Reflections     by Mark Insingel, Translated by Adrienne Dixon Original title: Spiegelingen Original language: Dutch Original year: 1968 Published by Red Dust, Incorporated Pub. Date: 1972 Format: Hardcover, 77 pages ISBN: 0873760212 List Price: $4.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $4.95 Published by Calder and Boyars, London Pub. Date: 1971 Format: 90 pages Not available for ordering Published by Red Dust, New York Pub. Date: 1972 Format: 90 pages Not available for ordering

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How meaning is constructed out of language is the abiding interest of all Insingel’s writing, whether in his poetry, his shorter prose pieces or his novels. These novels are generally episodic in nature and merely provide him with a larger keyboard on which to improvise. Reflections is the first of them and chooses a few moments from the childhood and young manhood of its unnamed hero, or perhaps in some cases they are only fantasies, what he fears might or wishes could happen. The telling is not sequential but circular, so that the book starts and ends with images of circular journeys, bracketing childhood memories on either side.


As a title, Reflections mirrors both the book’s construction and its narrative method. The hero reflects on everything that happens to him, recapitulates, questions and reconstructs, as the telling proceeds. Each episode is turned round on itself, proceeding from a slow development to an excited climax and then back again to the beginning. This also is the rhythm of the novel as a whole. Even the grammar is mirror-like at times; sentences are squeezed into each other in such a way that object becomes subject without transition, as in the sentence ‘Are there no children? are a nuisance trample on the carpet’.


Various recurring images drive home the book’s preoccupation with escaping the limitations of reality as it is framed in mirrors, by windows, the camera or language. Each distorts in its own way, the whole story can never be told, we always end up with a substitute and altered reality. Even when the same words are used, the meaning is changed by the new context and by what has followed their first appearance. This fact Insingel considers at greater length in his third novel, That Is To Say (Dat Wil Zeggen).

Your grandfather walks at the same times in the same places, he notes every change, going along the tree-lined walk around the town he is unchangeable, a clockhand which by means of absolute precision keeps points of time and points of place in equilibrium and through movement (apparently) maintains immobility. He lights the lamp, his silhouette moves, he has a right arm, cuffs, a goatee, a left arm, a jacket, two arms with hands with fingers between which smoke rises to above the screen which is stretched between you and him, behind which he is vaguer and clearer, black and sharply outlined, he lowers the puppets, fades away, you only hear him now, and you hear him, more distinct than if you saw him at the same time are these sounds of the old man with the walking stick who combs your hair with a parting in the middle, who asks (he bends over to you, puts his hand on your shoulder, a palm, a thumb, fingers): Do you like this? What do you like best? The music makes the puppets move (the puppets set the music in motion), the princess walks (flees) round and round, while the treacherous courtier walks behind her (is after her). Is the princess walking in front of the courtier? Is the courtier walking in front of the princess? The courtier gains ground (the princess loses), the courtier loses ground (the princess gains) and these are the princess and the treacherous courtier: you recognize their splendid clothes, the gold, the scarlet, the lace, the embroidery, the pink skin, the frightened, innocent look, the dark, furrowed face, the covetous look, you recognize the colours from the movements, the eyes from the arms. (p. 81, tr. Adrienne Dixon)