Disformations

Affects, Media, Literature

Tomáš Jirsa

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781501374890
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501362330
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Social Sciences

What happens when forms fall apart? And how do affects such as fear, shock, fascination, and desire drive and shape formal disturbances in modern literature, cinema, and contemporary art? Opening an interdisciplinary dialogue between cultural affect theory, media philosophy, and literary studies, Tomáš Jirsa explores how specific affective operations disrupt form only to generate new formations. To demonstrate the importance of the structural work of mutually interacting affects, Disformations provides close readings of four intermedia figures stretched out across modernist fictions, contemporary video art, and posthuman visual experiments-the faceless face, the wallpaper pattern, the garbage dump, and the empty chair. Analyzing a wide range of texts, images, and audiovisual works, from Vincent van Gogh and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Rainer Maria Rilke, Gaston Leroux, and Richard Weiner, to Francis Bacon, Michel Tournier, Ingmar Bergman, Eugène Ionesco, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Kosuth, and Jan Šerých, this book opens up a new avenue for addressing how aesthetic forms desubjectify affects to mobilize their mediality and performative qualities. Jirsa's innovative theoretical framework and incisive readings offer a fresh inquiry into how artistic media produce their own figural thinking and in so doing compel us to think with them anew.

Chapter 1

Facing the Faceless

Modernism, War, and the Work of Disfiguration

What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance.

David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1975

On November 27, 2005, an important milestone in the history of the face took place when the first partial facial transplant was performed at Amiens University Hospital in France. During the fifteen-hour-long operation, a team of surgeons led by Bernard Devauchelle transplanted the nose, lips, chin, and cheeks from a brain-dead donor to a 38-year-old French woman whose face had been mauled by her dog after falling into a deep sleep induced by an overdose of sleeping pills. Although both the accident and operation attracted a high level of media coverage and intense scholarly interest, surprisingly little attention was paid to the testimony of the beneficiary of the transplant, Isabelle Dinoire.¹ In an interview for Le Monde in July 2007, eighteen months after the successful operation, the patient described her condition shortly before the transplant: “I couldn’t breathe through my nose because there was nothing left. I had slipped into another world. I didn’t dare leave my room. I couldn’t bring myself to look at myself, but to impose that on others . . . . It was monstrous, traumatic, unpresentable. Standing in front of the mirror, I felt as if there was nothing of me left” (Cojean 2007: 20). Apart from the unimaginable amount of suffering the patient had to undergo, the absence of complete relief in wake of the operation, not to mention the self-alienating experience of confronting a new self, what is most striking about her comments is the language used to describe the transformation of what is the most exposed part of a person’s identity into a horrifying uncanny object, one that must henceforth strive to make its “unpresentable” appearance presentable. The difficulty of rendering the unspeakable experience of facial disfigurement into discourse seems to have been overcome by a sudden switch whereby the individual self had become an objectified “it.”

In his study on the affective capacity of the face, the pioneer of psychobiological theory Silvan Tomkins made a significant equation between the human being and the face, defining the latter as the primary site of affects (1995: 263). Considering the dreadful experience of losing one’s face, this raises some pertinent questions: What happens when the face begins to lose its familiar form, falls apart, and becomes faceless? If the face is no longer a guarantee of identity or a reliable sign of interiority but instead an unrecognizable, nameless, and disturbing object, what kind of affects do these shattered faces trigger and how do such affects operate? And how can language mediate the barely thinkable experience of the gaze facing the faceless? Rather than contributing to the history of representation of facial disfigurement or parsing the emotional responses this phenomenon brings about, this chapter delves into the formal work and affective agency generated by several encounters between subjects and disfigured, erased, or simply faceless faces that took place during the second decade of the twentieth century. Reading the faceless images in several modernist texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gaston Leroux, and Richard Weiner in dialogue with the war experiences of the gueules cassées (broken faces), the survivors of the First World War who suffered extensive facial injuries, as rendered in the novel Au ciel de Verdun (The Skies Over Verdun, 1918) by Bernard Lafont and the war memoirs Hommes sans visage (Men Without Faces, 1942) of the Swiss front nurse Henriette Rémi, I will argue that rather than simply represented the hardly thinkable faceless faces are performed through the formal work of affects that structure their discursive forms.

