CHAPTER 1
THE LITERARY THEORY OF MISE EN ABYME AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL MEANING
MISE EN ABYME AND MIRRORING
DĂ€llenbach, following Magny (1950), views an 1893 paragraph from Gideâs Diaries as the first theory and founding âcharterâ of mise en abyme:
In a work of art, I rather like to find transposed, on the scale of the characters, the very subject of that work. Nothing throws a clearer light upon it or more surely establishes the proportions of the whole. Thus, in certain paintings of Memling or Quentin Metzys a small convex and dark mirror reflects the interior of the room in which the scene of the painting is taking place. Likewise in Velazquezâs painting of the Meninas (but somewhat differently). Finally, in literature, in the play scene in Hamlet, and elsewhere in many other plays. In Wilhelm Meister the scenes of the puppets or the celebration at the castle. In âThe Fall of the House of Usherâ the story that is read to Roderick, etc. None of these examples is altogether exact. What would be much more so, and would explain much better what I strove for in my Cahiers, in my Narcisse, and in the Tentative, is a comparison with the device of heraldry that consists in setting in the escutcheon a smaller one âen abyme,â at the heart-point.
A major principle which DĂ€llenbach draws from the charter is that the mise en abyme, as a means by which the work turns back on itself, âappears to be a kind of reflection.â Indeed, literary theorists and philosophers alike have associated the mise en abyme with the emblem of the mirror right from the start. The type of mirror which they usually invoke, however, is uniqueâinfinite parallel mirrors (âtwo mirrors would in fact suffice!â)âa device which Deleuze, following Bergson, also terms âdynamicâ or âmobileâ mirroring. The specular relation prevailing in mise en abyme, writes Ricardou, âis not that of a still mirror, but a dialectical one which elaborates itself, incessantly resettles itself, and which escapes any immobilization.â Whilst the static mirror bears a relation of correspondence with the object it reflects, so that one can stably determine any part of the mirror-image to represent a part of the person gazing at the mirror (and that part alone) in the mobile mirror one stands on moving sands. In a mobile mirror where âA reflects B while being reflected by it in continuous mirror effects,â the âselvesâ (and features) of both the reflecting device and the reflected object incessantly change. Mirror A cannot reflect mirror B without being always already a different subject reflecting a different object, it is retroactively transformed into a conjunction such as (mirror A within mirror B), that is, mirror C. The subject and object of the mobile mirror bear not a âcodedâ identity, to use Deleuzeâs terminology, but only a âsituationalâ one, deriving from a here and now constellation. This also means that though a difference between the reflected and the reflecting does persist, one cannot stably discern here two respective substances, that is, determine which is the origin and which is the copy. There is no unique, singular, âfirst time,â preceding other instances of repetition temporally or qualitatively: The mise en abyme âdoes not redouble the unit, as an external reflection might do; in so far as it is an internal mirroring, it can only ever split it in two.â
The subject and the object of mirroring, incessantly changing, do not preexist the here-and-now juxtaposition between them. This is to say that the true object of reflection in mobile mirroring is neither the person gazing at the mirror, nor the mirror reflecting this person, but the very âmiddleâ between them, their very juxtaposition. Correspondingly, if La Tentative amoureuse, as Gide writes in the charter, âexplains much better what he strove for,â it is due to bearing what DĂ€llenbach calls a ârelational mise en abyme.â Mise en abyme, writes Gide, reproduces the âsubject of the work itself.â Bal notes the ambiguity of the word âsujet,â which may designate either the subject-matter or the creative, grammatical, and narrating subject. Gide, she writes, âwas interested primarily in the power of the narrating subject, a power which seems to increase when the subject doubles itself.â But, contrary to Balâs interpretation, La Tentative in fact shows interest in neither the subject matter, nor the narrating subject. What reproduces itself in La Tentative is rather the relation between the two: the subject is duplicated âas soon as the work begins.â This novel not only attributes to a character in the narrative the activity of the narrator in charge of the narration, but also poses an analogy between the situation of the character and that of the narrator, so that its mise en abyme is âa relationship of relationships, the relation of the narrator N to his/her story S being the same as that of the narrator/character n to his/her story s.â If Gide dismissed Poeâs story and othersâ as imperfect examples it is because âthe duplication they provide only comprises two of the four terms required (N:S::n:s)â; mise en abyme, to stress again, doubles no simple, but what is split into two at its very origin, what is retroactively already double. Indeed, in a paragraph adjacent to the âcharterââlater to inspire BlanchotâGide explains the mise en abyme in terms of a mechanism of retroaction:
I wanted to indicate In La Tentative the influence the book has on the author while he is writing it ⊠A subject cannot act on an object without retroaction by the object on the subject that is acting ⊠An angry man tells a storyâthis is the subject of the book. A man telling a story is not enoughâit must be an angry man and there must always be a continuing relationship between the manâs anger and the story heâs telling.
In mise en abyme, as in the double mirror, a subject of reflection becomes retroactively its object. In the other adjunct paragraph it is already explicitly a âdouble mirrorâ Gide reflects on:
I am writing on the small piece of furniture of Anna Shackletonâs that was in my bedroom in the rue de Commailles. Thatâs where I worked; I liked it because I could see myself writing in the double mirror of the desk above the block I was writing on.
