The register works because we are accustomed both to accept a representation of the head as a sign for the actual head and to accept that the head may stand for the whole person. In Greek and other ancient traditions, the chest is the seat of consciousness, but the head contains the psyche, the principle of life and soul, and the power of the person. A nod of the head is to be heeded as a physical sign of transmission of this power into the world. In its more emphatic, explosive way, a sneeze was regarded as even more significant for being involuntary. It had a prophetic force: whatever the sneezer was thinking at that instant would be fulfilled. This belief held up until the seventeenth century. It is in compensation for the forced expulsion of part of the soul from the head that today we still say ‘bless you’ when somebody sneezes. In language, we speak of a head of state or of counting heads (perhaps in a poll, a word that originally meant the back of a head). We abbreviate the whole to the head on coins, in sculpted busts and painted portraits, and above all in official identity documents. Signatures, fingerprints, iris scans and DNA profiles may all be used to establish our identity. These ciphers may in future be joined by such biometric arcana as hand geometry, ear shape and skin reflectance, or our personally distinctive voice, gait and key-stroke habits. But it is the facial photograph that has shown itself to be the most broadly acceptable means of official recognition. Any record of identity is always an unsatisfactory – and often somewhat insulting – reduction of our complex self. But the photograph excites less controversy than methods involving a high degree of technological abstraction, because in this case even we can see it is us. It is nevertheless a particular version of you that the authorities wish to see. United Kingdom passport instructions stipulate that you must have ‘a neutral expression and your mouth closed (no grinning, frowning or raised eyebrows)’. In other words, no clowning.
The head stands for the whole person never more clearly than when it is set upon a spike. This is the ultimate sign that the body is no more. In death, the head becomes the victor’s trophy and a deterrent to others. The weathered head of Oliver Cromwell famously stood outside Westminster Hall for more than twenty years as a warning to would-be republicans, until the spike supporting it broke in a storm, whereupon it was taken into safe keeping by a succession of self-appointed guardians. It was finally buried in the grounds of his old college in Cambridge, the city he had served as a Member of Parliament, 300 years after his posthumous execution, in 1960.
The head is sometimes kept because it provides solid proof of identity, but also for the more superstitious reason that it was thought even in death to harbour the soul. This proposition received an unlikely test during the execution by guillotine of a condemned criminal, Henri Languille, in Orléans on 28 June 1905. A curious physician, Gabriel Beaurieux, examined the man’s head as it fell from the guillotine. First, Languille’s eyelids and lips went into spasm for five or six seconds, which is a commonly observed reaction. Beaurieux continued to observe, and after a few seconds the man’s face relaxed and the eyes turned up. The doctor then did an extraordinary thing: he called out the man’s name. He saw the eyelids lift, and Languille’s eyes ‘fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves’. As the eyes closed once more, Beaurieux repeated his call, and once more got the same response. ‘I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.’ Current medical understanding is that a severed head can remain aware and conscious until falling blood pressure and lack of oxygen causes the brain to shut down, which may indeed take quite a few seconds.
In the Victorian chaos of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, I find several human heads preserved by shrinking in a display case labelled ‘The Treatment of Dead Enemies’. To mitigate my shock, a caption coolly reminds me that taking the heads of one’s enemies has been ‘a socially approved form of violence’ in many cultures, including our own. These particular shrunken heads, or tsantsas, are about the size of a cricket ball and somewhat of the same appearance – hard, leathery and mysteriously darkened by age. Some have abundant human hair, some are embellished with streamers. The heads were made by the Shuar tribe of the Upper Amazon in Ecuador and Peru. The Shuar believe that bodies exist in limited numbers. For them, the captured head of an enemy symbolizes the acquisition of an extra body for occupation by your own descendants. When the enemy was closely related by blood, however, it was customary not to take their heads as trophies, but to prepare substitute heads using animals. The Pitt Rivers collection is supplemented with a number of heads of suitably anthropomorphic creatures, such as monkeys and sloths. Like Europeans, the Shuar believe that part of the soul resides in the head, and part of the purpose of shrinking an enemy’s head is to pacify that soul.
