For by his face straight shall you know his heart.
Shakespeare, Richard III
Baby Face/Death Mask. Right away, at birth, the infant no sooner delivered, breathing, and bathed, its face is studied for clues to character. It looks so fierce, so wisely old, so placid, so much like “your” side of the family. . . . And, at the end, quiescent and struggle-free on the deathbed, they used to come with the plaster to make a death mask. The custom, begun almost five thousand years ago in Egypt, would capture the essence of character in the features of the face.
Ishmael Looks At Queequeg. Does the face reveal character or hide it? At the Spouter-Inn, Herman Melville’s Ishmael beds down with Queequeg before they sail off to hunt for Moby Dick, the white whale. At first sight of his roommate, a cannibal harpooner, Ishmael is frightened:
Good heavens! What a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares. . . . There was no hair on his head — none to speak of at least — nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.
Then, later, as Ishmael’s fears abate, he looks again at “the savage ”:
With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face — at least to my taste — his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. . . . [H]is head was phrenologically an excellent one.
Tattoos, odd hairdress, and the colored skin make Ishmael want to bolt for the door. But he returns to the face “with much interest.” He looks again, an act that literally initiates a new “re-gard,” a fresh “re-spect.” He begins to see through the “hideously marred face,” or see what comes through it. But this can happen only after he sits and watches; only after he calls upon his idea of soul does he imagine traces of form and value within the visible head. Ishmael already had an idea of character, and so he could see “soul,” “heart,” “spirit,” and “bearing” — the words Melville attributes to Ishmael’s perception of Queequeg. To see character, we must look for it with an idea of character.
Facial Courage. “I want to grow old without face-lifts. They take the life out of a face, the character. I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I’ve made,” said Marilyn Monroe. That’s one kind of courage. Another kind is exhibited by Joyce Nash, Ph.D., who describes her face-lift in detail in her book What Your Doctor Can’t Tell You about Cosmetic Surgery: “Most patients underestimate the amount of pain and physical trauma involved in cosmetic surgery. They are also unprepared for the depression that may ensue.”
Trauma? Besides the acute postoperative distress, which passed in time, there were long-term effects. Nash had trouble wearing earrings, because her earlobes were sutured to the surrounding skin. Her glasses no longer held behind her ears. Her jaw was permanently discolored, and she had the sensation that a strap was cinched tight under her chin and over her skull.
Depression? “What I saw was disturbing. It didn’t look like me, and it didn’t feel like me. Something was lost. A sense of sadness welled up. . . . The frown lines, the sleepy look, the sagging cheeks and neck were gone.”
The American Academy of Cosmetic Surgeons reports that 72 percent of those who consult cosmetic surgeons are interested in facial work. In 1996 more than half a million people had some kind of facial cosmetic surgery. Here we might distinguish between cosmetic plastic surgery, which is mainly intended to rectify the signs of aging, and reconstructive plastic surgery, which aims at improved socialization following a disfiguring accident or birth defect.
Nash had surgery for cosmetic reasons. She sums up the result: “The face I see in the mirror now belies my actual age, and it better reflects how I feel inside. I have accepted . . . all permanent reminders of my surgery in return for the improved appearance.” For Nash, an “improved appearance ” means that her outside accords with her inside and she no longer looks her age. Was the former discrepancy the fault of the outside, or of an inside that had not kept pace with her face? She had the courage to go through the operation, but not the courage to let aging form her face by what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “passive synthesis.” She could not yield to the “thematic harmony” (Roland Barthes’s phrase) that aging is achieving. For her, the artificial distortions brought on by surgery were improvements over the frown lines, the sleepy look.
Barthes makes a useful distinction between the chronos of biology and the chronos of passion, such as we see in Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, where the ravages depicted are due less to the passing of time than to the effects of passion. It is these effects in the face, the transmission to it of the passions of character, that Monroe hoped to have the courage to face. She spoke not of the biological face she was given, but of the face “I’ve made.” Anna Magnani, the great postwar Italian actress of passions, supposedly told the makeup man doing her face for a scene: “Don’t take out a single line. I paid for each one.”