I am not sure how Gide could view himself writing while writing, but it is definitely the case that only in a double mirror can one view oneself gazing at the mirror, that, contrary to the still mirror, one can gaze at the object of reflection and the process, or subject, of reflection, at one and the same time. Such principle of simultaneity between incommensurable logical or narrative levels also governs, as we shall see, the mise en abyme. Certainly, in the âcharterâ itself it is rather convex mirroring which served as Gideâs criterion in selecting pictorial examples, but Deleuze would later show convex mirroring to precisely share with double mirroring the principle of simultaneity. Like mobile mirroring, reflecting not only an external object but also the very reflecting device, the convex mirror, capable of condensing within itself almost the entire field of vision that is presented on the canvas, allows the painter to âperform the paradoxical feat of including observer and observed together in the painting.â
What Gide terms âretroactionâ is the breaking of linearity between cause and effect. The manâs telling the story as a cause of the story becomes, through âan act of retroaction,â an effect of that story. This system thus comprises two incompatible moments. On the one hand, the cause gains temporal and qualitative priority over the effect. On the other handâit is the effect which gains such priority; the mechanism of retroaction entails a double articulation, with the two discontinuous âslopesââto use Blanchotâs terminologyâseparated by an irreducible gap. If metaphysics throughout history invoked the static mirror paradigmâentailing a substance-based distinction between the reflected and the reflectingâto impose binary values upon free-floating variants, poststructuralist philosophy would invoke the double mirrorâentailing the irreducible gap of retroactionâto pursue the âdifference in itself,â unmediated by the binary logic of representation.
It was by taking interest in the poetics of the mise en abyme that philosophers adopted the emblem of infinite mirroring. At the same time, it was through attentiveness to the contemporary philosophical discourse that poeticians like Ricardou were careful to establish a qualitative distinction between static and mobile mirroring, associating mise en abyme with the latter alone. DĂ€llenbach is salient among poeticians who remained blurry as to this distinction. On the one hand, it was he who identified that in Gideâs supreme example of mise en abyme, the ârelational mise en abyme,â âreflexion of reflexionâ is a governing principle. Furthermore, in his definition of mise en abyme as âany internal mirror that reflects the whole of the narrative by simple, repeated or âspeciousâ (or paradoxical) duplication,â he incorporates the term âinternal mirror,â which Ricardou, as we saw, has already used as an equivalent to mobile mirroring.
On the other hand, he negligently overlooks that it is in fact a double mirror which Gide mentions in his paragraph on mirroring, and he recounts âimages of mirroringâ among writers and theoreticians of mise en abyme, without any discrimination between static and mobile ones. Finally, in articulating the three types of the mise en abyme, he seems to understand this distinction as rather quantitative. The term mise en abyme, he says, applies to three essential figures, corresponding to three âaspects of mirror reflectionâ:
a)simple duplication, represented by the shield within the shield, where a sequence is connected by similarity to the work that encloses it;
b)infinite duplication, represented by infinite parallel mirrors, where a sequence is connected by similarity to the work that encloses it and itself includes such sequence; and
c)aporetic duplication, where a sequence that is supposed to be enclosed within the work also encloses it. This type is represented by the Liarâs paradox or other contradictory statements such as âthere cannot be anything other than a personal philosophyâ (which is itself a personal statement claiming to be a general proposition). At the same time it is representedâlike the infinite duplicationâby Gideâs The Counterfeiters, where the main narration âcannot be captured in a single mirror, but is projected, through various filters, in a series of mirrors that open up dizzying perspectives.â
These three underlie three types of mise en abyme, respectively: the âsimple,â the âinfinite,â and the âparadoxicalâ (indicted as types IâIII in DĂ€llenbachâs typology). What is notable here is DĂ€llenbachâs implicit association of the âsimple typeâ of mise en abymeâincluding Gideâs important figure of the shield-within-shieldâwith the still mirror. Alternatively, these âaspects of mirroringâ do not correspond to empirical types of mirroringâthe simple and the mobileâat all, or else the âinfiniteâ and âaporeticâ would not have been differentiated. This indicates DĂ€llenbachâs disinterest in the actual mirroring devices and their phenomenology, so that the âmirror reflectionâ in DĂ€llenbach is an abstract genus whose three âaspects,â continuous to each other, differ in quantity rather than quality.
DĂ€llenbach, I will show further on, often employs a conscious and methodical ambiguity in his research on mise en abyme. This is not, however, the case here. His blurriness regarding the significance of mobile mirroring would have been avoided had DĂ€llenbach, like Ricardou, been aware of the ontological paradigm shiftâfrom still to mobile mirroringâwhich contemporary philosophers, invoking mise en abyme, have conducted.
THE DOUBLE-BIND OF THE MISE EN ABYME
If the first distinctive feature of the mise en abymeâthe essential and indivisible feature that distinguishes it from other literary notionsâis the idea of reflexivity, the second, writes DĂ€llenbach, is its immanence in the text: Mise en abyme is a âtransposition of the subject at the level of the characters.â Immanent reflexion is âhypodiegeticâ (or âmetadiegeticâ in GĂ©rard Genetteâs lexicon). If Achilles and the Tortoise in Hofstadter distract themselves from a tense predicament by reading a story in which two characters called Achilles and the Tortoise read this...