Andrew J.

Webber, The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature

(This is an excerpt from Webber’s introduction, pp. 3-5; The complete ebook is available
through library catalog, and as a google book)

So what is my working definition, my theory, of the Doppelgänger to be? It can be outlined here
in a series of premises, which will be tested and developed in due course.

1. (p.3) 1. If I choose the subtitle ‘Double Visions’, then it is because my first premise is
that the Doppelgänger is above all a figure of visual compulsion. Much of the ensuing
work will be concerned with the characteristic visuality of Doppelgänger texts. In the
visual field the autoscopic,1 or self-seeing, subject beholds its other self as another, as
visual object, or alternatively is beheld as object by its other self. This ambiguity is
programmed in the literary coinage of Doppelgänger, defined in a footnote to Jean Paul's
Siebenkäs as ‘Leute, die sich selber sehen’ (‘people who see themselves’ (J 3 67)). From
the start, it seems that the subject may not so much have as actually be the Doppelgänger
by seeing itself. This visual double-bind provides the model for the general divisive
objectification of the subject in the case of the Doppelgänger.
2. 2. If double vision sums up my first premise, then double-talk—the condition of
repetitive speech disorder—sums up the second. Not only does the Doppelgänger create
a visually compulsive scandal, but it operates divisively on language. Just as it exposes
the problematic double-glazing of the ‘window on the soul’, so it confounds this other
key agency of the transcendental subject. It echoes, reiterates, distorts, parodies, dictates,
impedes, and dumbfounds the subjective faculty of free speech.
3. 3. Accordingly, my third premise might be given as performance: the Doppelgänger is an
inveterate performer of identity; indeed it could be said to represent the performative
character of the subject. Selfhood as a metaphysical given is abandoned here to a process
of enactments of identity always mediated by the other self. The performances of the
Doppelgänger will be seen as so many rehearsals of a double role on various
reconstructions of the Lacanian mirror stage.
4. 4. The fourth premise is a double one: the challenge of the Doppelgänger to received
ideas of identity turns upon a double-bind between cognitive and carnal knowledge. It
embodies the stake which epistemology and sexuality have in each other. As the
Doppelgänger contests in both vision and language any unequivocal attempts at
cognition (and more particularly the (p.4) singular recognition of identity), so it subjects
its host to an ambivalent sexual agency. The Doppelgänger recurrently introduces
voyeurism and innuendo into the subject's pursuit of a visual and discursive sense of self.
5. 5. Knowledge and sexuality are the two predominant forms of the fifth characteristic
principle of the Doppelgänger, that of power-play between ego and alter ego. Power, in
the Doppelgänger scenario, is always caught up in exchange, never to be simply
possessed as mastery of the self, of the other, or of the other self. The Doppelgänger
stories under consideration here are thus also about such issues as tutelage, surrogacy,
and subalternation.
6. 6. The sixth premise is that the Doppelgänger operates as a figure of displacement. It
characteristically appears out of place, in order to displace its host. Italy is recurrently the
site of this displacement for the German Doppelgänger, and the German Jew is a
paradigm for the condition of a displaced or shadow identity on home territory. The
Doppelgänger is also temporally out of place, appearing at the wrong time; the time-warp
of the carnival, with its suspension of social conventions, is its favored scene. It troubles
the temporal schemes of narrative development and literary history. And it equally
displaces the conventions of genre, by gravitating between forms and styles in cases of
what might be called generic doubling or, after Bakhtin, dialogism.
7. 7. The seventh premise is that of return and repetition. The Doppelgänger returns
compulsively both within its host texts and intertextually from one to the other. Its
performances repeat both its host subject and its own previous appearances. It therefore
plays a constitutive role in the structuring of its texts, by doubling them back upon
themselves. This function of return will be read as ‘unheimlich’—uncanny—in the
Freudian sense.
8. 8. The Doppelgänger host and visitant are axiomatically gendered as male. I have called
the subject ‘it’, but it is almost invariably ‘he’. Where female figures are doubled, it is
typically as the objectification of a polarized male subject. Yet, while it may be the more
or less exclusive property of the male gender, the figure also subverts gender as the most
essential specification of an essentialized idea of identity.
9. (p.5) 9. The Doppelgänger is typically the product of a broken home. It represents
dysfunction in the family romance of structured well-being, exposing the home as the
original site of the ‘unheimlich’.