Nash’s “improved appearance” treats the face as a new and improved product, according not only with the younger age she feels, but with standardized notions of appearance. Her postoperative image adapts to conventional imagery; is that also the image of her character? Has she abandoned her uniqueness, sold her soul?
The depression that ensued gives a clue to how the soul regards the alteration of the face, the loss of its peculiar, if sagging, individuality. Nash refers the sadness to the loss of her old face. The depression, however, also brings tidings of what she was gaining: the sense of the soul’s reality that always comes with sadness and that notices what we do with our faces.
“Smile, That’s The Thing To Do.” To build character, “do something for no other reason than its difficulty,” said William James. Difficulty uses the face; it furrows the brow, tenses the eyes, purses the lips. Focus, concentration, effort. In James’s times, family photos and group portraits were gravely serious. “Wipe that smile off your face” was meant not only for soldiers. Then along came Kodak, and smiling became de rigueur. The face prefers to smile. Frowning and scowling take more muscle. The culture’s actual face has been easing slowly into a copy of its smiling photograph. If attention deficit and learning disability are increasing, let’s look to the little yellow “happy face” as contributing cause. The attention needed for learning hardly starts off with the imperative “Have a nice day!”
Expression, An Aesthetic Phenomenon. Not because of cosmetics and surgery is the face an aesthetic phenomenon, but because it is biologically so. Besides the muscles needed functionally to chew, kiss, sniff, blow, squint, blink, and twitch away a fly, most of the forty-five facial muscles serve only emotional expression. You don’t need them to bring in food, beat down an enemy, nurse an offspring, or perform sexual intercourse. The ventriloquist proves they are not needed for speaking. Nor are they essential to breathing, hearing, or sleeping. The extravagance of facial musculature is all for expression of major emotions, yes; but even more for such peculiar subtleties of civilization as supercilious contempt, wry irony, wide-eyed fawning, cool unconcern, smiling, and sneering.
By means of these muscles, our faces make pictures. The psyche displays aesthetically its states of soul. Character traits become intelligible images; yet each expression is characteristically different, and the more complex the character, the more individual the expression. “There is nothing average about expression,” Alfred North Whitehead writes in his Modes of Thought. “It is essentially individual. In so far as an average dominates, expression fades.”
If we conceive facial expressions only as Darwin did, they are evolutionary remnants of preverbal communication. “Basic” emotions, such as fear, surprise, and anger, are the least individualized, the most average — and the least expressive, if we follow Whitehead. The multitudinous face is required for aesthetic precision. This idea appears in an aesthetic principle set forth by the English philosopher T. E. Hulme: “You could define art as a passionate desire for accuracy.” Fear, surprise, and anger express only “that part of the emotion which is common to all of us. If you are able to observe the actual individuality of the emotion, you become dissatisfied with language” — and unsatisfied by Darwinian reduction. Although it may capture the animal background of expression, it fails the psyche’s individualized expressiveness. Besides, we are left wondering about the source of those expressions which animals do not have the facial muscles to display: laughing and weeping; orgasmic, mystical, and sadistic ecstasy; paranoid suspicion.
Character Seeps Through The Cracks. Will his jaw quiver, a tear emerge? Will his eyes shift away or narrow slightly? We watch the face for telltale signs. Portraits decorating the halls of corporate power and in the annual reports show faces with no cracks. Nothing seeps through. Is there nothing to seep through, or does this unrevealing face reveal the essential character of corporate power?
Disfigurement. An accident, a burn, a war wound, or partial paralysis from a stroke, and the face suffers radical alteration. Is character altered because the face has changed?
Two fictions — The Man in the Iron Mask and The Elephant Man — suggest that the resources of character lie concealed from view. What you see is not altogether what you get. As their faces are locked, stiffened, or grossly distorted, their characters seem nonetheless to deepen and become more resolute. Face and character must not coincide; then how conceive their relation? Not as one of identity; as interplay. Aging intensifies the partnership. In old age, they marry.
