La freccia e il cerchio
anno 4, numero 4, 2013
pp. 31-34
Stefano Manferlotti, Marisa Tortorelli
Beyond the mirror, inside the mask
I. Unity and multiplicity
TORTORELLI
By exploring the landscape of ancient philosophy through the binary view of unity and multiplicity, traces of twin souls are soon to be detected. They confront each other and confuse one another: Parmenides’s unity of being and Heraclitus’ s multiplicity of becoming, or being of the world and becoming in the world. Can we connect this pair with the mask/mirror binomial? Does it make any sense to do so? In the ancient world, there are mythical stories in which looking at oneself in the mirror is fatal. The variants of the myth of Narcissus, to name one, turn the philosophical problem of the image in the mirror into metaphors. Narcissus, tragically in love, confuses his own reflection in the water with a real entity. He tries to reach for his object of love, his self, but gets lost in the reflection, the other, and dies, drowning or changing shape, in a melancholic embrace between beauty and death. Among the modern versions of the myth, Gide’s Traité du Narcise is the only one where Narcissus does not die. Compared to the classical Narcissus, who dies while longing for an impossible reunion, Gide’s Narcissus is subtly post-idealistic and condemns himself to life so that the world can keep on living. Standing on the river of time, in the search of his love, who is lost in the sensible world, Narcissus sees images rolling on water and realises that the world only exists according to his gaze. Without man, there exists no time, no river, no objects.
MANFERLOTTI
I would say that the mirror serves first and foremost its primary function: it reproduces a virtual image, a double — so to speak– of the person. The mirror has as its birthmark a type of fundamental ambiguity, because, on the one hand, it should reflect what you really are, but, on the other, it can only offer an immaterial simulacrum. At the basis of all narrative fiction and western poetry lies something that is connected with this ambiguity: the relationship between reality and imagination. The double within the mirror is a disquieting double. Since the very beginning, the mirror has a two-folded meaning: it should reproduce reality as it is—we say “the mirror of things”, “the mirror of life”–, but in fact the image it reproduces is conceptually anamorphic.
TORTORELLI
The difference between falling in love with one’s own image and falling in love with a statue, or a painting, is not that great. Narcissus’s story is one of the socalled Pygmalion stories, but one in which, as Bettini wrote, “the game has turned into a solitaire.” In the classical version (the one by Ovid being the most famous), once dead, Narcissus turns into a flower, the flower of narcissus. Such a metamorphosis may find a sort of prehistorical version in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. The Hymn, dating to the 7th century b. C., tells the story of Persephone, who, allured by the extraordinary beauty of the narkissos-flower (here we find the first occurrence of the term), tries to pick it, but the earth opens up and, in place of the flower, Hades, the god of the dead, manifests and abducts the young woman. The flower, just like the boy, is both deception and play. The narcissus (narkissos from narké), a funereal flower, with narcotic powers, is symbol of death: the “other” is Hades, both as god and as place. Before the eyes of Narcissus, who admires his own face reflected in the water, an abyss opens up, one that is just as fatal. Artemidorus, in his treatise on dream interpretation, warns us that that to dream of seeing one’s reflection in water means one’s own death.”
MANFERLOTTI
One should not forget that the word narcissism commonly denotes a sin, a type of hybris, which in Christianity corresponds to vanity. Freud probably contributed to the increasing negative meaning of the word, when he detected in narcissistic behaviour a severe pathology of the psyche.
TORTORELLI
Thinking of Freud, and the use of a Greek myth to define a pathological condition, it is natural to wonder whether Narcissus was in fact a narcissist. Does the myth show “symptoms” which might bear witness of this diagnosis? Freud plays out the original homoerotic dimension of the Greek version of Narcissus’s myth in the realm of the unconscious. Narcissus’s attraction for his own image is experienced by the “narcissist” as a form of instinct for death, and as perception of his own failure reflected in the failure of Narcissus’ s image in the water.
MANFERLOTTI
Lacan is the first to theorize the “mirror phase.” He says that when a child in his sixth or seventh month of life looks at himself in the mirror, he recognizes himself as ‘I’. Such a phase accomplishes a specific necessity and leads to the reconstruction of the self. We are, then, on the opposite horizon compared to the mythical character of Narcissus, but also compared to the late 19th century parable of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Narcissus contemplates his own “beauty,” while Dorian Gray contemplates with a dandy-like detachment his own catastrophe, his image, which in the mirror inexorably ages day after day.
TORTORELLI
The sudden feeling of alienation that the change in looks generates in Dorian Gray is similar to what happens to Athena when she realises, viewing her image in the mirror, that the sound of the flute, an object she herself invented, alters her face in a horrible way. Viewing her ugly double in the mirror, Athena throws the flute away. Marsyas will pick it up. In the same fashion, Dorian Gray contemplates his own disfiguring in the mirror, but his daring desire is also his damnation, for he is condemned to eternally possess his own beauty, by translating the signs of aging onto the portrait. Magic play of metamorphosis, in which what changes takes on the looks of what stays the same, and vice versa. The fixed image turns movable, and the movable one, reflected in the mirror, stays always and paradoxically identical to itself.
MANFERLOTTI
Dorian Gray aims to affirm his own self. However, the final metamorphosis is no doubt one of deformation and decay.
TORTORELLI
Dorian Gray aims to turn the portrait into a mirror, or rather, he wants the portrait to have the same properties as the mirror. In this sense, one can say that the character Wilde created is an esthetizing re-visitation of the myth of Narcissus, a Narcissus now crystallised and miraculously taken outside of time.
MANFERLOTTI
This is no doubt a fin de siècle myth, which reaches its natural and terrifying conclusion with fantastic icasticity. Born as sin, with Wilde it becomes the decomposition of the ego, one that will inform western cultures all the way to Pirandello. With Pirandello we have the ultimate sanction of the malaise long entrapped within Wilde’s mirror.
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