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Mirrors and Pedro Salinas’ Doubled ‘You’ VIALLA HARTFIELD-MÉNDEZ Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist. Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking-Glass
The mirror, together with other specular devices, has long held symbolic meaning in Western culture and literature. It also early on came to stand as a metaphor for language, or certain aspects of language, a function that has been exploited with a great deal of subtlety in the twentieth century. This is the case in the writings of Pedro Salinas, whose specular images most frequently occur when a man is looking at a woman, though the situation is sometimes reversed. I have earlier argued, in a somewhat different context, that female split identities can be observed in Salinas’ mirrors, and that his specular images are often related to treacherous memory, thus frequently indicating a disillusion in the search for a mutual transcendence for lovers. Moreover, I will argue here, Salinas’ exploration of male-female relationships also involves mirror images in such a way as to go beyond the nature of these relationships to the nature of language and even of reality itself. Indeed, the special reciprocal relationship that mirrors and language have in Salinas’ work reveals a profound ambiguity about both. As we explore his equivocal view of these two reflexive devices—the mirror and language—it becomes clear that, while Salinas fully participated in a symbolist-modernist Weltanschauung, he also patently anticipated what is now considered the postmodern. Among Hispanists, Andrew Debicki has perhaps most successfully For example, John Lyons and Stephen Nichols recognize this metaphorical function of the mirror in the title of a collection of essays about mimesis: Mimesis. From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, where ‘mirror’ refers to the idea of literature as ‘an imitation of some reality outside itself’ present since antiquity (Mimesis. From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. John Lyons and Stephen Nichols [Hanover/London: Univ. Press of New England, 1982], 1). Vialla Hartfield-Méndez, Woman and the Infinite: Epiphanic Moments in Pedro Salinas’s Art (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P./London: Associated University Presses, 1996).
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recast the traditional divisions of Hispanic letters in European and American terms, referring to a ‘modernity’ in Spanish letters that loosely corresponds to a more general concept of modernism than the somewhat narrowly defined Latin-American modernista movement. Departing from Marjorie Perloff’s view that in Anglo-American modernism there are two antithetical tendencies, one stemming from symbolism, the other ‘anti-Symbolist’ in its ‘indeterminacy or “undecidability” ’ (Perloff’s phrase), Debicki maintains that a similar ‘strand of indeterminacy’ runs through Spanish poetics of the early twentieth century. Salinas is cited by Debicki as representative of this tendency to undermine confidence in language’s ultimate powers to convey experience. As he points out, the critic and observer in Salinas often propounded language’s capabilities, the best example of this stance being his El defensor, a series of essays in defence of the acts of writing and reading. Nevertheless, Debicki observes, ‘many of Salinas’s actual poems convey, above all, the impossibility of this quest [for ultimate meanings] and the undecidable nature of what we see, experience and seek’. While stopping short of declaring Salinas’ poetry ‘indeterminate’, Robert Havard has also observed a central preoccupation with language, along with an ‘often antagonistic attitude towards language’, stating that ‘Salinas’s whole purpose is to destabilize language, in its lexicon, its syntax, and in its rhetorical resources’. A close study of Salinas’ treatment of the mirror helps to elucidate this writer’s relationship to language, and reveals that specular devices play a much larger role in his poetics of language than critics have heretofore observed. Furthermore, this image appears in his earliest works and continues throughout his literary production. But before we engage in a systematic explication of the Salinian mirror images, a prior consideration of the speculum as a semantic presence will greatly aid our understanding of the mirror’s central position in Salinas’ articulation of the pitfalls of language. The mirror’s ability to function as a literary sign has been seriously questioned, most notably by Umberto Eco, in his Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. This may be due, in part, to a form of logocentrism, that is, the privileging of spoken and written language over Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1981), vii; Andrew Debicki, Spanish Poetry of the Twentieth Century: Modernity and Beyond (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1994), 30. It should be noted that Debicki considers this early ‘indeterminacy’ as clearly secondary to the dominant modernism rooted in symbolism. Pedro Salinas, El defensor, ed. and intro. by Juan Marichal, first published 1954 (Madrid: Alianza, 1967). Further references to this work are indicated by page number in the text. Debicki, Spanish Poetry of the Twentieth Century, 38. Robert G. Havard, From Romanticism to Surrealism: Seven Spanish Poets (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988), 177, 182.
