4 - Faces and Genitals in the fabliaux

Summary

In this final chapter I turn to the human body and explore the status of the face and faciality with reference to (and challenging the idea of) its bodily origins in a selection of fabliaux. Specifically, in this chapter I ask about the limits and definition of faciality in texts that appear to effect a certain kind of distortion on the face through pairing it with its ostensible opposite: the genitals. In Trubert, the genitals of an anonymous woman are successfully passed off as the mouth and nostrils of a king; in Le Chevalier qui fist parler les cons, vaginas and anuses speak when spoken to, and in both Du vit et de la coille and Do con, do vet et de la soriz, human genitals walk and talk independently of ‘whole’ human subjects. The questions raised by these texts and examined in this chapter concern the nature of the relationship between the face and other body parts which play its roles.

The fabliaux in which this is at issue engage with oppositional subversion, in terms of their experiments with closing the gap between ostensible opposites: face and genitals. What the texts subvert, I argue, is not the face itself, but the idea of the face as part of a stable binary. Instead of debasing the revered face by blurring the line between it and its conceptual and physiological opposite, the texts introduce and play on the possibility that this oppositional structure doesn't work. Into this I then read the literary enactment of the inherent instability of faciality. In other words, these texts don't invert – although they repeatedly hint at it – and so they posit the idea that there isn't anything to invert.

Throughout the book my goal has been to interrogate the face as a marker of interiority, and to give pause to the notion that it works exclusively to represent or to symbolise. The question of what, if anything, is ‘behind’ the face has guided much of my investigation, and I have explored various different ways in which the concept of the face moves away from the dynamic by which it is the physical, visible, surface signifier of an inner, less tangible essence. I have tried to open up a space between the face as a structural concept and the face as a physiological phenomenon.