“The real story was in the faces. All those faces on the Bush team. What you saw was
the spiritual emptiness of those people. Bush has one of the emptiest faces in America.
He looks to have no more depth than spit on a rock,” says Norman Mailer in an interview
with his son (14). And as Mark Danner (6) followed the camera’s eye “panning across
the faces of the country’s leaders” gathered in Washington to confront the nation’s
“financial crisis,” one of the images he saw protruding was the remarkable “black
face” of Senator Obama. “The radicalism of Barack Obama lies not in his policies but
in his face. It is a radicalism
not just of color, but of emergence, for scarcely a year ago that face was utterly unknown to the overwhelming majority
of Americans.” Hence, “the radicalism of that face … the unspoken centrality of race, the ancient fulcrum of American politics.”
For all the differences between the two portraits, the art of portraiture is much
the same. In both instances the protagonist’s face is seen, or read, as an indication
of a large—and largely murky—moral fabric. To Mailer, the emptiness of Bush’s face
epitomizes The Big Empty (his book’s title): the moral void at America’s centre, a site of Corporate Capitalism
surrounded by political wrongs on both the Left and the Right (xv). To Danner, meanwhile,
Obama’s face fills such a big emptiness as it “speaks” to the unspeakable moral void
left behind by America’s racial history.
I believe it behooves us to approach faces even outside political culture as fields
of signification, and to read especially faces of aesthetic import as signs—aesthetic
search engines, if you will—from which a variety of impulses emerge and toward which
interpretations from various angles converge. My chief concern is faces as facts of
fiction, more specifically in a selection of Danish aesthetic texts since Kierkegaard.
But to set the stage for my musings on this primary material, let me begin with a
sketchy historical backdrop and some graphics from other artistic domains.
Already in Moth’s 300-year old dictionary, the word “face” is contextualized in the
phrase “Ansigtet er hiertets speil” [The face is the mirror of the heart] (ODS 690)—a
parallel to the adage “øjet er sjælens spejl” [the eye is the mirror of the soul].
But even if faces can be read as reflections of larger spiritual schemes, the question
remains how to read them. The rationalist physiognomists tried (chiefly in vain) to
classify facial expressions, while Darwin argues in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) that “facial expressions of man, which are now important as social symbols, were originally functionally important.” More recently, “Desmond Morris and others have shown” that facial expressions,
even if innate (as held by Darwin), “are modified by social interaction.” Such interaction looms large to this day in encodings—and decodings—of facial expressions
proposed by practitioners of the arts.
In his autobiography
Breaking Ground, the architect Daniel Libeskind devotes a whole chapter to “Faces” (103-130) and
asks us to
[t]hink of your own face. You look at something, and even if it’s inanimate, it looks
back at you—and in that moment, there is some kind of communication in space, and
your face responds to it and changes. So it is with buildings. They don’t just have
facades, but faces that turn either toward us or away. (106 f.)
Accordingly, Libeskind designed his first completed commission, the Felix Nussbaum
Museum in Osnabrück, to capture the face of an artist who himself painted faces in
the cramped quarters where he hid from the Gestapo. Visitors to the museum are as
deprived of space and perspective as Nussbaum was when he practiced his craft (119-20).
Conversely, yet by the same token, Libeskind’s recent addition to the Denver Art
Museum, the Hamilton Building, “was inspired by many things
… but most of all by the wide-open faces of the people of Denver
… Part of their exuberant glow must come from the way their eyes reflect that clear,
high-above-sea-level light” (109).
Whether it be in tortuous absence (Nussbaum’s lack of perspective) or overwhelming
presence (the openly reflecting faces in Denver), Libeskind identifies an indispensable
artistic hallmark whose significance otherwise defies signification. Even the glaring
absence of the final act in Schönberg’s unfinished opera Moses and Aron becomes a source of inspiration for one of the architect’s structured voids: the
Jewish Museum in Berlin (92 f.).
Moving now to the art of film, Ingmar Bergman’s obsession with faces is indisputable.
