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Since my book is close to hitting shelves, I thought I’d say a bit about why I chose the cover image. If you're into theater, mascots, fursuits, or even just thinking about pandemic masks lately, this might be interesting (or boring or BS or whatever — you can decide) (1/26)
It’s from a 3rd century CE mosaic from the House of the Masks in Hadrumetum, a wealthy coastal city in present-day Tunisia, now in the Sousse Archaeology Museum. It depicts a poet holding a scroll and an actor holding a theatrical mask, both in meditative poses (2/26)
My book is mostly about how a 1st century BCE Roman poet uses comic theater to reflect on & represent everyday life & relationships. I chose this mosaic partly b/c it combines poetry & acting — the actor leans on a writing desk & stands near a capsa (scroll case) (3/26)
But more importantly, it shows a young man holding and contemplating the theatrical mask of another young man, likely the adulescens amator or stereotypical young male lover of Roman comedy — so he’s holding what’s essentially a doppelganger (4/26)
Masks were fundamental to ancient theater. Almost without exception, every performance that a Greek or Roman saw would have featured actors wearing masks that completely covered their faces or entire heads (5/26)
In some ways, masks were simply necessary costume that labeled a performer’s character type — for animation fans, this is like how color & shape language work (purple = villain, exaggeratedly triangular torso = tough warrior, etc) (6/26)
But masks also held power and even their own personality. The Latin word persona means both “mask” and “person” (some Romans claim this derives from per + sonare, “to speak through” — i.e., your self is nothing but the mask your voice goes through to get to others’ ears) (7/26)
And it’s not unusual to find pieces of art that depict people staring at masks, examining them as independent beings and seeming to wonder, “If I put you on, who is the person that will take over?” (8/26)
There’s an anecdote about the 1st century BCE actor Clodius Aesopus, who refused to perform unless he stared at his mask until he felt that he knew who that person was and could prepare his body and voice to do what the mask needed (9/26)
Aesopus even let himself become so “possessed” by his mask that he once beat another actor to death, since that’s what the character he was performing wanted to do. It’s an extreme example, but I think it illustrates the mask’s power (10/26)
The writer/politician Cicero also claims that he saw actors’ masks come to life during performances, & skillful actors could make static masks seem to move ( @Tophocles’ book on stagecraft covers this topic well, as does Tim Moore’s comparative work w/ Japanese Noh masks) (11/26)
In my book, I argue that Catullus’ depiction of himself & others as comic characters is partly literary play and using familiar cultural shorthand to convey complex ideas (not that different from how we use tv references, memes, gifs, etc) (12/26)
But I also argue that these comic representations are more than simply literary games and that some Romans saw every aspect of their lives and personalities as performance — and sometimes that performance happened to include “real life” versions of comic characters (13/26)
This blurring of “real” and “imaginary” can be disorienting but fascinating, which is also why reason I chose that mosaic for the book cover. We see similar geometric borders elsewhere, especially in depictions of Medusa, such as this one in the Vatican Museums (14/26)
Gazing at mosaics like this one from the Piraeus in Athens, you sense the power of Medusa’s head (which is mask-like) to transform viewers and protect the house from danger (mosaics like these are apotropaic, i.e., they “turn away” evil) (15/26)
So the act of putting on a mask simultaneously disorients and protects. The Hadrumetum mosaic’s swirling pattern hints at the mask’s power to make the actor someone else and to transport us to a different theatrical reality (compare the cutscenes from Majora’s Mask) (16/26)
A half-formed tangent: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about overlap b/w these ideas & my research on talking animals in literature. Sometimes authors use animals b/c they want to work in a particular literary tradition (fable, etc) or b/c animals are efficient shorthand (17/26)
Foxes, for example, carry particular baggage (cleverness, deception, eroticism). By representing a character as a fox, authors activate a rich set of associations (in animation terms, consider similarities b/w Robin Hood, Honest John, Nick Wilde, Fantastic Mr. Fox) (18/26)
But animals can be more than literary play. Animism, anthropomorphism, theriomorphic metempsychosis (fancy term for “reincarnation, but cross-species”), etc are common approaches to understanding relationships b/w animal and human in antiquity (19/26)
And there are many examples in ancient literature where putting on an animal mask & seeing through animal eyes is celebrated as a way to learn about yourself & the world anew. Apuleius’ Golden Ass is a good example (it’s like Emperor’s New Groove, but darker and sexier) (20/26)
In many ways, I think art and literature that talks through animal masks represents an attempt to make sense of fragmented human experience, to get at a more complete sense of self through something that is both distantly “imaginary” and very “real” (21/26)
These animal masks disorient “real” experience — not in a harmful way, but in one that jars you out of the mundane & offers useful distance between one lived experience/sense of identity and a different one (22/26)
We don’t typically talk about this in my course on talking animals (partly b/c I don’t feel qualified to teach it, partly b/c I think it’s unfamiliar to too many students), but fursonas and fursuits don’t seem far off from these artistic & theatrical ideas (23/26)
Is it performative? Sure. But “performance” doesn’t mean “fake” or “temporary,” and it’s much more complex than what we usually think of as “acting” — it seems transformative, using an animal mask to inhabit another self (24/26)
I’d love to hear from any furry followers if this jibes with your experience (or if you think this seems like complete BS). Do you see your fursona as an alternate identity, a more “real” identity, something else? Does putting on a fursuit feel productively disorienting? (25/26)
I’ll end by disclosing (as I often do with my ancient comedy students) that when I was younger, I had a brief stint as the Berenstain Bears’ Brother Bear — those couple weeks of work taught me so much about the complexities of masked performance! (26/26)
Oh, I forgot: if you're interested in seeing the challenges and possibilities of ancient masked performance, check out @NEHRomanComedy's videos from the NEH summer seminar on comedy!
