Faces as Facts of Fiction

ABSTRACT: The essay interrogates faces as fictional realities, particular sites of artistic signification. What do such faces signify, and how? While its focus is Danish literary texts since Kierkegaard, my search for answers begins by crossing artistic and discursive boundaries—of films, architectural musings, facial prints—and concludes that impressions of real faces must be erased in order for their artistic counterparts to surface. Modern art distances itself from reality so as to approach it, makes it disappear before resurrecting it on art’s own terms, disables it to enable an image of it. “Where everything coincides with its image/reality ceases to exist,” says Danish poet Per Højholt. But if cessation of reality is (post)modern artistic reality’s sine qua non, it is also what makes the given come into being. In the words of another Danish poet, Poul Porum: “See a non-face/behind an everything mask.” The mask is everything, the face behind it nothing; yet it is this visible, significant nothing we are summoned to behold and contemplate.