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other forms of communication, a process arising from what Albert Borgmann, following Richard Rorty, calls the ‘linguistic turn’ that philosophy took with the publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus in 1921. This precludes granting to any object the power to communicate or express reality, a process which is usurped by a discussion of the language used to present that object. While he makes no specific reference to such a ‘linguistic turn’, it is within this milieu that Eco argues that the mirror, and whatever may occur in the catoptric process, can only be considered a ‘(pseudo-)semantics’. Other critics have taken issue with Eco, some more emphatically than others. Jenijoy La Belle, in Herself Beheld. The Literature of the Looking-Glass, offers the most thorough rebuttal of the assumption that the mirror image is not a sign, preferring to see the catoptric and the linguistic as inextricably intertwined. Eco maintains that ‘the mirror image cannot be interpreted. At most the object to which it refers can be interpreted [...]’ [his emphasis]. La Belle counters with the argument that the mirror does indeed have a ‘differential’ property that can be perceived when one focuses on the psychological interaction with the mirror, a property that allows for interpretation, both of the mirror image and the object to which it refers. In her analysis of women in literature looking at themselves in mirrors, La Belle observes a phenomenon that she calls the ‘oxymoronic mirror’, where the specular image is a signifier necessarily different from its signified—and yet a signifier with a peculiarly (perhaps even uniquely) intimate, direct, and complete relationship with the signified. The mirror image is ‘at once the self (at least in the visual sense) and not the self’; that is, at once self and other. It is this oxymoronic nature that, Albert Borgmann, The Philosophy of Language. Historical Foundations and Contemporary Issues (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 91. As Borgmann puts it, this linguistic turn ‘implies that fruitful talk about reality is possible only if first of all we concern ourselves with the language in which that reality is accessible to us’ (91). Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Advances in Semiotics Series (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1984), 213. This is so, he argues, because, even if ‘the mirror “names” (and this is clearly a metaphor), it only names a concrete object, it names one at a time, and it always names only the object standing in front of it’ (211). Thus the mirror remains in the realm of relation between tokens, unable to refer to a relation between types, a move that Eco considers sine qua non for an object to be considered semiotic, or a sign (215). Ibid., 216. Jenijoy La Belle, Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1988), 41–42. Kathleen Woodward, in an article on ageism, perceives this equivocal nature of the mirror in our rejection of the mimetic function of the speculum in old age. Woodward
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La Belle contends, ‘provides mirroring with the differential nature of the lingual sign’. In numerous texts, this critic observes ‘competing semiotic modes of self-realization: writing and mirroring’. Thus, while she recognizes that the intertwining of the catoptric and the linguistic occurs ‘when the experience of mirroring is communicated to us through a text’, she maintains that this also occurs ‘at a more fundamental level when one recognizes one’s own reflection’. Hence the mirror’s competition with lingual signs in certain literary texts that present self-reflexive situations. La Belle’s study is generally focused on women looking at themselves in mirrors. When the third, and male, party is introduced (as is the case in so many Salinian texts), we find that the intermingling of the catoptric and the semiotic becomes even more complex, and paradoxically, more perspicuous. In a consideration of this writer’s poetry, Jonathan Mayhew has also taken some exception to Eco’s argument that the mirror image cannot function as a sign, asserting that Salinas does indeed ‘posit a semiotics of the mirror’. Mayhew’s observations regarding the Salinian mirror are along the lines of La Belle’s argument: that the reflection in certain texts is not merely mimetic but in fact it fundamentally changes the referent, and that even its mimetic characteristics create ambiguity. Mayhew’s study confines itself to Salinas’ poetry. Yet in his prose works, as well as in his theatre, we can also observe one being looking at the reflection of the other in the mirror, using the mirror in the realization of the other, in a strikingly semiotic manner, then facing the consequences of this act. Thus, while the mirror is crucial to any interpretation of observes, ‘As we age we increasingly separate ourselves—what we take to be ourselves— from our bodies. We believe our real selves, that is our youthful selves, are hidden inside our bodies, not commensurate with them’ (55). Thus, Woodward proposes a kind of Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ that occurs at the opposite end of the spectrum from infancy—old age. Characteristic of this later ‘mirror stage’ is a resistance to the specular image, which paradoxically has the effect of evoking the presence of the other, just as the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ of infancy evokes the presence of the other in the formation of the ‘I’ (Kathleen Woodward, ‘Instant Repulsion: Decrepitude, the Mirror Stage, and the Literary Imagination’, The Kenyon Review, V [1983], No. 4, 43–66). La Belle, Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass, 153. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 153. Jonathan Mayhew, The Poetics of Self-Consciousness: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P./London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), 45. Few critics have commented on the presence of mirror imagery in Salinas’ work. Mayhew’s chapter on Salinas in his Poetics of Self-Consciousness is a notable exception. See also David L. Stixrude’s The Early Poetry of Pedro Salinas (Madrid: Castalia, 1975), which includes a brief mention of mirror images within the context of Stixrude’s argument for a broad interpretation of the poet’s deep existential dissatisfaction; and Rupert C. Allen’s Symbolic Experience: A Study of Poems by Pedro Salinas (University, Alabama: Univ. of
