University of Wisconsin-Madison

In his essay entitled «The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I» (Écrits, 1-7), Jacques Lacan observes that infants pass through a prelinguistic stage of development in which they recognize their own image in mirrors and proceed to identify and assume a self-image before actually entering into meaningful contact with the «Other» (individual persons, society in general, language as communication, etc.), with its consequent broad social conditioning and determination. The interplay between the «Ideal-I» created in infancy and the world around it interests us in the context of the present study insofar as it constitutes the nuclear subject of three key Brazilian short stories published over the span of nearly a century and reflecting three distinct approaches to individual identity within the social matrix; in each case, the use of mirrors provides the fictional vehicle for the exploration of the relationship, and in a broader sense the function of the mirror may be seen to reflect the respective social worldview of the three writers in question.

Our glance into the literary looking glass leads us to contemplate two giants of prose fiction in Brazil -Machado de Assis (1839-1908) and João Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967)- and a living short story writer, Luiz Vilela (born 1943). Our three-generational study will focus specifically and graphically upon a triad of stories whose titles immediately reveal the subject of our contemplation. These stories are «O espelho» by Machado de Assis, the tale of the same name by Guimarães Rosa, and «Imagem» by Luiz Vilela. Machado's story was published as part of his Papéis avulsos collection in 1882, while Guimarães Rosa's appeared exactly eighty years later in Primeiras estórias (1962); Vilela's tale was published in his Tremor de terra collection the year of Guimarães Rosa's death (1967). Brief comments regarding the first two of these stories have been made by Leo Pollmann in his 1973 festschrift paper entitled «"O espelho": Zur Erzählkunst von Machado de Assis and Guimarães Rosa», while nothing has been written to date concerning the third selection; Pollmann feels that the mirror stories by Machado de Assis and Guimarães Rosa have very little in common beyond the incidental fact of involving mirror use, while the present study will attempt to show Guimarães Rosa's subversion or reversal of all that Machado was about and how Luiz Vilela in turn elaborates upon the dichotomy already set up by the previous writers.

In Machado de Assis's «O espelho», the first-person narrator of the anecdote set within the omniscient third-person story proposes to give his hearers an «esboço de uma nova teoria da alma humana»; Each of us, according to this theory, possesses an alma interior and an alma exterior, the latter of which is made up of those persons, things, values and processes in the outer world (Lacan's «Other») which together influence and are important to the alma interior with which the individual is born:

Jacobina, the narrator, recounts an experience of his early manhood to support his theory. He had just earned his uniform as alferes, and had thus become the object of attention and adulation among family and friends:

A visit to his doting aunt in the country places him in a new, yet friendly situation, which decomposes as the aunt is forced by a family emergency to absent herself from the plantation; the slaves desert the premises shortly thereafter, leaving Jacobina alone with his thoughts and without his public, his alma exterior. He is reduced to a nearly vegetational state, having lost his reason for activity:

After attempts at original composition and the reading of the classics fail to distract or satisfy him, he at last seeks consolation by looking in the large mirror his aunt had loaned him to see at least one figure other than his physical person. To his consternation, he can make out only a vague shadow in the glass, as though the ever-faithful mirror had joined the exodus of the alma exterior.

It occurs to Jacobina to put on his alferes uniform even though his doting public is absent, and he discovers with surprise that now the mirror reflects back a clear image of the person he has become:

To retain his newly found stability, he begins to sit in front of the mirror in full uniform for up to three hours a day, reading and glancing at himself; in this way he survives the absence of his physical public until his authentic alma exterior is reconstituted through the return of the inhabitants of the plantation.

Guimarães Rosa couches his story entitled «O espelho», situated precisely at the midpoint of the Primeiras estórias collection, in the same direct first-person confessional style he had employed six years earlier in Grande sertão: veredas. The anonymous narrator confronts the narratee, addressed as «o senhor», with the account of his search for personal authenticity and transcendence incorporating use of mirrors. Recognizing the imperfection of human eyes, looking glasses and cameras to reflect faithfully without distortion or exaggeration, he has attempted to employ multiple visual devices in his crusade of self-improvement over a period of several years. He has determined to penetrate the «mask» of what Machado de Assis calls the alma exterior and to seek out the true core of his being:

Where Machado de Assis's Jacobina has perceived an orange, with two equal halves of equivalent value, Guimarães Rosa's protagonist sees a multi-layered onion structure; he begins to peel away each layer, beginning with the most superficial or physical, which he considers lowest on the value scale:

Considering himself as somewhat jaguar-like in terms of animal appearance, he works at not seeing the vestiges of this sósia in his mirror image. Having accomplished that, he proceeds to work at eliminating successively «higher» extraneous elements:

(a) hereditary similarity with other family members,

(b) the «contagion» of passions resulting from transitory psychological pressures from the outside,

(c) the materialization of ideas and suggestions of other persons, and

(d) ephemeral interests.

