Doppelgänger, Jr.

I once had a nightmare in which everyone I knew had been cloned and were no longer the people I loved. Sound familiar? Anxiety dreams are one thing, full-fledged fantasy nightmares another. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, anyone?

When we wake up, we usually begin on the assumption that things will be as we left them the day before. So what happens when you wake up and find your own nose missing? This is precisely the crisis that Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) reveals in his 1836 short story, "The Nose." The story includes shifting points of view, starting with a barber who finds the nose in a chunk of bread he's about to eat. He panics and tries to fling it into the Neva River, only to be collared by a policeman. Next, Major Kovalyov realizes his nose is missing, and comes to learn that it has transformed into a higher ranking official. Much disorientation and desperation ensues.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) took the idea further in his 1846 novella, The Double: A Petersburg Poem. In it, Golyadkin comes to realize that he has an adversarial doppelgänger (dubbed "Junior") much like Kovalyov does in "The Nose." Dostoevsky's tale is scarier in tone, more like a David Lynch film at times, and perhaps asking the reader, do you really know your true identity?

Which begs the question: why do people pay a lot of money for elective non-essential plastic surgery operations like nose jobs? What compels someone like Michael Jackson to have other people chisel away at his nose and other features? Does he have his own identity? Sheila's recent post on body image opens up a lot of questions, and this is one. And what's the deal with Suri, the alleged daughter of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise? Is TomKat a new identity? Is there still a separate Katie Holmes? The lives of these celebrities seem as weird and outlandish as the fiction of Gogol, Dostoevsky, or even Franz Kafka, and as creepy as any nightmare I've ever had.

Auf Wiedersehen, doppelgängers!