For Jean Rowset The Mirror in the Text LUCIEN DALLENBACH TRANSLATED BY JEREMY WHITELEY WITH EMMA HUGHES ‘The University of Chicago Press(Originally published as Le vécit spéculuir: essai sur lo mise em abyme, © Bitons du Seu, 1977. ‘The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 Polity Press, Cambridge © 1989 by Polity Press All rights reserved. Published 1989 Printed in Great Bsitain 9897 969594939291 9089 54321 Library of Congeess Cataloging Publication Data Dilenbuch, Lucien, “The mirtor in the text. Translation of: Le rc spire Bibliography. p Includes index 1. Fition—Technique, 1 Tie PN3355. 1989 BOK3——- BQVANOR Talk, paper) ‘This book is printed om eid fve paper. Contents Preface 1 PART I VARIATIONS ON A CONCEPT 1 André Gide's shields 7 A critical heritage 20 3. Triple meaning 7 PART Il TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF THE MIRROR IN THE TEXT 4 Mise en abyme and reflexivity al 5. Fiction and its doubles 55 6 Narration revealed 5 7 The spectacle ofthe text and the code 94 8 The emergence of types 107 PART Ill DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVES 9. The mise en abyme and the nouveau roman 17 10. The mise en abyme and the new nouveau roman 137 Conclusion 164vi Contents APPENDICES “The three lessons of the mirror The novelas ‘poetry of poetry’ Mallarmé's ‘Sonnet en X" ‘Metaphors of origin Reflexivity according to Roussel moOmD Notes. Bibliography Index 169) 175 178 181 184 187 247 256 Preface Since its adoption by the nowveau roman, the term mise en abyme! hhas become so popular that within a few years it has invaded the field of literary criticism, has made more and more forays into neighbour- ing areas, has been brought to the attention of the general public and has insinuated itself into everyday vocabulary. But despite the tacit agreement which apparently exists as to its meaning, it has managed to be understood in so many different ways that it is now imperative to question the apparent certainty and to disturb the serenity with which it is accepted. What was its original meaning, and what precisely does it mean now? Does it have an unequivocal meaning? Or does it cover a number of different concepts? Does it designate a well-structured complex, or is it a terminological alibi for a protean and ultimately indefinable monster? These are the questions this study raises and tries to reflect on in three sets of analyses The first analysis, which is heuristic, lays the basic ground, Aiming to rediscover, or, if necessary, to formulate the concept in a coherent and relevant way, it notes how the mise en abyme made its entry into literary criticism, discusses its reception by its early interpreters, investigates the role of Gide, who was responsible for coining the term in the first place, but subsequently remained silent about it, and draws (not without scepticism) on the more or less explicit interpretations of the term offered by various authors. Under these various impulses, my enquiry will move closer and closer towards two negative conclusions, which will prepare the round for a more theoretical section: although the structure con: ceived of and expressed as mise en abyme is in fact neither as simple2 Preface and homogeneous as is usually thought, nor as anarchic and ir rational as initial investigation might make it appear, the only way of genuinely clarifying the concept lies in accounting for both its ‘multiplicity and its unity. To attempt on the one hand to distinguish the specific forms that the concept of the mise en abyme tends to blur by subsuming them into one common term, and to show, on the other hand, that despite their profusion and diversity, what appear empirically as mises ex abyme can be reduced to a finite ‘number of simple forms: these activities converge and point to the need to construct a typology of the device. From then on, the aim of the enquiry must be to arrive at an inventory of what has hitherto been hidden and to outline both a lexicon and a grammar of the mise en abyme. Such a lexicon and grammar could be ends in themselves. Here they provide the basis for a third set of analyses. These will be concerned with the diachronic evolution of the mise en abyme; they ‘must necessarily take a narrow view, but one that is compatible with the amount of material one person might reasonably read, The aim is therefore to follow the metamorphoses of the mise en abyme in the nouveau roman alone. Although this is worth while in itself, it i, however, possible that the coherence and status of such @ study might appear problematic. To clear this up, I shall explain how parts Il and III of my threefold investigation are related While part Il comprises viewually a general theory of literary forms (a poetic) ~ in that it aims to describe all real or potential mises ex abyme, starting {rom a small number of ideal types that define how the device can be used the third, historical and critical part sets out to describe and interpret one particular area of application of the ‘mise en abyme ~ that is, one area of the mise en abyme in practice. So, on the one hand we see the range of different structural possi- bilities presented by the mise en abyme, and on the other we find out the way in which these possible structures are actually used, sith all the questions this raises: what kinds of mises en abyme does the nowveau roman use, synchronically and diachronically? Which kind predominates? What functions do the mises en abyme fulfil within the respective structure of each text? What strategy are they part of? ‘And, lastly, why is this strategy adopted? ‘The problem of how these two sections of the study are linked comes down to the question of the relationship between literary Preface 3 theory and literary history (taken as a diachronic study of the change in type and function of a particular literary device); it also clearly overlaps with the more complex problem of the relationship between literary theory and literary criticism. In other words, part III pre- supposes part Il, from which it takes its descriptive and investigative methods. However, this process involves neither repetition nor simple illustration of part IJ, but eather a description and an in- terpretation of actual variations in the use of the device. Because of this specific division, nothing would in theory prevent the nouveaw roman from being discussed in part I? In fact, my examples will avoid this as much as possible, in order, of course, to avoid giving someone reading the final section the feeling that s/he has read it somewhere before; but also in order to prepare for the critical analysis in part II, In fact, keeping the nowveaw roman out of part IE prepares for the future: ic will in no way detract from the uniqueness of the nowveaw roman if this lies merely in the original use of the types and functions of the mise ev abyme that I isolate in part II; and it will also allow this uniqueness to be depicted in terms of difference, if it arises from a metamorphosis of the mise en abyme such that it cannot be reduced to these types and functions. This division therefore seems likely to encourage the greatest possible interplay between the theoretical and historical/crtical sections and thereby to make the examination of the nouveau roman more interesting, It is easy to see what is at stake in this examination; by showing whether the nowveaw roman resists or fits into a framework (which would be all the better as @ guide to its novelty for having been constructed from examples drawn not from the nowvean roman, but rather from the very representational and expressive works whose traditions, as we know, the nouveau roman secks to break with), it will reveal its ability to challenge (or at worst to conform to) recog: nized forms: it will show whether, and how far, it still forms part of the great Western artistic tradition (of art as mimesis) - or whether, and since when, it has broken with this tradition. To appreciate through a structural transformation the metaphysical change that has come about in and through recent literature ~ this isin fact the ultimate goal of this study, which aims rigorously to take account of our transition to modernity.PARTI Variations on a conceptli André Gide’s shields 1 THE FIRST REFERENCE In order to clarify what should be understood by mise en abyme, itis ‘most appropriate to return quickly to the sources and to reproduce the text in which the mise en abyme is mentioned for the first time. Gide wrote in 1893: In a work of ar, I rather like to find thus transposed, at the level ofthe characters the subject of the work itself. Nothing sheds more light on the work or displays the proportions of the whole work more accur ately, Thus, in paintings by Memling or Quentin Mews, a small dark. convex mirror reflects, in its turn, the interior of the room in Which the action of the painting takes place. Thus, in a slightly diferent way. in Velaquer’s Las Meninas. Finally, in literature, there is the scene in which a play is acted in Hamlet this also happens in many other plays. In Wilhelm Meister, there are the puppet shows and the festivities in the castle. In The Fall of the House of Usher, there isthe pice that is read to Roderick ete. None ofthese examples is absolutely accurate. What would be more accurate, and what would explain better what 'd wanted to do in my Cabiers, in Narcisse andi La Tentative, would be a comparison with the device from heraldry ‘that involves putting a second representation of the original shield “en abyme’ within it! This text, which is more often quoted than interpreted by critics inclined to think that Gide is speaking about himself,? is more complex than it appears at first sight. Although it is more correct, and concise than the passage from Hugo that itis perhaps recalling,*8 Variations on a concept its apparent clarity becomes blurred if one reads it carefully; despite its straightforward appearance, it is so enigmatic that one starts to wonder whether this ‘charter’, which gives the mise em abyme its status in literature, is not responsible, to a certain extent, for the ‘uncertainty surrounding it today. Before coming to a conclusion on this question, by considering at source the subtle ambiguities of the passage, let us try to note some basic points from it: 1 the mise en abyme, as a means by which the work turns back on itself, appears to be a kind of reflexion; 7 its essential property is that it brings out the meaning and form of the work; 3 as demonstrated by examples taken from different fields, it is a structural device that is not the prerogative either of the literary narrative or indeed of literature itself:* and 4 it gets its name from a heraldic device that Gide no doubt dis covered in 1891. ‘The last point leads to some further remarks: (@) The word abyme here is a technical term. I shall not therefore speculate on its many connotations® or hasten to give it a meta- physical meaning: instead of invoking Pascal’s *gouffre’, the abyss of the Mystics, Heidegger's ‘Abgrund’, Ponge’s ‘objeu” or Derrida’s ‘differance’, I shall rather refer to a treatise on heraldry: ‘ “Abyss” (*Abime”) ~ the heart of the shield. A figure is said to be “en abime” when it is combined with other figures in the centre of the shield, but does not touch any of these figures."? (b) Although the word still remains allusive, we can now under stand what Gide had in mind: what fascinated him must have been the image of a shield containing, in its centre, a miniature replica of itself. (© Rather than worrying about whether heraldry contains such a device, of whether it is simply a product of Gide’s imagination,® J shall take the analogy on its own terms, in other words, as an attempt to explain a structure that could be defined as follows: a “mise en abyme' is any aspect enclosed within a work that shows 4a similarity with the work that contains it ‘Once this has been clarified, we can return to the text of the ‘André Gide's shields 9 ‘charter’ for more information. It is here, as we shall see, that the real problem arises. As soon as we try to go beyond the straight: forward points just listed and to deal more accurately with Gide’s text as a coherent whole, it becomes unclear and seems to make a definitive interpretation impossible. It is fairly clear how the text becomes more and more difficult: the burden for the interpreter is that s/he cannot avoid coming up against the problem of the relation’ ship between its three elements. What is the relationship on the one hand between the pictorial and the literary examples, and on the other hand between these two sets of examples respectively and the mise en abyme? To put it another way, which highlights the rel fevance of these questions to this study, is it valid to suppose that these three levels are interchangeable, to illustrate the procedure from heraldry through Hamlet, for example, and to assimilate the concept of mise en abyme to that of the mirror? The study has no chance of success unless we begin by dividing up Gide’s text into its diferent strata, since if this structural approach is not taken, two essential elements will inevitably be misunder stood. “The first is that the passage is truncated and that the “thus” ofits first sentence refers to La Tentative amoureuse, mentioned at the end of the text as an example of the mise en abyme. So the first important conclusion we reach is that the text has a circular struc: ture. It starts off implicitly with the mise en abyme and ends up explicitly with it ‘The second point to consider is that the ambiguity of this circular text lies in the three successive “thus’es and in the “finally that follows on from these. The argument slides from La Tentative amoureuse, which is definitely referred to, from one adverb to another (‘thus ... thus... thus . .. finally") weaving the various ‘examples interchangeably together, until the slide is halted by the ‘unexpected phrase ‘none of these examples is absolutely accurate’, which puts them into perspective. From this fact alone, one initial conclusion is clear: one cannot do justice to Gide’s fundamental intentions by purely and simply assimilating the mise en abyme to the pictorial and literary examples that prefigure it. In the final analysis, the only thing the heraldic ‘metaphor does ~ and it does this better than any other metaphor is, to express what Gide ‘wanted to do’ in some of his books. The10 Variations om a concept problem - which rears its head again - is from now on to account for the particular suitability ofthis metaphor. To understand it correctly, we can do no better than to start negatively, by showing why the other analogies are inadequate. Following the order of Gide’s text, 1 shall therefore begin by considering the pictorial tradition mentioned by Gide, and in particular its main exponent (although Gide does not refer to him): Van Eyck 2. APPROXIMATIONS Pictorial examples By exploiting certain natural reflective properties (notably the unique power of revelation), a well-placed mirror can enable us to see what is going on behind our backs, and a combination of mirrors can enable us to sce ourselves in profile and so on. Van Eyck uses mirrors to compensate for the limits of our field of vision and to show us what usually lies beyond it. With the help of a mistor, The Woman at Toilet (a painting now lost) allowed the spectator to contemplate the hidden side of her body.? Similarly, in the famous Amolfini Marriage, what is invisible is made visible by the same device. But here the artifice is even more subtle, since the little convex mirror hung on the back wall allows us to see, behind and between the couple, people standing in the doorway of the room, whom only the couple can actually see. These are the wedding guests, among whom (if we are to believe the famous inscription above the trick-mirror - “Johannes de eyck fuit hic’) was the painter