As he progressively works these traits out of his self-image, he notices that his reflection in the mirror is becoming more and more partial or spotty, something like the contour of a sponge or cauliflower. He begins to suffer headaches, so ceases looking at himself in mirrors for several months. When he does look by chance, he sees nothing in the glass; it is as though he had become transparent. The process he had so carefully cultivated has indeed carried itself out, even while he was unaware of it, but the conclusion he must draw about himself is horrifying:

So great is the shock of discovering his own vacuity of spirit and personality that for years he refuses to look in mirrors. He confesses to having suffered considerably through the vicissitudes of life during this period, and when by chance he again catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror, yet a greater surprise awaits him:

It would seem that, in the mystical tradition, purgatio has taken its course and illuminatio has begun. Further years go by, according to the narrator, and his interest is indeed drawn away from himself toward the needs of others. He begins to learn love, joy, compassion and reconciliation, and when he again catches sight of himself in a mirror, yet a further development is apparent: the emanent radiation is beginning to take form as a child-like image in the glass! From the «first fight» of creation is developing a reborn personality in its pristine clarity.

The narrator concludes that earthly life is indeed the «plano -intersecção de planos- onde se completam de fazer as almas» (78) and that it is a serious enterprise requiring «o consciente alijamento, o despojamento, de tudo que obstrui o crescer da alma» (78). Breaking out of his polite address to a single narratee at this point, he states the fundamental question in universal terms to all potential listeners/readers through the use of a more familiar form:

The story ends with an appeal to the narratee to respond by offering his own opinion on the subject in the fight of what he has just heard.

We may graphically depict the contrastive concepts of the human soul and mirror use in the homonymous stories by Machado de Assis and Guimarães Rosa in the following pair of concentric circles:

Machado offers a neutral view of the duality alma interior/exterior, inferring equality of value for each half of the whole. Two affirmations appearing early in his story, however, open the door for Guimarães Rosa's later reversal of this balanced view. The first statement, couched in a tone of ironic pomposity, tells us that

Jacobina, the silent fifth member of the group,

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defends his lack of participation in the discussion:

It is precisely the area of disparity between the herança bestial and the alta transcendência of the cousas metafísicas being debated that Machado de Assis does not address in his story, but which Guimarães Rosa takes up as the point of reference for his. Machado prefers to maintain through Jacobina's narration the interdependence of the «inner» and «outer» soul, having his narrator confess that the «outer» has indeed impinged upon the «inner», robbing it of some of its authenticity. Instead of making the least effort to recover the strength and independence of his alma interior at a time when it is at last in the position of potential weaning from the alma exterior, Jacobina has recourse to the mirror as a substitute «outer soul», choosing the route of abdication or «bad faith», in order to maintain a comfortable status quo. Appropriately enough, the story itself ends with Jacobina leaving the scene of his peroration, his four friends still waiting for «the rest of the story» when in fact there is nothing more to tell. Jacobina, in his abrupt departure, has obviated any reply or inconvenient questioning from his friends, those most interested in pursuing the «highly transcendent» and «metaphysical» matters of discussion.

Guimarães Rosa subverts nearly all elements of Machado's «Espelho», beginning his story with the invitation to dialogue from the anonymous narrator to his listener. Rosa's mirror, unlike the dominant looking glass that serves as surrogate alma exterior for Jacobina, is undependable; the narrator, in fact, employs multiple mirrors over several years of his life in an attempt to compensate for the inadequacies of any one of them. And when he does have recourse to mirror use, it is to «check up» on his progress from the outside, so to speak, in order to evaluate the degree to which he has succeeded in his conscious campaign to purify his «real» soul of the extraneous elements he perceives in it (depicted by the concentric outer circles in the diagram on the preceding page). His goal is indeed transcendence, though he consults a succession of mirrors to verify the external reflections of the internal processes he is seeking to carry out:

The herançe bestial mentioned by Jacobina, but never addressed directly by him, becomes the vestígio animal attacked initially by Guimarães Rosa's protagonist in his self-analysis. Here the perceived animal vestige is followed by the four successive layers of undesirable components of which he seeks to rid himself. Taken together, these layers form the «outer soul» as Guimarães Rosa conceives of it and are clearly depicted as lower or inferior to the «real soul» that the protagonist aims to discover, achieve or develop. In opposition to the balanced modus vivendi of inner and outer soul advocated by Jacobina in the Machado story, Guimarães Rosa proposes a neo-platonic ascensional path of progressive purgation of the external, superficial and ephemeral. Whereas Machado portrays the alma interior as being impinged upon by the alma exterior (, even in Jacobina's dreams, his supposedly independent «inner soul» imagines him as uniformed in the midst of an admiring throng of family and friends-[143]), Guimarães Rosa shows the progressive emergence of the «reborn» soul from within the alluvium of the extraneous and secondary, pushing its way toward the fight with increasing vigor.

