The only way we can see our living and moving face is in a reflecting surface, best of all a glass mirror. But our mirror image mimics us and we can’t trust it except for practical or private purposes. It’s like a wry joke nature plays on us in the disposition of things. We can look at a good many parts of our bodies in the flesh but not at our faces.
What we have otherwise had to rely on has been the artifactual image, especially, the painted portrait. At its best its humane properties of seeming to tell us something more about ourselves than we thought we knew are more satisfying than the absolute superficiality of the mirror.
But then came the photograph standing halfway between the exacting mirror and the deliberation of the painted portrait. Only, the more used we became to the posed photograph, including the averted gaze that made it possible to see ourselves somewhat apart the way we see others, the more we also gradually had to accept the unwanted surprises and even insults of hidden cameras and inadvertent snapshots catching us off guard. Not to mention the overall ultimate unreality of the photographic instant itself. There is no such thing as stopped time except in the photograph. Whatever we look like as living beings, even motionless asleep, our faces do not exist in stopped time. Not even in the decaying actuality of death.
Mechanical and, later, electronic imagery made the reflected face (and all other appearances in motion) move-- but insubstantially, on a flat surface, as at most a semblance.There’s nothing more thrilling than seeing yourself caught on camera for the first time. Seeing the back of your head for the first time! It can also be disconcerting to realize that you’re seeing the same you you’ve been inflicting on others all your life
At the most, you, we, can enjoy the celebrity status of seeing ourselves on a TV screen. Since the invention of the photograph we have known the human face as never before, but the glamour of being able to show ourselves publicly wears off soon enough without real celebrity.
Beyond being a universal thing, the human face is a subject difficult to categorize satisfactorily. Some subjects can be studied in exclusive detail by one or more of the sciences, as is the human body, including the entire head and brain by chemistry, biology and physiology; or by one of the humanities, as portraiture by art history. The human face belongs to all those disciplines but with much left out even if we include all the social sciences, which sometimes seem to have taken it over.
There’s something about the human face that resists studied inquiry no matter what kind of scientific research tries to deal with it. Like God or Soul or Self, it eludes straightforward thinking about. You never see yourself except in a mirroring surface; the presence of the real you must always be invisible to you, even as a moving image, because you’re not in control of the act of seeing. In the mirror you’re still spying on an irrelevant you, a curiosity, even while experiencing strong reactions to its familiarities. This is far from the eye-to-eye conversance you have with someone else’s face in casual conversation, by which you are constantly “reading” their face in all its unsuspecting dynamic expressiveness.
We use terms like anger, fear, satisfaction, scorn, to identify emotions registered on the face. There seems to be a correspondence in mind-body co-ordination, inner feeling with outer motions, of such facial expressions among many geographically diverse groups. Extreme feelings, deep feelings that cause the face to express delight or pain or grieving seem to be universal. But subtler or more mixed feelings are not always recognizable as such, including those migrating passages seen on the face of our own best acquaintances that we later find out connoted anger or disgust or satisfaction but don’t belong to the expected stereotype.
Psychologists and anthropologists have long been devising schemes for reading emotions and demeanors in facial expression—but what if the subject is an actor, politician, hypocrite, or seducer? Or those who hide their feelings from themselves? Even secret cameras can’t capture self-deception There’s no art to finding the mind’s character in the face--and yet we can’t believe that face of ours hasn’t got a moral dimension. As for pure practical identity, it was Ulysses’ dog that recognized him, not a human being, when he came back to Ithaca ten years later. Scenes involving mistaken identity of lovers and friends are familiar to us from Shakespeare and go back to Roman comedy. Of course, realistically speaking, such cases are unlikely but they have a psychological grounding in circumstances that catch us off guard Was that really my wife I saw kissing some complete stranger?
Besides, between the lump of a baby’s face and a face shriveled by age, only the observer near enough in time to the reordering of the features in first, maturing, and then degenerating, stages would easily get used to the differences so shocking to old friends or relatives who haven’t seen each other for decades.
Your identity, however visibly unreliable as you change from decade to decade, either from unavoidably growing older or, alas, from having experienced the misery of real suffering--your identity is fixed only invisibly inside your Self (whatever the Self may be). And the word “fixed” is really wrong, since who among us is not somewhat unsure or insecure about who we are?
For all purposes of identification by others, by the public, by history, there is an unbridgeable gap between the existential self and the face we were born with. Since we don’t have two heads we can’t see either representative face in all its modes and versions the way we can contemplate another’s face. And so there is simply no inborn sympathetic relation between our inner and outer selves, our psyche and our physique. I mean, we might have had another somewhat different face by genetic lottery. For supposedly ugly people, it’s of course never the face they wanted; but isn’t it surprising to discover how many beautiful people, especially women, wish they had been born with looks less spectacular, especially when they can’t escape others staring at them and constantly remarking on their beauty while ignoring the so-called real person hidden inside? And it’s worth adding, what about all the so called ugly people who seem to have no trouble finding lovers and mates?
