Metaphors of self-awareness
When reading a book that uses poetic language we sometimes stumble. A metaphor, inconspicuous at first, somehow seems not quite right. When we start looking closer, it gets even more confusing. Nothing is how it seemed at first; but insights arise, too. In this way, a simple choice of phrase can suddenly reveal surprising depths.
1. Here’s an instance:
Looking up from the lectern from time to time he saw the looming faces of his staff and fellow secretaries in the shadowy gloom of the ballroom as they followed his voice; faces gleaming white and sunless—he had a sudden image of them all floating belly upwards in a snowy lake, like bodies of trapped frogs gleaming upwards through the mirror of ice.
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet [Mountolive], 445.
How can the ice be a ‘mirror’ here?
In everyday experience, an icy water surface can indeed seem to be a mirror (if sufficiently smooth and pure).1The strangeness, in fact, starts here already. Durrell writes ‘snowy’ lake. But ice can act as a mirror (or indeed as a transparent surface through which we can see anything) only if it is smooth and pure. A snowy lake would not even allow us to see the icy surface, let alone to look through it. But we have to ignore that in order to even get started at all. When someone walks across such a surface, looking down, they might see the reflections: their own face and other features of the world above the surface. But then the onlooker cannot see what is below the mirror, in the water, under the ice — which in this case would be the belly-up frogs. If, on the other hand (somewhat weirdly) the mirror was meant from the point of view of the frogs, below the ice, they would see their own underwater world reflected. But of course they would not see themselves as ‘gleaming upwards’ then, but as gleaming downwards (in the reflection). And since the light must be coming from above (otherwise the bellies would not gleam if directed upwards), it is doubtful that, seen from below, the surface would have the same mirror effect which it has when viewed from above.
Either way, talk of seeing something ‘through’ a mirror is somewhat strange, for that is exactly what is normally not possible with a mirror. We cannot see ‘through’ a mirror, i.e. see what is behind the reflecting surface, because the mirror reflects what is before it. Mirrors, typically, are opaque.
That, of course, is why we stumble over this metaphor.
Perhaps Durrell’s image, then, was intended to be more refined. Perhaps he wants us to think of a surface both acting as a mirror and allowing us to gaze through: a surface on which we can see an overlay of a reflection and what is behind the mirror. Although that is not what first comes to mind, it is still a common experience. Many glass surfaces (such as shopping windows) can, given favorable lighting conditions, be both reflecting and transparent. If it was this which Durrell had in mind, we were to think of a smooth, icy surface which is reflective (and thus a ‘mirror’) but at the same time somewhat transparent, so that we might see the gleaming white frogs/faces as well.
2. But why choose ‘mirror’ here at all? What the paragraph, primarily, is intended to express (apart from the inhuman cold and colorlessness of the atmosphere in the lecture hall) is a sense of the somewhat detached position from which an outside onlooker perceives others as ‘trapped’. The protagonist, who gives the lecture, and who has the image in the quote, does not visualize himself as in the same space as the frogs/faces: he visualizes himself as an onlooker, separated from them, as behind the surface.2This makes sense, from the context of the surrounding narrative, for David Mountolive sees his posting there (in Moscow) as only a stepping stone, and is working towards moving on from it.
Suppose Durrell had instead written ‘through the sheet of ice’. This would have equally conveyed the sense of a surface behind which the trapped frogs might be seen. Why does it also have to be a mirror?
I think the use of mirrors here adds an element of self-consciousness. It is not the transparent perception of an onlooker who just notices the image of the frogs. An onlooker who sees it in a mirror also perceives a bit of himself, is aware of himself or at least of the act of perception. We’re never quite free of our own self-awareness in such situations, and that is what Durrell captures here by the use of the mirror imagery. (This of course subtly applies to both the imaginary onlooker who sees the frogs and David Mountolive himself, who is giving the lecture and at the same time having the image.) ‘Mirror’ is one of Durrell’s words; mirrors are one of his images: they appear throughout the Alexandria tetralogy, in various interrelated functions. Let’s survey some of the most interesting of them.
Things that happen in the mirror
1. When the narrator’s relationship with Melissa starts, her previous lover is jealous (to the point of following him around with a pistol in his coat). The two men fall into a pattern of staring and ignoring each other when they meet. But then something happens, and — characteristically — it happens ‘in the mirror’.
