Mirrors and Myths: Antonio Machado and the Search for Self

Abstract

The topos of the mirror has attracted attention throughout the ages and the themes of reflection and speculation speculum, quod in eo specimus imaginem and speculorhave a long and respectable ancestry. 1 Such verbal interplay invokes the notion that the process of speculum/speculor has to do with a reflected aspect of itself. The humanist or hermeneutical view has held that there exist three separate entities: 'text', 'author' and 'reader', the last two constituting a unified perspective or human consciousness, a 'soul'. The text marks the projection of the author's concerns and·is a reflection of the reader's. After the explosion of structuralism in Paris in the turbulent 1960s, however, things were presented very differently. There was no lessening of interest in the mirror theme. Where interest, did shift was in a growing emphasis on the facticity of a literary text as opposed to some essentialist or idealist content it was supposed to have. 2 By the mid-1960s 1966 and 1967 seem to have been two anni mirabiles not only was the mirror (as 'state', 'stage', 'text') the central topic of literary discourse but one type of deconstructionist theory had begun to argue that if a text was nothing more than the sum of its tropes, strategies and discourses, then the meaning or truth or reflection of 'self' was nothing but an illusion. From 1966, with Foucault's disquisitions on 'Las Meninas', Lacan's revolutionary readings of Freud, shortly followed by Derrida's powerful trilogy,3 the old humanist position seemed not merely unfashionable but untenable.