Double Trouble

The Doppelgänger from Romanticism to Postmodernism

Eran Dorfman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000763294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The double, doppelgänger, is mostly understood as a peculiar figure that emerged in nineteenth-century Romantic and gothic literature. Far from being a merely esoteric entity, however, this book argues that the double, although it mostly goes unnoticed, is a widespread phenomenon that has significant influence on our lives. It is an inherent key element of human subjectivity whose functions, forms, and effects have not yet gained the serious consideration they merit.

Drawing on literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, and combining a personal story with theoretical interventions, Double Trouble develops a novel understanding of the double and human subjectivity in the last two centuries. It begins with the singular and narcissistic double of Romanticism and gradually moves to the multiple doubles implicated by Postmodernism. The double is what defies unicity and opens up the subject to multiplicity. Consequently, it gradually emerges as a bridge between the I and the Other, identity and difference, philosophy and literature, theory and praxis.

1The Double That Takes My Breath Away

“I have no air”: my father kept pronouncing these words over and over again for more than two hours, sometimes murmuring and sometimes shouting them out. Only three weeks earlier he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and that morning he was hospitalized because of severe weakness. Toward the evening he suddenly started to feel stifled, and no matter how much oxygen he was given, his breathlessness only further persisted. The doctor finally took me and my sister aside and told us that the only way to ease our father’s suffering was to give him a morphine inhalation, the side effect of which would be, however, a further suppression of respiration. Devastated by our father’s cries for help we agreed to this procedure, and one hour later we witnessed with tears our father’s last breath – a peaceful one at last.

“I have no air” were therefore my father’s last words, which haunted me for months and which I will never forget. But I felt that beyond their immediate expression of an urgent need, they also contained a secret message, a testimony but also a will, articulated through a heartbreaking lament. Rather than expose here my father’s biography, I wish to better understand his strange and difficult testimony. Why didn’t he have air? The clue, I suggest, is a certain link between physical breathlessness – having no air – and mental breathlessness, an idea that I will try to elucidate.

Breathing is first of all an engagement with the environment, taking air in and letting it out in a constant exchange. Second, it is passive and automatic, not necessitating one’s intervention. Third, breathing is mostly invisible, and in normal conditions I don’t see the air I inhale and exhale. These three features – exchange with the outside, passivity, invisibility – make breath something much less trivial than it might at first seem. Breath can be considered as a quasi-passive and invisible diaphragm, a threshold between the inside and the outside, with all the problematics such a condition involves. In this sense, breath may become a focal point for investigating one’s identity: who breathes? But also: what is breathed, inhaled, and exhaled?

These questions link breath with the figure of the double, which stands, too, at the threshold of the I and the not-I. Both breath and the double challenge and transgress the clear boundaries of the subject, yet both remain invisible until something goes awry: breathlessness in the first case and the appearance of a threatening double in the second. In the same way that breath quietly takes place and announces itself only when there is a problem, so we secretly have doubles that show themselves during times of emergency, yet often in a distorted way.

The double flourished in nineteenth-century Romantic and gothic literature for reasons on which I will elaborate in the next chapter. For the purposes of this chapter, however, it is sufficient to note that the double was used to represent an undesired element or trait of the protagonist, such as immorality, greed, or sexual desire. This element is projected outside onto an external figure, which is identical or attached to the protagonist (mirror image, shadow, etc.). But this figure, the double, gradually takes over and finally destroys the protagonist through a last-moment introjection, in which the undesired element returns to the latter at the moment of death. This mechanism of projection and introjection is equally at work in certain types of breathlessness: something in breathing – taking the air in and letting it out – appears to be unpleasant or unwished for, forcing one to find a double to assume this activity, only to finally be annihilated by the double. To understand the meaning of breathlessness and the involvement of the double in it, in this chapter I will examine Guy de Maupassant’s 1887 short story entitled “The Horla.”¹

“The Horla” is constructed as the diary of a wealthy single man living on a big estate near Rouen. Nothing much seems to happen in his life, and yet he is very satisfied with it. Here are the first lines of the story: “May 8. What a wonderful day! I spent all morning stretched out on the grass in front of my house, beneath the huge plane tree that completely covers, shelters, and shades the lawn” (6). The diarist poses himself as a laid-back man, with: “profound and delicate roots that attach a man to the land where his ancestors were born and died, […] to what one should think and what one should eat, […] to the smells of the earth, of the villages, of the air itself” (6).

