Copyright
2018 by Gary L. Pullman
Edgar
Allan Poe, in a different context, argues something similar. To
create a singular, unified effect, or emotional payoff, Poe writes in
“The Philosophy of Composition,”
the author of a narrative literary work must direct every element of
the composition toward the story's conclusion. Character, plot,
setting, style, theme—all must contribute to the story's effect, so
that its conclusion appears to be the inevitable outcome of all that
has preceded it. There is beauty in such a deliberate and thoroughly
consistent, precise series of causes and effects, Poe implies.
Poe also had something to say about the aesthetics of literary art. For him, not only beauty, but also ugliness, could be a source of pleasure. As Kevin J. Hayes notes, in The Annotated Poe, the author of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, argues that “Poe . . . built the grotesque into his critical theory. Beauty and deformity could be combined in original ways to create art” (8).
Poe also had something to say about the aesthetics of literary art. For him, not only beauty, but also ugliness, could be a source of pleasure. As Kevin J. Hayes notes, in The Annotated Poe, the author of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, argues that “Poe . . . built the grotesque into his critical theory. Beauty and deformity could be combined in original ways to create art” (8).
Since
ancient times, philosophers have struggled to define and clarify the
concept of beauty. Aesthetics, as a discipline, was born neither of
literature nor of advertising; it is one of the five branches of
philosophy, the others of which are epistemology, ethics,
metaphysics, and ontology. The article “Aesthetics”
in The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
states that the term “may be defined narrowly as
the theory of beauty, or more broadly as that together with the
philosophy of art.” Some of the features and problems of aesthetics
with which philosophers have dealt and with which they continue to
deal are such “aesthetic concepts” as beauty and
sublimity; “aesthetic value” in which such characteristics as
symmetry, uniformity, and intensity, truth or “aptness,”
universality or “partiality,” and knowledge or “non-cognitivism”
come under consideration; the role of the audience in determining the
constituents of the aesthetic experience; and the elements of
“aesthetic attitudes” (e. g., “disinterested attention” and
the degree of “distance” between the aesthetic object and its
audience); the creators' “intentions” as artists and how their
experiences may have contributed to their creations of art.
One of the more interesting matters of controversy concerning the aesthetics of art discussed in “Aesthetics” is perhaps the section concerning “Definitions of Art”:
Up
to the “de-definition” period [beginning about the middle of the
twentieth century, with the work of Morris Weitz], definitions of art
fell broadly into three types, relating to representation,
expression, and form. The dominance of representation as a central
concept in art lasted from before Plato’s time to around the end of
the eighteenth century. Of course, representational art is still to
be found to this day, but it is no longer pre-eminent in the way it
once was. Plato first formulated the idea by saying that art is
mimesis, and, for instance, Bateaux in the eighteenth century
followed him, when saying: “Poetry exists only by imitation. It is
the same thing with painting, dance and music; nothing is real in
their works, everything is imagined, painted, copied, artificial. It
is what makes their essential character as opposed to nature.”
With the rise of the Romantic Movement, circa 1800-1850, “the concept of expression became more prominent,” and, in “the twentieth century, the main focus shifted towards abstraction and the appreciation of form,” but “response theories of art were particularly popular during the Logical Positivist period in philosophy, that is, around the 1920s and 1930s,” when “Science was . . . contrasted sharply with Poetry, . . . the former being supposedly concerned with our rational mind, the latter with our irrational emotions.” More recently, communication theorists, emphasizing audience, artwork, and artist, focused on the transmission of “aesthetic emotion” between artist and audience by way of the artist's work, often employing the analogy of art as “a form of language” with a syntax and grammar of its own (“Aesthetics”).
Finally,
the “Aesthetics”
article considers the nature of art objects themselves. The
discussion distinguishes tokens, or examples, of objects and types of
objects. In the alphabetical sequence “ABACDEC,” for instance,
there are seven tokens and five types. “Realizations” of ideas
for art objects are tokens; “but ideas are types.” An artist
creates tokens, but “particulars are made” from a “recipe”
provided by the artist. For example, a choreographer creates a dance,
but the dancer makes it; an architect creates a blueprint; a builder
makes the house; a script-writer creates a script; actors make the film. In
the same way, Leonardo created Mona
Lisa,
but print makers make it (in the form of prints). This line of
thought, however, takes no account of the artist's community and the
social context in which he or she works:
.
. . The major difficulty with this kind of theory is that any novelty
has to be judged externally in terms of the artist’s social place
amongst other workers in the field, as Jack Glickman has shown.
Certainly, if it is to be an original idea, the artist cannot know
beforehand what the outcome of the creative process will be. But
others might have had the same idea before, and if the outcome was
known already, then the idea thought up was not original in the
appropriate sense. Thus the artist will not be credited with
ownership in such cases. Creation is not a process, but a public
achievement: it is a matter of breaking the tape ahead of others in a
certain race.
Several
of my own short stories, as collected in volume
one and volume two
of Sinister
Stories: Tales of the Fantastic, Marvelous, and Uncanny,
illustrate some of the concerns of aestheticians.
