THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

1.2 Fantastic Psychoanalysis and the Doppelganger The Avatar in Panamastates “[p]sychoanalysis has replaced (and thereby has made useless)the literature of fantastic. […]. The themes of fantastic literature havebecome the very themes of the psychological investigations of the lastfifty years” (160-161). This latter comment seems to link the fantasticinextricably with the psychological. Jackson argues that, given that thethemes of the self and the other tackle issues of relationships betweensubjects and unconscious desire and, as fantasy, deals withunconscious material, it is hard to understand how “Todorov repudiatesFreudian analysis as inadequate or irrelevant when approaching thefantastic” (6).Ana María Barrenechea believes Todorov’s study to berestrictive as it does not take into account all twentieth-centuryliterature, only the French. 30 Carter Wheelock surmises that Todorovhas difficulty approaching the contemporary fantastic, and bothBarrenechea and Wheelock share the idea that Todorov put temporallimits on his definition and study from the end of eighteenth century toMaupassant at the end of the nineteenth. 31 In general, critics agree thatTodorov's definition is too constrained as he only considers fantasticthose stories which sustain the fantastic element beyond the story’send: some stories, he contends, fall either in the realm of themarvellous or in the uncanny and therefore cease to be fantastic.However, the marvellous and uncanny are not the only sub genres ofthe fantastic. The Latin American fantastic comprises several groupsincluding magic realism, lo real maravilloso and the neofantastic whichwill be discussed in 2.2 “Modernismo and its Masters: Darío andQuiroga”.Urban terror and the Gothic Shocker: Dracula, Jekyll andHydeConcerns regarding the self and identity were at the forefrontduring the modern period and this preoccupation found its naturalhabitat in cities which became cosmopolitan centres. 32 Throughout themodern period and, particularly in its literature of the double, the cityrepresented a conflicting image of entertainment, pleasure, dark terrors,and horrible transformations. 33 The alienating yet overcrowdedmetropolis lent itself to split personality, physical transformations,mistaken identities, and doppelgangers, resulting in an unstable, oftendual identity. This double life was regularly allegorised as social,30Ana María Barrenechea, “Ensayo sobre una topología de la literatura fantástica”395.31Julia G. Cruz, Lo neofantástico en Julio Cortázar 21.32Hawthorn 47.33Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde andWells (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 17.45