An unofficial transcript of the podcast episode by Alexis Kennedy and Lottie Bevan.

—

LB: Welcome to episode 3 of Skeleton Songs…

AK: The episode where Lottie won’t let me sit next to the cat.

LB: Now this is a vile calumny, because there is a good reason…

AK: It’s literally true.

LB: It— I mean, it is true, but it is also very misleading, because Alexis has ADHD, which means he apparently can do what he likes, and justify all of it, and you may have heard, in last episode, that, in our last episode, that there was quite a big clang, several times in the background, um, that it’s my job to edit out, badly, which I can’t do, ‘cause I don’t understand editing software.  Um, so now I have physically interposed myself between man and cat…

AK: HE’S SO FLUFFY…

LB: That’s justifying all the misogynist claims of literature forever.  But we are talking this week about…

AK: Doppelgängers.

LB: Would you like to define doppelgängers?

AK: Uh, double-goers.   Well, we— when we started looking into this, we found there’s— there’s, um, two kinds, really, of double.  Uh, and doppelgängers and fetches and ka and foregoers, that we’re all talking about, but there’s duplicates of people that appear, and there’s elements of people that mass— that manifest as duplicates, and of course, I think, one of the reasons the legends about this get so intricate is, is that it’s not like any of these sat down and said ‘I’m going to create a legend that exemplifies the external articulation of the baser aspect of the self’…

LB: Science!

AK: …and then everyone else hewed, that, to that theme, so if somebody says ‘There’s this legend about, if you go to a graveyard, at dawn, and you see yourself, that means you’re going to DIE, and then if you go to a graveyard at dusk and you see yourself that means you’re gonna live a long happy life’, and then somebody else, two centuries later…

LB: I mean I actually love that idea, but sure…

AK: That, well, that’s actually a thing!

LB: Is it?

AK: Yes— so, so…

LB: Wait, there’s, like a, there like a horoscope of seeing yourself?

AK: So, ah, well, this is the point, is, is that it’s all myth, it’s all legend, it’s all folklore, all literature.  Of course, it tells you different things.  And um, somebody picks a, a compelling idea…

LB: Mhm…

AK: …from a piece of folklore two centuries before, writes it into a short story, and it’d be something different, but, um, the doppelgänger is, is the, um, the double-goer, literally, obviously.  Er, the identical version of the person who is seen by that person, or by somebody else.

LB: Mm.

AK: And often you’ll, like, see them on a lonely road, you’ll pass somebody, and, and they won’t speak to you and you won’t speak to them, and you’ll go home and say, um, ‘I saw you…’

LB: ‘That was odd’

AK: ’That was odd’.  And, you know, obviously, sometimes, maybe it’s just, the doppelgänger is somebody who really, like ‘Oh shit, it’s HIM, I’m just gonna look at the ground and pretend I don’t know him’.  But, but yeah, if you see— this is something that comes up again and again, if you see somebody, um, and this is the doppelgänger myth in, in Germany and, um, points east, it’s the— the, fetches in, um, England, Ireland, Scotland… uh, and if you see a fetch, one version of a person at morning, and if you see… that means they’re gonna die, and if you see a fetch at evening, that’s good news, that means they’re gonna live a, a long, er, wonderful life.

LB: You see, that’s the difference between you and me, I discovered also that they were known as fetches, which I hadn’t known before researching for this podcast, and my immediate response was ‘We’re making ‘fetch’ happen’.  We’re finally…

AK: (bursts out laughing)

LB: This is the Mean Girl dream.  Well, you were like, ‘Oh, I’m actually gonna read about the myths and what actually happened.  But go on.’

AK: We have your episode title now.

LB: (laughs)

AK: So: fetches, doppelgängers, ka— that’s, uh, again, it’s one of the things that comes up [inaudible] as soon as you start—

LB: For an audio programme, we should spell it: it’s ‘KA’.

AK: KA.  Uh— um— it’s one of the things that comes up, as soon as you start looking at duplicates of, of people.  The, um, ah, okay, I’m gonna say this with an attitude: the ancient Egyptians had (asterisk – we’ll come back there)…

LB: We’re gonna be doing, um, audio punctuation from now on, so sit back and enjoy!

