THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP

The Magic Mirror with a Magic Lamp:

 Towards a Reconciliation of Mimetic and Expressive Theories of Literature

 

   In his widely admired book, The Mirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams gives a well-documented tracing of the origins of many prominent romantic ideas which, constituting the so-called expressive theories, came to replace in vogue gradually during the Romantic Period a former set of classical or neo-classical ideas which make up the so-called mimetic theories.  Now, as we understand from Abrams's own explication, the mimetic theories are all oriented towards the universe, seeking to explain art as essentially an imitation of aspects of the external world in which we live, whereas the expressive theories are author-oriented for its persistent recourse to the art producer to explain the nature and criteria of art.  This tracing and this explication of Abrams's are indeed admirable as a piece of scholarship.  However, I find Abrams himself did not seem to keep the different theoretical orientations clearly in mind when he made some statements.  For example, in his Preface to the admirable book, he says: “The title of the book identifies two common and antithetic metaphors of mind, one comparing the mind to a reflector of external objects, the other to a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives” (Viii).  The key word in this statement is mind, which we ordinarily take to be a word referring to the mental organ inherent in a person, be he an author or a reader, instead of referring to a work of art although an artist's mind will necessarily enter his work in some way.  If we will remember, when Plato and Aristotle say that poetry is an imitation, they are referring to the concrete work, especially a dramatic work, not to the poet's or playwright's mind.  Or even more accurately, the two initiators of mimetic theories are thinking especially of players imitating man's action and speech on the stage, who naturally represent the characters in the dramatic poet's text.  If Plato and Aristotle compare anything at all to a mirror, it should be first and foremost the artifact (e.g., the painter's bed), not the artist.  But, of course, even a wise man may get confused.  When Plato states in Republic X that a mirror can create appearances and so can a painter, he seems to suggest indeed that an artist's mind is like a mirror.  Now it is not that one's mind cannot be compared to a mirror.  But we must understand that to claim the resemblance of a poet's mind to a mirror is not equal to saying his poem is like a mirror.  In other words, the author's mind and the mind in the work should not be considered an identical one in the discussion of mimetic and expressive theories.  And Abrams's explanation regarding the title of his famous book is obviously a betrayal of his neglecting the subtle distinction.

 

   Nevertheless, Abram's explanatory statement is true in that man's mind does resemble both the mirror and the lamp in certain respects.  And as I shall soon expound it below, every mind--the author's, that in the work, as well as the reader's--is capable of taking the two metaphors for a description of its nature and function in the literary world, which I think involves five co-ordinates (author, work, reader, language and the universe) in two basic actions (reading and writing).¹  And furthermore, I shall argue that no literary mind can possibly function well without its lamp quality and mirror quality working together.  Thus, a reconciliation of mimetic and expressive theories is all but indispensable.

 

   First, let us consider the author's mind.  An author is fairly like anybody else in one respect, no matter what people have said about his talent or genius, sensibility or madness.  That is, he lives in the universe, he experiences whatever comes to him in it, and thus there may be times when he thinks he “knows” something about it.  This cognitive process is not possible without both the universe and the author's mind.  But how come one can “know” or claim to “know” something?  Here philosophers have differed in their interpretations.  But fundamentally the various interpretations are of two groups: rationalism and empiricism.  The former, variably called intuitionalism or apriorism and with such adherents as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Wolff, holds that genuine knowledge cannot come from sense perception or experience, but must have its foundation in thought or reason: certain truths are natural or native to reason and these innate or inborn truths are valid truths.  The latter, also called sensationalism and followed by such thinkers as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, asserts instead that there are no a priori truths: all knowledge springs from sense perception or experience, and pure thought, or thought absolutely independent of sense perception, is impossible.²  Now, when we talk of an author acquiring his knowledge from the outside world, we do emphasize the empirical viewpoint.  Yet, if we admit the existence of inspiration, of the time when a literary genius penetrates the outside world and “sees into the life of things,” the time indeed when imagination so possesses us that we lose consciousness of ourselves while a vision, a transcendental truth, an intuited meaning of life catches us unawares; then we must admit also the rationalist point of view.

