Real Face A Mask example essay topic

"No man or woman is wooed by theory alone". (WITD 32) In declaiming the ability to woo by theory, Kobo Abe betrays his desire to do exactly that. Trained as a physician, Abe has a mindset which leans toward the scientific method: one of hypothesis, experiment, result, and conclusion. In this case, the original hypothesis posed that a man could woo by theory alone, the experiment was the attempt of a wooing guided by theoretical principles, the result a failure, and the conclusion drawn is that such a wooing is not possible, disproving the original hypothesis.

We see in this procedure not only Abe's predilection for theory and introspection, but we also are provided a glimpse at the motivations of a man who would initially believe in a theory of wooing, a concept which to many might seem an obvious contradiction. His novels, indeed, is rife with the contradictions that have been Abe's trademark, and it is in his attempt to unify these various contradictions to prove a common theme of personal freedom and nonconformity that the novels gain the greater part of its power. In The Woman in the Dunes, Abe describes the nature of reality: the individual reality, wherein it ultimately springs forth from the unconscious mind, and the social reality, where the individual reality, at least in terms of its manifestation, can be either suppressed or encouraged by the type of society in which the individual lives and works. It is a complex attempt to unify these two realities, and to reach a sort of accord whereby the individual self can find expression and participate in a meaningful manner in the social reality.

In other words, he is attempting to bridge that chasm, the gap that separates the constricting perception of day-to-day social reality from the larger and far less stable absolute reality, of which the day-to-day social reality is but one small part. Abe deals with these themes through the image of the sand. The sand is formless, and yet it becomes a barrier blocking the protagonist's attempts at escape. It sucks moisture from his body, but also traps it, causes wood to rot, and, in the final pages of the story, becomes a massive water pump.

Abe uses sand imagery as a means to convey both the absurdity of the social day-to-day reality as well as a means by which an almost Zen-like meditative state is induced in the protagonist, through which he may achieve a higher level of consciousness. Used as a metaphor for samsara, the shifting, illusory state of reality in traditional Buddhist doctrine, it also becomes the source for water, or wisdom and enlightenment. These contradictions unified under a single element, the sand, serve as the theme of the novel. The protagonist's view of the sand in the early portions of the novel is one of abstract, intellectual curiosity. He is ostensibly drawn to it in his attempts to discover a new species of beetle, but his interest in it goes far beyond its impact on the mutation of beetles. Attracted by the seemingly dualistic nature of the sand (as close up, a solid with a definite form, yet on a larger scale it behaves much like liquid) he attributes to it an almost romantic mystery.

He finds himself in awe of its slow yet unstoppable force, force which has been sufficient to wipe out empires, and its ceaseless motion. "What a difference", he says, "when compared to this depressing reality where, throughout the year, people are constantly being pressured to cling together". (WITD 15) His life in the city lacks every virtue which he has attributed to the sand. He follows a very routine, sedentary existence and, rather than attempting to emulate the sand's denial of stability and impermanence, his life's goal has become that of discovering a new species of insect so that he may, in a very humble way, be immortalized in the insect encyclopedia, with his name integrated into the Latin name of the beetle.

This sort of contradiction between the ideal (the sand) and the real (his life in the city) is possible only so long as one of the two remains within the realm of the abstract. Here we see it is the sand that is abstracted, but the situation will soon be reversed. We see the man's world and sense of identity begin to fall apart when he is trapped within the pit and forced to battle each night with the cascading sands. The endless labor of the villagers, which he likens to the infernal punishment at the River of Hades, draws from him an irrational anger.

During his first night's stay with the woman, before he realizes that he has been imprisoned in the pit, he attempts to help her with the work of shoveling the sand, but soon gives up, dismissing the endeavor as futile. He becomes irate when the woman refuses to follow his example and continues shoveling the whole night through: The sand would never allow them any rest. The man was completely disoriented. He was confused, as if he had casually stepped on the tail of a snake he had thought small, yet was in fact unexpectedly large, and, before he realized it, its head was already behind him. "But, if that is the case, it is exactly as if you live only to clear away sand, isn't it?" ...

Suddenly anger boiled up within him. He was angry at that which bound the woman, and he was angry at the woman who was bound. .".. I can't understand this at all... This is ridiculous! I give up!

I quit! I have no sympathy for you!" (WITD 27-28) The anger, though the protagonist is not yet aware of it, is not directed at the woman for allowing herself to be enslaved in such a meaningless life, but rather at himself for allowing himself to be enslaved in his life in the city by his own narrow perception of reality. Confronted directly with the futility of the labor of the sand, in such a manner that he cannot escape it, he is forced to take his previous, abstract evaluations of his own life in the city much more seriously. Reflecting on a conversation he had had with the only colleague with whom he felt any affinity, he evaluates his job as a schoolteacher: .".. I have considerable doubt about a system of education that teaches that there is any foundation in life... In other words, an illusory education which makes one think that something that isn't there is there".

