Read the previous post in this project here.
Throughout Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy struggles with how her sickness and subsequent disfigurement shapes her identity. One of the most perplexing aspects of Lucy’s memoir is that for most of her life, Lucy refuses to acknowledge how she really looks and therefore takes a long time to understand that she must come to terms with and accept her face.
When Lucy was young, she didn’t “hadn’t a clue how sick [she] was or what was going to happen” (43)– that the operation would leave her face permanently changed. After it happened, she quickly accepted the change because she didn’t value herself in terms of her looks. As she got older, however, the way people perceived her began to affect her more and more. When she was able to return to school for long amounts of time, she was relentlessly bullied, especially in middle school.
Using Roland Barthe’s approach of examining Intertextual Codes, we can analyze Lucy’s inability to associate herself with her own face. The predicament that young Lucy is in is already strange: a young girl in a semi-dysfunctional family who gets sick and diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer in the lower jaw. Even as a young child before the operation, Lucy “hadn’t had a strong sense of what [she] looked like” (52). I can’t imagine many children have a good grasp on their physical identity, but even after the operation that resulted in a huge scar, Lucy “felt only proud … and eager to show it off” (52). Little did she know how much that scar would affect her entire life.
These statements can comprise the Thematization and the Proposal of the Enigma, according to Barthe’s hermeneutic code. The most recognizable time that Lucy starts to associate herself with how she looks is when she gets excited and hopeful at the prospect of the first reconstructive surgery “fixing” her face. This can be seen as our first Request for an Answer; in Lucy’s mind this surgery will be the answer to all her problems. She starts to care about her looks and how it relates to her identity. This hope, however, is also a Snare; the surgeries, in addition to being unsuccessful long-term, also can’t resolve Lucy’s struggle with her appearance and her self worth.
Lucy sabotages herself from true acceptance throughout her life, most notably with each time she decides to take on a new identity to make her worthy of happiness and life in general. She tries to prove her worthiness to herself by doing things like resolving not to cry at her chemotherapy appointments, forcing herself to believe in God, becoming a model student in school and a model patient while in the hospital, and finally by becoming an image of sex appeal and femininity, in order to fill the void in her heart of self worth with fleeting romantic escapades. All of these things prevented Lucy from getting to the truth, the real answer for how to live her life. At one point, a false solution of hers was to completely resign from looking in mirrors entirely, or else learn how to look in a mirror while “staring straight through … allowing none of the reflection to get back to [her]” (222).
Lucy found a Partial Answer to her enigma by way of expressing herself through writing. She discovered her talent for writing before the mirror-avoidant philosophy, but even though she discovered it in college it still carried her over later in her life when she needed it. She also developed a partial answer when she was able to make real connections to people and make true friends who helped her and saw her as a person outside of her face. However, a true Disclosure, a real conclusion to her issue didn’t happen until after her final reconstructive surgery, when she began to see herself and recognize herself as her reflection, with no feeling of shame or fear attached to it. She could be herself, interact with people, and think of herself worthy of that interaction. All of her life she had a faltering grasp of her physical and metaphorical identity and who she wanted to be, but at the end of her memoir Lucy finally could start to recognize herself as exactly who she was, and nothing more.
How Writers Read... 
The end of this story troubles me. I think readers often expect some semblance of Freytag’s pyramid in their reading. This always ends in some sort of conclusion or resolution. In the Hermeneutic code, this would translate to be the Disclosure. The end of this memoir was not the end of Lucy’s life, though we do know it ended rather abruptly just a few years later. It makes me wonder if the “disclosure” ending the narrative is true at all. I wonder if Lucy ever did begin to accept her face and her life as is or if her editor needed some kind of resolution to make her work publishable. With that being said, I wonder if the hermeneutic code is the best lens through which to read “Autobiography of a Face.”
I would argue that the Symbolic Code is better for “Autobiography” because what is most noticeable about Lucy’s story is all of the different things (people, emotions, self, biology) always pulling her in opposite directions. These conflicts are often unresolvable. Lucy’s disfigurement will never go away. Though Lucy was in remission for many years, there is no cure for cancer, only treatments.
LikeLike
I would like to add and specify that lucy’s true disclosure did not happened immediately after her successful surgery. She states “Where is all that relief and freedom that I thought came with beauty” after the surgery(204). This is a snare, she still has not found her identity. In the past Lucy being fully aware of her physical image would project her idea of herself, which was ugly, into her perception of how people saw her. She says “I’d handed my ugliness over to people…it was reflected back to me”, this is how she saw her image and it became her identity, it was all she could see. When talking to the man at the cafe she wonders what he sees in her. She can not answer as before, she hasn’t looked in a mirror for so long she can’t resort to his perception of her being ugly. She realizes that a new face wasn’t the answer but a perception stipped of face/image. With her image out of the way she can embrace her true internal identity. Before this resolution there are partial answers throughout the book that I felt Lucy could have just grasped her happiness had she put herself in a different context in her thought process. For example she says “As long as I disengaged any expectations of being physically desired by anyone, I was able to indulge a fantasy of myself as an artist, as someone special, a face you remembered”. This is a partial answer to her future disclosure because she makes that fantasy a reality. She strips herself of her own physical expectations and can then see herself as someone special.
LikeLike
Julie is correct when she points out the snare for Lucy. What she’s noting is that there is a Hermeneutic code within the story, though I do see why Amanda believes that the story is better with a symbolic code. Throughout the story, we do see how beauty pulls Lucy in different directions, and it shows what anyone in her position would be going through. These symbols create problems for the character, but as the chapters go on, some of these problems just never get resolved, lining up with the code. However, I have to side with Julie and Cayla with the story using a Hermeneutic code. Not only is there a snare that Lucy gets caught on, in a way, there’s also jamming. As she gets made fun of throughout her teenage life, she desires to be ‘pretty.’ This wouldn’t happen for a long time, so until then, she was stuck. Stuck in this position where she thought people would only see her as ugly due to her physical appearance.
Jamming and Snare might only be small pieces of the code to be made an example, but they help prove it is there in this story.
LikeLike