THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

1.2 Fantastic Psychoanalysis and the Doppelganger The Avatar in Panamal’eau et du lait sans paraître toucher à aucunautre aliment (89-90). 80The malade has a pseudoscientific explanation for hispredicament. In what has turned out to be a prophetic gesture, herecalls: “je le saluai, je ne sais pourquoi, tant ce navire me fit plaisir àvoir”. 81 This is curious as the verb saluer is employed with people andnot with boats and so le horla may have been unwittingly summoned(60). The narrator sets out to verify his visions, rationalising them aspart of an epidemic, a contagion for which he is not responsible. Hebelieves le horla was on board the Brazilian boat, and the mass globalhysteria was not caused by collective hallucinations but by the invisiblehorla: “je me rappelle le beau trois-mâts brésilien qui passa sous mesfenêtres en remontent la Seine, […] L’Être était dessus, venant de làbas,ou sa race est née!” (90). 82 Maupassant deftly epitomises, with thislast phrase, all that Latin America was said to represent at the time; acontinent to which criminals fled and from which killers came. 83With regard to the narrator’s reliability, perhaps he does seesomething not apparent to everyone else. This may be substantiated byexperiential evidence, that is, the tactile contact when he feels himselfbeing touched on the shoulder and ear seems to be sufficient to80 “An epidemic of madness, comparable to those waves of collective insanity whichaffected the peoples of Europe in the Middle Ages, is raging just now in the provinceof São Paulo. The frenzied inhabitants leave their houses, desert their villages, andabandon their fields, saying that they are pursued, possessed, and dominated likehuman cattle by invisible though tangible beings, vampires of some kind who feed ontheir vitality during their sleep and also drink water and milk without apparentlytouching any other form of food” (336-337).81 “The sight of this boat gave me such pleasure that for some unknown reason Isaluted her” (314).82 “I remember the splendid Brazilian three-master which sailed past my windows on 8May, on her way up the Seine! […] But the Being was on board, having come all theway from that far-off land where his race was born!” (337).83 After receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, Gabriel García Márquezcautioned his audience on viewing and interpreting the social and politicalcomplexities of Latin America’s history from a European perspective. Myth and realityabout Latin America had been mixed by the first voyagers to the New World whomanaged to describe their discoveries in the only way they knew how, throughEuropean literary fantasy and convention. After their enthusiasm for the New Worldwaned, all that remained was the dark and alien aspect of the continent: “Even today,myths of Latin America prevailing in Europe and the United States see the continentas the place to which criminals, bank robbers or ex-Nazis can run and hide, the placedown below from which dark hordes of illegal immigrants, drug traffickers, killer beesand other diabolic things seek to rise up and cross the Rio Grande into the light ofwestern civilisation.” Susan Bassnet, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 86-87. See reference to the fountain of youth, 99.58