn't look much like art to me I thought it was garbage so I put it all in the trash can and it's a it's a funny example where the average person looks at something and says you know that is that is simply not art it is not great art and so there can be an ugliness that is not combined with beauty.
PJ (47:14.75)
Hahaha!
Mark Roche (47:31.463)
and we should have the courage to call it out.
PJ (47:43.114)
Yes, even as I think about what we struggle with in our contemporary times and through modernity, you've talked about self-reflection, ugliness, technology and industrialization. As you were talking earlier, I thought of one of my favorite authors, Franz Kafka, obviously embodies a lot of that.
PJ (48:09.734)
If we live too long in this alienation, we are stuck living as victims. There's a lot about the connections between our current society and mental illness. Do you see that kind of crotch?
Mark Roche (48:16.841)
Yeah.
Mark Roche (48:30.635)
Hmm?
PJ (48:38.514)
uh kvatch if i'm saying that right um the as uh as maybe a symptom but maybe also as root probably some kind of cyclical nature there in regards to uh some of the ills of our society
Mark Roche (48:56.535)
Yeah, it's a good question. I would say someone like Kafka was very attuned to the ills of his society, the alienation felt by persons in a bureaucratic system or in relationships that were clearly not loving relationships. But he also had the foresight to anticipate authoritarian rule. If you think, for example, of the trial where reasons are not given,
but the person is nonetheless arrested, etc. That attentiveness to the emotional ugliness of the age, the moral ugliness of the age, is something that art should explore. And it should explore mental illness. It should explore the various catalysts for crises of the age and how they work themselves out in human beings.
But if we have only Kafka, then my fear is that we will dwell in this world without thinking of alternatives. Now, Kafka may not be the best example because I had a funny anecdote. I was an undergraduate in Germany and...
20 of us went to see Orson Well's version of the trial. And I was the only person in an audience of about 60 people, 40 Germans, 20 Americans, who was laughing, constantly laughing. And my American undergraduate friends were really upset with me. I was the ugly American, if you will, who should not be laughing at such a serious film. And I went home that night and...
opened Kafka's The Trial and read the preface by Max Broad. And Max Broad said Kafka could not get through two or three lines of The Trial without laughing out loud hysterically. So Kafka himself has a certain ambiguity. On the one hand, he portrays this ugliness. In a serious way, you're really gripped by it and you understand the crises.
Mark Roche (51:23.303)
and the integration of technology, for example, in the penal colony, the self-reflection, and almost all Kafka tales and the ugliness, you are gripped by it. At the same time, Kafka in my eyes is showing the ugliness of this reality. So he is distancing himself, and the comic, the absurd, is simultaneously there.
Both moments are present in Kafka. So Kafka doesn't give us answers. There are almost no answers, even hints of answers, but he is quite clear about what is untenable. And that is progress beyond wallowing in negativity. But as I say, one thing about beauty that is great is that one form of beauty does not exclude another. And we still have works that portray
what I call speculative beauty, but they so often fall into kitsch. And I would challenge artists to give us speculative beauty, perhaps gestures that take us beyond the ugliness without falling into kitsch. That is perhaps a form that has existed throughout time. You mentioned Oedipus. Oedipus at Colonus is an example of speculative beauty.
PJ (52:22.818)
Hmm.
Mark Roche (52:45.899)
Oedipus is able to challenge the guilty verdict. He himself becomes a demigod at the end. He experiences a moment of love with Antigone and friendship with the leader. And that moment of beauty is certainly not kitsch.
And it's not kitsch because the ugliness was so severe, because he suffered so much along the way, because it's so subtle, the resolution. And that requires really a great artist.
PJ (53:26.199)
And even as you mentioned Kafka and the laughing at the trial, which I would not have guessed. The
PJ (53:37.454)
It makes me want to read it. Yeah, again. And so as we talk about, you mentioned earlier, there's this connection between comic and ugliness, or at least the Hegelian disciples thought so. Does some of that come from the play back and forth between beauty and ugliness?
Mark Roche (53:50.183)
Yeah.