(WITD 61) Prior even to his experience in the pit, then, the man had seen life as lacking a solid foundation, and equated this lack of a foundation with meaninglessness. It is only now, however, with the sand acting as a mirror which both reflects and magnifies everyday life to the point where he has no choice but to confront this perceived meaninglessness head-on, that this abstract thought begins to have any real effect on him. It is this realization that "it's only natural that one shouldn't know such things, no matter what kind of life you lead", that represents the man's abandonment of his attempts to return to the illusory world he had known before. While the labor of the sand is no less monotonous than that of his job as a teacher, in the pit, no pretense of stability and security is made, and every member of the community is aware of the precarious nature of their existence, for were they to stop shoveling for a mere ten days, the entire village would vanish in the sands. The man realizes that there is nothing left but to reconcile himself to this uncertainty. The novel could well have ended at this point, concluding that life was uncertain, that the man had no alternatives but to reconcile himself with this uncertainty or perish.

Obviously, however, the novel does continue, and it is at this point that the man, though having achieved this significant realization, is still not satisfied and seeks something to relieve the pressure he feels as a result of being kept in the pit. His sole remaining chance at escape is the crow-trap that he has constructed using a water bucket baited with a piece of fish. This device, which the man dubs "Hope", in theory, is intended to trap a crow long enough for the man to tie a message to its leg before letting it go in the hope that someone might find and read his call for help. The crows, as the man had half expected, were not fooled by the contraption. One day, however, when checking the trap, he notices that the bucket, which he had buried in the ground, had collected several inches of water. He concludes that this is a result of the capillary action of the sand and that the water that normally would have evaporated and become the evening mist had been trapped inside the bucket.

He decides to study this unexpected outcome further, and for the first time in the novel, he shows true excitement, similar to the excitement he felt when he had discovered a new beetle: If this experiment were to succeed, he would no longer have to surrender if his water were cut off. But more importantly, there was the fact that this entire desert was a pump. It was just as if he were sitting on top of a suction pump. The man had to crouch down for a short while and quiet his breathing in order to quiet the palpitations of his heart, so strong were they. (WITD 141) His reaction to the discovery is telling; more importantly, the potential value of the discovery as a weapon to use against the villagers is the discovery in itself. The words, "but more importantly", are fraught with meaning: the sense of reversal in this phrase is crucial, for it indicates that the logic of final accommodation has entirely replaced the earlier logic of escape.

As a result of this discovery, that from the destructive sand one can also find life, the man is swept away by feelings of liberation and elation. "There was no reason to expect", the man says, describing his joy, "any but a shipwrecked person who had at last been saved to understand the psychology of a person who wants to laugh simply because he can breathe" (WITD 141). The man's outlook on life is fundamentally and irrevocably changed as a result of this discovery. He is able to view his life prior to the pit from a distance, whereas before he had been too close to see it in its entirety.

Life is like a mosaic, he says: "If one brings one's eyes too close, you get lost in the fragments. Even if you get away from one fragment, you soon get tangled up in another fragment. Perhaps what he had been seeing up until now was not sand, but simply the individual grains of sand" (WITD 142). This leads him to reevaluate the relationships he had had with people in the city, with the woman, with all of his colleagues: "He thought that they were just like cookie molds. With cookie molds there were only outlines, nothing inside" (WITD 142). Thus, he has realized that acceptance of illusory society is not only pointless, but harmful in that it deprives one of the possibility of creating meaning when an illusory meaning imposed from without is accepted as genuine.

However, the result of this acceptance of illusory meaning is that, where true meaning should lie, there is only a void: "Even if the chance presented itself where he could renew his relationship with them", the man observes, "everything would have to start over again from the beginning. The change in the sand was at the same time a change in himself. Perhaps what he had found in the sand, along with the water, was another self" (WITD 142). With this new, changed self, the orientation of his life has changed dramatically. This change is summarized in the final lines of the story when the woman is taken out of the pit to the hospital as a result of complications in her pregnancy; the villagers forget to remove the ladder after they leave, and the man climbs up out of the pit for the first time in several months: The wind seemed to snatch the breath from his mouth. Walking around the hole, he climbed to a spot from which he could see the sea.

The ocean too was yellow, muddy. He drew in a deep breath but it only felt rough and did not taste as he had expected... There was no real need to rush about escaping. Now the roundtrip ticket in his hand had the destination as well as the return location left blank for him to fill in as he pleased.

