Eyes Left 18 comments

By A.G. Harmon

Take a look at that picture to the left—the avatar for this blog post. I know nothing about the book; I didn’t even read the jacket, so I’m not recommending it by any means. I’m just using it to make an observation. Now that you’ve taken that in, take a look at this, and this, and this.

See? (Ironically, that’s the operative word). In short, the only thing that can be asked of this apparent book cover phenomenon is: What the hell?

Last Sunday, just before the NFL started (a weekly event that can tether me for up to six solid hours), I stopped by the bookstore. After I’d moved some of the books I like onto better shelves, and stuck the ones I don’t into the discount bins, I made my way to the New Fiction releases.

That’s when this plethora of full frontal women, their heads cut off just below the eyes, confronted me—in all their sightless strangeness. The ones I’ve presented here are hardly all; I counted ten in that section alone. Granted, there were some variations. Some had women’s eyes covered with a veil; some featured women turned backwards; some were missing whole heads, so that only a torso was pictured, with the two hands offering a talisman to the potential reader: a peach, a shoe, a purse. A lot of these decapitated females were foreign—like the Oriental girl, or the Egyptian Queen; some were historical—Civil War Belles and Renaissance Ladies. But other covers bore more conventional women, in summer dresses, or sweaters and toboggans.

And to the last one, they were at the very least missing their eyes.

I walked around the bookstore a bit longer, with hopes of further confirmation of my findings (once you notice something like this, you see it everywhere). By the time I left, I’d found a multitude of other examples, and was calm and quiet for a time as I made my way home (once football starts, I’m pretty nervous and yell a good deal).

But the cause for this marketing calculation stayed on my mind. Certainly, they were all books written with the expectation of a female audience; wisely so, as women buy a lot more fiction than men.

And knowing there are platoons of marketers who focus group this kind of stuff—novel titles, and the color and texture of book jackets—I’m sure this fad is the most intentional of things. That is, it’s not why I myself would do it this way: because eyes are hard to draw. No. They must be on to something; this must be a good idea, sales-wise.

But how come? I decided that eyes give too much away; they’re too committal. These books all seem intended to reserve an air of mystery, of exoticism: “if you want to know me, you must pay twenty-five dollars for the hardcover, and still you’ll only scratch the surface.”

Has there been some Madison Avenue calculus that determined women who can afford hard covers like faces, but only at a certain reserve, with a certain psychological density implied? (there are, of course, covers depicting full faces, but those must target a different demographic).

Too, there’s a disconcerting impression caused by these headless—or at least crownless—women of Sleepy Hollow; something a little threatening and kinda spooky. Which implies the converse: that eyes, when shown, are comforting, humanizing. Even when they menace, they assure us that it’s at least something mortal we’re dealing with—not something less or something more.

Is that why the most fearful phantasms are hooded or masked?

Aphorisms and clichés abound: Cicero said that the eyes are the mind’s interpreter; Matthew, that the eye is the body’s light; and the origin of the saying, “the eyes are the windows to the soul,” is too storied to account.

It’s the power of the eyes that makes the icon master so praiseworthy, using the visual orbit as a portal to heaven. All of art and history testify that sight is figuratively, if not literally, a key to humanness. We must be able to see inside in order to know; forbidding the same is assurance of an epistemological block. “You’ll only be allowed to know so much, and not more,” says the Calligrapher’s Daughter over there to your left. Whether there’s anything much to know of her in the first place, who can say? But that’s her marketer’s story, and he’s sticking to it.

You’ll have to fork over twenty-five bucks to find out.