You may like to know how to prepare a tsantsa. First, carefully remove the skin from the skull by cutting a slit upward from the nape of the neck. Discard the skull, brain and other interior matter. Sew up the slit you have made in the skin, and stitch up the eyes and mouth, ensuring that the facial shape is preserved. Then boil the skin until it has reduced to about a third of its initial size. Scrape off any flesh still adhering to the inside. Then cure the skin by repeatedly filling the head with hot pebbles. This will dry it out while preserving its overall shape and characteristic features. The shrunken head is finally suspended by threads. It may then be subjected to verbal abuse, after which its mouth is skewered shut with wooden pins before it can reply.
The preparation of the heads in this manner was a protracted ritual, conducted in stages during retreat from battle raids. Each stage of the process was significant, and the proper enactment of the whole ritual was more important than the finished artefact. The Pitt Rivers Museum holds a number of shrunken heads that it considers to be counterfeit because of irregularities in the way they have been prepared. Today, I am dismayed to learn, the people of the region make heads for the tourist trade stitched together using animal leather.
As the head may stand for the whole person, so the nose sometimes stands for the head. A red nose is enough to advertise a clown, after all. The nose is not the most important facial feature, but it is unquestionably the most prominent, owing to its singular nature, its central position and its forward projection from the head. For all these reasons, the nose gets noticed. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it is also the facial feature about which people tend to be most self-critical. Statistics from the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons show that more people undergo rhinoplasty than any other change to their facial appearance. (Coming in a distant second are ear corrections for men and eyebrow lifts for women.)
Nikolai Gogol’s hilarious short story ‘The Nose’, published in 1836, plays on the confusion that ensues when a nose takes on the life of a person. The story begins one morning in St Petersburg when the barber Ivan Yakovlevich finds a nose in his breakfast roll, and recognizes it as belonging to one of his clients, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov, whom he shaves twice a week. Meanwhile, Kovalyov awakens to find himself with a smooth expanse of skin in place of his ‘not unbecoming nose of moderate proportions’. As he goes about his morning chores with a handkerchief clutched to his face wondering what to do, he suddenly passes a ‘gentleman in uniform’ who is none other than his own nose. As a collegiate assessor, Kovalyov enjoys a rank in the Russian civil service equivalent to that of a major in the army. And the nose? From its gold braid and cockaded hat, ‘it was apparent that he pretended to the rank of state councillor’. Kovalyov plucks up the courage to challenge the nose: ‘The point is, you’re my very own nose,’ he blusters. But the nose corrects him: ‘I am a person in my own right.’ Indeed, it will have nothing to do with its former owner, who ranks lower in society.
Rebuffed, Kovalyov is at a loss how to go about his life without his nose, especially as he is hoping for promotion and a good marriage. This was not part of his plan. Ironically, to wind up with
nothing in Russian is ‘to be left with a nose’. But he has been left without a nose: what does that mean? It is not as if he had lost a toe, he moans; then he could just tuck the injured foot into a boot and no one would be any the wiser. ‘If only I had lost an arm or a leg – it would have been far better; or even my ears – that would have been hard, yet I could have borne it; but without his nose a man is nothing.’ He tries to place an advertisement in the newspaper, but the clerk refuses, fearing such an announcement would bring ridicule on his publication, which already stands accused of publishing a lot of nonsense. Kovalyov is indignant: ‘this is about my very own nose, which amounts to practically the same thing as myself’.
Eventually, the nose is apprehended. Now it must be reunited with its face. ‘And what if it won’t stick?’ At first, Kovalyov tries to reaffix it himself, but it falls to the table with a thud, like a piece of cork. A doctor warns that restorative surgery might only make matters worse. Then, after a couple of weeks, the nose reappears on Kovalyov’s face in circumstances just as inexplicable as when it vanished, and Kovalyov resumes his normal life in high spirits as if nothing had ever happened.
