Toward affective realism

There are two sides to the human face. It is familiar from the outside, yet from the inside it is hardly thinkable, shocking, uncanny. This case study addresses the question of what happens when the face is disfigured and turned inside out. In order to address this question, I will examine several encounters between subjects and disfigured faces before, during, and after the First World War. Based on the war experiences of extensive facial injuries, I argue that rather than being simply represented, the hardly thinkable disfiguration is affectively performed. The so-called gueules cassées are at the center of the novel Au ciel de Verdun (1918) by Bernard Lafont and the war memoirs Hommes sans visage (1942) of the Swiss front nurse Henriette Rémi, and faceless images are also key to two modernist texts, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) by Rainer Maria Rilke and the short story “Smazaný obličej” (1919) by Richard Weiner. Not only do the witness accounts from the battlefront and literary fictions share an emotional force of the traumatic images but they also enable affects of shock, disgust, and fascination to structure their discursive forms. Consequently, the aesthetic force of what I suggest to call ‘affective realism’ lies in literature’s capacity to trigger a potential experience while pushing the realist representation toward its limits.