The face is, technically, the front part of the head, usually understood as running from forehead to chin and from temples to jaw along the sides. The hair on the head would be more of a distinguishing characteristic since it doesn’t participate enough in the face as visage or countenance or look--as an expressive feature. The hair on the head, or on the lower part of the face in males, lies somewhere between clothing and adornment.
Unless you add the word “human” to “face,” the bare definition includes something of facade in buildings, face in coins, facet in cut stones, or the unwavering gaze of the upturned flower. And however “superficial” the idea of the face, however much the mere outside or appearance, the ultimate derivation is from facere, to make, which includes the entirety of whatever is made.
The face is the relatively smooth or figured front of anything that has a less distinctive back. But no artifact or object in nature has our peculiarly human interconnected nervous mobility of facial features.
Do animals have faces? Why not, especially if you talk to your pet or stare at lions or tigers in their cages while they stare back at you. The eyes make the difference. Otherwise face for birds is mostly beak, snout for pigs, muzzle for dogs or horses. But it’s not just the eyes, the traditional seat of the “soul,” that have to carry the burden of face in animals, the play of the features is missing. Especially the alliance between eyes and mouth. As Malcolm de Chazal says in Sens-Plastique:
The essence of the human face lies in the intimate connection between mouth and eyes when the soul trembles peculiarly or is deeply moved. The essence of the animal face is the very absence of relation between mouth and eyes, which are totally separated and divorced. An animal’s eyes at times are more human than a man’s but its mouth is still animal in construction and form.
The eyes and the mouth are of course closer in bond because of the human ability to speak and read, especially in reading aloud, much more widely practiced before the invention of printing, which enabled the eyes to peel along the page faster than the mouth could enunciate the words. But in addition it is only the eyes that can engage with another pair of eyes in the transaction of the look. And it is the look that goes beyond recognition to implicit understanding without the need to speak, the so called speaking look, that leads to spiritual equality or submission or union, depending on the culture to which the persons belong. And, of course, the same transaction that in touching leads to a complete physical embrace.
That eyes and mouth are bound together in facial expression every living moment. But there is also always something “facial” going on with the hands, and less obviously with the rest of the body, and not just among all those foreigners who talk with their hands. It has only been brought to general attention recently, but now we know that what used to be called Deaf and Dumb Sign Language is a system of intricately fluent gesturing as syntactically efficient as speech itself.
We live in a material world in which we do not expect the objects we look at to look back at us, hence a lonely world in which we hope against hope to find a look returned. We are happy when it is returned by other humans if only an instant at a time. Looking at a portrait that holds our attention for a moment reminds us of that satisfaction and sometimes startles us into thinking that it is actually taking place.
Deep and lingering look-exchanges cannot ordinarily be held for more than a moment without provoking laughter or annoyance at the embarrassment of having been under a spell. Our first confirmation of an infant’s humanity comes from the prolongation of the look and the softening of the mouth into the beginnings of the smile. Chazal takes the soul for granted, just as novelists take soul, spirit, mind, and character for granted as more than provisionally useful abstractions when trying to plumb the depths of the human face. We may have to agree for the most part that that we can never hope to understand much about the human face without combining abstractions and metaphor.
The organs of sight and hearing, tasting and smelling, are the parts of the face that communicate physiologically with the rest of the body as well as our environment of persons, creatures, natural objects, and things. Touching is done mostly by the fingers, though sometimes with the face in intimacies. But insofar as all the senses can participate, the face would indeed seem to be as much a part of the rest of the body as the inverse is true.
Test this inseparability by imagining head and body divided. Without being horrifyingly dramatic, let’s imagine the occasion as a neat division. Where now is the person? Obviously more in the head with its face than in the body. If you were restricted to taking a loved one’s either part with you for burial and remembrance, surely it would be the head.
Or cover the body, and the nakedness of the head is not only its natural state but its conventional one; cover the head and the naked body immediately inspires lust or provokes revulsion because the person is absent.
The enigma of the face is easily dispelled by speculating about it no farther than evolutionary theory will allow or mystifying it in a circle of philosophical abstractions. You can never know what you look like because your face is your identity. To say that every face has its own personality means that every person has a claim on his or her own face. And yet, paradoxically, you cannot afford to care too much about your looks because there are no definable links of correspondence between your inner self and your public visual identification: Socrates was reputedly ugly, Alexander Pope was a shriveled dwarf, and George Eliot didn’t photograph well. There’s something wrong in a world where such mismatches between inner and outer are common. Or, to put it otherwise, why should we expect that there should be? Better think of the face as pure singularity rather than as part of any conceivable correspondence.
