Speaking faces

To Troilus right wonder wel with alle
Gan for to like hire meuynge and hire chere,
Which somdel deignous was, for she let falle
Hire look a lite a-side in swich manere
Ascaunces, "what, may I nat stonden here?"
And after that hir lokynge gan she lighte,
That neuere thoughte hym seen so good a syghte.

I am currently writing a paper for a very cool-sounding conference in Berlin in a couple of weeks. It's called "Performing the Poetics of Passion – Chaucer’s “Troilus & Criseyde” and Shakespeare’s “Troilus & Cressida” (just look at the list of papers below and see what an incredible treat is in store for me).

I'm worrying away at this stanza from book I, trying to think about the performative elements of Criseyde's expression, which she "let falle" ... "a lite a-side", as if to say "what, can't I stand here?" I love the defensivess of this facial expression. Boccaccio's is more direct, "E non ci si può stare" (None can stand here). His Criseida holds out her mantle to make space for herself: Chaucer's has only to cast a downward glance and she finds room for herself.  Chaucer's Criseyde's sideways look is followed by the lightening of her glance, as if she is relieved somehow to have silently spoken her anxiety on what may be her first public appearance after being welcomed by Hector.

According to OED and MED, this Ascaunces, "as if to say", while obscure in origin, is quite separate from modern "askance" (obliquely, or with disapprobation). However, influenced by the "let falle hire look a lite a-side", I find it hard not to see both senses in Chaucer's use here.

My question to all you rhetoric buffs out there is whether there is a name for this figure by which Chaucer and Boccaccio describe their heroines' faces as speaking. I guess it's a form of prosopopeia or enargia, but even this wonderful website, Silva Rhetoricae doesn't give any specific examples.

And what other medieval examples are there? There's the Book of the Duchess, of course ("By God, my wratthe is all foryive"), and even Troilus's appeal, equally ascaunces, to the heavens, "loo, is this naught wisely spoken?"

I must say it is lovely to be working so closely on a little bit of text. It's particularly lovely to think of other ways of reading faces than through physical features, which some of us find excruciatingly difficult. We have just started a five-week sequence on the Troilus in my honours class today, and I took them through some of the problems here. 

Here's the list of papers: what an amazing couple of days it will be:

Thursday, May 13
15.30 – 16.30 Welcome Coffee and Registration
16.30        Welcome Address
17.00    Paul Strohm ‘As for to looke upon an old romaunce’: Looking and Overlooking in Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s Troy
18.00        Conference Dinner

Friday, May 14
9.30 – 11.00    Wolfram Keller Passionate Authorial Performances: From Chaucer’s Criseyde to    Shakespeare’s Cressida
                         Andreas Mahler Potent Raisings: Performing Passion in Chaucer and Shakespeare
11.00 – 11.30    Coffee Break
11.30 – 13.00    David Wallace, Changing Emotions in Troilus: the Crucial Year
                          Kathrin Bethke, Value Feelings: The Economy and Axiology of the Passions in Troilus and Cressida
13.00 – 14.30    Lunch
14.30 – 16.00     Robert Meyer-Lee Criseyde’s Precursor: Dido, Emotion and the Literary in the House of Fame
                          Hester Lees-Jeffries ‘What’s Hecuba to him?’ Absent Women and the Space of Lamentation in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

Saturday, May 15
9.30 – 11.00    James Simpson ‘The formless ruin of oblivion’: Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Literary Defacement
                         Stephanie Trigg Public and Private Emotion in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde
11.00 – 11.30    Coffee Break
11.30 – 13.00 Kai Wiegandt ‘Expectation whirls me round’: Hope, Fear and Time in Troilus and Cressida
                       Richard Wilson ‘Like an Olympian wrestling’: The Pause in Troilus and Cressida
13.00 – 14.30    Lunch
14.30 – 15.15    Ute Berns Love and Desire Delineating Selves in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida
15.15 – 16.00    John Drakakis ‘No matter from the heart’: Passion, Value and Contingency in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

What was she thinking?

I called into Clegs today and found my attention caught by a bolt of the material Haley Bracken chose for the "bodice" — I use the word loosely — of the dress she designed herself for the Alan Border presentation. It's a gruesomely fascinating image — her hair, her dress, her smile, her breasts — that I can't quite bring myself to post on my blog. If you haven't had enough of an eyefull, go here. The material itself is quite pretty, in an ornate sparkly fairy princess kind of way. And the layers of blue and green in the long wavy skirt and its train? Ditto.

But I couldn't help but wonder: what was she thinking? Glamour, cameras, fame, and all the mystique of The Dress that will transform you, and, in this context, take on a life of its own, I guess. But apart from the sexual politics of her choice, there's a more prosaic question, about the imaginative process by which she negotiated the passage of seeing all those beautiful materials in the shop, choosing this combination and those shapes to end up with the finished product?  I used to be quite good at negotiating those tricky waters: today I became paralysed and indecisive. It's not that clothes shopping is that much fun: but at least when you try something on you can see what it looks like.

I'm also struck by the oddity that I can barely tell the faces of this one and the other blonde WAGS apart; but that I could pick the textile of her dress, out of context, in a flash.

