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I have been parting my hair on the left side my entire life (although admittedly there is now less hair to part than there used to be). And yet when I look at my reflection in the mirror, the part appears to be on the right. That’s because mirrors get everything backward — or, to be precise, they get them reversed, left to right and vice versa. I am so accustomed to seeing myself in reverse that I automatically make the adjustment when I am combing my hair using a mirror. But I find that I quickly become flummoxed if I use the mirror to perform any less familiar task that involves telling my right from my left.
The fact is that I don’t see myself the way the rest of the world sees me. Since human beings are bilaterally symmetrical, the difference is not glaringly apparent, apart from the part. It becomes more obvious if I happen to be wearing a T-shirt with writing on it, or I hold up a book to the mirror. Little Alice does this in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, except it’s a double reverse. She has already passed through the mirror over the mantel in the family drawing room and is looking back at her reflection from the other side. She picks up a book with mirror-writing that she can read only by holding it up to the glass. Carroll’s little joke it that the mirror-writing turns out to be his nonsense poem, “The Jabberwocky,” which begins this way:
Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves
Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:
All mimsy were ye borogoves;
And ye mome raths outgrabe.
In the mirror world Alice has entered, the reversal of left and right we encounter when we look at our reflection extends to all of time and space, even encompassing cause and effect. To approach the Red Queen, you must walk away from her. Cake is passed around first and then sliced. The White Queen moves backward in time, putting on a bandage, screaming in pain and finally pricking her finger. She has found herself in a parallel universe adjacent to our own in which the symmetries of our world are exactly reversed.
Parallel universes and magic kingdoms are a standard motif in children’s literature, fantasy novels and science fiction. Often they are entered by means of a portal that suspends the normal constraints of time and space. For Alice, the portal is a mirror that melts away “like bright silvery mist.” (Earlier, of course, she finds herself in another topsy-turvy world when she follows a tardy rabbit down a hole in the ground.) Dorothy is transported to the Land of Oz in the funnel of a cyclone. The four young protagonists in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe find themselves in the frozen land of Narnia by burrowing into some old coats hanging in the titular wardrobe. Then there is the famous “star gate” sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the astronaut Frank Bowman is pulled into a vortex of kaleidoscopic colors that lands him rather incongruously in a windowless Louis Quatorze bedchamber. In Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, entertains the notion that mirrors are “leaks” between two worlds and warns children not to get too close.
Kilgore Trout’s bit of whimsy notwithstanding, the real risk that children run by getting too close to a mirror is that they will identify with an externalized image of themselves. Mirror self-recognition is considered a fundamental sign of self-consciousness, but it comes at a price. According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the self that emerges during the so-called "mirror stage” of a child’s development is an illusion. It is a “misrecognition” of self to the extent that it becomes identified with the object in the glass – or indeed with any objective representation. The child has, in effect, turned himself inside out, giving birth to a self that is not the perceiver but the object of his awareness.
Taken to an extreme, the externalization of self degenerates into narcissism. The toddler who gazes upon his reflection in a mirror and exclaims, “Hey, that’s me!” may become an adult who sees the whole world as a reflection of “me.” He finds himself in a vast hall of mirrors — or rather, he does not find himself, strictly speaking, nor can he, since he mistakes the reflection for the real “me.” Unlike Alice, who entered a mirror world where the symmetries were reversed, the narcissist’s world has no symmetries at all. The usual symmetry of self and other has given way to a world in which there is only self, which means there is no portal that can be exited to restore balance to one’s life.
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