Facing Old Age. As we get very old, our mind wanders among images, and we are brought back to our bodies by infirmities and the caring attention or neglect of others. As our bodies shrivel, we become our faces. Feet, hams, arms, and shoulders lose their shapeliness while the face gains distinction, even beauty. The old naked body is unsightly, yet its naked face is a subject for long contemplation. The sagging skin and webbing of veins on the body tell only of old age, while on the face they enter the composite portrait and contribute to its significance, sometimes its magnificence. The face makes visible the metamorphosis of biology into art.
The Bare Face. “Prior to any particular expression and beneath all particular expressions . . . there is the nakedness and destitution of the expression as such, that is to say the extreme exposure, defenselessness, vulnerability itself . . . a mysterious forsakenness,” writes Emmanuel Levinas. “The face of man is the medium through which the invisible in him becomes visible and enters into commerce with us.”
According to Levinas, the most radical, soulful, and profoundly positive French thinker of the last fifty years, the human face as an archetypal phenomenon bears one message: utter vulnerability. Therefore, the face will be disguised, covered, decorated, surgically altered — or, on the contrary, deprived of all possibilities of hiding, as in the abject condition of prisoner, captive, and victim.
This is also why our faces are so impossibly difficult to accept: we are staring into “vulnerability itself.” In the face is our forsakenness, our exile. Age has nothing to do with it. Teenagers flock to plastic surgeons to have their faces changed — those young faces the old wish they had again! They flock to return from exile, to be one with the crowd, to end the condition of extreme exposure; they want to remedy the face that has begun to exteriorize their unique individuality.
Although the teenager doesn’t yet know it, that vulnerability, that nakedness is the face’s greatest appeal, its true beauty. Witness Marilyn Monroe, whose attraction lay not in the proportions of her features but in the mysterious forsakenness her face revealed. Even if gladdened and tautened and lifted out of its destitution, a face remains the visage of mystery. It is soul present as an image, soul in all its vulnerability. For Levinas, the face expresses a sacred power.
Hamlet To Gertrude. “You go not, till I set up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you.”
According to Shakespeare, the face reveals character. The mirror does not lie.
Yet T. S. Eliot, another observant poet, claims the face to be precisely where we can and do dissemble: “Time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” The face both reveals and conceals. Is it possible to control the revelations for a desired effect, and if so, are these truly revelations, or, more likely, manipulations? Marilyn Monroe said: “I can make my face do anything I want.”
The transparencies of emotion passing through the face of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, filmed so revealingly by Ingmar Bergman, were all for the camera. They were acted expressions. Had she made visible her inmost part? Or was she “merely” acting a character? And — unless her character called her to be an actress — then, like Marilyn Monroe, was she not using her face rather than revealing it? Besides, was there an inmost part not available to her face, like the prostitute who maintains her virginity by always holding inviolate some place, word, act, or feeling symbolic of the inmost part?
Hamlet Corrected By Proust. “The human face is really like one of those Oriental gods: a whole group of faces juxtaposed on different planes; it is impossible to see them all simultaneously,” said Proust. We must watch a face over time, in shifting lights, through many scenes. No one has “a” face. Gertrude’s inmost part cannot be caught in a single mirror only. The old face displays the superimposition of the “whole group of faces.” All seven ages passing and repassing, a texture to be read between the lines. Even a baby’s face intimates this range, fleeting expressions of dispositions unrealized, but possible.
Break The Mirror
by Nanao Sakaki
In the morning
After taking cold shower
— What a mistake —
I look at the mirror.
There, a funny guy,
Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin
— What a pity —
Poor, dirty, old man!
He is not me, absolutely not.
Land and life
Fishing in the ocean
Sleeping in the desert with stars
Building a shelter in mountains
Farming the ancient way
Singing with coyotes
Singing against nuclear war —
I’ll never be tired of life.
Now I’m seventeen years old,
Very charming young man.
I sit down quietly in lotus position,
Meditating, meditating for nothing.
