THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

3.2 Double Whammy: Mixed Doubles The Avatar in PanamaFederman suggests propositions for the future of fiction. Firstly,that the traditional way of reading fiction must be challenged and thewriter must do it. The concept of syntax must be transformed. 101 This isapparent is stories such as “Libro sin tapas”, “El lector” and “La imagenmisma” where in the first two make active participants of the reader andthe third is unpunctuated. Secondly, that the shape of fiction; linear andorderly narration are no longer possible as life is never experienced in asingle straight line. Fiction will be in a perpetual state of redoubling onitself: Imitating, repeating, parodying, and retracting what it says. Fictionwill become a metaphor for its own narrative process and will establishitself as it writes itself (10-11). Thirdly, Federman asserts that if thematerial of fiction is invention, then writing fiction will be a process ofinventing the material of fiction. Finally, Federman cites Borges andCortázar as examples of the writing just defined (14). The latter has aheavy influence on Jaramillo Levi’s work by the Panamanian’s ownadmission. Like postmodernism, Federman writes “fiction is as muchwhat is said as not said, since what is said is not necessarily true, andsince what is said can always be said in another way”. As a result fictioncharacters will no longer have fixed identities with a stable set of socialand psychological attributes with names and professions. Newcharacters will be changeable and dynamic, illusory and nameless andthere will be a marked repetition of character (12). The lack of stableidentity is true of the majority of the characters in Jaramillo Levi’s fictionand repetition of characters appears throughout. This metafictionaltechnique is said to equate with all that is postmodern and is exploitedby many Latin American writers including Jaramillo Levi.Strategies of IdentityThe 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. Kohut’s contention was that the basis ofhuman anxiety was caused by a fragmented and crumbling self, acondition which he termed as annihilation anxiety. 102 With perceptionand identity inextricably related, perception is, indeed, the essence ofone’s reality. Laing’s understanding of identity is defined as, “thatwhereby one feels one is the same, in this place, this time as at thattime and at that place, past or future; it is that by which one is identified.An ‘identity’ sometimes becomes an ‘object’ that a person has or feels101 Raymond Federman, ed. “Surfiction-Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction”Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow (Chicago: Swallow, 1975) 9.102 Heinz Kohut (1913-1981) was a psychiatrist whose roots were in Freudiananalysis. His theory of the bi-polar self distinguished between two aspects of selfwhich first emerge in the earliest stages of life. J. Brooks Bouson, The EmpatheticReader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self (Amherst: Uof Massachusetts P, 1989) 11, 14.214