Once, encountering him at a bar, I stood for nearly an hour beside him; we were on the point of talking to each other, yet somehow neither of us had the courage to begin it. […] As I was leaving I caught a glimpse of him in one of the long mirrors, his head bowed as he stared into the wineglass. Something about his attitude […] struck me, and I realized for the first time that he probably loved Melissa as much as I did.
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet [Justine], 25.
Durrell could have had his character looking at his rival directly instead, and he would have seen the same. Why does he have him seeing it in the mirror?
For one thing, note that the narrator realizes here something, not just about his rival, but also about himself. To compare someone else’s feelings with your own, it is not just enough to empathically realize what their feelings are — you have to be aware of your own feelings as well. (It is true, of course, that the empathy only works because you have these similar feelings in the first place. But that does not invalidate the point. If you want to compare them, you have to be aware of both sides.) The mirror appears in the text to subtly symbolize this requirement of self-awareness as a component of other-awareness.
But the episode is also the first instance of a frequent pattern of things happening ‘in the mirror’. Let’s have a look at a few others.
2. After a lecture, Justine follows the narrator to a grocer’s shop, where he has followed a sudden craving for Italian food, and now sits and eats from a tin of olives. She talks to him, and he — does not look at her directly, but rather sees her in the mirror:
Unable to disentangle myself from Italy I looked up boorishly and saw her leaning down at me from the mirrors on three sides of the room (32).
The slightly unrealistic element in that scene — if someone where to talk to you in public, would you look at them indirectly, in a mirror, instead of looking them in the face? — is explained here by the fact that the narrator was just immersed in his “tasting Italy” (via the Italian olives), and had been abruptly pulled out of it. But if there is an adjustment, i.e. if the narrator then turns directly towards Justine for the rest of the conversation, the novel does not mention it. The important, mentionable detail for the novel is that the first glance happens ‘in the mirror’.
3. And this pattern is not limited to romantic encounters and related topics (such as jealous feelings). It extends into everyday life as well.
Mnemjian’s Babylonian barber’s shop was on the corner of Fuad I and Nebi Daniel and here every morning Pombal lay down beside me in the mirrors. (35)
The morning routine of getting a shave in the shop around the corner is the setting for a scene, early in the novel, which has the function to characterize the barber Mnemjian and the narrator’s flat-mate Georges Pombal (plus a few others). And nothing is more natural, for a barber’s shop, than lots of mirrors. But the choice of phrase is still remarkable: instead of simply mentioning that he went to get a shave together with Pombal, and then describing how they both lay down in the barber’s chairs, seeing their reflections in the mirror, he says that Pombal lay down in the mirrors.
The stylistic pattern does return, not just generally, but also specifically in Mnemjian’s barber shop, when Scobie visits it in Balthazar, and the narrator notices that he “did not dare even to wink at me in the mirror” (222, my emphasis).
4. Communication between the characters frequently uses mirrors as medium. The most ordinary case, of course, is self-talk.
[Nessim] noticed that he involuntarily repeated phrases aloud to which his conscious mind refused to listen. ‘Good’ she heard him tell one of his mirrors, ‘so you are falling into a neurasthenia!’ (130)
‘I want to know what it really means’ I told myself in a mirror whose cracks had been pasted over with the trimmings of postage stamps. I meant of course the whole portentous scrimmage of sex itself […] (151)
Then, he could make her laugh — quite the most dangerous thing to do to a woman for they prize laughter most after passion. Fatal! No, he was not wrong when he told himself in the mirror: “Ludwig, thou art an imbecile.” (290, see also 288)
Justine does the same thing:
Later, going to bed, she would catch sight of herself in the mirror on the first landing and say to her reflection: ‘Tiresome pretentious hysterical Jewess that you are!’ (35)
In none of these examples, the self-talk is of the half-mindless, ordinary kind: it rather has a certain theatric quality. The theatrics are not meant, however, for other people; for the speaker either is or thinks himself alone. So the self-talk is of the kind which, as Erving Goffman observes, involves a kind of impersonation: “after all, we can best compliment or upbraid ourselves in the name of someone other than the self to whom the comments are directed.”3Forms of Talk, 82, 83. To that end, we are “stage-acting a version of the delivery […] we briefly split ourselves into two, projecting the character who talks and the character to whom such words could be appropriately directed.” Mirrors are an especially helpful instrument to do precisely that.
