THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

1.2 Fantastic Psychoanalysis and the Doppelganger The Avatar in Panamaproblems generated by the unconscious. The other is often perceivedas evil, threatening the original, from whom it is more often than notdissimilar, with destruction or substitution. In this classification, thethreat develops outside the subject. An external force enters theindividual, brings about the transmutation, and then leaves oftenenabling the subject to do the same to others. Bram Stoker’s Dracula isgiven as the example here (58).Fantastic literature encompasses themes like transmutation andmetamorphosis, invisibility and dualism, which introduce motifs likeghosts, shadows, and reflections, vampires and werewolves, doublesand partial selves, monsters, beasts, and cannibals. Abnormalpsychological states are frequent and are classified as hallucination,dream, insanity, and paranoia, all of which derive from these themes. 28The fantastic is free from the unities of time, space, character;distinctions between animate and inanimate objects, self and other, lifeand death. Literary conventions are threatened with dissolution infantastic texts, as they are in postmodern texts. Past, present and futuretime lose their historical sequence and ebb toward a suspension, aneternal present (46-47). Caillois and Vax include these themes in theirclassification but also include: spectres in limbo; death personified;indefinable creatures; statues and figures; human body parts;pathologies of personality; animated automatons; inversion of realms ofdream and reality; interplay between the visible and invisible; thecessation, suspension, or repetition of time, and regression. 29 Ratherthan the monstrous or supernatural, what is likely to concern the readerin the modern fantastic are the interior struggles with insanity, theintrusion of dreams into reality, and issues relating to the unconscious.Madness, dreams and drugs also provide a rational explanation forillusions, delirium, and hallucinations, as the borders between theexternal and internal worlds fuse. The collapse of limits that havedoubling as a result is also common to the drug experience andtherefore facilitates the emergence of the double (114-115). All of theseadditional motifs and modern fantastic themes are found in JaramilloLevi’s work.Todorov’s structuralist theory of the fantastic has been criticiseddue to the temporal and geographic limits on the literature it analyses,and the stance it takes regarding psychoanalysis. He rejectspsychoanalytic readings insisting that “[p]sychosis and neurosis are notthe explication of the themes of fantastic literature” (54), yet he also28 Jackson 49. “An emphasis upon invisibility points to one of the central thematicconcerns of the fantastic: problems of vision. In a culture which equates the ‘real’ withthe ‘visible’ and gives the eye dominance over other sense organs, the un-real is invisible.That which is not seen, or which threatens to be un-seeable, can only have asubversive function” 45.29Todorov 100-101.44