AN ACADEMIC INTERLUDE

Academic Interlude

We must unfortunately pause at this critical crux in the poem to examine
several things which pertain directly to our interpretation, but will return to
this very point as soon as we have finished the required discussion.
The above portrait is a good example of a sculptural configuration which is
noted in the world of Academe as the "Archaic Smile". This curious uplifting
of the edges of the mouth was regularly used in sculpture around 600-
500 BC, and constitutes one of the easily recognizable marks of art of the
archaic period. But for some reason which I find inexplicable, the term
"Archaic Smile" seems to have captured the ear and imagination of our
modern world, as a quick search on the Internet shows. There are some
1220 search results on this exact phrase, which range from a band, a men's
choral group, a T-shirt manufacturer, a volume of poetry, several Japanese
websites which I cannot fathom, and other assorted appearances which seem
to have nothing in common beyond the use of these two words in their
name.

It is as if every person who had ever taken a course in Greek Art remembered,
if nothing else from the syllabus, this one phrase as memorable,
and many continued to employ it in later some personal fashion.
Exactly what this Archaic Smile originally was and why it was used then
and later suddenly changed to a normal, relaxed mouth counter is not easy
to say, but a quick survey of the mechanics of the situation may be of use
here: Smiling is a complex facial adjustment involving a number of specialized
muscles, which are used in concert to effect the social notion which we
identify as a SMILE. Important musculature includes:

Musculus orbicularis oris, a muscle which goes around the mouth
aperture and is able to construct the lips into a circle or pour. This is
actually a muscle similar in function to the anal sphincter, but more
mobile and probably more communicative in most social situations.
The M. quadr. labii superioris raises the upper lip, and is one of the
components of the photograph smile which is evoked by saying the
word CHEESE for the photographer.

The M. caninus is which is named after the dog's angry lifting of the
upper lip showing the teeth as a warning, usually preceding attack.
The M. zygomaticus as attached to the zygomatic arch reaching from
eye socket back to the skull laterally, swings down toward the mouth.
The M. risorius as a laugh-actuator pulls the mouth laterally, one on
each side to create a laugh as a further development of the simple
smile. Of course several of these muscles will work in concert to
produce the classic smile.

It is interesting that the analogous musculo-facial operation in a dog, usually
accompanied by a threatening growl, means anger and danger.
Chimpanzees have almost the same smile as ours, but it generally denotes
irritation preceding anger, although by clever manipulation of camera shots
a chimp may seem to be laughing with us, or even learn to give the gesture
as a smile for human approval. Smiling too much and especially laughing at
a dog makes him very nervous and often angry, and he will return the smile
with his very different dental version.

The smile is a universal human gesture which seems to transcend social,
cultural and racial frontiers, although it can have different functions
in different social settings. The friendly Mid-Western social
smile toward strangers is quite different from the conservative girl's
apologetic smile. A smile in a singles bar has one meaning, while the
silent smile to a waiter means a call for attention in the U.S., but
might mean a homosexual come-on in another setting. Many French
people regard the American automatic smile as foolish, but this may
be merely part of a larger anti-American feeling. The Romans felt the
same way about unnecessary smiling, as in Catullus' poem 39 about
the Spaniard with white teeth who smiled broadly at all occasions
(incidentally one who used urine as his mouthwash!).

The eyes and the mouth are the primary contacts in dealing with another
person, which applies equally to artwork of all kinds. The
Greeks understood how hard it is to portray eyes realistically in stone,
and at timea resorted to ceramic or glazed inserts for the eyeball.
Certainly eyes were painted, presumably with colored iris. But the
mouth is also very important, since innervation and musculature
around the mouth is very complicated. Someone watching or listening
to a speaker has equally complex nerve connections called "proprioceptive"
, which give visual signals to the brain ahead of the
hearing and decoding of the sound signals.

Carving in marble a mouth which represents a real mouth is much
more complicated that it would seem. Anything short of a true representation
will appear strange, unnerving and perhaps even threatening.
Carving a mouth requires awareness of musculature and the underlying
bone formation, and since the mouth is an extremely expressive
organ, slight changes of shape can suggest sarcasm, a sneer,
risibility, unpleasant determination, or gloom. Later sculptors learned
how to design a neutral mouth, earlier ones who must have been discouraged
by ruining a face with a two millimeter deviation from
what was needed, must have found the Archaic Smile not only useful
as an artist's salvation, but also as potentially carrying a live-contact
impression.

So the question stands, why did the Greeks in that archaic period
decide to use the SMILE on their sculpture? Was it that the Greek
sculptors could not make a normal mouth contour, a view which
many traditional art historians have espoused without explanation? As
the Greeks developed their sculpture they incorporated anatomical
details which the fast developing medical science had defined, and
such matters as the complex knee joint with associated musculature
were soon understood and carved into the marble figures. If the knee
which is complex, why not the mouth which is very simple?

If you go to a museum and stand before a statue with Archaic Smile, stare
at it for several minutes without moving your eyes, until the face becomes
normalized and familiar, your eyes will eventually blink, and then you will
see in a flash the statue smiling back at you. I have done this many times in
the GHreek collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and have asked
others go there to take a look and test it out. It is a real psycholgico-visual
reaction, and it really works.

I believe that all this is bears on to Sappho's use of the smile on the face of
Aphrodite. The visual "apparition" of unconsciously animating the face
which although carved in immobile stone, can seem to move and respond
with a smiling gesture, would have been a wonderful experience for prayerful
litigants in the seventh century BC. But like many a devotional process,
it would have been overused to the point of finally becoming trite, and this
would explain the abandonment of the Smile after 550 BC. Another factor
in its disappearance could stem from the increasing accuracy of the medical
art in describing the external appearance of the human body, which would
make non-typical rendition of surface features somewhat objectionable.
Overused, over-contemplated in prayer and ritual, and a finally mere
feature of ordinary temple stonework, it would have lost its original use and
meaning. It may have scared children and believers who feared something
about a moving stone face, but it seems to have had a definite period of
constant use, and if it disappeared over one or two generations, that too
cannot have been accidental and without a reason..

End Academic Interlude