Cecil Pineda's Face

In 1977 Cecile Pineda, then an aspiring journalist working in San Francisco, found a backpage news story originating from Brazil reporting on the tragic accident of a man who had, falling down a cliff, had his face torn from his skull. For two years she sat on the story, believing that a novelist would inevitably pick it up, transforming the facts into fiction. Nothing happened, but the memory of the story lingered and, she says, came to "fester like an unhealed wound". She took up the challenge herself, writing a breathtaking 200 page novel entitled, Face. The story is one of identity and insensitivity, recognition and representation, suffering and social acceptability. Following the accident Helio Cara, unable to afford reconstructive surgery, receives a rubber mask through which he can barely breathe. Wandering the backstreets of Rio de Janeiro's Whale Back slum, wearing a handkerchief where his face used to be, he invites the seemingly endless hostility and violence of his neighbours. He loses his job as a hairdresser, his girlfriend, and any sense of social identity. All react with revulsion and disgust. It is wrenching. Interestingly and importantly, as you'll see, the 2003 Nobel Prize winner, J.M. Coetzee writes in the book's foreword:

Helio Cara is a man who loses his face and learns what it is to live in a society that is neither particularly cruel nor particularly kind, just has no philosophy of the face, has given no thought to the face, and therefore reacts to facelessness with bewilderment and anger.

Indeed, this is the natural Human reaction to the unknown, but Coetzee suggests that there is a unique manifestation of this phenomenon that is reserved especially for the face:

What is this thing, this structure of skin and bone and gristle and muscle, that we are condemned to carry around with us wherever we go? Where does is it begin, where does it end? And why does everyone see it rather than seeing me?

My most recent professor of English, Carlos Gallego has an interesting theory on the subject. He claims that we are instinctively, yet also consciously repulsed by Human mutilation, particularly of the face, because it reminds us of our sameness. Articulating this concept is problematic. Human society and cultural ideology is heavily steeped in the concept of individuality. The fact that we are merely animals requires constant mental reinforcement. Identity and recognition provide the grounding upon which we construct our most elite notions of personal integrity, fortitude, and success. Gazing upon the viscera of a fellow Human's innards, therefore, acts an unwelcome reminder of the ultimate futility of individuality. The unpolished, unkempt, and stinking contents of one's gut, for example, are not nearly as revolting or terrifying as the prospect they conjure, not of death, but of sameness.