Indeed, it is an idyllic and organic life with an easy and effortless breath thanks to the sweet air that seems to have suffused this place from time immemorial and freely enters the lungs of its inhabitants. All the diarist has to do is simply to continue a long chain of tradition and affiliation, to which he has nothing much to add except his mere presence on the soil, under the peaceful shadow of the ancient tree. He is therefore very happy, and when he sees on the river a long line of boats with different flags, he is even more pleased and salutes a magnificent Brazilian three-master.

But this pastoral picture soon changes when a sudden, feverish illness lowers the spirit of the diarist and makes him ask: “Where do these mysterious influences come from that change our happiness into despondency and our confidence into distress? You might say that the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Powers, from whose mysterious closeness we suffer” (6). The air that seemed to innocently enter the lungs thus suddenly turns into a potential danger, since breath brings with it various forces that are all external and invisible. The air now is no longer sweet and pure but rather takes on a character opposite to that of the soil: whereas the latter is solid, stable, and rooted, the air is amorphous and mobile – two traits the diarist seems to particularly dislike.

The diarist’s illness soon worsens and the dislike now becomes nothing less than death anxiety. He is convinced that someone is trying to kill him in his sleep, or, more exactly, to strangle him:

I sleep – for a long time – two or three hours – then a dream – no – a nightmare grips me. I am fully aware that I am lying down and sleeping … I feel it and I know it … and I also feel that someone is approaching me, looking at me, feeling me, is climbing into my bed, kneeling on my chest, taking my neck in his hands and squeezing … squeezing … with all his strength, to strangle me. […] I try, with terrible efforts, gasping for breath, to turn over, to throw off this being that is crushing me and suffocating me – I can’t! (6–7)

This “someone” who tries to strangle the diarist remains at this point an imaginary character: a nightmare figure that tries to stop him from breathing. Once the nightmare is over, this stranger/strangler disappears and breath and sleep are again allowed, as if this battle for air was after all won by the diarist, who can at last breathe on his own with no fear or anxiety.

Who could it be that scares the diarist so much? What is the cause of his anxiety attacks? It is too soon to answer these questions, but we know for certain that breath is central here. As I noted earlier, breathing lets the outside in and the inside out in a continuous trade, and the fragility of this process is revealed in anxiety. Breath becomes the focal point of anxiety precisely because it is natural, neutral, and transparent. Breath blurs agency, which makes it a central theme also in Buddhist non-self meditation (anatta). Anxiety attacks stem from what is both feared and desired, that is, the loss of control, the immersion of the I in something else, a zone in which the distinction between the I and the not-I is no longer maintainable.

This zone is hinted at by another element in the diarist’s nightmares: darkness. In the same way that breath incarnates a danger because of the invisibility of the air and its unknown origin in the external world, darkness equally threatens one’s control of the situation through the restriction of sight. This restriction culminates in sleep, a sort of inner darkness where the eyes must be shut, and conscious surveillance must be diminished in order to give way to invisible forces and uncontrollable dreams.

Indeed, once the cracks in the I appear, it is difficult to ignore them, and it is even more difficult to restrict anxiety attacks to specific times and places. Thus, the diarist starts to suffer from these attacks not only during the night but during the day as well. He then decides that he needs to get away from his ancestors’ estate for a while and travel to Mont-Saint-Michel. This journey, surprisingly, cures him of his illness, but even there he must face the threat of the invisible. He climbs up to the magnificent abbey on the top of the hill, and viewing the majestic scenery, he expresses to the local monk his envy of the happiness that must result from living in such a place. The monk, however, doesn’t seem to share this enthusiasm and oddly answers: “It is very windy, Monsieur.” He then continues: “Look, here is the wind, which is the strongest force in nature, which knocks men down, […] here is the wind that kills, whistles, groans, howls –have you ever seen it, and can you see it? Yet it exists” (9).

