‘Mise en Abyme’ - Reflections and Illusions: Mirror of the mirror

 

-By Kamalraj Sigdel

In The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide the hero is a novelist writing a novel of the same title. Often readers get confused by the mise en abyme (mirror of the mirror) strategy. Readers get confused in understanding who is the real actor manipulating the events of the multi-layered story: is it the hero of the novel, the external narrator, or the 'original' novelist who is actually writing the novel. The novel is like a picture that contains a miniature of itself which then repeats this image in ever similar copies.

 

The confusion is very similar to that of a hopeless Nepali who is trying hard to understand the Nepali politics.

 

How could he understand what the PM means when he says a "space" should be reserved for the king?

 

S/he is too innocent to differentiate the real from the reflections.

It is because nobody knows anything about the original manipulator of the political plot. All the political heads, whosoever may they be, could be easily anchored to certain external forces where they appear to be the reflections of the 'original' external forces – else most of the problems including the Maoist problem would have been solved easily with a consensus among all the political forces in Nepal's and Nepali people's well-being.

 

There is indeed a clash between the puppets on stage while the string pullers are off-stage. The string pullers can do anything: they can break, join, again break and rejoin the parties. Sometimes they even seem to have the gut to change the government as well. So the commoners are totally confused as they keep on witnessing the multiple reflections in the mise en abyme. However confusing, the common Nepalis kept on (mis)identifying the original image somewhere in the series of reflections in the mirror for they are the people hardest hit by all the events of the political story.

 

Looking at the miraculous mise en abyme several intellectuals have given their 'most penetrating' interpretations but only to prove themselves sailors floating too low in the dark and deep undulations of the bright sea. Recently, one interpreted to us over a cup of tea what he called a 'chain of power' that decides the direction of Nepali political story. His interpretation was somewhat like this: we are in Kathmandu, Kathmandu in Nepal, ….Asia on Earth and the Earth is hanging on God's tail. When one of the long-tormented victims asked where God was hanging, the whole thing collapsed. So let us not try to penetrate this miraculous mise en abyme to end up only in desperation.

 

Finding no hope of coming out of this hellish labyrinth, I sometimes think of suggesting all of us to remain in the illusions trying to be a little bit postmodern. But the disquieting question is, would it be better to affirm such mise en abyme, so to say illusions and mysteries?

[Manuscript date: June 2003]