Doubles
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And besides, can't I do it the way I always used to as a child in matters that were dangerous? I don't even need to go myself, it isn't necessary. I'll send my clothed body. If it staggers out of the door of my room, the staggering will indicate not fear but nothingness. Nor is it a sign of excitement if it stumbles on the stairs, if it travels into the country, sobbing as it goes, and there eats its supper in tears.
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In The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory by Soviet neuropsychiatrist A. R. Luria, we read of the hyperthymesiac Shereshevsky—a real life Ireneo Funes—who used to play a similar game.
He lies in bed as a young boy, dreading the thought of getting up and going to school. But suddenly it occurs to him: Why shouldn't "he" go? And so Shereshevsky deploys a vivid mental double, watches as it puts on its cap, puts on its coat, its galoshes. There! Everything is as it should be. But suddenly his father walks in and asks him why he isn't getting ready for school. The imagined self was so vividly real that for several moments Shereshevsky mistook it for his actual self and thought that he had really gotten dressed.
On another occasion, Shereshevsky tells Luria, they were moving to a new apartment. His brother took him by the hand and led him to the cab waiting outside. “I see the driver munching a carrot. But I don't want to go so I stay behind in the house; that is, I see how ‘he’ stands at the window of my old room. He's not going anywhere.”
A psychologist would call this “depersonalisation.” In response to stress, both men experienced a separation of mind and body, but with this interesting difference: Shereshevsky retains the natural point of view from inside himself—the double is the other. Kafka, bizarrely, identifies with his fictional half so that it is his own body that becomes the other—an automaton, a thing monstrously lacking selfhood but which mimics it with such treacherous exactitude that no one even notices.
He lies in bed as a young boy, dreading the thought of getting up and going to school. But suddenly it occurs to him: Why shouldn't "he" go? And so Shereshevsky deploys a vivid mental double, watches as it puts on its cap, puts on its coat, its galoshes. There! Everything is as it should be. But suddenly his father walks in and asks him why he isn't getting ready for school. The imagined self was so vividly real that for several moments Shereshevsky mistook it for his actual self and thought that he had really gotten dressed.
On another occasion, Shereshevsky tells Luria, they were moving to a new apartment. His brother took him by the hand and led him to the cab waiting outside. “I see the driver munching a carrot. But I don't want to go so I stay behind in the house; that is, I see how ‘he’ stands at the window of my old room. He's not going anywhere.”
A psychologist would call this “depersonalisation.” In response to stress, both men experienced a separation of mind and body, but with this interesting difference: Shereshevsky retains the natural point of view from inside himself—the double is the other. Kafka, bizarrely, identifies with his fictional half so that it is his own body that becomes the other—an automaton, a thing monstrously lacking selfhood but which mimics it with such treacherous exactitude that no one even notices.