Abstract
The masks of comedy and tragedy: the mask as persona, the faces of the dramatis personae. They also signify as per sona, through sound, deploying the voice to reveal the hidden face itself. Or, rather, not to reveal it as the expression of a self, but as what it impersonates.1
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Notes
Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray and F. Wieck, New York: Harper & Row, 1968, p. 32.
A comprehensive survey of thinking on shame is included in Steven Connor, ‘The Shame of Being a Man’, Textual Practice, 15, 2001, pp. 211–30.
But, of course, the Buddha is not so easily corralled within such a physiognomy — hence his common figuration as the ‘laughing Buddha’, the one who mocks his own serious pretensions. See James Siegel, ‘Georg Simmel Reappears: “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face”’, Diacritics, 29, 1999, pp. 100–13.
Denis Diderot and William Archer, The Paradox of Acting/Masks or Faces?, New York: Hill & Wang, 1957.
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, London: Picador, 1995.
Aleksandr Luriia, The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory, trans. Lynn Solotaroff, New York: Basic Books, 1968, pp. 77–8.
See, for example, Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View From Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, New York: Basic Books, 1985.
Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 397–404.
Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Jacques Derrida, ‘The Violence of Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985, pp. 86–7.
David Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment, Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1999, p. 279.
Ibid., pp. 281–2.
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© 2011 Simon Bayly
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Bayly, S. (2011). The Borrowed Masks of Being. In: A Pathognomy of Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306936_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306936_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32277-0
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