   

   In fact, in its cognitive process, an author's mind is indeed like a lamp and a mirror at once.  It is like a lamp in that it throws light on that part of the external world which the eye is to see.  Without one's mind (“absent-minded”), one may look at something without seeing anything.  With one's mind (fully attentive), then, one can perceive what otherwise will be overlooked in one's sight.  The mind is the source of will, desire, or impulse; the headspring of emotions; the projector that spotlights the empirical world with its possessor's will, desire, impulse or emotions so as to render different colors or shapes to whatever is under scrutiny, and to focus the eyes' attention for a clear sight or an extraordinary insight.  The world is all darkness itself without “the lamp of Heave, the sun.”  It is likewise all darkness without “the lamp of man, the mind.”  “I think, therefore I am”; and therefore everything is, as it is perceived.

 

   On the other hand, however, the mind is really like a mirror, too.  It is so because no mind can perceive anything without taking in images of the perceived.  When the images come in and register themselves in the mind (become what we call memory or ideas), they are like images reflected in the mirror.  They are never “the real thing”; they are only “images,” appearances, of certain reality.³  But however unreal these mirrored images may be, they are nonetheless crucial to man's understanding.  Man never knows or understands directly through things themselves, but indirectly through images of things reflected or staying in the mind's mirror.  That is why some philosophers come to affirm that no real understanding of the universe is possible.  If reality is not a pre-existing Platonic Idea located in a special realm beyond our physical world, nor an a priori idea in one's mind, it is then only something perceived as an image from the empirical world; that is, it is only a phantom, an illusory or delusive phantom.  Hence, all understanding is misunderstanding.

   

   Now, it is not just the images as insubstantial phantoms that make man forever detached from reality.  Man is willfully determined not to see the spade as a spade; he prefers to construct a spade of his own by means of his “imagination.”  This is especially true of an artist.  A poet's reality, we may say, is more the images he himself creates than the mere images reflected instantly from outside into his mind's eye.⁴  Various descriptions have been given of the imaginative faculty of mind, ranging from Dryden's “conjunction of two natures, which have a real separate being”⁵ to Coleridge's “esemplastic” or “synthetic and magical power” (XIII) or the “shaping spirit.”⁶  All descriptions, however, just go to show that the mind is not just an ordinary mirror reflecting images of things from outside; it is rather a magic mirror capable of magnifying, minimizing, dissecting, rearranging, adding ,and deleting images.  And this unusual mental power has been explained in the light of association theories since Hume and Hartley and in the light of creative thinking, a subject much studied in relatively more modern times.  But as such explanations need not concern us here, suffice it to say that all psychologists, past and present, agree that man's perception is a “plastic perception,”⁷ that the human mind with its molding power is a creative, inventive, or innovative organ.

   

   This understanding, however, should not blind us to the fact that the mind never really creates anything out of nothing; its invention is always based on certain already existing things; its innovation is often a mere remolding of the old material.  To be brief, one can imagine only the imaginable.  A chimera, as often adduced as an example, is never a purely fictional being beyond our empirical understanding; it is in fact the composite of three ordinary images: the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent.  Likewise, any fantastic idea, abstract or concrete, that occurs in the mind is never so fantastic as to lose its root in the practical world of sense.  So, we can say that the inventive mind is still imitating other things in its course of invention.  Our mental mirror never ceases to reflect the external universe despite its strong creativity.  That is why Edmund Burke says that our creative power cannot produce absolutely new things.⁸

 