himself. Effecting an encounter, and showing Van Eyck’s artistic self-awareness, the trick-mirror (and its duplication the large signa ture in Gothic script) is like a sacrament that authenticates, conse- crates and immortalizes the moment of a union. ‘Similar examples of the use of a convex mirror are rare in painting, which enables us to identify with a fair amount of certainty the works that Gide is referring to, even though he does not name them. ‘Thus his allusion to Memling is likely to be a reference to the Martin Van Newenboven Diptych which the young Gide certainly had time to admire in July 1891 at the Hopital Saint-Jean in Bruges.! The right-hand panel shows a three-quarter portrait of the donor at prayer. The leftthand one depicts a Virgin and Child, the André Gide's shields uw Virgin holding an apple, Behind the Madonna, the little convex mirror, which reflects her back, also captures the image - given the supposed angles of the panels ~ of Martin Van Newenhoven, this time in profile, adoring the Infant Jesus. Although He is excluded from the reflected scene, His supernatural presence does appear in the rays of light from His aura, which pass through the mieror, sanetifying and uniting in a single communion the two characters who are re-presented As for Van Eyck’s last pupil and heir, Quentin Matzys, it is probable that when Gide refers to him, he is thinking of the work in the Louvre called The Banker and his Wife or The Man Weighing Gold. In this work, the convex mirror has the same ‘spying’ func- tion that it has in the Arnolfini Marriage, but here it goes far beyond the space being represented, revealing, set back, a person in a red hat ‘with a piece of paper in his hand (cither the painter himself or (more probably) the usurer’s client) and a window seen in perspective, which reveals the Italian influence. The key innovation here is the placing of the mirror at an angle. Finally, in Las Meninas,12 the mirror is facing the spectator, asin ‘Van Eyck’s picture. But in Velasquez. the technique is more realistic in that the “rear-view" mirror in which the royal couple appeat is not convex, but flat, Whereas the reflexion in the Van Eyck recon: stituted objects and people within a space that was condensed and distorted by the curvature of the micror, Velasquez’s picture spurns such playing with the laws of perspective. It projects on to the canvas the exact image of the King and Queen, who are standing in front of the picture. Moreover, by showing the people the painter is looking at, and also, by the use of the mirror, the people who are looking at him, Velasquez's painting achieves a reciprocity of contemplation that creates an oscillation between the interior and the exterior, making the image ‘come out of the frame’,(3 while inviting the visitors to enter the picture. We could continue this investigation, but it has already shown why Gide eventually dismissed these pictorial examples as analogies for the mise en abyme. His idea of the device, as we have seen, was that it resulted in an accurate reflexion of the subject of the work itself. This is not the function of the mirrors enclosed in the paint- ings of Van Eyck, Memling, Matzys and Velasquez. It is not merely that they only partially reflect “the interior of the room in which the12 Variations om a concept action of the painting takes place’; the duplication that they give rise 1, far from being faithful, is distorted by the convexity of the mirror or, at any rate, by its reversal of right and left. Moreover, this re- flexion is problematic, since it is topologically necessary, for the characters actually to be seen, for them to be standing in front of the picture, facing it (the person we assume to be the usurer’s client, the royal couple in Las Meninas, and the guests at the Arnolfini Marriage) ~ which prevents them a priori from being duplicated in the picture. For the optical illusion sought in all these pictures, which is their main attraction, lies in bringing into the painting items that (fictively) are outside it: the reflexions provided in the mirrors complete the picture and function primarily as a medium for interchange. At the frontier between interior and exterior, they area ‘way of taking two-dimensionality to its limits. It is therefore not surprising that these pictorial examples were not able to retain Gide’ interest in any lasting way. The role they fulfil - making the external intrude upon the internal ~ was merely a rather flawed approximation of the structure Gide had in mind, Is it the same for the examples from literature? It is to these that I shall now turn. Literary examples Of all the internal duplications in the history of literature, none is more famous than the ‘play within the play” in Hamlet. Critics have ro difficulty in claiming that it represents the mise en abyme in its purest form, and are not alone in giving it the status of a paradigm, Even before Gide, writers referred to it in order to illuminate their own practice of duplication,!* and some works, while avoiding explicit reference to Hamlet, even use it in the same way that Shake: speare uses “The Murder of Gonzago’ - for reflexive purposes." In the brief theory of literature he expounds to the players (Act Ill, scene ii), Hamlet assigns to the theatre the permanent function of holding ‘the mirror up to nature’. !® This is precisely the theory that the central scene of the play puts into practice. By representing the King’s own crime and the Queen's infidelity, the ‘play within the play’ holds up an accusing mirror to the guilty parties, pricks Claudius’s conscience through this simulation, gives the (over-> scrupulous Hamlet irrefutable proof that he has not been duped by André Gide's shields 1B an evil spirit and finally inspires him to take action, confident he is in the right. Since the success of the play within the play!” is proof of how faithful itis to the primary plot, itis hard to see why this example did not find favour with Gide. Did he disqualify it because the primary function of the reflexion is to make the action ofthe play progress, so that it fulfils, to some extent, an instrumental role? Nowhere, how: ever, does Gide lead us to believe that the mise en abyme has to be gratuitous. What he does demand, on the other hand, is, as we have already seen, that it reflect the subject of the work itself. Is this the case here? Note that the play within the play is called “The Murder cof Gonzago’, and not, for example, *The Melancholy Prince’. So what it reflects is not the procrastinations of the hero (which is the true subject of the play that bears his name), but rather the “pre history” of the play that is related to the audience by the Ghost. It is therefore a mistake to suppose that it strictly parallels the plot. It repeats the account given by the Ghost, and makes actual the events that preceded the beginning of the play: as such it invites us to put it con a par with the inadequate analogy of mirrors in paintings.!® Such parallels with the pictorial examples do not seem to apply to the reflexions in Wilhelm Meisters Lebrjabre. The puppet scenes in Book I symbolize the novel just as the magic lantern does in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and identify the dominant themes of the story right from the start as theatricality and the division in ‘Wilhelm between his imagination and his sense of reality. Since this conflict is to change and be resolved as the hero’s education pro: ‘presses, the reflexions that point to it can only be imperfect. They can either reflect the conflict in @ general way - as in the initial Puppentheater ~ and as such inevitably remain diffuse, or they can claim to take his development into account — like the “festivities in the castle” (Book II) - thereby limiting themselves to a partial revel ation. This double disadvantage alone, inherent in the Bildungs roman,'® would explain why Gide only temporarily adopted these reflexions as an analogy, discarding them later. Gide’s reluctance to retain ‘the piece that is read to Roderick’ is less easy to explain, because the explicit duplication provided by The ‘Mad Trist in Poe’s story is undeniably extensive. This Gothic novel has a double function: an emblematic one ~ it is clearly associated with the protagonist, and through its ttle it serves as the device of4 Variations on a concept Usher's lugubrious personality and morbid exaltation; and a pre figurative one, since it relates, as if in counterpoint, and in veiled terms, the very story of the visions of Madeline. So it is regrettable that Gide did not explain why he rejected an example that apparently should have been satisfactory. Did it after all contravene some over- riding requirement that, for the moment, eludes us? This hypothesis would seem more plausible if we could sueceed in proving that, besides examples taken from his own works, Gide had another unimpeachable example of mise en abyme, which he also however rejected for the same mysterious reason. Fortunately such proof (albeit indirect) can be found two pages before the charter (which dates from August or September 1893). Gide notes in his Journal (in August 1893): ‘I shall have to translate Heinrich vom Ofterdingen without delay.’ Now, Novalis's novel contains, as we shall see,2” a perfect example of mise en abyme, which corresponds in every way to Gide’s definition. How can one account for the fact that the potential translator does not mention the reflexion in this, ‘work, which must have been in the forefront of his mind? ‘This strange omission, while restoring to our text its enigmatic quality, peshaps points us in a direction that might clarity it. The ‘only explanation, if there is one, is that, however irreproachable the reflexion in Heinrich von Ofterdingen is, like the one in The Fall of the House of Usher, it does not really convey what Gide ‘wanted to do’. To understand what he really did want to do, we must put our text back into its context: I wanted to indicate, in La Tentative amoureuse, the influence the book has on the author while he is writing it. For, as we give birth to it it changes us and alters the course of our life; in the same way that in physics, when liquid is poured out of filled floating containers in fone direction, the containers move in the opposite direction, our actions have a retroactive effect onus. ‘Our actions act upon us as much as we act upon them’, said George Eliot So was sud because a dream of unattainable joy torments me. [tell of this dream, and, dissociating the joy from the dream, make it mine. ‘The dream thus loses its mystique and I am joyful as @ result ‘A subject cannot act on an object without retraaction by the object fon the subject that is acting. It is this reciprocity that [ wanted ¢o indicate ~ not one’s relationship with other people, but with onesel. The active subject is oneself. The retroactive thing is a subject one André Gide’s shields 15 imagines, So it's a kind of indirect action on oneself that I conveyed in La Tentative amoureuse it's also just a tale. Luc and Rachel too want to achieve their desire, but whereas in ‘writing of mine, | achieved it in an ideal way, they dream of the park ‘of which they can only see the gates and which they want to go inside in realty: so they feel no joy. In a work of art, I rather like to find thus, transposed ... the device from heraldry that involves putting a second representation of the original shield “en abyme” within it. The retroaction of the subject on itself has always appealed to me. e's typical of the psychological novel. An angry man tells a story = this is the subject of the book. A man telling 2 story is not enough = it ‘must be an angry man and there must always bea continuing elation ship between the man’s anger and the story he’s telling.?" ‘These comments pave the way for a productive line of enquiry. So ‘as not to jump the gun, I shall first consider the phenomenon that it is the mise en abyme’s function to bring to ight ~ the way in which the writer constructs the writing, and vice versa. 3. TWINNING This reciprocity, as Gide presents it in his Journal, seems to be clarified by what psychoanalysis tells us about linguistic commun cation (and this is perhaps not entirely coincidental): namely that the “sender gets back from the receiver his/her own message in inverse form’?? and that, mediated through the desire of the other, my ‘words construct me by anticipating the response they seek. Gide, years before Lacan, observed this on many occasions, and it would riot be impossible for his whole aewore to be understood in terms of 44 methodical attempt to create according to this law. To use this, law in order to give solidity to a being who was receptive, fluid and existed ad libitum,2> and at the same time to avoid the aspects of this, law that alienate a spirit who dreams of self-suificiency (the inevitable recourse to the other, who, by constructing me, falsifies me) - this is, at its most basic level, the unavoidable requirement of Gide's wish for sincerity. Can one ever hope to satisly it? All of Gide's work aims to enable him to do so. The choice of the medium of ‘writing is itself part of this strategy. By writing, Gide becomes his own interlocutor. But unless this introspection is combined with16 Variations on a concept cone particular condition, it still only provides a precarious solution: for although it excludes the (de-Yormative personality of the other, it replaces it with the captivating and no less specious character in the novel. In order to derive a real benefit from the transaction, one has to contrive to ward off the very otherness of the fictive character, and, in order to do so, to impose sufficient constraints on oneself: in other words to create it in one’s own image, or, better still, to make it engage in the very activity that one is oneself undertaking in creating it - the writing of a novel (The Notebooks of André Walter) or the telling of a story (La Tentative amoureuse) It is tempting to compare this narcissistic doubling with the creative experience, which Lacan calls the ‘mirror stage’ or ‘mirror phase’.2# since this strategy of auto-generation through writing reveals a perversion on the symbolic level that results in an even ‘worse lapse into the imaginary. Thus we know, through a fortuitous note in the Journal, that Gide sometimes wrote in front of a mirror 80 as to get inspiration from talking and listening to his reflexion: am writing on the small pice of furniture of Anna Shackleton’s that wwas in my bedroom in the rue de Commailles. That's where I worked! liked it because I could see myself writing in the double mirror of the desk above the block I was writing on. [looked at myself after each sentence; my reflexion spoke and listened to me, kept me company and sustained my enthusiasm > ‘The reflexive language of writing, exalted by the reflected image of the writer; the mirror of his early years recalling the first fusion of body and language: what we have here is doubtless a typical reappro priation scenario, which only a psychoanalyst could interpret full. For my part I shall only take two points from it: the first is that this reflexion through writing is based on an imaginary reflexion, which allows the writer obsessively to enjoy the image of himself as he wants (0 sce himself - as a writer; the second point is that the imaginary reflexion that aims to restore the immediate and con timuous relationship between self and self comes up in this scenario against the discontinuity and the shift caused by the very activity of swriting itself! Gide may well imagine himself a writer by means of this narcissistic image, but he can no more see himself writing than cone can stop and watch oneself walking. ‘I could see myself writing’, he states.2° But as soon as it is uttered, this statement is belied by André Gide's shields 7 the detail that follows: ‘I