Taking Pleasure in Failed Faces: On Namwali Serpell’s "Stranger Faces"

Namwali Serpell | Stranger Faces (Undelivered Lectures) | Transit Books | October 2020 | 196 Pages

Faces don’t always tell the truth. Perhaps that is why Zora Neal Hurston’s Janie sends just her face to her abusive husband’s funeral, while she “herself went rollicking with the springtime across the world.” Faces can be difficult to interpret, and masked and digital faces are even harder to read. The ambiguity intensifies when mouths—the locus of speech—are covered, or when interacting with faces through a screen. Whether placed behind a mask or framed as a rectangle on Zoom, 2020 was a year of partial faces, a year of unusual and unfamiliar facial encounters. One might also say these are strange faces, or failed faces. 

In Stranger Faces, Harvard professor Namwali Serpell uses semiotics to describe her version of a “failed face.” An award-winning novelist, Serpell’s writing spans literary criticism, short stories, and film reviews, and Stranger Faces adds to her skill in writing across genres. The second book in the Undelivered Lectures series, Stranger Faces reads more like a collection of intellectually rigorous long-form blog posts than an academic monograph. The first book, entitled Lecture by Mary Cappello, recasts the oft-stuffiness of lecture as a means to wander, question, and excite. In this spirit, Stranger Faces adds another verb to this list—the lecture as a means to play—and what Serpell means by play is as intriguing as it is provocative.

Serpell begins Stranger Faces by highlighting a dominant mode of facial interpretation: the surface/depth binary. This is the idea that the exterior physical features of the face signify the interior character and attributes of a person (i.e., physiognomy). Writing in the early twentieth century, sociologist Georg Simmel argued that “it is in the features of the face the soul finds its clearest expression.” For Simmel, aesthetics and human identity were inextricably linked. Conversely, neurologist Duchenne le Boulogne and biologist Charles Darwin sought to pin down authentic expression not through Simmel’s espousal of artistic symmetry and balance, but by analyzing the contractions of facial muscles. Although the disciplines differed (one rooted in art, the other in science), these two theories were united under the normative judgment that the Ideal Face does not lie. Simply put: what’s on the outside validates what’s on the inside, and vice versa. 

With a sharp eye and critical wit, Serpell topples this Ideal Face from its pedestal. She offers robust counterexamples of faces in history, literature, and film that do not embody this Ideal: disabled faces, racially-ambiguous faces, substitutive faces, animal faces, and emoji faces. For Serpell, all of these examples show that, “the gap between the face and its depth is a span across which we fondle, flirt with, and fret over meaning.” As she points out, we know that faces do not always convey what they mean. Faces that are unusual—insofar as they do not harbor standard conventions of beauty, truth, and identity—further accentuate this gap between the exterior and the interior. And here is what I think is Serpell’s most intriguing take on strange faces: she says that we should take pleasure in these facial failures, to see them not as indexes of human worth, but as art.

Faces that fail not only call overt attention to the prevalence of facial illegibility at large, they also illustrate that the Ideal Face is an exclusionary and discriminatory one. For example, Serpell traces the emotionally gripping tale of Joseph Merrick, known more commonly as “The Elephant Man.” Merrick’s face is the opposite of the Ideal: misaligned, opaque, and disfigured. She argues that rather than treat his unusual face as a signifier of some kind of morbidity that eludes comprehension, what if it was instead embraced as a work of art, as worthy of awe of wonder? Serpell takes up the ethical implications by stating that Merrick chose of his own free will to exhibit his strange, disproportionate face to the world. She concludes with an insightful question: doesn’t the fact that Joseph Merrick made his face “a shameless spectacle… reject the notion that strangeness is a matter of shame at all?” 

