Mise-en-Abyme: Recognizing Yourself in the Mirror

The alienation and fascination of physical transformation.

In the Summer of 2021, I sat cross-legged on the floor of my empty home office, not yet having moved in any of my office furniture. I had just picked up an antique gilded mirror from Facebook Marketplace that sat on the floor in front of me. It had me captivated in a skin-crawling uncomfortable manner, as I sat gazing at myself, for longer than I could ever remember doing. Was this truly my reflection? If I moved my arms would it follow? If I ran away would it disappear? Was my mind recognizing it’s vessel?

Chemotherapy had left me bereft of myself. My skin oozed with acne, my under-eyes had darkened, my hair, wispy and thin like a halo of cobwebs. I had lost any semblance of fat and muscle that gave me a youthful, human glow. I appeared before myself as a skeleton, roaming the earth in a thin shift of skin. Gazing unflinchingly at my reflection with grotesque fascination as if I were examining a tarantula at the zoo. I felt alienated from not only my body, but the idea of me as a person. I was distorted, darkened, and lost in a haze of poisonous chemicals and poisonous thoughts.

Forgive me in advance for this sudden Lacan drop, but the psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan identifies this internal drama between the expectation of our own image and the reality of our reflection as “The Mirror Stage” often observed in infants when they develop the understanding of the unity between their own consciousness and the outer image of themselves that others perceive.

“To exist one has to be recognized by an-other. But this means that our image, which is equal to ourselves, is mediated by the gaze of the other. The other, then, becomes the guarantor of ourselves.”

Jaques Lacan Seminar VII

The alienation of the mirror stage occurs when the unity between these visions of self is disrupted by the expectation of what it is you should see in your reflection.

Mise-en-Abyme translates from French to “Placed into the abyss” and is a artistic technique utilized in literature, film, music, visual art, design, and even computer programming to mythologize a physical phenomenon that occurs when mirrors are pointed back at themselves, creating a repeating image ad-infinitum.

Detail, Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velásquez Showing the Painter painting the portrait staged in the mirror.

But to truly master the “abyss” aspect of mis-en-abyme, it’s not enough to just show the audience a repeating image, or to include a meta-reference, like at the end-credits of a Marvel movie. There is something distorted, darkened, and lost every time the image is repeated, diluting its form, its purpose, and our understanding of its context.

I felt myself fragmented in this same manner, looking at the mirror in that empty room. There was a me that existed before cancer. There would hopefully be a me that existed after cancer. But then there was also the stranger that was me now, that I greeted with prejudice and disgust in the mirror. Like the ever-darkening repeating reflections in the mirror, was I on a journey of transformation that could not be undone? That could not be demystified? Both placed in an abyss and displaced from myself.

In literature, mise-en-abyme can refer to techniques of story-telling that are self-referential or repetitive. Think of Shakespeares’ play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the The Princess Bride’s narrative-device of the grandfather telling the fairytale to his grandson, just as he is telling the story to an audience beyond the frame of the camera.

One of the most successful and masterful literary uses of mise-en-abyme I’ve ever encountered is from a Swedish author, Jonas Hassen Khemiri in his book, Montecore. He employs various techniques of mise-en-abyme storytelling to illuminate unreliable narrators and narratives–blending the line between fact and fiction, the author and his characters, the book itself and the reader. Hell, even the translator of the book is in on the post-modern chaos of it all by utilizing “malapropisms, missing words, and broken syntax” in her translation from Swedish to further distort the story to further afield audiences.

Echoing to myself these awful things about my appearance, my future, my worth, I was my own unreliable narrator. I was my own “other” distorting and twisting myself through a veil of cynicism to mirror expectation.

On the other side of cancer treatment now, I’m living as the hopeful me that exists after cancer. It wasn’t a one way journey into the abyss, but rather a pendulum that swings back and forth; in and out of gratitude, turning off and on my peace, and navigating my boomeranging mood and body as it dips in and out of recovery.