THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

3.2 Double Whammy: Mixed Doubles The Avatar in Panamaperception, and the use of standard redundant language as an aside, aliterary device. 1The cause of many personality disorders was believed to stemfrom a dislocated identity, the symptoms of which include errors ofperception and misidentification. A variety of contributions have beenmade to this field of psychiatry. Several have direct relevance to identitywith reference to the double and the divisions in the psyche.Given that the concept of personality and its potential disordersare fundamental to the formation of one’s identity and the double,selfhood and character are examined from the modern and postmodernperspective in order to diagnose Jaramillo Levi's characters. Aspects ofseveral strategies of selfhood postulated by Heinz Kohut, R. D. Laing,D.W. Winnicott, Jacques Lacan, Anthony Elliot and Zygmunt Baumanare considered. From the fear of depersonalisation and detachmentoffered by Kohut, to Lacan’s notion of identity being structured throughits reliance upon the ‘other’, their relevance to literary characters andtheir doubles is discussed.The Case for Modernism and PostmodernismThe case for modernism is supported by the fact that it hasalways been a literary theory concerning universality and relating to theindividual: therefore a theme like the double which has as its centrepoint a subject’s body and psyche would lend itself to the employmentof modern devices. These often include alienated characters,marginalised artists or the self-exiled protagonist, disrupting the linearflow of narrative, and overturning conventional expectations concerningunity, coherence of plot and character.Unlike modernism, postmodernism is rooted in architecturefrom where the term, at least in the English-speaking world, arises. 2Critics have described postmodernism as being punctuated byabsences and defined by what it is not. Anthony Elliott writes of the“dissolution of the subject’s inner experience and received socialmeanings”. 3 Walter Truett Anderson posits that postmodernism impliesthe retiring of the modern and that the postmodern constantly looksback at what has just ceased to be - by what it is no longer. 4 This in1See Appendix C xv for a comprehensive listing of recurring items in Jaramillo Levi’sfiction.2Thomas Docherty claims the origin of term is uncertain although he asserts Federicode Onís used the word postmodernismo in his Antología de la poesía española ehispanoamericana (1882-1932) published in Madrid in 1934. Thomas Docherty, ed.Postmodernism: A Reader (Hertforshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) 147.3 Elliott, Subject to Ourselves (Cambridge: Polity, 1996) 20.4 Walter Truett Anderson, “Introduction: What’s Going on Here?” The FontanaPostmodernism Reader, Abridged ed. (Hammersmith: Fontana, 1996) 3.182