THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

3.2 Double Whammy: Mixed Doubles The Avatar in Panamaand revises the original, revisionist works”. 77 This is an act that JaramilloLevi continually performs.Linda Hutcheon proposes this intertextual revision be labelledparody, as the process involves “replaying, inverting, and ‘transcontextualising’previous works of art”. 78 More succinctly she definesparody as “repetition with difference” and categorises it as “one of themajor forms of modern self-reflexivity; it is a form of inter-art discourse”(101, 2). Parody is a means of dealing with previous texts of the past.Contemporary writers realise that change entails continuity and profferparody as a paradigm for the process of transfer and reorganisation ofthat past (4). The resultant texts are part of a great intertextual tapestry.Narrative and textual doubling are often deemed characteristicsof postmodern writing. Doubling of narrative would constitute therepetition of story or plot metaphorically but not necessarily insemantics on the actual page. Doubling of the text would literally meanduplicating at least part of the printed text itself in the style of JacquesDerrida. These writing techniques are found in the examples ofliterature of the double already presented and indeed in the work ofJaramillo Levi. As examples of narrative doubling James Hogg’s TheConfessions of an Unjustified Sinner is comprised of a double version ofthe same story “The Editor’s Narrative” and the Protagonist’s version,and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde is actually a ninety-page presentationof multiple perspectives; those of Lanyon, Utterson and Jekyll himself.Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios is told twice: the two hundredpagenovel incorporates a thirty-page story entitled “Os Gafanhotos”(“The Locusts”) which appears first in the book. 79 Maupassant’s “Lehorla” comprises two divisions which relate the same story; first theshorter version and second, a protracted reworked account. Thenarrative is duplicated but parts of the text itself are also doubled withinthe same work and there are also differences between Maupassant’sconte version and second nouvelle version of “Le horla”. 80There is irony in Jaramillo Levi’s title Duplicaciones as it refersto the book itself, a division of that book, and a story within it. Luminoso77 The example John Pennington offers is the story of Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly as arevisionist text of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. “Textual Doubling and Divided Selves:The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mary Reilly” 204-205. “The Doppelganger inContemporary Literature, Film, and Art”. Double Issue. Journal of the Fantastic in theArts. Vol 6: 2, 3. (1994). eds. Michael J. Larsen and Gordon E. Slethaug.78Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms,(New York: Routledge, 1985) 11.79 It reduces the time span of the novel’s events to a particular day and evening andtells in that time the same events the novel re-examines from an alternativeperspective. Lídia Jorge, The Murmuring Coast, Trans. Natália Costa and Ronald W.Sousa. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995) 92.80 See 1.2 Fantastic Psychoanalysis, footnote 61.206