Today, the Western world's concept of feminine beauty is being challenged as ethnocentric and racist in its emphases upon characteristics typical of Caucasian women. However, some of the attributes singled out as beautiful in regard to the feminine face can be ascribed to women of any race. Symmetry, uniformity, and intensity, for example, can be applied to women across the globe. The question then becomes whether women whose features lack such qualities to one degree or another are more or less beautiful (or ugly). Another way to examine the issue is to ask whether a woman must “fit” the socially accepted or traditional idea of beauty in order to be beautiful.
“A
Complete Makeover” examines these questions. Aging star
Penelope Sweet is losing her fan base. She's receives fewer and fewer
calls from her agent, Louie, as her popularity fades. Lately, she was
asked to “star” in a commercial—about a wrinkle
crème. Insulted, she'd turned it down, as she had Louie's suggestion
that she revitalize her career by accepting nude roles. Now, Louie
was advising her to submit to plastic surgery. After distressing news
from her accountant concerning her precarious financial situation,
Penelope reconsiders her agent's advice and decides “a little nip
and tick couldn’t hurt.” Although Penelope decides to have “a
complete makeover,” her luck doesn't change until she contacts her
friend Guido, who's “connected” to the “Chicago mob” and asks
him for “a favor.” This story shows the influence that
traditional concepts of feminine beauty have on the American
consumer—in this case, moviegoers—and the people—in this case,
an actress—who provide aesthetic sensations associated with beauty.
Penelope's career was built upon her beauty as much as her talent, it
seems, and, as her beauty fades with age, her career suffers to the
point that she is at risk of losing everything for which she's
worked. It is only by obtaining “a favor” from a mobster that she
may make a comeback.
In different ways, in both “A Complete Makeover” and “The Engine of Pain,” people (i. e., fictional characters) become art objects. Dehumanized and objectified, they are exhibited as if they were nothing more than mannequins in museum or art displays. In the latter story, a tour guide for The Museum of Cruel and Unusual Punishments offers Les, a visitor, a “private tour” of a closed wing after the museum closes and the other visitors have left. He's astonished and disturbed to find that several of the mannequins seem more than just life-like: the wax “skin” of one feels like human flesh, and the wig of another feels like human hair. Sharon tells Les she's a sadist, and he's surprised to find himself following her commands. He lies upon a slab, and she secures him in place with leather straps. She then inserts a balloon into his urethra, inflating it as she tells him, “The pain will get worse and worse . . . until you want to die. Scream all you like. No one will hear you.” When Les asks why she selected him, she explains,
“All
day, I’ve looked for the perfect mannequin for this exhibit, and
you were it. Young, handsome, virile―a real stud. You’ll make a
great
mannequin. James Dean said it best―die young and leave a
good-looking corpse. That’s just what I have planned for you,
except I prefer to think of my corpses as mannequins.”
In “Engine of Pain,” people are reduced to museum “mannequins”; in “The Art of the Avant-garde,” photographer Jerry Mason keeps the interests of his voyeuristic BDSM clients in mind as he photographs Betty Burke, a beautiful model, insisting that she lie inside a coffin on a mortuary set. He closes the lid on her and locks it, allowing her to expire as he shoots photographs of her through the custom-made coffin's glass lid. Later, her death verified and her corpse matched to the model who appears in his photographs, Jerry will make a fortune from “the world’s first and only snuff products.” As he confides to her corpse, “To the BSDM crowd who will buy the calendar, no art is more avant-garde than snuff pictures.”
Both
stories' victims are types, or examples, of the idea of a dehumanized
and objectified person, human beings reduced to objects of art. (In
Poe's fiction and poetry, this type recurs, possibly because Poe
regarded “the death of a beautiful woman as unquestionably the most
poetical topic [or idea] in the world.”)
Another way to think of the relationship of type to idea is to consider the former an example of the definition of a term, and the definition, or meaning, of the word as constituting an idea. For example, if “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground” defines the idea of a tree, specific types of this definition are its examples: apples, beeches, chestnuts, dogwoods, elms, figs, gingkos, hickories, and so forth.
Horror arises when a type seems to contradict the idea that the type supposedly exemplifies. The Euglena is a type (i. e., an example) of this notion, or idea, that taxonomic contradictions horrify us. The microscopic organism has chloroplasts, which enable it to photosynthesize, as a plant does. At the same time, however, it can move under its own power, thanks to its flagellum, and it can obtain nourishment by consuming other organisms, as an animal does. It has abilities of both plants and animals, which defies the once-neat kingdoms of Plantae and Animalia. It is both part plant and animal, yet, at the same time, neither fully plant nor animal. As the seventh edition of Biology, edited by Eldra P. Solomon, Linda R. Berg, and Diana W. Martin, points out, the Euglena “has been classified at various time as in the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom” because its peculiar abilities don't fully match those of other specimens in either kingdom.
True, the microscopic Euglena itself doesn't necessarily horrify us, but that's not my claim; my assertion is that the idea of taxonomic contradictions horrifies us. That's not to say that, under the right set of conditions, a creature similar to the Euglena might well horrify us in and of itself, as a type, rather than as an idea. Were we to meet DC Comics's Swamp Thing or Marvel Comics's Man-Thing face to face, it's exceedingly likely that we would be horrified, and what are they but gigantic Euglenas who are smarter than your average swamp lily? It is just this manipulation of forms, this combination of existing materials in new ways that Poe regarded as the basis of creativity and may be the reason he believed that the aesthetics of art should include not only the concept of beautiful, but that of “deformity' as well.
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