Antinomic Chronology in “Mirrorstory”

Abstract

Antinomic Chronology in “Mirrorstory” William Nelles (bio) Brian Richardson proposes the term “antinomous chronology” to cover narratives that “invert the direction of time and move forward into the past” (“Unnatural” 387). His exemplar of reverse temporality in our Target Essay, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, is too complex a case to address here, [End Page 409] but Richardson has elsewhere relied on Ilse Aichinger’s “Spiegelgeschichte” (“Mirrorstory”) as his go-to antinomic text, so I’ll assume that story is fair game.1 Seymour Chatman also identifies “Mirrorstory” as a touchstone in his own important discussion of “backwards” narration, listing it as one of three texts (with Time’s Arrow and the short film Happy End) that exemplify a structure of “sustained continuous backwards narration” as opposed to the more common sustained “episodic” backward subtype. While an “episodic” text like Harold Pinter’s Betrayal proceeds backward through a series of analepses or flashbacks in which “each succeeding episode [in the story] must precede the previous one in the discourse,” the episodes themselves are related from start to finish in chronological order. A “continuous” text like “Mirrorstory,” on the other hand, “consistently reverses each event” throughout the discourse (Chatman 33), analogous to a film being run backward. The modest point I will try to make here is that “Mirrorstory” is not in fact “a curiously linear story that moves forward into the past” (Richardson, Unnatural Narrative 31), but one that jumps around quite a bit temporally. Richardson’s summary of the story, “in which a woman’s life is narrated (in the second person) as if she experiences it moving backward in time from her burial to her death from a botched, illegal abortion back to meeting the man who would impregnate her and further back to her childhood and birth” (Unnatural Narrative 149), is consistent with Chatman’s version: “starting with her removal from the grave, through her return from the cemetery to the hospital, through a fatal abortion performed by an old boozer, to her first meeting with the young man, the father of her baby, her sad childhood, and finally her birth” (34).2 Closer examination of the story’s structure, however, reveals a different sequence of events. Maurice Aldridge, having initially offered a similar summary (the story presents “an account of a young girl’s journey through life from a moment of birth to her death in a hospital ward . . . but reverses it”), goes on to observe that things are of course, more complex than the preceding synopsis would suggest. I shall not discuss these complications here, but it is important to note [first] that, in the opening sentences the girl is still alive in her hospital bed. . . . Second, throughout the story, our picture of the young girl growing rapidly towards being born is backgrounded by references to the scene at her death bed. (152) [End Page 410] Taking these points into account, Aldridge offers this revised synopsis: “Aichinger tells the story in a backward loop, first forward in the dying mind to the moment of burial then backward through the funeral to the cradle and back again to the moment of death” (152). In sum, the story does not proceed in a linear fashion at all: it begins in the narrative present, with the girl in her hospital bed at the point of death, then flashes forward to the future as the girl imagines the aftermath of her imminent death, then proceeds by intercalating episodes from her past (arranged in retrograde sequence) with brief scenes in the narrating present in the hospital (arranged in chronological sequence). But even this correction falls well short of recognizing the complexity of the story’s narrative order. W. Michael Resler’s discussion of “Mirrorstory” will help us take another step in this analysis. While his primary purpose is pedagogical rather than theoretical or even critical, and his target audience consists of teachers of undergraduate German conversation and composition courses rather than narratologists, one of his classroom exercises involves dividing up the story into eighteen chronological segments and asking his students “to reconstruct the plot in its chronological order” (31). Resler helpfully includes a chart outlining those segments (32), and...