Sightings: Mirrors in Texts—Texts in Mirrors (review)

Joyce Lowrie's study unites French texts from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries around the thematic and structural device of the mirror, largely through an analysis of chiasmus and "imbricated structures" (a-b—a-b) at both macro- and microtextual levels, along with consideration of techniques such as ekphrasis and mise-en-abyme. Four of the nine chapters focus on prose fiction of the nineteenth century. The "sightings" of the title brings together the concept of seeing and citing, and Lowrie claims that mirror structures often reveal intertextual echoes in the texts: "To sight-see is to profit from similarities, correspondences, linkages, as well as differences. While many may have been missed, looking and finding intertexts in texts and realizing that the "seer" in the text reflects the text in the seer is to see and read-to read and see" (6).

The introductory first chapter frames the question of mirrors through an analysis of Lewis Carroll's Alice books and the myth of Narcissus, finding in the former "a paradigm for chiastic and interlocking microstructures because crossings textual borders into a looking glass necessarily entails crossing and turnings about in a Wonderland of repetitive linguistic patterns" (14), whereas Narcissus allows us to see the reflection of one who is both same and other, a simultaneously true and false reflection. Lowrie emphasizes that "Echo repeats, and is a model of imbricated structure, while Narcissus [...] sights an image of himself, which is perforce reversed, and is thus a model of chiasmus" (19).

Chapter two offers a reading of La Princesse de Clèves that emphasizes the "mirror in the middle," the letter of Madame de Thémines that offers a mise-en-abyme of the plot of the novel more generally, since her "passion, structurally, stylistically, and rhetorically, is a looking glass in which M^me de Clèves's own passion is reflected" (63). Lowrie also considers the relationship between historical and fictive accounts in the novel, noting the imbricated structure of the narrative's characters Valentinois (historical), Tournon (fictional), Boulen (historical), and Thémines who is "an admixture of both" (45).

Chapter three features a similar reading of Les Liaisons dangereuses, focusing on the Prévan cycle at the juncture of the chiasmic structural organization of the novel into groups of 50, 37, 37, and 50 letters. Prévan is, according to Lowrie, "Valmont writ small" (82), but the former succeeds where the latter fails. Laclos' novel cites and transforms other epistolary novels such as La Nouvelle Héloïse, whose words are "deformed by being reformed" in Les Liaisons. Plot and structure come together when the "Liaisons 'unhinge' because of the novel's very negation of symmetry: passion, the love for one who is not oneself, undercuts Narcissus, and does him, finally, in" (96).

Lowrie's analysis continues in intertextual mode in her readings of Balzac's "Facino Cane" and Barbey d'Aurevilly's "Une Page d'histoire," two of the book's shorter chapters. In the former, she traces references to 1001 Nights, Dante's Divine Comedy, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles, and in the latter, to Baudelaire's "Le Cygne." The Balzac chapter, despite its solid demonstration of Balzac's reappropriation of his intertexts, seems an odd fit within the book because there is a far more diffuse focus on mirrors here than in the other chapters; in tracing the intertexts, the author leans quite heavily on indications she draws from the notes to the Pléiade edition of Balzac, thus making the reading less original than it is in other chapters, more a commentary than an analysis. Similarly, the penultimate chapter, devoted to André Pieyre de Mandiargues' La Motocyclette, takes up interesting questions of circular and linear narrative structures as well as tarot rituals of birth and rebirth, but beyond the relationship of microcosmic to macrocosmic structures in the novel and the indication of a chiasmic plot structure, there is...