It would be foolish to seek too much meaning in what is essentially a brilliant nonsense story. Gogol gleefully exploits the visible absurdity of the human nose. The ridicule that Kovalyov encounters as he walks around St Petersburg, and that he invites from the reader, is amplified by the thought of this most ridiculous facial appendage. The collegiate assessor’s acute status anxiety means that, while he professedly never takes personal offence, he simply will not have his rank or title abused. Once his proboscis is restored, he is newly confident but just as status-conscious. After a conciliatory trip to the barber, he visits a pastry shop where he allows himself the pleasure of casting a ‘supercilious glance at two officers, one of whom had a nose no bigger than a waistcoat button’.
The temporary autonomy of Kovalyov’s nose also provides a playful rehearsal of some of the ideas in Gogol’s uncompleted masterpiece, Dead Souls, which revolves around the illicit trading in serfs who ‘exist’ for tax purposes even though they have died. In such a world, the question of a man’s ownership of another person, whole or in bodily part, gains a sharp satirical edge. At the end of ‘The Nose’, Gogol’s narrator teases his reader with the observation that strange things do happen, even in St Petersburg, even things that may be of no benefit to the nation. The detachment of a nose from a face, we are led to understand, is not the oddest experience a Russian citizen could expect to undergo. The story occasioned the first of Gogol’s several run-ins with the censors for laying bare the absurdities of the system of rank, privilege and favouritism upon which the state depended. It may not be irrelevant to add that Gogol himself had a great beak of a nose.
Conspicuousness begs significance. The size and shape of noses has always provided material for those looking for meaning and difference as well as material for comedy. Why, asks Rabelais’s Gargantua, does Frère Jean have such a handsome hooter? Various theories are advanced: God fashioned it so, ‘as a potter fashions his vessels’; or, he got first choice when noses were for sale. Jean himself suggests that it ‘rose like dough’ in the warmth of his wet-nurse’s soft breasts. Gargantua adds the bawdy profanity that ‘from the shape of his nose you can judge a man’s I lift up unto Thee’. Tristram Shandy, the narrator of Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century masterpiece of that title, also refers sadly to the ‘succession of short noses’ in his family, observing that his grandfather was limited in his choice of wife ‘owing to the brevity of his nose’. In short, you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see that the nose is a symbol of that other forward body part, the penis. There is a hint of this symbolism in Gogol’s story, too. When Kovalyov’s nose is restored, he finds that he is invigorated in other ways, too, less interested in marriage now, but quite up for sex.
Noses have also drawn the more serious attentions of men with rulers and protractors. The physician and traveller François Bernier was the first to attempt to classify the human population into races, long before the project got into its stride in the nineteenth century. He made a twelve-year voyage to Egypt, the Middle East and India, and wrote an account of his journey called Travels in the Mogul Empire. He returned to the salons of Paris dubbed Bernier Grand Mogol, although when Louis XIV asked him which of the countries he had visited he liked best, he apparently replied: ‘Switzerland’. In 1684, he anonymously published his scientific ideas in A New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or Races which Inhabit It. He divided the world’s peoples into four groups: Lapps, Sub-Saharan Africans, Central and East Asians, and a large remainder group including Europeans along with North Africans, people of the Middle East and South Asia and Native Americans. His classification is noteworthy for largely ignoring skin colour and relying instead on physiognomic features, and in particular the shape of the nose. The nose featured in most systematic anthropometric projects thereafter, its casual role in defining race gaining new scientific respectability. That data is useful today in planning nasal surgery, but it never said much about race. The fact is that real people’s noses so often fail to conform to the parameters of their supposed racial type that they were always a useless measure of anything at all. It is perhaps odd that Bernier was not alerted to this early on since, as a student in Paris, he had made friends with Cyrano de Bergerac, whose nose seems to have deserved a category of its own.