Still, this can only be part of the story. The author has other means than portraying self-talk for giving us peaks into the minds of his characters. One such means is indirect speech, as we can see in the third example: Pursewarden’s realization that he was making Justine laugh, that this would make him attractive to her and thus might have furthered the possibility of an affair, is characterized as ‘dangerous’, not by the narrator, but as an explication of Pursewarden’s thought. The thinking is not presented directly (“Pursewarden thought it was dangerous…”) but indirectly; and if this works, then why is there suddenly need to present the character as saying his next evaluation (“thou art an imbecile”) out loud, rather than presenting it as a thought as well? Without that, the author could present the scene without needing a mirror as a means to stage it (along with the theatric language he puts into Pursewarden’s mouth).
And again, I think Durrell must have thought the other way round: the scene is explicit self-talk behavior happening in the external world (not just in silent thinking) because that allows Durrell to insert a mirror. The mirror introduces an element of reflection, self-awareness: the character self-consciously talks to himself. This self-awareness accompanies the thought that is expressed in the self-talk, and it is symbolized by the mirror. In this way, the mirror is part of the scene as a stylistic element just as the theatric language the characters use.
5. Not just self-talk, but also interpersonal interaction happens via mirrors throughout the Alexandria Quartet — both of the verbal and non-verbal kinds.
[…] while she was dressing for dinner […] Nessim came into her room and addressed her reflection in the spade-shaped mirror: ‘Justine […]’ he said firmly […] (142)
From time to time in the driving mirror I catch Nessim’s eye and he smiles. (170)
Similar:
Pombal catches my eye in the mirror and looks hastily away lest we infect each other by a smile. (37)
This once more adds an element of self-consciousness to the acts of communication (represented in the story world by having it happen ‘in the mirror’). It removes and separates the two parties of the interaction from each other.
6. Such distancing is not just, in the settings of the novel, effected by inserting mirrors. It is a habitual part of life for many of the characters — and part of their philosophy, too. Thus in Justine’s melancholy world view, separation and loneliness are the default situation. There is no real connection or exchange between two people, even lovers — just a kind of coincidence of feeling, temporarily.
‘Idle’ she writes [in her diary] ‘to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. […] the illusion that she communicates with her fellow [….] is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences to compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. […] from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.’ (46-47)
Likewise Melissa would engage in what the narrator describes as “fragile mirror-worship”:
[She might] sit naked at the dressing-table to light a cigarette — looking so young and pretty, with her slender arm raised to show the cheap bracelet I had given her. (‘Yes, I am looking at myself, but it helps me to think about you.’) (50)
Infatuation and tenderness, just as empathy (§1 above) and communication (§5 above), frequently happen ‘in the mirror’, that is, in a subtly distanced and separated manner.
7. Perhaps it is just a thing with Alexandria. Compare this passage:
You do not know what a thing it is when a lover is looked at. It has a greater pleasure than the Business. For the eyes receive each others’ reflections and impress from there little images as in mirrors. Such an emanation of beauty, flowing down through them into the soul, is a kind of copulation at a distance.
Achilles Tatius, Leukippe & Cleitophon [Quoted in Goldhill, “The Erotic Experience of Looking”, 378.]
This is from a novel, set in Alexandria and written probably in the late 2nd century CE, by Achilles Tatius — and notable for an “extended portrayal of the effect of seeing Alexandria for the first time (ibd., 377). I have no earthly idea whether Durrell knew about or had even read this book, but it certainly seems congenial with many of his themes and obsessions in the tetralogy.
In the many colorful passages that relate the unique flair of the city, mirrors are never absent (viz. 625, 658, 660). And the indirect and distanced nature of communication and love-making is captured in one of its most typical features:
[…] cafés sweet with trilling of singing birds whose cages were full of mirrors to give them the illusion of company. The love-songs of birds to companions they imagined — which were only reflections of themselves! How heartbreakingly they sang, these illustrations of human love! (624)
So even where the mirror metaphor is not bound specifically to characters in the novel, it’s not an entirely generic narrative device either: it still characterizes — in these cases, the city as a whole.
