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Chapter 6 presents three analytic scripts for navigating the triadic universe, and shows how those scripts and their compositional instantiations are represented using the concepts and geometries introduced in chapter 5. The first script involves retention of a single tone, varying the harmonies that support it. Der Dopplenganger and the development of Brahms 2nd Symphony illustrate. The second script involves a downshift/upshift sequence, sometimes with an overshoot requiring recuperation, generalizing prototypical Riemann-functional scripts. Schubert’s Auf dem Flusse, Liedesend, and Bb piano sonata, and a short organ work of Liszt, illustrate. The third script involves a continuous upshift, illustrated by the long-range tonal structure of Schumann’s Dichterliebe and the local harmonic progression of the development section of Dvorak’s New World Symphony.

Published in 1982, “Se non ora, quando?” (If Not Now, When?) is Primo Levi's first novel proper. Perhaps, Primo Levi regretted not fully living life as an Italian Jewish partisan that he re-created his lost dream through its pages and had his partisan brigade not been captured. This novel might reflect Levi's need to explore that sought after life as a partisan, which he had been denied after only three months of activity. This chapter proposes that this novel might be read and understood as the “other” story, the narrative of that partisan experience that Levi did not live in full, the story of his destroyed dream as an aspiring freedom fighter against the Nazi and Fascist tragedy. It submits, then, that the narrative of this novel develops the theme of Levi's doppelganger through the discourse of a fictional, projected alter-ego protagonist.

This chapter introduces the concept of the Doppelgänger. It argues that the Doppelgänger is an operative or effective presence to the extent that it affects the undoing of the framing of the subject by the opposition between mere presence and absence. Such an operation indicates a function of relationality—the various relations that structure the subject's ontology. This relationality is what is called here the Doppelgänger. Debra Walker King summarizes the Doppelgänger as the collision between real bodies and an unfriendly informant: a fictional double whose aim is to mask individuality and mute the voice of personal agency. A first thesis of this book is that the resistance to presence indicates the Doppelgänger's ontology, bringing literature and philosophy into productive and mutually illuminating contact. While the second thesis of the book holds that the Doppelgänger is in a process of construction—its effective presence is transformative.

The introduction outlines how split identity frequents the silver screen continually across a range of genres and introduces the multifaceted ways the double or fragmented identity function onscreen. Doubles provide narrative cause and effect, character motivation and above all, spectacle. What is often so effective about films and TV examples that feature that doppelganger is that an unconscious subjective split nature erupts from the unknown into the ‘real’ and knowable. This provides an extremely spectacular way of providing drama and tension in order to attract an audience, but it also taps into contemporary concerns that surround identity, and this also helps to explain the popularity of onscreen examples that feature doubling and why they might engage audience interest.

The chapter focuses on the title Celan gave to his 1960 speech delivered on the occasion of his reception of the Büchner Prize for Literature. While critics tend to understand the title word “meridian” exclusively in spatial terms, the chapter argues that it should be understood temporally as the moment when the sun stands directly overhead at noon, dividing the day into a.m. and p.m. This moment recurs at critical points in Büchner’s plays and prose works and it is Celan’s achievement to have recognized its pivotal— and highly contradictory— significance. What is gathered together at this privileged point in time are three competing ways of viewing the meridian: as a moment of absolute sovereignty, as a point of stasis and traumatic fixation, and as the site of a possible opening toward what is yet to come. It is through his encounter with this critical moment in Büchner that Celan articulates his own poetic practice, his way not just of incorporating readings of other writers into his own work but of leaving his poems open in their turn to the solicitations of others. His notion of poetry as “desperate conversation” should thus be understood in terms of this intertextual relationship.

