Final Paper: The Smile of Freedom

                 “It is because there is freedom that there is the smile.” This passage from the novel The Magus by John Fowles (445) completely startled me. I read it over and over again, trying to figure out what it meant. What freedom? Why is there a smile? It reminded me of another passage from the same novel when the character Conchis is describing a stone bust. The most significant quality the bust possesses is not a chiseled face or deep-set eyes, but its smile. “That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yan. But the smile” (150).

                At first, these quotes startled me with their simplicity. The smile of truth; the smile of freedom. I love to smile, and I think a smile can mean much more than people often think. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but I believe a smile is worth more. I wanted to find out what exactly the meaning of a smile was, hence this project. I chose to focus on a series of questions: What is a smile of freedom? When does a smile of freedom appear? When can it appear?

                These questions dive into the cosmological and anagogical interpretations, but the literal interpretation becomes the anagogical, so it is still important. The smile is the most biologically uniform facial expression. It only takes one muscle to smile, whereas frowning takes several more. The smile is such a fundamental expression that ultrasounds on babies in the womb have shown them smiling. This suggests that humans do not need to be taught to smile. It is said that a “genuine” smile is generated by the unconscious brain, perhaps even from what some might call the “collective unconscious.”

               

A. Nelson Mandela freed at last

B. Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci

 

                 The only way to talk about a smile is to look at examples of smiles throughout history. Take image A for example. It is a depiction of Nelson Mandela, a South-African political activist, finally freed from prison after nearly thirty years. His smile extends throughout his whole face, tugging at the corners of his eyes, making his cheeks stand out, wrinkling the sides of his face, and showing all the teeth he possibly could show. His smile moves from his face and is carried throughout his body to the fist he pounds in the air. You cannot help but smile just looking at it. The image is powerful in itself, but also powerful because of the context it was taken in. We know it was taken shortly after he was released from prison, so it is literally a smile of a now free man. But is this what Conchis meant? What about the Mona Lisa (picture B), arguably the most famous smile in history? Her smile, if it is a smile at all, is much more reserved. I see her smiling because I think her eyes crinkle at the sides ever so gently, like she’s secretly laughing hysterically inside but can only show the slightest bit of emotion. But why is she smiling? Unlike the picture of Nelson Mandela, we have no context of which to know what triggered her facial expression. Many people have ideas about why she is smiling, if she is smiling at all, but no one really knows for sure. Does she possess a smile of freedom?

                To understand what a smile of freedom is, first I needed to understand what Conchis meant by freedom.  In The Magus, Conchis describes freedom as “the final right to deny. To be free to choose” (441).  We have often said in class that we can only be free when we have emptied ourselves of everything we once knew and become naked.  Conchis emptied himself in that moment with Wimmel of everything he thought he knew before, and was freed by realizing he had the freedom to do everything, to choose to do everything, or nothing at all. It’s really just a big contradiction. Knowing nothing, we have the freedom to think anything.

                When Jonah Barta spoke about freedom, he said “freedom is the act of perception,” meaning we never actually possess freedom. But freedom is inside us, often trapped by the shelters we build in our own heads by categorizing and quantifying everything. Take a smile, for example. When I was doing research on this topic, I saw so many ways in which you could “characterize” a smile as a certain type and stick a label to it, as if that gives the smile a certain meaning. Look at dreaming. If a person has violent dreams, we think they are a horrible person and must have thoughts of hurting people. The list of examples of this idea could go on and on. We must make a choice to break these shelters of categories down and rebuild them with new perspectives. Only then can freedom be released; only then will the smile appear.

                Looking at the pictures, do these embody Conchis’ view of freedom? I think Mandela’s photograph possesses this smile, or better yet, he is smiling the release of freedom inside him. His smile has everything in it: pain and hardship, sadness, triumph, passion and eleutheria—freedom. His smile is a realization of the freedom to choose. It is here that the literal “smile of freedom” works its way around to the cosmological and the anagogical, because the literal is the anagogical. But the Mona Lisa has an air of mystery in her, like maybe she is hiding something. Her smile could possess everything, but she doesn’t want to show the world that she does. Isn’t this a smile that realizes the freedom to choose as well?   

                Then I wondered can this smile only appear when a person has gone through a hardship, like Mandela did? Can anyone smile the smile of freedom? For this I refer to another passage from The Magus: “You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me” (351). The smile of freedom is a smile of realization; when you realize you exist as you. It’s all a big circle, as we know. What you are is what you will become. When you accept this, you smile. “It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be” (112). Can a person realize this without being confronted with any obstacles?

                I think every person experiences some sort of pain in their lifetime. As Brooke Wimer put it in her project, “One thing is certain. We all feel pain.” Some maybe more than others, but I don’t think we can compare one person’s pain with another’s. Whether it is a moment of pain or a lifetime of pain, we all feel it and we are all affected by it. And it is only after this pain that the smile of freedom becomes available. The key word is available. I don’t believe every person reaches this smile, because it is not just experiencing the pain that makes the smile available, it is what we choose to do with that pain. Like I said earlier, freedom is all about choosing. We can choose to let the pain control us, build shelters in our head, or we can choose to break down those shelters and let the pain help shape who we are, not define who we are. Look at Nicholas in The Magus. The smile becomes available to him at the end of the novel as a result of all the pain he endures, but he never smiles the smile of freedom because he let his pain define who he was.

                After all that pain, there is something else we must realize. Joe Schadt said in one of his blogs, “smile comes from the simple truth that human existence is fucking ridiculous.” Annie Dillard showed us that we as a single individual are not important in the grand scheme of life. Isn’t this a form of freedom? Is it not freeing when we realize that what we do doesn’t really matter? So how shall we live knowing this? We should smile; smile at the insignificance of life.

                To me, the smile of freedom is the smile of the collective unconscious. It is the smile of knowing and understanding the pain and passion for life. A fundamental realization that we are what we are, that we can only be, and we have the power to choose. Freedom is inside us. We must choose to find it, break the shelters that contain it, and let it go so we can smile the smile of freedom. This is the smile of the statue; it is the smile that contains EVERYTHING.