Cognition En Abyme: Models, Manuals, Maps

When Don Quixote, in Part Two of Don Quixote, becomes aware of the existence of Part One; or when Hamlet stages a play that mirrors his uncle's crime; or when Roderick Usher's friend, in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," reads aloud a tale that duplicates Roderick's own situation; or when Edouard, in Gide's Les Faux-monnayeurs, reflects on his plans for the novel he is writing, also entitled Les Faux-monnayeurs; when self-embeddings of this type occur in a work of narrative fiction, a play, or a film, we recognize that we are in the presence of the figure that goes by the name of mise en abyme. ¹ While the figure itself is an old one—much older than Don Quixote or Hamlet, with examples attested from ancient and medieval literatures—its identification and analysis belong to the twentieth (and now the twenty-first) century.

A high-water mark in the research on mise en abyme was achieved in or about the year 1982. In that year there appeared in the journal Poetics Today (of which I was then assistant editor) a characteristically lucid and incisive article by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan on mise en abyme and other metaleptic figures in a novel by the scandalously underrated postmodernist novelist, Christine Brooke-Rose. Rimmon-Kenan's article belonged to a second wave of scholarship on mise en abyme. The first wave began with André Gide's identification and naming of the figure just before the turn of the nineteenth century, and was extended down to the mid-century through the efforts of the French critic Claude-Edmonde Magny (1950). The second wave began in the late sixties, in response to the proliferation of the figure in the work of the French nouveaux romanciers. The key contribution here is Lucien Dällenbach's book of 1977, Le récit spéculaire, which gave the impetus to further research and analysis by Mieke Bal (1978), Ann Jefferson (1983), Linda Hutcheon (1984), Moshe Ron (1987), and myself (1987: 124-8), as well as Rimmon-Kenan.

So rich was this scholarly literature that, by the end of the eighties, one might have been forgiven for thinking that something like the last word had been said on the subject of mise en abyme. In the past five years, however, the subject has been reopened, with the publication of major reinterpretations of mise en abyme from a number of perspectives by John J. White (2000), Paisley Livingston (2003), Gérard Genette (2004) and the contributors to a volume edited by John Pier and Jean-Marc Schaeffer (2005).

Mise en abyme is exhilarating to think about, frankly, because it is such a prolific source of problems. Not least of all its problems is the question of what exactly counts as mise en abyme. By the strictest definition, the figure properly includes only those works that, paradoxically, contain themselves, such as Don Quixote or Les Faux-Monnayeurs. This purist criterion is straightforward, but it also yields the fewest instances. More relaxed definitions would admit all kinds of analogies or isomorphisms among more or less distinctly bounded parts of a text (e.g., "framed" descriptions, views from windows, etc.). Defined as broadly as this, the figure of mise en abyme ends up shading off into a general principle of analogy, whereby anything in the text can be construed as analogous to anything else (see also Ron 1987: 426).

I prefer a middling sort of definition, derived from Bal and Ron, that is neither as strict and exclusive as some nor as lax and inclusive as others. By this definition, candidates for mise-en-abyme status must satisfy two criteria. First, there must be a demonstrable relation of analogy between the part en abyme and the whole, or some substantial and salient aspect of that whole. By this criterion, the parts that qualify as mise en abyme are those that may plausibly be construed as yielding an acceptable paraphrase of the "whole story," or as producing an acceptably scaled-down model of the "whole" fictional world, the "whole" act of narration...