Doppelganger

           

            On Tuesday morning I didn’t need to rush off to Philosophy class because we’d gotten an email the day before that Professor Gibbs was still too sick to lecture. He promised though that there would be a Thursday lecture whether he was ill or not.

            That afternoon I went to my second Short Story lecture. A young woman sitting beside me recognized me from Children’s Literature class. I remember now that she sat behind me. She noted how engaged I’d been with the material.

Our first three short stories were by Edgar Allen Poe, whose body of work was published during the time of the Enlightenment and his emphasis on emotions went against the grain of the pure reason of the period.

            We started with The Tell Tale Heart, which Andrew said is probably the most widely read of Poe’s short stories. I read it in high school, and I think it’s the only story of Poe’s I know from text form.

            The doppelganger is the shadow self. If you meet your doppelganger and it’s good, that means you’re the evil one. He asked us for examples of the doppelganger from literature. Someone suggested Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”. Another offered Alvin Schwartz’s Bizarro Superman. Andrew liked that.

            The Tell Tale Heart features a doppelganger that the narrator sees in the old man that he kills. Poe’s use of repetition in the text also emphasizes this same doubling.

            If we look for the logic behind the narrator’s insanity, the key to that logic is time.

            He prepared for the murder of the old man for seven days. The week is a human construct based on the biblical creation story.

            The heart is a timekeeper whose beating is like the ticking of a clock.

            The period of waiting for someone to die is called a deathwatch. A watch is also a timekeeping device and the deathwatch beetle is the name of an insect that beats its head against the wall.

            I pointed out, of the reference to the old man’s “vulture eye” that the vulture is also a death watcher.

            Andrew said that when read aloud, “eye” could be “I”, representing mortality.

            The old man’s only crime seems to be that he is old. After killing him, the narrator was “singularly at ease”. No longer doubled.

            In the second quarter of the class we discussed Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”, which speaks of the trouble of not being able to be alone but also of how some stories do not reveal their own meaning.

            The narrator is sitting in the D---- Coffeehouse (this wasn’t mentioned, but I couldn’t help filling in the blanks with “-eath”). He is recovering from a long illness and is very much enjoying the experience of observing the ordinary activities of passers-by. His observations of people though are enumerations in descending order by class and worth. The pedestrians outside the café window change in class from upper to lower as the day transforms into night. He shows himself to have a talent for reading people, but there is one old man who passes that he can’t read and so he follows him as he wanders apparently aimlessly through all of London. The only common element is that the old man must be where there are a lot of people gathered. He is a man of the crowd but in following him, the narrator also becomes a man of the crowd.

            There is a structured rhythm in the story that alternates purposefulness with aimlessness. The story is circular and ends with the same aphorism about the trouble of finding solitude with which it began.

            The narrator experiences an existential crisis. He is also a stranger in London, from America. The old man is a symbol of isolation and of rootlessness to the threat of anonymity.

            The story is a commentary on metropolitan life.

            We finished the last half of the class in a discussion of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

            The story has a pensive beginning. Poe makes it clear to us that the house is gloomy but he keeps on going with his negative description. The narrator is seeing things as they are and the more the veil drops the more morbid the house becomes.

            Andrew claimed that the word “sublime” means a mixture of terror and beauty. Etymologically though it means “elevated clay”, suggesting something man made having been raised to an exalted state.

            Andrew Lesk told us at this point that he grew up in Sudbury and admitted almost apologetically that he’d been a Boy Scout. He told us about his experience of riding in a car on the frozen lake and how one knows one is safe while at the same time not being sure.

            The tarn is a type of pond, which in this case sits in front of the house of Usher and in which the narrator can see the house’s upside down reflection as he approaches. The tarn doubles the house while the House of Usher itself is also doubled in that the name represents both the building and the family. The house reflects Roderick Usher’s sickness, which is the result of inbreeding. Roderick and his sister Madeline are not only twins, probably resulting from incest, but they are also lovers.

            Roderick paints a picture that is symbolic of both the house and family of Usher – a sealed room with its own perverted logic. The house has its own atmosphere and is sealed off from the rest of the world. Roderick believes that all things, including objects are sentient and so he thinks the house is alive.

            Madeline is cataleptic and in her rigid state is mistaken for dead and so is buried in the family tomb. After fighting her way out of the grave she comes to Roderick, falls on him and they both die. Shortly after this the house of Usher collapses into the tarn that reflected it. The story itself falls apart with the house.

            Andrew recommended the Stephen King story “Under the Dome” and one of the students commented that the Simpsons Movie basically copied King’s story.

That night I watched an episode of Make Room for Daddy. I think every second show was sponsored by the American Tobacco Company and on this December 1954 show they actually had all the main adult stars smoking in a scene. It was the first time on this show that I’ve seen them so obviously pushing the product in the story. One of the commercials even suggested that a carton of Pall Malls would make a great Christmas gift.