THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

2.1 The North American Double The Avatar in PanamaDOUBLING THE AMERICAS: NORTH AMERICA,MODERNISMO, LATIN AMERICA2.1 The North American DoubleIn an instant I seemed to rise from the ground. But I had no bodily, no visible, audible,or palpable presence. The crowd had departed. The tumult had ceased. The city wasin comparative repose. Beneath me lay my corpse, with the arrow in my temple, thewhole head greatly swollen and disfigured. But all these things I felt - not saw.Edgar Allan PoeSigmund Freud’s manifestations of the uncanny seem to beblatantly omnipresent in the European tales of the double studied in thepreceding chapter. 1 Unlike the previous stories, the following are not ofthe horror genre yet, as one finds in traditional fantasy tales, they docause degrees of discomfort, from a feeble feeling of familiarity to astrong sensation of the spookish. 2 One of the renowned North Americanexponents of this atmospheric uneasiness was Edgar Allan Poe whoimpacted upon many writers and from whom Enrique Jaramillo Levidraws. The universally traditional themes of madness, death, andjealousy all of which transcend centuries and continents were at thecore of Poe’s writing and consequently re-emerge throughout JaramilloLevi’s in various forms. There are shared common images in the shapeof sinister dwellings, narrative devices such as bookreadings and theconcept of reality mirroring fiction, and non-traditional characters suchas nefarious felines. These elements are all found in both JaramilloLevi's classic and postmodern stories and in Poe’s “The Black Cat” and“The Fall of the House of Usher”.In an early foray into clever narration, the perspective ofNathaniel Hawthorne’s protagonist in “Monsieur du Miroir” resonateswith Jaramillo Levi’s highly creative “Testigo”. In experimentation withvarious planes of consciousness, O. Henry’s story, “The Dream”,Jaramillo Levi’s “Agua de mar” and “Mientras dormía”, all embroilseveral different levels of awareness which result in the characters’disorientation leading to their accidental death. Finally, in a scenarioattempted by few in the literature of the double, Jaramillo Levi's1 According to Freud the double manifests itself in different ways: split, or recurringcharacters, automata, relived fantasies, omens and visions, déjà vu, dreams andnightmares. Repressed experiences are somehow triggered and this results inuncanniness. Freud, “The Uncanny” 387.2 A typical example is explicit in Dostoevsky’s The Double whose lead characterGolyadkin feels uneasy right before meeting his double for the first time: “The fact isthat the stranger somehow seemed familiar”. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double, trans.Constance Garnett, .73