Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

136emphasis, amounting to a moralistic interpretation of the old soul belief. Originallyconceived of as a guardian angel, assuring immortal survival to the self, the doubleeventually appears as precisely the opposite, a reminder of the individual'smortality, indeed, the announcer of death itself. Thus, from a symbol of eternal lifein the primitive, the double developed into an omen of death in the self-consciousindividual of modern civilization. This reevaluation, however, is not merely dueto the fact that death no longer could be denied as the end of individual existencebut was prompted by the permeation of the whole subject of immortality with theidea of evil. For the double whom we meet after this completion of thisdevelopmental cycle appears as "bad," threatening self and no longer a consolingone. (74; emphasis mine)This might seem, of course, very simplistic, yet if we follow the career of the double we find thatthe emergence of the figure of the double stakes the epistemological rupture in the Westernphilosophy of humanism. Since the appearance of this motif, man has been considered ascontaining multiple competing forces. Once the double occursrather, once the encounterbetween these competing forces is missedit is impossible to avoid the unpredictable effects ofthe missed encounter.One of the constituent elements of representation, the poetics of the double serves as anattempt to recreate a reality, primary or secondary. Re-creating reality, literature (as a form ofduplication) imitates, while defying the rule of creation. Such imitation draws from the writer’sfear of death and his or her vacillation between narcissism and melancholia. Creating a new Realand shoring up a life on the hinge between these two poles, the double invokes the figures of theshadow, the copy, and the ghost. In all these figures, there is the duality of the material and theabstract. In fact, the figure of the double is central to philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis,