Reading the emotional rhetoric of the face : Tarjei Vesaas' "The Ice Palace"

In the cultural history of the face, there is a great deal of productive metaphorical overlap between the ideas of 'reading' the face as an image, and 'reading' the face as a text. The face, whether in personal encounters or in representation, is often described as a 'text' (or even, an Äopen book') to be read and interpreted as a guide to character and feeling. Conversely, literary texts are sometimes praised for their apparent capacity to produce strong visual images in the mind. Nevertheless, the invocation of realism tells only part of the story of literature’s engagement with the face and faciality. Poets and novelists often write about the face in ways that are concerned less with rendering visual effects and more with appealing to other senses; or the feelings and emotions associated with facial cognition and understanding. [...] My key text in this essay is the novel, "The Ice Palace" (1963), by the Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas. I did not know of this novel until very recently, when it was brought to my attention by my sister, who had heard a discussion of it on the Backlisted podcast, hosted by John Mitchinson and Andy Miller. Inspired by the podcast, and its performance of a striking passage, she bought a copy of the novel (recently re-issued in the Penguin Classics series), and knowing of my research on the face, read aloud to me the passage she had admired. In this scene, two young girls, just starting to get to know each other, hold up a mirror and look at each other’s faces. This encounter with a mirror image is both thrilling and disturbing, and it sets off a train of traumatic events.