Mark Roche (54:01.028)
I'm not sure. Yeah, in a sense, if, yeah, I would put it this way. The Hegelians said that ugliness should be integrated into art. It should not be excluded because art should deal with the full universe of meaning in this world. But ugliness for the Hegelians should never represent the whole. It should be a vanishing moment.
PJ (54:07.553)
Yeah.
Mark Roche (54:28.539)
it should be present. There should be something beyond ugliness. And they, therefore, very clearly saw an asymmetry between beauty and ugliness. You could have beauty without ugliness, but not ugliness without beauty. And they felt that beauty arose when the ugliness of the ugly was revealed. So obscenities, for example, could only be freed.
through the comic, through exaggeration. Think of representations of Priapus with the phallic representing a size that's twice his body. That is funny. That is a way to make fun of the obscene. And Aristophanes is really great in this regard. He has in the clouds, for example, the father.
has debts and He's worried about paying the debts and he says well perhaps I could commit suicide and that I wouldn't have to pay my debts Well, that is an example of intellectual ugliness. It's not really thought through but it's funny because it's so absurd It's not a position that is in any way tenable, but it's shown to be untenable and that is funny. So
PJ (55:52.779)
Right.
Mark Roche (55:53.395)
Aristophanes is able to show the ugliness of intellectual ugliness and that becomes beauty. And that is how beauty emerges out of ugliness. It's the same way in which we mentioned earlier Plato. When Plato wants to uncover truth, he shows fallacies and he reveals the wrongness of false positions.
False ideas are refuted, so we come to truth by way of refuting falsehoods or fallacies. We understand goodness in its depth when we understand how we can fight evil. Naive goodness is not going to get you very far. You need to know under what conditions you can combat evil without yourself increasing evil. So the idea of just war, for example, needs to reflect deeply on...
evil in order to come to what is goodness. And here's the amusing thing. Studies of truth deal with falsehood. Studies of goodness deal with evil. But sides of beauty have neglected ugliness. And that is a gap that has rarely been addressed. If you think between Rosencrantz and today there aren't a lot of
PJ (57:11.149)
Hmm.
Mark Roche (57:21.203)
books that try to understand the richness of ugliness, integrating various examples and categories, et cetera. And that is a gap.
PJ (57:32.37)
I want to be respectful of your time, but I did want to follow up To as you talk about speculative beauty And you talk about like for instance the Christian idea of like immersing yourself in ugliness But coming out to really salvation like that story is salvation to go from ugliness to beauty what is the
Mark Roche (57:47.528)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (57:54.774)
the story called what is the journey in comedy? Is it absurdity or what would be that of like the ugliness taken too far, taken so far that it becomes beautiful, if that makes sense.
Mark Roche (58:08.271)
Yeah, I would say what you need in comedy, and Aristotle would say this, is some element of ugliness, but that ugliness cannot be so painful, so hurtful that you can't laugh at it. So for example, imagine a slapstick scene where one character is hitting the other over the head.
with a stick. Well, in the comedy, the person is not really hurt. We are playing with this. We are laughing at it. We are distant from it because there is no pain. So I would say comedy requires some element of ugliness. Goldoni, for example, has a play called The
Mark Roche (59:02.755)
inventing stories has really great imagination. You almost have to love this character, how he gets out of one situation after another by inventing lies. Eventually, those lies will be revealed as lies and the false character will be rejected and the happy end excludes that particular character. But no one is hurt from the lies. The marriage of persons who should not
Mark Roche (59:33.143)
I go back to Aristotle here, who I believe borrows from this early insight of Plato's that ugliness can be weak or strong. The weak ugliness is ridiculous and a weak ugliness is one that causes no pain. So comedy is some negative trait, maybe it's arrogance, stubbornness, a line, not even knowing who you are.
following the wrong person, think of Midsummer Night's Dream, that needs to be corrected, that needs to be overcome in some way, so that you either have the critique of the negative figure or the figure who is in some kind of intellectual mistake is guided toward some element of harmony. So you can't really have comedy without some element of ugliness, but that element of ugliness...
