THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

3.2 Double Whammy: Mixed Doubles The Avatar in Panama3.2 Double Whammy: Mixed DoublesAnd everywhere there is connexion, everywhere there is illustration: no single event,no single literature, is adequately comprehended except in its relation to other events,to other literatures.181Matthew ArnoldThe coexistence of modern and postmodern elements inEnrique Jaramillo Levi’s fiction proves to be one of its most originalaspects yet appears to be overlooked in much of the criticism to date,which generally focuses on the postmodern. By that fact alone thePanamanian’s body of work is equated with originality and innovation.However, there is the blatant use of classic images, symbols, themes,and concepts, which have been exploited globally for centuries,particularly in those arts dealing with the double. Fundamentally, theseconceptions remain the same although their treatment and context maybe different as the traditional presentation of text, perspective, andstructure falls away. Jaramillo Levi's fictional characters simultaneouslyexhibit features of the dual elements of modernism and postmodernismwhich are found in descriptions of metamorphoses and in the doublingof their literary personalities.Jaramillo Levi's various protagonists, incidental characters,objects and scenarios are replicated and repeated across his decadesof writing stories, and throughout the writer’s editions and divisions. Thisextreme intertextuality maybe a legacy of Honoré de Balzac or perhapsBalzac’s reappearance of characters was the modern equivalent ofintertextuality. Nevertheless, various versions or duplications ofJaramillo Levi's stories exist as they are often re-edited prior to eachpublication; in this sense Jaramillo Levi is a revisionist. These texts thenare the same story yet are different. Jaramillo Levi also plays withmetafictional structures by dedicating various stories to the theme ofcreating fiction.There are general ideas which recur throughout Jaramillo Levi'sstories. These appear as words, phrases, images, concepts, themes,redundant language, and reference markers. Exact words and phrasesare frequently repeated to express transformation and physicalalteration, mental states, infinity, foreshadowing, general descriptionsand scenarios; reiterated imagery ranges from animals to tangibleobjects and abstract concepts; continuous and classic concepts likeinevitability, substitution, repetition-compulsion, conjuring andsummoning of double, telepathy, presence and absence, pain andpleasure, automatic writing, fusion of lights, blurring of features, sensoryhypersensitivity; obsessive themes of ageing, returning after a longabsence, personality decentring and disintegration, artistic sublimation,reliving of a dream, identity confusion and errors or misidentification or