   Here mention can be made of the magic mirrors prevailing in ancient China and Japan.  It is reported that such mirrors are hand mirrors of metal, with polished faces slightly convex in form, and with backs occupied with ornamentation and inscriptions in bold relief.  They are known as magic mirrors from the fact that when a strong beam of light is reflected from their smooth and polished surface, and thrown on a white screen, an image of the raised ornaments and characters on the back of the mirror is formed with more or less distinctness in the disk of light on the screen.  And it is observed that a mirror of this kind is so made that the irregularity of its surface is inconspicuous in ordinary light and does not visibly distort images, but when the mirror reflects a bright light on a screen the unequal radiation renders the minute differences of surface obvious.⁹

 

   Now it occurs to me that this magic mirror is the best symbol of our mind.  Our usual mind naturally can reflect images of outward entities without visible distortion, that is, in a manner of sheer copying or imitation.  But this mind of ours is not without something of its own.  What compose our memory, call them thoughts or ideas, are just like the ornaments or inscriptions on the back of the magic mirror.  If only there comes a strong beam of light to work on the surface of the mirror, then such things in the memory (thoughts or ideas) will appear, though somehow distorted, on the screen.  But the questions are: where does the strong beam come from?  And what is the screen in our comparison?

 

   We are all familiar with the story of Aladdin.  It is related in The Arabian Nights that youth gets a magic lamp and ring, the rubbing of which brings two jinn, who do the owner's bidding.  I think this story is a good allegory for our present purpose.  No matter what the magic lamp and ring may represent, it is a tool used to fulfill one's wishes.  In our routine life, we use hammers, pencils, trains, computers and other material tools to fulfill many of our wishes.  But for an artist his tool is imagination.  Whatever he wants, he just imagines and then there it comes, just as the rubbing of the magic lamp and ring will surely bring about the jinn to do one's bidding.  So, we can say an author is an Aladdin with a magic lamp and ring in hand.  It is only that his magic lamp is equipped, as it were, with one of the above-mentioned magic mirrors.  Therefore, its working not only sets its own agents going but also provides a strong beam of light to set the magic mirror working too.  To speak plainly, imagination is a writer's magic lamp which makes possible the magic mirroring of his mind (the magnifying, diminishing, dissecting, rearranging, adding and deleting of images from within and without).  So, when we lose our imagination in our humdrum life, it is as if our soul's lamp-light has faded “into the light of common day” so that our magic mirror can no longer reflect anything extraordinary and fresh on our screen of life.¹⁰

 

   Yet, an author is one who has not yet lost his magic lamp, who can still project a bright light on his magic mirror and thus reflect images from within and without onto the screen of writing, which is no more than a verbal transcription of the reflected images of his mentality.  But, of course, this transcription, as any transcription is, is never identical with the original copy.  Besides, by the use of language, which is admittedly a poor medium for transmitting messages (not to say attitudes or moods), the author can never convey exactly what he has in mind, including his thoughts, ideas, feelings or whatever we choose to call it.  This is why Buddha prefers not to say anything and recognizes the impossibility of language.

 

   To be sure, a true poet will also find himself tongue-tied in the face of an intuited truth, a truth (call it a vision) with such a happy arrangement of images as his bright magic lamp has caused his magic mirror to reflect miraculously on his mental screen.¹¹  But, after all, a poet is not a Buddha.  He cannot be content with silence.  He has to utter what is overflowing in his mind.  And the way to utter it is by language, spoken or written.  It is to be remembered that when Wordsworth, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, defines poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” he is referring to the state of poetic fullness in the mind.  It is not until the state is transcribed in human language (that is, when composition of a poem has truly begun) that a poet can be recognized as a poet.  In other words, a poet has to turn his mental screen into a linguistic screen before he can reach others for recognition.

 

   But here we find a seeming division of opinion.  Benedetto Croce holds that ｅxpression presupposes impression (those who have never seen the sea can have no impressions of the sea and consequently cannot express the sea), and intuition co-exists with ｅxpression in the cognitive process (to intuit the sea is to express it).¹²  Therefore, for him art is intuition, is a “representation” in mind, is impressions reappearing in ｅxpression which is not necessarily verbal; in other words, there is no distinction between author and work, art is an act of intuition-ｅxpression, and what is external is not any more a work of art.¹³  In effect, Croce seems to identify our mental screen with the linguistic screen by asserting the strong bond between intuition and ｅxpression.  However, the fact is that by adopting language as the mode of ｅxpression, our mind must of necessity externalize our intuition and the process of externalization cannot but bring about dissimilarities (however subtle they may be) between intuition and ｅxpression.  One may disregard a sequence of sounds or a succession of printed words as the essence of poetry, but there is no perceivable poem without such external signs of linguistic entities.

 

   Whereas Croce tries to eliminate the discrimination between intuition and ｅxpression and thus minimize the significance of artistic media, E. H. Gombrich, in contrast, tries to highlight the function of the media.  He says, “The forms of art, ancient and modern, are not duplications of what the artist has in mind any more than they are duplications of what he sees in the outer world.”  For him, all art forms are “renderings within an acquired medium, a medium grown up through tradition and skill-that of the artist and that of the beholder” (1172).  This view, when applied to literary art, amounts to saying that literature is primarily a manipulation of language (an idea all Russian formalists will agree to); it has little to do with the writer's imitating the external world or expressing his internal world.  In other words, Gombrich seems to see the linguistic screen only, without caring much about its relationship to the mental screen where a writer's mind, with its magic lamp and mirror, first reflects images from outside and projects images from inside.

 

   It is my contention that a literary text cannot be viewed as solely a pattern of unseen mentality nor solely as a tangible mode of linguistic system.  So long as the mental screen can be understood as distinguishable from the linguistic screen, a literary text should refer to both, which we may call internal and external texts respectively for convenience sake.  Then it becomes obvious that the external text (the linguistic screen) is the signifier while the internal text (the mental screen) is the signified, if we consider them in the light of a symbolic system.  It is of course difficult to maintain that language imitates or reflects reality (a three-letter word like cat never imitates or reflects the animal's appearance or action in any way), since, as de Saussure has told us, language is an arbitrary symbolic system.  However, there is no questioning that language does try to represent one's idea of something.  If one's idea of something is already an imitation or reflection of images from outside and a projection of images from inside, then language is, doubtless, a representation of these reflected and projected images.  In consequence, a literary work in its physical appearance as a linguistic entity is a representation of the author's mental reflection and projection.

 

   Now, another question can be raised.  Is verbal representation a pure representation?  Does language merely represent ideas without shaping them in its own way?  To put it clearly, for example, does the word cat only denote the mewing animal or refer to the idea of that animal without adding something extra to it?  The answer is no, of course.  For at least the three-letter word has a sound, and a shape too if it is written or printed.  The sound and the shape of the word are the additives.  And in literature of all types, especially in poetry, the arrangement of sounds and shapes as well as the ideas of words strongly determines the “meaning” of the work.¹⁴  Therefore, language as a symbolic system is also like the magic mirror with a magic lamp.  It at once represents (in a sense imitates or reflects) ideas and projects something of its own onto the linguistic screen.  So the linguistic screen (the external text) is never identical with the mental screen (the internal text).  An author's “intention” is never wholly equal to his “extention.”  To see both as the same is to commit the “intentional fallacy.”¹⁵

   

   Talking of the intentional fallacy, we have stepped into the realm of reading.  Reading, to be sure, is the reverse process of writing.  While writing is the externalization of text through language, reading is the internalization.  In reading one takes in the verbal text (the linguistic screen) and interprets or deciphers the textual codes or linguistic symbols by means of linguistic conventions (the set-up grammatical rules and lexical meanings).  In ordinary reading it is expected that language remains the medium all the time, that it only enables the linguistic screen (the verbal or external text) to become in reverse order the mental screen (the imaginary or internal text), that it should only help the author's “extention” to be traced back to and tallied with his “intention.”¹⁶  In other words, in an ordinary sense to read is to imitate (or to reflect or to represent, if you like) what is being read (using the reader's voice to imitate the writer's voice, and the reader's ideas to reflect the writer's ideas).  This idea of reading, however, is much challenged in recent phenomenological or psychological studies of the reading process.¹⁷  It is commonly held nowadays that to read is to interpret, and to interpret is a subjective act, an act, we may see, no less than a self-ｅxpression.  In other words, this new idea of reading holds that the reading process is not a passive course of reconstruction; it is rather an active course in which the reader is also a magic mirror with a magic lamp, always ready to project his own images onto the linguistic or mental screen.  Hence, a reader reading is not very different from a writer writing; both are inventive to a high degree.