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Salinas’ treatment of the man/woman relationship, it is just as fundamental to any interpretation of his views of language and of reality. As early as 1914 and 1915, in love letters to his then fiancée Margarita Bonmatí, the mirror image appears metaphorically. For the young writer, he and Margarita are mutually illuminating and reflective: ‘Vida, los dos somos luz y espejo. Yo espejo para tu luz y tú, alma, espejo para la mía’. This and other similar references in the letters anticipate certain images in Salinas’ later love poetry and in his theatrical and narrative projections of the male/female relationship. The mirror images form an integral part of the way in which Salinas perceives and projects the female persona, the male persona, and especially the relationship between the two. Narrative, theatrical and poetic pieces written throughout his career point to a dual function of the speculum. On the one hand, mirrors are a possible tool in a metaphysical quest for the essence of woman, of man, or of a world beyond the parameters of the individual human soul accessible to the man and woman together. On the other hand, there is ample evidence that the mirror fails as a transcending device and thus becomes a symbol of disillusion and error: disillusion in the process of mutual knowledge in the male/female relationship, in the process of self-knowledge through that relationship, and ultimately in the search for transcendence through language, or the expression of such a relationship. One of the most salient characteristics of Salinas’ poetry is his insistence on the use of pronouns, especially the yo and the tú. A frequently cited passage from La voz a ti debida points to this obsession: ‘¡Qué alegría más alta: / vivir en los pronombres!’. Numerous interpretations of Salinas’ pronouns have been put forth, most of which have to do with a search for some sort of transcendence. J. M. Aguirre, Alabama Press, 1986), in which the mirror is interpreted as ‘divinatory’ in the sense that it ‘readily activates the projection of unconscious contents’ (43). Additionally, several of the mirror images treated here also appear in my study Woman and the Infinite, though, as mentioned earlier, in different contexts. Pedro Salinas, Cartas de amor a Margarita, 1912–1915, ed. Solita Salinas de Marichal (Madrid: Alianza, 1984), 159. In Salinas’ early and late poetry there are references to a unilateral relationship between the poet and the mirror, yet the most significant development of the specular theme is in the context of the love relationship. Pedro Salinas, Poesías completas, ed. Soledad Salinas de Marichal (Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1971), 243. All further references to Salinas’ poetry are to this edition, and are indicated by page number in the text. I cite a few representative views: Elsa Dehennin, in the first book-length study on Salinas, proposed that the pronouns substitute for more carnal language and thus are transcending devices. See Passion d’absolu et tension expressive dans l’oeuvre poetique de Pedro Salinas (Gent: Romanica Gandensia, 1957), 45. Salinas’ close friend, fellow poet and life-long confidant Jorge Guillén suggests that the pronouns allude to the essence of things
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referring to Bergson’s postulation of the existence of a fundamental ‘I’ set in opposition to a conventional, mundane and material ‘I’, has argued that La voz a ti debida presents the case of the poet’s fundamental ‘I’ searching for communication with the fundamental ‘I’ of the beloved. Yet there are many instances in Salinas’ work of a divided yo, or tú, that is very aware of its own division—instances in which later psychoanalytical approaches prove to be more pertinent. The idea of aware divided selves, of one self that observes the other, is of course Freudian in origin, and has been developed further by various psychoanalysts and theorists. Best known among these is perhaps Jacques Lacan, whose theories regarding the stade du miroir and the construct of self through reflection in another, are related to the ontological questions of self-knowledge and knowledge of the other. Crucial to Lacan’s notion of a developmental ‘mirror phase’ is the idea that the child at once discovers himself and sees himself as other in the mirror. D. W. Winnicott and Heinz Kohut go beyond the actual mirror to other ways of self-reflection. As Wendy Lesser points out, for both these theorists, it is the mother or a similar substitute figure who initially ‘offers the mirroring function that Lacan attributes to the mirror itself’. Departing from this premise, Lesser argues that such a concept of mirroring opens up the process, so that, instead of the closed prospect offered by the cold inanimate mirror there is a sense of mutuality and of a self contained within another being. Thus, for Lesser, when men look at women through art, there is a sense of completion of themselves, a discovery of their other selves. This frequently manifests itself explicitly in the image of the woman-as-mirror (an image that occurs in Salinas’ texts). This is a mirror ‘in which the portrait one gets back is not the self one expects, but the lost self for which one searches’. There is the sense of a self regarding itself, being truly selfaware and simultaneously aware of a lack, a gap into which another being can step and act as a mirror where one can find, as it were, the rest of (see ‘Poesía de Pedro Salinas’, Buenos Aires Literaria [13 October 1953], 32–53). Carlos Feal Deibe sees the pronouns as an escape from names, which he considers corporeal, into the realm of the soul (see La poesía de Pedro Salinas [Madrid: Gredos, 1965], 151). And C. B. Morris notes the freedom of anonymity in Salinas’ use of pronouns in Una generación de poetas españoles (1920–1936) (Madrid: Gredos, 1988). J. M. Aguirre, ‘La voz a ti debida: Salinas y Bergson’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, LII (1978), 98–118, at p. 101. The Function of Language in Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self. Psychoanalysis, trans., with notes and commentary, by Anthony Wilden (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1968), 160. Wendy Lesser, His Other Half. Men Looking at Women through Art (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard U. P., 1991), 16. Ibid., 17–19. Ibid., 11.
