THE DOUBLE AND THE OTHER 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 The Double and the Other Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction PAUL COATES Assistant Professor of English McGill University, Montreal M MACMILLAN PRESS © Paul Coates 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988978-0-333-44591-4 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 978-1-349-19455-1 ISBN 978-1-349-19453-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19453-7 For Anna 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 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 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 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