AK: Audio hyperlinks.  A— a complex conception of the soul, and one of the elements of the, ah, the soul, was the ka— KA.  Now, that asterisk is as follows: Ancient Egypt was a civilisation that stretched from something like 2500 BC to 50 BC, when it shades into, into the Ptolemies.  So, talking about Ancient Egyptian culture…

LB: (laughs)

AK: …like talking about, um, European culture from, uh, before classical Greece all the way through to 21^st century Europe… because there was less technological advancement in Egypt, because it was in this very circumscribed, um, domain along the Nile, where it’s really important that you have your annual floods, and you’ve got an autocratic top-down system of government, it changed a lot less than European culture changed in the last 2500 years, and, um, it is, as I understand as a very amateur historian, certainly not an Egyptologist, still meaningful to talk about Ancient Egyptian culture.  But, for example, you talk about Egyptian beliefs and so on— I went digging and, um, first of all I found a lot of Egyptian texts about the soul have wonderfully evocative names, um, like the Book of Traversing Eternity.

LB: Woooow!

AK: Or The Spell of the Twelve Caves.

LB: Oh, they are good!

AK: Or the Book of the Sky. Uh, but the, the coffin-texts, which is the, sort of, end of the, um, I can’t remember if the Old Kingdom or Middle Kingdom, um, uh, end of Old Kingdom— anyway, that’s not important— so the coffin texts are… it’s not even one text, it’s a bunch of stuff that was written, like, on the walls of pyramids and sarcophagi that included spell and descriptions of the afterlife, and was assembled into a sort of more or less coherent body, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which is the one that everyone’s heard of…

LB: Yeah.

AK: …was really one text.  But it was one text that was updated over the whole of the New Kingdom period, so that is about a thousand years.  So, um, and it didn’t have the same, kind of, of top-down, er, idea of dogma that the Bible, er, has.  So this is, this is one body of opinion over a thousand years, during which gods have risen and fell, and some gods get promoted and some gods get demoted and occasionally you get an enthusiast who tries to impose monotheism: Akhenaten—

LB: Ugh!

AK: — um, the whole thing and so on.  But the point is, the ka is, ah, physically in appearance, it’s physically identical to the person, and, erm, one of the distinctive features of some Egyptian ideas about the afterlife is, is that life begins when you die… so, you get put in the tomb, and it’s sort of important to keep looking after you?  You need funerary offerings.

LB: Hmm…

AK: Because the ka’s gotta eat something, so you go and leave beer in the tomb, so it can drink some beer.

LB: Wait, so the ka is a version of you that is birthed to life when your original body dies.

AK: So…

LB: Because that’s not what I would normally call a doppelgänger.

AK: Well, this is the thing, is, is, depending on— on uh, which text you read, or in my case, which, sort of, tertiary versions of secondary accounts of the text you read–

LB: This is a very, very in-depth researched programme.

AK: The ka is something that you will see walking about, er, while the person’s still alive, because their personality is in some way separated from their body.

LB: Because of the certainty of their impending death.

AK: Yes.

LB: Gotcha.

AK: So you’ve got this— this connection still with the idea of, of, death, and, and, things come—

LB: Which would then explain the, kind of, thing about, you know if you see it at a certain time, that it means something, because the ka wouldn’t exist unless some significant life event were about to occur to the individual.

AK: Yes.

LB: Got it.

AK: Yeah, and you, kind of… I think, often, when you talk about doppelgängers or about parts of the soul that have appeared separately as something that has come unmoored, [like it’s?] something important, and this is one of the things that comes up in the—

LB: That’s very interesting.

AK— Insoll Codex a lot, is that you get, um, elements of the soul as organs of being that allow people to continue to exist— like it takes work to continue to exist, in the same way that your heart sort of keeps your blood pumping around your body.  Otherwise you drop dead.  Um, if you don’t have the relevant bits of your soul all operating together, then you will just, just pop out of existence.  But that’s obviously not an Egyptian thing: that’s much later, that’s, like, fifteenth century, in the village of Insoll.  And the, uh, the Egyptian thing is, is bit of your, uh, soul starts separating, and again, the, er, your heart, or your physical body, are maybe parts of your “soul”, because of course there’s no one single translation for the word ‘soul’ in any language; they mean different things, er, all the time.

