It was Elias Canetti who threw down the challenge: ‘To write about teeth. Just try!’
Canetti’s epigraph is the opener for an article on teeth by the American essayist Eliot Weinberger, one of the writings in his exquisite book Karmic Traces. In an enjoyably bizarre reflection on the problems of non-occlusion in his pet rabbit, he notices, as I have too, that while many writers seem to earn their keep by being qualified doctors, he couldn’t think of a single writer who puts in hours as a dentist. Teeth, Weinberger reasons, are too often identified with power, or the lack of it: ‘the sickness of the tooth and its subsequent extraction have tended to be viewed allegorically rather than as revelatory of human nature’.
In fact, dentists perch too close to the cutting edge of sarcasm to entertain immodest thoughts about having been specially endowed—as physicians so often like to boast—with extrahuman humane concerns. How can you believe the soul is a butterfly when the human breath is so foetid? Dentists ought to make good satirists, even if they all too often end up as the butt of satire. The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who was banished to the Gulag after daring to write a satirical poem about Stalin, had a thing about the buzzing of the dental burr (his teeth weren’t in such good shape either) and wrote sarcastically about loving ‘dentists for their artistry, their wide horizons and their tolerance of ideas’ (The Egyptian Stamp).
Perhaps the bigger problem with being a dentist is that you can’t have a conversation with your patients, at least not much of a verbal exchange. Anything a patient says with a drainage pipe, cotton wool and gloved fingers in mouth is going to sound strangulated. It’s no way to learn about the roots of social problems.
It seems appropriate enough that Canetti, who spent twenty years of his life in London writing his unclassifiable book Crowds and Power, should seize on a symbol which, if you watch a lot of television, seems to be what television is best at revealing. In the world of show-biz TV, people smile, and they smile because they know that figuratively at least they’re having you for breakfast; and the more the showmaster flashes his credentials (and everybody knows it’s a faked smile) the more pitiless it all seems. This stopper-rod assembly, this fender-bar, this enamel xylophone of incisors, canines and premolars that makes a mouth: after years of orthodontic corralling and straightening, it may be perfect to the millimetre, every tooth a regular tombstone—but which tombstone ever had this effulgence, this phosphorescent veneer, this whiteness?
There are mouths that fill screens. Some of them are macrognathic too, gleaming Chrysler fenders, enormous lower jaws that can barely contain all the teeth. As the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard once remarked, ‘Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.’ The whiteness of American teeth is virtue itself; and the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, in one of his novels about the end of the Second World War, was haunted by the dental arcade ‘that every American, as he steps smiling into his grave, projects like a final salute to the world of the living’. It was of course an American marketeer, Claude C. Hopkins, who got people to brush their teeth regularly with Pepsodent in the early years of the twentieth century (and allegedly inspired Willem de Kooning’s famous series Woman, in which each just-about-recognisable female form sports formidable teeth). Now Americans spend three billion dollars every year on aesthetic dentistry alone.
It had all been prefigured by Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote an especially creepy story, ‘Berenice’, about a man obsessed with a beautiful consumptive girl who, like a ghoulish version of the Cheshire cat, shrinks back to her teeth: his nightmare was illustrated by Odilon Redon in a charcoal drawing of 1883, which shows two rows of gleaming teeth suspended in front of a shelf of books to which they impart the most spectral light.
Franz Kafka, in one of his meditations on power and powerlessness, sees teeth where nobody else does. ‘It was an ordinary day; it bared its teeth at me; I too was held by the teeth and couldn’t squirm out of their grip; I didn’t know how they were holding me, for they weren’t clenched; nor did I see them in the form of the two rows of a dental arcade, but merely some teeth here and some there. I wanted to hold on to them and vault over them, but I didn’t succeed in doing so.’
The steeplechase through the graveyard might not have worked out for Kafka, but periodontal medicine has come on leaps and bounds since his time. Nobody has to lose all their teeth at the age of eighteen these days, as half the inhabitants of Glasgow did in 1900 (many still lose their teeth even now, though perhaps not all at once). The journalist Ian Jack, who comes from the other side of Scotland, wrote an off-putting piece for the Guardian newspaper about his father arranging to have all his teeth removed before he was fifty, and spitting them out one by one into a bucket, while the dentist stood by; his mother had long since been edentulous. Being a practical man, his father thought it would make life easier not having any more teeth to worry about.
