The double redux: Multiplying identity in postmodernist fiction (Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, Alain Robbe-Grillet, France, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Morocco, Paul Auster, Vladimir Nabokov)

This dissertation focuses on the multiplicity of identity in twentieth-century world literature as a solution to the questions aesthetic philosopher Dick Higgins asks: "Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?" Brian McHale argues in Postmodernist Fiction that characters create alternative worlds in order to solve these ontological problems; this study contends that characters also create multiplicitous identities in order to solve their ontological problems, to do what needs to be done. The project arises from an archaeology of the double that follows the emotion evoked by the double in other characters and readers. While in Romantic and nineteenth-century literature featuring doubles the keynote is terror---philosophical, moral, or psychological---postmodernist fiction reveals a remarkable lack of anxiety over the multiplication of identity. In fact, characters explore a variety of ways of multiplying their identities consciously and unconsciously in order to do what they need to live. This dissertation examines the sources, motivations, and modes of multiplied identities in texts by Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Auster, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Vladimir Nabokov.; Since the double, or rather, the multiple, in postmodernist fiction does not represent a pathological condition, but rather the accepted condition of postmodern identity, this study turns from psychoanalytic criticism as the predominant mode of reading the double toward a variety of critical perspectives, including postmodernist poetics, feminisms, and performance and reader response theories. The idea of multiplied identity as a solution to ontological problems connects with the larger issue of the interconnection between Western thought and the evolution of its concepts of subjectivity from the essentialist to the performative. Ultimately, considering the historical arc of literary stagings of multiple identity from the doppelganger to the double to the multiple alongside its accompanying change in attitudes from abject terror to fear to bland acceptance, the adaptability of identity to the problems of living characterizes the double and offers a glimpse of the evolving future of this persistent theme.