The Trope of the Mirror in Contemporary Experimental Literature

Abstract

The Trope of the Mirror in Contemporary Experimental Literature Saloua Karoui-Elounelli Ever since M. H. Abrams used the metaphor of the mirror in his theorizing of mimetic literature, the trope has been invested in communicating opposed tendencies of literary creativity and largely antithetical conceptions of the literary art. Indeed, from Abrams’ seminal work The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953), and up to the theoretical rethinking of mimetic and anti-mimetic literary narrative, in works such as Narcissistic Narrative (1980) by Linda Hutcheon, Silverless Mirrors (1983) by Charles Caramello, or also Postmodernist Fiction (1987) by Brian McHale, the trope of reflection and mirroring have abounded in the critical discourse. Whether in the theoretical delineations of mimetic fiction or avant-gardist metafiction, such tropes have often prompted a questioning of literature’s relation to aesthetic and cultural paradigms, which, in turn, has directed scholarly research to a vital reconsideration of the notion of experimentation. Indeed, the persistent debate, and even controversy, in the discourse of literary criticism, around the idea of the experimental is partly grounded in the divergent approaches to the terms of the relationship that connects literary creativity to an apprehension of its poetics, as well as to the politics of culture. In the context of the modern and postmodern literary production, the debate around the experimental vein in literature has often acknowledged the relevance of the issue of literary self-reflexivity which is not assumed to be a (post)modern invention, but rather to have gained prominence since James Joyce’s Finnegans’ Wake (1939) and Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim Two Birds (1939). The argument that the thematic and aesthetic significance of self-reflexivity in the poetics of experimental literature induces a rethinking of the two concepts of mimesis and representation has contributed a great deal to the critical interest in scrutinizing the metadiscursive, and often self-ironic, quality of such literature. In the context of the present issue, the term “experimental” is conceived of in line with what Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale posit when they argue that “all literary experiments share is their commitment to raising fundamental questions about the very nature and being of verbal art itself” [End Page v] (1). Experimentation and avant-gardism are both conceived of as interrelated qualities of the kind of literary texts that question and demystify their own formal constructs as much as they reinvigorate a critique and a skeptical outlook of cultural and ideological discourses alike. The radicalism of such critique and / or skepticism ranges from the aestheticism of literary self-irony—with an invocation of a sense of crisis with regard to the notions of creativity and representation that the verbal art can neither trust nor do without—to the engagement with the politics of representation and the unmasking of the ideological (and, possibly, hegemonic) implications of literary conventions and systems.1 The rhetorical turn in the discourse of literary criticism and in the critical dimension of self-reflexive literature, whereby the trope of the mirror becomes connotative of a metacritical, metadiscursive move, allows the trope to mediate a critical rethinking of literature’s representational processes. As Caramello puts it: “texts have turned their reflecting planes inward, towards one another, and they have skewed these planes even further by incorporating a metalinguistic discourse on that turning” (48). Far from being mere pointless solipsism, or expressing a predilection for aestheticism, the inward move of literary self-reflexive texts tends to be associated with a continuous interest in raising key conceptual questions that hinge upon the paradoxes of the creative process, or pinpoint, in the very play of self-reflexivity, issues of cultural encounter, traumatic experience, or the act of resistance. In fact, the essays gathered in the present volume / issue go each in either one of those directions, arguing either for the substantial metacritical thematics in metafictional narratives (Elounelli, Dridi) or for the significance of cultural and historiographic critique (Bueher, Souissi, Bouhlila, and Fekir). Critical works on self-reflexive fiction in the scene of experimental postmodern and postcolonial literary writing were mostly published in the late 1970s (Robert Alter, Robert Scholes) and the 1980s (Linda Hutcheon, Margaret Rose, Patricia...