In Ansiktet (1958) [The Magician, or literally The Face] a single still of Mrs. Vogler standing between her husband Albert and Dr. Vergerus
speaks volumes (Bergman on Bergman 124-25). Out of the magician’s speechless mouth cries emotion and desire, metaphysics
and
mysticism, irrationality and chaos, while the examining doctor with tellingly rational
and objectivistic composure dissects his fellow human as if he were a mere thing.
Mrs. Vogler has rightly been called “the only sensible presence in [the film’s entire]
gallery of posturing idiots and
hypocrites” (Cowie 177). Yet while each of her two male counterparts falls victim
to his respective one-sidedness,
they both prove ambiguous in relation to their own dispositions and are thus not simply
each other’s opposite.
Altogether, Bergman’s fixation with faces, no less than Liberkind’s, has an inner,
spiritual reality as its point of fixation, a human dimension: “that little dot, the
human being; that is what I try to dissect and penetrate more
and more deeply, in order to trace his secrets,” Bergman told a Danish newspaper in
1972 (Cowie 300). Thus Mrs. Vogler adds an ever so transitory self-realization to
the male dichotomies
around her. Its focal point, her face, mirrors the film’s heart and the soul, but
does it so artfully that only the ambiguity itself sticks. This double exposure is
the Swedish film-maker’s equivalent to the Polish-American architect’s designs.
In pictorial art since the Renaissance, such complex visions have supplanted impulses
from reality to increasingly individual degrees. In the twentieth century Matisse has elaborated, both in his 1955 book Portraits and in his actual execution of portraits, the art of being true to nature without
seeking photographic precision. In fact, the painter employed endless sittings and
refined sketches in order to contrast the countenance of his models with other humans,
exposing the formers’ asymmetrical facial rhythm and style, or the emotions these
traits evoked in the observer. As the artistic strategy involved a gradual secretion
of individual characteristics from their context, it meant to reconnect them as “liberated”
facial components and to integrate them into a total vision of what once was—without
obscuring their indebtedness to the individuality of the facial features here, now,
and later.
Matisse’s strategy and visionary prowess form a striking counterpoint to the artistic
experience of such contemporaries as the Danish-Jewish playwright and novelist Henri
Nathansen, whose keen awareness of anti-Semitic signs around 1900 repeatedly translates
into an uneasiness among his Jewish characters about their faces and identities within
the majority culture. But as I have tended to this matter elsewhere, suffice it here
to say that Mattisse’s artistic key to integrating facial individuality into a transindividual
sense of human presence was out of reach for Nathansen. To him, as to generations
of writers before him, the notion of the individual as the one and only was sustainable only at great cost and loss. I hypothesize that we are facing both
a trope and a prototype—and I want to spend the rest of my essay to test this hypothesis
on samples of Danish literature from the last century and a half.
I turn first to Kierkegaard’s “Skyggerids” [Silhouettes] from
Enten—Eller, Første Del (1843; 1962) [
Either/Or, Part I, 1987], in which not only spirituality—“Sorg” [sorrow]—but two-faced ambiguity
is engraved in the physical face under observation:
Naar man længe og opmærksomt betragter et Ansigt, da opdager man stundom ligesom et
andet Ansigt inden i det man ser. Dette er i Almindelighed et umiskjendeligt Tegn
paa, at Sjælen skjuler en Emigrant, der har trukket sig tilbage fra det Udvortes for
at vaage over en forborgen Skat. (162)
[When one looks long and attentively at a face, sometimes another face, as it were,
is discovered within the face one sees. Ordinarily this is an unmistakable sign that
the soul is hiding an emigrant who has withdrawn from the exterior face in order to
watch over a buried treasure.] (174)
Still, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author, so skeptical of art, admonishes the
reader that
Ansigtet, der ellers er Sjælens Speil, antager her en Tvetydighed, som ikke lader
sig kunstnerisk fremstille, og som i Almindelighed ogsaa kun bevarer sig et flygtigt
Moment. Der hører et eget Øie til for at see det, et eget Blik for at forfølge dette
usvigelige Indicium paa hemmelig Sorg. (162)
[The face, which usually is the mirror of the soul, here takes on an ambiguity that
cannot be artistically portrayed and that usually lasts only for a fleeting moment.
