What's in a Face?
- By Jim Hicks
Like any enduring cultural form, the novel has many origins, and its history has been told many times. Safe to say, in any case, that our ideas about psychology and our techniques for novelistic characterization were born as twins. One parent, certainly, was the early modern pseudo-science of physiognomy, which the OED defines as “The study of the features of the face, or of the form of the body generally, as being supposedly indicative of character.” Though the history of antisemitism, and recent history in the Balkans, demonstrate that racism still manages to flourish even when visual differences are themselves mostly fictive, the sordid consequences of psychological typing by appearance are undeniable throughout the last centuries, and generally appalling. How, one has to wonder, to wake up from this nightmare?
What better, then, than to find a part of the answer in a novel? Tabish Khair’s spirited, masterfully-crafted composition The Thing about Thugs dives literally head-first into this history, and tells its story of phrenological specimen hunting, police investigations, graverobbing, and murder as a dramatic display of Western provincialism. Shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize, and excerpted in MR’s Summer issue, this novel is sure to be a hit in the U.S., where the debate it enters into seems to be part of our so-called national DNA.
Weaving its text from multiple narrators and a variety of literary genres, Thugs takes as its most direct source a 1839 novel, Confessions of a Thug, by Philip Meadows Taylor, an administrator for the British empire whose best-seller success with this first novel, about the Thugee assassins cult in Indian, led to a series of lesser sequels, also on colonial themes.
The Thugee character at the center of Taylor’s Confessions, Syeed Amir Ali, reappears at the center of Thugs, as does an account resembling Confessions. Khair’s book invents excerpts from a work titled Notes on a Thug, written by a certain Captain Meadows, who hosts Amir Ali in order to get his story. In Thugs, however, Amir Ali is a sympathetic confabulator rather than a reformed assassin; he spins tales made to order for Crown’s subjects. Moreover, brutality in Khair’s novel is shown as a fact of life in Victorian London, where it is set, rather than an Indian import.
In short, what makes Tabish Khair’s work compelling—in addition to being intricately structured, beautifully written, and just plain fun—is his choice to reimagine that police state we’ve lived in for the past few centuries from the perspective of many of its targets, innocent victims. If we do some day, incrementally, arise from the slough of physiognomical falsehoods, it will no doubt be due, at least in part, to the work of novels like this.
For the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, of course, the face was emblematic of our encounter with others tout court. Or, as he famously put it: “The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility […] the face says to me: you shall not kill.” Collecting skulls, we may assume, should be prohibited as well.
