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ABSTRACT
The metaphor of the mirror is central to the communicative praxis of philosophers who wish to articulate ontological insights into the nature of existence, and into the recognition that “I am, I exist.” However, the philosophical tradition has deployed this metaphor at the expense of place. Human persons are said to exist as disembodied and displaced minds—mysterious and immaterial entities that are exiles in their own bodies. Modernist literature reverses this procedure, creatively appropriating the mirror metaphor in a communicative praxis that reveals place to be essential to being, and particularly crucial to being human. This essay explores the mirror metaphor as it reveals the ontology of place in two Modernist novels: Luigi Pirandello's One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand and Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. These novels show the mirror transformed from a praxis that projects the illusion of certain, immoveable egos to one revealing the ontological centrality of place in constituting what I am. Thus, to communicate that I am becomes to communicate the place from which I am.
Notes
1 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Michael Hulce (New York: Penguin, 2009); Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, trans. William Weaver (New York: Marsilio, 1992).
2 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 150–52, 156–67, and 162–63.
3 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), 247–48.
4 Ibid., 246–47.
5 Ibid., 250–51.
6 René Descartes, “Meditation II: On the Nature of the Human Mind,” in Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. 1, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (New York: Dover, 1955), 150.
7 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 60.
8 Bernard Williams, “The Self and the Future,” Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 161 original emphasis.
9 Ibid., 79–80.
10 Derek Parfit, “Part Three: Personal Identity,” in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 199–350.
11 See Robert Nozick, “Personal Identity through Time,” in Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981), 29–70; David Kellogg Lewis, “Survival and Identity,” in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 55–77; Ernest Sosa, “Surviving Matters,” Noûs 24, no. 2 (1990): 297–322.
12 Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
13 Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19. This essay opens the floodgates on externsalism.
14 Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007).
15 Shaun Gallagher, Phenomenology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Shaun Gallagher and Don Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2012).
16 Andy Clark, Being There (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
17 See Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
18 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Chicago: Open Court, 1921), 15.
19 Ibid., 66.
20 Ibid., 245.
21 Casey, Getting Back into Place, 29–32.
22 Alcise Sforza Tarabochia, “The Aphanisis of the Pirandellian Subject,” Italian Studies 68, no. 1 (2013): 123–37. This article is my major sounding board for the Lacanian interpretation.
23 Douglas Radcliffe-Umstead, The Mirror of Anguish: A Study of Luigi Pirandello's Narrative Writings (London: Associated University Presses, 1978).
24 Tarabochia, “The Aphanisis of the Pirandellian Subject,” 124.
25 Michael Quinn, “Relative Identity and Ideal Art: The Pirandello Conflict and Its Political Analogy,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 3, no. 2 (1989): 75.
26 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 76–78.
27 Ibid., 75.
28 Ibid., 78–79.
29 Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, 3.
30 Which, surprisingly, Tarabochia does not suggest.
31 Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, 25.
32 Ibid., 14.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 15.
35 Ratcliffe-Umstead, Quinn, and Tarabochia all admit this basic insight, however, always in a way that lends support to Lacan, and never as a potential criticism of Lacan, or of psychoanalysis in general. Certainly, I am being more strident here and am getting, ultimately, at the ontological dimension of Vitangelo's crisis as written by Pirandello.
36 See Warren F. Motte, “Reflections on Mirrors,” MLA 120, no. 4 (2005): 774–89; Andrew J. Weber, “Gothic Revivals: The Doppelgänger in the Age of Modernism,” in Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 317–57; Judith Ryan, “Validating the Possible: Thoughts and Things in James, Rilke, and Musil,” Comparative Literature 40, no. 4 (1988): 305–17; Lorna Martens, “Autobiographical Narrative and the Use of Metaphor: Rilke's Techniques in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge,” Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature 9, no. 2 (1985): 229–49; “Mirrors and Mirroring: ‘Fort/da’ Devices in Texts by Rilke, Hofmannsthal, and Kafka,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 58, no. 1 (1984): 139–55; Herbert Blau, “The Shadow of a Magnitude,” Daedalus 98, no. 3 (1969): 654–76. There is, surprisingly, no recent literature relating this episode in Rilke's work to Lacanian psychoanalysis, nor to the mirror stage.
37 Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 67 emphasis added.
38 Ibid., 68.
39 Ibid., 67.
40 Ibid., 69.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 69–70.
43 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), 125.
44 Ryan, “Validating the Possible,” 312.
45 Casey, Getting Back into Place, 22 original emphases.
46 David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality: Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Ecstasy, Catastrophe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015). These are excellent studies on the ecstasies of time in Heidegger's philosophy.
47 Casey, Getting Back into Place, 23.
48 Ibid., 48 original emphasis.
49 Ibid., 53–56.
50 René Descartes, “Treatise on Man,” in The World and Other Writings, trans. Stephen Gaukroger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 99–169.
51 See Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin, 2004), 123, 187, 231–45, 253; Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 74–92.
52 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Allen Wood and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 189–90.
53 Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1991), 22, 296.
54 Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), 200.
55 Casey, Getting Back into Place, 29.
56 Motte, “Reflections on Mirrors,” 777.
57 Ibid., 779.
58 Ryan, “Validating the Possible,” 312.
59 Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, 20.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., 21.