the eye and the I: the mirror focuses

Ok, I have the flu, so this is going to be shorter than usual, and possibly influenced by cold medicine, and I am sorry I always seem to be posting so late.

One of the interesting explorations of realism that Anderson goesthrough is a discussion of the mirror as a metaphor for the realist fictional work. I had often thought of the same logical point that he goes on to raise...that the mirror is NOT in fact a faithful representation of reality (great news to me at the moment: I look like death). THe mirror, like the camera, and the train of movement in the realist story, is dependent upon viewpoint, upon focus. THis makes the discussion of focus on kinds of detail ostensibly superfluous to plot development especially interesting, particularly with regard to the writing of Shen Congwen. If we follow the logic that it is only in those inexplicable moments of blank lull, of fixated attention on a sheet or a landscape that reality can be viewed we must ask why. It is suggested by Anderson that because these things are not FUNCTIONAL to a plot because they disrupt and disjoint, they behave in their confounding, in a :lifelike" manner. THat realism should be a method by which we seek a knowing mimesis of the world that is real because of its pretensions of being BEYOND THE AUTHOR"S IMAGINATION is also telling. The reality sought therefore must be unknown...cannot be known. In this sense the moments of stillness and detail that pop up in works by shen congwen, a sort of managed compulsion to look, even as they are indeed subject to the control, behest and artifice of the author may well manifest a reality as well as it can possibly be described, in that it is in those places that meanings are sought and sought and sought by critics because there is no one solid meaning, because in fact those moments represent a state of not understanding that IS the only element close to a truly objective eye. In other words that which is unknowable is the only thing that approaches a true Reality, and it is not a reality that is inside our epistemological bounds, it is one that MUST lie just outside of it, and therefore be beyond the quotidienne, the experience of reality that is perhaps more like what we would expect of realism.