The Face and Faciality in Medieval French Literature, 1170–1390. By Alice Hazard

Abstract

This book is a challenging and inventive study of the face and faciality in medieval French literature. Alice Hazard’s core project is to rethink faciality, defined here as ‘the quality of being a face’ (p. 202), in a way that destabilizes and uncouples this concept from its associations and apparent affinities with the physiological face. Hazard also challenges the traditional view that the human face in medieval literature might offer any kind of reliable guide to individual subjectivity or interiority. She is more interested in the philosophy of faciality and the shifting planes and patterns of perception in medieval literature — its ‘engagement with the productive illusion of interiority’ (p. 146) — than, for example, the face as the site of gesture, physiognomic character, the expression of emotion, or the marker of ethnic or racial difference. The book’s conclusion makes it clear that, for Hazard, the face is not a text to be deciphered; but, in its mutability and instability, it is a ‘literary motif, a cultural model and a philosophical construct’ (p. 206). Four core chapters consider the face in Arthurian romance, in ‘doodles’ in the decorated margins of manuscripts (p. 82), in the opening scenes of Le Roman de la Rose, and in selected fabliaux. All four chapters explore the inherent and productive instability of faciality. Hazard draws her theoretical inspiration variously from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Lacan, Silvan S. Tomkins, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, and others, while also engaging with recent scholarship and criticism on medieval French literature. Most of her primary texts and her theoretical approaches are oriented towards secular literature. This means that her reading of Levinas, for example, is somewhat selective, as she interprets his conception of otherness through the face primarily as a relationship with another subject, not with the divine. Throughout this book, Hazard consistently steers us away from the face as a stable sign that might be confined to or co-extensive with the physiological features on the front of our heads. For instance, her reading of the armed and helmeted combatants in Old French romances leads to a very subtle argument about the dispersal of faciality onto ‘codified facial surfaces’ such as the knight’s helmet and shield which both constitute the ‘facing surface’ of the knight and therefore, his face (pp. 148, 207). The chapter on Le Roman de la Rose uses Deleuze and Guattari to read the wall around the garden of Deduit as an example of faciality, while the discussion of the relationship between faces and genitalia in the fabliaux affirms how little one needs, in the surreal and improbable world of these stories, to make a face (p. 176). This book reads like a PhD that has been adapted — not entirely successfully — for publication as a monograph. It is somewhat weighed down by the burden of its theoretical material, and its prose is careful and dutiful rather than elegant or lively; nevertheless, it is a strikingly original book that makes a powerful intervention into contemporary theories of the face and faciality.