If probed keenly, there would be no truth as riveting as one that you might come by through a deep study of faces. Besides all geometrical shapes, cuts and contours, faces say much more than what meets the eyes.
In fact, a face does bear a figurative significance as a synecdoche to define a whole person. Our face anatomy has figured in a number of idiomatic expressions in language whereby a lot many semantic and semiotic expressions help us communicate pretty well indeed. You feel it much convenient using the phrase “shut the door in one’s face” than a lax and loose construction of a long sentence to gain the same impact.
Similarly other idiomatic phrases as “put on a brave face,” “face a problem head on,” “face the music,” “put the best face on,” etc codify the whole human persona in action, and not merely the face.
You have quite often heard people saying that faces are deceptive and we cannot simply understand a person through means of his facial features alone. A big chunk of literary texts bears witness to this proposition. Shakespeare, for example in his famous play “Macbeth” puts it:
There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.
Well, the truth of this notion can be hardly denied particularly in the context in which it holds sway. However, in certain revealing moments, every one of us can read people’s thoughts running quite evident on their faces.
Though referred as a junk science, Physiognomy bears witness to a number of character traits munificently revealed through the interplay of muscles on your face. Authors of literary texts dedicate a good deal of descriptive content to picture faces in their fiction. I believe a face is to character as preface is to a book. However, the irony of the matter is that most of us succumb to the sizzling urge in us to straightaway go for the text completely overlooking the prefaces. It’s only when we are puzzled by the intricacy of themes the book resists to unveil for our impatient mind that we rush back to manage a perusal of the preface to reset the alignments. But that makes your impressions undergo a complete surgery till they are restructured and tamed into a better comprehension of the plot.
This intricacy of faces has long been the topic of study in various disciplines of which, literature has no doubt been the phenomenal interpreter. No reader of literary texts can deny the author’s vehement intent to deal out to his reader a fairly rich account of his characters’ facial features, let alone the treasure trove of words accorded to their body and dresses. Quite often, it is the description of face that binds a particular character to a certain theme which a literary work aims to unfold. Sometimes the description is so well worded that you can really see the countenance coming alive right through the crannies of the text. That is when your imagination inadvertently strays into an intimate understanding of the character as if he has been brought under a microscope.
The Other Side
Yet in the actual thick of life, this ‘face-features-character’ caboodle is so corrosively defaced by our worldly pursuits that we actually become faceless. Of all the misfortunes that befell humans, this facelessness has singularly been the most outrageous one. Metaphorically speaking, you can bear a face over you shoulders only if you have a character to reflect through this index. Otherwise, it is simply a lump of flesh devoid of any pertinent shades of personality that make a man an individual. The over mechanized living of modern times has eroded this element of individuality, which is the only means to furnish our faces with the richness of uniqueness.
Our individuality has been sacrificed or, to be more exact, massacred at the threshold of institutionalization of various faculties of human existence. We have imperceptibly been compartmentalized into various fragments that perceive of man being alive only if he fits in a certain pre-designed scheme of work. His freedom is so ruthlessly hacked out of him that he is reduced to a stature of faceless entity that can simply be replaced by another of its kind. This other-person-ness is what rids us of our individuality and mingles us into stereotypes. Thus we become one of a kind, hence, easily maneuverable and exploitable.
Such is the force of materiality that it has rent a man’s ties to his actual self. He has grown utterly alien to his own existence, which has been over generalized for a collective trip to nowhere ness. Now his face has been replaced by the face of institutions where he is just a contributor not a creator. This objectification has effaced man of his essential character to such an extent that over a period of life time we seldom come face to face with ourselves.
But, sure there will be time for such a rendezvous with our own real face only if there is a conscious effort made to this end. Eliot’s particular concern with time and faces in his ‘Love Song of Alfred Prufrock’ does convey a shade of such paucity of time to prepare a face that we can recognize as our own:
There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet
As long as a man is not allowed a personal space to breathe, act, decide and execute, he will remain a faceless slave to his untamed pursuits, which is like the internment of your true self alive.
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