Sometimes you turn the mirror to the wall, or you look into the
mirror and see nothing, or you mistake a new reflection for your
face.‘Mirror’ (Smith 2000, p. 11)Here the mirror is a way of exploring the tension between what we are and
what we would like to be; the instability of identity (and gender); and the
fusion of reality and illusion. The mirror is a fluid image and appears in
the poem in various guises, for example as ‘a glass’, ‘a magnet’ and a ‘cross’.
‘Mirrors’ by Australian writer Richard Lunn is an experimental short story
about an upper-class, monied woman who is having an adulterous affair. The
piece is written in sections, and realistic scenes are juxtaposed with highly
symbolic passages about a mirror maze, in which the woman and her lover
feel trapped, but which they also find erotically stimulating. When the man
and woman try to fight their way out of the maze the man ‘dies’, and the
woman is left to struggle on her own. At this point the text forcefully conveys
the woman’s confrontation with the mirrors, and her struggle to control the
images which threaten to multiply, fragment and overpower her:
Example 1.28
A slow, cold anger takes hold of her and hurls her like a stone
through corridors of glass. A mirror crazes around her fist and
breaks apart. Another follows, then another, but hunger and
exhaustion too are fists, which beat inside her as she moves until, as
if she were a shattering reflection amongst a host of shattering
reflections, she stumbles to the floor. Unconscious hours pass in
which her memories fragment and merge with fantasies, as multiple
reflections might break apart and merge into reality. For when she
wakes there is no past that she recalls, no thought or feeling but the
anger that hurls her down the corridors. Emptied of memories,
devoid of fear or regret, she marches through the gleaming
chambers. Her images swagger beside her, raise bloodied arms and
smash themselves to tinkling shards. She lies on floors in jagged
puddles of reflections and rushes up glass tunnels in a headlong herd
of selves. She feels at times as if she’s nothing but a moving
consciousness, a disembodied, many-bodied anger, nowhere and
everywhere, conquering whole armies of herself. Her body streams
with red medals. She lifts her fist to smash a mirror. It tinkles into
splinters and reveals a man face down upon the floor.From ‘Mirrors’ (Lunn 1986, p. 9)24 The Writing Experiment