looked at myself after each sentence.” No doubt this means that the reappropriation cannot be complete, but also that while the two reflexions are dependent on each other, they remain distinct: whereas the visual experience of looking in a mirror is instantaneous, the writer and his reflexion can only speak to, and answer, each other in turn However, we must not infer that the mere acceptance of this diachronic constraint can alone create a work “en abyme” as Gide conceives of it. In order to achieve this form, another condition must be met: the work itself must point up the reflexion that is taking place; or, more precisely, the reflexion must become the subject of the reflexion. La Tentative amoureuse provides a better example of this ‘second-degree’ activity than do the Notebooks,2” and since itis in the context of this later text that Gide refers metaphorically to heraldry, a concise analysis of this work may be sufficient to enable us to define fairly precisely what Gide’s own version of the mise en abyme was. ‘The author who writes the “Envoi’ is tormented by a dream of happiness he knows is unattainable, but he achieves it by proxy: he makes a narrator (with whom he identifies) tell a (fictive) lady the story of Luc and Rachel’s happy love affair. From the beginning of this experimental tale, a certain complicity is apparent between the two couples. Their respective situations are similar, apart from the fact that Luc and Rachel are happy. Rachel corresponds to the woman who is listening to the narrator, and Luc is such a perfect extension of the narrator that {rom time to time Luc takes on his role ‘when he is with his companion: he tells stories. He does not ramble: he transposes his own love life in the same way that the narrator transposes his as he creates Luc’s; Luc’s narratives go beyond their immediate addressee (Rachel) to affect the subject and the object of the narration - the ‘narrateur’ and the ‘narrataire’ 2° whose destiny they recapitulate and anticipate, and it is through this fluctuation between the two narrative levels that the retroaction can occur, Initially, there is a contrast between the narrator's sadness and the lovers’ happiness (° “Madame, I shall tell this story to you. You know that our sad love affair lost its way on the moor” ")2° but soon the balance changes and Luc and Rachel's boredom (which over- takes the narrator - * "Madame, this story bores me”, p. 54) is followed by the triumphant realization that his illfated desire should18 Variations on a concept not distract him from his more ambitious plans (* “Iam happy; I am alive, I have great things in mind. I've finished telling this boring story: great things now await us” °, p. 58). So the imaginary identi fication that the narrator himself contrived finally has a great thera- peutic value for the story-teller. Restored by his fictional work, he can devote himself to more real adventures with a joyful heart.°° ‘The example of La Tentative amoureuse is clear enough to enable us to try to formulate what the structure of Gide's mise en abyme is What distinguishes it from everything else is that it attributes to @ character in the narrative the very activity of the narrator in charge of the narration. This is what is achieved when the ‘je’ of La Tentative amoureuse is taken over by Luc. If this taking over of the narrative is, different from that initiated in The Arabian Nights, and used, for example, in Le Roman comique ot the picaresque novel, this is because the secondary narrative in Gide reflects the primary one in so far as the process of retroaction requires an analogy between the situation of the character and that of the narrator, in other words between the thematic content of the main story and that of the story contained within it. One can therefore define Gide's mise en abyme as a coupling of a twinning of activities related to a similar object; or as a relationship of relationships, the relation of the narrator N to his/her story S being the same as that of the narratoricharacter n to hishher story s. From this itis possible to understand a certain number of key facts; first among these is that the ‘charter’ owes part of its ambi- uity to a word whose sense is not made clear: the word ‘subject’. ‘As soon as we realize that the “subject of the work itself’, for Gide, is relational (the relationship between the work and the person writing it) - and is in other words duplicated as soon as the work begins - we can see why Heinrich von Ofterdingen was neglected and The Fall of the House of Usher challenged as examples. Since Novalis’s novel and Poe’s tae tell stories and do not contain the reciprocal construc tion of a story and a narrator, the duplication they provide only comprises two of the four terms required (N'S::'s), and so could not satisfy a writer who had chosen, as a problematic subject, the prob- lematic of the subject.3! ‘What is less easy to understand in this context is why Gide came to give a privileged position to a metaphor that, because it was not able to designate simultaneously the reflexion of a narrator, of André Gide's shields 19 story and of the dialectic between them, doubtless applied to his own work, but even more accurately to his other examples. It may well be that this comment reveals that it is impossible to explain fully a choice, the basis of which is not entirely evident, but in both sets of examples the image of the “shield within the shield’ does represent the duplication of the ‘subject’ (which is ‘simple’ in Novalis and Poe, and relational in Gide) of the work within the work; itis there- fore appropriate as an image of all works that use the muse en abyme, and, al in all, this device is now sufficiently defined by the prelimi: nary statement of the ‘charter’. In other words, as long as the nature of the reflected subject is irrelevant, we can return, after many a detour, to our initial belief - namely, that when the expression mise cen abyme first appeared, it unequivocally designated what other authors cal ‘the work within the work’ *? or “internal duplication’.** But now the unavoidable question arises: is this how it has been and is today understood by critics? It must be admitted that this is often not the case. Did Gide contribute to these misinterpretations? This possibility certainly cannot be excluded. But to hold the text from the Journal as mainly responsible for the uncertainty that exists today would be to forget that we have not yet got all the facts at our fingertips7 A critical heritage Let us continue our enquiry - or rather state straight away the conclusion it will allow us to arrive at. As far as the charter is con- cerned, this conclusion is ‘case withdrawn’ For if most critics have not interpreted this key document as they should have, it is not because they have run into problems due to the examples it contains (or due to any intrinsic difficulty: itis, more simply, that they have become aware of it, and read it, through C. E. Magny and P. Lafille." One fairly clear indication of this indirect awareness of the charter is the use, by various authors, of the expressions “composition” and “construction en abyme’, which are certainly derived from Lafille” Magny’s role as 2 gorbetween seems to me to be sufficiently proved by one simple observation: if she had not been the main channel through which the charter became known, the term mise en abyme, which she coined,* would not have been accepted so readily by other critics. Besides, it can only be because of her role as initiator and protagonist of the term that intelligent people felt it appropriate to praise her surprisingly highly. If they had taken the trouble to check her statements, they would no doubt have been more circum spect about her commentary, whose capacity for encumbering and obscuring the meaning of the charter is still considerable today. This earliest gloss is the source of the misinterpretation of the charter: it does more than get in the way of the text it is supposed to comment on, it obscures what it sets out to illuminate and it confuses what it should be trying to unravel From out point of view this confusion is not uninstructive, and I shall therefore examine in some detail how it came about, frequently referring to the text itself. A critical heritage a 1 THE ART OF SIDESTEPPING According t0 Magny, Gide’s device, later imitated by Huxley, allows the construction of an ‘open supernovel’, defined ‘by the fact that all ofits possible meanings form an infinite set’ (Histoire de roman francais, p. 269). One can establish whether @ novel really does present such a “set” of meanings by referring, as a mathema tician would, to Bolzano Weierstrauss’s criterion: An infinite set is recognizable by its capacity to be put in a term-to- term relationship with a genuine subset of tsel, i.e applied to, and as it were referred back to, this subset, Thus the set of whole numbers can be applied to the set of even numbers, or to the set of perfect squares, despite the fact that all of them are contained ini: simply by ‘writing next to each number the double, oF the square ofthis number, ‘ne can ist all posible terms ofeach ofthese two series. As early as 1893, Gide considered applying this proces of “refering back’, of ‘reflexion’ (in the optical sense), to the novel, and actually did so in The Notebooks of André Walter, La Tentative amoureuse and Le Traite du Narcisse. (Ibid.) This cavalier comparison is followed by a quotation from the charter, which Magny links to The Coumterfeiters, Paludes and (more loosely) to Huxley’s Point Counter Point, She adds ‘One could find yet further literary examples besides those mentioned, by Gide: for instance, in Ulysses the conversation inthe library about Hamlet, where we find a reprise, “en abyme’ as Gide says Joyce, who was fond ofall technical languages, would certainly have liked this term taken from heraldry), of some ofthe main themes of the book: in particular the theme of paternity in its two aspects - the spiritual and the temporal. (Tbid.) One might wish for more precision here: what is the status of this supplementary example? Is Ulysses an impeccable illustration of the ‘mise en abyme? If so, is this definition of the device as the “reprise” ‘of ‘some of the main themes of the book’ compatible with her other definition of it as ‘the device of “the novelist’s diary” ’ (p. 271)? These questions remain unresolved But more seriously, while she pays homage to heraldry, Magny2 Variations on a concept does not think it necessary to consult works on it, preferring ~ with- cout knowing any of the facts ~ to rely on her intuition alone: Without wanting to push the mathematical comparison too far, i is easy t0 imagine intuitively the infinite series of parallel mirrors and the ‘internal space’ this device introduces into the very heart of the work (interior designers use similar mirror effects to make small rooms look larger) and also the attraction, the sense of metaphysi vertigo we feel as we peer into this world of reflexions which suddenly ‘opens up beneath out feet; in shor, the ilusion of mystery and depth inevitably produced by chese stories whose structure is thus ‘en bye’, in the felicitous phrase of heraldry. (p. 271) I would not dispute that the mise em abyme in this sense evokes the idea of the infinite.° But is this the same thing as Gide's mise en abyme? Has not the image of the shield within the shield been warped by a shift in logic here? Everything in the above text ~ its style, its vocabulary, its imagery - reveals the distortion: the tech nical term ‘abyme’ has become a victim of its connotations, has been infected with its metaphysical meaning, and has found itself evoking those images best suited to this metaphysical meaning: ‘mathematical infinity, an ‘infinite series of parallel mirrors’, etc.” ‘And yet these are not the only images that crowd forward under ‘Magny’s voluble pen. Unable to control her metaphors, she piles up the most varied comparisons for this single subject: parallel mirrors, mathematical infinity, a feeling of vertigo, a tin whose designs are infinitely repeated (p. 271), the Leibnizian impression of a series of worlds each enclosed within another, in a dizzying series of re- flexions’ (p. 273), and also ~ in a quite different sense ~ monads and microcosms/macrocostns (p. 272) ‘When she notes, for example (pp. 30ff.), that Huxley attributes to Philip Quarles his own wish to create a multiple series of super imposed vicarious novelists - But why draw the line at one novelist? Why not place a further novelist within the second (imaginary) novel, and so on ad infinitum (as on packets of Quaker Oats there is a Quaker holding in his hand ‘a packet of cats, on which there is another Quaker holding another packet, on which there isa further Quaker etc). At the tenth remove ‘one could have a novelist who would tell the story in terms of algebraic symbols, oF of internal organs, or of reaction times (pp. 27 f)° ~ A critical heritage 2B she feels no need for any discrimination between the structures of different novels. She passes from Gide to Balzac (L’Auberge rouge cetc,) and from Balzac to Proust (noting that Swann in Love ‘is similarly “en abyme” in relation to the story of “Marcel”, whose major themes it prefigures’ — p. 273), she moves from one author to another who seems to be connected, moving from resemblance to similarity, from error to misunderstanding, from impression to effect and from trope to trick, managing by this process of almost universal analogy to touch on everything without going deeply into anything, drifting along until the reader has lost all his/her bearings: itis impossible, at this stage, to formulate precisely what the mise en abyme is for Magny. ‘Alter this glissando, no more light is shed, for the last pages of the book are hardly any clearer than the previous ones. From her assertion that “the aesthetic effect of the “mise en abyme” is this impression of broadening and deepening, of limitless complexity, that I have just described’ (p. 274) one might infer that she is opting, in her heart of hearts, for infinite reflexion (illustrated by the packet of Quaker Oats and quoted earlier in regard to Huxley) as her definition. This interpretation seems to be corroborated by the importance she attaches to The Counterfeiters, which ‘continually reminds us of the impossibility for each human being of liberating himself sufficiently from his “metaphysical situation”, from his human condition and from his personal characteristics to take a completely impartial view of reality’ (p. 274). Now, 1k in an analogous, but a it were inverse way that in extent philosophy what Jaspers calls ‘the cipher of transcendence” emerges. Jean Wahl wetes in his Etudes herkegsniionnes: “One might formate ths the problem posed by Jaspes's philosophy: what ithe philsophical value ofthe phrse: one cannot philrophize without entering a reality where one cannot say sentences like: one cannot ptilosophive without entering a redlty where one cannot say sen- tences ke, ec?” The reader wll immediately have grasped the analogy between this, the ultimate essence of Jespes'sphilasephy, and the device ofthe mise en abyme': the image ofthe packet of (Quaker Oats precisely enpresses this structure of realty where one cannot say sentences lke et. (p. 276) But is this Magny’s last word? Even this conclusion, painfully arrived at, seems to be withdrawn by this comment:24 Variations on a concept However, everyone would no dubs also agree with Jaspers that even this truth ~ ‘there cannot be anything other than a personal philos cophy’ —is contradictory, since is itself a personal statement claiming to be a general proposition. This is not sophistry, deriving from a ‘dumsy (or over skilful) use of language, but rather « paradox or a scandal, inherent in the structure of the human being. One cannot formulate this truth, which is perhaps the philosophical essence of the novel, in abstract terms without producing, a vicious circle which reveals the essence of transcendence ~ without seeing, beneath our feet, the gaping ‘abyss’ (‘abyme’) that the intellect cannot contem- plate without a sense of vertigo. (p. 277) ‘The earlier comparisons therefore give way to a new image: the vicious circle - and this time depth and vertigo are associated with paradox and aporia.