.: The Absent Narrative :.

In German legend, the doppelgänger or double-goer is a ghostly version of oneself who follows us like our shadow. When it appears however, the doppelgänger becomes a harbinger of death, pointing Shelley to his drowning in the Mediterranean, or a portent of the future, like Goethe meeting his future self on the road to Drusenheim. The Norse believed in the vardøger, a less sinister spirit that precedes before people performing their actions first, or in other times and places an individual might bilocate, appearing in two places at once (a phenomenon artfully explored in Pynchon’s Against the Day). It seems that, with a belief in fairies and other folkloric beings, the old world imagination contained an uncertainty over the consistency of the individual self, a fear that we might at any moment split apart or turn against our most fundamental, along with the belief in a contagious magic that could bring such self-representations to life.

My own waking experience with doppelgängers has been less ominous than merely strange. Despite being a twin, which already makes the boundaries of the self thin not even considering the case of evil twins, I have come upon alternate versions of myself and family, reflections cast up from the psyche’s longing for recognition, but shadows that did not recognize me in turn and faded mutely back into the multiplicity of faces on the street, or to whatever alternate realities they come from. A friend would see her brother on every corner, only to look closer and see each time it was just someone wearing a similar outfit or attitude.

The problem it seems is that in our modern, too-post modern world, we no longer believe that such alternatives can become real. We are much too solidly who we are, and yet, at the same time, not nearly aware of ourselves enough to meet our true doubles. How would we recognize them among all our self-representations? The American magic, in particular, is one of representation and mediation, the multiplication of surfaces, and the contemporary American doppelgänger is merely a wished for celebrity look-alike, as in the viral Facebook meme of last week. I have been told I resemble Johnny Depp (though that’s because we are actually distant cousins), but I did not change my profile pic. To do so would, in the old myths, mean death to one of us, but more importantly, to do so would be to fall into that trap of self-representation where we are only what we can point to in the world: other people, favorite media, social and professional roles. Even the seemingly simple act of updating one’s status duplicates us, creates another version of ourselves who goes out into the world to interact with others where we are unable. While avatars were once the descended forms of gods, they have become these frail shadowy projections, not Jung’s Shadow, but like a hall of mirrors of the self, that we cannot break through to express who we really are.

Jung does not directly address this reflection or Double, as I call it, but it seems the doppelgänger may be becoming a contemporary archetype. As I suggested above, we long to meet ourselves, or find familiar elements in a world that is changing rapidly enough that we can see how each new generation has an entirely unfamiliar understanding of reality. The representations of our childhoods do not always apply in later life; places change, people change, all is, as Heraclitus first said, in flux. We change, but our self-representations do not, like masks hewn at certain junctures in time these are static images, shed as we mature, but not killed off. Every earlier version of ourselves still stalks the world, especially those selves recorded in the public sphere, and as we become ever more multiplicitous our doubles clash in around us. Someone presenting themselves now as a wholesome or academic persona for instance may not be able to hide from an old self who was arrested for disorderly conduct, the double kept alive through the availability of old police blotters on Google search.

But when our conscious self-representations are so numerous and mercurial (and not even fully conscious most of the time), we must perhaps turn inwards to find a truer self-image. Dreams, in particular, seem to consist entirely of unintentional self-representations, and our lack of agency in creating them make such images more direct expressions of the undoubled self. Except even here the representations stack up; as some schools of interpretation hold, everything we dream is a reflection of us, though not without structures that make dreams worth attending to. For instance, I have noticed from my own dreams that the representation of the dreamer often expresses personal and even primeval desires and fears: that we wish to fly, fear we can’t save our parents from dying (or, more peculiarly, that spiders will breed in our eyes). Sometimes we take on other forms, animal to angelic, conveying our sense of self in metaphor. When I am most fully self-realized I represent myself as an enormous dragon, but when not, that dragon chases me through landscapes that are also myself. But regardless how strange, these psychic representations always feel more valid than anything I could consciously come up with when awake.

Yet even in these depths of our psyches, the doppelgänger plays a supporting role. I have often dreamt that I or a friend was followed by a vaguer, less actualized version, often another person the first is identified with in waking life, who we displace many of the untoward dream circumstances onto instead of suffering them ourselves. This inverts the traditional role of the doppelgänger, who here goes before us so that we don’t die, who even dies in our place, like the nameless red shirts of Star Trek who step into every trap so the principles can later solve them. This doubling of the self is similar to the function of side kicks in literature: Sancho Panza represents the smaller sane self of Don Quixote, Robin represents the moral uncertainty backing Batman’s bravado. It seems we shouldn’t trust heroes (and other human beings) who do not have such divided souls, or who flat out disobey themselves, as even Pinocchio turned his back on Jiminy Cricket. As Emerson said, consistency is hobgoblin of small minds, and the psychic double allows us to try out different perspectives without identifying these beliefs so closely to ourselves that we can not adapt when new experience forces us to revise our maps.

Then again, the doppelgänger may just be a type of hobgoblin regardless, seeking only to kill us when we least expect it. Yet in our modern world is it possible to live without this variety of self-representations, to be an undivided self fully aware of and integrating all the inconsistencies that make us human? Is it possible to imagine ourselves without reference to an Other? That is perhaps beyond the scope of this cursory glance, written primarily (like most of my articles) out of an impulse contrary to the spiritlessness of our times, when we seek to maintain only the surface layer at the expense of the subconscious, where we multiply these images of selfhood a thousandfold instead of piercing through them.

