Looking in the mirror

Many things have been powerful influences on literature, the invention of the printing press, for example, and the spread of literacy beyond the clergy and the upper classes. For individual writers, their work is influenced by their early lives, their failures and frustrations, their painful rejection slips, etc.

Steven Johnson

Yet in his book How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson points to something I would have never guessed — the mirror.

He gives credit for this insight to Lewis Mumford. "Self-consciousness, introspection, mirror-conversation developed with the new object itself," Mumford wrote. There was a time, not so many centuries ago, when people had little or no idea what they looked like. The mirror had a profound impact on people, and especially on artists. Painters began to paint self-portraits. If no model was handy, they looked in a mirror. The mirror allowed the Renaissance to happen, Johnson argues.

Writers, too, felt the influence of the mirror. They began thinking more about themselves. They began writing first-person novels. "The psychological novel, in a sense, is the kind of story you start wanting to hear once you begin spending meaningful hours of your life staring at yourself in the mirror," Johnson writes.

This argument requires a certain degree of conjecture. Certainly people thought about themselves a great deal even before the invention of the mirror. There are first-person accounts in the Bible and elsewhere. Yet it's not hard to believe that commonplace mirrors must have had a huge impact on human lives, just as commonplace cell phones have. And surely some of that impact must have affected how people write and what they write about.