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The Mirror: a philosophical and theological analysis of
transcendence and individualization on Guimarães Rosa’s short
story
Carlos Daniel Santos Vieira
Department of Classic and Vernacular Letters, Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences,
University of São Paulo, Brazil.
This research intends to analyze the presence of elements from Christian and Buddhist
theological thoughts into the short story The Mirror (or O Espelho, in its original), from the
Brazilian author João Guimarães Rosa – namely one of the best authors of the country. The
short story, present in the book First Stories (Primeiras Estórias, 1962), is also formally
analyzed, showing a connection between its structure and the philosophical apparatus known
by the author.
In this short story, a first person narrator tells us what happened to him: in an ordinary day, he
saw himself in the mirror as a bestial monster. Horrified, he started a series of “experiments” in
order to see what he calls his “vera forma” (“true form”), through methods that are both
scientific and superstitious. After many processes, he looks at a mirror for the second time, and
surprisingly, he sees nothing. Getting desperate, the narrator asks himself if he may be a “soulless”
man (“um de-almado”, separating the word to emphasize the spiritual part). He spends
the next years avoiding mirrors. After this time, we are briefly told he already loved. When he
accepts looking at his reflex again, he sees a small light, which slowly takes form as the primal
face of a boy. The narrator has then find his true form, and finishes the story by offering the
reader a question: would not be this plan an opportunity to finish forming our souls?
We can notice a narrator that allows in his speech the abortion of essayistic features, although
one cannot say it loses its identity as a short story once it uses the interruption of an empirical
thought (the mainly thought in a scientific essay) to create a shock in the reader. This result of
mysticism and scientism therefore generates a double-faced, many times ironical narrator, who
never gives the reader the impression that future events can be predicted.
A great influence Rosa suffered can be realized through a spiritualistic perspective. The
character/narrator walks through a self-knowledge process with three “stages”, in which the
first one (of ignorance or ordinary life) can only take the individuals to a third stage (of
absolute wisdom or self-knowledge) after sustaining a point of existential emptiness and
apparent failure. This way of spiritual growth similarly appears in both Catholicism and
Buddhism. Catholic Theology assures that human soul passes through three Stages of
Perfection – Purgative, Illuminative and Unitive; and, at the same time, the Buddhist Ch’an
states that between ignorance and knowledge there is the realization that nothing is real, and
that everything is nothing.
Guimarães Rosa, just like his most famous character Riobaldo (from the novel Grande Sertão:
Veredas), “drinks waters from all the rivers”.
3 rd meeting of young researchers at UP 197