We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. What he is really interested in is the vagaries of the imagination and the power of words not simply to describe but to define existence: What Saramago is interested in in this novel is not this story. Their meeting sets in motion a series of events that ends in what can properly be called absurdist tragedy. Through a long, overly discursive, narrative Saramago finally brings Claro and Afonso together.
Finally, by chance, he finds the name and contact the actor (who uses the stage name Daniel Santa-Clara but whose real name is Antonio Claro).
He watches a series of movies from the same production company trying to find out the name of his doppelganger. Afonso becomes obsessed with finding the actor. The film, The Race is to the Swift, has a scene with a hotel receptionist that Afonso realizes is his exact twin. A well meaning friend, a mathematics teacher, recommends a film to him – as a diversion from his worries. He is divorced, depressed, and at loose ends in both his professional and personal lives. Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is a history teacher. Saramago’s The Double is both a story of a man who accidentally encounters his human duplicate while watching a video and a meditation on identity, self-hood, and the power of language. The Portuguese Nobelist Jose Saramago (whose Baltasar and BlimundaI wrote about last year) offers a postmodern spin on the doppelganger. Hydewherein the doppelganger idea is blended with an exploration of chemically induced multiple personality disorder. Of course the device has been given permutations, the most famous of which is likely Robert Louis Stevenson‘s The Strange Case of Dr. In novel form Dickens treats the idea in A Tale of Two Cities and Dostoevsky explores it in The Double. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson” and Joseph Conrad’s “ The Secret Sharer” explore the idea of a double who shares an intimate relationship with the protagonist. The use of doppelgangers in literature is a common enough device. The Double by Jose Saramago Image courtesy Goodreads)
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