I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me…
– Borges
We have already mentioned in a different context a passage in Jean Oury’s Création et schizophrénie in which, inquired by the therapist, a schizophrenic patient evinces her lack of self-recognition: upon looking at herself on a mirror, she sees no one.
But what other things apart from oneself, or no one in its default, can one see on a mirror when one looks at it?
An Other, for example, that steals your gaze only to see itself.
Call it Mayan “second attention” (Castaneda), or “figure-ground reversal” (Wagner, to whom the example is due), or a “perspectival shift” (Viveiros de Castro).
The extraordinary labyrinth’s reversal operated in Borges’s “The House of Asterion” (which can be read here in James E. Irby’s English translation) responds to this same principle, which inspires many of Borges’s tales.
The very first words of the opening first-person narrative place already the reader, without her/him knowing it, in the counter-perspective of that “second attention.” For one is used to approach the myth from Theseus’s human perspective, which can thus be argued to be the figure in respect to which the Minotaur remains the background – and yet the tale begins with the Minotaur’s monologue. Nevertheless, the reader is incapable of discovering this but towards the end of the tale, when the Minotaur’s monologue is abruptly dissolved into a third-person footnote-like comment: the tale’s abrupt but illuminating conclusion, or what Anderson-Imbert described as “Theseus’s final words, which solve the mystery.” And if a subtle clue to such mystery is provided exactly one line before that dissolution actually occurs (“What will my redeemer be like? […] Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?,” i.e. “a man-like being with the face of a bull,” as per Apollodorus’s own description of the Minotaur), it is only afterwards, however, that the reader realises what these questions really mean, and that he understands that they are made from the opposite side of a mirror to which they provide the key:
This mirror stands – one may venture – as the tale’s internal threshold (within the Minotaur’s mind), whereas the shift from the Minotaur’s monologue to Theseus’s concluding comment constitutes its narrative threshold. But there are other mirrors in the tale, as well. First, an unresolved internal mirror: “the other Asterion,” who is neither the Minotaur’s human opponent (Theseus) nor his strict Other (a hypothetical bull with the face of a man), but his dreamt duplication. Secondly, the multiplicative cosmic mirror made of the juxtaposed infinites of the labyrinth and the world. Thirdly, the intertextual mirror supplied by the counter-Messianic logic suggested in the tale’s incipit (“And the queen gave birth to a child who was called Asterion”), which is reminiscent of Christ’s birth and mission, yet only for the sake of its inversion, as in Borges’s tale the protagonist expects to be redeemed rather than being anyone’s redeemer (for even if he is periodically given men by other men, to redeem them).
Borges once wrote that “there is no other pleasure as complex as that which thought provides,” or rather “as that which thought is.” “The House of Asterion” is a perfect example of this. It contains a beautiful hint as to the different ways in which Otherness can be thematised, that is to say, fancied, dreamt, portrayed, eluded, and met.
George Frederic Watts, The Minotaur (1885). Photo: Tate Gallery, London. Borges acknowledged his indebtedness to Watt’s painting: “I owe it ‘The House of Asterion,’” he writes in the epilogue to The Aleph. Yet Borges first learned about Watt’s Minotaur in Chesterton’s 1904 biography of the latter. A (first) text then (Chesterton’s) is the clue to a painting (Watts’s) which is, in turn, the clue to a (second) text (Borges’s) that relies on another (third) text (Apollodorus’s)…