William Vollmann - Kissing the Mask - Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

(What is a woman? She is a Noh mask with rectangular eye openings. Male masks’ eye-holes are a trifle curved, and demon-masks’ utterly round. Now the question is settled!)

As I write this book, biological research suggests that male brains are more prone to systematize, female ones to empathize. “They are not mystical processes,” writes a scientist, “but are grounded in our neurophysiology.” But then how should an onnagata’s accomplishment be characterized? — As a mix of empathy (projection) and rehearsed procedure, it would seem. — Meanwhile the performances of Noh actors and geishas, as we have already begun to see, are more procedural, more memorized, less projected. And some women are far less empathetic than others. Who am I to rule out any construction of self? Please raise your sake cup in honor of mystical processes.

Saadi again: “A pretty face and dresses of brocade, sandals, aloes, colors, perfumes and passing fancies; these are all the ornaments of a woman.” Thus femininity: appearance, attributes and performance all together. Hence femininity’s metonym (if you don’t care for the black bowels of the mud snail): A painted fan, which is beautiful in and of itself, which belongs to a dancer, and expresses deliberate grace in motion.

The woman who had once been the little boy dressing furtively in his sister’s clothes (she was nearing the end of her thirties now) asked herself what features or proportions made a face feminine, and could not answer. All she could say was that gender, for a transsexual at least, must be the longing of the mind to be embodied and thereby recognized.

How can the mind succeed in that? Yes, there is an operation; there are pills and props (and a psychoanalyst rather meanspiritedly reminds us that “the transsexual does not exist without the surgeon and the endocrinologist”); there is identity itself; 3the rest is performance — and for all humans who project an image of “who they are” (in other words, of who they truly want to be — someone slightly more perfect, attractive, etcetera), performance is a quotidian fact. Hence the anxious preoccupation of these American women’s magazines with covering the dark circles beneath the eyes, lifting sunken pouches to make skin “flawless,” hiding freckles, shaving armpits, preventing the audience from seeing past the mask of performance. If one’s figure is imperfect, wear an embellished collar to direct attention upward to the face. Employ the lipstick slightly past the border of the lower lip to make it appear fuller; in Tokyo, the makeup artist Yukiko does this when she is feminizing her cross-dressing clients. High heels will help either sex project the buttocks in female protrusions. In California, a femininity coach advises her “new girls” to smile and hide their large mannish hands behind their backs when they walk. A helpful T-girl suggests that novices go out in public “with a man, preferably one whom you do not tower over, because his presence validates you as a woman.” — Back to the magazines for biological women: A high-waisted skirt flatters the hips. Cream on the lashes will make them shine. Use an eyebrow stencil because “anything around the eye that can make it look brighter and make you look more awake is amazing!” Play up the eyes or the mouth but not both. And of course beauty emulates celebrity. “You have to treat your hair like it’s a baby… It looks super strong but it’s not. It’s an illusion.” Perhaps this is merely a gentler form of the rigorously disciplined imitation through which apprentice geishas and Noh actors learn from their teachers how grace ought to be stylized. In the advertisements, beauty is invited to buy things through which to express and improve itself. After all, costume comprises a significant aspect of performance. And so a blonde actress in a strapless pearly gown gazes out at us with the calm of a goddess. Her breasts are supported and mostly covered, but the gown offers us some décolletage. The fabric falls away from her in crisply elegant folds. Don’t tell me that this moment, this configuration, is not a performance.

Here I disagree with Zeami (or perhaps misunderstand him), when he says that if a woman “connives” to beautify herself “and expends effort to manifest Grace, her actions will be quite ineffective,” since “an actual woman living in the world has no thought of imitating a woman.”

Each of us is an audience of her own performance. “Beautiful nails are a constant reminder of the feminine you,” advises Miss Vera’s Cross-Dress for Success. For Miss Vera, femininity is its own reward, and the main person to be reminded by the nails is their wearer. 4Identity’s performance partakes as much of inwardness as a marble Aphrodite’s pupil-less gaze.

But the male gaze deserves its own moment of consideration. Most of the observations and opinions you are reading in these pages were made through just that lens. A Noh play takes place for its spectators, and the performance of femininity, while it does of course to a considerable degree exist in and for itself, like the stirring of a man’s penis when he lies beside a woman to whom he is attracted, seeks its appreciators. (Kanze Hisao: “It is highly detrimental to a mask to be treated like a piece of antique art, to be shut up in a box or shown only in a glass case. It is only on the stage that it continues to maintain its vitality.”) Why else would a woman put on lipstick before going out into a public composed mostly of strangers? Women sometimes tell me that they dress not for men but for other women, but when I consider the gender composition of the human race, I wonder if this might be merely half true. Whether or not somebody pays any attention to me as we stand in rush hour in a subway car, it remains my inclination and privilege to appreciate her . There are men whose appreciations are limited to recognitions of breasts, buttocks, thighs; and in a strip club the point less often tends to be the revelation of some individual beauty than the display of that general quality, nudity of the female body in a state as near as may be legal to nubility. Proust, whose characterization of love is frequently pathetic, introduces the subject with the cynical assertion that when one is young one mistakes for the bounteous grace of a specific sweetheart simple erotic satisfaction, the objects of our desire being “the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same.” But the accusation, so often leveled at men in my time and place, of objectification, could be applied to all of us, and therefore seems no more inherently “bad” than the function of the anal sphincter. The gaze can praise grace in the way that this book hopes to do, by memorializing it. I am getting old now, and the women of my age who were beautiful in their first flower are ageing, too. Mr. Kanze is gone; Mr. Umewaka has performed for sixty years. I cannot give grace as they have, but I can reflect and perhaps preserve a trifle of it.

A man on the street who shouts menacingly admiring obscenities at women, a theater-goer, an uxorious fellow who buys a pair of dress shoes for his wife, an ancient Egyptian poet who likens his sweetheart’s breasts to mandrakes and her hair to a willow-snare in which his hands have been caught are all four, like it or not, relatives — my relatives. Just as the golden hairpicks of bygone Japanese courtesans may to my eyes resemble the haloes of Byzantine saints, so any number of specifically feminine expressions may be misperceived by their audience. I readily admit that before I began this book, I had no idea of the difference between mascara and blush. Thus for most of my life my appreciation of women’s made-up faces was as ignorant as my pleasure in Noh plays: I could be gratified by an effect without being able to say what had caused it, or even if what I saw was “natural.” What is grace? We men may not know. Sometimes our gazes’ desire to be temporarily completed by the Other becomes as frantic as the sharp flakes twisting down between the platforms of Niigata station, changeably pitting the silver trains as if with corrosion. The ice cream machine stands empty beside the cigarette machine; the conductor walks the platform, peering into every window. A family in hooded parkas wanders along the edge of the train in bewilderment. In an office which resembles a phone booth there is a window through which another conductor can be seen standing at attention. A young woman enters my traincar, brushing snow from her rich brown hair. I see her; she is beautiful; I feel happy.