Evil and Ugliness across Literatures and Cultures Pobrano z https://repo.uni.opole.pl / Downloaded from Repository of Opole University 2021-09-28 UNIVERSITY OF OPOLE INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH Evil and Ugliness across Literatures and Cultures Edited by Ryszard Wolny Stankomir Nicieja Andrzej Ciuk OPOLE 2013 Pobrano z https://repo.uni.opole.pl / Downloaded from Repository of Opole University 2021-09-28 RECENZENCI Ewa K³êbowska-£awniczak REDAKCJA TECHNICZNA Halina Szczegot SK£AD I £AMANIE Jolanta Brodziak KOREKTA Stankomir Nicieja PROJEKT OK£ADKI Wis³omira Nicieja © Copyright by Uniwersytet Opolski Opole 2013 ISBN 978-83-7395-537-0 Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego, 45–037 Opole, ul. H. Sienkiewicza 33. Sk³adanie zamówieñ: tel. 77 441 27 14, 77 441 08 78; e-mail: [email protected]. Druk: ALNUS Sp. z o.o., 30-698 Kraków, ul. Wróblowicka 63, e-mail: [email protected] Pobrano z https://repo.uni.opole.pl / Downloaded from Repository of Opole University 2021-09-28 Andrew Taylor Edith Cowan University Perth, Australia INTRODUCTION: Evil, Ugliness and Disgrace: An Australian View Evil. Ugliness. Disgrace. What an unappealing trio! Two of them can be seen in the painting that was used to publicise the recent conference on this theme, but can we tell which one is missing? A reasonable guess would be that it is disgrace that is not pictured, as the two that can be seen seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. And disgrace is generally considered to be not only not enjoyable, but particularly painful. That, surely, might suggest then that if disgrace is not enjoyable, while evil and ugliness seem to be – at least for these two characters – then maybe evil, ugliness and disgrace may not be such natural bedfellows, such constantly inseparable companions, as one might first think. To deal with all three in the one essay is therefore something of a challenge. Of course one could take the easy way out and discuss only one of those topics, for example evil. Or disgrace. If one chose only to focus on disgrace one could plunge right in with a discussion of the brilliant and harrowing 1999 novel of that name by the former South African, now Australian, Nobel Prize winning novelist, John Maxwell Coetzee (born in 1940). Although Disgrace was written and set in South Africa, Coetzee is now an Australian citizen. And Australia, like South Africa, has had a long relationship with disgrace. This is something that emerges in the media from time to time, is voiced in public and political discourse, even in the national and state parliaments, and figures in our arts. There will be a more detailed discussion of this in the second half of this essay. But first it is worth looking more closely, even if only briefly, at those three terms, and asking whether there is – really – any natural or inevitable relationship between them. Are they, in fact, inseparable or even habitual bedfellows, or is their relationship considerably more problematic than that? Pobrano z https://repo.uni.opole.pl / Downloaded from Repository of Opole University 2021-09-28 8 Andrew Taylor It is hoped that whatever tentative and by no means dogmatic findings emerge from contemplating this question may shed some light on these concepts, and at the same time serve to locate several aspects of Australian culture within Western paradigms much older than that nation’s anti- podean versions of them. * The first thing to point out is that these three concepts belong to three quite distinct categories. This is perhaps most clearly brought out by looking at them in relation to their opposites. Evil is a moral quality. It is the opposite of Good, which is also a moral quality. Pictorially, as in a canvas by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569), evil is snarling little demons with pitchforks inflicting ceaseless and merciless torment. Its opposite, Good, can be imaged in that timeless conjunction of mother and child which is to be found in countless representations of the Virgin and Child. In an Italian Renaissance example, such as by Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, 1483-1520) or Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), the mother looks distinctly human, unlike her medieval precursors. But in these idealized compositions, she is not the harassed or sleep-deprived mother of the real world, but a serene image that transcends the dichotomy of the physical and the spiritual. It provides the observer with, one might say, a bridge to heaven. Here, it says to us, is what motherhood and childhood truly are, without the imperfections of daily life. Evil, on the other hand, maximizes the im- perfections, maximizes to excess. This will be looked at more