® If no definite conclusion is therefore possible as a consequence of this new meaning of the mise en abyme, is this to say that in this historic chapter it isa term that can be used and adapted at will? A closer examination of Magny’s use of it reveals that, despite every- 2, this is not in fact the case. Hidden beneath the critical hotch potch (an idea of which I have perhaps given), a latent sense of order an be discovered: an unsuspected logic that has Iain behind this sliding from one analogy to another. ; This logic can be perceived if one tries to classify the paradigms that have emerged to describe the nature of the mise en abyme, In reality, the metaphors that have been used as comparisons for it can be grouped under three headings 1. ‘simple’ reflexion, represented by the shield within the shield, the microcosm and the monad (literary examples being Ulysses and Swann in Love); 2. infinite reflexion, also symbolized by monads, but particularly by the reference to mathematics, infinite parallel mirrors (two mirrors would in fact suffice!), the packet of Quaker Oats and Jean Wahl’s selfrepeating phrase about Jaspers’s philosophy (a literary example being the Utopian novel of Philip Quarles, Huxley's spokesman); and 3 paradoxical reflexion, represented by Magny"s commentary on jJean Wabi’s sentence ~ and by this sentence itself, which creates fan endless spiral. A critical heritage 25 The Counterfeiters seems to belong to each of these categories, although Magny does not help us understand why it has this triple allegiance. But what she does imply is that the mise en abyme - even for her ~ is possibly not an unstructured reality. 2. INDECISION AND CONJECTURE Does Lafille's work confirm, in those areas relevant to our enquiry Magny’s chapter, which it vouches for to some extent? It immedi ately seems different by virtue of the more technical ~ and quite ireproachable ~ definition it gives of the ‘aesthetic device which Gide will often use and which he will call composition “en abyme”, following the vocabulary of heraldry, to designate the reproduction ‘miniature, at the centre of the shield, of the shield itself. Gide initiates this procedure, which installs the problematic of the work at the heart of the work itself, in L'tmmoraliste’ (p. 25). Admittedly, Lafille uses the ‘shield within the shield’ interchangeably with the mirror metaphor (‘a mirror inside the narrative’ ~ p. 26 (ct. also pp. 113ff, and 207), ‘devices of reflexion and inclusion’ - p. 113), but this does not prevent him from making further valid comments oon the charter when he refers to it in respect of The Counterfeiters: “The Counterfeiters gives a characteristic illustration, as is well known, of the device of construction “en abyme”, of which Gide was so fond, whereby the primary work is reproduced at its very heart...” (p. 206). Tis exactly as if Lafille were assimilating quite simply mise en abyme - shield and mirror - to simple reflexion. But we should not draw hasty conclusions, for a few lines earlier Lafille had remarked: “Itis not unusual for this double structural change to produce a kind of vertigo, making it necessary to reflect carefully in order to find ‘out where one is and whether it is Edouard or Gide who is narrating Are we in Gide’s The Counterfeiters? Or in Edouard’s?” (ibid) ‘The impossibility of answering this question may derive from the possiblity of error, which is one of the characteristic attributes of paradoxical reflexion. Does this form part of Lafille's definition of the mise en abyme? This cannot be excluded; nor can the second category we discerned behind Magny’s remarks (infinite reflexion). Gide’s constant denigration of Point Counter Point, according to26 Variations on a concept Lafille, can be explained as jealousy ~ and understandable jealousy, since if Gide had deigned to read more of Huxley's novel, he ‘would have found a novelist, Philip Quarles, who is hero, spectator, and writer of a notebook, as Edouard with his Journal was in The CCounterfeiters. This reflexion within the novel is fiendishly extended into vertiginous series of reflexions. The device of the ‘shield’ and construction ‘en abyme’ are developed well beyond what Gide himself had imagined or achieved. Thus Philip Quarles says, seriously and caustically, ‘Put a novelist into the novel .. "1° While acknowledging that the work of both novelists contains an clement of vertigo, Lafille therefore admits that the one device of mise en abyme can have sometimes a simple, and sometimes 1 ‘developed’ (hyperbolic) form, which ultimately comes down to saying that his book, too, presents us with the three main elements intuitively’ discerned by Magny (although Lafille handles them more coherently), and with the equivalence ~ confirmed despite the charter ~ of the mise en abyme and the mirror. This repetition, which is odd to say the least, and the idea that is zgradually emerging ~ and is still problematic ~ of three versions of the mise en abyme, invite us to ask, with some urgency, whether ‘our definition of the device is adequate, Does it take into account the ‘complexity of this phenomenon? Why, in other words, is there such a divergence between our interpretation and that of these two critics of Gide? ‘One possible reason is that our respective readings of the charter ‘were not made against the same background. Whereas I was trying to grasp the concept through an intemal analysis of the famous page and by reference to the example Gide himself gives (Le Tentative ‘amourewse), Magny and Lafille were influenced by later works and interpreted the muse en abyme primarily in the light of The Counter {feiters.}2 Could it be that Gide’s later development made his state ‘ments of 1893 appear in a different light? Did he renounce his earlier views? Or modify them, make them precise, or broaden them? Our examination will clearly have to be extended in order to ‘outline answers to these questions, 3 Triple meaning ‘The thrust of my analysis shifted considerably in the last chapter: whereas I was trying to show that the current uncertainty about the mise en abyme derived essentially from its early commentators, whose work had the effec of abscuring things, these commentators themselves challenged me to prove that my definition of the term ‘was not contradicted or to be modified by the way Gide thought of the mise em abyme after 1893, Tt might seem quite appropriate that the accuser has been more of less put in the dock by those he set out to confound: but the fact remains that I cannot be comfortable with my definition until I have tested it, not against any theoretical view of Gide’s ~ the absence of which one can only deplore! — but against what my implicit opponents, Magny and Lafill, challenge it with: namely against The Counterfeiters (whose unexpected verdict will be final}: and, closer to the charter, against a work that is already auspicious ~ Paludes. 1 RETURN TO GIDE Paludes (1895) For Paludes to overthrow my analysis and to invalidate what I have painstakingly revealed, it would need not to use the ‘work within the work’ (whose very presence would give comfort to my definition), for any alternate narrators, or the famous procedure whereby the narrative reflects on the narrator.28 Variations on @ concept But rather than simply noting that their presence does confirm my definition, we need to go more deeply into the resurgence of these devices. For are we to conclude that in comparison with earlier ‘works Paludes contained no structural innovations? This has often been claimed;? but for such a conclusion to override the impression the reader has that Paludes does deviate from its predecessors, it ‘would be necessary for the consequences of this conclusion also to be true ~ namely that the new mise en abyme in Paludes can be straightforwardly assimilated to that in La Tentative amoureuse "An assimilation is possible, but not a complete one, ‘There are undeniably striking similarities: the ‘je’ who writes ‘Paludes" is projected on to another ‘je” (Tityre) who writes his diary “or ‘Paludes”” *;} Tityre’s swamp corresponds to the stagnation of his inventor; the narrator, contaminated by his character, ends up, like Tityre, taking pleasure in his sedentary existence. * But to leave it at this would simply amount to finding those elements we were looking for in advance, and simplifying a complex structure that, although containing these features, cannot be reduced to them. 'At any rate, this one-dimensional approach only serves to stiffen the resistance of the example of the mise en abyme in Paludes, which will not be satisfied until its originality is recognized. The first step towards clarifying this originality lies in realizing that the threefold unity we observe again in Paludes can take on dif ferent values and that on each occasion we have to concentrate on the way in which its variables are characterized, Once we have fixed on this as the appropriate approach to the problem, it appears that this characterization in Paludes has a peculiar quality: that of disturbing the programmatic equation to the point of making it either equal zero or not be soluble at all. Since only a change of value could explain this perversion of the matricial formula, we must attribute this to the only variation that affects our threefold unity: the change of ttle. “To recapitulate: in the Notebooks, the work Walter was writing was called ‘Allain’; in La Tentative amoureuse, “the story of Luc and Rachel" had no title; but the innovation in Paludes is precisely that it gives its name not only to the embedding work written by the ‘author,? but also to the embedded work written (fictively) by the narrator and (more fictively still) by the character the narrator sub: stitutes himself for when he writes: Tityre Triple meaning 29 Although it is at first sight of minimal importance, this concord- ance of title of itself creates an oscillation between the embedded and the embedding work, to which T shall return later. We may, how- ever, note at this stage that its disruptive aim finds the best possible ally in the personal pronoun of the narration: bearing in mind the concept of “shifters” in linguistics, one of whose peculiarities is their alienable character, since ‘je’ designates the person who says “ie”, it follows that this pronoun, which is self-referential and therefore capable of infinite mobility, ‘can only be identified through the discourse that contains it." Paludes, precisely because ofthe ttle it gives to its secondary narrative, makes the only context in which the various ‘je’s could be differentiated so ambiguous that they retain their original potentiality and can simultaneously refer to the inter- ittent ‘je’ of Tityre, the originating ‘je’ of the narrator and also ~ when the contextual meaning allows - the concealed ‘je” of the author. To use an image from a sphere often used by linguists, the zgame of chess, we can therefore say that the personal pronoun of Paludes produces a ‘fork’, whose main function is to provoke spec tacular concatenations of the three narrative levels. ‘Admittedly, such telescoping is rare with Tityre: protected by his proper name when the narrative is in the third person, he keeps his distance sufficiently, even when he says ‘je’, to discourage any identification with the other levels. However, such an identification cecurs continually between narrator and author.” and has a triple objective: tracking down the fleeting figure of the narrator and forcing him to renounce his anonymity: allowing the author to step cout of his role and to appropriate the name on the title-page; and giving the book an insoluble aspect through this interchange of function and identity. Are we in Gide's Paludes, or in the narrator's? The question Lafile asked in the context of The Counterfeiters cannot be answered here, since Paludes deliberately plays with problems of topology. Continually hesitating between interior and exterior, it takes us into a realm where eccentric and concentric circles intersect and where the mirror of the painters recurs, with all it symbolizes: the integration of the different into the same, the ‘oscillation between within and without Ie would be audacious to claim that this uncertain refation rules ‘out infinite reflexion. This is undoubtedly not present as far as the inserted works are concerned. But itis present, at least in outline, in30 Variations on a concept the alternation of narration that here comprises three terms (author narrator-character), all of which are clearly built upon each other, rather than two (as previously). ‘We must therefore admit that Paludes does in retrospect shed light on the vague theses of Magny and Lafille, and that if its mise en abyme proves me right as a *novel within the novel’, it does not prove them wrong as a ‘novel of the novel” or a ‘novel of the novel ‘of the novel” The Counterfeiters (1925) Despite having reached this already complex conclusion, it would be premature to pause here: we have only covered half of our journey, and we must continue and confront the key element that is still ‘missing from our inventory: Edouard’s diary in The Counterfeiters, This is the novel’s main organ of reflexion’ and forms an enclave within it which irresistibly evokes the image of the ‘shield within the shield”, But one thing is surprising: however much one looks for hhints from the author or scrutinizes the allusions made by the figures he has created, there is no indication that Edouard’ diary has any relationship with the heraldic device, On the contrary, just when one has decided that the relationship is too obvious to need to be signalled, Edouard surprisingly describes his diary as follows: “It is my pocket mirror’ (p. 144) ‘The implications of this statement are obvious. This substitution of the mirror for the heraldic metaphor counters, rather than supports, the charter and answers one of our questions: the fact that the heraldic image is supplanted by the mirror (or must at best coexist with it) clearly explains why Gide did not think it appropriate to return to the idea of the mise en abyme after 1893. In order to find out the reasons behind this, it may be enough to study the role of this mirror within the novel. : ‘Among its functions, two immediately demand our attention: those of focusing and of spying. To clarify the former, we can begin by comparing this ‘pocket- mirror’ with the mirror ‘carried along a road’. The important thing to note is that the parodic nature of the quasi-quotation chal: lenges a whole concept of the novel: by replacing anonymous neu irality with the first person Gide is targeting not only Stendhal, but Triple meaning 31 also the adherents of ‘objective’ realism, which The Counterfeiters refutes in its practice; he also invites us to infer that the observations centered in Edouard’s Journal come from a point of view that is just as partial (in both senses) as that of the other characters, ‘This filtering of the facts through a highly individualized vision is the fundamental subject of the book, and it is only revealed asa filter ing because Gide lets the characters narrate the events and also ensures that each fact is seen through different ‘lenses’ - and at least twice: by Edouard and by one or other of his friends in turn, ‘Apart from making the reader forsake his/her usual passivity and establish a form of truth from these divergent versions, this double or triple perspective, which regularly