Serpell further explores the face-as-spectacle in her exhilarating reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, where she traces how the main characters’ faces are substituted easily with the faces of their costars. In Psycho, the faces come to mean nothing through their constant circulation. They lose their individuality in favor of universality. Serpell poses similar questions here: “What if we played with rather than attached to people in a film? What does it mean to treat the faces as pleasurable objects rather than the seat of the soul?”  Serpell frames these questions as traversing a taboo:

Stranger Faces lead us to go beyond the usual question—what should a face be?—to an even more basic one: what counts as a face and why? If we dislodge The Ideal Face from its seat of power, the array of stranger faces we’re left with might give us insight into faces as such, as we experience them. We might move towards new models of being, aesthetics, affect, and ethics that rely not on identity or truth, but on pleasure, in all of its richness and complexity. We might even traverse that ultimate taboo: treating the face as a kind of thing. 

“Treating the face as a kind of thing” is likely to be met with some resistance. The face is what people often rely on in order to cultivate empathy. “Put a face on it” is a common phrase, invoking that deep-seated plea to recognize the human in each other. For example, I can’t help but think of Richard Renaldi’s poignant photography in “Faces of a Fast-Food Nation.” Margaret Talbot describes the time intensive process of his photography, deeming it akin to nineteenth century studio portraiture. She comments, “his subjects hold our gaze; they compel us to see the human being in the uniform.” Here, the Ideal Face seems to rise again, in the sense that these faces of fast food employees are supposed to be communicating some kind of truth about the harsh realities of working in the industry. If we see their faces as things, like Serpell recommends, does that not risk somehow denying their stories, and by extension, all of the underpinnings that make them human?

Serpell anticipates this resistance. She poses her own question about the face of Hannah Crafts, an enslaved African American author whose light skin allowed her to pass for white. Regarding Crafts’ autobiography, A Bondswoman’s Narrative, Serpell remarks: “If your face is already a lie, why not make it a story?” Serpell makes a persuasive case for divorcing attachment to the face as solely a sign of beauty, truth, or identity. These are problematic social hierarchies. If the Ideal Face collapses, then the face exists on an interpretive plane that is fleeting and mutable, one that is closer to capturing what the face actually signifies. “We love to play with faces, make them art,” Serpell surmises. It is this changeability of the face that Serpell celebrates, that makes her think of the face in artistic terms. But her theory of art differs from Simmel’s aesthetic conventions. In fact, for Serpell, playing with faces entirely refashions why they appeal to us. 

Serpell argues in her treatment of Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man that humans frequently anthropomorphize animals and objects in order to compensate for their elusiveness; the incomprehensibility of nature is turned into “a source of pleasure.”  The story here may be that in our inability to understand the face itself, we turn to the artistic facializing of others to make up for our failures. Turning to art is a form of play. If the face is no longer “the seat of the soul” it can then open up to a wide range of modifications and juxtapositions. But we still find it almost impossible not to imbue the face with meaning; nowhere is this more evident than in the communicative uses of emojis, which Serpell discusses in her final and best chapter, “The E-Face.” 

In thinking about the semiotics of the emoji, Serpell says “you can try to ‘humanize’ communication by putting a ‘face” to it” but it is impossible to escape the contradictory nature of facial logic. The “contradictory nature of facial logic” is that the face is multi-faceted, mutable, and difficult to interpret. Looking at Renaldi’s exquisite photographs is a process of trying to override the logic: we mold the faces into an Ideal. The face’s meaning is crafted entirely by humans themselves. But treating the faces of Renaldi’s subjects as things does not mean the people themselves are things. Instead, such artistic play actually recognizes the inconsistency of the face. Asking “what counts as a face” can be disentangled from asking “what it means to be human,” and more importantly, such a question recognizes that a person’s identity and value do not have to rest on their facial features. Indeed, the phrase “putting a face to it” already suggests that faces are interchangeable and movable, that they can be taken up and put down at will. Playing with this faciality phenomenon, is, in fact, something we already do; Stranger Faces says we should not deny this impulse, we should embrace it. Serpell ushers in an ethics that does not adhere human value to something as fickle—and paradoxical—as the facial surface. 

All that to say, I can’t wait for Serpell’s forthcoming book, American Psycho Analysis. In her own words, she both loves to hate and hates to love Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial novel American Psycho (and the film adaptation starring Christian Bale). If Stranger Faces is any indication, American Psycho Analysis also promises to challenge, amuse, and delight its readers.