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Civilization's first gesture is to hold up a mirror to the Object, but the Object is only seemingly reflected therein; in fact, it is the Object itself which is the mirror. (Baudrillard 1993, 172-73)
the terror of the/mirror held up by one's own self up to one's broken nature - . . . IS THIS TRUE? The terrible wresde/to convey the truth since there is always the temptati-/on/the seduction to allow the word to lead you on to something else to falsify or make it easier on yrself. (Brathwaite 1993, 151)
Why are there so many mirror moments in graphic novels? Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons (2002), for example, opens with a mirror scene dramatizing the author-illustrator arriving at the premise of her memoir, an episodic kiinstlerroman in the form of the comic book album or graphic novel. In one panel, we see her drawing herself in a self-portrait where in miniature she appears just as she does in the larger panel - drawing herself. The doubled self-portrait invokes the classic topos of mue en abyme, a reflection of a reflection.1 On one hand, the doubled reflection seeks to assuage by confronting those anxieties of duplicitous self-consciousness that Kamau Brathwaite laments in the epigraph above; on the other hand, it enacts the same homology of reflective content and systems of reflection described by Jean Baudrillard. Both gestures affirm the sincerity of Barry's authorial address by raising questions of mediation and veracity as part of the obligatory "autobiographical pact," as theorist Philippe Lejeune calls it (1989), whereby autobiographers establish authority according to subjective, rather than verifiable, truths. In Barry's text the autobiographical pact culminates a two-part query. Sitting at her drawing table in the first panel, she wonders: "Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true?" (2002, 7). In the second panel, she binarizes the query: "Is it fiction if parts of it are?" (7). Here, her posture mirrors the finished drawing on the table and, as mentioned, pitches the scene into the infinite abyss of the mirrored mirror. Presumably, visual reference to the author's labor of creating the very text we read lends credibility to her subjective truths by hypostatizing them in the material commodity object (the finished memoir). We can be certain,...