Ironically, I finished reading The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) on a Wednesday. I wonder if that influences my appreciation of it. I won’t summarize the plot here; Wikipedia does a reasonably concise job of that. Apparently, Kingsley Amis read this book once each year. While I can appreciate that it might deserve a prominent place in the mesh of whatever literary web I choose to weave for myself, I can’t imagine holding it up and proclaiming that it should stand on its own as a hallowed object. Then again, I don’t think any novel deserves such reverence. No more than one should point to a single word and say: “Above all other words, this word best exemplifies the words of my native language so, to honour it, I’m going to publish a dictionary comprising only that word.” This may be a variation of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (12:14 ff.) “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?” No one literary experience is a totality unto itself, but depends for its meaning on its place in a wider reading.
I read The Man Who Was Thursday because Matthew Beaumont devotes a chapter to it in his book, The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City, and like each of the other works he treats in his book, he uses the habit of walking as his point of entry to the text. However, with Toronto’s lockdown extended for another 4 weeks which will take us from November 23rd to the end of April, most of my walking has been restricted to a treadmill in my living room where, most recently, I’ve been listening to Ronald J. Deibert’s 2020 Massey Lectures, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. That has taken me in a somewhat different direction, providing me with a different point of entry into Chesterton’s novel.
At the risk of sounding reductive, Deibert’s account of social media and related new technologies can be drawn into a generalized narrative: these technologies were rolled out with utopian fanfare, promising individual users opportunities for empowerment, but further development has revealed them to be ambivalent tools; the paths to empowerment also reveal vulnerabilities which powerful interests can exploit to oppressive ends. One example is facial recognition software. I am writing this on an iPad which I secure using facial recognition. I can also use such software for other benign purposes, like cataloguing and sorting my image library (which runs to the hundreds of thousands). However, facial recognition is also used for what is quickly becoming ubiquitous surveillance that far outstrips anything Orwell could have imagined. In fact, the adjective Orwellian has been utterly emasculated by the current surveillance infrastructure. And what would have been incomprehensible to Orwell is the fact that this infrastructure has been implemented almost exclusively by private interests in pursuit of the profit motive. To the extent that the state is implicated in contemporary surveillance, it is as a client of behemoth tech corporations whose resources dwarf many states.
Even as I listen to Deibert deliver his depressing account of the breathtaking speed with which private enterprise has wrought this change, Amazon has mounted a “grassroots” campaign against a union drive. (See The Guardian: ‘Fake’ Twitter users rush to Amazon’s defence over unions and working conditions – March 30, 2021.) Individuals have been able to identify suspicious tweets popping up in their feeds, suspicious because they’re identical to tweets by other “people” and may use faces that appear in other profiles. No one is quite certain if they are real people, maybe hired to run a batch of anti-union accounts, or maybe bots, or hybrids, human text on accounts with profiles lifted from thispersondoesnotexist.com, a site that uses AI to generate human faces that seem real but have no correlate in the real world. The internet began its life as a utopian libertarian free-for-all and now authoritarianism seems only a click away.
Lurking in the background is my concern for the future of street photography. Already, my images have been scraped to “train” facial recognition software and I am growing concerned that, despite my benign motives, my photographs may nevertheless be used in ways that don’t align with my intentions or politics. I have little control, not even over my own interactions with this beast.
Among the many reasons Chesterton’s novel makes an odd read is the fact that Chesterton espouses a far more conservative social vision than I am accustomed to allow inside my skull. The main character, Gabriel Syme (who assumes the name, Thursday), infiltrates a group of anarchists who are bent on assassinating the Russian and French leaders. The amusing trope at play here is that, as it turns out, virtually every member of the anarchist organization is a police detective trying to infiltrate the group. There are no anarchists, not even its enigmatic leader who goes by the name, Sunday. We are meant to share the narrator’s palpable relief that the threat has been contained and order restored. Had Chesterton written his novel in the age of the internet circa 2020, he might have been taken as a propagandist or, at the very least, an apologist for the likes of Amazon with its anti-union campaign and its substantial contract with all 17 of the U.S.’s major intelligence services.
I detect in Chesterton a fascination with the human face. We see this, for example, with Professor de Worms, an elderly hobbling man who is one of the police detectives posing as an anarchist. At the close of an anarchist meeting, Syme heads out into Leicester Square and realizes that Professor de Worms is following him. Syme does not yet know that all his anarchist colleagues are really police detectives and fears that de Worms has found him out. Syme leads de Worms on a merry chase throughout London, amazed that the elderly man can keep pace with him. When it becomes apparent that Syme cannot outrun de Worms, the pair sit down to a lunch of mutual confession. Professor de Worms is not an anarchist but a police detective, and the reason he can keep pace with Syme is that he is not an elderly man but a much younger man in disguise. When Syme blurts out his discovery, de Worms admits as much but says: “I can’t take off my face here.” The make-up is too elaborate. Syme then reflects on Sunday’s face:
“The face of the unforgettable President sprang into his mind as startling as a coloured photograph, and he remarked this difference between Sunday and all his satellites, that their faces, however fierce or sinister, became gradually blurred by memory like other human faces, whereas Sunday’s seemed almost to grow more actual during absence, as if a man’s painted portrait should slowly come alive.”
As an aside, my photographic brain finds the remark about the coloured photograph historically interesting. Clearly, in 1908, coloured photographs existed, but were sufficiently rare that they captured the viewer’s attention. The latter half of the quotation calls to mind Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and raises the question whether the clarity of a face’s image doesn’t also suggest a moral quality: a person of moral force will etch an indelible record of their face upon the memory. In the age of policing through facial recognition algorithms, the clarity of a face’s image calls to mind the more banal claim that you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide. In that regard, clarity is less suggestive of a moral quality than of a moralizing quality, which is not the same thing.
Later, the “anarchists” share their impressions of Sunday. I quote at length some of their thoughts about his face:
“Well, when I saw Sunday’s face I thought it was too large—everybody does, but I also thought it was too loose. The face was so big, that one couldn’t focus it or make it a face at all. The eye was so far away from the nose, that it wasn’t an eye. The mouth was so much by itself, that one had to think of it by itself. The whole thing is too hard to explain.”
He paused for a little, still trailing his stick, and then went on—”
“But put it this way. Walking up a road at night, I have seen a lamp and a lighted window and a cloud make together a most complete and unmistakable face. If anyone in heaven has that face I shall know him again. Yet when I walked a little farther I found that there was no face, that the window was ten yards away, the lamp ten hundred yards, the cloud beyond the world. Well, Sunday’s face escaped me; it ran away to right and left, as such chance pictures run away. And so his face has made me, somehow, doubt whether there are any faces. I don’t know whether your face, Bull, is a face or a combination in perspective. Perhaps one black disc of your beastly glasses is quite close and another fifty miles away. Oh, the doubts of a materialist are not worth a dump. Sunday has taught me the last and the worst doubts, the doubts of a spiritualist. I am a Buddhist, I suppose; and Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt. My poor dear Bull, I do not believe that you really have a face. I have not faith enough to believe in matter.”
In a way, this reflection on Sunday’s face anticipates the skepticism that has infected contemporary conversations about faces and, more generally, about the unique quality of personal identity that the face is supposed to support. Facial recognition software and its opposite, facial generation AI algorithms, have destabilized our understanding of personal identity. To the extent that our reality is increasingly defined by our connection to virtual environments, the function of our (facial) identity will be increasingly restricted to concerns of social control and commercial opportunity. Like our memory of faces, more numinous concerns, like personal engagement and spiritual connection, seem to be fading from sight.