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oneself. Even in Lacan’s explication of the mirror stage, this lack, or gap, is intuited, since, as Carmen Chaves Tesser notes, ‘[t]he mirror stage is also the point at which language begins to fill voids’. When one is at once self-aware and aware of a space which another being can fill, the articulation of that space is through language. At the same time, language is also the medium through which that space may be filled—the expression of the recognition and/or creation of the other. And yet in Salinas’ work, we are confronted, not only with selfcontemplation and division of the ‘I’, but also the complicated relationship of self to the other. The distinction between self and other has also been explored by Tzvetan Todorov, who in turn refers to Martin Buber’s concept of I-Thou, according to which, ‘[t]here is no I taken in itself, but only the I of the primary word I-Thou and the I of the primary word I-It. When a man says I, he refers to one or the other of these’. Todorov adds: ‘Further, the I and the Thou—that is, the self and the other—designate the two participants in the act of discourse; the one who speaks and the one addressed’. The creation, or acknowledgement, of the other—of a tú, as in Salinas’ poetry—thus presupposes the relationship of the self, or the yo, to that other. If we continue Todorov’s line of thought, it follows that the literary creation of the other also arranges the self and the other in an active (speaker)/passive (listener) relationship. Thus, we can argue, the I of a narrative or poem or theatrical speech simultaneously speaks to the other and speaks the other into being. This may seem almost tautological, and yet it is fundamental to a clear understanding of the yo-tú relationships found in Salinas’ work. Not surprisingly, especially given that much of his poetry evokes an apparently real love affair, in most of these relationships the speaker/listener dichotomy is also male/female. It will also be clear by now that the dichotomy ‘self/other’ exists in two Carmen Chaves Tesser, ‘Post-Structuralist Theory Mirrored in Helen Parente Cunha’s Woman Between Mirrors’, Hispania (USA), LXXIV (1991), No. 3, 594–97, at p. 595. Ruth Katz Crispin has written an explication of Salinas’ La voz a ti debida in Lacanian terms, according to which the trajectory of this book is comprised of an intent to communicate with the other, in order to ‘lograr una confirmación más auténtica de su propio yo’ (see ‘Interpretando a Salinas a través de Lacan: el lenguaje y la identidad en La voz a ti debida’, Texto Crítico, XVI [1990], Nos. 42–43, 37–52, at p. 37). According to Crispin, in La voz a ti debida, this ‘interrogation’ of the beloved is combined with ‘la apremiante cuestión ontológica de la muerte y a la confrontación inconsciente pero esencial con la misma tradición poética’, a confrontation that Crispin regards as resolved at the end of the book— that is that Salinas sees himself, not so much in competition with earlier poets, but as an essential link in the endless chain of the poetic tradition. The present study observes a confrontation, not only with the poetic tradition, but with the nature of language itself, a conflict that is not necessarily resolved. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland/London: Case Western Reserve Press, 1973), 155.
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domains: first, there is the self and the other as two distinct beings, two different people in relationship (even though the ‘other’ may be a construct of the ‘self’); and within that relationship, both entities, the self and the other, may become divided, so that we have the self (or I) and its other ‘self’, and the other and its other ‘self’. That is, both the yo and the tú can have other ‘selves’ unilaterally. In his 1914–15 letters to Margarita, Pedro Salinas had already conceived of the divided self as both masculine and feminine. Each is light and mirror, source and reflection. And each sees another self reflected in the other’s mirror. In these early letters, Salinas celebrates the separation within each individual self because he wants it to mean union with the other being and thereby access to their higher ‘true’ selves. However, he quickly begins to recognize the pitfalls of this division of self and is suspicious of the veracity of the reflected selves. Interestingly, the references to a division of the masculine self disappear almost entirely, allowing for a concentration on a doubled feminine tú. This reflects a deliberate I-Thou construct in which the emphasis is on the Thou, yet in which definition of self is in the other. Keeping in mind the implication of the yo in the construct of the tú, let us examine this feminine tú and her experience with the mirror in Salinas’ work. La Belle identifies a particularly feminine tendency in literature toward a psychological dependence on the mirror and observes two internal processes. The first is an identification of the reflection in the mirror with the self, leading to the definition of self (sometimes exclusively) through that intangible image. In the second process the differences between the two images are emphasized, in some cases to such a degree that the woman does not recognize her own reflection and refuses to own it. There is a ‘destabilization of identity’; the act of looking into a speculum actually produces a division of the self. In Salinas’ work, the poetic male yo, or other male characters tend to observe and even create the feminine split identities by placing literal and figurative mirrors before the women. The resulting doubled selves are a barrier to communication between the sexes, a barrier that is clearly evident in a poem from Razón de amor in which the poet addresses a tú who vacillates between her selves: the self that responds to his love, and is in fact identified with the emotion amor; and the other more cautious self. The poet exclaims: ¡Qué vaivén entre una y otra! A los espejos del mundo, al silencio, a los azares, preguntabas cuál sería la mejor. (Poesías, 363) La Belle, Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass, 112.
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The espejos are a place where the beloved must choose between one and the other, a place which assumes the division of herself. The suitor’s frustration stems from his inability to be with both simultaneously: Cuando estabais separadas, como la flor de su flor, ¡qué lejos de ti tenía que ir a buscarte el querer! (Poesías, 363) A resolution of the conflict occurs when the beloved’s two selves look at each other, as in a mirror, and are focused into one being: Cara a cara te miraste, tu mirada en ti te vio: eras ya la que querías. (Poesías, 363) Yet the poem ends ambiguously, as Salinas intended. In the poet’s earlier description, the woman’s self is separate from her other self, the one that loves, and that other self’s identity is ‘amor’, a masculine noun in Spanish. The self that loves is the self that responds to her lover’s demands and is indistinguishable from his masculine perspective. In the end, when the doubled tú seems to be refocused into one, the poem takes a turn from resolution to a sense that one being has overcome and eclipsed the other: Y esta paz de ser entero no sabe el alma quién la ganó: o es que tu amor se parece a ti, de tanto quererte, o es que tú, de tanto estarle queriendo, eres ya igual que tu amor. (Poesías, 364) The use of a mirror by the male yo is even more patent in an early poem from Presagios. It is not the woman but her lover who observes her image in the mirror, and who therefore a priori doubles the you: ¡Cuánto rato te he mirado sin mirarte a ti, en la imagen exacta e inaccesible que te traiciona el espejo! (Poesías, 60) The flesh-and-blood woman urges him to kiss her, but the mirror woman interposes herself: y mientras te beso pienso en lo frío que serán tus labios en el espejo. (Poesías, 60) The probable frigidity of her lips in the mirror makes it impossible for him
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to be satisfied that the woman is truthful when she says, ‘Toda el alma para ti’. He experiences an emptiness that can be filled only by ‘ese alma / que no me das’. But the essence of herself that she is not surrendering to him (notwithstanding her protestation to the contrary) is in the mirror, the poet says. Or is it? The last three lines reveal both a ‘true’ self and a disguise: El alma que se recata con disfraz de claridades en tu forma del espejo. (Poesías, 60) It is in the context of his discussion of this poem that Mayhew makes his observation, cited earlier, that Salinas posits ‘a semiotics of the mirror’, since ‘the reflection does not merely copy the referent, but rather simultaneously adds to and subtracts from it’. The mirror thus becomes ambiguous and paradoxical, rather than a mere mimetic device. According to Mayhew, the conclusion ‘willfully introduces obstacles to the mimetic directness of the mirror image’. Mayhew’s commentary is centred on Salinas’ ‘poetics of self-consciousness’ and the poet’s deliberate foregrounding of the medium of expression ‘at the expense of the reality represented’. Yet Salinas’ intentional focus on the mirror, and therefore the medium of language, does have consequences in the poet’s relationship with the tú, which are not considered in Mayhew’s comments. If we focus on the nature of the tú, given the equivocal characteristics of the Salinian mirror, we can see that the result is a disconcerting doubling of the tú that alternates between, and exists in, both the real woman and her reflection. Salinas’ intent is not so much to reject the living reality of the woman as it is to explore the repercussions of the poetic medium in his relationship with her. In the last lines of another poem from the same book, the poet clearly recognizes the danger in seeking out images of the woman in a speculum. There is a clear ‘amenaza / de romperte en dos pedazos / —vida o muerte, tierra o cielo— / bruscamente, irreparable’ (Poesías, 64). Once having separated the tú into something like a Bergsonian fundamental ‘I’ and superficial ‘I’, the doubling may be irrevocable. At the very least, it becomes another obstacle to the union of the yo and the tú. Salinas expresses a similar fundamental fear in La voz a ti debida: ... Mejor no amarse mirándose en espejos complacidos deshaciendo esa gran unidad en juegos vanos. (Poesías, 281) Mayhew, The Poetics of Self-Consciousness, 45. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 50.
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Here the fear is not so much that the tú will be irreversibly doubled and therefore inaccessible, but that the union of the lovers can be annulled by the mirror’s power to separate. Thus, even when the lovers seem to have found their other selves in each other, thereby forming a new being that transcends themselves and the mundane, there is still the constant threat that the new being will be rent asunder. There are also numerous parallels in Salinas’ short narratives and theatre where, as in the poetry we have seen, the woman’s reflection in a mirror is manipulated by the man. The central motif of the short drama La bella durmiente is the female protagonist’s loss of herself in a mirror owned by her would-be suitor. The two characters meet at a mountain retreat under the assumed names of Soledad and Álvaro. They begin to talk and to fall in love, but their past will prevent a happy ending. Soledad works as a model for the Rolán mattress company, for which she created a ‘Sleeping Beauty’ character as part of an advertising campaign. She feels that she has lost her own identity and blames its destruction on the company. Álvaro, as it turns out, is the owner of the company, and thereby the owner of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ image. Soledad, never cognisant of this, tells her story to Álvaro in all confidence. In her description of the loss of identity, she speaks of a moment which occurred while she was dressed as Sleeping Beauty, when someone held a mirror for her: ‘yo me incliné sobre su círculo y me hundí desde entonces para siempre en él. La vi a ella, no a mí’. The radical disjunction of her two selves is indeed irreparable, as the poet Salinas had earlier comprehended that it could be. Soledad’s autonomous self is lost in a mirror image belonging to Álvaro. Before hearing her story, he had proposed to her. At the end of her story, she explains why she can never marry: Ese nombre me ha vaciado de mí misma. ¿Siente usted ahora por qué le dije que no tenía en mí mujer con quién casarse? La ha absorbido toda ... el nombre ese. Rolán ... (Teatro, 189) The possibility of relationship or even the most basic communication is denied. Once Soledad has told him her story, he cannot even acknowledge that he is the owner of the Rolán company, the man who has already ‘absorbed’ her entire identity. Pedro Salinas, Teatro completo (Madrid: Aguilar, 1957), 185. Further references to Salinas’ theatrical pieces are from this collection, and are indicated by page number in the text. Salinas thus turns on its head the traditional Sleeping Beauty myth, according to which the Prince Charming who is her true love is the only possible agent of Beauty’s release into life from her death sleep. In this case, the predicament that Salinas creates for his characters is oxymoronic in the way that La Belle takes the mirror to be: Soledad is for Álvaro at once her self and not her self; the ‘true’ Soledad bares her soul for him, but is prevented from being in relationship by the ‘other’ that his mirror has created for her. The
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Soledad’s tragedy lies in her inability either to return to herself, or go forward into a mutually reflective relationship with Álvaro. Not all of Salinas’ female characters are so paralysed, however. On occasion, the woman takes the mirror into her own hands, holding it for herself, creating her own self image. Paradoxically, this action on the part of the woman removes her even further from the male/female relationship, as she turns from her lover to her mirror. It also upsets the active/passive arrangement of the discourse. In Salinas’ work, when the male yo extends a mirror to the female tú, this action is part and parcel of the creation of the female other, which depends upon the passive acceptance by the woman of the image that she finds there. When that acquiescence disappears, so does the relationship of self/other that the male yo has been creating. La Belle has found numerous examples of ‘how the male/female bond breaks down as the mirror/female bond becomes stronger’, and she offers an explanation: Since the mirror image is both self and other, it becomes possible to conceive of a relationship with the glass having a degree of intimacy more intense than any relationship a woman can have with a lover. The clearest literary examples of this counterbalance that La Belle finds are in D. H. Lawrence’s portrayals of women with their mirrors, texts in which Lawrence consistently urges the woman to forgo acts of selfreflection in front of her mirror in order to, in La Belle’s words, ‘forget the ego and dissolve into the greater male/female unity’. Lawrence and Salinas coincide in the search for unity and in the view that a woman’s deliberate use of her own mirror disrupts that unity. ‘Livia Schubert, incompleta’, an early short story from Víspera del gozo illustrates the way this transpires in Salinas’ literary evocations of relationship. Livia is asleep on the bed after an afternoon of love. Her lover, the narrator, observes her. He sees himself on her sleeping face, but knows that upon awakening she will remove every vestige of him. Finally, se quedará ante el espejo, yo deshecho, rehecha ella, convertida lo que era hace un instante, rica y tumultuosa vida en mis brazos, en una biografía correctísima, sin una imperfección. As the story progresses, Livia’s actions correspond to her lover’s figurative expectations. Her final act is to leave on a train with the clear intention of kiss of her Prince Charming has become the source of her solitude. La Belle, Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass, 67, 69. Ibid., 71. Pedro Salinas, Prelude to Pleasure, a bilingual edition of Víspera del gozo, trans. and intro. Noël Valis (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P./London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993), 94.
