Mirror mirror on the wall

 

Begin with a metaphor: that of the mirror. The novel as a mirror, the artwork. History itself.

 

The metaphor is, of course, inexact. It falls in the category of near misses. What mirror shows the consciousness? A mirror that falls cracks. And this, too, is added to the tab of the mirror metaphor.

An unblemished mirror. A communicating one. Snow White’s stepmother’s magic mirror. The mirror speaks.

 

Like all mirror metaphors, the aim is to tell us something about the real. The real and its image, which is somehow less real. Stendhal’s metaphor – which he attributes to an obscure luminary, Saint Real – of the novel as a mirror walking down the road. Stephen Dedalus’s metaphor of Irish art as the cracked mirror of a servant girl.

And if the mirror has a mouth. But it doesn’t. A voice, but it doesn’t.

 

We see. But sight does not touch. It lacks the tactile guarantee. What is in our hands, what weighs on this earth we stand on, what we feel with the tips of our fingers. What wakes us up when we play with each others sex, or simply with our own. Sight is such longing in comparison to the consummate moment.

 

The dropped mirror cracks. The shattering of the mirror: one assumes a certain violence, a certain shock. Some projectile, some violent shudder. The mirror dropped, the mirror struck, the mirror radiating silvery-white, opaque lines outward from some central injury to the tain and substrate.

 

The Wilderness of mirrors.

 

Eliot, in Gerontion. One of his high wild mercury passages - one that will have a strange career:

 

These with a thousand small deliberations

Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,

Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,

With pungent sauces, multiply variety

In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,

Suspend its operations, will the weevil

Delay?

 

As always in Eliot’s glorious 1920s period, suggestion and insinuation produce funhouse poetry that states and retracts and leaves you on the brink of… oh do not ask what is it, let us go and make our visit. Perhaps the excitation of the membrane here refers to the brothel, which as far as I can tell was not a known Eliot destination. The suggestion, however, of numerous mirrors, some reflecting each other, some catching the action of exciting the membrane, some noticing the spider in the corner - this is in continuity with the old man in a dry month, living down and out among down and outs.

However, a phrase so rich was not destined to stay anchored in a cobwebbed brothel.

 

In 1937, James Jesus Angleton, the son of one of those transatlantic families like the James family in the 19th century, arrived at Yale and roomed with the poet Reed Wittemore. Angleton was coming from his stay in Italy, where he had visited Ezra Pound at Rapallo. So he was in the modernist mood when Wittemore made him read Gerontion.

 

Aside: I myself loved Gerontion when I first read it in High School. I memorized parts of it and used to spontaneously, and to the irritation of all and sundry, quote them. I didn’t notice, at the time, that there was some pretty ugly anti-Jewish bits in that poem. However, these remarks could be regarded as matters of one remove, parts of the inner and outer monologue of the narrator, and not Eliot’s own. We might think that this deniability is not credible, but deniability is, I think, so built into poetry that every confession is a little lie, there.  Eliot’s weird upper Midwest bourgie prejudice against Jews. Of all the things he chose to carry with him across the cold Atlantic.

 

To return to our man Angleton – he loved the codedness of the poem. Like the sixties students trying to piece together the meaning in Bob Dylan’s lyrics, Angleton and his Yale friends liked the collage effect, the sense of a meaning hiding behind another meaning, and so on, in the depths of the poem.

 

Angleton went on to become one of the most influential CIA agents of the Cold War. He had cred, partly because he seemed hooked into a way of reading intelligence that resembled, as his biographer Jefferson Morley puts it, the New Critical practice of close reading. Morley is a journalist who has always hopped down the intelligence path – and so one shouldn’t expect too much from his attempts to bring together New Criticism and espionage However, one biographical fact that is startling: Angleton not only read Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity but met Empson himself. In this period, Angleton even started a small press magazine, in which he published, among others, Pound.

 

Angleton had a dire effect, I think it is fair to say, on American democracy, but a more major negative effect on Italy and Israel. For the latter, he almost certainly directed the stealing of material from the U.S. that helped the Israelis build nuclear weapons. The effect on the former is in front of our eyes right now: the Fascist prime minister of Italy, whose far right party was strengthened historically by Angleton’s numerous interferences in Italy’s politics, from rescuing Mussolini’s follower, Prince Borghese, who later tried to overturn the Italian state in a rightwing coup in the seventies, to creating numerous capillary lines with the far right groups that manipulated Italy in the strategy of tension in the sixties and seventies. Plus, of course, the U.S. putting its thumb on the first elections Italy had after Mussolini, which led to the election of the Christian Democrats and all that followed.

 

But to return to our mirror metaphor. The wilderness of mirrors became Angleton’s go-to metaphor for understanding counter-intelligence. He was the head of Counter-intelligence at the CIA for almost twenty-five years. In that time, he almost absolutely fucked up the spy agency’s Human Intelligence on the Soviet Union, since he was persuaded that every defector from the Soviet Union was actually a double agent – for by the wilderness of mirrors model, you had to read back into any information you received the sinister intent of the vast and complicated hive mind of International Communism. The unreliable narrator comes in from the cold. It was through the wilderness of mirrors principle that Angleton deduced that the split between China and the Soviet Union was a feint – to trick us. And so on. It was, in fact, pretty much the dreary traveling salesman anti-communism of your average John Bircher dressed up in New Critical clothes of close reading – with the cavil that Angleton couldn’t read Russian. In D.C. and Georgetown, where Angleton roamed, drink in hand, being able to quote T.S. Eliot was an intellectual feat comparable to splitting the atom – our overlords have always been pretty dull – and so Angleton gathered around himself a mystic that is hard, at this distance, to understand.

 

The mirror metaphor: it is easy, in pondering the great works, to think that they form a self-contained world. They don’t. Literature spills out of us all, every day. Biography, history, poetry, tv, video games – all mirrors. Mirrors in a maze, mirrors that show us looking into mirrors, the selfie world without end, amen.