The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

he had lived with her.And now their life together was whole as only

the past can be whole. Abruptly Biff turned away.

From The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (McCullers 1981, p. 198)

Here the mirror is integrated into the narrative with other symbolic ele-
ments, such as the scent of the perfume. The passage follows the sentence
‘He seldom thought of her’, and precedes a paragraph in which we are told
how Biff has ‘done over’ the bedroom which before had been ‘tacky and
flossy and drab’, and made it much more attractive, bright and modern,
‘luxurious and sedate’. We are informed that ‘in this room nothing
reminded him of her’, though at the same time Alice’s scent bottle con-
stantly brings back the past, and some of its more positive aspects, such as
the period before they were married. Looking in the mirror symbolises the
balance between commemorating the past and moving on from it.
American writer Don DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist also deals with the
relationship between death and self. In this passage the mirror image is
a way of re-membering and re-embodying the mourned person. The
passage also suggests that the mirror has a life of its own and that different
mirrors present the same reality in their own distinctive way:

Example 1.25

When she could not remember what he looked like, she leaned

into a mirror and there he was, not really, only hintingly, barely at

all, but there in a way, in a manner of thinking, in some mirrors

more than others, more than rueful reproduction, depending on

the hour and the light and the quality of the glass, the strategies

of the glass, with its reversal of left and right, this room or that,

because every image in every mirror is only virtual, even when

you expect to see yourself.

From The Body Artist (DeLillo 2001, pp. 112–13)

In British novelist Julian Barnes’s novel Love, etc , Oliver contemplates a
past incident involving his wife Gillian. He meditates, in his own effusive
and exaggerated voice, on how useful it would be if we all had a rear-view
mirror to keep track of the past and its impact:

Example 1.26

So there I was, two-wheeling out of your sight past glinting steel

silos crammed with the crushed blood of the Minervois grape,

while Gillian was doing a fast-fade in my rear-view mirror. A gauche

22 The Writing Experiment