THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

3.2 Double Whammy: Mixed Doubles The Avatar in Panamamore three dimensional, this inventive device would establish a pool ofpeople from which he could draw. A character would reappear in thefore or background of different fictions so the reader could graduallyform a full picture. Balzac's use of this technique places him among theoriginators of the modern novel. Prior to Balzac no one had thought ofapplying this procedure to an entire fictional output. He constructed aworld that had its own internal coherence and increased the number ofcharacters by retouching later editions of his earlier novels. 19 Thisconcept came to Balzac due to the way he thought about his writing - asa corpus and not as independent units. He employed an array oftechniques to increase his recurring characters by reintroducing aprevious character from the past into the present, or he would re-edit anold work, change the text, or add a name which had originally beenabsent. 20 After their addition, Balzac’s characters’ names may havebeen totally different, slightly varied, may have been implied only ormay even have been merged. Unusual animals remained the sameanimal regardless of name, and this also referred to unusual places too(10, 11). In Balzac’s work the insertion of a name changed ananonymous person into a reappearing one and he also altered namesof characters who were privileged to conversations and otherinformation so that references to these could be attributed to othercharacters in the work (21, 40).In Theory of Literature, René Wellek and Austin Warren declarethat characterisation and narrative plotting may be original, copied fromreal people or situations or perfectly plagiarised from another text. Eventhe most original writers draw protagonists and literary devices from thetraditional literary stockpile. Thus, character creation is supposed tocombine inherited literary types, people observed and the self. 21 Thecoupling of name and form produces the first step of identity, andWellek and Warren maintain that “the simplest form of characterisationis naming. Each ‘appellation’ is a kind of vivifying, animizing,individuating”. Flat or static characters show a single, obvious, ordominant trait whereas round and dynamic characters require spaceand emphasis and are more linked to the novel (219). If then, as alegacy of postmodernism, many literary creations in the literature of thedouble and Jaramillo Levi’s fiction are nameless, it may follow that thefirst step of the identity process is lacking and therefore a character’s19 The first edition of Le Père Goriot had twenty-three recurring characters; when latereditions appeared, there were forty-eight. He used events and characters from otherstories increasingly as points of comparison as if they were historical fact. La ComédieHumaine ultimately is made up of ninety-five novels with something over two thousandcharacters created in less than twenty years. Cynthia Grenier, “Balzac's GrandCanvas: Writers and Writing”, The Reappearing Characters in Balzac’s ComédieHumaine, ed. Arthur Graves Canfield (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1961).20 Graves Canfield 8.21 Wellek and Warren 89.187