THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

1.1 Double, Double, Toil and Trouble The Avatar in Panamaemerged during an altered state of consciousness certainly advancedthe theme and enabled a new way of seducing the double onto thepages of literature. 27 E. T. A. Hoffmann represented this second self asa projected physical double which importantly could be either real orimaginary and who usually embodied the malevolent, hostile side ofpersonality (55). Dual personality lent itself to the revelation of acharacter’s double life, which was either conscious or unconscious, aspotential subject matter. Hoffmann’s stories “The Mines at Falun” and“Mademoiselle de Scudery” are cases in point. This prototypicaldepiction of the double alone makes Hoffmann’s contribution invaluablein revolutionising the theme at this early stage.From the 1820s onward, German romanticism declined but,although Mesmerism lost influential ground, it did not disappearcompletely. Mesmer’s theory had a crucial influence on Frenchpsychologists, who at the time were investigating hypnosis and hysteria.As these investigators and their experiments became more prestigious,hypnotism became almost de rigueur in the doppelganger stories of theera. This altered state of consciousness lent its original name toHoffmann’s “The Magnetiser” and appears in both Edgar Allan Poe’s “ATale of the Ragged Mountains”, and Guy de Maupassant’s “Le horla” inwhich the narrator comments on “the extraordinary phenomenaproduced by recent experiments in hypnotism and suggestion”. 28 Hethen refers to the Nancy School where the future founder ofpsychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, witnessed experiments during whichorders, suggested under hypnosis, were carried out by patients in theirwaking states. 29Freud’s Uncanny Stranger WithinFreud’s theories were popularised during the late nineteenthand early twentieth century, a time which heralded a period of massiveeconomic growth marked by important developments in many differentfields. These developments were accompanied by daring, almostradical, ideas on social anthropology and the human condition; the mostrelevant to the establishment of the psychoanalytic theory being those27Tymms 26–27.28 All translations are from “The Horla”, Selected Short Stories. Trans. Roger Colet.(Middlesex: Penguin, 1971) 324. “des manifestations extraordinaires auxquellesdonnent lieu en ce moment les expériences sur l’hypnotisme et la suggestion”. Guy deMaupassant, “Le horla”, "Le Maupassant du "Horla", ed. Pierre Cogny (Paris: Minard,1970) 74.29 Chertok and de Saussure 150.21