involves Edouard’s Journal, gives it an undeniable focusing quality: by giving one person's per spective a greater continuity than the others, it counters the tend cency to diffuseness and disintegration that tends to undermine all narratives that have a multiple focus. ‘And yet this mirror is not by any means limited to reflecting “the interior of the room in which the action of the painting takes place’, Like the trick-mirror of the painters, it gives the narrative more information by intercepting what passes through its field of vision. Tt is certainly likely that this “espionage” will operate to the advantage of the exposition of the plot: creating subtle flashbacks, the Journal achieves a conjunction of past and present. But its use is not limited to ‘catching up’ with what is necessary to understand the story; working within the action, it can capture the unknown, ‘catch’ certain events and in particular introduce aesthetic reflexions into the novel that clarify its purpose. We must therefore devote particu lu attention to the links between the theories of the vicarious novelist and the practice of the author, and, in more general terms, to the relationship between Gide’s novel and Fdouard’s virtual novel! ne thing is certain from the start, namely that this relationship is to be seen in terms of a paradox: since the two novels have the same title and an identical subject,!? and obey shared aesthetic principles," they will of necessity slide into one another, interchange, blur theit distinctions, mix up their authors and translate us into an ambivalent area where the principle of identity is continually abused. In other words the spy-mirror has less the role of integrating an ‘external’ ‘eality into the novel than of abolishing the opposition between32 Variations on a concept within and without, or rather achieving a sort of oscillation between them. This reversibility, which is most noticeable when Gide's novel evokes Edouard’s by calling it by its name, occasionally uses trickery to produce an all the more effective short circuit. To give just one example, in the following sentence the illicit intrusion of the Ueictic “here” {instead of ‘there”) combines with the artful use of the perfect (‘has been able’ instead of ‘will be able") to complete the Superimposition of the two levels: ‘It will be dificult in Les Faux ‘Monnayeurs”, writes Edouard in his Journal, “for it to be credible that the character who will play me here has been able, while remain: ing on good terms with his sister, not to know her children’ (Les Faux Monnayeurs (Paris, Gallimard, 1949, p. 116; cl, The Counter {feiters, p. 81) ‘Although such a refined use of ambiguity recalls certain tricks in Paludes, it does not mean that The Counterfeiters takes up the same discourse atthe point at which it was interrupted thirty years earlier: there are undeniable similarities between the two uses of the mise em abyme, bat these are paralleled by no less undeniable differences ‘This is shown in the way each text uses layers of narration: whereas in Paludes the narrator and the author were superimposed to the point that their writing activity was indistinguishable, the author of ‘The Counterfeiters takes over from Edouard in that he writes the work that Edouard plans, discusses, but is careful not to write, The two novels are separated as potential is from action, the two authors separated as theory is from practice; and it is by accumulating the differences that appear as so many complementary aspects of the same work that The Counterfeiters can state the theory it illustrates ‘and can present, by its internal twists, what normally cannot be Seen: the genesis of the book of the same title, Everything occurs as it, like the Remembrance of Things Past or one of Lacretelle's rnarratives,!> the novel, ‘the novel of the novel’, which is also necessarily “the novel of the novelist’, was presenting itself as a work whose main subject was its own production. 'A closer examination shows, however, that this is only one side of the story. Ihave already said that what makes The Counterfeiters & novel in which everything is reversible is the discontinuous tran~ sition between Edouard’s virtual novel and Gide’s novel. If, then, on the one hand everything invites us to posit a relationship of identity between them, everything on the other hand also dissuades us from Triple meaning 33 being certain of their correspondence, himself from his counterpart. ‘This is marked in various ways: by the use of a forename that distinguishes the vicarious novelist from his creator; by Gide’s refusal to delegate to his counterpart all of the conduct of the nar- ration; by the decisive way the author criticizes as Utopian the quest for a reconciliation between realism and the “pure novel’;!© by the very existence of the book we are reading and which proves that Gide is not fr his part taking up the idea thatthe story ofthe work is more interesting than the work itself (cl, The Counterfeiters, p. 174); and finally by the place reserved in the finished novel for “real facts’ (news items taken from press reports ~ the discovery of the counterfeit coin, Boris's suicide), which Edouard criticizes, con fessing that they make him feel ‘uncomfortable’. " Despite the many ways in which Edouard is accused (his theories are extreme and dogmatic, he is illogical, displays bad faith and ~ ‘most seriously ~ is idle), his condemnation does not irremediably disqualify him in Gide’s eyes. Despite all the differences between them, the author continues to use him occasionally as an official spokesman and to recognize himself in the depiction of Edouard. This combination of correspondence and discordance which is evident throughout the Logbook of The Coiners'? reveals an ambiguity that is productive on the novelistic level. Edouard not only gives Gide an alibi, but also allows him to play @ double game. By putting himself forward behind his mask, Gide is able to theorize while pretending to set no store by his theories; to give a glimpse of the genesis of the work while suggesting that it was different; to include in his book a critique that is positive or negative, depending oon whether Edouard is the subject or the object of it; and finally to resolve for himself the conflict between the ‘pure navel’ and the flux of life by adopting ‘the only possible aesthetic solution: putting into the impure novel one writes the theory of the pure novel itis imposs ible to write."18 We can therefore see that for Gide the mise en abyme, despite authorizing acrobatics and pushing the narrative to the limit, was far {com being merely a means of illusion to mystify the reader. Through the division of responsibilities it establishes in the work, it alone could be used fora theme that had also profoundly dominated Gide’s re the author dissociates34 Variations on a concept thought: the reconciliation of contingence and necessity, of vitalism and symbolism, of reality and ideal, and of life and art However, in order not to lose sight of our initial interest here, another element must be taken into account. Having concentrated fon describing the specific nature of the mise en abyme in The Counterfeiters, we have so far emphasized in particular selfinvolve- ment and Gide’s partial negations of it. The novel certainly does suggest a centripetal movement that induces it to close in on itself or to vacillate and hesitate between the two levels; but it also conceives of the reflexive process in terms of the dynamic centripetal mode of infinite expansion, Presenting the spectacle of an author who hands over toa substitute, who is himself then replaced by the character of a novelist writing a novel that is very likely also to be called The Counterfeiters, is to present a literary version of infinite regression. Ta comparison with the images of infinite reproduction we have discussed (such as the cocoa tin or the packet of Quaker Oats), the mise en abyme in The Counterfeiters takes the process even further, to the limits of the novel in the Logbook of The Coiners'? and beyond in Gide's Journals which in their turn comment on the progress of the novel and of the journal of the novel: the reflexion cannot be captured in a single mirror, but is projected, through various filters, in @ series of mirrors that open up dizzying per spectives. “There is @ great temptation to enter this labyrinth of reflexions, but if we did pursue these duplications to the fourth or fifth degree swe would risk losing sight of our goal, which was to check whether four definition was well founded. We already know that the definition will certainly have to be modified; now I shall return to my earlier considerations and attempt to take a synthetic view. From our limited perspective, what Paludes and The Counter {eiters show is that the charter of 1893 is completed and modified by ‘Gide’s subsequent practice. Retrospectively validating what Magny and Lafille had indistinctly glimpsed, our study has arrived at two conclusions we can summarize thus: 1 although Gide initially rejects the image of the mirror in favour cf the one from heraldry, he later reverses this decision and enjoins us, if not purely and simply to substitute the idea of mirror reflexion for that of the mise e7 abyme, at least to see the two terms as equivalent; and Triple meaning 35 2. since the mise en abyme shows itself to designate not only the ‘novel in the novel’, but also the ‘novel of the novel’ = which implies the ‘novel of the novelist” ~ it cannot be fully described in terms of the ‘work within the work’ or “internal duplication’. 2. GENERALIZATION ‘And yet the suspicion arises that this double conclusion might only apply to Gide: the only way toallay such a doubt would be to expand the investigation to include the theory and practice of other authors." This expansion does in fact provide perfect proof of these conclusions, and, without reproducing it here, I shall restrict myself to emphasizing the two points it assures us of: 1 the practice of most critics shows that the mise ew abyme and the mirror are sutficiently interchangeable for us to combine the two and to refer to ‘the mirror in the text’ whenever the device appears; and 2 the term mise en abyme is used unproblematically by authors to ‘group together a collection of distinct things. As in Gide, these can be reduced to three essential figures: (@) simple duplication (a sequence which is connected by simi- Tarity to the work that encloses it); () infinite duplication (a sequence which is connected by simi larity to the work that encloses it and which itself includes a sequence that .. . etc.): and (©) aporetic duplication (a sequence that is supposed to enclose the work that encloses it The emblematic and unifying use of the mirror by numerous critics is explained by the fact that these three duplications can cach n way, Be elated to one or eer aspect of miro re Given this threefold division, and, moreover, the fact that some narratives (such as Paludes and The Counterfeiters) themselves contain each of these elements, it can be said that we stand before these three types of duplication like the three sons in the parable of the three rings; itis impossible to decide which one is the authentic version, Rather than opting arbitrarily for one or another, oF restric:36 Variations on a concept ting ourselves out of loyalty to the charter to internal duplication alone,2! all three can be accepted as representing the three species of the generic term mise en abyme. This triple recognition challenges any simplistic view and requires a pluralistic definition of the mise en abyme which we might hazard as follows: a ‘mise ew abyme’ is ‘any internal mirror that reflects the whole of the narrative by ‘simple, repeated or ‘specious’ (or paradoxical) duplication 3. ACTRINITARY® CONCEPT The only remaining question is whether the mise em abyme is coherent whole or a false unity; whether it designates one complex Structure or is merely a triple rather than a “trinitary” term covering, three conflicting and heterogeneous realities, ilicitly related under cone single name. “To prove that the mise en abyme is a coherent whole, it would no doubt suffice to call as witnesses once more Gide and the other fauthors cited in appendix 1. But | would prefer to invoke a neglected maestro of the mise em abyme avant la lettre ~ Jean Paul. He also bears witness to the complicity of the three types and to the possi- bility of passing seamlessly from one to another, and invites us most insistently to subscribe to the interpretation whereby the mise em ahyme, to be seen as such, can take on one form of duplication after another, but while always remaining a single unity. “To consider some examples from Jean Paul's work: the theatrical performance described in Titan (1800-3) is a microcosm of the hrovel itself, and is interrupted by the ("real") suicide of the author director-actor Roquairol who, playing himself, takes his wish for selfaffirmation to extremes. Giving the final word on the various ‘commentaries this ostentatious suicide provokes in the audience, Jean Paul’s spokesman draws the following lesson from the ‘work ‘within the work’ From a purely artistic point of view, one might wonder whether this situation could aot be used to great effect. One would need, as in that ork of genius, Hamlet, to intertwine a play within the play and, ‘within che primary play, transform apparent death into real death, Doubtless this would only be the appearance of appearance, reality at ‘play with the real, a miraculous reflexion repeated a thousand times.?? Triple meaning 37 A mere suggestion from an artistic adviser, this apparently inno cent remask i cenaialy tended to lumoete the authors actual practice. But what is more interesting from our point of view is that both the reflexions in Hamlet and, in its footsteps, those in Titan, are associated with infinite duplication ~ which neither in fact involves. Flegeljabre (1804) is an equally clear example of the slide from cone type of mise en abyme to another, and also of the complicity between the types. In this narrative, which artfully blurs the demarcation between within and without in order once more to produce a vacillation in the categorization of the fictive and the real.” we again find a ‘work within the work’, in this case a ‘Doppelroman’ written in collabor- ation by the opposite, but complementary, twins Walt and Vult This curious work reflects the themes, aestheties and genesis of the embedding novel just asthe latter in turn enunciates the story of the gestation of the embedded novel, and it is all the more suggestive of, selfembedding in that it apparently was neatly also called Feget Jahre ~ and in that its conception dates back to the twins” stay “at an inn called The Inn” (*Wirtshaus zum Wirtshaus’)25 a place that is an example par excellence of that vicious circle whose function ean Pol makes epi in Die Voracbule der Aesbetit (1804), section 46: ‘THE CIRCULAR WITTICISM ‘This clement of abstract or reflective wit consist of an idea that i set {in opposition to itself, but none the ess makes peace with its opposite jn terms of similarity, if not in tems of equality. Ido not have in mind te ny pwn, ut he cir wim, eae cone si. Iv isso easy that it only requires a ltl... goodwill: fo exam Mo plkh op me plist cic! kes om “to put the Bastille in gaol” ~ “he who steals from a thet’. Apart from its concision, its charen lies inthe fact thatthe mind (‘Geist’) which must always move forward, see the same idea ~ ‘rest’, for example ~ rising up before ita second time, but this time as its own adversary, and that tis constrained to track down some sort of similarity herween them. The simulation of war requires a simulation of peace. In this circle what one finds is an interlinked and shimmering polygon. As Naame do Defatsidof theeginet Vcc, wn she ad found very stiff and boring: ‘I had an elevated idea of bim: found vey si * ted idea of hi: I bet he38 Variations om a concept [And yet as Jean Paul illusteates the reflexive qualities of his work, he is not content to evoke the specious circularity it actually achieves; his ideal would be to raise it to a higher power, so that the ‘shield within the shield’ generates an infinite number of ever smaller shields. Thus Vult is intrigued during the memorable descent to the inn called ‘The Inn’ by the hotelier, ‘a pietist who only painted on his inn-sign another inn sign with another sign on which the same thing again was represented”.?7 Jean Paul’s commentary on this humorously fi of Kant, F. Schlegel and Fichte:?