It takes a special eye to see it, a special vision to pursue this unerring indication
of secret sorrow.] (175)
Such a privileged vision was precisely what Matisse possessed, and
his artistic exposure of faces corresponds well to what must be labeled Kierkegaard’s
non-artistic employment of repetition.
As for the latter, Villy Sørensen calls it a loss of eternity to be healed in and
by the fullness of time (cf. 103, 117, 120, 215). “Tilværelsen, …” [Life, …]—a face, if you will—“… som har været til, bliver til nu” [… as it has been, comes into being now] (123). Subsequently, Sørensen finds that “kunsten
bekræfter den Kierkegaardske filosofi, men forsoner netop derved det æstetiske
med det væsentlige. Og denne forsoning er et andet navn for ‘gentagelse’” [art affirms
the Kierkegaardian philosophy, but in doing so reconciles precisely the
aesthetic with the essential. And this reconciliation is another name for “repetition”]
(126). Or another name for the Kierkegaardian unification of soul and body in “spirit”
(cf. 140).
Save for the injection of art, Sørensen cites Kierkegaard approvingly and synthesizes
his words to mean that when a simple soul’s spontaneity is reclaimed unharmed, wisdom
is obtained; and no spontaneity is lost because a person knows s/he is spontaneous
(cf. 64, 96). This reading of Kierkegaard brings his repetition on a par with Matisse’s
art. In
both modes the past is reconciled with the future, and the most hidden spiritual dimension—sorrow—is
brought to reveal itself as a stimulant for the observer’s dormant passion. It is
an unmistakenly ambiguous dimension—at once external and profoundly concealed. And
if Kierkegaard is doubtful of art’s capacity to preserve its volatility, then modernistic
art is all the more grounded in such skepticism as it sees volatility as its sole
foundation.
Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen’s familiar take on this ambiguity was modernistic, but not
whole-heartedly so. Show me your mask, she asked, which tells me who you can become,
rather than your face, which tells me only who you are. The preference is modernistic;
not so the wholesale rejection of the face, which reduces the ambiguity. Still, Blixen’s
resolution of the irresoluble modernistic dictum is far from unprecedented in Danish
letters. Georg Brandes, for example, ends his entire book about Disraeli/Lord Beaconsfield’s
dramatic life with a straight look into Disraeli’s “blege, fortærede Ansigt” [pale
and haggard face] (314; 238). What he sees here turns all the ambiguities of the famous
politician’s unsettling
life into a visage with which his critical observer can finally settle—and settle
the score with his subject—on a positive note: “halvt imod min Villie en Følelse af
levende Sympathi bemægtigede sig min Sjæl” [almost against my will, a feeling of sympathy
took possession of my mind] (315; 238) reads the book’s last line.
In Harald Kidde’s little-known parable “Faders Ansigt” [Father’s Face], it is the
female protagonist whose face is at issue—as a tragically ambiguous site
of identity. The dying spinster has inherited her father’s gigantic snout: an apt
match for his mighty self-esteem but a humiliating blemish on his daughter’s face.
Its significance is no more uplifting for her doctor, who turns out to be her uncle.
Had he had his way, he would have fathered the woman and saved her from her nasal
handicap. But instead his powerful brother wooed her mother, leaving both uncle and
niece to miss out on life. Thus, the struggle for life is written in facial letters
as an epochal—1890s—sign of fitness or incapacity for life, victory or its polar opposite. At all events, one generation’s hope is pitted against another’s
lack thereof.
For the faces also tell of a father’s—and a mother’s—actual love of the child who
is dead set on returning the favour with a vengeance. Only humility before the law
of life—and its capricious dispersion of the good things in life—will assuage the apparent conflict. In fact, the singular value of life—and the verdict against its losers—mark the high point on which conflictual
facial expressions converge and yield one symbolic meaning. “[Kafka’s] ‘Before the
Law’ is the law,” writes Derrida (cf. Gossman 32); and so is Kidde’s “before the
law”—the law!
