In these one-liners, Marías isn’t just parodying our screen culture. He is also parodying the movement of his own complex trilogy. As it develops it plays out in full what it means to be naïve, intelligent, a phony, lying, attractive, a wanker — and what it means not just to want to shoot someone without batting an eyelid, but for someone to stand — with no protection, nothing in between — opposite another human being who means to do harm. On the one hand Your Face Tomorrow is about war, about the Spanish Civil War and its legacy, about the legacies of the twentieth century, and on the other it’s about how we’re seen, how we see. Its title plays on what it might be like to see — or not to see, because it’s already too late — in tomorrow’s newspaper, a picture of your own face, the latest victim of history, dead on the page.
It was photographs of the Spanish Civil War that galvanized Woolf, in her most political text, the antiwar polemic Three Guineas (1938), into becoming one of the first commentators on the ways in which a photograph will involve us and simultaneously distance us:
Here then on the table before us are photographs.…They are not pleasant photographs to look upon. They are photographs of dead bodies for the most part. This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig.
The viewer’s reaction is a kind of vacillation. It involves judgement that marks a certain level of distance (‘not pleasant photographs’) and, in the act of the inquiring glance and in the meld of understanding and deciphering, a reduction of human being to pig. In her writing about cinema a decade earlier, Woolf had already commented on how the exchange between eye and brain when watching cinema forms a separating surface between us and participation. She argued that what we see has become ‘real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life[.] We behold [what we see in moving pictures] as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it.’
2: Going Near the Edge: Depths, Borders, Bridges
Woolf was a great believer in art’s capacity both to change things for us and to make visible crucial changes to us. ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed,’ she famously says in her 1924 essay Character in Fiction, in which she is challenging the novelist Arnold Bennett to a kind of realism duel and using Roger Fry’s curation of the exhibition at London’s Grafton Galleries, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, as fruitful evidence for the changes in the ways things were seen, in the ways of seeing. On or around July 1936, the year Woolf began writing Three Guineas, human character in London was getting its head round the First International Surrealist Exhibition, at the New Burlington Galleries, and Salvador Dalí, a figurehead for the edgiest of European art, was preparing his own head for a visit to new and dangerous depths:
A programme of lectures was organised, including Breton, Eluard and Dalí. Dalí decided to give his lecture in a diving suit and Edward James, with whom he was staying, took him to Siebe and Gorman, the renowned makers of hard-hat diving suits. The technician took Dalí very seriously, and inquired: ‘Certainly sir, and for what depths do you require this suit?’ To which Dalí replied: ‘The depths of the subconscious!’ He arrived at the gallery like a bug-eyed monster from the deep with a jewelled dagger in his belt and two borzois on a leash. Edward James, the collector of Surrealist art, positioned himself close by the helmet to translate Dalí’s muffled words from Catalan to English, but could hear so little that the speech became more than usually incoherent. What did become quickly recognisable were Dalí’s shouts for help as he began to suffocate inside the helmet. The helmet, secured against the extreme pressures of the subconscious, could not be released…The spanner was useless, but Edward James had been posing around with a billiard cue and that fitted neatly into the big brass loop on the nut which fastened the round window at the front of the helmet. Undoing it bought enough time to work out how to unscrew the helmet and save Dalí from becoming a more extreme event than even he had planned.
Edges involve extremes. Edges are borders. Edges are very much about identity, about who you are. Crossing a border is not a simple thing. Geopolitically, getting anywhere round the world in which we live now requires a constant producing of proof of identity. Who are you? You can’t cross till we’re sure. When we know, then we’ll decide whether you can or not.
Edge is the difference between one thing and another. It’s the brink. It suggests keenness and it suggests sharpness. It can wound. It can cut. It’s the blade — but it’s the blunt part of the knife too.
It’s the place where two sides of a solid thing come together. It means bitterness and it means irritability, edginess, and it means having the edge, having the advantage. It’s something we can go right over. It’s something we have on someone or something when we’re doing better than him or her or it. It’s something we can set teeth on. And if we take the edge off something, we’re making something more pleasant — but we’re also diminishing it.
There’s always an edge, in any dialogue, in any exchange. There’s even an edge in monologue, between the speaker and the silent listener. In fact there’s an edge in every meeting, between every thing about to come together with something beyond it.
Edges are magic, too; there’s a kind of forbidden magic on the borders of things, always a ceremony of crossing over, even if we ignore it or are unaware of it. In medieval times weddings didn’t take place inside churches but at their doors — thresholds as markers of the edge of things and places are loaded, framed spaces through which we pass from one state to another. In the eighteenth century people found that standing on the edge of a cliff or a sheer drop was a very good way to view what became known as the sublime; a hundred years later Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about the edge as a force of psychological sublimity, how ‘the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there’; for the notion of edge is double-edged, involves notions of survival and a natural proximity to words like over the.
‘It is at the edge of the / petal that love waits,’ William Carlos Williams writes in The Rose Is Obsolete, a poem that begins by declaring overness, something finished, a poetic and a natural obsolescence, but immediately moves on to become a poem about the renewal of both natural power and aesthetic symbolism when it comes to an old bloom, an old poetic cliché, the flower of love, the rose:
Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness — fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching
What
The place between the petal’s
edge and the