The «Doppelgänger» in our Time

Hypothesis

In the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the figure of the double is largely associated with the manifestation of evil, baser instincts, and the subsequent moral struggle of a male protagonist. The double, or the doppelgänger^* as it is known in German after Jean Paul Richter, is a living person’s lookalike who is not a blood relative. Richter coined and defined the doppelgänger in his novel Siebenkäs (1796) as “people who see themselves”.¹ This definition announces a struggle between two parts of oneself and characterises the doppelgänger in primarily ocular terms as a figure of “visual compulsion” (Dieguez, 83). The doppelgänger in its early literary forms takes the shape of a ghostly self or a shadowy reflection that torments the first self. Almost all the early literature of the double sees the destruction of the original as well as the second self, the male protagonist failing to win the battle between desire and conscience. I am referring to such canonical works as Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl (1813), Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson (1839), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Similarly, in folkloric renditions of the apparition, such as the Irish fetch and Nordic fylgja, the appearance of the doppelgänger foreshadows the end of life or the approach of harm. Individuals such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Donne, and Abraham Lincoln, who reported sightings of their physical doubles, believed that this vision was associated with subsequent harm to befall them or those close to them.

It was thus generally believed that doubles were inherently antagonistic, and often fatal, to the first self. Literary depictions and cultural representations marked the figure with an aura of morbidity and darkness, with the motif as a whole declining by the end of the nineteenth century, in part due to diminishing public interest in the supernatural (Herdman, 132). The stigma of doom and the inevitable demise of the self, and usually of the counter-self too, haunted this leitmotif until the second half of the twentieth century, since when portrayals of the double have significantly altered in form, content, and message. From that point, we observe the motif of the double as it undergoes a renaissance in contemporary narratives, through which it extends beyond psychomachia, or the struggle between vice and virtue for man’s soul, which is its primary form during the Romantic, Victorian, and Gothic periods. The classical depictions, in which the doppelgänger figure appears as repressive, antagonistic, and ultimately fatal, are contrasted with what I refer to as “the new double”: the shapes and modes in which the figure manifests itself in the second half of the twentieth century and at the dawn of the new millennium. These are depictions in which the meeting between self and double changes in structure and significance, carrying a redemptive message.

This project is rooted in a desire to show the evolution of the doppelgänger from the classical forms to the new double and to investigate the paradigm shift involved from repression to recovery. The dimension of recovery can take the shape of self-reconciliation, self-construction, or self-expression along with a topical exposition of contemporary concerns such as male domestic alienation and several strands of problematic self-perception. This book and the choice of texts, trends, and campaigns to investigate aim to show an increasing energy emanating from the figure of the double which sees it expressed in new guises and in different media. This energy leads to a somewhat complex outcome that often contributes to the validation, real or illusory, of the protagonist of the story or the person seeking his/her lookalike. I offer close readings of this explosive and paradoxical vitality through an investigation of selected manifestations in which the doppelgänger self is consistently sought after as a necessary and integral part of the self.

The structure of consciousness of the doppelgänger figure has shifted in the last seventy years in response to social phenomena such as a heightened emphasis on metropolitan existence, the nature of modern warfare, an increasingly rampant capitalism, but most importantly the digital turn² in which we experience “the progressive virtualisation of the world” (Westera, 6). In the literary and cultural depictions investigated, the doppelgänger is sought after rather than feared or avoided. In the literature and culture of the double, alterity can be seen as a condition that elicits one of two effects: expanding possibilities of existence or inducing crippling anxiety. This book is mostly a meditation on the power of alterity³ as a positive and enriching force, showcasing numerous examples across various genres to that effect. My use of the term plays on the indulgence of being other, whether an exploration of a hidden or suppressed part of one’s own identity or a meditation on the experience of taking on someone else’s identity, partially or fully. Think of Tom Ripley and Dickie Greeleaf in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999); when the desire to be an(other) overwhelms a person, it’s an all consuming one. Alterity is, after all, a manifestation of the “what if” whether acted upon or simply remaining a flight of fancy. A case in point, in contemporary culture, alterity, as fulfilled through digital doppelgänger trends, can ward off anxieties of FOMO (fear of missing out). In this conception, the doppelgänger as a figure of alterity is now connected to the recovery of dormant or unexpressed elements of the self. The evolution in the narratives of the doppelgänger revolves around three elements: the visual, the feminine, and the doppelgänger as an expression not only of fragmentation but also of multiplicity. Each chapter showcases one or more of these three elements in connection to the conciliatory nature of the new double, in texts spanning the literary and the visual. The reconciliatory aspects of the new double appear at their strongest when all three elements converge in a single work, as I detail in this Introduction.