Not only do the witness accounts from the battlefront and the literary fictions share an emotional force of the traumatic images but they also enable affects of shock, fear, disgust, and fascination to unfold and shape the texture of these faceless encounters. By revolving around the Lacanian real—a constitutional failure of reality suffused with trauma, shock, and pain, a “crack within the symbolic network itself” (Žižek 2008b: 215)—the texts dealing with disfiguration perform this crack through the affective operation of shattering that comes about as a result of the fearful encounter with the faceless and allows to think of the face as a site of formal conflicts rather than a place of identification. Shifting from an emotional ontology of the face toward the affective analysis of the faceless encounters, the following lines will also demonstrate that far from merely providing a narrative theme or a striking visual motif encompassing the imagery of horror, disgust, and fascination—as employed widely in expressionist literature and visual arts but also in horror and sci-fi cinema—the faceless operates as a figure that embraces, on the one hand, the aesthetics of the formless and, on the other, the traumatizing experience of war.² The disturbances, shattering, and “formlessnessing” of the formal integrity of the face will be explored in conversation with both the relational and formalist approaches to affect, a conceptual encounter that helps to understand how the affective force of the faceless not only works “over form” (Brinkema 2014: 37) but also triggers latent experiences in all those who face it.

To keep up with the conceptual premise of this book arguing that rather than an artistic destruction, an intentional elimination, or ontological negation of form, disformations stand for the affective operations that open the form toward new formations and disturbances, and that such deformations situating form at the very limits of representation are both aesthetically and theoretically generative, it is important to carefully trace how this unsettling agency of affects penetrates into the texture of media and drives their forms, whether rooted in modernist literary discourse or witness accounts from the battlefront. One of these representational limits that the language nonetheless strives to name and perform emerges when a human face—the proverbial “pathway to the soul”—is turned inside out.

Shattering the Face in Modernism

Shortly before and after the First World War, literary modernism began to abound in the uncanny images of the faceless face. In a fragment from the beginning of Rilke’s only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), an initially melancholic scene involving an anonymous poor woman on a Parisian street quickly morphs into a terrifying event.

The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless [bloßen wunden Kopf ohne Gesicht]. (1990: 7; 2012: 12)

Far from simply depicting a shocking inversion of the face, faithfully echoing the traumatic dimension of the anonymous life in modern metropolis, the scene displays a complex transgression of the gaze. The laconically described, chillingly dreadful situation of facial removal stands for a moment during which the anthropological order is violated while staging the encounter of the subject with the uncanny object.³ The inside of a face, embodying, as aptly noted by Gerhard Richter, “the unthinkable inside of something that is the very definition of the outside” (2012: 113), suddenly changes from the observed object to a space entered by the frightened narrator from whose perspective the whole scene is focalized. This perspective is then doubled as the narrator struggles between, on the one hand, the inquiring surgeon-like gaze at what Malte’s eyes cannot avoid—the reverse of a face, the hollow skin clutched in the palms—and, on the other, the voyeuristic and terrified gaze, eager to see—while taming the desire to do so—the gaping remains of the bodily reversion, the faceless head.

As a result, two different regimes of seeing underpin the entire scene. While the narrator deals with his own fears, the text leads the reader to the place where Malte’s eyes dare not look, to the faceless, disfigured head. And if the language remains descriptive and coherent, it is the gaze that is split—between both narrative modes of seeing and between what Rilke explicitly depicts and what his text allows us to get a glimpse of: an image that is not visibly represented but instead visually performed.⁴ For when the female protagonist’s face is torn off by her abrupt movement, another gaze, belonging neither to the narrator nor to the observed woman, enters the scene: the gaze of the groping reader watching the right and so far invisible side of the skin, the facial object peeping through her fingers. Along with the gaze, the transgression also disturbs the semiotics of the face whose etymology, rooted in the German word Gesicht and the French word visage (coming from the Latin word visum denoting both seeing and sight), links the viewed object to the very act of seeing while referring to the face as “something that we see in front of us and that in turn looks back at us” (Schmitt 2012: 7). Through the traumatic encounter with the faceless, Rilke—in “his farewell to the face,” as Hans Belting recently dubbed the novel (2017: 23)—thus undertakes a double transgression of both the gaze and the anthropological meaning of the face, showing that the face from the inside is not just an affective site of fear and fascination but that these affects also trigger the split between two kinds of seeing—the representational and the performative one.

The same year saw the publication of Gaston Leroux’s famous novel The Phantom of the Opera (1910). Erik, the novel’s ghostlike protagonist, is a mysterious phantom with a disfigured face who lives in an underground labyrinth beneath the Paris Opera House. Described as a repulsive skeleton who wears a mask to conceal his monstrous noseless face, a glimpse of his eyes alone is enough to traumatize the viewer. Adopting a partly satiric and partly enigmatic tone, the narrator introduces “the most extraordinary and fantastic tragedy” (Leroux 2012: 5), teasing out the superstitions and ripe imaginations of both the diegetic characters and readers. Firmly rooted in the genre of the Gothic novel with its touch of the burlesque, the novel precisely evokes the equivocal nature of a lost soul dwelling at the very edge of a physical and fantastic existence.⁵ As such, the verbal depiction of the disfigured face is preceded by a profound trace, or rather cleavage, in the memory as experienced by one of the protagonists who saw the monster just for one second and yet “the memory of what he had briefly glimpsed had left an indelible mark on his mind” (2012: 13). Echoing the unbearable recollection of the phantom, this traumatic pattern will recurrently appear throughout the whole text while competing with the actual sight of the phantom to such an extent that it will occasionally overshadow it.