LB: I think that idea of unmooring’s really interesting.  Because I had no idea that this, sort of, idea of the doppelgänger or the other self would go back as far as ancient Egypt, though of course, as soon as you said, they were well into their spirituality and had a whole, kind of, plan for it all, so it would make sense, um, but I know it primarily through gothic literature, and the doppelgänger is a famous trope of literature, um, at that time, um, and that often revolves around ideas of, of, sort of divided selves or madness or, or, um, some kind of cause of extreme anxiety or obsession, and one of the things that, that late, sort of, 20^th century— sorry, late 19^th century literature really loves to play with is the idea of ‘is it madness, or is it reality?’

AK: Mm.

LB: So there is this constant sense of the individual becoming unmoored from reality, and is it that that they have this sort of third eye that’s opening to this other spectral realm where ka and doppelgängers actually exist, or is it that they are having some sort of breakdown?  And like most gothic literature, it usually ends with a violent ending…

AK: Mm.

LB: It doesn’t go well for the protagonist, um, and leaves questions unanswered, so one of the classic endings of a, kind of, doppelgänger trope would be that ultimately the protagonist gets so obsessed or upset or angry that they kill the, the lookalike, and that often ends up killing them as well.  Um, you know… you know, stab you in the heart and it turns out that my heart is bleeding too.

AK: Mm.

LB: And so, like, some of the highest-profile doppelgänger examples of literature of that time is, of course, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which doesn’t go great for him, or The Picture of Dorian Gray.

AK: Mm.

LB: Oscar Wilde’s very famous novel, which again, has this sense of ultimately destroying this other self, and that being your destruction too.

AK: I hadn’t, I hadn’t thought about that, and that ties into— I won’t go into it quite yet, but the Gerald Durrell thing that I was going to talk about, er, later.  And it does tie into one of the things that started coming clear when I looked into this, which is, there’s two literary or mythological functions that, that doppelgängers, duplicates, fetches tend to serve.  Now, one is that they are externalisations of the personality, as you said before…

LB: Mhm.

AK: And that really works, and you’re doing something literary, and it’s a really natural thing to do, if you’re, um, thinking about yourself— you externalise bits of self; but the other thing is identity horror.

LB: Mmmmmm.

AK: And…

LB: I love identity horror!

AK: It’s, it’s, it’s, er…

LB: I don’t have any existential issues…

AK: (laughs)

LB: …it’s just interesting…

AK: So if you’re thinking about which part of you is really you…

LB: Oh god.

AK: Is it— is it your body?  Of course not: there’s something in you, isn’t it?  Where does it exist?  ‘Cause it exists— it’s obviously, the actual you is located at a point two inches above…

LB: Right, behind your eyes!

AK: Well, yeah!   Where your lines of sight happen to, to, to coincide.

LB: Where a tiny conscious me exists!

AK: Is it the same person all the time?  But, but, as soon as you start bringing out, as soon as you start seeing somebody else who could be mistaken for you, it’s this, this, um…

LB: Have you ever been mistaken for someone else?

AK: I don’t think so, [inaudible]

LB: I think I was accused of looking like Frank Zappa, which I found quite offensive.

AK: That’s really mean!

LB:  It was quite— I was a fat kid…

AK: But I was gonna say, there was a, a rich subgenre of stuff, like Doskae—Dostoevsky’s The Double…

LB: Yeah.

AK: …which I haven’t read, um, Ayoade’s…

LB (stage whisper): Tolstoy is better!

AK: …film of The Double, which I have seen, it’s fucking great.  And—

LB: I prefer The Idiot.  It has my heart forever, another Dostoevsky classic.

AK: Ah, or, you know, to keep lowering the tone, ‘cause you keep being literary…

LB: Oh, what—

AK: Silent Hill 2…

LB: Wait [’til I get?] later on.

