Mirror Gazing by Warren Motte

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mirror Gazing by Warren Motte Andrew Sobanet Warren Motte. Mirror Gazing. Champaign, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2014. 295pp. When I was an undergraduate, I had a professor who pointed out to my class on twentieth-century French theater the importance of mirror scenes. I do not remember the specifics of the lesson, either its theoretical underpinnings [End Page 308] or the specific mirror scene we were studying. But I did internalize the central point of the matter: that mirror scenes are noteworthy. So in the 20-plus years since I took that class, I have paid special attention to mirror scenes in books, films, plays, and television shows. And it is indeed true: mirror scenes, across genres and media, often mark or coincide with a crucial narrative moment. Be it an instance of self-awareness, a pivotal moment of transformation, or a marker of alienation from the self, mirror scenes frequently indicate to the reader or viewer a key element about the mirror-gazing character in question. Often some sort of commentary on the narrative itself, mirror scenes can “reflect” a thematic or formal element central to a story. Take, for example, three mirror scenes in L’Etranger: one in Meursault’s apartment, when we don’t see him in his mirror at all; a second, in his prison cell, when his reflection in his pannikin (“ma gamelle de fer”) won’t smile at him, despite his efforts; and a third, when Meursault (by looking in that same tin cup a moment later, this time with the help of the sun’s last light) acknowledges his current state of seriousness as a prisoner. The first two scenes complement other elements in the text indicating that Meursault is, in many regards, unknowable and other, even to himself. The third scene suggests that Meursault’s sense of self is evolving, an evolution that continues through the final lines of the novel. I have used such scenes in almost all of my literature classes—while teaching works by Camus, Sartre, Colette, Queneau, and Marie Redonnet, among others—to show my students how mirror scenes can serve as gateways into understanding how narratives function and how characters are formed. Warren Motte, in his most recent book, Mirror Gazing, delves deeply into the topic that he brought up in that French theater class in which I sat as an undergraduate more than two decades ago. His book is based on more than three decades of reading, collecting, and categorizing mirror scenes. The full scope of the project renders clear what a voracious reader Motte is; over the years, he has read and categorized approximately 10,000 such scenes. That is not a typo: ten thousand scenes, an incredible number. Those roughly 10,000 scenes appear in around 1,500 books from a wide range of periods and genres. The set of authors covered in Mirror Gazing is huge and diverse. Ovid, for instance, lies in close proximity to William S. Burroughs. Barack Obama, Christine Montalbetti, and Agatha Christie share space with Proust and Whitman. In one paragraph, chosen more or less at random, Motte analyzes scenes in books by William DeAndrea, Len [End Page 309] Deighton, Harold Bloom, Carlos Fuentes, Alejo Carpentier, Patrick Deville, and Harry Mathews (208–09). From start to finish, Mirror Gazing has a pleasant ludic quality to it. Motte employs abundantly the first-person singular in order to continually remind the reader that his book is about him looking at himself as a reader and cataloguer, and that this text is the reflection of an activity that has been a part of his distinguished readerly life since he was a graduate student. Indeed, Motte’s engaging, playful, and highly self-referential investigation involves considerable doubling and multiple layers of self, as do many of mirror scenes he so brilliantly analyzes and so ably situates into context (both in his book, and in the books from which they came). Incredibly, Motte manages to distill the thousands of mirror scenes he has catalogued into three basic categories, all of which revolve around degrees of self-recognition: simple recognition; difficult recognition; and failed recognition. Now, those categories as I have just outlined...