Suddenly a voice comes to me:
“To stay young,
To save the world,
Break the mirror.”
Mirror, Mirror On The Wall. Mostly what the mirror shows is not the inmost part but the outer face of aging. A glanced-at reflection in a shop window, the face seen in a mirror at an odd angle supposedly brings, in the words of literary critic Carolyn H. Smith, “the first disturbing awareness of aging.” Freud had this disturbing recognition: While he was traveling on a train, an elderly person suddenly entered his compartment. But it was Freud himself. He had caught sight of his head in the compartment mirror behind the door, flung open by the train’s sudden movement. He was repulsed by his own reflection.
Why the shock? Is it purely a refusal to witness the fact of age, or a refusal of something else? The face itself? Do I suddenly see my mother? But it’s me, O Lord! Not my mother, not my sister, really me, O Lord! “After a certain age,” said Proust, “the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one’s family traits become.” Owning our own faces = becoming more individualized = owning our ancestry. At any age, the sudden mirror holds the same surprise. “I did not know I looked like that!” I tear up the snapshot, destroy the video of an off-moment conversation. I want the recorded image to conform with and reaffirm the invisible image I feel to be “me.” So it is not the marks of age as such that I cannot bear, but the documented revelation of my cherished illusion: that my face presents my character. I want the invisible image of “me” to be truly present in the mirror. The mirror leaves out too much. Mirrors cannot tell the whole truth, and therefore they always lie.
The Whole Truth. What do the mirrors leave out? Why can that reflected image never be just right? W. B. Yeats explains:
From mirror after mirror
No vanity’s displayed.
I’m looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
The primordial image embracing your whole character remains incomplete because you are still living and it is still taking shape. The whole character cannot ever show. The only true image is that which appears momentarily. So we look and look again in “mirror after mirror.”
“Faces Need To Be Used.” “A face is something that is incomplete: a work in progress . . . faces need to be used because they are not finished images,” says the Chicago art historian James Elkins. Aging as a progress of the face. If you consider your face as one more part of the body, then it withers, crinkles, blotches, and falls away like other parts of the body. If you imagine your face as a phenomenon with a different significance, with its own destiny, then all that goes on there — after sixty, especially — is a work in progress, building the image, preparing a face that has little to do with the faces that you meet. What’s going on, rather, is the progress of a portrait, toward a memory.
“Faces need to be used.” How? Out there, weathering and leathering, actively engaged with the world? Should we engage in full-face confrontations, get in each other’s faces? Another way to use the face is aging. Aging uses the face every day, and it is these traces of use that cosmetic surgery sets out to repair. Without any effort on our part, quite passively, even in the solitude of a monk’s cell, even in an immune-protective bubble, the face is being used. “The aging process,” says Levinas, “is probably the most perfect model of passive synthesis.” A face is being made, often against your will, as witness to your character.
Jung And Freud. Jung did more than relativize Freud’s theories of childhood, sexuality, and development. He relativized the power of the analyst by opening analysis to the face. He moved the analyst’s chair from behind the reclining patient to a position across from the seated patient. Patient and analyst, two armchairs, face to face. Concealment and disclosure shifted to the present reciprocal gaze. The unconscious was now present in the terrifying difficulty of the encounter.
If your face is not a finished image, then psychoanalysis may provide occasions to finish it, to work on your face. The patient seeks to release or compose a face that does not impede the changes in character that analysis fosters. However, the Freudian face seems a finished image, like the bust of Freud on the mantel of the consulting room, like the photo of Freud on the wall with the diplomas, like the male analyst’s beard. When analysts sit behind the patient, employing Freud’s faceless method, they take on the image of Freud, imitatio dei, and practice a method analogous to the International Style of architecture, universally functional anywhere and serviceable to any client.
Jung’s Face. A group of students at the Jung Institute in Zurich went to Jung’s house for conversation with the ancestor of our discipline. He was then in his eighties. Someone asked him an abstract question about the shadow. He went right at it. Putting his hand to his cheek, he said, “It is right here.” The shadow was not a concept, not a theory, not lurking behind a curtain: a living force in the face.