In 1968, the year when many established societal norms and much conventional public
wisdom came undone in much of Europe, Tove Ditlevsen published a short but major novel,
Ansigterne [The Faces], in which the stage of unsettlement is the individual psyche. Noted psychiatrist
Erling Jacobsen calls it “en af de frygteligste bøger, der er skrevet” [one of the
most horrendous novels ever written] (134) and goes on to explain what he means by
this apparent hyperbole (134-38). As normal childhood’s unconditional emotions of
anxiety, love, and hate mature,
they generally turn inseparable, ambivalent, and quite unbearable unless compromised
and negotiated for comfort—into so-called adult indifference and normalcy. This solution,
preferred by the social majority, comes at the price of emasculating original human
authenticity; and other escape routes, such as schizophrenia or psychopathic megalomania,
obviously are no less costly. Only a selected few, artists like Tove Ditlevsen, insist
on confronting their inner ambivalences and stand out as truth-tellers, although the
price they pay for their integrity is no trifle either. Ansigterne’s protagonist and Ditlevsen’s autobiographical alter ego, Lise Mundus, goes insane,
though she comes to realize it; her story provides much insight, but little utopian
hope of a better world.
Lise’s road to insanity (97-98, 108) is lined with faces that bespeak the psychological
equivalence of society’s crisis
anno 1968 (112). These faces are frightening in their mutability (5-6, 32); don’t
fit their owners but come apart (41) and are put on like evil fates (7, 9, 12, 32,
82); take on lives of their own at odds with both conscious and subconscious strata
of
the psyche behind them (32, 41, 97); get voided of human substance or evolve into
animal shapes (12, 28, 51); triangulate or mutate into brittle (55), tortured two-
or many-faced visages (12, 64, 75, 78), round or square (87), lavishly creviced
(83), obtrusive or obtuse (99, 100), wilted or indistinguishable from copies (71,
111). Left behind like abandoned houses (77), they relativize (72), if not disrupt,
received ideas of the face as a gateway to essence and personhood
(82); and they reflect cores to be mined and explored but never truly enriched (61),
loci of sanity permanently at risk (108, 110, 112) and prone to transgressions (82).
Ditlevsen’s art is certainly instrumental for the movement beyond the lawful, if merely
symbolic, resolution of existential gaps that opened in Kidde’s (and Kafka’s) scenarios.
But as she realistically allows her Lise to cast off all normalcy and go to where
the chips may fall, without undue authorial interference, the many fallen chips, and
faces, along the way are merely road signs leading nowhere. No path, even after Lise’s
return to “normal,” takes her normalcy out of its inverted commas. It will take a
full-blown modernistic breakthrough to do justice to this kind of realism without
succumbing to its premises, and not until denormalization has become the law of the
land will that occur. Moreover, the occurrence will require that art move away from
the role of psychology’s handmaiden into the role of a sovereign creator, albeit one
that remains beholden to psychologically durable insights.
Jens Smærup Sørensen’s short story “Ansigter” [Faces], from Det menneskelige princip [The Human Principle] (1985), is but one text in which this unsettling modernism
has settled down. The
protagonist is a mentally institutionalized man who has been entrusted to the care
of a farmer and his wife. The man has been losing his face to its mirror image but
now finds it juxtaposed—in the mirror—to the real face of the farmer’s wife. Only
a mirror image of his self has the same reality as the real image of the desired “other”;
she is his life and hope—as opposed to the farmer and “ham på knallerten” [the one
on the scooter] (107), who both epitomize his humiliation and exclusion. His dreams
of mating with her
become inseparable from his urge to dispense with them. Just as he crashes the farmer’s
combine into two different reflections—his mental image of the farmer’s wife and a mirror image of himself—he literally runs down his enemy on the scooter, whose reflection he incidentally watches in the
co-op’s window pane.
In this synthetic manner he reaches his conflict-ridden goal, yet the narrative preserves
the conflict as an ambiguity within the fulfillment he arrived at. The last sentence
reads, “så kunne han dø” [now he could die] (107), without specifying “his” identity.
