This chapter is about graphic images of faces on the manuscript page and the questions they pose, via the reader's encounter with them, for the processes of meaning formation, signification, representation and reading. The faces I examined in the previous chapter were, first and foremost, verbal constructions. As such, before their diegetic or narrative functions, they played a successful role in verbal signification; to read ‘vis’, etc. is to refer to and recall in the mind of the reader a universally understood referent. I acknowledged this in my previous chapter, although it was not the primary object of investigation. In this chapter, however, I want to look at the concept and image of the face under a higher degree of magnification, and delve further into its particular role within signification. The faces I look at here are considered against the backdrop of their perceived function as an image of an image, insofar as the assumption being interrogated in this book is that the primary, conventional role of the face both in literature and in society is to act as an external image or representation of internal and, in this model, pre-existing features.

The argument put forward in this chapter is that the face images found in the margins of a selection of manuscripts are not just images of faces but are faces themselves. In making this point, I argue for a collapse of the hierarchy of faciality that puts the physiological face in prime position, and which thus subordinates all other kinds of face as mimetic reproductions. In the previous chapter, I used a close reading of Arthurian duel scenes to argue, with the aid of Emmanuel Levinas, that ‘face’ need not only be used in reference to a surface–depth system, whereby the visible exterior (the face) works to reveal something about the qualities of a hitherto invisible interior. With Levinas's understanding that the face is not exclusively concerned with accessing interior meaning, it became possible instead to see emerge in the texts in question a series of surfaces that expressed the presence of a subjectivity (in this case, a knight) without being invested in gathering knowledge about that subjectivity. Consequently, ‘face’ came to mean something that not only refused to reproduce the priority of the interior over the exterior, but also something that could be divorced from the physiological face.