Yet another twist is given to the mirror theme by contemporary mineiro fiction writer Luiz Vilela in his story «Imagem». In this tale, the anonymous first-person narrator-protagonist becomes aware of mirrors in a serious way for the first time as he is passing from childhood to adolescence. His unselfconscious infancy yields to an increasingly self-conscious teenage period, and he finds himself taking refuge in household mirrors as a buffer against the casual conversational comments directed at him by teachers and playmates. But one day the mirror offers no clear image of his adolescent person, precisely at a time when he is beginning to agonize over whether he is a good or bad individual in a moral sense:

Throughout adolescence he discovers that his mirror serves very well for narcissistically reflecting objective physical details such as his eyes and pores, but is increasingly unsatisfactory for revealing anything deeper. When his girlfriend jilts him, he begins an incessant self-searching in the mirror; but to no avail:

It is when he actually faints from emotional exhaustion after a prolonged period of staring at «aquela mancha escura e torturada como o borrão de um louco» (43) in the mirror that our protagonist begins to transfer his dependence from it to the verbal comments of other people as a means of self-identification, exactly the opposite of what he had done earlier. Having lost his confidence in mirrors as refuge or self-affirmation, he comes to avoid them and to look increasingly to valorative comments about his person made in his absence by other people and either overheard by him or transmitted to him by third parties. Initially, his «mirror-phobia syndrome» and resultant psychosomatic illness offer plenty of grounds for such comments to proliferate:

The prospect of seeing himself through the eyes of others and thus getting to know himself vicariously so renews him both physically and psychologically that he undertakes a systematic program of eliciting valorative comments from his relatives and acquaintances via direct and indirect means:

So it is that our protagonist, now presumably a man in his twenties, finds himself as it were being doubly reflected simultaneously in two mirrors: one of glass on the wall and the other the eyes of those who know him. It is plain, however, that the latter is gaining increasing ascendancy over the former, for the very mirror that had reflected a dubious and blurred image now alternatively and successively reflects various differing images of the narrator according to what comment has most recently been made about him. When his grandmother makes reference to events of his early teens, for example, he sees himself as a fifteen-year-old in the mirror. At this point, he begins to doubt the validity of his own perception and memory of himself, which in turn enhances his dependence on the perception and memory of others:

Gradually, what had been a healthy curiosity concerning the multiple perspectives of others regarding his person becomes a morbid dependence on those perspectives and an increasing undermining of his own self-confidence and esteem. In a curious multiplication and substitution exercise, the protagonist comes to view himself as a mirror:

In his conception, the opinions of others and the mirror reflections of the same come to form an increasingly infallible unit, whose veracity he trusts more and more to the detriment of his own powers of perception and analysis:

The supposed infallibility of the diverse and internally contradictory image(s) projected upon him by the combined forces of acquaintances and mirrors finally reduces our protagonist to a total loss of self-confidence and the capacity for self-analysis. From chameleon, he is being debilitated further to a nearly vegetable passivity.

The culmination of the protagonist's failed search for self-understanding comes when he discovers that those whose opinions about him he had sought are in fact becoming baffled about him themselves because they no longer find him a dependable or «fixed» point of reference:

His fragmented self-image has now reflected itself back on those who helped him create it, and once again he is the victim of his own game. His last attempt to find employment is as a circus clown, «como várias de minhas imagens eram as de um sujeito engraçado» (47), but his trial demonstration in that role fails miserably. The circus director brings the matter squarely to a head with his brusque question:

In Machado de Assis and Guimarães Rosa we have seen the contraposition of an individual first-person narrator-protagonist and an external collectivity (the «Other», in Lacan's terms). Machado generalizes the collectivity further by calling it the alma exterior of the protagonist, and its relationship to the latter is as a block with a single voice: it sees the narrator as an alferes and brings him to see himself in the same way. Guimarães Rosa delineates various levels or depths of influence of the outer collectivity upon the protagonist, seen initially as being at the center of, or «under», the several coexisting layers of socio-psychological «alluvium» accumulated around him throughout his existence, and which he must successively pierce in order to identify and cultivate his authentic self. Luiz Vilela now goes one step further than the two earlier writers: he discerns within the externally existing elements various and sometimes conflicting individual perceptions of the narrator-protagonist and brings all of these into play as they impinge simultaneously upon the vacillating central figure of the story. The «Other» has become the determinant of the «Ideal-I». It is the exploration of these multiple points of view and their cumulative effect upon the narrator-protagonist that constitutes the uniqueness of Vilela's «Imagem». The central figure becomes progressively disintegrated psychologically and socially as he moves from trying to discern what he is to other people to trying to become what he thinks he perceives others think him to be; since he cannot, in fact, be «all things to all people», he loses his integrity in the attempt.

The use of mirrors by Luiz Vilela differs from that of Machado de Assis and Guimarães Rosa in precisely the same way as does the interaction of the story's protagonist and the world around him. Machado's protagonist took refuge in mirrors as substitutes for external human presence and support, while Guimarães Rosa's used them as a verifying device in his campaign for self-realization as a unique and authentic individual. At the start, it would appear that Vilela is about to return to the Machadian use of mirrors in his «Imagem» but after the first few paragraphs of the story it becomes apparent that such is not the case. His protagonist realizes his passage into adolescence through his sudden fascination with self-contemplation in mirrors, but that phase runs its course and is followed by a veritable flight away from looking glasses. The mirror on the wall is replaced by the mirror in the eyes of others, and our protagonist finds himself becoming increasingly dependent on the evaluation of his person made by them. He still attempts to verify their varied and contradictory comments through self-contemplation in physical mirrors, but finds the results increasingly confusing and the effort ultimately fruitless once he loses his own set of criteria for self-evaluation. He has become the image of the mirror image of the opinion of his friends and acquaintances. This process may be shown diagrammatically as follows:

The proliferation, multiplication and consequent disintegration of the protagonist's self-image in the Vilela story, resulting in the dismantling of the image he projects to others, is paralleled structurally by the progressive weakening of the role of the assumedly objective mirrors in the story. Initially somewhat equivocal in their dependability, even while functioning as the narrator-protagonist's sole refuge from the onslaught of the outer world, mirrors slip by the end of the tale to be totally subservient to the very external opinions that were so threatening at earlier times. There has, then, been a reversal or turnabout of roles, though in both cases the central figure finds himself in an inferior and dependent relationship vis-à-vis the opinions of others, whether these be absorbed directly or «bounced off» a mirror reflector for verification. As mirrors were for Guimarães Rosa's narrator-protagonist the witness or checkpoint of his discovery and affirmation of personal authenticity, in the Vilela story they are witness of the exact opposite -loss of whatever authenticity the protagonist may have possessed in his younger years and increasing alienation from both others and himself.

In short, Vilela's mirrors, while reflecting usages already seen in the stories of Machado de Assis and Guimarães Rosa, ultimately offer reverse images of both writers, carrying Machado's usage to a new and exaggerated degree that disintegrates the status quo rather than maintaining it and turning Guimarães Rosa's positive mirror effect into a dubious and negative one. In each of the three authors we have considered, the mirror role captures the essential psychological quality of the individual stories involved, thus serving as nuclear metaphor for each and, in a larger sense, for the totality of each writer's fictional world-view. It is Guimarães Rosa's protagonist, and only he, who creatively engages the «Other» and is personally strengthened and matured as a result, in the manner envisioned by Lacan and paraphrased by Jameson in the following terms:

Through mirror use, Machado de Assis's protagonist manages to maintain a dubious status quo of mental and psychological stability, while Vilela's progressively deteriorates. In contrast to both, however, Guimarães Rosa's achieves a saldo positivo in the course of the story, which ends with an optimistic challenge to readers to escape existential despair and deterministic «defeatism» and to rise to the fullness of a balanced new life:

Guimarães Rosa, João. Primeiras estórias. 2nd ed. Rio de Janeiro, José Olympio, 1964.

Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language. Princeton: University Press, 1972.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits (trans. A. Sheridan). New York: Norton, 1977.

Machado de Assis, J. A. O conto de Machado de Assis (org. Sônia Brayner). Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1980.

Pollmann, Leo. «"O espelho": Zur Erzählkunst von Machado de Assis and Guimarães Rosa». Studia Iberica (Festschrift für Hans Flasche). Bern: Francke, 1973: 469-77.

Vilela, Luiz. Tremor de terra. Belo Horizonte: n. p., 1967.

Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 72, Number 4, December 1989