How this face-blindness thing works

Ok, so this is what happens.

I'm in the changing room on campus, about to head out to my weekly tennis game with Alison, Denise and Clara. I hear two women come in, and identify them from their voices as Denise and Alison. Two women come around the corner and I greet Denise cheerily and smile politely at the unknown woman. 'Oh!' I think, 'Denise has brought someone new to play with'. And then of course I realise it is Alison.

There are some reasons for this misrecognition, however. Before her chemotherapy, Alison used to have gorgeous long, shiny, straight dark red hair. After her hair fell out, she wore a wig that looked exactly like her hair, but for tennis she wore a little cap over her slowly re-growing hair. So I knew it had grown out curly, though no longer shiny dark red in colour. But she had, as she explained, 'come out' as a cancer patient, and was now wearing her curls clipped and coloured a beautiful pearly blonde, and so I did not recognise her, even though (a) I was expecting to see her; (b) I had heard her voice; and (c) I knew she had short curly hair. To cover my embarassment, I found myself explaining the concept of face-blindness. It was only a second or two of misrecognition, but it was obvious that I was greeting one woman as a friend and the other as a stranger. Awkward, especially as the attention should have been on Alison's new look, not my mild cognitive impairment.

Alison also told me one of her students complimented her on her hair, and said, 'Did you have that done for cancer?' Alison hadn't been particularly public about her illness, but thinking she was going to have to face lots of these queries, said, 'yes'. But then it became clear that the student thought Alison had cut or coloured her hair in support of cancer research.

And so we all go on, half-understanding each other, half-recognising each other, and only half thinking about other people.

Other avatars

Ok, so here's the avatar Joel made for himself. Very serious. But he has got the hair and the eyebrows exactly right. He hasn't done the face recognition test yet, but was looking over my shoulder at a distance the other night and saying things like "I know who that one is", with great confidence, and he is always recognising actors in the movies, etc. Lucky I didn't pass this problem on to him.

And really, it's hardly debilitating. Though I am a bit shocked to see how well other people have done on the test!

Update:
And here is Pavlov's Cat's glammo avatar of me, done from memory, no less, based on the photo on my home page. Charitably, she has portrayed an avatar of me of at least two decades ago, but she matched my favourite black top pretty well. Though I must say, I am often pretty good with remembering and recognising textiles myself: no clothes-blindness for me! For the record, I am also very good at remembering menus. In the old dinner-party days in the 80s, I could always remember what I had served, and what I had been served, for years afterwards. It's not really a memory problem, this prosopagnosia thing.

Face-blindness

Pavlov's Cat directs us to a great page where you can make your own manga. This is mine.

I cheated, though, since I got Joel to make it for me. As PC remarks, it has options for making you look "too young", as Joel said, or completely shrivelled. He found by putting my reading glasses on he could get a better image, but he was disadvantaged as it allowed you to put only one spot on.... (He used to practise counting, when a small child, by counting the moles on my face.) I did try having a go at doing my own, but couldn't work out how to translate the image in my mirror into the graphic possibilities listed. As a Wii player, though, who at one point made Wii avatars of most of the cast of the West Wing, he was my resident expert.

I find the question of facial recognition very interesting. I am not very good at it at all, and am one of those people who can't always follow the plots of TV or films because I can't always tell the actors apart. There is a lovely name for the serious end of this spectrum: prosopagnosia, or face-blindness. It can be acquired (after trauma or degenerative illness), or developmental (it can take hold before your growing brain learns how to distinguish faces).

There is a terrific website about this condition, from the Prosopagnosia research centres at Harvard and University College, London, where you can take a couple of online tests. On the first one, where you are asked to memorise then recognise faces, I scored 49/72, which translates to 68%, where if you score less than 65% you probably have face-blindness. On the second test, where you are asked to recognise famous faces without their hair, etc. I scored 18/30, which was 60%, where an average score is 85%.

This is not a particularly big problem for me, though I do tend to use things like hair and voice and clothes and emotional affect to help me in the movies. On the other hand, I have had a couple of truly awful moments in my life when I have not recognised someone I really should have, or where I have confused a perfect stranger with someone I know. I have told these stories to a select few, and they are kind of funny; but it can be a little tricky — and in the extreme cases, where people can't recognise their nearest and dearest, it must be quite debilitating. For me, it's mostly just a case of being amazed when people I'm watching TV with can recognise actors from other shows. I've never had any trouble remembering my students' faces, for example, though I'd be absolutely hopeless if I ever had to sit down with the police and the Identikit.

Dame Eleanor has recently blogged about the fatigue of being at a conference and feeling a bit shy and catching herself looking past the person you're with for another familiar face. And I'm sure we've all been there. At the same conference, I found myself often over-compensating for my fear of not being able to recognise people I had already met (I hate the embarrassment when someone I think I've just met for the first time tells me when we last met), by greeting a number of folk rather more effusively than they had reason to expect. So if that was you, this was why. In addition to my being overcome by enthusiasm for your writerly and scholarly brilliance, of course.

Later.... Wanna take the test and post your results as a comment? Or send me your avatar in an email? We could put up a gallery. This seems to be the meme of the moment, judging from the (Australian) (women's) blogs I've dropped in on tonight...