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PARTISAN REVIEW
effects. Because of a certain grotesquerie it lent itself to caricature.
It's too bad she did not do many films.... Unfortunately caricature
tries to freeze a face, to mummify expression, to make that which
is changing historically static. A good caricature--one by Beerbohm,
say, or Daumier-is a wonderfully sane therapeutic thing. A fine
caricaturist can visualize the complications of a lifetime with a few
strokes of his pen and sum up a social truth in a way that saves us
reading columns of print. From the middle of the sixteenth century
caricature has had a world influence but during the 1900s it lost
its vigor; potentially good artists have been swallowed up by adver–
tising.... In passing, I'd like to draw your attention to a truth
that lies in back of a stereotype. Whenever a highbrow is caricatured
he is pictured wearing spectacles. When one reflects one can glimpse
behind this a legitimate psychosomatic observation. A man whose
true world opens inward tends to develop a voluntary blindness
toward outward things.-Some day a great book will be written on
physiognomy. Now that we can record the instant by photography,
catching the most evanescent glance, subjects like phrenology, face–
reading, chiromancy and metoposcopy may perhaps become more
scientific or if not scientific more fully documented.
I: It would require immense research.
A: Oh yes, one would have to go through thousands of photo–
graphs of heads, hands, bodies.
If
you want to find out if a person's
crooked or not, don't look in the face. That is on the defensive, un–
der conscious control. But look at the back of his head. Or look at
his hands.
I: Perhaps word-origins might give us an insight into physiognomy.
Take the verb "to face" in the sense of to resist or oppose. For the
source of this shift in meaning we must go back to the physical cir–
cumstance of rout in war. We can see the rationale of this: in retreat
one's face is hidden from the enemy, whereas if one remains to
fight, one confronts him. Each part of the anatomy has metaphoric
application. Take the phrases "to hand someone a line," "to stomach
an insult." The latter implies a psychosomatic reaction. Anger may
cause in some people a disturbance in the belly, in others a flattening
of the ears or a constriction of the face. Such expressions may take
us back to odd medical hypotheses. The use of the word "nerve" as