The innocent, sweet air of the diarist’s estate in the beginning of the story becomes here a powerful wind that can destroy everything in its path and yet is for the most part invisible and uncontrolled. Wind, then, is a metaphor for a physical power that has an element of the spiritual in all senses of the term. In both Arabic and Hebrew the word for wind also means ghost, and the Old English gast, the origin of the word ghost, means breath. The air hides in itself death and destruction, and breath is therefore a diaphragm not only between the outside and the inside but also between life and death. Breath is the constant source of life, but this source, like everything that is organic, also contains a self-destructive element that lurks in every corner and threatens to make the organic inorganic again.

This is why no journey can save the diarist from this inner threat, and two days after his return the attacks recur:

Last night, I felt someone squatting over me, who, with his mouth over mine, was drinking in my life through my lips. Yes, he was sucking it in from my throat, just like a leech. Then he rose, sated, and I woke up, so wounded, broken, and annihilated, that I could no longer move. (10)

Life is taken away by a vampire or a ghost, but who is this ghost? The diarist discovers that it not only takes his breath and sucks his blood in his imagination but also, and more simply, drinks the water from a bottle on his table in the real world. This discovery makes him wonder – at last – whether this ghost is none other than himself: “So I was a sleepwalker, then, and was living, without knowing it, this double mysterious life, which makes us suspect that there are two beings inside us, or that a foreign being, unknowable and invisible, animates our captive body when our soul is dulled” (10).

This actually is the only moment of truth and sincerity in the story, the diarist daring to acknowledge the doubling of the I. He is no longer the master of the house, the master of his body, soul, and breath. In him is hidden another, invisible I, a revelation that changes not only the content but also the form of his language: “Who? Me? Me without a doubt? It could only be me?” (10, translation modified), he cries, as if to declare that the I or, rather, the “Me without a doubt” must be put, from now on, into question. No sovereign autonomy of the self or the I is possible, no matter how many Cartesian meditations the diarist may try to practice.

Yet the truth is too dreadful to maintain, and so the diarist decides to travel again to escape this inner ghost. This decision, though, is not a simple escape, since it stems from the diarist’s deep understanding that he is dependent upon others, upon the outside. He suddenly realizes that it is precisely the negation of this dependence that leads to the appearance of the double: “When we are alone for a long time, we people the void with phantoms” (11). It is only when he is deprived of others, remaining in his isolated and apparently autarkic estate, that the attacks occur. Home shows its dangerous, uncanny, unheimlich aspect when one tries to deny otherness and use home as a protection against it. Otherness is a part of being alive, as we’ve seen with the phenomenon of breath, and no one can escape it. The appearance of the threatening double, as I earlier claimed, is only the externalization of the internal doubles each one of us secretly encompasses, doubles that are agents of the inherent alterity within one’s subjectivity. It is the refusal to acknowledge and embrace alterity that leads to its projection outside, but rather than make one the master of the house, this projection only further strengthens alterity until it becomes monstrous.

This point is further stressed when, arriving in Paris, the diarist attends a dinner party and meets there a doctor who belongs to the Nancy School, where hypnosis and suggestion were practiced at the end of the nineteenth century and much influenced the young Sigmund Freud. The diarist is very skeptical about the technique of suggestion and more generally about the possibility of being controlled from the outside, and to prove the truth of his method the doctor performs a terrifying experiment. He hypnotizes the diarist’s cousin and asks the diarist to sit behind her. He then orders her to look in a “mirror,” which is actually nothing but a simple visiting card, and to describe what her cousin does. She answers correctly: he is taking a photograph from his pocket and looking at it. And who is in the photograph? Once again she...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Double That Takes My Breath Away
• 2 The Shadow’s Gaze
• 3 The Double’s Lesson of Love
• 4 Islands of Doubles
• Epilogue“It’s Not Me, It’s You”: From the Personal to the Collective Double
• Bibliography
• Index