Monsters in the Modern Mirror.
“We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Cesares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men.” Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”1
“It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.” Jorge Luis Borges, “Nightmares” lecture.2
Unbeknownst to the legendary Argentine writer Borges, the idea of placing mirrors reflecting into each other had already been practiced by Leonardo da Vinci who in his notebooks said the reflected image went on to infinity.3 For Borges this infinite regress was comparable to a labyrinth because the viewer could easily get lost in the maze of reflections resulting in a nightmare search for identity. Mirrors were “monstrous” to Borges and in her book on the mirror Bonnet notes the horror of the mirror/labyrinth to Borges. Bonnet also uses the word “monstrous” to describe Parmigianino's magnified hand achieved by optical trickery. When this optical deception including doubling of the self is associated with religious ideas such as the mirror as a source of vanity or sin, the distortion is thought to be caused by supernatural evil entities. The history of the mirror shows that supernatural beings, sprites, imps, and especially the Devil were connected with reflections which with their distortions, reversals and crossings could almost be seen as demonic in origin. There was a legend that if one looked into a mirror late at night the devil could be seen, which might be what Borges is hinting at in the quotation from his short story “Tlön” above. Though Leonardo took a purely scientific and empirical attitude to the mirror, quite a lot of renaissance paintings show the mirror juxtaposed with the Devil as in Memling’s Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (1485). As for Borges, he was writing in the 1940s, a decade in which the mirror appeared in psychology, science, visual art and film, though it was concerned less with the “monstrous” in folklore and more with the monsters in one’s mind as in the mirror sequence in Citizen Kane (1941). If there is counterpart in visual art to Well’s optical grandeur or Borges’s mirrored nightmares it is arguably Escher who was fascinated with mirror images, and indeed mathematical labyrinths. Escher’s Magic Mirror lithographic print of 1946 (above) which shows mythical creatures- gryphons- produced by a mirror, form a procession and then form into a tessellated pattern. The link between mathematics and mirror magic had already been forged in the home-grown surrealism of the mathematician Charles Dodgson’s (Lewis Carroll) books, Wonderland reached via the mirror, and this kind of visual trickery is present in Escher too. Completing the circle by taking the mirror and self-image back to the classical age is Salvator Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) which is based on his own poem about the beautiful, self-regarding youth who drowns in his own reflection. Sigmund Freud who coined the word “narcissism” for psychoanalysis was a huge influence on Dali’s “paranoiac-critical method.”
1Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, (Penguin, 1964), 27.
2“My other nightmare is that of a mirror. The two are not distinct, as it only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth. I remembering seeing, in the house of Dora de Alvear in the Belgrano district, a circular room whose walls and doors were mirrored, so that whoever entered the room found himself at the center of a truly infinite labyrinth.”
3Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks, 106.
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