Stranger Faces
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"Serpell’s vital treatise is one readers will find themselves returning to again and again."— Publishers Weekly, Starred Review If evolutionary biologists, ethical philosophers, and social media gurus are to be believed, the face is the basis for what we call «humanity.» The face is considered the source of identity, truth, beauty, authenticity, and empathy. It underlies our ideas about what constitutes a human, how we relate emotionally, what is pleasing to the eye, and how we ought to treat each other. But all of this rests on a specific image of the face. We might call it the ideal face. What about the strange face, the stranger's face, the face that thwarts recognition? What do we make of the face that rides the line of legibility? In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces—the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the dead—Namwali Serpell probes our contemporary mythology of the face. Stranger Faces imagines a new ethics based on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces.
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STRANGER FACES
Namwali Serpell
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Perhaps even stranger is that though Charlotte’s surgery is successful—seamless—it makes her unrecognizable. Her face is unscarred, still beautiful, possibly improved by plastic surgery, but somehow vague. Once a professional model—the title is obviously riffing on this valence of look at me, too—she can’t return to her work: “people looked at me in the particular way people do inside the fashion world: a quick ravenous glance that demands beauty or power as its immediate reward. And then they looked away, as if what they had seen were not just unfamiliar, but without possibility.”13 Her accident has destroyed what she calls “a shadow self” or “shadow face”: “that caricature that clings to each of us, revealing itself in odd moments when we laugh or fall still, staring brazenly from certain bad photographs.”14 Her face no longer functions as a source of identity, power, or ethical relation for her.
For Egan, the opposite of The Ideal Face isn’t the non-ideal face—what I’m calling “the stranger face.” It is the face “without possibility,” which our glances pass over as if over porcelain, or through as if through glass. And outside of Egan’s novel, that face doesn’t exist. Its very impossibility is what makes the premise of Look at Me so intriguing. Every real face is interesting, worth looking at, often precisely because of its deviation from an abstract ideal. If we think of every face, even the strangest one, as a work of art, then beauty and truth—what we claim to seek when we look at a face, what we want to hear when we say look at me, what do you see?—suddenly seem insufficient indices for all that a face can hold, for all it can do.
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