Meeting in the mirror
So far, we have seen two roles that mirrors play in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet: they indicate a certain self-awareness (a ‘reflectiveness’, we might say with a somewhat tired pun) in a character, and they expose a distance, even separation between their inner worlds when they interact. Durrell has his characters perceive things in mirrors (or ‘as’ in mirrors) when he wants to direct the reader’s attention to the self-awareness that accompanies that perception; and he has his characters communicate via a mirror, sometimes in complicated ways (and sometimes with themselves only), in order to insert distance, and several times even the characters’ own philosophical musings refer to that symbolic function explicitly. But these two functions can also collude, and form a third one.
1. When the narrator tells us about the beginning of the relationship between Justine and Arnauti — a relationship he knows only from Arnauti’s autobiographical novel —, these two functions are again in play. He quotes Arnauti’s book:
‘I have already described how we met — in the long mirror of the Cecil, before the open door of the ballroom, on a night of carnival. The first words we spoke were spoken, symbolically enough, in the mirror. […] We smiled and I passed her on my way to the ballroom, ready to walk out of her mirror-life forever, without a thought.’ (63)
That this meeting ‘in the mirror’ is called symbolic already by Arnauti is remarkable. Remember that Arnauti is the author of a book-within-a-book. It is as if Durrell wanted to hammer the point home: he has Arnauti use the phrase a second time, using the same wording: “‘I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror […].’” (59) And the narrator himself leads into his quotations from Arnauti’s book with a summary, again with the same phrasing: “They met […] in the gaunt vestibule of the Cecil, in a mirror.” (58) (He then quotes Arnauti’s book verbatim: ‘In the vestibule of this moribund hotel the palms splinter and refract their motionless fronds in the gilt-edged mirrors.’ At this point in the novel, the narrator has already related how his own connection with Justine came about, and characteristically, that had also happened ‘in the mirror’.)
Moreover, the separation that is invariably effected when characters interact in the mirror rather than directly is suggestively alluded to in the image of ‘her mirror-life’. It sounds as if the encounter takes place, not in the real world and thus in Justine’s life, but rather in a second, just ‘mirrored’ world, and so in her ‘mirror-life’. This bifurcation of worlds and lives is something Arnauti ascribes to Justine here, but it is congenial with her own views, too (as she formulates them in her diary). In contrast to Justine’s account, however, where the separation is inescapable, in this scene the mirror world proves to be accessible: after all, Arnauti can enter and leave it.
Arnauti (in the passages the narrator quotes at length from his autobiography) claims to be, not jealous, but curious about Justine’s many secret friendships, one of which is with (as we infer) Balthazar. In the course of his spying on her, Arnauti finds the impression of a letter from Justine to Balthazar on a blotting pad:
Once she left a particularly clear impression on my blotting-pad and in the mirror (the mirror again!) I was able to read […] (64)
Again it is Arnauti himself who emphasizes the symbolic meaning of the mirror image, as if he associates the secret world of Justine’s thinking (and connections with people other than himself) with a location in a separate mirror world. But if there is a separation, the mirror is also somehow a privileged instrument to overcome that separation, a kind of window into that secret world.
This, then, seems to be a third function, or at least a kind of extension or synthesis of the two others: the mirrors provide a stage, or a window onto a stage, on which the kind of meeting of the souls is possible that (sometimes at least) cannot happen in direct interaction.
2. And it is not restricted to interactions between different people. It is also in play with self-talk.
The moonlight shone directly on to the mirror, and by its reflected light he could see his father sitting upright in his chair, confronting his own image with an expression on his face which Narouz had never seen before. It was bleak and impassive, and in that ghostly derived light from the pierglass it looked denuded of all human feeling […] he saw [his father] confronting himself in a moonlight image, slowly raising the pistol to point it, not at his temple, but at the mirror, as he repeated in a hoarse croaking voice: ‘And now if she should fall in love, you know what you must do.’ (418-419)
It is not entirely clear whether the old man envisions suicide or murder here — and if the latter, whose: that of his wife, or her lover (or both) —, but again the mirror provides something like a stage for the contemplative rehearsal. The mirrored image of the person himself is of course part of that stage, cast in the role of an auxiliary character; but note that the mirror also does the lighting here, which considerably increases the drama of the scene.