extensively shortly. Ugliness, on the other hand, is an aesthetic quality or property, and its opposite would be Beauty, also an aesthetic quality. A Madonna by Raphael or Leonardo is beautiful, as are the landscapes by Claude Lorrain (1600- -1682). On the other hand, not many of the counts, princes and merchants who appear in Italian or Flemish Renaissance portraits could be called beautiful. In fact, to our modern eyes many of them could be aptly described as being “as ugly as sin” (What a telling phrase that is!). Yet despite that idiom, these were not usually evil men. They were however, almost uniformly, wealthy and powerful. In fact, it is power that is being imaged, and power might not be beautiful and can certainly be ugly, but it is certainly not necessarily evil. Disgrace is neither moral nor aesthetic. It is, literally, the consequence of the stripping away of grace, or of good standing, or of social approval. It is, one could say, a psychological quality – one feels disgraced, shameful, one wants to hide from the public gaze. The ultimate example of disgrace in Western culture is, of course, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, after they disobeyed God’s edict and ate “the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, / With Pobrano z https://repo.uni.opole.pl / Downloaded from Repository of Opole University 2021-09-28 Introduction: Evil, Ugliness and Disgrace: An Australian View 9 loss of Eden” (II. 1-4), as John Milton (1608-1674) writes in the opening lines of Paradise Lost (1667). Traditionally, their expulsion is seen as the work of the devil: as Eve confesses to God in Book 10 of Milton’s poem, “The Serpent me beguiled, and I did eat” (II. 162). But one can also see the expulsion and its consequent disgrace as the result of a broken contract. Adam and Eve have ignored a condition agreed upon with God, eating the fruit of the one tree that was forbidden them. When we put it like that we also acknowledge that disgrace has a social, even at times a legal, dimension. Privately, one may feel shame as a result of something we have said or done. But at least in English one would not say that one can be privately disgraced. Disgrace involves a public disclosure, so that it is at one and the same time both psychological and social. We have been witnessing Adam and Eve’s disgrace, their Fall from Grace, and its consequences for us all, ever since. It is called by the Roman Catholic Church Original Sin. * At this point one must look a little more closely at each of them, starting with evil. History, and our public consciousness, is so populated with instances of evil that we tend to think we know what it is, even if we fail to understand it. One could start with Caligula, Roman Emperor from AD 37 to AD 41: Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Caligula for short, whose name has become synonymous with brutality and cruelty. In more recent times we have the Third Reich in Germany with its mass extermina- tion of the Jews and Gypsies. Or the Pol Pot (1925-1998) regime in Cambodia in the latter half of the 1970s, during which more than twenty percent of the Cambodian population perished. Perhaps not so commonly regarded as a figure of evil is China’s Mao Zedong (1893-1976). Mao is still officially held in high esteem in modern China, his face adorns the banknotes and his statue greets you on university campuses. But Mao’s policies, during his decades in power, caused the death of up to 70 million Chinese people. On a less massive scale we encounter evil in media reports of mass or serial murder, brutal sex crimes and callous violence, including the abuse of children. As we all know, evil has also been of great interest to writers and other artists. In English, the character of Iago in William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) Othello (c. 1603, pub. 1622) immediately comes to mind, or the three characters Bosola, the Cardinal and Ferdinand in John Webster’s (c.1580 – c.1634) play The Duchess of Malfi (1612-13). There is also the figure of Mephistopheles from Christopher Marlowe’s (1564-1593) play Doctor Faustus (c. 1592, pub. 1604) and, of course, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (first version 1808, revised 1828-9) and Hector Berlioz’s The Damna- tion of Faust (1846). Interestingly, Mephistopheles in Thomas Mann’s 1947 Pobrano z https://repo.uni.opole.pl / Downloaded from Repository of Opole University 2021-09-28 10 Andrew Taylor novel, Doctor Faustus, is more an apparition of Leverkuhn’s fevered mind than an embodiment of evil in itself. But Leverkuhn’s demonic inspiration becomes a powerful symbol of the moral pathology exemplified by the Third Reich, which was destroying itself as Mann was actually writing the novel.