As people reading this (maybe/probably don’t) know, I studied Comparative Literature in college as one of my two majors. I truly, absolutely, indefatigably, believe in language and its power, and in images and their power, and in analyzing the latter with the former and in analyzing both and in trying to think critically even in the most vapid situations and about the most usually-unexamined topics (or normally seemingly straightforward ones).
Reading is one of the greatest joys of life. It’s a way of mediation. The words are their own rhythm. My dream job was/still is to someday write for The New Yorker (shoot me). I believe that there will always be value in bringing things together where they usually wouldn’t be, and in making people see what they wouldn’t have seen before. This book does exactly that.
And yes, it was on the best books of 2020 list that The New Yorker posts each year. I quickly nabbed it up with my remaining Amazon credit (thank you to Discover for your 5% cashback rewards system, you’re the true hero, here) as a late Christmas gift for myself and finished reading it today.
I’m not gunna lie to you. The first fifty pages made me want to fall asleep…they were a bit reminiscent of an undergraduate comparative literature survey of how faces become indicative of the societal values of those depicting them [insert general thesis sentence here, quote Derrida for no apparent reason there]. I kind of felt like, okay? Who cares? The first chapter, Elephant in Room, is about the famed elephant man and the subsequent art made around his existence. It was a good primer for the book, because it begins by asking the question of what it means for a face to be ugly versus beautiful. I didn’t really feel like this essay was impactful…until the very last bit, when she talks about how Michael Jackson was wildly fascinated with Merrick, the elephant man, and even references him in many of his music vidoes (he also owned his actual skull!). Curiously, Jackson was obsessed with Cleopatra, too, which he saw as the ideal face..and owned valuable esoterica related to her as well. I also had no idea his obsession with plastic surgery (and making the ultimate “face” on himself) is what led to his prescription drug addiction…when Serpeli asks: “ What if we thought of his addiction to plastic surgery not as self-loathing body modification, but as artistic practice?” I felt like I had learned something, but I couldn’t explain what.
Luckily, the second chapter, “Two Faced”, was much more obvious. It mostly centers on “The Bondwoman’s Narrative” a book supposedly written by a former slave. The tension about who actually wrote the book serves as the backdrop for the entire chapter…the fact that the book was ever written and eventually published is viewed as miraculous by historians and literature experts alike. Authenticity versus duplicity…What does it mean to be an authentic fiction writer?, Serpeli asks. To tell the truth, or to tell you own lie? Eventually the protagonist escapes slavery, as a light-skinned black, but is able to do so by politely lying about who she is…to the people asking if they’ve seen the person enumerated in a flier as a missing slave.
The last chapter, E-Faced, is of particular interest as well. It’s all about how emojis are a relatively imprecise way of expressing one’s self and were even invented by Wittgenstein (Nabokov apparently had his own symbolic system, too). I loved it. She writes about the origin of the smiley face…as an illustration created by a contracted hire for the New England Insurance Company in the 1900s as a way to sell life insurance. Then she proceeds to call on Sianne Ngai’s explanation of the smiley, in that it “expresses the face of no one in particular, or the averaged-out, dedifferentiated face of a generic anyone.”
Think about that the next time you send one. 10/10