* ‘Whereas the entire Wits of philosophy is to make the subject ‘Tinto fan object and vice versa, the philosophy of the Witz nowadays is one that similarly tries to ensure that the ideas of this subject-object are treated subobjectively; in other words, I am being profound and serious if I say: Tam registering the registering of the fact of sexster- ing the fact of registering’, or “Tam rellecting on the fact of reflecting fon the reflexion of a reflexion on a brush,” ‘These are serious sen- tences, which reveal infinite reflexion ("Widerschein ins Unendliche')! Such depths are certainly beyond the reach of some people! I'll 30 further: only he who shows himself able to write, several times in a row, the genitive of the sume infinitive of whatever verb, can be allowed to say: Lam philosophizing .. 2? in tothe tradition “Thus the idea that will serve as the conclusion of the heuristic section of this work is reinforced: through a solidarity of principle, the three versions of the mises em abyme constantly refer to one another, and the unity of the mise en abyme is not compromised by its refraction in three directions. PART II Towards a typology of the mirror in the text4 Mise en abyme and reflexivity (Our analysis up to now has considered in turn the appearance, the reception and the use of the concept of the mise en abyme in literary criticism, It ce established the original meaning of the term; it showed that authors confused under the one concept different realities and that these could reasonably be reduced to three essential forms. Were we to conclude that this ternary character lay at the root of the device, of conversely to see in it an unconscious extension of the concept? This question was resolved by the novelistic practice of Gide and Jean Paul, which provided very clear proof of the former hypothesis. The time has therefore come to start the major phase of cour triple study, in order to undertake in the proper place the central task of this enquiry, namely to take our conclusions on to the theor: tical level and to elaborate the typological model these conclusions demand, 1 TYPOLOGY AND IMMEDIATE ANALYSIS This model presupposes a choice between two approaches. ‘The first consists in unproblematically starting from the three types we have isolated and ordering them appropriately, not in terms of a historical succession, but rather by reference to their increasing logical complexity as compared to an archetypal form. This approach ‘would be based essentially on the relation between the three types and would involve revealing their various similarities and growing differences, and constructing a generative tree with the simplest at its base and the most complex at the top.42 Towards @ typology of the mirror in the text The second approach would not tolerate such a progressive tree like structuring. Freely based on the linguistic model, it envisages, the three types as probably being amalgams rather than distinct essences, and attempts to show that the units they respectively represent can be broken down into smaller, more consistent units that can in turn be broken down into a limited number of indivisible features. In other words, it aims to establish an exhaustive list ofall possible elements at each level at which the structure operates, and, ascending that structure, to follow from level to level (from distine- tive feature to elementary mises en abyme to types) the triple com bination in play when the structure is actually used (igure 1). | few | ] Figure 1 Although at first sight these two hierarchical and classificatory approaches seem equally valid, for reasons the relevance of which will gradually become clear I have decided to follow the one that will allow the construction of a theory of the mise en abyme through an elaboration of a structural typology of its elements, namely the second approach, The immediate task is to identify the essential and indivisible features that distinguish the mise em abyme and must form part of the definition of the concept at the most basic level. The common root of every mise en abyme is clearly the idea of reflexivity,! and ‘our first identifying property. Mise en abyme and reflexivity 43 2. Basic pRopeRries ‘The reflected narrative (@) Objects of reflexion Analysis of the object of reflexion is an appropriate starting point. It will be recalled that Gide thought of this as “the subject of the work itself’. But this expression of his is not unambiguous, since it can cover not only the theme or the plot of the novel, but also, as we have seen, the story being told and the agent of the narration ~ to which can be added, in the case of The Counterfeiters, the story, the aesthetic and the criticism of the work.? It may be that this is too broad a range for a term (‘subject’) which usually has a more restricted meaning, and this was why I substituted ‘narrative’ for “subject” in my earlier definition. But in describing a mise en abyme as ‘any internal mirror that reflects the whole of the narrative in simple, repeated or “specious” (or paradoxical) duplication’, I may have achieved accuracy at the cost of some vagueness. In fact, since this study will unfold gradually, there is no reason why it should not be possible for any global definition to be developed later. Now that it is necessary to be more specific, we must ask whether the use of the term “narrative” is an appropriate description of the reflexivity concerned; whether, in other words, we can distinguish different types of reflexion by considering the different objects - the different aspects of the narrative ~ subjected to this reflexion, Tt appears that we can, and, in order to do so, it seems justifiable to adopt for our own purposes the classic distinctions of Jakobson’s linguistics and to divide reflexions into reflexions of the utterance, reflexions of the enunciation, and reflexions of the whole code.3 But before clarifying what each of these terms covers in our context, we can usefully reverse the direction of our analysis and concentrate on the other aspect of any reflecting structure: the subject of the reflexion. (0) Superimposition and double meaning Once we realize that this swbject isan utterance ~ and more exactly a synecdochal* utterance ~ we can relate the two aspects of reflexivity and suggest the follow: ing definition: a reflexion is an utterance that relates to the utterance,44 Towards a typology of the mirror in the text the enunciation of the whole code of the narrative. This phrase reveals and confirms that any rellexion represents a semantic super imposition, of, in other words, that the utterance containing the reflexivity operates on at least two levels: that of the narrative, where it continues to signify like any other utterance, and that of the reflexion, where it intervenes as an element of metasignification, ‘enabling the narrative to take itself as its theme, ‘Now, if the same words are being used to say something other than what they say, there is no reason why the reflexive unit cannot be compared with other linguistic devices that have a single signifier, but a plethora of signifieds - for example, the symbol and the allegory. In.common with these structures with a double meaning, the rellexive phrase is also over-determined, harbouring semantic parasitism (since one of its codes lives on the other), and stratitying its meanings so that the literal and obvious primary sense both covers and uncovers the second, figurative one ‘And yet this similarity between the mise en abyme and the other structures is combined with a twofold difference. The reflexion is not a symbol, since the relationship between the literal and the metaphorical sense is instituted’; neither is it an allegory, because the ‘two meanings are not a priori interchangeable. It alone is neither opaque nor transparent, it exists in the form of a double meaning, ‘whose idemtfication and deciphering presupposes a knowledge of the text, In other words the text ~ and not only, oF initially, the primary meaning of the sequence - enacts “the analogy by providing the analogue’? and consequently the hermeneutic key can never open up the reflexion until the narrative has revealed the existence and the location ofthe reflexion. To put it less metaphorically, a reflexive ‘utterance only becomes such through the duplicative relationship it admits to with one or other aspect of the narrative ~ which, in concrete terms, comes down to saying that the emergence of this relationship depends, on the one hand, on the progressive assimi lation of all of the narrative, and, on the other, on the decoder's ability to make the substitutions necessary to pass on from one register to another. Is it more appropriate to rely on the decoders performance? Or to help him/her by compensating for any possible opacity in the reflexive utterance? Poe's tale The Fall of the House of Usher, quoted by the young . opts decisively for giving benevolent help. Here, the reader Mise en abyme and reflexivity 5 «does not have the task of establishing equivalences and in i ' and interpretiny them: this is done fist by the narrator, who points up the analogies between the remarks in the book he reads in the text and what he himself hears, and then by the protagonist (Roderick), who gives him word-for-word translations of what he has been reading: ‘And now - tonight - Ethelred ha! ha! - the becaking of 1 breaking of the hermit’s, door, and the death ratle ofthe dragon and the clangout ofthe shield say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the icon ‘ngs other prison, and her srg win the copped archway of Other texts also take om inthe decoder’ stead this substitution of expressions, which is the perfect definition of the activity ofthe addressee of reflexive utterances. But few lteraly spell it out, as Poe does, in a twin, repeated and one dimensional correspondence. The reason is clear: authorized by a kind of extended metaphor, term-or- term translation immediately seems t00 close to allegory for it to be compatible wth the genre of the novel. Other text, therefore, a8 a rule only make explicit one analogy, while taking care to blur this by sn apatent use of yl some sate tig”. Z's tse teen can eves an xp of nd oe peste Before leaving the Rome he dreamt of regenerating, but where he only succeeded in being rejected by a domineering and sceptical Pope, Abbé Pierre Froment, facing an unknown Botticelli, finds himself suddenly confronting his destiny I was ony ston ck, hd ana 0 wit Bie diner when, looking around the walls to be sure of remembering, every: thi hs es elon ld paming,y the eel maser shat wrt be de edt wihematn dri i sy The Uap taped be seg ill and ene gh on a toe sha stk alee so ice Re ow in he mini the fal momen compe i oh re He othe hi nope hs wom eke tt gon he sesh pte ene ad ee Cry, herein hr fan isso soem kr ho “Shed sc om nti ns brown ot ven hat sh hed ie, or ahae he came har sf ones he ete inant flo toupee eel econ46 Towards a typology of the mirror in the text and awful rejection that is the lot of man when he comes up against the wall that keeps out outsiders?” ‘The question may be chetorical, but it reveals very well Zola's concern to tie each representation to the narrative as a whole, and also his fear that the author and reader might not communicate suf ficiently. What is striking here is his wish to lift the veil he initially imposed, to reduce the scene to a merely transparent meaning, and, in order to do this, to make an allegory of the symbol by translating it (atthe start of the passage) and by an explanatory paraphrase of it {at the end), Haunted by a onedimensionality of meaning, Zola's novels are condemned to mark their reflexive utterances in the most ‘obvious way, and almost always to duplicate them with a discursive explanation Tt goes without saying that it is not difficult to find texts that are less obvious in their reflexivity. Most narratives instinctively partake ‘ofa polysemy that seems basic to literature, and eschew mere trans lation, Rather than putting themselves in the place of the interpreter, they provoke interpretation by signalling that such and such an ‘utterance is a transposition of the narrative,* or that such and such fan element of their structure conceals a latent meaning behind the obvious one. Mademoiselle de Maupin couches thus its invitation to decipher the text below the text: We were all extremely interested and preoccupied by allthis: in a way it was another play within the play, a drama we were acting, which ‘was invisible and unknown as far as the rest of the audience was Concerned, and which, in symbolic words, summarized our whole life and expressed our most secret desites.? ‘And yet there is no need for such an emphatic declaration to invite a double reading: it just requires one warning signal to be picked up. The clearest signals are given by words that posit an analogy between an utterance andl an aspect of the narrative (‘resem blance’, ‘comparison’, “paralil’, ‘relation’, ‘coincidence’). But there are others that are ess direct but no less powerful. Among the ‘most frequent, one can mention similarities achieved by {@) homonymy between the characters of the inserted and enclosing narrative; (b) virtual homonymy between a character and the author: Mise en abyme and reflexivity 47 (©) homonymy between the titles of the inserted and enclosing nar- rative; (® sepeton on evocative seing nda combination of characters an (©) textual repetition of one or more expressions relating to the primary narrative within the reflexive passage. Less immediately recognizable, and more dependent on the reader's performance, are words and phrases with a double meaning = which can lead to the need for the passage to clear the way for the metaphysical meaning. This is the case in the following passage, in which the “naturalist” in question is one and the same as the author of this and future Rougon-Macquart novels: Pascal gave the mad woman, her father and her uncle a penetrating stare: the egotism of the scientist took over, and he studied this ‘mother and her child as intently as a naturalist would the metamor pphoses of an insect. And he thought of these developments of the family tree, of the trunk that produced different branches, its bitter sip carrying the same seeds to the farthest twigs, themselves twisted in difleent ways according to their degree of exposure to the sun. He momentarily glimpsed, in a lash, the future of the Rougon- Macquans 1 In The Counterfeiters, the “symbolical picture of the ages of life’ is Jess transparent. It is true that Gide does mot stint the winks he gives (o the reader: the adjective *symbolical’ is one, the comment that the ‘chief value’ of the engraving ‘lies in its intention’ is another But does this lift the veil enough? : The biology lesson is similar. Although announced by a pun made by a knowing character," and signalled by the term ‘abime’ as well as by the reference to the hybrid ‘parent trunk’,"* is its reflexivity clear enough on the first reading? Given that virtually all commentators have ignored it, we should not be too confident hat itis The majority of texts, however, nether perform the transposition, of meaning themselves, nor suggest