What's in a Face?

“Loss of Face” by Charles Baxter, in The Believer (Nov. 2003), 826 Valencia St., San Francisco, Calif. 94110.

Though the face once seemed a window to the soul, it’s gotten fogged up. How one appears no longer reveals how one is. But the blank look yields curious results for both the novelist and, possibly, the ethicist as well, writes Baxter, author of the prize-winning novel The Feast of Love (2000) and professor of English at the University of Minnesota.

Until around the turn of the 20th century, most people thought physiognomy reflected character. And even when it didn’t (as with snub-nosed, beautiful-souled Socrates), they thought that it should. As Montaigne said, appearance should not be “the shoe made of polished leather, but the well-made shoe that reveals the shape of the foot.” The Victorian novelists—Dickens, Eliot, Hardy—introduced the men and women of their books with assured and comprehensive facial interpretations.

But America in the 20th century entered what Baxter calls a “post-face” age: The exterior no longer revealed the interior. With the deal-making of the businessman came the triumph of the poker face, or the sly face, or any face but the real one. “Life has become a theater and there are actors everywhere,” says Baxter. The evils of racism and other forms of discrimination caused novelists to lose faith in the ability of the face to say anything meaningful about an individual.

It’s true that every child still learns to read faces as a basic social “survival skill.” And even when you think that you can’t judge a book by its cover, secretly you “may believe that you still can.” In the literary world, too, there are some holdouts. Saul Bellow, for example, still assumes “that you can tell who a person is simply by looking at him (or her) carefully enough.” Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me (2001) and Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved (2003) are notable for their “considerable concentration on what remains of the face.”

Yet those are exceptions. The absence of the face from the modern novel can’t be explained as a simple byproduct of literary innovation. Writers may have cast their lot with Henry James, who thought that you never “get the full sense of the person at first glance.” Or maybe dwelling on the details of the face has “acquired a creepy voyeuristic overtone.” Then, too, we’ve always known that “clothes and body language may be a sign of artifice . . . now [that] the face and the rest of the body may be completely ‘engineered.’”

Baxter sympathizes with the modern skepticism toward appearances. But just as publications should continue to print photographs and painters paint portraits, novelists should keep physiognomic description in their literary repertoire, he argues, especially description of those faces that “we don’t want to see . . . at all.” The face is what most brings the sense of humanity—if no other characteristic—to an audience’s attention. Baxter cites the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who “argues that the face is the unique physical presence that provokes the [audience’s] obligations” to the person with the face. It’s always ineluctably particular, never abstract or theoretical. Nobody’s just another pretty face.