The importance of the human face in our experience as the source of recognition, resemblance, identity, and communion means that it serves also as a fund of primary symbolic references. It’s hard to look at a shapeless agglomeration of landscape forms without seeing a physiognomy somewhere. Until the digital revolution most machines were built on analogies with the actions and operations of the human head and body. Try as the abstract artist will to hold representation at bay, museum- and gallery-goers keep finding eyes, noses, and ears where all that Pollock, Gorky, Still, or Motherwell meant to put down was something of not inpaint. Although, given the scope and depth of their artistry, who knows how much they may not have wanted to tease or toy with our expectations?
We will never be able to contemplate the world without assimilating it. The struggle for scientific or artistic objectivity is formidable from the start, but not trying to be objective would be an insult to our Maker. And, there, I said it: dwelling on the face too long and seriously leads to thinking about it mythically, spiritually, or religiously.
Jews and Moslems forbid putting a face on The Unnameable One, whereas Christians adapted the pagan humanism of the gods by having the Son die for a while at least like a mere human. It is worth remembering, however, that iconography has always been a problem: the long-haired Christ of European art began in the Roman catacombs before the 4th century A.D. as the beardless lad, the Good Shepherd.
The casual objection to Freud that says a penis is a tower as much as a tower is a penis has more grounding in the human face. Our eyes are pools or suns, our noses ridges and peaks, our foreheads plains, our mouths caves. The point is not which came first, our idea of the sun as an eye or our eye as the sun, but that, as in the Homeric simile, each can be seen in terms of the other because as elements or activities both terms came into the world together. We belong to the world by means of our faces as the world belongs to us as soon as we begin to use our senses.
Portrait painting since the Renaissance has provided our most faithful means of viewing the human face as an image. In the great examples left us by Titian or Rembrandt, the portrait is the most magical form of figural representation: as noted before, it seems to speak. The arresting portrait evokes recognition of personality behind identity, the uniqueness of face that perhaps those who have loved another’s face in life (in an act denied to the subject himself or herself in a mirror) can best attest to. It seems to be the thing itself as well as a simulation. (Trompe l’oeil painting asks to be taken only as the thing itself and can never encompass portraiture.) As Gombrich says in Art and Illusion:
Expression in life and physiognomic impression rest on movement no less than on static symptoms, and art has to compensate for the loss of the time dimension by concentrating all required information into one arrested image.
What the portrait painter does is translate the life of the subject’s face from the still model into the painter’s own time of execution, depicting mouth, nose, eyes, cheeks in actuality as sources of possibility. The work achieves facial recognition by the painter’s empathizing with the spirit of the look, interpreting the symbolic vocabulary of the features and sensuously responding to the subject’s peculiarity. Novelists know that to describe a face convincingly it cannot be separated from the body or from its habitual surroundings or from the conditions of the moment--even as we who know the familiar faces around us might find them somewhat unrecognizable and not quite acceptable outside their surroundings: any mother’s son turns into a stranger when he comes back home years later in a soldier’s uniform. Without his collar, the priest slips by unrecognized. With the students gone the retired distinguished professor looks like any old man wearing a beard. A great novelist in charge of fictional illusion can’t easily stick to face alone without fillings-in from beyond the head.
The outlines of her figure, revealed by her dress of the simplest and cheapest materials, were also youthful. There was the same kind of charm about her too slender form, her faintly colored face and light-brown hair, that modern poets find in medieval statues, and a sweet expression, a look of Christian resignation in the dark grey eyes. She was pretty by force of contrast; if she had been happy, she would have been charming....If the delights of a luxurious life had brought the color to the wan cheeks that were slightly hollowed already if love had put light into the sad eyes, then Victorine might have ranked among the fairest; but she lacked the two things which create woman a second time--pretty dresses and love letters.
(Balzac, Père Goriot)
The reason Balzac can get away with such godly assurance is that he created the face in the first place. But the novelist’s privilege can be treacherous to the biographer when he tries to read into his historical subject’s physiognomy a firm jaw denoting moral determination, the vague expression in the eyes denoting weakness of character, and so on. We must remember the warning of the famous faces that don’t look like the great persons they belonged to. For every Beethoven and Einstein whose faces fit, there’s Emily Dickinson’s slightly “retarded” expression, and Schubert looked too chubby to have written the rippling, sensuous “Die Forelle.”
The difference between knowledge and belief: you know that the person’s face you see is that person. But, for yourself, you can still doubt that the mirror image is you. It represents you, it stands for you, but since it is completely under your own control and responds exactly to every look or movement, you cannot be sure that the person that at the least is inside you and sometimes is whole, though often divided--that the semblance at the least is really you. What a travesty of reality that you can touch yourself, hear yourself, smell yourself but you can’t see your own face except in a mirror.
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Irving Weiss is a resident of New York State and the translator of Malcdolm de Chazal's Sens-Plastique.
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