Books like Death…

Reading a good book is not like dying. What I mean is that reading a good book enables us to prepare ourselves for the universal experience of dying.

Kurt Vonnegut deduces that this universal experience of death must feel as if we were detaching ourselves from Time. Don’t good books, in a much more limited context, lead us to experience something similar?

If you accompany me throughout the following reasoning, perhaps we can untie the knot that we have raised together.

Writing fiction, and therefore any other form of artistic expression, requires an essential element: possessing a dissociated personality.

This has nothing to do with a general dysfunctionality of the personality, but rather with the possibility of expressing a repressed portion of the being, a restless, challenging portion that escapes from the supervision of the artist’s conscience, and that due to those characteristics do not be subject to your Ego.

We can even think that the act of writing fiction, or expressing ourselves artistically, is a kind of conjuring of our Doppelgänger.
The definition of Doppelgänger is meager in relation to the torments it produces. Suffice it to say that it is a kind of duplicate that haunts the original person, eventually making a devastating revelation, often related to an inevitable misfortune.

Doppelgängers abound in literature; in general, through a veil of uncertainty where it is not really known if the double or duplicate of the protagonist is a product of his imagination, or if he has a separate, autonomous, and certainly malevolent existence.

In terms of fiction, we can find shocking examples of the Doppelgänger in works such as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), by Robert Louis Stevenson; and The Sandman (Der Sandmann), by E.T.A. Hoffmann, but it is in the work of Sigmund Freud, and more specifically in the essay: The Sinister (Das Unheimliche), where the Doppelgänger takes on a completely new dimension; in this case, as a manifestation of the Unconscious.
Is the Doppelgänger then simply a repressed part of being; a part that, although submerged in the abysses of the unconscious, manages to manifest from time to time the disguised and disturbing features of an organized personality?
Naturally, not all authors are capable of achieving this level of commitment to their work. To get the Doppelgänger to write is also to question the nature of human identity, of the integrity of our soul; It is asking ourselves who we are, and accepting that, perhaps, we are not who we think we are.

The doppelgänger is not the most appropriate term to define that degree of commitment between the author and his creation; because the phenomenon does not constitute the creation of a duplicate of the author, but rather the intrusion of his subconscious in the creative process.

The best books are written from great obsessions, and this implies a loss of control on the part of the author: a transfer of the creative helm so that this kind of doppelgänger emerges, from a portion of his subconscious. This entity, when it finally appears, upsets the initial focus of the author, becomes independent of his interests, and simply speaks without pettiness.

Few things are as exciting, from the reader’s perspective, as coming across a book conceived under these conditions; perhaps because it also forces us to dissociate by touching some kind of nerve from our own doppelgänger, which reacts and at the same time becomes involved in the story.
These books, the product of a tremendous obsession, and in part of a dissociated personality, are those from which we simply cannot detach. They catch us from the first page, like a warm and familiar voice calling us in the middle of the night. We can’t stop following her.

Perhaps that feeling of absolute submission that, as a reader, one experiences before certain books (few, by the way) resembles the universal experience of dying.

In short, what is death if not the end of all physical and psychic limits, of everything that compresses us, that restricts us, the dissolution of sequential time, the rupture between objective reality and the imagined?

Thus, when faced with one of these books, the transitions between our memories and our imagination become blurred. The reader’s mind, like that of someone who is dying, detaches itself from Time.

In other words, creativity, in a way, is a dissociative process. The person who writes is not necessarily the author, but those regions of his being that are not illuminated by the light of consciousness. In the same way, the reader who gets caught in a book is not him, or at least not partially him, as we are most of the time, but his entirety.

We can even say that every good book is written in collaboration between disparate parts of the author’s personality. In this dissociative state, the events, the settings, and especially the characters, take on a life of their own, precisely because they have been imagined separately.

Reading a good book is not like dying. No. That is not what I mean. Reading a good book is expanding our own life, it is opening the secret compartments of our soul, it is freeing ourselves from Time, in a way that we could only feel in very particular circumstances: love, sleep, which also, like death, universal experiences.