Modernism's Mirror

I'd like to use the following quote from the Auerbach reading as a springboard for the rest of this post:

"The writer as narrator of objective facts has almost completely vanished; almost everything stated appears by way of reflection in the consciousness of the dramatis personae." (534)

The motif of reflection/mirroring seems particularly pertinent to the issues raised by Auerbach and Gikandi: firstly in how mirroring as a means of constructing the self appears to be a trait (or product?) of modernism. I say this based not only on Woolf’s technique of using the random external event to reflect the inner self (538) and Gikandi’s argument of how Picasso uses the African art object to isolate the “pure” forms of Western art; Auerbach’s own method of explication - reflecting the stylistics of modernist fiction off (an)other text – bears this out as well. Of course, one can give a pat explanation for this trait: the destabilizing of the central, unitary self that accompanied the modernist movement (as Auerbach says several times) means that identity can only be asserted in relation (or reflection) to another, or an external circumstance. However, I would argue that this method of mirroring comes with its own problematic set of double standards, as it were.

It seems to me that we can read Gikandi’s argument as providing the underside to what is generally considered innovative and pathbreaking about modernism. One such feature: the external and mundane serving as a mirror/catalyst for the richer inner world. Here’s what Auerbach has to say about it:

“in Virginia Woolf’s case the exterior events have actually lost their hegemony, they serve to release and interpret inner events…” (538)

Besides the striking choice of the word “hegemony” - with its connotations of power relations - here, I can’t help but see a parallel between this and Gikandi’s argument. The external, or the African/Other (bearing in mind the common technique of relegating the Other to the margin), is not considered in and of itself but in how it sheds light on the internal/central self.

At the same time, both Woolf and Auerbach both employ the technique of extrapolation: using something small (a brown stocking, a short extract from To the Lighthouse, a madeleine..sorry Proust) to derive larger conclusions. Yet how is this different from what Gikandi accuses Picasso and other Primitivists of doing – fetishizing and using a part of African culture (like the mask) as sufficient representation of the whole?

I guess it’s hard to think of such questions without bringing in value judgments – Auerbach was right when he said that this was “indicative…of certain tendencies and needs on the part of both authors and public” (546). Yet my question is: is it possible to conceive of the self without a mirror? We are used to thinking in dichotomies, I think - even the module title seems to be setting up a sort of self-other divide…but how else can we think of one without the other?

- Andrea