Just a while ago I attempted to google my name and in surprise realized that a person with whom I share my name has signed this petition.
I immediately thought of sending an email to the administrator to inform them that I do not recall ever signing this petition and asking politely to remove my name from the list.
Soon thereafter I realised I am not the only ‘Eleni Fergadi’ in this world, something which I have to admit made me feel less unique than I previously thought of myself thus leaving my ego a bit wounded, and that therefore I would be foul to send any such e-mail.
I soon thought that I should rather fall into an identity crisis for how can I fit myself in a world where other people around me hold the same name and surname as I do, and thus lead a life using what I previously knew of as the initial and unique aspect of my identity[?] More so in a digital age like today, when people might know and not know each other, for how could any one know that it is not me but another ‘Eleni Fergadi’ who has signed x,y, or z petition or anything like it for that matter[?]
Then I began thinking of ways in which this kind of ‘confusion’ might be solved, but I would always find myself trapped in the probabilities that another ‘Eleni Fergadi’ might exist somewhere in the world, having even been born the same day, maybe, even the same time as I was. Even looking like me!!!
Even worse, I though of a person less accomodating that I am, and while bearing a similar name to mine, wishing to erase all other ‘Eleni Fergadi’s’ from the face of the earth trying to desperately hold the exclusivity of the name.
Then, I reminded myself of Jose Scaramago’s The Double , a book I read the summer before last. [hence the paranoia]
I provide with extracts from a review of the book by Amanda Hopkinson, Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation.
“The Double confronts the nightmare that, contrary to the promises of religion and science, we may after all have become multiples rather than individuals. A video replays an original film, with a character played by an actor, Daniel Santa-Clara. This character has all the transient features, from fashion sense to moustache, that the viewer – Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a history teacher – sported five years’ earlier. Tertuliano naturally wishes to reverse roles and revert to playing the lead in a life he is finding depressed and dowdy.
The closer the two identical men approach each other, the more exactly their lives not only replicate but substitute for one another. Instead of being pursued by a Doppelgänger who wishes to slay him, Tertuliano becomes subverted by one who wishes to subsume him.
Much is made of the commonality of “ordinary” people. Saramago’s heroes are always ordinary: his Communist politics, if not his reading of history and his fictive imagination, dictate as much. Much too, is made of “common sense”, which appears to dictate that the cock-up must ever prevail over the conspiracy theory… except when paranoia intimates that they really are out to get you.
Common sense finds that “the existence of absolute doubles” means “one of us has to be a mistake”. But what if there were no mistake, what if “the really amazing thing would be that out of the six thousand million people on the planet there weren’t two people exactly alike”? What if we not only found we might have a double but – the final horror – a triple or a quadruple?
Tertuliano’s double, the professional actor, is here no longer the protagonist but the imitator, then the blackmailer. As each man acts more out of character, the pair converge until not even they can convincingly distinguish whose life each is leading or whose spouse each is loving. Just as actors and authors adopt pseudonyms, individuals can adopt multiple lives. So much of our existence is predicated upon other people’s perceptions of who we are.
The Double is Saramago at his most practised and polished. It is philosophy and thriller rolled into one with – as ever – a tight cast of characters, including one of Saramago’s own dogs. “Words are all we have,” concludes Santa-Clara’s wife. And, here, words are all that are required to evoke an unearthly world of counterpoint and counterfeit.”