that it should be performed by the reader. Should these be decoded as reflexive? Or, since they do not prescribe this either explicitly or implicily, do they proscribe it2 I have given an inital and partial reply above, and I shall now return to it briefly to note what it excludes.48. Towards a typology of the mirror in the text To say that a reflexive utterance only becomes reflexive through the duplicative relationship it admits to with one or other aspect of the narrative is to rule out two symmetrical, but opposite, interpret ations, The first, which is t00 limiting, implies that texts with no ‘warning signals (such as those I have described) contain no reflexive duplication, and that theie utterances are to be taken only at face value. The second, which seems to me to go too far in the other direction, comes down to inferring from the inevitably self-centred Titerariness of the text that reflexivity must be omnipresent and that every narrative can be read as an uninterrupted orchestration of the double meaning. But if this were the case, there would be no distine tion between Balzac's novels and Rousse’s fictions. Both would be reflexive, and both would need to be decoded in the same way. Such an equalizing of texts could only be tenable if one presupposes that rot only are all narratives polysemic - which they are - but also that they are semantically organized in one, specifically cumulative mode, the parable ~ which is not proved. It would certainly be absurd to deny that being by definition ‘intransitive’, all texts are primarily concerned with themselves. But although they refer back to themselves in this way, does it follow that their themes and plots only express the texts themselves, as metaphors of their own story and modes of function? In my view, such self reflexion characterizes fonly some texts; those that, conscious of their literariness, ‘narra- tivize’ it and strive, by a permanent ot occasional reference back t0 themselves, to reveal the law underlying every linguistic creation, To give this a universal value presupposes a different view of the and, as J. Rousset. showed,2* diversifying the discourse. ‘The insertion is supposedly under the aegis of a narrative agency differ ent from that of the primary narrative (and can be either (a) oral or (b) written), and (¢) thereby legitimizes its stylistic variations; it can also (¢} lead to the injection of @ personal narrative within a third person fiction, or, conversely (e) impersonalize for a varying length of time a narrative in the first person.2” Reflexive metadiegetic utterances are distinct from metanarratives, in that they do not aim to liberate themselves from the narrational control of the primary narrative. Spurning the use of an alternative racrator, they limit themselves to reflecting the narrative and only involve the suspension of the diegesis. Such reflexive interpolations include (a) indirectly reported narratives; (b) dreams; (c) visual and (@) auditory representations.2° Reflexive (intra)diegetic utterances neither change the narrational agency nor suspend diegetic continuity: totally dependent on the primary narrative, they follow its course and are arranged within its universe.2? This classification in itself would allow us to return to the ques- tions we have left in abeyance. But before returning to the question of the basic properties of the mrise en abyme, it would be appropriate toconsider whether the device is linked not only, as we have seen, to narrative voice, but also to narrative mode. Mode and voice are indeed specific terms, but the fact that for a long time they have been52 Towards a typology of the mirror in the text ‘confused perhaps indicates that they are not inseparable. Moreover, it is no coincidence that Bruce Morrissette’s article on the mise en abyme, which reopened study ofthe device, was devoted to the ques tion of the narrative ‘point of view”.*” In this respect some remarks about the history of the device may be helpful Let us consider the use of the mise en abyme in realism and naturalism, and how this use is justified. The mise en abyme here is clearly a compensatory device: forbidden from reflexion by contem: porary theoreticians who are unanimous in the belief that, in order to be credible, the fiction must feign independence, the author avoids this difficulty by intervening at the level of the characters, allowing him/herself to be heard while still respecting the sacrosanct commandments of ‘objectivity’ and ‘impersonality’. Now, although it can be seen in its classic form in the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, this delegation of power is always inherent in the mise en abyme, rather than limited to specific periods. All intra or metadiegetic reflexions are in fact of equivocal origin because they involve the interplay of two spheres: the sphere of the author, who eschews personal comments on his/her own work in order to transmit his/her knowledge of it to a character who serves as his/her ‘cover"; and the sphere of the character, who is promoted to the level of the author throug this spokesperson role ~ hence the necessity of attenuating the transgressional character of this trans. position by making the authorial representations authentic in order to keep the narrative credible, This need for authenticity is of course 4 consequence of the intra- or metadiegetic status of the reflexions: in the mouth of the author, they would not be questioned: but once they are dependent on a character, how can they inspire confidence? ‘Are characters competent to speak in the name of the person who is, responsible for the narrative? Do not uncertainty and lack of infor ‘mation reign at the diegetic level?" This is certainly the case, but again there is a way round it. The trick in the narrative consists in allowing either a very limited intrusion by the author as a “sponsor” of the authorial substitute, or an authentication of the substitute which involves satisfying three criteria 1 choosing agents who are not integral to the plot, which leads to the appointment of (a) old people, (b) foreigners or (c) com- panions, who are able to appear solely to carry out the role which is expected of them;3? Mise en abyme and reflexivity 33 2. recruiting qualified personnel from among those who specialize in, or make their living from, the truth; hence the following archetypal characters: (a) the novelist; (b) the artist; () the critic; (@ the scientist: (¢) the clergyman; (f) the librarian; (g) the book seller; ~ but also (h) the madman; (j) the innocent: (j) the drunkard; and (k) the dreamer; 38 3 in the absence of such ‘organs of the truth’, doing without them and using the services of a work of art that, valid in itself, might in an emergency need no guarantor. It would be tempting to continue this study of the ‘constraints’ imposed by any reflexion at the level of the characters. But there is ‘no need to do so since we can now list those properties necessary in any basic definition of the mise en abyme, Alter full consideration, wwe can limit these to two: 1 the reflexive character of the utterance; and 2. its intea- or metadiegetic quality. Alternating narratives, strictly speaking, and interruption of the diegesis are not features necessary to the mise en abyme.®° Nor does the choice of narrative perspective affect in any fundamental way a device which is essentially transgressional 3 ELEMENTARY MISE ABYME AND ITS DEMARCATION Having adopted these two criteria, we can now fill in the lower levels, of our typological model; if « designates the intra- or metadiegetic character of a segment of the text, and a, b and e represent respect- ively the reflexion of the utterance, of the enunciation and of the whole code, we have three elementary mises en abyme (&, Band C), cach determined by a constant (the coefficient a) and a variable (a, b oF 6) (igure 2). ‘This demarcation evidently has the corollary that if the reflexivity e of a, b or c alone defines the conditions in which the mise en abyme appears, the locating of mises en abymte must also take place at this level of analysis ~ and at this level alone, In other words, the isolation and demarcation of a segment of the narrative that satisfies the two criteria will, according to each case, detach from the narra- tive a unit of highly variable size,** compatible with any of the34 Towards a typology of the mirror in the text Miosoralyme a 8 c [p+ teas eevee ees [etal ale | i Figure 2 “registers of narrative discourse’ (Todorov),2” not necessarily sharing the contours of the narrative structure it is grafted on to: thus, with the mise en abyme too, the function creates the organ.3® 5 Fiction and its doubles Although the constitution of the mise en abyme as an ‘organ’ of the text is synonymous with its function (rather than its form), one might none the less expect it to operate differently according to whether itis the utterance, the enunciation or the whole code that is subjected to mise em abyme, Each of the three elementary types of ‘mise en abyme must therefore be approached separately, in the above order, starting with the mise en abyme of the utterance. ‘Starting by limiting ourselves to the referential aspect of the utter ance as a *story" ot ‘fiction narrated”, it seems possible to define this, sort of mise en abyme as an intertextual résumé or quotation of the content of a work. Inasmuch as it summarizes or quotes the content of a story, itis an utterance that refers to another utterance ~ and therefore belongs to the metalinguistic code; inasmuch as it is an integral part of the fiction that it also summarizes, it generates the ‘means to reflect back on the fiction and consequently gives rise to internal repetition, It is therefore not surprising that the narrative function of what I shall call this fictional’ mise en abyme is basically characterized by a combination of the usual properties of iteration and of second-degree utterances, namely the capacity to give the ‘work a strong structure, to underpin its meaning, to provide a kind of internal dialogue and a means whereby the work can interpret itself. This is no doubt what Gide had in mind when he said that “nothing sheds more light on’ a narrative than its mise em abyme. But the fact that this kind of intervention happens in all kinds of ‘works, in all periods, should not inhibit us from going beyond such generalizations, For although it is true that the mise em abymie rust56 Towards a typology of the mirror in the text disappear on one level in order to suggest its existence on another level, it is also the case that the impact and side effects of this inter- vention vary on the one hand according to the degree of analogy between the reflecting and the reflected utterance (as a parameter of the paradigmatic rules), and on the other according to the position of the mise en abyme in the narrative sequence (as a parameter of syn tagmatic obedience) 1 SEMANTIC COMPRESSION AND DILATION ‘The reason why the frst of these parameters has a decisive influence ‘on the function of the fictional mise em abyme is that the transition from the story being told to its reflexion implies two different oper ations as far as transformational logic is concerned; a reduction (ot structuring by embedding), and an elaboration of the referential paradigm (or structuring by projecting a metaphorical “equivalent” ‘on to the syntagmatic axis). sn that this latter operation can involve a greater or lesser degree? of analogy of contrast, a whole range of possibilities exists, between virtually mimetic reproduction on the one hand, and free transposition on the other, each interacting with the story in a different way. Thus, when the mise en abyme is limited by a sort of homothesis to reproducing the fiction on another scale,* it is identical to the miniature model whose virtues Lévi-Strauss analyses in a famous chapter of La Pensée sauvage. In simplifying the complexity of the original,> the fictional counterpart converts time into space and succession into contemporaneity, thereby increasing out ability to “take it in’. Thus Gide was not wrong to remark that “nothing displays the proportions of the whole work more accurately’, not Valery to echo this when he wrote that ‘reflexion confronts the being with its function’.? By stylizing what it copies, the model distinguishes what is essential irom what is only contingent: it informs, But the question is whether by acquiring this power to inform, the model loses more of the original than its dimensions. Expressing it in the terminology of communication theory, one might say that the Fiction and its doubles 37 more scrupulous the reproduction, the more any redundancy in the ‘work is amplified. Given that the informational content of a message is inversely proportional to its redundance, it follows that precisely because the ‘reproductive’ mise en abyme allows a maximum closure and codification of the narrative, it correspondingly reduces the possiblity of polysemy. An ‘isotopic’ reading is surely too high a price to pay for a mise en abyme. Be that as it may, two types of narrative willingly pay this price: those intent on an unequivocal meaning at all costs, and those that aim to affirm themselves as narrative and. therefore exploit the truism that ‘life’ and repro: this mirror of a mirror was bound, thematically, to call up other mirrors, creating multiple, infinite reflexions. Such examples, and the general remarks that preceded them, make it clear that, from the paradigmatic point of view, the fictional ‘ise en abyme, like synecdoche, can be divided into two groups: the particularizing (miniature models), which concentrate and limit the meaning of the fiction; and the generalizing (transpositions), which sive the context a semantic expansion beyond that which the context alone could provide. !* Compensating for what they lack in textual extent by their power to invest meaning, such transpositions present a paradox: although they are microcosms of the fiction, they superimpose themselves semantically onthe macrocosm. that contains them, overflow it and end up by engulfing it, in a way, within themselves. Of course, such expansion is only possible in the light of certain narrative choices. Thus, it seems significant that the reflexion in the three works briefly referred to above does not result from a novella or any over schematic duplicate, but from a tale or myt. The tae is suited to the propagation of universal truths, since it can be univer- sally appreciated. As for myths, even if they are being brought into an allegorical context, they never quite lose all of their original ‘character: “symbols extended into narrative form’, they ‘make one think’,!” and in moving the narrative into an unreal register, none the less produce an inexhaustible supply of meanings60 Towards a typology of the mirror in the text 2. DISTRIBUTION EFFECTS ‘Cutting across the first variable (the question of the kind of model), another is at play, determining the function of the fictional mise en abyme according to its place on the syntagmatic axis. I shall try to reveal how, and for what narrative purposes, after noting that (a text can integrate a mise en abyme by (a) presenting it once, en bloc’ (b) dividing it up so chat it alternates with the embedding narra tive; and (©) making it occur a number of different times Gi) (a) (rather than (b) oF (¢)) above allows us to articulate more clearly the problem of the relation between the position of the ‘component and the general economy of the narrative; (i) this problem can be expressed and resolved essentially in terms of the narrative timescale To prove this last point, I shall limit myself to noting that any “story within the story” must necessarily challenge the development ‘of the chronology (by being reflexive) while respecting it (by being a segment of the narrative sequence). For it cannot both conform and conserve its other main function, Too small to have the same rhythm as the narrative, its only means of rivalling itis by shorten: ing the duration of the story, presemting the content of the whole book in a limited space. Now, as I have said, such a contraction cannot avoid calling into question the chronological order of the book itself: unable to say the same thing at the same time as the story itself, its analogue, saying it elsewhere and ‘out of time’, sabotages the sequential progress of the narrative. But we can be more precise: one only has to consider the placing of the duplication in the narrative sequence to be able to confirm that all fictional mises en abyme have an anachronic form. Logically, ‘one can therefore distinguish three sorts of mises em abyme corre sponding to the three forms of dissonance between the time of the narrative and the time of the figure: the first (prospective) reflects the story to come; the second (retrospective) reflects the story already completed; and the third (retro prospective) reflects the story by revealing events both before and alter its point of insertion in the narrative.!