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never returning. The woman’s deliberate use of the mirror in a solitary fashion that removes her from the mutual relationship has similar connotations in Salinas’ poetry. In his trilogy of love poems (La voz a ti debida, Razón de amor and Largo lamento) there is a discernible progression from a mutual, transcendental relationship to the lovers’ separation and the poet’s disillusionment—with love and with the act of writing. Repeated references to mirrors in Razón de amor and Largo lamento evoke a nostalgia for the earlier relationship. In an especially poignant passage in Largo lamento, the speculum conveys the pain of the lovers’ separation: ¡Qué olvidado el espejo, sí el espejo, en donde nos miramos una tarde [...] un deseo común nos subió al alma!: no salir nunca de él, allí quedarnos igual que en una tumba, mas una tumba de vivir, [...] Tú te marchaste de él: era mi vida. Y mientras yo contemplo en su vacío poblado de fantasmas de reflejos, la soledad que es siempre mi cara si la veo sin la tuya, tú, antes de ir a algún baile, en otro espejo, sola, te miras a ti misma con los ojos que un día prometieron que sólo te verías en los míos. (Poesías, 500–01) First, the lovers had contemplated themselves together in a mirror that became a tomb—an ominous prison from which the tú escaped. The poetic yo is left with an empty mirror, or, more correctly, a mirror in which the reflected beings are ghosts from the tomb, while the feminine yo turns to her own solitary reflected image, refusing to see herself in the man’s eyes. The poem’s subtle shift from an external mirror to the poet’s eyes reveals the reason for the woman’s flight from a ‘tumba de vivir’. Her identity is in her mirrored image, and it is impossible for her to be both the identity that her lover reflects back to her (and in a real sense creates for her) and the identity that her own mirror reflects back (that is, her own construct of herself). This fatalistic outcome had been foreshadowed in La voz a ti debida, the first book of the trilogy: Y al verte en el amor que yo te tiendo siempre como un espejo ardiendo,
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tú reconocerás un rostro serio, grave, una desconocida alta, pálida y triste, que es mi amada [...] (Poesías, 236–37) Thus, the attempt at a union of two individuals is thwarted. When the male yo extends a mirror to the woman, it is an act fraught with the danger that she will lose herself in that speculum owned by the man, or that she will be irremediably fractured into two pieces. If she then returns to her own mirror image she is twice lost to him. The poem from Largo lamento is one of the few texts in which the poet or male yo contemplates himself in the mirror. Notably, what is left for the poet, in the absence of the beloved, is a doubling of his own yo, so that what fills the semantic void (‘vacío’) of the mirror is not the expected image of himself in relationship with her, but rather ‘soledad’, an image which of course finds resonance in the character Soledad in La bella durmiente; it turns out that the male active partner/speaker is in fact vulnerable to the same dilemma of isolation and paralysis that the female (passive partner/listener) protagonist of this drama faces. In Salinas’ work only rarely does the woman offer a mirror to the man. Yet when this does occur, the result is just as disconcerting for their relationship and identities. In ‘La gloria y la niebla’, a short story written late in his life, Salinas explores this inversion of roles. Lena, an American woman, while on vacation in Mexico, falls in love with Luis, a Spaniard in exile in that country. Luis is a budding writer. Lena is the product of a prudish environment that fears the stereotypical Latin passion that Luis represents. As a result, she disguises her authentic attraction to Luis in the form of intense admiration for his writing. Their long-distance courtship is conducted through letters. Lena’s letters create a third entity, an idealized, literary Luis. Her letters insist repeatedly that Luis think ‘más que en sus propias personas de amantes, en el gran tercero en concordia, el Luis soñado, ideal’. Luis resists: ‘¿Por qué tenderme siempre ese espejo, azogado por tu generosidad, para que yo me vea embellecido, quizá imposible?’ (Narrativa, 119). Finally, it becomes clear for both that they must see each other and ‘pararle los pies, o las alas, a un sueño que iba muy de prisa’ (Narrativa, 120). They agree to meet and marry in San Francisco. Their first afternoon together is spent exploring the city. A thick fog overtakes them in the park. Eventually, they stumble upon a large monument and manage Pedro Salinas, Narrativa completa, ed. Soledad Salinas de Marichal (Barcelona: Barral, 1976), 119. Further references to this story are to this edition and are indicated by page number in the text.
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to decipher the name Edgard [sic] Allan Poe. For Lena, this is an omen: Luis will be as famous as Poe one day. On a sudden impulse, Luis succumbs to Lena’s insistence on his future of glory, and decides to climb the statue. Blinded by the fog, Luis is unable to see that there is in fact no statue at the top of the base. Groping to find it, he falls to his death, recognizing in his last moments the great error that they have committed. Robert Spires has analysed this story in the context of a conflict between ‘una realidad concreta de hoy frente a una realidad inventada e intemporal’ and notes that it is Luis who first gives Lena access to this other invented world, with his ‘habilidad de crear una realidad a base de signos de sugestión’. In the first part of the story, Luis, who is acting as a guide for Lena and her friend Florence, accompanies them to the indigenous ruins near Mexico City. When they stop to have dinner at a seventeenth-century palace converted into a restaurant, Luis describes in great detail the private regions of the palace that are off limits to the tourists, even though he has never entered them. This affects Lena profoundly, and is the beginning of her obsession with Luis. Spires interprets Lena’s growing creation of Luis as a great and famous writer as her impulse to concretize everything, resisting that ‘invented and atemporal reality’, and yet her creation of Luis may also be read as precisely her own invention of reality, set in opposition to concrete evidence—an invention tainted, it is true, by her materialistic and puritan manner of being that rejects sexual impulses and substitutes the idea of glory in their place, as Spires observes, but an invention, nevertheless. Throughout most of Salinas’ work, the man creates another self for the woman, frequently by offering her a literal mirror. In this story, he has turned the tables. Lena’s letters, her written word, are the figurative mirror that creates a new self for Luis, just as the poet’s written word was the mirror for the woman. Luis at first resists this literary and specular self. When he does embrace it, the result is death for both his selves. Salinas repeatedly turns to specular devices to explore the male/female Robert C. Spires, ‘Realidad prosaica e imaginación transcendente en dos cuentos de Pedro Salinas’, in Pedro Salinas, ed. Andrew P. Debicki. El Escritor y la Crítica (Madrid: Taurus, 1976), 249–57, at p. 253. Ibid., 255. Poe’s influence on Salinas has not been fully explored. The Spanish poet lived in Baltimore, site of Poe’s death and burial, for a number of years while teaching at Johns Hopkins University and was well aware of the American writer’s influence on other Hispanic writers, including Darío and the other modernistas. For our purposes here, it is of considerable interest that Poe also explored the question of doubleness, or of a divided self in his stories of the detective Dupin; and certainly, the almost other-worldly aura of mystery in this story created by the fog, which is in itself a perfectly explainable natural phenomenon, yet in combination with human interpretations and actions has disastrous consequences, evokes similar scenarios in Poe.