 

   Indeed, there is some sense in equating the reader and the writer.  After all, what makes them different is the material of their reading only: the reader reads books while the writer “reads” nature which is all the empirical world including man's books.¹⁸  If, as we have argued in the early part of the paper, an author both imitates the outer world and expresses his inner world in his act of perception as well as in his act of writing, there is no reason to negate that a reader does pretty much the same thing.  In fact, we can even equate reading with writing.  For, if the linguistic screen is removed (language as a medium taken aside), what can be left of reading and writing?  Only the presently-perceived images, and the created images which are but a new shaping of the already-existing images in the mind.  If we will follow Croce to eliminate the boundary between intuition and ｅxpression, then there is practically no difference among author, work and reader.  They are a Trinity.  Reading is the beginning and end of writing, and writing is the end and beginning of reading.

 

   If we cannot forget the difference, then the difference is only a diffèrance, to use a helpful term of Derrida's.  The universe cannot be understood directly by itself.  It has to be understood through its images given to our senses.  The sensually perceived images are also not final reality.  They become our mental text with the aid of our imagination.  Now the mental text has to be understood in turn through the linguistic text which stands for it.  Then the linguistic text becomes another cluster of images to be perceived by the reader's senses (primarily those of sight and sound).  And then the reader's perception of the linguistic text is to become another mental text in the reader's mind, which is again not understandable unless it is again changed into a linguistic text by the use of language.  If to change perceived images into a mental text is an act of internalization and to change a mental text into a linguistic text is an act of externalization, then the process from author through work to reader is a process of internalization--externalization--internalization.  At each stage, the text to be internalized or externalized is at once different from and similar to the text that has been internalized or externalized--a phenomenon much like the steps of a ladder (the lower step is always the same as, and different from, the higher step).  In other words, the entire literary world from the universe through the author and the work to the reader is a symbolic system, using God's language (all things in the universe) and man's language (words representing all things in the universe) as the basic symbols.  As a result, we have various texts--God's text (the arrangement of all things in the world), the author's text, which includes the arrangement of images or ideas of the world in his mind (the mental text) and the arrangement of images or ideas of the world in words (the linguistic text or what we commonly call “work”), and the reader's text (the arrangement of images or ideas of a linguistic text) which again can either stay a mental text or further become a linguistic text (as in the case of a written piece of criticism or translation)--and these texts are in a signified-signifier relationship, if we wish to borrow two semiotic terms.  But as the two terms often suggest a relationship of arbitrary representation, it may behoove us to discard them in our consideration of writing and reading theories which, as we have tried to demonstrate so far, are all theories of the mind--the author's mind, the mind in the work, or the reader's mind--and the mind, viewed from any angle, is never a mere mechanic device for arbitrary representation.  In point of fact, the mind, so long as it is a mind at all, always projects images of its own at the same time when it reflects images from outside.  It is always a magic mirror with a magic lamp, to be metaphorical.  Thus, mimetic and expressive theories should be reconcilably combined to describe it at any stage of creation, no matter whether it is experiencing life, writing a work, or reading a text.

 

Notes

 

1.Abrams sees only four co-ordinates, excluding the element of language, which I think is another focus of literary critics' theoretical thinking.

2.For a brief contrast of ideas like this, many books of philosophy can be referred to.  See, for example, Frank Thilly's A History of Philosophy, pp. 282-3.