* Fiction and its doubles 61 Illustrating each of these mises en abyme with suitable examples will not only reveal more about them but will also show their relative frequency: on the basis of my samples, few such mises em abyme ‘occur at the start of the narrative, virtually none at the end and very ‘many in the middie. The ‘programmatic loop’ Set up at the opening of the narrative, the prospective mise en abyme provides a ‘double’ for the fiction in order to ‘overtake’ it and to leave it with only a past for its future. The fiction’s room for manceuvre is limited to reflecting back on this previous reflexion, catalysing it, adhering to the programme announced by it and spell- ing out its contents. If this room for manceuvre is restricted, this is because the remainder of the narrative is fated: tolerating its own revelation by a precursor, it must follow the latter’s directives. But this precursor’s revelatory and matricial fanction necessarily entails other functions; most importantly, by revealing a condensed version ‘of the fiction, the reflexion combines isolated episodes and elements which, by being perceived almost simultaneously early on in the book, cannot help influencing how the book itself will be interpreted. Made aware that what s/he perceives synthetically will occur over @ longer scale, the reader knows what lies ahead and can immediately regulate the itinerary of his/her reading, recognize important parts as she goes through, and determine his/her own rate of progress. In addition, by programming the remainder of the fiction so forcetully, this preliminary mise en abyme takes away all of its anecdotal interest ~ unless it provokes tension or gradually enhances the readers expectations. It can do this to the point of exasperating the reader, as Tieck’s Der Zauberschloss proves, To recall the plot, in broad terms In love with a young captain, Luise is none the less to marry the rich and aged ‘Landrat’, of whom her father approves. The imminent wedding will take place in a castle that the strangest legends sur round. During the preparations for the ceremony, a family friend, who can be a practical joker when he feels like it, tells the assembled ladies (including Luise) an extravagant and tragic story that is sup posed to have happened at the castle during the Thirty Years War: promised by her father to a rich landowner, a certain Luise loved a62 Towards a typology of the mirror in the text young captain ... There follows a story, all of whose episodes anticipate those of the main narrative, down to the smallest detail, but with one small, but important, exception: although there is a succession of coincidences between the embedding narrative and the preliminary mise en abyme, which seems to presage a catastrophic denouement, at the very end the relationship is reversed, and the characters and the reader experience an ironic happy ending, having been misled by the false prophecy of the inserted narrative. The suspense of the narrative derives from the repeated confir- mations of the “horizon of expectation’, each of which inereases the tension, which is carried forward to the next prediction, up till the final «wist when the reader gets (0) the point of the story. Although such @ large number of analogies between the primary text and the mise en abymre is not compatible with all literary genres, it is particularly applicable to the fantasy novella (e.g. The Fall of he House of Usher) and, to an even greater extent perhaps, to the classic detective novel ‘The way in which Agatha Christie treats the rhyme and the staru- cettes in Ten Litle Indians is very instructive in this respect. The premonitory song is first presented en bloc at the opening of the novel; then each of its verses echoes, in an accelerating rhythm, each of the ten murders, cither again announcing them prophetically, or commenting on them a posteriori, as in a morality play. To avoid these repetitions becoming wearisome and to accentuate further their inexorable progression ~ since here the narrative does not use ironic anticipation ~ each verse ofthe lullaby is related to a statuette whose breakage or disappearance punctuates, ata slight distance, the horrible sequence of crimes, Here the numerous and repeated omens ‘dramatize the action, give ita new impulse and gradually make the reader's critical powers diminish, Since this cannot be @ goal common to all narratives, novels in general will avoid overtrequent literal coincidences. They will ensure that premonitory signs relate only to essential clements and cannot be deciphered too clearly. Two factors lead to this, On the fone hand, the narrative aspites to be read synoptically, that is, in its totality. It can make up for the fact that this totality is not complete until the last sentence by having recourse to preparative devices, of which the prospective mise en abyme is the most radical, This immediately makes possible a second reading, which is literal rather Fiction and its doubles 63 than referential. This is why Goethe felt obliged to ‘subordinate the law of delaying to @ higher imperative: that which prescribes that cone can - and must ~ know how a good poem ends and that, in summary, it is only the “how” that arouses the interest. In this ‘way, curiosity does not play a role in such a work ..."19 This extract from a letter to Schiller can be compared to the con- versation in Flegeljabre after the flute recital: Bur how did you listen to it? Going backwards and forwards, or just note by note, as it proceeded? Most people, like animals, can only hear what is present, not what comes before or after: they only hear syllables of musi, not its syntax. I is because of the first phrase of a sentence that @ good listener can divine perfectly what the following phrase will be” However judicious it is. this implied definition of the ‘good reader” is not the only notable thing in this passage. Its interest lies in the attention it focuses on the inherent difficulty of any inaugural mise en abyme, Pointing in one direction alone, it can only be attuned to ‘what comes after’, and not ‘what comes before”, in Jean Paul's terms. Is not the inevitable consequence that the vector it introduces into the work is too strong to maintain the equilibrium, and that revealing the whole story right from the start does, after all, make whatever may follow seem boring? Some sort of compromise seems necessary between immediate and total revelation and the rights of the referential illusion, which produces a number of diverse solutions that I cannot study in depth here, I shall merely indicate the most frequent ones, which are in any case often used by the mise en abyme. ‘One of the most remarkable consists in counterbalancing the disruptive force of the anticipatory vector by tying it securely to @ fictional past: the premonitory mise en abyme will therefore be subtly directed towards a diegetic or extradiegetic past that it would not normally be able to actualize, A prime example of this on the dliegeti level occurs in Scott's Waverley, where itis only because of his ‘prodigious memory” that the simple-minded Gellatly can sing of the chronicle that will later be told. An extradiegetic example is Swann in Love, which ‘Proust places at one of the entrances to his novel, like a small convex mirror, to reflect it in miniature,"2! Looking both ways in time, in that it prefigures the narrator's love-64 Towards « typology of the mirror in the text alairs, prepares the meeting of the two “ways’, but also provides a flashback that enables the author to ‘skip’ a generation, this ‘novel within the novel” subverts, through the time-scale of its narrative, the exclusively anticipatory tendencies of the premonitory mise en abyme “The fact remains, though, that most narratives prefer to dissipate the force of the vector by blurring the revelation itself. This usually operates through (a) circumstantial lyricism; (b) duplication of ‘omens that seem to neutralize each other; (c) explicit denial accom: panying the premonitory signs (d) false commentaries by certain ‘characters; and finally ‘noise’ due to a lack of comprehension on the part of those most directly involved.? However, an example from the beginning of Maupassant’s Une Vie shows misunderstanding not presenting a difficulty for the decoder: although the ‘noise’ may be deafening, communication still takes place: Jeanne, liting up her amp, studied the subject of the tapestries X young lord and a young lady, dressed in the strangest way in arcen, red and yellow, were talking under a blue ere chat bore white fruit. A large white rabbit chewed some grey geass. Just above these characters, in the conventional distance, there were five small round houses, with pointed roofs, an, at dhe top, a sed wind Large leafy and floral designs were interspersed inthis. The other two panels were very similar co the ist one, except that they showed four litte men dressed in Flemish costume coming out of the houses and raising their hands to heaven in extreme astonishment and anger. But the last tapestry showed some dramatic events, Next to the rabbit, which was still chewing, ly the young man, apparently dead ‘The young lady, looking a him, was falling ona sword and the frit on the tee had turned ack Jeanne had given up tying to understand the eapestres when she ‘made out, ina corner, a tiny beast that che rabbit iit had been alive, could have eaten like a stalk of geass ~ and yet it was Ton She then recognized that it was the sad story of Pyramus and This: and, although she smiled athe simplicity ofthe designs, she ‘was sad 0 be surrounded by this love story that would always remind her of cherished hopes, and would make this antique and legendary love Took dowsn om her every aight as she slept.2? Revealed by the recurrence of certain semes, the fiction is hence Fiction and its doubles 65. forth fixed on its thematic axis. And if the protagonist can still misjudge her destiny, the reader already knows the denouement of her life, the ‘Vie’ of the novel’s title; the reader, like the novel itself, is also “orientated It scems then that the only means whereby the narrative can regain its balance is by compensating for the initial reflexion by a “terminal” one - or, better still, by making the ending of the story lead back to the initial reflexion, This procedure, which is accom: plished in Fontane’s L'Adultera, necessarily gives a geometric shape to the narrative, a strict ‘mirror’ composition that the realist novel ‘cannot in all conscience tolerate - as is shown by Fontane himself, ‘who uses the double structure under the cover of irony, “The coda" I the initial mise en abyme says everything before the fiction has realy started, the final or terminal mise en abyme has nothing to say save repeating what is already known, How, then, can one conceal that it has a delayed effect? Even if it can disguise its obvious redun: dance by the greatest possible degree of transposition, it must stil conform to the code of credibility that has hitherto ruled the text. This is a great constraint which, apparently, can only be avoided in cone way: by moving on to a higher plane and universalizing the ‘meaning of the narrative. To this end, the mise en abyme might resort to the tale or myth, if it were not for the fact that they would risk giving the fiction a new impetus, since they themselves have narrative form.2* At the end of the fiction, when it seeks rest, it is more appropriate to form a pact with the themes of the narrative in the shape of a symbol or of music when the story allows. Whereas music limits the mise en abyme to the inexpressibie and is inherently suited to the purpose of suspense.?> the symbol seems destined to terminate, but never to conclude. Its *vertical” mode has the con centration the narrative is searching for; indicating unfathomable depths, it provides a pause in the narrative; motivated and non: arbitrary, it conceals the weakness of the narrative. ‘Thus, in the passage from Rome that I have already discussed, the meanings of the text become progressively more ‘catholic as a result of the description of the symbolic painting; for does not the66 Towards a typology of the mirror in the text tearful exile who represents for the protagonist ‘a complete symbol of bis failure in Rome” reflect for him ‘the image of all futile efforts to force open the door of truth, the complete and awful rejection that is the lot of man when he comes up against the wall that keeps out ‘outsiders? 26 The question mark left hanging, the abstract vocabulary (which ‘generalizes and makes indeterminate), the definite article replacing the possessive adjective, and the collective noun replacing the proper ‘name all prove that once the destiny of an individual or ofa narrative is raised to the symbolic level, it can only radiate out and become the index of a universal meaning. Te should be noted that this generalization of meaning is repeated a few pages later, where, taking over from his protagonist, itis the author and his contemporary readers who recognize in the evocative image of the painting a prefiguration of their century before dis: covering in it a timeless expression of the Century: He was ecstatic, overwhelmed by an admiration that grew as he appreciated more and more of this subject, which was so simple and yet so poignant. Was it not acutely modern? The artist had foreseen all of our painful century, our anwiety at the invisible, our disteess at not being able to cross the threshold of mystery, whose door is permanently closed. And how this woman, whose lace could not be seen, who was sobbing, distraught, and whose tears no one could wipe away, was an eternal symbol of the misery of the world! An ‘unknown Botticelli, a Botticelli of such quality, uncatalogued ~ what afind!2” A find that is primarily a narrative one; an enthusiasm that ‘guarantees the description; and a paraphrase to clarify the symbol ism ~ but this is not all. More remarkable is the fact that Zola is acting as if he is hesitating between two solutions: on the one hand describing a symbolic image and, by not making it explicit, forgoing ‘making the circumstance into a reflexion; and on the other hand transcribing the meanings it opens up, thus tying it into the story. Such hesitation no doubt reveals the difficulty all narratives have in successfully negotiating the problems of the terminal mise en abyme. Any paraphrase of the symbol weakens it and wrecks it on the reef of redundance: by not translating it, the narrative must be finalized by it and move off in a direction that transcends it (which implies that the narrative was not transcendent previously ...) Fiction and its doubles 07 The pivot Be that as it may, the preceding remarks have shown the inherent