Death: walking into the mirror
There is a rather special use of mirror imagery in Justine, when Durrell’s narrator reflects on his last conversation with the writer Pursewarden (which had taken place immediately before the latter committed suicide).
The fact that this was our last meeting has invested it, in retrospect, with a significance which surely it cannot have possessed. Nor, for the purposes of this writing, has he ceased to exist; he has simply stepped into the quicksilver of a mirror as we all must — to leave our illnesses, our evil acts, the hornets’ nest of our desires, still operative for good or evil in the real world — which is the memory of our friends. Yet the presence of death always refreshes experience thus — that is its function to help us deliberate on the novelty of time.
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet [Justine], 99
Death, then, means to become a memory to one’s friends; more precisely: to become a mere memory, to be reduced to the traces one has left behind in their minds. But something else, too, remains back in the world, from the person who has died. We respond to a person’s actions, thoughts, emotions while they live and we interact with them. When they die, some of this lingers on, partly in habits we haven’t adjusted yet, partly in direct consequences still in the process of playing out. (Something similar happens when people become separated from their lovers, or others with whom they have shared a life.)
Interestingly, however, what the dying person leaves back in this way, according to the quote, is just bad stuff — what we might summarily characterize as ‘bad karma’: evil acts, illnesses, desires. These things, the implication seems to be, do not cling to the person, are not transferred into the mirror: they belong to the world of the living; and there they are left behind. When the person dies, their reflection in the memory of their friends is freed from this bad stuff. Death, then, is in some sense a cleaning and purification of the person — in the minds of their friends.
Thus death effects a kind of split: ‘we’, the person, become a purified memory (though one that exists only in the minds of our friends), and our bad karma gets separated from us and leads its own existence, separately now, as a kind of rippling after-effect. This metaphysical thought — or rather: this sketch of a metaphysical thought — makes use of the mirror symbolism, again, in order to point to some quality of the mind. In this case, however, it is not the subject’s own awareness (i.e.: it is not reflective self-awareness). The minds are the minds of other people, this time.
This single occurrence, in contrast to all the other uses of mirrors in Durrell’s book, seems to point to a different idea about the metaphor: namely, that mirrors symbolize a form of self-knowledge which is also (and sometimes: only) accessible to others, and therefore can be mediated to us through what others perceive about us. In mirrors, other people can sometimes see something about ourselves that we ourselves can’t (or won’t) see. And in our passage here, that something becomes metaphysically separated from us when we die, and thus even more strikingly assigned to the minds of others. In Durrell’s metaphysical thought, the disconnect becomes the absolute and final separation of death.
But Durrell’s main symbolic function for mirrors, throughout the Alexandria Quartet, is to signify self-awareness. And sure enough, Durrell has not forgotten to supplement our passage with another one where they do exactly that.
Although he says that he has forgotten nearly all of it, there is one piece of conversation the narrator remembers from his last encounter with Pursewarden. The latter speaks about religion, or rather, about preoccupations with religion:
He stood up to pour himself a drink and said: ‘One needs a tremendous ignorance to approach God. I have always known too much, I suppose.’ […] I remember, too, that in the very act of speaking thus about religious ignorance he straightened himself and caught sight of his pale reflection in the mirror. The glass was raised to his lips, and now, turning his head he squirted out upon his own glittering reflection a mouthful of the drink. (99, 100)
Pursewarden’s harsh gesture of self-disgust is appropriately triggered, again, by a perception of his own image in the mirror. As before, mirrors come into play here as a symbol for self-awareness. Of course, to the narrator much of the background motivation for the disgust itself is, at this point in the novel, unknown; consequently, he has only a dim understanding of it all: a messy mixture of psychology, artistic self-interpretation, vicarious interpretation of the artistic mind of the other writer, and spiritual speculation. To the reader, in contrast, mirrors again point to an element of self-awareness in a character, in this case Pursewarden; at the very least, this serves as a clue that there is more to his self-disgust, and probably more to his suicide, than the narrator can understand at this point in the book.
References
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea. London: faber & faber 2012 (orig. 1962).
Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1981.
Simon Goldhill, “The Erotic Experience of Looking: Cultural Conflict and the Gaze in Empire Culture”. In: Martha C. Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola (eds.), The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002, 374-399.
