Through the Looking Glass: The Mirror Metaphor in Ana María Matute's "En el bosque"

On April 27, 2011 Spanish author Ana María Matute formally accepted the Premio Miguel de Cervantes, Spain's most prestigious literary prize, in the Paraninfo of the University of Alcalá de Henares. Following tradition, Matute delivered a brief talk, in which she likened her early literary endeavors to the adventures of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass: "Cuando Alicia, por fin, atravesó el cristal del espejo y se encontró no sólo con su mundo de maravillas, sino consigo misma, no tuvo necesidad de consultar ningún folleto explicativo. Se lo inventó [. . .]" ("Discurso" 8-9). This isolated reference to Alice is really an allusion to an earlier speech she gave upon entering the Real Academia Española in which she fully developed this analogy.

In her discurso de ingreso of January 18, 1998 entitled "En el bosque," Matute, first humbly defined herself as a "contadora de historias" (13), thus acknowledging poet and fiction-writer Carmen Conde, who was first female member of the Academia,¹ and who also occupied the same sillón Ka mayúscula. Matute then presented a defense of the fantastic in literature:

Es mi intención invitaros, en este discurso mío tan poco erudito y tan poco formal, a ensayar una incursión en el mundo que ha sido mi gran obsesión literaria, el mundo que me ha fascinado desde lo más temprano de la infancia, que desde niña me ha mantenido atrapada en sus redes: el bosque que es para mí el mundo de la imaginación, de la fantasía, del ensueño, pero también de la propia literatura y, a fin de cuentas, de la palabra.

(13-14)

She further said that the forest, just like literature, had always held an attraction and mystery for her: "Antes de saber leer, los títulos de los libros eran para mí como bosques misteriosos" (15). She explained that "su mera imagen siempre me ha sugerido toda suerte de historias y leyendas, de recuerdos que ignoraba poseer, pero que estaban ahí, confundidos entre los árboles o escondidos en la espesura de los zarzales" (15).

While the symbolic forest is Matute's primary means of characterizing both the act of understanding and of creating the world with literature, I am interested here in another, though not unrelated – as Matute would show – metaphor; that of the mirror. The mirror metaphor has been used since the earliest theoretical considerations of art (think of Plato's condemnation of artists in The Republic) to symbolize the relationship between human creativity and the material, social and spiritual world in which such activity takes place. Matute's reference to mirrors demonstrates the inevitable psychological implications of a symbol of objectivity so linked (think of Lacan) to human development. Like a window or a doorway that opens to a forest, the mirror is a portal to fantasy. Reflection leads to introspection, a repository of experience in the physical world not bound by the rules of science.

It is not surprising, given the way she characterizes the forest, and given her long history with children's literature, that Matute makes reference very early in her speech to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and, more significantly, Through the Looking Glass:

El momento en que Alicia atraviesa la cristalina barrera [...] siempre me ha parecido uno de los más mágicos de la historia de la literatura, quizá el que ofrece un mito más maravilloso y espontáneo: el deseo de conocer otro mundo, de ingresar en el reino de la fantasía a través, precisamente, de nosotros mismos.

(14)

The mirror in Through the Looking Glass, which critic Donald Rackin has called a "great lasting document of psychological realism" (12), symbolizes for Matute a way to characterize the promise and richness of literature: "la posibilidad de cruzar el espejo e internarse en el bosque de lo misterioso y de lo fantástico, pero también del pasado, del deseo y del sueño" (15). She added: "No...