This chapter, which emphasises the importance of the interplay between an uncanny phenomenon in the text and an uncanny affect in the reader, holds that the uncanny is both a ‘foreign body’ and something on the page in front of the reader. It describes nineteenth-century doubles who remind people of their textual predecessors as well as of their own doubled selves. The chapter looks at uncannily Gothic doubles of the earlier decades (James Hogg and Edgar Allan Poe), through the novels of the mid-Victorian period, in which doubles are more usually deployed to drive a sensational plot (Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon), and at a second, more self-conscious Gothic flowering in the novels of thefin de siècle (Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde). It concludes that the tendency to invoke earlier examples of the Doppelgänger tradition becomes increasingly pronounced.

This chapter charts the progress of the Doppelgänger in later twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction. As the genre established itself more securely, the possibilities for complex allusive doubling and redoubling became greater. Some recent writers, such as Sarah Waters and Will Self, find Doppelgängers in their Victorian predecessors. Others, such as Bret Easton Ellis, respond to the doubles created by their near contemporaries, while Christopher Priest's characters, like those of Daphne du Maurier, seem to be the uncanny doubles of his own earlier creations. The chapter furthermore argues that the clone may also come into play as a science-fictional subtype of the double as uncanny allusion marker when many earlier texts are being referenced.

This chapter posits a psychoanalytic reading of Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s short story ‘I fatali’ (‘The Fated Ones’) published posthumously in the collection Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Tales) (1869). It focuses on the mortal rivalry between the father and son figures, Count Sagrezwitch and Baron Saternez, who become known in late nineteenth-century Milanese society of the short story as true embodiments of fatal beings belonging to popular superstition, known as jinxes – bringers of bad fortune, illness, harm, and even death to others. Drawing from Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud’s conceptions of the Doppelgänger, it is argued that these protagonists emerge as complementary doubles for one another, as opposing incarnations of Death in the form of mysterious foreigners. This chapter also highlights the post-Unification, socio-cultural undertones of Tarchetti’s fantastic tale, affirms the existence of an Italian Gothic, and reveals the author’s portrayal of death’s spectacular nature.

This chapter explores gothic elements encoded into the narrative and the very act of choice that govern video games. These elements both reinforce and expose the lie of rational choice that undergirds the neoliberal economy that saw games rise to media dominance. Videogames may be simulacra, but not just virtual realities: they are the uncanny symptom of how the neoliberal subject recognizes its own lack of identity. Games are thus the gothic double of the Enlightenment self, the prime image of the hollow American neoliberal consumer mass-marketed as self-fashioning individual.

The texts of ‘Der Atlas’ and ‘Der Doppelgänger’, like many of the poems in Heine’s Buch der Lieder, are concerned with the themes of memory and loss. One unusual feature that these two poems share is an unexpected shift in narrative perspective in the final stanza. In ‘Der Atlas’ the protagonist suddenly begins speaking to his heart, and in ‘Der Doppelgänger’ he addresses a ghostly figure who turns out to be himself. In this essay I consider some of the ways in which Schubert responded to the narrative peculiarity of these poems when he set them as the first and last of his Heine songs. By combining recent techniques to analyse rhythmic declamation with the analysis of other aspects of the songs, such as tonality, voice leading, texture and hypermetre, I show how Schubert exploits and manipulates the declamatory patterns in the poems in order to express musically the narrative and semantic levels of meaning.

One commonly acknowledged indicator of ‘late style’ in music is self-critique. At the end of a long career, a composer subjects his or her musical language to a rigorous deconstructive analysis, exposing its fundamental premises in order to reassess its expressive validity. In 2008, however, Joseph Straus suggested that ‘late-style’ musical features are often more fruitfully interpreted as inscriptions of a composer's physical or mental disability. Speaking of a retrospective, self-critical ‘late style’ in Schubert’s case is potentially problematic, since he was only thirty-one when he died. But there is general consensus that Schubert’s experience of his fatal illness (and the limitations it placed upon him) left traces in his music. This chapter offers a reading of Schubert’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’ as a ‘late’ work in both respects. Schubert’s artistic response to disability in this song takes the form of a reflective self-critique.