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relationship. Early on, the mirror symbol suggests the possibility of transcendence of the individual selves when they find the completion of themselves in the other. Yet, ultimately, the mirror is a sign of the impossibility of such transcendence. Consistently in Salinas, identity is split, or doubled, in the speculum. When male and female personae are in relationship, one offers a mirror to the other, most frequently the man to the woman. Repeatedly this action results in a fracturing of the other’s self in the mirror, and finally in a disintegration of the yo-tú relationship. Since, as we have seen, the self-definition of the yo is bound up in that relationship, the implications for this self are ominous. The situation of one being observing, or even creating, another in a speculum allows the mirror to take on semiotic characteristics that are even more clearly apparent than when one being interacts with the mirror in self-reflection. The aborted mutuality of Salinas’ mirrors; their dynamic potential for realizing the other, or for encountering the ‘other’ of the other; their differential nature present in the radical disjunctures of self that occur in them: all these elements contribute to their function within a semiotic structure. Clearly, these mirrors operate at the symbolic level as well: they are themselves symbols for a literarization of the other human being, and ultimately for literature. It is their peculiar semiotic quality, however, that allows their function in the symbolic realm to be so compelling. It is precisely their differential, semiotic nature that creates a distrust toward the catoptric, in the writer and in the reader; and the distrust of the mirror becomes a distrust of language. In an essayistic ‘defence’ of language, Salinas goes to great lengths to insist on language’s ability to allow man to know himself and his surroundings. Yet he prefaces his arguments with a caveat: las palabras poseen doble potencia: una letal, y otra vivificante. Un secreto poder de muerte, parejo con otro poder de vida; que contienen, inseparables, dos realidades contrarias: la verdad y la mentira, y por eso, ofrecen a los hombres lo mismo la ocasión de engañar que la de aclarar, igual la capacidad de confundir y extraviar, que la de iluminar y encaminar. (El defensor 284–85) This double-edged power of the word is played out in the specular images of his narrative, theatre and poetry. The mirrors in which the poet Salinas sees another you are essentially his creation of her in words. And just as Lena’s word mirror has the intention of union and the effect of disunion, so the poet’s words have the intention of transcendence and the effect of disillusion. Having established the connection between mirrors and language, we can see, as a consequence of the mistrust of the catoptric, an undermining of the expectation that language embodies meaning and can distil the
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essence of experience—or even function as a tool in creating realities. This is most poignantly intuited in Salinian texts that set men and women in relationships where one is ‘creating’ the other, either directly through words or in literal or metaphorical mirrors. When language no longer illuminates and guides, it betrays and stymies. In the place of Poe’s symbolism, a vacío or emptiness gapes, tricking a would-be writer into falling to his death. This pervasive element of distrust of language is related to Salinas’ ‘antagonistic attitude’ toward language that Havard observes, and to the indeterminacy that Debicki sees in an early poem, influenced by the avantgarde movement, ‘35 bujías’. It is also one of the hallmarks of what has come to be known as postmodernism. Matei Calinescu has posited the question of whether the insistent use of the technique of palinode, or retraction of one’s position, might be considered a defining characteristic of a certain direction in postmodernism. The effect of palinode as it appears in postmodernism is that a text doubles back upon itself, refuting or at least calling into question its own earlier assertions. In this respect, we can see a certain anticipation of the postmodern in Salinas’ semiotic mirrors. These at first seem to offer various possibilities: that a lover can find the true self of his beloved in the speculum; that he can create an image for her that she will adopt, thereby opening communication between them; that together in the mirror they can transcend their circumstances; and even that the two protagonists can be mutually reflective, turning from other mirrors to become a mirror for each other. Nevertheless, no sooner has Salinas proposed these scenarios than he retracts them, questions them, or negates them outright, always paradoxically or ironically, allowing the inherent dangers of doubling the you in the mirror to manifest themselves. Furthermore, just as the mirror takes on semiotic attributes in Salinas’ work, language becomes specular, taking on the equivocal nature of his mirrors, and acting as a mirroring device whose meanings are as slippery as the quicksilver that his silvered glasses suggest. Thus, in spite of his strong symbolist legacy, or perhaps because of it, Salinas came to question its essential tenets in his work, anticipating early on some of the postmodernist tendencies that were to surface in the second half of the century.
Debicki, Spanish Poetry of the Twentieth Century, 36–38.