In German legend, the doppelgänger or double-goer is a ghostly version of oneself who follows us like our shadow. When it appears however, the doppelgänger becomes a harbinger of death, pointing Shelley to his drowning in the Mediterranean, or a portent of the future, like Goethe meeting his future self on the road to Drusenheim. The Norse believed in the vardøger, a less sinister spirit that precedes before people performing their actions first, or in other times and places an individual might bilocate, appearing in two places at once (a phenomenon artfully explored in Pynchon’s Against the Day). It seems that, with a belief in fairies and other folkloric beings, the old world imagination contained an uncertainty over the consistency of the individual self, a fear that we might at any moment split apart or turn against our most fundamental, along with the belief in a contagious magic that could bring such self-representations to life.

My own waking experience with doppelgängers has been less ominous than merely strange. Despite being a twin, which already makes the boundaries of the self thin not even considering the case of evil twins, I have come upon alternate versions of myself and family, reflections cast up from the psyche’s longing for recognition, but shadows that did not recognize me in turn and faded mutely back into the multiplicity of faces on the street, or to whatever alternate realities they come from. A friend would see her brother on every corner, only to look closer and see each time it was just someone wearing a similar outfit or attitude.

The problem it seems is that in our modern, too-post modern world, we no longer believe that such alternatives can become real. We are much too solidly who we are, and yet, at the same time, not nearly aware of ourselves enough to meet our true doubles. How would we recognize them among all our self-representations? The American magic, in particular, is one of representation and mediation, the multiplication of surfaces, and the contemporary American doppelgänger is merely a wished for celebrity look-alike, as in the viral Facebook meme of last week. I have been told I resemble Johnny Depp (though that’s because we are actually distant cousins), but I did not change my profile pic. To do so would, in the old myths, mean death to one of us, but more importantly, to do so would be to fall into that trap of self-representation where we are only what we can point to in the world: other people, favorite media, social and professional roles. Even the seemingly simple act of updating one’s status duplicates us, creates another version of ourselves who goes out into the world to interact with others where we are unable. While avatars were once the descended forms of gods, they have become these frail shadowy projections, not Jung’s Shadow, but like a hall of mirrors of the self, that we cannot break through to express who we really are.

Jung does not directly address this reflection or Double, as I call it, but it seems the doppelgänger may be becoming a contemporary archetype. As I suggested above, we long to meet ourselves, or find familiar elements in a world that is changing rapidly enough that we can see how each new generation has an entirely unfamiliar understanding of reality. The representations of our childhoods do not always apply in later life; places change, people change, all is, as Heraclitus first said, in flux. We change, but our self-representations do not, like masks hewn at certain junctures in time these are static images, shed as we mature, but not killed off. Every earlier version of ourselves still stalks the world, especially those selves recorded in the public sphere, and as we become ever more multiplicitous our doubles clash in around us. Someone presenting themselves now as a wholesome or academic persona for instance may not be able to hide from an old self who was arrested for disorderly conduct, the double kept alive through the availability of old police blotters on Google search.

But when our conscious self-representations are so numerous and mercurial (and not even fully conscious most of the time), we must perhaps turn inwards to find a truer self-image. Dreams, in particular, seem to consist entirely of unintentional self-representations, and our lack of agency in creating them make such images more direct expressions of the undoubled self. Except even here the representations stack up; as some schools of interpretation hold, everything we dream is a reflection of us, though not without structures that make dreams worth attending to. For instance, I have noticed from my own dreams that the representation of the dreamer often expresses personal and even primeval desires and fears: that we wish to fly, fear we can’t save our parents from dying (or, more peculiarly, that spiders will breed in our eyes). Sometimes we take on other forms, animal to angelic, conveying our sense of self in metaphor. When I am most fully self-realized I represent myself as an enormous dragon, but when not, that dragon chases me through landscapes that are also myself. But regardless how strange, these psychic representations always feel more valid than anything I could consciously come up with when awake.

Yet even in these depths of our psyches, the doppelgänger plays a supporting role. I have often dreamt that I or a friend was followed by a vaguer, less actualized version, often another person the first is identified with in waking life, who we displace many of the untoward dream circumstances onto instead of suffering them ourselves. This inverts the traditional role of the doppelgänger, who here goes before us so that we don’t die, who even dies in our place, like the nameless red shirts of Star Trek who step into every trap so the principles can later solve them. This doubling of the self is similar to the function of side kicks in literature: Sancho Panza represents the smaller sane self of Don Quixote, Robin represents the moral uncertainty backing Batman’s bravado. It seems we shouldn’t trust heroes (and other human beings) who do not have such divided souls, or who flat out disobey themselves, as even Pinocchio turned his back on Jiminy Cricket. As Emerson said, consistency is hobgoblin of small minds, and the psychic double allows us to try out different perspectives without identifying these beliefs so closely to ourselves that we can not adapt when new experience forces us to revise our maps.

Then again, the doppelgänger may just be a type of hobgoblin regardless, seeking only to kill us when we least expect it. Yet in our modern world is it possible to live without this variety of self-representations, to be an undivided self fully aware of and integrating all the inconsistencies that make us human? Is it possible to imagine ourselves without reference to an Other? That is perhaps beyond the scope of this cursory glance, written primarily (like most of my articles) out of an impulse contrary to the spiritlessness of our times, when we seek to maintain only the surface layer at the expense of the subconscious, where we multiply these images of selfhood a thousandfold instead of piercing through them.