Validating the Possible: Thoughts and Things in James, Rilke, and Musil

Abstract

The mirror, of course, has often been used as a symbol of art, and it has usually had two meanings: first, the idea of mimesis, in which the mirror is a surface that simply reflects the world of actuality; second, an essentially Romantic idea, is that of the mirror as a symbol of the poetic transformation of reality, a device that heightens the real and raises it to a higher power of itself. Mallarm6's desire to fall through the mirror is an extension of this thought, but in conceiving of mirrorspace as potential physical space it marks a new phase in the use of the mirror-image. Lewis Carroll's Alice is the one who finally takes the plunge, stepping through the looking-glass into a world that strangely illuminates the contradictory logic of our own. The important thing about Alice's looking-glass world is that it is not a pallid imitation of the real world; it is, in its own way, equally real-a valid (though other) version of the world we know. The very idea of stepping into the looking-glass world marks a significant turning-point in the conceptualization of the mirror, whose image had been regarded up to that point as in some sense unreal, even if some thinkers saw it as presenting a kind of higher truth than the world of the actual. In the early