The Mirror and the Veil: The Passing Novel and the Quest for American Racial Identity - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by John Sheehy

In other words, the child at the mirror quite literally "re-cognizes" himself, and in so doing lays the groundwork for a cognitive conception of himself as separate from the world, and of that world itself as separable into distinct categories - which are distinct precisely to the extent that they are recognizably "different" from each other. The paradox at the heart of the mirror stage is that the subjective construction of the I is predicated on an objective and problematic icon: the mirror image. This "specular I," according to Lacan, "deflect[s] into the social I." In either case, this I is a projection, a construction, or ultimately something other than the still ineffable "self" (Lacan 5). The desire, then, to be oneself is inextricable from the cognitive function which demands that "self" correspond with the image of self represented by the concretized mirror image, or by the reified social image; i.e., the image of the self is, itself, other:

This moment in which the mirror stage comes to an end.., decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into mediatization, through the desire of the other, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence by the co-operation of others, and turns the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger, even though it should correspond to a natural maturation .... (Lacan 5)

Thus, the I, conceived in the mirror stage, becomes ironically the "alienating armour" of social identity, a construct whose mandate is to correspond to the self, and yet whose very existence involves the subject in a complex and mutually reflective relationship with the "other."

As in Lacan's example, the ex-colored boy's confrontation with the mirror is the first literal announcement of what will become, figuratively, a theme for him: his repeated and ultimately inconclusive encounters with himself as image, revealed first in the looking-glass, but later reflected in the less forgiving reflective surfaces of the various social groups through which he must "pass." In a Lacanian moment that takes place immediately after his encounter with the mirror, the boy recognizes (in the special sense in which I have been using this word) both himself and his mother:

I ran downstairs to where my mother was sitting .... I buried my head in her lap and blurted out: "Mother, Mother, tell me, am I a nigger?" ... And then it was that I looked at her critically for the first time. I had thought of her in a childish way only as the most beautiful woman in the world; now I looked at her searching for defects. I could see that her skin was almost brown, that her hair was not so soft as mine, and that she did differ in some ways from the other ladies who came to the house; yet, even so, I could see that she was very beautiful, more beautiful than any of them. She... said with difficulty: "No, my darling, you are not a nigger." ... But the more she talked, the less I was reassured, and I stopped her by asking: "Well, mother, am I white? Are you white?" She answered tremblingly: "No, I am not white, but you - " (Johnson 12)