Obviously “he” is the man on the scooter, but “he” is also—on the subconscious level—the
handicapped man self-destructively riding the
combine. In the course of the narrative, his deranged perception—of facial expressions
of self—gets severed from the confines of quotidian reality, though not from the consequences
of this perception going its own way. As a face drops out of reality, “as in a mirror”
(to quote the title of Ingmar Bergman’s film Såsom i en spegel), the autonomy that ensues appears a valid replacement of the given reality. In fact,
Smærup Sørensen’s story about loss of face and artistic substitution for reality also
accounts for the expenses involved in the conversion and tells us about their connection
to the ambiguity of language.
As a code for transfer of meaning, this modernistic trope begins to crystallize in
Danish lyric poetry around 1960. Per Højholt’s 1963 poem, “Ansigt til ansigt til ansigt”
[Face to face to face], can be read as an underpinning of Smærup Sørensen’s story.
It concludes Højholt’s
principal collection
Poetens hoved [The Poet’s Head], which even has the face in question on its front cover. The poem’s
basic concern—how
reality is lost (now in cosmic reflection) when distinctions between it and its image
recede—pulsates through its lines from its very beginning until it all comes to a
head toward the end of the text:
Hvor alt sammenfalder med sit billede
hører virkeligheden op.
Ingen forveksling er mulig thi
Ingen forveksling er mulig.
Men der skal et stort spejl til. Eller to.
En mængde spejle
skal til så sandt jorden er rund.
…
… Står
denne mand Malewitch
malende et kvadrat
med sine øjnes selvmord.
…
Hvor alting mødes med sit billede
Hører virkeligheden op.
Hvor længe endnu kan vi leve
I denne gyngende boble?
…
(45-46)
[Where everything coincides with its image
reality ceases to exist.
No confusion is possible for
no confusion is possible.
But a large mirror is needed. Or two.
A multitude of mirrors
is needed as sure as the Earth is round.
…
… Stands
this man Malewitch
painting a square
with the suicide of his eyes.
…
Where everything encounters its image
reality ceases to exist.
How long can we still live
in this swinging bubble?]
Højholt’s blurring of distinctions reaches dizzily repetitive, well-nigh murderous,
and inarguably tautological proportions. From the title concept stuck in its groove
to the clearly confusing lines insisting that “No confusion is possible for/no confusion
is possible” to the final lines about existence within a perilously “swinging bubble,”
the poem is an instance of the art of the impossible. In a different manner of speaking,
Poul Borum in his 1985 poem “Ansigt” [Face] puts the same manifest dilemma of grasping
an elusive reality into title terms of
his own when his poetic “I” ultimately calls upon the reader to “Se et ikke-ansigt/bag
en alting-maske” [See a non-face/behind an everything-mask] (100). Here, too, the
punch lines come at the end (as the entire poem almost concludes
the collection of sixty-one poems to which it belongs). But what the two preceding
stanzas make clear was merely intimated in Højholt’s text: the absent reality (“ikke-ansigt”)
underlying the omnipresent illusion (“alting-maske”), though incorporeal, is not only
the one reality “vi” [we] have; it is one that is at once mortal and invigorating.
Pia Tafdrup’s 1986 poem “Dit ansigt” [Your face] stresses the latter point. The poem’s
“other” is absent, but its language engenders a reader response that makes the “other”
present and gives life to the poetic “I” itself. In place of absence, art creates
presence: an otherness that is “ingenting/andet” [nothing/other], yet is “alt hvad
jeg har” [all that I have] (131). This is a shining repetition, in Kierkegaardian terms: a mere vision reclaiming real temps perdu.
It all comes full circle as Marianne Larsen exits her 1996 I en venten hvid som sne [In a waiting white as snow]—a volume whose white cover with title and byline in
white letters inevitably harks
back to Højholt’s Malewitch. But the full circle comes even fuller. Not only do Ditlevsen
& Co.’s many faces and facial ambiguities not come home to roost in Larsen’s finale
(86-87), they actually get liberated from their nature- (and psyche-) given fetters
before
they disappear into the great whiteness of a Harald Kidde-like symbolism. A symbolic
act of liberation indeed, since this very whiteness is the topos of both death, within
an empty transcendence, and life (or persistence), within a deeply soothing sensibility
not of this world either. In the final analysis the act even borders on the kind of
post-symbolism to which Malewitch tended with his suprematism, cf. also Per Højholt’s
deconstructive incantation about “face to face to face.”