AK: …where it’s all about the identity horror again— but this, this, as soon as you start not being clear, which is actually you, or which other people think is you— because identity is about what other people think you are…

LB: Mhm…

AK: As well as what you think you are.  So if everybody is saying ‘that person over there is the real you’, er, we’ll just put you behind this window and you can beat on it in horror, as the other-you puts an arm around your spouse and kids.

LB: Well, I have a very specific example, um, that does sound horrific, and, er, we do live in an age of curated social media profiles, where a lot of people’s interaction with us all is via this heavily curated version of ourselves that we put up online, and that leads to what we often call impostor syndrome.  Which is of course, actually, the doppelgänger syndrome, and actually quite a well-documented medical issue, of actually thinking your identity is someone else’s, it’s part of psychosis and delusion, but, but we have a little inkling of that every day, because, you know, none of us put up photos on instagram of us waking up in the morning, or falling down the stairs, or forgetting to put our shoes on…

AK: There’s that c-word thing you like, isn’t there?

LB: The c-word?

AK: The syndrome, something.

LB: D’you mean Capgras?

AK: I possibly do, I don’t know whether it’s Capgras…

LB: It is, um, because moron that I am, I have been pronouncing it ‘cap-grass’ syndrome…

AK: Right.

LB: But it turns out it’s by a French guy, so it’s definitely Capgras, and therefore everyone who heard me talk about it obviously knew that I was talking nonsense.  But yes!  This is a really rare, badly understood, um, syndrome, where essentially you believe that people you know are being, um, replaced by identical copies of themselves.

AK: Mmm.

LB: So it’s not them, but it is them, and of course this leads this poor patient to having horrific anxiety, and there’s this sense of, kind of, who, who is doing that, and why, and there’s a malignancy around the people they believe to have been replaced, and sometimes it revolves around one particular individual, so there’s lots of documented cases of spouses waking up one morning and thinking that the person next to them who they’d been married to for years is not the person they know, so they’ll refuse to share the bed with them, and they refuse to, to stay in the same house, and it’s obviously very frightening.  Um, and there are also documented cases of people thinking everyone in their close circle of friends is, is actually being slowly replaced, leading to general senses of anxiety and terror, um, uh, interestingly there’s a temporal version, which I hadn’t heard about, where time is warped or substituted and you think that something weird is, timey-wimey, going on, um, and there is a, a, a locational version as well, which is uh, called, um, reduplicative paramnesia (which I just wanted to say), where you think that certain locations either exist at the same time in another location, or have been replaced, or have been moved.  So that’s a whole ‘other kettle of fish.

AK: And that’s really interesting, but, er, because it’s sort of the geographical equivalent of identity horror, you don’t know who you are, you don’t know where you are, you don’t know when you are, all these seem…

LB: You’re just, kind of, lost in this void.

AK: Yeah.

LB: And what, what really struck me about, and Capgras syndrome is really interesting anyway, because it’s just such a horrible idea, and obviously it ties into this idea of the doppelgänger, that, that somebody’s being replaced, and, and how do you deal with that: it’s not about yourself, but it is about people you really care about, and love, and know.  And I looked into the scientific background of, of what we think is going on, because like I said, it’s very misunderstood, and I found this really interesting thing, which is, um, it’s believed, it’s probably linked to prosopagnosia, which is where patients lose the ability to recognise faces.

AK: Mm.

LB: Um, this has been pros— most popularly, uh, documented in Oliver Sachs’ The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, in case anybody is interested and hasn’t read that, it’s brilliant, um, but people believe that there are two pathways to facial recognition.  There’s the conscious pathway, which is, you know, I’m looking at you, Alexis, and we’ve been dating nearly five years, so I’m fairly confident that it’s you and I know who you are, but there is also the unconscious pathway, which is, um, autonomic arousal.  Now, that doesn’t mean that you are very sexy, that I’m getting aroused, what it means is that my body is physically responding through electrodermal signals to this sense of recognition and knowledge, there’s something physical that happens, which is kind of your example of where does the soul start and the body end, right?  And what people believe happens with Capgras syndrome is, um, the conscious, ah, function is there…

AK: Mm.

