Tag Archives: Umberto Eco

The Golem in the Attic, and Other Tales

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Buried deep in the New York Times this weekend, you might have noticed the article entitled, Hard Times Give New Life to Prague’s Golem. This would be scary were it true; a golem is, after all, a monster. Yet the golem is a unique and relatively recent monster, one of debatable bloodlust.

The inhabitants of Prague might now consider it a deformed patron saint of sorts, akin to Quasimodo in Paris, when they see vendors hawking little statues and images of it. The Golem is a historically Jewish monster with a long history. Mentioned once in the Bible, the instructions for fashioning one are in the Book of Creation, part of the Kabala, and involve forming it in clay and bringing it to life with words. What results is a strong creature with blazing eyes and an inability to speak. It will keep going on whatever task it’s creator assigns it until it is destroyed.

The most well-known story of the golem is connected to a Rabbi Loew, called the Maharal of Prague, in the 1500s. It was said that he created a golem out of clay to protect the Jewish community from blood libel and to help out doing physical labor. (Medieval inhabitants sometimes even planted children in Jewish houses to spur riots against the Jews who were ritually killing and drinking the blood of Prague’s children.) The golem acted as a protector of the Jewish community for a time.

Then the golem ran amok, threatening innocent lives. Rabbi Loew removed the Divine Name he had written on the golem’s forehead, rendering it lifeless. He saved the clay body in case it was ever needed again. It is widely suspected the golem is still lying in the attic of Rabbi Loew’s temple in Prague.

Whenever times are tough, and people need protection, the golem becomes more popular. Unfortuantely, as the legend shows, golems literal and dogged following of instructions often has bad results. So this odd hero/protector/monster is returning to populairty in Prague, according to the New York Times. If he mad more artistic debuts, we’d be lucky.

The golem has sprung up all over the arts for the past few centuries. He had appeared in early silent films (since lost) and even a ballet. (This conjures up images of the elephant ballet dancers from the movie Fantasia, so I can’t even imagine what it a golem would dance like.) The golem of Prague has appeared in more recent novels, such as Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, in which Josef Kavalier helps save the Golem of Prague from Nazi invasion, Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, and Dara Horn’s The World To Come, about the life of artist Marc Chagall. All three of these books are fascinating reads of historical interest with great storylines.

Statue of the Golem of Prague

That Intellectual Kind of Beauty

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Beauty is instantly recognizable. What is a little more difficult is to pin down exactly what beauty is. Even is you missed the debate regarding Theodore Dalrymple’s Beauty and the Best, you still have a chance to get into the latest aesthetic theories by checking out the prolific writer and philosopher Roger Scruton in a book entitled, properly, Beauty.

Beauty as Scruton means it is of a specifically mental rather than visceral nature. Along with Sebastian Smee of The Guardian, I rather think Scruton does an injustice when he relegates beauty to an act of rational contemplation. Like every other book on beauty, it deals with whether we can make value judgements about art, i.e. can something be better or more beautiful, than another. He also considers whether art can be moral, rather an old-fashioned question but then so is the question of beauty.
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What kills me about books like this is they tackle a huge and general subject, and then meander bombastically about for 100 pages. Dalrymple’s article made his argument precisely, even without him repositing Kant.
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The best primer for any discussion of beauty, as far as I’m concerned, remains Umberto Eco’s On Beauty, which, with it’s thickly illustrated pages, is a thing of beauty itself. Scruton either ripped off Eco’s jacket cover, or Renaissance woman remain the ideal of beauty…

Ugliness, More than Skin Deep

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“It is a fact universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.” So begins Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and this tongue-in-cheek maxim could perhaps be qualified by more recent research to state: “a single man in posession of a fortune must be in want of a beautiful wife.” As a New York Times article points out today, the more beautiful a woman is, the wealthier her husband tends to be.

Indeed, who wouldn’t want a beautiful wife? Beauty is more than just beauty. Because beauty, historically and today, is associated with virtue and intelligence. Thus, beautiful people are even payed more. The NYT article discusses ‘ugliness’ as a quality coming up more in public discussion, everywhere from the popular TV show “Ugly Betty” to Umberto Eco’s art history tome On Ugliness, which I’ve recommended in another post on ugliness. It ends by discussing a new awareness of ugliness as a quality discriminated against, similar to race or gender. Certainly a fair point.

More interesting though, is how ugliness has been systematically ignored throughout history and why, if at all, we should remove the stigma. Beauty has been discussed ad nauseum, while ugliness, as Eco points out, has simply been considered the opposite. Ugliness, in its grotesque mutations and fascinating sinfulness has all the appeal of Milton’s Satan, who remains far more compelling than his God. Beauty, like perfection, is boring. Absolute symmetry only means you need to see half the face before you know everything that you need to know. If one considers ugliness or beauty something more than superficial, then I think one has to acknowledge that it as a very powerful force. Look at the variations of ugliness below:



In defense of this misunderstood phenomena, I’ve pointed out the ugliness is more interesting and more complex than beauty. In addition, aside from the fact it is uneradicable and necessary to a conception of beauty, ugliness should have a stigma. Beauty and ugliness go behyond the skin deep. They express qualities beyond symmetry and proportion, and to limit them to simplistic ideas of Barbie dolls and Ugly Betty’s is to limit our cutural heritage. Why is uglyness such a loaded term? What is it we fear? Death. Sickness. Deviation from the norm. Evil.

Tomorrow expectations of beauty will be reversed. It’s Halloween, when people embrace the ugly and scary and creepy. However, it’s more fair to say that the scary, creepy, and horrible are in themselves ugly. With costumes of monsters and witches, people embrace their deepest culture fears. (Obviously, this article is not going out to all those skanky barmaids and Playboy bunnies. Yawn.)

Halloween is a celebration of all that ugliness signifies, and even if we as a culture only give it one night before shedding our talismanic ugly skins and returning to our beautified selves, it is an important expression of all the variety and power of ugliness.