is not the serious ugliness that, let's say, in Christianity plays such a dominant role in portrayals, let's say, of Dante, of the Inferno, or of Bosch, of The Last Judgment. These do not lend themselves to comedy in our everyday sense, although Dante's is of course called a comedy, because it goes through negativity and ugliness to a resurrection. But what we're thinking about in terms of
film and drama, it can't really be so horrific that we are turning away. So there is the superficial limited concept of comedy, what's allowed in a particular work, and a metaphysical concept of comedy. That's another reason to integrate ugliness. What role does ugliness play in the universe? So Gertrude Faust, which is really the modern work.
that captures humanity the way Dante captures humanity for the Middle Ages, in the preface, the prologue in heaven, Mephisto, the ugly character, appears in a congenial conversation with God, because God knows that the ugly Mephisto, the negative Mephisto, has a role to play in the
Mark Roche (01:01:54.399)
too lethargic. There's a great line, Des Menschen Tätigkeit kann allzu leicht erschlafen. Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruhe. Drum gebe ich gern ihm den Gesellen zu, der reizt und wirkt und muss aus Teufel schaffen. So that's the German, a beautiful German of Goethe. He's basically saying, human beings can become all too lethargic. Therefore I invite the negative spirit of Mephisto to keep...
human beings striving and acting. He has a role to play in the universe. And ugliness is not only something that we should exclude and flee from, it is something that we should think through, linger with, until we understand its various elements.
PJ (01:02:42.838)
You remind me, my middle child, his brain just works very differently and I love that about him. And he came up to me and I was talking to my brother and he said, would you like to hear a joke? And we're like, yeah. And he said, this huge object comes out of the sky and smashes me flat on the street. Ha ha ha. He like dies laughing. And we look at each other and we're like, it's a weird joke buddy. And then all of a sudden I looked at my brother and I was like.
It's Looney Tunes. That's what it is, is he had been watching Looney Tunes and in Looney Tunes, no one, yes, in Looney Tunes, no one actually gets hurt, which of course, what I need to explain to him is please don't try this at home, right? Like that's the distance. But that's why Looney Tunes is funny because they may walk around, Daffy Duck gets shot in the face, but his beak just goes around and he snaps it right back. And so...
Mark Roche (01:03:15.539)
And they're not really dead. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark Roche (01:03:25.151)
Hehehehe, yeah.
Mark Roche (01:03:34.003)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. It's very rich.
PJ (01:03:38.782)
And of course, kids find that funny because, you know, I remember watching America's Funniest Home videos with my family when I was younger and I thought they were hilarious, watching people get hurt. And then I watched it with my kids for the first time, like a year or two ago, and I was like, this is not funny anymore, I've seen people. It's just a different thing. But I wanna say thank you so much for coming on the show today. If you could leave our audience with one thing to really.
Mark Roche (01:03:54.219)
Yeah, yeah.
PJ (01:04:06.006)
think on or chew on for the next week after listening to this episode. What would it be?
Mark Roche (01:04:10.811)
Yeah, I would say don't flee from ugliness. Understand that ugliness is a fascinating phenomenon and try to understand ugliness. There are ways in which ugliness can be presented meaningfully. There are categories that you can employ in order to understand the different ways in which ugliness contributes to meaning. And...
PJ (01:04:17.015)
Hmm.
Mark Roche (01:04:39.455)
We can't have a resolution unless we've gone through ugliness. So it's a necessary element of life and an attractive element of art. But if you have a certain confidence in the categories you employ, then you can see a work and say, that is beautifully organically done. That is ice-creek beauty. And another work that
seems to me to be kvatch. I don't see. I need someone to explain to me what is the greatness of taking a banana and putting it on a museum wall by duct tape. That strikes me as kvatch, and we should have confidence to call that out, to see whether someone can truly defend that as beautiful ugliness.
PJ (01:05:12.856)
Yes.
PJ (01:05:35.443)
Dr. Roach, it's been an absolute honor today. Thank you for coming on.
Mark Roche (01:05:38.955)
It's been fun. Thank you so much.