Begam, Samuel Beckett

[Dave Monroe]

An again, from Richard Begam, Samuel Beckett and the
End of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996),
Chapter Four, "Beckett's Mirror-Writing: Doubling and
'Differance' in 'Molloy,'" pp. 98-119 ...

"The mirror has become our most enduring symbol of
literary mimesis, the epitome not of reproduction but
of duplication, a simulacrum of the world in which
representation corresponds at every point to the
analogy of the mirror.  Cartesianism has also been
conceived of on the analogy of a mirror: consciuosness
functions as a 'glassy essence,' a window of
perception that fixes in its luminous gaze all the
shifting shapes and forms of reality." (Begam, p. 98)

And see here, according to Begam ...

Abrams, M.H.  The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic
   Theory and the Critical Tradition.  New York:
   Oxford UP, 1956.

Dallenbach, Lucien.  The Mirror in the Text.
   Trans. Jeremy Whiteley with Emma Hughes.
   Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Gasche, Rodolphe.  The Tain of the Mirror:
   Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection.
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986.

Lyons, John D. and Stephen G. Nichols, eds.
   Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to
   Descartes.  Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1992.

Rorty, Richard.  Philosophy and the Mirror of
   Nature.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1979.

To continue from Begam ...

"... the motif of the dark glass from 1 Corinthians
13.12.  This association is by no means accidental,
for it is in a mirror that we observe ourselves to be
identical yet different, since the mirror reproduces
what it reflects yet reverses what it reproduces."
(Begam, p. 103)

You know, it's been a while since I actually opened V.
itself.  Or my Stravinsky stuff, for that matter.  A
little over a week left, better get to work ...



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