Also, he realized that his heart was about to burst, so strong was his desire to speak with someone about the water device. And if he were to talk, there would be no better listeners than the people of this village. If not today, by tomorrow he will have talked to someone. He could just as well think about how to escape the following day. (WITD 144) No longer is the air outside the hole laden with the scent of freedom; rather, it irritates his throat, and its taste is disappointing. The roundtrip ticket he has now is the knowledge that physical escape, if he truly desires it, is possible, but this realization is accompanied by his recognition that there is really no reason to be so concerned about escaping.

His discovery has given his existence meaning, a meaning which he has created himself, independent of external social meaning. And, indeed, if anyone were to be able to appreciate sufficiently the significance of his discovery, it would without a doubt be the villagers. The Face of Another, a psychological study and an existential allegory, also employs sense of epiphany that unifies the contradictions. The protagonist is again a scientist, the section head of a respectable laboratory, whose face has been disfigured in a chemical explosion. This disfigurement creates a rift between the scientist and everyone he encounters, particularly his wife. The source of this rift is due less to others' repulsion at his face than to the scientist's self-disgust, both physically and mentally.

The destruction of his face triggers the protagonist to debate his essential worth; the scientist acknowledges that he is being treated differently due to his face. As an intellectual, he believes that his work, and not his exterior appearance, is of primary importance. However, since those around him base their reactions to him on his face, perhaps his works are of lesser importance than his appearance; perhaps his works are altogether worthless, or worse, he himself is worthless. This self-abnegation also widens the chasm growing between himself and his wife.

In creating a mask, so life-like that it could not be detected by an intent viewer, the scientist attempts to re-enter a meaningful life through the use of an external artifice. From an existential point of view, this attempt is obviously doomed to failure, since no external means could possibly overcome the inherent isolation of the individual. All the same, the mask is created, primarily to recapture the affection of his wife. The scientist writes to his wife, "Under any circumstances, I simply did not want to lose you. To lose you would be symbolic of losing the world". (FOA 93) In his creation of the mask, he resorts to all the tools at his disposal in presenting emotion for it is not enough for the scientist to be lonely.

On the contrary, he must admit to himself his loneliness, dissect it in order to ascertain its causes, and ultimately belittle himself for it. He writes, "Surely I have made too much of my loneliness. I thought my loneliness greater than all of mankind's combined". (FOA 94) In a cheap, darkened apartment, on a low table near a thermos of water for tea, the narrator has left three notebooks for his wife to read. The notebooks contain an extremely detailed, deeply personal confession by the narrator; not only do the notebooks provide his wife with the tale of how he came to construct an elaborate mask with which to attempt to seduce her, they also trace his experience of and journey through profound shame. The narrator has carefully recorded every step of his progress, from fantasies and fears to details of his actions, in the notebooks which he hoped his wife would use to "come safely through this moment and make a step toward" him.

Although the narrator disingenuously tells his wife that "there is no relationship, of course, between colors and content", claiming that he "chose haphazardly, merely to distinguish among notebooks". (FOA 5) After reading all his notebooks, the narrator's wife confirms his fears in her parting letter to him, in which she denies his accusation of infidelity and rejection: "Didn't you reject yourself all by yourself?" The wife then discloses that she knew he was behind the mask all the time, and went along with the seduction play believing his actions to be a therapeutic means by which he could have recovered self-esteem: At first you were apparently trying to get your own self back by means of the mask, but before you knew it you had come to think of it only as your magician's cloak for escaping from yourself. So it was not a mask, but somewhat the same as another real face, wasn't it? You finally revealed your true colors.

It was not the mask, but you yourself. It is meaningful to put a mask on, precisely because one makes others realize it is a mask. You don't need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don't ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors.

(FOA 222) The last several lines of the wife's letter are erased to the point of illegibility, suggesting that she ultimately remains obscured, incomprehensible, and inaccessible to the narrator even as she shines the blinding light of judgment on him. In revealing his own hidden motives to her, she has once again deprived him of the power he had attempted to steal back from her by seduction. In the act of tearing away his final layer of self-delusion, his wife has given him a painful gift: the choice of self-ownership. Stripped of all masks and given instead a mirror, the narrator finally has the opportunity to discontinue his "false self" pattern of conceited attempts to please the other with a view to gratifying the regressive wish for total attunement.

Should he choose to put away the "wish to attune and to be accepted without reserve" and embrace instead the "emerging capacity for feeling shame", he might experience the shameful perception by the other as a tolerable stage that no longer demands self-abandonment. Abandoning his preoccupation with the blinding gaze of the other, he might be able to build an identity that is not reliant upon shame and judgment, and be rid of the sensations of rage, jealousy, and shame which have tormented him for so long. In stark contrast to his self-reflexive, self-protective feelings of shame and self-disgust, his wife has offered him a conscience. Does the narrator take up her challenge? His first reaction is, of course, the sensation of swarming shame. Having imagined that the mask would magically protect him from the blinding gaze of his wife, he now sees that, My mask, which I had expected to be a shield of steel, was broken more easily than glass.

