While looking through a medieval manuscript of the Book of Genesis, Benjamin A. Saltzman encountered a curious illustration. Adam and Eve, freshly fallen from grace, held their hands in front of their eyes rather than the more obvious bits.
Why are they covering their faces? He wondered.
He found the gesture tricky to pin down. A classic interpretation was shame at their newly realized nudity. But Saltzman also saw sorrow, grief and even a literal blindness to God.
Suddenly, Saltzman began to see the gesture everywhere—in art, in film, in harrowing images of war and death on social media. But what he didn’t see was indifference.
“What happens when we block off our senses, when we touch our face and become hyperaware of our own bodies, is we’re able to focus,” said the associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. “This gesture allows us to turn inward, process and reflect in really powerful ways.”
In Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture, Saltzman traces averted gazes through dozens of works of art and literature, centering iconic scenes including St. Augustine’s Confessions and the Crucifixion of Christ, while invoking thinkers ranging from Plato to Hannah Arendt, artists from Salvador Dalí to Langston Hughes.
“Often when we encounter this gesture in a work of art, it's made by people who are deeply engaged in the pain of the surrounding world,” Saltzman said. “It made me realize that, actually, when we feel the urge to turn away, that's not only a very human urge, but it's actually something we should pay attention to.”
In this edited Q&A, Saltzman discusses what covering our faces has meant throughout history and why, in an era when looking away is seen as a moral failure, turning away might be more important than ever.
In the book, you talk about “gestures of aversion.” Could you define what that means?
The book is very much about a group of related gestures that all involve some form of blocking one's vision, such as covering one's eyes or lowering one's head.
But there's so much variety within that category.
When you cover your face, are you covering your eyes so that you're not seen, or are you covering your eyes so that you do not see? Is it a masking or a shielding? There's a kind of blurriness between those two things that, especially when encountering it in a work of visual art, makes it hard to tell.
To me, that was the exciting part of the project.
So, you’re drawn to these gestures because they’re ambiguous. How do you analyze their meanings across artworks that span different historical periods and cultural contexts?
That's something that I try to be highly attentive to.
For example, when writing about Marc Chagall’s paintings of Christ’s crucifixion, I was prompted by a colleague to think about the specifically Jewish meaning of the gesture. When Chagall paints figures covering their eyes, they almost always use their right hand. That's significant because that's the hand that Jews use to cover their face when they're saying the Shema, the prayer that is said, in certain practices of Judaism, twice a day and in the moments prior to a loved one's death or passing. That word literally means to listen and the gesture helps you clear your senses so that you can pay attention to God. Had I not been attentive to that meaning, then I would have been missing out on that specific context.
But at the same time, the gesture resonates with other meanings. In those paintings by Chagall, for instance, it also might signify grief or sorrow.
So, there’s a push and pull between my responsibility as a scholar to think about all the different contextual pressures, but also, it's exciting to push against those pressures and recognize how the gesture might be freed from them.
Each chapter begins with a list of thinkers and artists, like characters in a play—St. Augustine, Plato, Francisco Goya, Hannah Arendt, Langston Hughes. How did you tackle that kind of breadth and scope?
This is a very UChicago book; I could not have written it anywhere else. So much of it is inspired and informed by conversations I had with colleagues. They would say, “Have you thought about this work of art?” or “Have you read this philosopher on this aspect of the gesture?”
Where do you draw the lines at all? That became the challenge.
The book could have kept going on and on; in fact, I just received a letter in the mail from a reader who wanted to share three more examples with me. My hope is that Turning Away might open up precisely these kinds of responses, where everyone has their own examples that come to mind.
Today, we are constantly bombarded with images of human suffering. Not averting our gaze has become a rallying cry, a moral imperative. What would you say to those who tell us, “Don’t look away?”
To be very, very clear, our collective attention is clearly one of the few guardrails against atrocity, injustice and corruption. In many ways, the most dangerous possibility is a world of indifference where people just don't care anymore.
But what happens when someone who is inclined to care is told: Don't look away?
For one thing, you might begin to justify doom scrolling as an act of paying attention, though it’s so clearly anathema to human flourishing. And then, as you become over-saturated with images of suffering, there is a risk of moral paralysis. We risk becoming unresponsive or apathetic.
There's something quite dystopian and problematic about looking in a state of unflinching indifference. So, I want to push back against that and think more deeply about the problem.
In what way?
The question is, what do you do when you turn away? Do you turn away and forget? Or do you turn away in reflection? Do you prepare to take some kind of action beyond merely looking? In many of those cases, you must turn away first, in order to respond.
We shouldn't necessarily try to resist the urge to turn away but instead recognize that this urge is how we tell ourselves: This is something serious. This is something to which I might need to act in response.
“Don't turn away” is a very powerful message, but it’s one that's easy to ignore because it's so unsustainable. Maybe a better message is: Notice when you're turning away. If you catch yourself looking away, that probably means that it's something you should engage with, however difficult or unbearable.