The German mystic Jakob Boehme would have sympathised with Jack’s father’s decision: in his writings he suggested that the prelapsarian Adam needed no teeth for eating the ‘Paradisicall fruit’. It is quite a thought: Adam and Eve were masticating with their gums until the Fall. (Of course, they hardly needed to consume either, having nothing as revolting as entrails.) But the deep metaphysical problem with teeth comes from a different direction: you need them not just to eat but to speak.
The Jack family’s loss of dentition was nothing unusual in Scotland. In the early twentieth century conservative dentistry was almost unheard of except in Scandinavia and the United States. Prostheses (‘falsers’ or ‘wally-dugs’ in Glasgow), bridges and implants successively replaced teeth rotted by time’s subtle sugars. Some scientists even began to think of caries as a slow-acting infectious disease. But who’s thinking caries? Now whitening techniques (‘customize your bright, white smile’) help to give the impression that we are a generation not just of perfect teeth, but perfect tout court. The Smile Design Center in Los Angeles makes a livelihood from exploiting the fact that the impeccable smile is a social marker, and not just in Hollywood. No need to suffer the stain of tobacco: fingers might be yellow, but teeth can be brushed and polished clean, and even veneered. All of the members of the immigrant families in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth have what the novel’s title advertises. They are poised, as it were, between the strong natural teeth of people who have yet to meet the refinements of civilisation and civilisation’s ability to provide extraordinarily refined dental aftercare.
Stomatology would seem to be a brazen business then. Yet, strangely enough, the suspicion remains that these perfect teeth are hiding something. Perhaps they’re not really morally perfect teeth? They smile at you but mean to tear you limb from limb. ‘Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne, und die trägt er im Gesicht’, wrote Bertolt Brecht in his famous song about Mack the Knife. The shark has teeth, and he sports them in his face—sure, and they don’t always stay in the oral cavity. Giorgio Pressburger writes in his story ‘Teeth’ that his obsession with teeth began the day when, as a child of six, he saw an old actor begging in the street who, at the end of his routine, whipped out his false teeth in order to bag the sympathy coin. I can only imagine that his sense of pity was sharpened by a streak of that other moral sentiment, disgust. In one of his novels Philip Roth is pleased to inform us that the mouth in its very origins is also a hiding place, being derived from the same germinal tissue in the embryo as the genitals.
Humans are nothing if not dialectical. How else could baring the teeth, the most unambiguously aggressive and hostile of facial expressions, qualify with the help of a few other changes in facial posture as the universal signal of friendliness and cooperation? Darwin notices, in his remarkable other book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), one of the first scientific books to be published with photographic illustrations, that the teeth are generally exposed by the raising of the upper lip under the action of the zygomatic major muscle. It was the pioneering French neurologist Duchenne who noticed that the genuine smile of enjoyment rather than just the frozen gesture of appeasement involved the action of the eye muscles in synchrony with the lip muscles. To grin, though, has two meanings: not only to smile, but also to draw back the lips in a grimace of leering displeasure or aggressive intent. In sneers of defiance, noted Darwin, the canine on one side only tends to be exposed (and it must be of interest to more than philosophers of the Cynical School that ‘sneer’ and ‘snarl’ are cognates, too).
When I eventually located that Canetti epigraph, on page 242 of his book of aphorisms The Human Province, I discovered what he had actually written was: ‘To write without teeth. Just try!’ Had that great ‘Menschenfresser’ (man-eater) Canetti left his falsers at home on one of his research raids on the old British Library? Was the haughtiest man in Hampstead down on his uppers? It was a Pressburger moment that cast Canetti’s lifelong obsession with power relations in an entirely new light. Now it made sense to me why Canetti thought false teeth had something to do with dialectics. Dialectics are falsers which, if you use them to bite into a stone instead of a freshly baked loaf, will break, just as surely as the real ones.
If one of the events that define the end of history is that people no longer need to lose their teeth, it still needs to be said how many teeth have been lost in the course of history.