THE DOUBLE AND THE OTHER

Transcription

1 THE DOUBLE AND THE OTHER

2 Also by Paul Coates *THE REALIST FANTASY: Fiction and Reality since Clarissa THE STORY OF THE LOST REFLECTION: The Alienation of the Image in Western and Polish Cinema *WORDS AFTER SPEECH: A Comparative Study of Romanticism and Symbolism IDENTYCZNOSC I NIEIDENTYCZNOSC W TWORCZOSCI BOLES AWA LESMIANA *Published by Palgrave Macmillan

3 The Double and the Other Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction PAUL COATES Assistant Professor of English McGill University, Montreal M MACMILLAN PRESS

4 Paul Coates 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WClE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Coates, Paul The double and the other: identity as ideology in post-romantic fiction. 1. Fiction-History and criticism I. Title 809.3'034 PN3499 ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI /

5 For Anna

6 What is unique about the 'I' hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. Milan Kundera Without exception, men have yet to become themselves. T. W. Adorno

7 Contents Preface xi Introduction 1 Theses on the Double and the Other 1 Writing and Ideology: the Imagination of the Divided Self 5 1 Notes on Imagination and the Novel 7 On Imagination and Negation 7 Visions of the Mind's Eye: Imagination and Visualisation 15 Conjugations of the Present Tense: on Lyric and Narrative Time 24 The Double Beginning 30 2 The Double and the Other 32 The Rise and Fall of the Double 32 E. T. A. Hoffmann: the Double and the Disowned Life 35 De Quincey: Self-definition by Negation 36 The Double and the World of Light (Frankenstein) 38 Twin and Twain: the Dual Textuality of Pudd'nhead Wilson 45 The A voidance of the Double 50 The Double and the Doll 58 Appendix I The Double as the Second Person: Tadeusz Konwicki 65 vii

8 viii Contents Appendix II A World of Doubles: Invasion of the Body Snatchers 66 3 Joseph Conrad and the Imagination of the Fin de Siecle 69 Introduction 69 The Adjectival Style in the Fin de Siecle 70 The Fetish of the (Newspaper) Leader 72 The Malaise of Male Authority 77 The World Elsewhere 79 Discontinuous Identity 80 The Fetish Form of Narration 83 Reading Russian Characters 84 The Detached Retina 87 The Ideology of the Image: Conrad and Cinema 89 Writing and the Blackened Page 92 Concentric Circles 97 4 In the Realm of Transformation 102 Introduction 102 Hysterical Transformation: the Work of E. T. A. Hoffman 103 Resentment and the Fear of Transformation: Notes from Underground 107 The Masquerade of Herman Melville 111 La Bete Humaine: some Reflections on Lawrence's 'The Fox' 116 Night and Jubilee in Villette and 'A Nocturnal Reverie' 122 Transformation and Oblivion: Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka 127

9 Contents ix 5 The Fiction of Central Europe 131 Introduction 131 The Pathos of the Ephemeral: Milan Kundera 131 Hofmannsthal and Kusniewicz: the Soldier- Aesthetes of the Austro-Hungarian Army 136 Bibliography 147 Index 150

10 Preface The following book, like its author's other works, may well be criticised as lacking a centre. Its author could point to its title and counter this stricture by emphasising the degree to which the essays it contains constitute variations on the title's theme. He could argue that a unity of theme does indeed exist in the book: the unnamed point of intersection of the themes of projection, negation, the Double, transformation, the monstrous or Sublime, Utopia, the ideology of the fin de siecle, the relationship between the workings of imagination and those of cinema, of fiction as a 'good' projection as opposed to the malevolent projections of ideology. To do so, however, would be to agree with one's critics in maintaining the paramount importance of a monographic unity habitually blind to the social and intellectual processes out of which the monograph's subject emerges. The unity of the following book is not the centred unity of the monograph but the decentred one of the constellation of themes. It seeks to do justice to the intermeshing contradictions of individual and overall process by aligning works and writers in a series of dots the reader is required to join up in order to discover the hidden face of events. Unity is definable only by negation as it floats between the archipelagos of the separate particles of the perceivable. Its overdetermination should not be mistaken for acausality, however: a superimposition of causes may seem to generate a negative causality, for no single cause is fetishised as the cause, but this is in fact a more demanding reformulation of causality, opposed to all reductionism. The author expresses his solidarity with the work of Pynchon or Adorno. For him, as for them, the unity of self is a pseudounity, achieved through an exclusion and projection of otherness that is really a mystification of self-knowledge, a denial of the actual fragmentation of the self in the modern era. The self is not a permanent unity but an accidental combination of the genetic kaleidoscope; it lacks the transcendental features of necessity. As xi

11 xii Preface they seek to suggest a decentred unity that tolerates rather than proscribes the other, the following essays eschew the effort to speak last words on a subject. They do not open and shut a case in the manner in which the institution of the book, with its clear beginning and end, allows us to delude ourselves we can do: in a sense, this may be termed an anti-book. It may also be term,ed 'interdisciplinary' (its links with my work on cinema should be apparent to those who know that work) in its awareness of the arbitrariness of the division of labour within the academy: for in order to comprehend the multiple mediations that constitute our image of reality one has to puncture the partitions of 'one's own' subject, even if only speculatively, in imagination, never actually able to break down the walls but only to dream of their downfall and the advent of the true, withheld totalisation. Hence this book is very much about the impotent power of the imagination to translate one from 'here' to the place that is arbitrarily separated from it by its naming as 'there'. The speculative connections it draws initiate a process the reader is asked to continue. As it strives to transmit messages down the piping that leads to and from the academic cell known as 'its field', the following book is nevertheless all too aware that it does so in darkness, never knowing who inhabits the adjacent cells, or whether or not the code it raps out is deciphered anywhere. It is dedicated to whomsoever receives that message. Here I would like to thank three persons who helped bring parts of this book to formulation: Fredric Jameson, whose invitation to speak at Duke University prompted 'On Imagination and Negation'; Stephen Winfield, who heard a shorter version of the Conrad section when I addressed a meeting of University of East Anglia postgraduates at his invitation; and Joel Black, whose stimulating talk on De Quincey's autobiographical biographies, given at the University of Georgia, alerted me to De Quincey's remarks on his doppel-ganger. 'On Imagination and Negation' and the Kusniewicz section of the Hofmannsthal and Kusniewicz essays first appeared in PN Review and The Polish Review respectively.