The Face Of The World. “The world lives in order to develop the lines on its face,” says T. E. Hulme. Repeat: its face. Not only humans have faces. We do not own them all. The man in the moon, faces in clouds, profiles in rocks, eyes staring out of tree trunks, carrots, potatoes . . . Buildings show off their façades and surface skins; they face each other across the downtown streets. Ancient Egyptians imagined the sky as a vast face with the sun and moon as eyes. The Navajos say something is always watching us.
If we no longer imagine that “objects stare back,” then the things around us spark no ethical challenge, make no appeal. They are not partners in dialogue, with whom an I-Thou relationship exists. Once the soul of the world loses its face, we see things rather than images. Things ask no more of us than to be owned and used, becoming possessions.
The lost face of the world is not mentioned by most environmentalists. Like their opponents — the harvesters, exploiters, and developers — they read the world according to their desires. Sustainability, conservation, and restoration are noble programs, but still the human is in charge and the world is merely the arena where we implement our plans. Instead, environmentalism needs to read the lines in the face of the world, read each piece of the world for its character, to study its development and be struck to the heart by its defenselessness.
To be attentive and only attentive would slow action. Hence, environmental studies are slow to report conclusions. There is no quick read of the lines on the world’s face. Each bit needs the assiduous attention of the portraitist, the landscapist. They read the lines and read between the lines. Is that why Constable, Cézanne, and Monet are truly so important? Each gave years to the face of one small bit of the world, a mini-bioregion. Art historians consider them founders of Impressionism, of Cubism; I see their work as the beginning of environmental painting. Each was a character painter in search of the invisible image in the visible lines of the world’s face.
Losing Face In America. If the face is where the ethics of society begins, then what happens to a society when the aging face is surgically altered, cosmetically subdued, and its accumulated character falsified? What ethical damage occurs when the faces of elders are rarely on view? Or if the old faces on view are those that have been plucked, tucked, and brought on camera to authenticate a product? Or those that have not been improved and appear wretched enough to sentimentalize?
For the good of society, should cosmetic face-lifts be prohibited? Are they a crime against humanity? What you do to your visible image has societal implications. Your face is the Other for everyone else. If it no longer bares its essential vulnerability, then the grounds for caring, the demand for honesty, and the call to respond on which societal cohesion rests have lost their originating source.
This ground for the crisis in American integrity is never discussed. Yet the coverup of the aging American face may be more the reason for ethical decay than the liberating movements of the 1960s, which supposedly corrupted family values and bent the moral backbone of America into its present “perverted” condition. Rather than standing on high moral ground and exposing the faults around them, the older generation would do better to expose the fault lines in their own faces.
What the old can do for society lies in their hands: they can help, they can give, they can instruct. It also lies in their feet: they can march, they can vote, they can go out to local meetings. Mostly it lies in their faces, in the courage to be seen.
We have few ready images of the compelling intensity of soul. There are so few faces to point to, no visible ancestors to anchor the community. Who on TV can we look at and be struck to the soul? If we’re to see character, someone has to impersonate Lincoln! What public figure can put a nation back on track just by force of character as shown in an older face? Without such elders, we are left with reprimanding bullies and pulpit hysterics whose faces belie the virtues they profess. Chiefs, shamans, elders, rabbis, dons, doges, bonzes, bishops — the antique masters of disciplined studies commanded the respect of their communities by the presence of character shown in their faces. Not all, not always, but at least they embodied the idea that the face of the old belongs to the group. To gain his troops’ allegiance, a new Caesar in Rome had to walk among them, reveal himself to them. Words and deeds and photo opportunities cannot encompass the full measure of character; we need to see it at length and often. We look at each other to see into each other. Of course we misjudge and follow the wrong perceptions, but these errors do not negate the idea that it is a citizen’s duty to make his face public. Only God may hide his face.
“The Force of the Face” is excerpted from The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, by James Hillman. © 1999 by James Hillman. It appears here by permission of Random House, Inc.