I cannot refute you on that. As you said, I had come to feel that the mask was closer to being a new face for me than a mask. If I still intended to persist in believing that my real face was an incomplete copy of the mask, then I had gone to a lot of trouble to make a fake mask. (FOA 225) Having succeeded in his semi-conscious goal of removing himself from the pain of the other's gaze, but still reliant on her for self-definition, he is swept into a crisis. Since the other was not only an offensive object but also a defining other, he lacks an identifier and, feeling worthless and ridiculous, decides that his only remaining choice is to become a monster: "my mask had complained without ultimately doing anything. Enough of this coat of shame".

The final self-protective layer of shame is discarded. Having been exposed as ridiculous and impotent in his docile, fake masks, he wonders if his scar webs weren't enough without the mask and, imagining what a real mask would look like, pictures it as a monster: ... perhaps one could only call something which completely got away from the real face a mask. The popping, bug-like eyes, the great mouth filled with fangs, the nose set with shiny buttons. It was the expression of a poignant aspiration to go beyond man, an effort to consort with the gods, a violent compression of will in an attempt to combat a natural taboo. Perhaps I should have made a mask like that. If I had, from the very beginning I should have been able to dispense with my feeling of deceiving others.

(FOA 142) Having been finally and totally rejected by his wife, the narrator attempts to reconcile "the two discordant hammers of anger and desire" which mercilessly beat out the rhythm of his shame by himself becoming the gazer who observes and judges his actions. Since he imagines his wife has seen him as a monster, he must become that monster. At the same time, by becoming that monster, he has in an important sense merged with his now-absent wife, eliminating the shame of separateness that has plagued him since his dream of the two fathers. Considering a facially scarred woman who suicides in a film, the narrator describes her incestuous lovemaking with her brother as a brave swan song, but ultimately an impotent gesture against the social taboos which judged her scars as shameful, and asks his now absent wife, "How would you feel if you were the swan? No matter what song others sang for the girl, she did die, she was unmistakably defeated. I don't want to be like the swan".

(FOA 235) Having concluded that suicide is not a viable option, he feels no other choice but to unleash his rage onto others, warning his wife that "the mask that descends on you this time will be a wild animal. Since you have seen through it already, the mask will concentrate on its lawlessness, un weakened and un blinded by jealousy". (FOA 235) He now heeds his wife's advice to "call the mask back" and use it with intent, presumably not the intent she had hoped he would devise. Taking up his pistol, he goes out into an alley and waits for the footsteps of an approaching woman.

Hardly sure what he himself is about to do, he wonders... if I shall become a swan with an act like this. Can I make people feel guilty for me? There will be no other reward outside of being freed from the crime of being ridiculous. Anyway, I shall have to go through with this, for doing so is the only way to conquer the face. I shall hate people. I shall never admit the necessity of justifying myself to anyone!

(FOA 237) The narrator is finally propelled into an action that is designed to turn the gaze back on those who have shamed him. By transforming his shame into his wife's fantasized guilt in allowing him to become a sexual criminal, he has successfully achieved a tragic transcendence of his crippling shame. No longer paralyzed by the judging gaze, he has no further need of his endlessly self-reflexive notebooks: "So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens". (FOA 237) Something has indeed happened; the narrator's freedom from shame has been won at the cost of his humanity.

The man's freedom, then, is realized through discovery, through what might be termed a creative manifestation of the unconscious mind. It would appear that here Abe is returning to that basic tenet of surrealism according to which the unconscious is considered the wellspring of human individuality. It is through the expression of this unconscious, which by definition is impervious to the influence of society, that the man has achieved freedom and meaning in life. The manifestation of the individual reality is, unquestionably, dependent upon the social situation in which the individual lives his life. It would appear that the proper role of society is to provide an environment where the above sort of freedom is possible.

Bibliography

Abe, Kobo. Beyond the Curve. Juliet Winters Carpenter, Trans. Tokyo, New York: Kodansha International & Alfred A. Knopf, inc., 1991, 1993.
Abe, Kobo. The Face of Another. E. Dale Saunders, Trans. Tokyo, New York: Vintage Books & Alfred A. Knopf, inc., 1966, 1992.
Abe, Kobo. The Woman in the Dunes. E. Dale Saunders, Trans. Tokyo, New York: Vintage Books & Alfred A. Knopf, inc., 1964, 1972.