Descent narratives can be read as an exploration of the Self, reaching beneath the surface of consciousness to gain access to knowledge, deeper understanding or even universal truth. In this process the Self is restructured so that the protagonist emerges with an altered sense of identity. Central to many descent narratives is the protagonist’s desire to encounter an Other, an alternate subject against whom a new identity can be defined. In post-modern texts, however, the relationship between the Other and the Self is not so simple; images of twinning and mirroring distort and challenge their correspondence and the validity of any identity formed through confronting an Other is called into question. In the light of Lacanian theories of reality, this essay will examine such conflicts and attempts at resolution in three contemporary descent narratives: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills and a Hollywood film, The Matrix, written and directed by the Wachowski brothers.

Lacan’s proposition of a three-layered system of understanding the world suggests the possibility of descent. ‘The real,’ the base on which all experience rests, becomes inaccessible once a person has acquired semiotics such as language, but paradoxically one is not aware of it and has no desire to reach it until this intervening layer, which he labels ‘the symbolic,’ is formed. The level on which people exist day-to-day he calls ‘the imaginary,’ in which the subjective and intersubjective structures imposed by the symbolic are, in the words of Jane Gallop, ‘covered over by mirroring’. She comments that Lacan’s description of this tripartite structure contains an implicit imperative to break the mirror, to ‘disrupt the imaginary in order to reach "the symbolic"’, and thus begin to perceive the real beneath. However, because the only available tools for this shattering of the imaginary are also contained within it, according to Lacanian theory descent into the self ought not to be possible at all. This kind of anxiety is reflected in post-modern descent narratives, in which the protagonist often fails to experience any kind of epiphany, or is unable to communicate to other characters or to the reader exactly what they have discovered.

Mirrors are extremely problematic in a Lacanian reading of katabasis, since they embody many of the difficulties in penetrating the layer of the imaginary. They themselves are devoid of content but humans naturally focus on their own mirror image. This is deceptive, as Gallop cautions: ‘In the ethical imperative to be symbolic, the charge is to look into the mirror and see not the image but the mirror itself’. A subject struggles to overcome his or her instinctive aggression towards the alter ego in the mirror and to remember that there is nothing behind it, that what they see is an image only, part of the imaginary. However, the mirror image can also be a key to access the symbolic. The feelings of attraction and rivalry a subject experiences for this identical yet opposite version of him- or herself are evidence of the elastic, unstable environment of the imaginary and a challenge to his or her subjectivity. Though the symbolic may always block attempts to apprehend the real, distortions in its translation into the imaginary, such as the ambiguity of mirror images, may allow one to grasp the symbolic and so begin to gain knowledge of oneself, others and the world.

The protagonists of Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet seek encounters with Otherness to consolidate their own disjointed identities. Each has more than one twin or mirror image in the fictional world of the novel, and they struggle with how to treat each double, whether to take them as a replica and a complement or as an opposite and an adversary. Ormus Cama’s birth is mysterious; his very existence is hidden by his twin, yet he survives and Gayomart does not, as if he has vanquished his alter ego within the womb. Yet, deprived of his Other, Ormus spends the rest of his life deliberately or unwittingly pairing himself, looking for his other half:

Ormus does not seem to be satisfied with Gayo as a shadow of himself, however. The dead twin draws his living brother into a seedy underworld, a ‘limbo’ populated with examples of unrealised creativity who are trapped in the imaginary without even a base in language, only to sing him songs that have already been written. When Gayomart escapes from his head during a hallucination, Ormus seems almost relieved since now he can seek out his chosen Other, Vina; his only concern is that Gayo might bind himself to her first: ‘If you meet him, remember he’s not me. He just looks that way. He’s not me’. This worry is especially odd since they are non-identical twins; Ormus nonetheless regards his brother as a mirror image of himself, and loves and loathes him accordingly.

Ormus’s attempts to take Vina as his Other also fail because again he encounters the problems of a mirror image. On the one hand she can hardly be an Other as her passion, her musicality and her devotion so closely mirror his own: she does not provide any challenge to his subjectivity because her purposes blend so seamlessly with his own. On the contrary there is constant antagonism and disagreement in their relationship as the two egos battle to determine which will be in control. They idealise each other, which in their complex Self/Other relationship amounts to narcissism since, as Lacan argues, one only idealises objects with which one identifies.

