Modernist Prosopopoeia: Mina Loy, Gaudier-Brzeska and the Making of Face

This article examines two examples of a modernist concern for what Mina Loy, in her 1919 manifesto, Auto-Facial-Construction, termed facial integrity, arguing that the act of building a face in many modernist texts is often an impersonal attempt to alter, even disfigure, the face as its expression consolidates a humanist personality. For Loy, the possibility of efficiently articulating just what one means necessitates a sculptural restructuring of the face as it consolidates an individual organized around categories of personality and subjectivity. This sculptural vision, I suggest, responds to a westernized notion of the face that developed in the nineteenth century, which predicated its expressive strength on the power of personality as a consolidation of the interior and exterior dimensions of the human subject. In contrast, the face-making I analyze in this article organizes the face as form against the possible diminishment of speech resulting from the invasive reading and analysis of expression. By divesting voice from face, both Loy’s Auto-Facial-Construction and Gaudier-Brzeska’s The Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound critically engage with the trope of prosopopoeia where the making of face amounts to the making of a speaker and, in this modernist context, I contend, a personality.