From such categorization it is but a short step to impute distinctive character to various nose shapes. Inevitably, the phrenologists and physiognomists who inferred human traits from bumps on the skull and facial features had their nasal counterpart. The eighteenth-century Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper tried to gauge intellect from the slope of the nose, a notion based on the fact that this angle changes from infancy into adulthood. ‘The idea of stupidity is associated, even by the vulgar, with the elongation of the snout,’ Camper wrote. According to his measurements, Classical busts had the most vertical noses, with modern Europeans, Asians and Africans following in that order. To the race anthropologists who followed in his wake, Camper’s metric implied a ranking of races, although Camper himself stated his belief that both black and white shared the same descent from Adam and Eve.
The American publisher Samuel Wells itemized four nose profiles in his popular phrenological annuals (four being a reminder of earlier schemes that linked facial types with the four humours). His ideas were expanded with unpleasant gusto by John Orlando Roe, an ear, nose and throat surgeon in Rochester, New York. In 1887, Roe published a paper defining five nose types: Roman (indicative of ‘executiveness or strength’), Greek (‘refinement’), Jewish (‘commercialism or desire for gain’), Snub or Pug (‘weakness and lack of development’), and Celestial. Roe’s anti-Semitism is striking – Wells had characterized the ‘Jewish or Syrian nose’ more kindly as denoting ‘shrewdness, insight into character, worldly forecast, and dominant spirit of commercialism’. ‘Celestial’ was Roe’s own addition. I have absolutely no idea what shape a celestial nose is, although Google Images helpfully informs me that the actress Carey Mulligan has one. Roe says it has the same unattractive attributes as the snub nose, with the addition of ‘inquisitiveness’.
Roe’s interest in promoting such a typology is all too clear: his speciality was ‘correcting’ snub noses, to which end he introduced the innovation of operating from within the nostrils so as to leave no visible scar. In late nineteenth-century America, a snub nose was thought undesirable because it was identified with the nose of the degenerate Irish immigrant. Fifty years later, in Nazi Germany, it was the supposedly large nose of the degenerate Jew that was anathema. The nose is seen according to the prejudices of the times.
Laurence Sterne anticipates much of the nonsense that would flow from the scientific measurement of noses and their subsequent organization into ‘types’. Tristram Shandy finds in his father’s library a treatise by one (fictional) Prignitz, and quotes with approval his findings that ‘the o
sseous or boney parts of human noses . . . are much nearer alike, than the world imagines’, and ‘the size and jollity of every individual nose, and by which one nose ranks above another, and bears a higher price, is owing to the cartilagenous and muscular parts of it’. He concludes satirically that ‘the excellency of the nose is in a direct arithmetical proportion to the excellency of the wearer’s fancy’.
The nose features abundantly among the many idioms we use that are based on parts of the body. We nose around in other people’s business or keep our nose clean, we follow our nose or pay through the nose, we put somebody’s nose out of joint or cut off our own nose to spite our face, we stick our nose in the air or keep it to the grindstone. But most parts of the body, both external and internal, get their turn. We have a nose for trouble, but a head for business and an eye for detail. We could, for instance, rework Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man’ speech from As You Like It entirely in terms of body idioms associated with those ages. The infant has skin as smooth as a baby’s bottom. In childhood, we cut our teeth and dip our toe in the water. The young man may fall head over heels in love and wear his heart on his sleeve. The soldier goes armed to the teeth and, if he has the stomach for it, fights tooth and nail. The justice may be even-handed or he may put his thumb on the scales. Then, in retirement, we take the weight off our feet until, growing long in the tooth, we are on our last legs. Alternatively, we could proceed from head to toe to characterize the ideal man or woman we met earlier, who might have a stiff upper lip, take it on the chin, speak straight from the shoulder, and always get off on the right foot. His or her less fortunate counterpart might be a misery guts who’s all fingers and thumbs and has two left feet.
Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body Page 11