Vina is such a multi-faceted and unpredictable character – described as ‘[l]iterally selfless, her personality smashed, like a mirror, by the fist of life’ – that she is regarded an Other by many characters besides Ormus. She is twinned with Maria, the visitor from another world, who claims also to have ‘a marriage of mythological proportions’ with Ormus and whom she detests as a rival in love and in subjectivity: ‘Other-hatred is for Vina the mirror image of self-love’. She is understandably alarmed and somewhat offended to discover that in this case there is someone on the other side of the mirror. Vina is also mirrored by Mira, the pun in whose name is made explicit in the chapter title ‘Mira on the Wall.’

Rai regards himself as Ormus’s secret Other, rendered selfless by his secondary, reflective place in Vina’s heart. She is his Other, the only person with a subjectivity strong enough to make his own coherent: ‘I took the name she gave me, and the criticism, and the love, and I called that discourse me’. When she dies Rai feels that his selfhood is fracturing and, after allying himself with Ormus’s mental descent, seeks out a new Other with whom to structure himself. He finds one in Mira, who first appears as a replica of Vina but who soon emerges with a powerful identity of her own. Just as Vina was infertile but Mira has a child, so her relationship with Rai is a far more productive conjoining of Other and Self: ‘What remains is ordinary human life...This I’ve discovered and worked for and earned. This is mine’.

Close to the beginning of the book, Rai describes them all as ‘living on a broken mirror’: if one’s mirror image disappears then one is presumably about to ‘slip through [a] crack and be lost’. This is what happens to Ormus after Vina’s death. He descends into a sterile, drug-fuelled world in his search for her, but he does not seem to find her there; he cannot even uncover the truth about her death. Perhaps he cannot reclaim her because she is not his alone: during the course of the novel she is a significant Other to many different people. Eventually, however, she comes to claim him from the world of the living, a mirror image reversal of the Orpheus myth:

Linden Hills is closely based on Dante’s Inferno, with the nine circles of Hell figured by the nine crescent drives of a capitalist, materialistic community, presided over by the demonic Luther Nedeed. The novel intertwines two stories, the first a descent by two young men who parallel Dante and Virgil, and the second the experience of Nedeed’s wife locked in the basement and her discovery of a feminist ‘herstory’ that eventually gives her the strength to re-ascend.

Willie seems to feel that Nedeed’s wife could be his Other: he very much wants to meet her and is fascinated by the fact that no-one seems to know her name. His entire journey through Linden Hills could be construed as an attempt to reach her, and she repays his perseverance with inspiration for a long-awaited poem: ‘"There is a man in a house at the bottom of a hill. And his wife has no name"’ . The identification between the two is reinforced when, as if in answer to the poem, the reader is told that her name is Willa. She seems to be a female counterpart for Willie and one is led to believe that his visit to her house the next day will have a positive, even romantic outcome. This is not the case; he catches sight only of a monster in a mirror and Willa, her dead son and her husband die in an indistinguishable ball of flames while Willie and Lester flee for their lives. Willa is not a convenient, storyless Other who exists to counterpoint and confirm Willie’s personality, but a woman who has emerged from a long search for her own identity with a wholeness that does not include him.

Unlike most descent protagonists, Willa is static; she cannot descend because she is already physically and spiritually at the lowest point of Linden Hills. Although she does succeed in ascending at the close of the novel, for most of it her journey is in time as she discovers the history of the previous Nedeed wives and in doing so ‘unothers’ herself and becomes a Self in her own right. Maxine Lavon Montgomery comments that Otherness has been the destructive force for all the Nedeed wives: marriage does not bring them identity or personal fulfilment (as Willa at least had hoped) but rather erodes their selves and increases their sense of alienation. They have no identity except their social role in marriage and respectability, and even that is a sham.

The crucial point in Willa’s journey towards identity involves a mirror, echoing Mamie Tilson’s advice about keeping the mirror propped up in one’s soul, a mirror which, Montgomery says, ‘can allow an individual to form an identity apart from the institutions, conventions and ideals of bourgeois society’ and which Lester says brings peace. Confronted with the disappearing face of Priscilla Maguire Nedeed, Willa begins to doubt her own and needs a shiny surface to check her memory. After seeing it again she is sure of her existence: ‘No doubt remained – she was there’, and also of her identity: ‘Now that she had actually seen and accepted reality, and reality brought such a healing calm’.