3.Cf.  Hume's remark that ideas seem to be in a manner the reflexion of sense impressions. Treatise, p.2, quoted in Abrams, p.160.

4.Here let us not forget Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey,” 11. 106-7, with the comment that the natural scene observed is half-perceived and half-created (echoing Young’s Night Thought, Night Ⅵ, 11. 425-6).

5.Originally said by Lucretius, but quoted by Dryden in his “Heroic Poetry and Heroic License,” Essays, Ⅰ, 186-7.  Quoted again in Abrams, p. 161.

6.See his “Dejection: an Ode,” 1. 86.

7.The phenomenon implied in this term is well illustrated in Irving A. Taylor, “The Nature of the Creative Process,” pp. 66-72.

8.See his The Sublime and Beautiful, rpt.in Adams, p. 306.

9.See the entry “magic mirror” in Encyclopedia Britannica.

10.This is the philosophy embedded in Wordsworth's “Intimations of Immortality” from which I quote the line.

11.For an instance of this, see the famous passage about the crossing of the Alps in Wordsworth's The Prelude, Book Ⅵ, 1. 591 ff.

12.See his Aesthetic, rpt. in Adams, pp. 730-4.

13.For an explication of these ideas, see René Wellek, Four Critics: Croce, Valéry, Lukács and Ingarden (Seattle & London: Univ. of Washington Press, 1981), p. 3ff.

14.What I. A. Richards calls the meanings of feeling, tone and intention, in addition to sense, in his Practical Criticism, all owe their existence largely to the shapes and sounds of words, not just to ideas.

15.I think this is the best way of explaining this often-confusing term invented by Wimsatt and Beardsley.

16.This is E. D. Hirsch's idea when he says in his Objective Interpretation that “hermeneutics must stress a reconstruction of the author's aims and attitudes in order to evolve guides and norms for construing the meaning of his text.”

17.See, for example, Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading and Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? 

18.Here we may well remember that nature has been considered the Great Book created by God or Heaven in both Western and Eastern worlds, and it is a common idea of many romantic nature poets.

 

 

 

Works Consulted

 

Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp.  New York: Oxford U. P., 1953.

Adams, Hazard, ed. Critical Theory Since Plato.  New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. 

Burke, Edmund. The Sublime and Beautiful.  Rpt. in Adams, 303-312.

Coleridge, S. T.  Biographia Literaira.  Ed. J. Shawcross.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954.

Croce, Benedetto. Aesthetic.  Rpt. in Adams, 727-35.

Fish, Stanley.  Is There a Text in This Class?  Cambridge, MS: Harvard UP, 1980. 

Gombrich, E. H. “From Representation to ｅxpression,” Art and Illusion.  Rpt. in Adams, 1168-75.

Hirsch, E. D. “Objective Interpretation.” Appendix to Validity in Interpretation.  New Haven: Yale UP, 1973.

Hume, David.  Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. L. A. Selby-bigge.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.

Iser, Wolfgang.  The Act of Reading.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 

Richards, I. A.  Practical Criticism. London: Routledge, 1929. 

Taylor, Irving A.  “The Nature of the Creative Process.”  Creativity: An Examination of the Creative Process.  Ed. Paul Smith.  New York: Hastings House, 1959. 

Thilly, Frank.  A History of Philosophy.  Revised ed.  New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1951.

Wellek, René.  Four Critics: Croce, Valéry, Lukács and Ingarden.  Seattle & London: U of Washington P, 1981.

Wimsatt, W. K. Jr. & M. Beardsley.  The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry.  Kentucky: U of Kentucky P, 1954.

Wordsworth, William.  The Prelude.  Ed. Ernest de Selincourt.  Oxford: Oford UP, 1979.

Wordsworth, William & S. T. Coleridge.  Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads.  Ed. R. L. Brett & A. R. Jones.  London: Methuen, 1978.