THEDOUBLEASTHEUNSEENOFCULTURETOWARDADEFINITIONOF.pdf

UNIVERSITY OF NI? The scientific journal FACTA UNIVERSITATIS Series: Linguistics and Literature Vol.2, No 7, 2000 pp. 121 - 128 Editor of series: Nedeljko Bogdanovi?, e-mail: nedbog@filfak.filfak.ni.ac.yu Address: Univerzitetski trg 2, 18000 Ni?, YU, Tel: +381 18 547-095, Fax: +381 18 547-950 http:// ni.ac.yu/Facta THE DOUBLE AS THE UNSEEN OF CULTURE: TOWARD A DEFINITION OF DOPPELGANGER UDC 820.01 Milica ?ivkovi? Faculty of Philosophy, Ni?, Yugoslavia Abstract. Despite a considerable interest in the fictional double, as a literary device for articulating the experience of self-division, the motif of the double seems to resist narrow catagorization and definition. The starting position in the attempt to arrive at a comprehensive definition is founded on the assumption that the fictional double is not a literary motif but a construction of traditional culture – myth, legend and religion. Although surviving as a perennial motif present in all literary styles, periods and genres the double is never free – it is not outside time but produced within and determined by its social context. Though it often struggles against the limits of this context, it cannot be understood in isolation from it. Its origins in traditional culture make him a motif liable to semantic changes because literature tends to adjust its treatment of the double to the respective culture, being in functional correlation with it. In a progressively secularized culture dialogues of self and the double are increasingly acknowledged as being colliloquies within the self: the double has become an aspect of personal and interpersonal life, a manifestation of unconscious desire. Through the introduction of some modern psychoanalitic theories, it has been possible to claim for the double motif a subversive function. Signifying a desire to be reunited with a lost centre of personality the double shows in graphic forms a tension between the laws of human society and the resistance of the unconscious mind to thes