The capturing of this identity may not be so triumphant as it appears, however. One view of selfhood is that it is only created in the act of expression: there is no ‘I’ until it is uttered by a self-conscious being. Lacan places mirrors in an analogous position to language. The mirror image becomes a totalising ideal that organises and orients the self; but since selfhood is necessarily a totalised, unified concept, a division between the inner and outer worlds, then, he argues, there can be no Self before the mirror stage. Willa’s new sense of identity may therefore be self-reflexive and unfounded. This perspective, combined with her tenuous escape from the morgue, recourse to traditional ‘women’s work’ to find a place in the home and revengeful yet accidental death, suggests a deeply ambiguous reading of Linden Hills’ denouement: has Willa found purpose or, as Luther suspects, only delusion and madness?

The Matrix is a film imbued with mirror images and questions about reality. Its protagonist, Neo, has an intense desire to meet the mysterious Morpheus, suggesting a Self/Other relationship. It turns out to be much more complicated, however, as Neo’s encounter with Morpheus leads to his discovery of an entirely different system of reality and his own, important place in it. The different levels of reality within the film echo Lacan’s description: humans live in a world which is fictional, literally ‘imaginary’; the computer matrix that generates this world is analogous to the symbolic level of language; and outside all of this there is a real dimension that one can only reach by breaking through the symbolic matrix.

There are several points in the film when mirrors are used to highlight this division of reality. The first is when the viewer sees Neo reflected twice in Morpheus’s glasses, in one lens with the red pill that will answer his questions and in the other with the blue pill of oblivion. In this scenario Morpheus fulfils the role of Otherness in the descent narrative: he is the Devil at the bottom of Hell, tempting Neo with knowledge. The strong stylistic image emphasises the immense decision Neo has to take and actualises the split in his self between the temptation to stay and the desire to leave. When Neo takes the red pill and leaves the matrix this divergence is resolved: he is absorbed by a mirror as his ego in the matrix (Thomas Anderson) and alter ego in the real world (Neo) are fused.

Lacan, in writing about the difficulty of perceiving the imaginary, comments that a mirror is pure surface but is almost impossible to distinguish from the images that constantly cover it. Neo, in his training on the rebel ship, comes to understand the symbolic and thus to perceive and even control the images it produces. His first successful attempt to manipulate the actual matrix comes when he visits the oracle and manages to ‘bend’ a spoon like the children do. The viewer then sees Neo reflected upside-down in the spoon, showing that he, like Dante at the end of Inferno, is at his moment of conversion: he understands that the matrix can be distorted and could therefore even be destroyed.

The Matrix’s occasional references to Marxist theory, such as the inclusion of the book Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, reinforce the film’s overall philosophy that in order to understand society one has to stand outside it. This view is also evident in Linden Hills where the best critics are Willie and Ruth who live in Putney Wayne, and in The Ground Beneath Her Feet in which Darius Cama’s insight that ‘[t]he only people who see the whole picture...are the ones who step out of the frame’ is repeated several times. This need in all the narratives to alienate oneself from society and otherness in the search for objective truth follows Lacan’s injunction to break through the imaginary and the symbolic in order to access the real; removing challenges to one’s subjectivity from others by stepping outside their realm of existence allows descent protagonists to gain knowledge about themselves and the ‘real’ world.

A confrontation with an Other remains a crucial part of contemporary descent narratives but it no longer takes the form of evil or chaos; instead the Other can be understood as part of the protagonist’s Self. The use of imagery of mirrors in such narratives emphasises this: the reflection in a mirror would not exist if no-one stood in front of it and in the same way a person is only made an Other by someone else’s perspective. In The Matrix Neo seems to become aware of this trick of the symbolic and to surpass it; the characters of The Ground Beneath Her Feet eventually form relationships that stabilise their identities. The protagonists of Linden Hills, however, remain deceived: Willie, in looking for an Other, finds only himself, and Willa, in trying to create her own identity, finds only a mirror image.

Gallop, Jane, Reading Lacan (London: Cornell University Press) 1985

Girard, René, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, tr. Yvonne Freccero (London: John Hopkins University Press) 1965

Kelley, Margot Anne (ed.), Gloria Naylor’s Early Novels (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida) 1999

Naylor, Gloria, Linden Hills (London: Penguin) 1985

Rushdie, Salman, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (London: Vintage) 2000

Schroeder, William Ralph, Sartre and his Predecessors: The Self and the Other (London: Routledge) 1984

Wachowski brothers (dir.) The Matrix (1999)

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