The Double

twentieth century. And the qualities which he most admired in a novelistintelligence , perception, observation, and imagination—were the essential ones which enabled him to enhance the art of the criticism of the novel. Alice R. Kaminsky SUNY, Cortland 10. THE DOUBLE Karl Miller. Doubles: Studies in Literary History. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 1985. $24.95. Professor Miller, who occupies the chair of Literature at University College, London, has written a collection of essays, called chapters, on the imagining of two or more selves in one, of doubles. He does not claim to tell here the entire story of the continuity that proceeds from the Romantic period to the present. In laying stress on "features of congruence, influence, movement, and anest" (vii), he refers to many texts and occasions. But he does very well in including a recognition and explanation of doubles in Uterary writings from the time of the ancients to the present and in many different countries. The present book opens in the Romantic period with a "cardinal text," James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and "goes on to matters of definition, to specimens of duality drawn from the romantic modem world of more recent times, and to the themes of isolation and escape, suffering and salvation" (vii). After the idea of an after-life is treated, the book advances chronologically from the Romantic period to the present day. Approximately the first half of the essays is concerned with English literature; the second part includes chapters on American literature and various other subjects. Some of the chapters have been previously published as book reviews. There is a literature, and a magic, Miller claims, which can be traced to antiquity. Dualistic lores and philosophies had been evolved long before the romantic literature of duality began to appear in the later eighteenth century. But Romanticism did much to secure for the subject an unexpired cunency which can be located in the common speech and common knowledge, and in the literature of the present time. This book, states the author, accurately--and here we should note his style as well as his content—" is about the imagination of two minds or more for the human individual, and the term 'duality' is used to refer to facts and to fictions, principles and practice, to states of mind and of affairs, to a manner of speaking and of a way of life, to an aspect and subject of the literatme of Europe and America from the Romantic penod onwards" (p. 21). Duality refers to the double life, which can be treated as a matter of observation and record, and to the fictional double or doppelgänger, to "the clinical phenomenon of multiple identity, and to the cultmal phenomenon of multiple identity which opens itself to the world and to the experience of others, which both enhances and annihilates the self, and which became known to readers of John Keats as 'negative capability'"(pp. 21-22). 338 Miller claims that psychic dupücation and division on the one hand and the open mind on the other are conceptions that are kept apart by historians of Romanticism, but they were pursued at the same early point in its history and then came together in the writings of the later nineteenth century. These principles were to yield a concept of art: an author may be thought to lead a double Ufe, or to achieve a second self, an alter ego, in the art he creates, and he may also be thought to lose himself there. These thoughts predict, and participate in, the newly accepted ideas of the following century—or the Modernist's view of the impersonality of art, of the need of the artist to be free of his creations. This view has played a part in the vehement theories of the last few years. A recent subverter of authorial intention, Jacques Derrida, has, for example, claimed for Uterary texts an uncertainty which derives from their employment of words with a double and undecided meaningwords like Plato's pharmakon, which could mean either a poison or a cure, and has a place in the long history of duality. Proteus served...