For the cultural historian Sander L. Gilman, the mystery of Eric’s disfigured face could not be clearer. In his view, the phantom’s missing nose along with his fixed pupils and the stench of the rotten flesh functioned for a common reader at the turn of the century as an obvious indicator of social disease, evoking the hereditary physiognomy of syphilis. However persuasive Gilman’s observation that “[a]ll lost noses, according to the common wisdoms of the nineteenth century, the age of syphilophobia, were signs of sin” (1998: 34) certainly is, it remains grounded in the physiognomic reading of the face as an external sign of the interior morality, and hence fails to account for the aesthetic work of the disfigured face affecting both the language and gaze of its beholders. From a different perspective, Žižek, in his psychoanalytic and joyfully intertextual reading, argues that the phantom’s repulsive face stands for a site of an intrusion of the real: “The amorphous distortion of the face: the flesh has not yet assumed definite features; it dwells in a kind of preontological state, as if ‘melted,’ as if deformed by anamorphosis” (1991: 47). Rather than pursuing Žižek’s anamorphic view that leads him to disclose the vibrant horror under the mask through specific ideological meanings, I want to take his argument one step further by suggesting that this amorphous distortion of the phantom’s face comes about not as a lurking inherent potential to be yet accomplished but as a specific formal work of affects that are performed through the movement of language—that is to say, as an act of disformation.

No less conspicuous than the “palpitating skinned flesh” (Žižek 1991: 47) concealed beneath the mask are the phantom’s eyes whose demonic force consists paradoxically in the contrast between presence and absence. “His eyes are so deep-set you can’t hardly make out the pupils which never move. In fact, all you can see is two great big black holes like sockets in a dead man’s skull” (Leroux 2012: 13). But the almost missing eyes—the holes that lead toward nothing else than to the groping trajectory of a look attempting to discern them, and hence to their confusing mediation by the text—do substitute and eventually overcome their partial absence by the effect of the mesmerizing gaze; in fact, they lead to the “eyes popping out” (2012: 14) of the bystander’s head, making the sight of the phantom no easier to countenance. As if the negative sentence uttered by Erik were addressed not only to the opera singer Christina Daaé but also to the whole account of the novel’s impossibility of representation: “You will never see Erik’s face!” (136). Rather than translating the generative negativity of this paradoxically unseen and yet observed facial object into a physiognomic screen upon which the others’ anxieties would have been projected, or, as Žižek suggests, reading the figure of phantom allegorically as “a fetish that stands in for the class struggle” (1991: 62),⁶ the affective agency that emerges whenever the phantom’s faceless face appears opens up a different theoretical avenue for thinking the formal disturbances. The necessary question then is: How can language capture, mediate, and perform such an experience of the unseen, shocking, and barely nameable face oscillating between presence and absence?

In his take against the traditional reduction of the face to a legible sign, Didi-Huberman argues for a notion of the “ruckus of the face” (le chahut du visage) that exceeds the borders of psychological and physiognomic expression and has “a capacity to open before us as a field, a source of agitation, conflicts, and symptoms” (1992: 44). To play out this desubjectifying and loud facial field, the linguistic means that Leroux employs involve an insisting accumulation of synonyms and repetitions, unveiling “a face so pale, so grim, so repulsive” (2012: 32). More importantly, anyone spotting Erik without his mask can only give voice to an overwhelming and purely affective speech—“Oh! Horror, horror, horror!”—only to be repeated by the surrounding nocturnal echoes modified ever so slightly to produce: “Horror! . . . Horror! . . . Horror!” (2012: 139). Far from the language voiding itself through such repetition, what it actually achieves here is an imitation of the unspeakability of the disfigured face. In doing so, the text switches into a different operational mode whose main goal is less a depiction of the fearsome face and the related evocation of disgust, fear, and panic—a mode that is rather invested in production of an affective portrait shaped by the visual and acoustic qualities of what is essentially nameless and formless:

If I live to be a hundred, I shall never forget the inhuman scream he uttered, his howl of hellish pain and fury, while my eyes, round with horror, remained fixed on that ghastly . . . thing . . . and my mouth stayed open but no words came out of it [comme ma bouche qui ne se refermait pas et qui cependant ne criait plus]! (2012: 139)

On the one hand, the language expands a peculiarly violent mechanism that reduces the most human part of the body to a nameless—both alive and dead—object, a fascinating yet monstrous and rejected “abject”; on the other hand, the protagonist’s vocabulary reaches the discursive limits of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• WHEN FORMS FALL APART: AN INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• CODA: AFFECTIVE COMPOUNDS MAKE A MEDIA EXCESS
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright