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Namwali Serpell

— If I were to count up the number of encounters I’ve had in my life with those whose faces were in front of me and those whose faces are not, I believe the proportion would greatly favour the latter. And this is as an able-bodied person with relatively good vision, and the capacity, opportunity (somewhat suppressed at the moment) and proclivity for social interaction. This might be because I am an unreformed bookworm, but ‘facelessness’ also characterises my social media engagement — contra the brand name ‘Facebook’, an avatar, even a photograph, isn’t really a face. So this faceless, or perhaps face-free, dynamic is familiar to me, and in some ways preferable. A very smart reader once noted in a Q&A that the three very different stories of mine from which I’d just read (‘The Book of Faces’, ‘The Sack’, ‘Bottoms Up’) were all obsessed with mediation. I believe, as Bernard Williams once paraphrased Nietzsche, that ‘we have art… so that we can both grasp the truth and not perish from it.’ Form interrupts the blazing face-to-face encounter. It is not just an emotional buffer but an ethical frame — it permits us to interact with the intense presence and difference of other people; it allows us to engage with them rather than be overwhelmed by them. (I would reserve that often thrilling overwhelm for people with whom I have intimate relationships.) Aesthetically and affectively, of course, it can be more fun, or differently fun, to see and touch live faces! But the only ethical difference I perceive in the face-to-face interview would be the idea that it promises greater transparency, authenticity, and expressiveness — in sum, greater truth. But I assure you, having had a face-to-face conversation about this topic before, that would not be the case. I wouldn’t, for example, feel comfortable to say to you what I’m about to write: I am as likely to lie to your face as I am to lie in typeface. This is in fact one way to express the premise of my book.

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Namwali Serpell

— Yes. I think the face-to-face encounter is mediated — by preconceptions, by sensory input (someone’s clothes or smell or race), by the stochastic noise of other presences in the immediate environment — as much as reading or social media are. These are all just differently mediated encounters. I note in my essay on emoji that black and/or queer people on Twitter have a very different attitude toward social media than (white, upper-middle-class, educated elite) pundits who bemoan twenty-first century ‘disconnection’. Many people find community, solidarity, education and genuine connection through social media. And some find it there precisely because they don’t have to experience judgments about their identity; they can camouflage themselves, choose what to keep private, which isn’t equivalent to deception.

 

Over the years, rereading Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ essay, which is at the centre of a new short story I’ve just published (‘The Work of Art’), has come to influence my take on this. We tend to think that Benjamin’s essay is simply anti-technological reproduction. But Benjamin is in fact attuned to all of the affordances of, say, film, both positive and negative: not just how it strips aura, but also how it gives us an ‘x-ray’ vision we’ve never had with the human eye (an ‘optical unconscious’); not just how it chops up the actor’s presence into discrete shots, but also how it has a phenomenological openness for crowds of people, akin to how we interact with architecture. There’s rarely a reason altogether to dismiss a technology or a medium — which are neutral apart from the uses to which we put them; there are always real human reasons we created that modality for ourselves and there are often incredible ways that we’ve elaborated on it. (I’d go so far as to say this bent toward invention and adaptation characterises the history of art, black art in particular.)

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Namwali Serpell

— What a wonderful observation! I hadn’t noticed it, but it makes perfect sense, given my preoccupations. I find myself pouncing on this sentence: ‘And yet these women, as we imagine them, do have faces, they just exist beyond the reach of signification: “a piece of language” that appears to exceed language.’ Where are these faces that they have? Are they beyond the layers of obscurity or distortion, or are the layers themselves? One minor example of this in the novel is how the Corsale brothers interact with Sibilla’s face (which is covered in hair) when she’s a young girl. The Colonel wants to see it — he presses the hair on her face back tightly so he can read the outline of her features. Federico, with whom she falls in love and marries, isn’t particularly interested in her face. He is far more taken with her hair — that surface layer which sprouts from her face and is therefore part of it, the way that beards or, more broadly, eyebrows are part of ours.

 

One of the more precise continuities across the faces I consider in Stranger Faces — from the ‘disabled’ face of Joseph Merrick to the racially ambiguous face of Hannah Crafts to the object-like faces in Psycho to the blank faces in Grizzly Man to the emoji and GIFs we’ve invented so we can play with faces — is this layeredness. Whether it is split into a face and a countenance, a face and its race, a face and its skull, the face isn’t one surface that corresponds to the depth of an entity. It is a severalty of surfaces, a set of slippery signs, which, in a poststructuralist framework, always exceed how we want language to work.

 

My larger analogy — somewhat reduced in the final version of the book — ties our beliefs about the face to our beliefs about authorial intention. In the same way that in the West we think, per the cliché, that the eyes are the window to the soul, we tend to think, per Orwell, that ‘good prose is like a windowpane’. But faces and prose are never transparent; they’re translucent at best, and riven by time and context into shifting veils. And if you can never see clearly into someone, neither can you see through their eyes in a clear way — and yes, this would preclude the extreme model of ’empathy’ we are so drawn to in contemporary culture. I’m more interested in the way we mediate our ethical relationships than in pretending that there are definitively better or worse, clearer or more opaque versions of them. I don’t deny our desire to find truth and beauty and connection and empathy in strangers’ faces, but this book is about understanding the shape of that desire — and its conjoined opposite, our desire to play with faces like they’re things, like they’re works of art — rather than an effort to advocate for either.

 

The book looks at faces in written texts (Crafts); faces in visual texts (Psycho, Grizzly Man); faces we know from both (The Elephant Man); faces that turn visual icons into text (emoji); faces in fiction and non-fiction; in portraiture, sculpture, online. I don’t do this to elide the distinctions among different genres and media — to pretend they’re all the same — but rather to explore the specific possibilities each affords, like the flash shot that layers Norman’s face with Mother’s skull at the end of Psycho, or the availability of piling emoji up to convey intensity.

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Namwali Serpell

— I don’t see their faces! I’m glad you asked this because I find this phenomenon both deeply fascinating and somewhat disconcerting. I think it’s because, as Morrison put it, ‘writing to me is an advanced and slow form of reading’, and I don’t see characters’ faces when I read. (Tristram Shandy’s instruction for readers to draw their own image of a beautiful character on a blank page is a great insight.) When a novel is adapted into a film — or vice versa — we often find a divergence of opinion about how the characters have been cast between those who read the novel first and those who see the film first. The dissonance that readers frequently experience, the sense that the actor is the ‘wrong person’, is a testament to the ineluctable difference between how we experience people in these two media. And the fact that we laud an actor’s transformation into a character suggests that this isn’t about likeness but about capturing another person’s quiddity, beyond their face. Relatedly, I often feel I know a character from, say, a Russian novel, very deeply, and then find myself stumbling over their name out loud! As I’m reading, I simply register that particular set of letters as ‘so-and-so’. I would hypothesise that this is about a distinction between characters and real people, but I find this to be the case even when I write about real people that I know in non-fiction essays! I experience a feeling of personhood — built out of language, which includes voice (I do hear characters) — whether I’m writing or reading about people. This makes me wonder if our sense of others’ personhood is a collection of vibes and senses and inexact memories — not just of someone’s face but of, say, their smell (a feature deeply resistant to transcription in language).

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Namwali Serpell

— I do feel a different responsibility when writing about real people: not necessarily to their real face, as such — as monolithic emblem of their personhood — but to aspects of their face that have to do with their life. For instance, I wanted my Matha Mwamba to have dark skin and black hair, as the historical one did, but once I set her crying, I felt I could write anything I wanted when it comes to the transformations that take place in and around her face — her eyes, sinuses, skin, etc. Similarly, Nkoloso’s dreadlocks were important to register. But you’ll notice that with the other historical figures I write about — Percy Clark, Pietro Gavuzzi, Ngulube, Sir Stewart Gore-Brown — and in the personal essays I’ve written about family and friends and lovers, I don’t spend much time describing their faces at all. I’m keener to make sure I get their words right — and I always run my work by any living subjects before publication if I can.

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Namwali Serpell

— A bit of both! Readers tend to obsess over the face behind the name, the author behind the pseudonym. But again, I think expressiveness and a sense of someone’s personhood is a matter of language, including punctuation, not just a matter of cheek muscles.

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Namwali Serpell

— I wanted to dramatise the argument by calling out the readerly obsession with faces while noting the unlikelihood that my actual face would hover over your reading experience. As you say, the face of an author hovers between absence and presence — my concern throughout is about what that hovering affords for us aesthetically. I think the difference between Didion’s Listen to me and my Look at me is that her imperative to the reader is already happening (in the sense that we’re reading the words she’s ‘saying’) while mine is impossible — not just logistically, unless you were to watch a video of me reading the entire book out loud, but also, as you say, because to look at someone is unlikely to coincide with looking with someone. Listen to me is rhetorical persuasion; Look at me is a rhetorical trick, a piece of irony.

 

My model of the relationship between reader and writer is one of solidarity, which is to say, hard work and co-construction. We need each other to make this instrument called language work. I am not very interested in getting the reader to wholeheartedly agree with my argument; I want the reader to construct, join in, participate, ‘argufy’, as William Empson put it.

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Namwali Serpell

— An hour ago, I closed the Twitter tab on my browser while murmuring ‘time is a scam’. It’s not that time doesn’t exist, but that, as the pandemic has clarified so vividly, the ways we divide it up and describe it are highly contingent. Which is to say, neither of these books took the amount of time between their inception and their publication for me actually to generate and revise them. If we calculated the hours spent, they each probably took a couple of years (of a 9-5) at most. But those hours were scattered among many other projects, not to mention the tasks of life, like teaching and eating and thinking. I don’t mean to sound defensive. It’s just important to understand the context for my reply. I don’t sit down to write a book and then take 10-20 years to finish it. A project comes to me, hazy but complete in its spirit, and goes on a list. I toggle between the projects on that list until I’m done with one or the other. (For example, I will stumble on an image or an idea and know exactly which project it belongs to.) So, it isn’t as though a book or a writing project is interrupted and I have to get back to focusing on it. It’s more like a garden. A seed appears and I sow it, and prune and water the plant at various stages, and eventually, when the time is ripe, I pluck and harvest (and cook and eat?) it.

 

Finishing The Old Drift taught me this because when it came to be time — when the time was ripe — to write down and revise everything I already knew, and to learn everything I didn’t yet know, about that book, the process of accommodating it to my older self and a changed context was less difficult than I thought. I was able to stay true to the instincts of my younger self (though I did edit her) because the project already was what it was — the seed had not changed though the plant had grown. (This is making me laugh because one of my other seeds has the tentative title Seed.) I have come to learn that, for me, being a writer isn’t sitting down and wondering ‘What shall I invent next?’ It is trying to learn, myself, what I have inside my mind that I want to know more about, and sowing my seeds, and taking as much time as needed to cultivate them.

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Namwali Serpell

— This is the age-old battle, right? The editor’s deadline vs the writer’s process. To transform what has become, as you say, an ‘industry’ would require an anti-capitalist reconception of art. I do think we ought to be able to make a living from making art, but as a socialist, my ideal world would entail equal and robust funding for everyone (in advances, grants, fees, etc). But I’m very sceptical of the insistence that we peg aesthetic value to monetary value. Money can support the creation of art, but the two value systems are frankly incommensurable. The idea that ‘bestseller’ is an index of literary value we take seriously is mind-boggling if you know anything about literary history, and if you take a moment to look at the word ‘bestseller’.

 

It would also require a reconception of time. I believe in deadlines — they’re extraordinarily useful in all that I do — but they function best as formal constraints or as temporary temporal prostheses. I fundamentally see my own writing as a vocation, a calling that spans my life and hopefully stretches beyond it, not as a job with billable hours and urgent deadlines. (What could possibly be urgent beyond survival right now?!) Unless you’re a journalist on a relevancy-based deadline, it seems strange to make artists operate on market time rather than artistic time.

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Namwali Serpell

— Thank you, that is both very perceptive and pleasing to hear. That quality of peripeteia in a plot — a turn that is a fall, that both surprises and satisfies, that feels true to life though it’s rarely found outside of the narratives that we conjure and impose on life — is incredibly difficult to do on the page. And I worked very hard to try and achieve it in my revisions, especially because, as you say, error is the philosophical screw on which the entire novel turns.

 

Practically speaking, as a writer, I believe only in intentional errors, of which there is only one in the novel because, as I say of Matha, who ‘inserted a few errors into her work’ to stay under the radar in an all-boys school: ‘it’s not so easy to be believably wrong’. My publishers acquiesced to over a hundred corrections from me between the hardcover and the paperback editions. I knew that, like mosquitos, error would haunt me if I chose to write about it. But I’ve learned that I’m far more worried about errors than most readers are, maybe because I’m a teacher.

 

Error vexes me. (Hence mosquitos.) Like uncertainty, it intrigues me precisely because I struggle so much with it. In both cases, I was working through not just an acceptance of these negatively charged and inescapable phenomena of human existence, but an effort to take seriously their uses: What do they allow? What do they afford? What do they produce?

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Namwali Serpell

— My philosophy of error is that we try to get it right — by fixing it or by fleeing from it — but even when we think we’ve grasped it or turned it to our own purposes, it crops up in a different way, an unexpected place, a new form. That’s why I find error both vexing and delightful! The history of genetic science tells this story over and again. It’s no surprise that as a writer, I am subject to the workings of my own philosophy. There’s a lovely paradox here: I’ve tried to get it right but my philosophy of error is, on its own terms, inevitably prone to error — so is it right?

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Namwali Serpell

— Thank you, again — this is another ongoing effort for me.

 

I used to say: I know that the critic and the writer in me speak to each other but I’m not privy to the conversation. I used to cite Hyde scrawling dirty marginalia in Jekyll’s books — though it’s unclear which is the writer and which the critic in that analogy. I used to joke that I live inside the hyphen in Nabokov’s term ‘the artist-reader’. The longer I do this, though, and the more I engage in a third mode — non-fiction essays — the more I feel that these are just strained, if quasi-inventive, attempts to satisfy a question about a rather recent and largely false division, one that really only serves gatekeepers in both academia and the literary community. So now I quote Morrison: ‘I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.’

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Namwali Serpell

— I am constitutionally wary of institutions, but I concede that they are necessary and often pleasant and intellectually invigorating. At this stage in my life, I’ve decided to make peace with a symbiotic mutualism — facultative rather than obligate — between me and institutions.

 

If my work has been compromised by institutional pressures — beyond the pinch of low pay or insufficient time — I’ve had the good luck not to know it. But one can never really know, you know? There’s no purity here. No transcendence, either. I’ve willingly made compromises with people, with readers or editors in positions of power over me. I regret some of these; others, in retrospect, were the fruit of engaged argufying. Mostly, like Morrison, I make sure to maintain a parallel life to my institutional life — community, circles of readers, (chosen) family — and to remember that what those people think is more important than any institutional imprimatur.

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Namwali Serpell

— No, it hasn’t. There has been a parallel conversation in the public discourse about irony, which we’ve seen the alt-right and fascist politicians use as an excuse (‘my racism was just a joke’, etc). My take on both uncertainty and irony is not that we need to do away with or bracket them now that they suddenly seem dangerous or threatening or trivialising or distracting for the polis. (Who are we, Plato?) It’s that we need to learn their uses and intricacies, their pitfalls and possibilities. To attend closely to anything is to privilege it, but my hope is that my work is as attuned to the bad and ugly as it is to the good when it comes to these phenomena. I personally feel far more capable of action when I better understand the roots of my doubt — and accept that it might be foundational to the human enterprise — than if I try to dismiss it or clear it up.

 

We need better, finer literacy in these matters, and I believe reading literature can help with that. Being able to discern the difference between irony and sarcasm, to be able to recognise how uncertainty can be constructed and weaponised, is literacy. Being able to understand how the uncertainty about Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual assault was wrought — as mutual exclusion (it either happened or it didn’t) rather than multiplicity (several witnesses reporting different takes) — is literacy. As is being able to perceive that, when we have incommensurable values in an uncertain situation, like those of teachers vs parents vs teachers who are parents during this pandemic, we have other models available to us than mechanistically calculating who gets their interests served first (Bentham). We might instead reframe the whole structure of how this society does childcare so that these values, though they may ultimately be incommensurable, aren’t pitted against each other, can all be accommodated (Hegel). Irony and uncertainty aren’t going away and we certainly shouldn’t try to ban them. (Who are we, Big Brother?) We should try to understand them, their implications and their effects, rhetorically and politically.

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Namwali Serpell

— I don’t know him or his work well enough to say! It’s been interesting to see John Oliver and Trevor Noah negotiate this Scylla and Charybdis. And to be honest, one of the reasons I spend so much time on Black Twitter is that the highest forms of contemporary irony – poker-face, shade – are still very much alive there when it comes to how we talk about the news.