LB: So I look at you and I see Alexis, but my body’s autonomic arousal is failing, so I get this inherent sense that you are the person I know, but there’s something wrong, and a lot of patients have described it as this sense that there’s just something off, or it just isn’t them, because they’re getting these two opposite signals to their brain…

AK: Mhm.

LB: Which is horrible, but I find fascinating from the idea of the, kind of, doppelgänger motif.

AK: Mhm.  That’s, that’s really interesting, and I—

LB: Right?

AK: It, it reminds me of two things, er, one is— very briefly, it’s not exactly doppelgänger-y, one is, um, er, a horrifying short story called The Screwfly Solution.  Er…

LB: I think you’ve told me about it!

AK:  I have told you about it, and I don’t want to spoil it for our listeners, but it’s by, um, James Tiptree Jr., who is the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon, a very interesting, complicated, SF author last century, and The Screwfly Solution deals with what happens when one biological, um, neu— *pfft* physiological, really, process…

LB: Embarrassing…

AK: Er, that’s, ah, normally associated with good things, doesn’t get associated with good things— I haven’t, now— read, read it!  It’s horrible!  And you’ll have nightmares, sorry.

LB: (Laughs)

AK: The other thing is, is much nicer, it’s Ted Chiang, lovely Ted Chiang…

LB: I love Ted Chiang…

AK: Ah, who, ah, did the, fa— most famously, he wrote the story on which the film Arrival was based, but, uh, Stories of Your Life and Others’, which I think has, the, uh, “Arrival” story in that collection, also contains…

LB: (inaudible)

AK: …a story called Liking What You See: A Documentary, which is a, um, it—it’s presented in the form of, of talking heads, uh, doing transcripts.  In a near future world, where there is a voluntary process called calliagnosia, which is a sort of version of prosopagnosia, where you undergo a very subtle neurological operation that, instead of preventing you from recognising faces, prevents you from judging how attractive a face is?

LB: Oooooh…

AK: So once you’ve been through calliagnosia, you can’t see whether or not somebody is attractive.

LB: Uhuh—

AK: So it’s sort of analogous in the story to something like being a vegetarian.  Where you just decide to stop, ah, participating in something that you think is, is bad, even if other people still are, like judging people on their appearance, so— so that—

LB: It being Ted Chiang, I assume it has some, um, surprising outcomes.

AK: It does, there— there are some surprising outcomes, and there is an, er, interesting thought-provoking twist, it being Ted Chiang.  

LB: We are really selling literature in this podcast.

AK: But— But with… everyone should read Ted Chiang.

LB: They should: he’s great.

AK: And, ah, the— but the other thing I wanted to talk about was the Gerald Durrell thing…

LB: Mm.

AK: Which follows on very naturally from what you’ve been saying.  So Gerald Durrell— had you heard of Gerald Durrell before I mentioned him?

LB: No, but you said it about eight times, and now I feel like he’s my brother.

AK: So he’s, I think he’s er, er, I’m 48 and Gerald Durrell was sort of famous in the previous generation, I, I guess.  He was a conservationist and an author, er, who was part of a peculiar literary family, who founded a, um, zoo for, er, endangered species in Jersey, where it exists to this day.  So he was generally sort of a— another complicated and interesting person, generally well-regarded, and, and he wrote a lot of fluffy likeable, ah, books that sold well in airports about his adventures going off and collecting animals.  And about the bonkers things that happened when he was growing up as a nature-obsessed boy on a Greek island, with his mother.  But he also wrote, er, the story called, I think it’s The Entrance?  And… uh, it comes at the end of a, a collection, ah, of fluffy friendly stories about his family and things.  And it presents, initially, as he’s gone to stay with a couple, who he knows, in a farmhouse in Provence, and he talks about, like, their dogs, and their cooking and they say some sort of witty bohemian 1970s things, which is a very Gerald Durrell short story.  And then they casually mention that they have this old book that they bought at an auction, ah, some doctor left us a memoir on the 19^th century, and somebody said ‘Oh, you’re a writer, Gerald”…

LB: That’s a classic trope.

AK: “Why, why don’t you read it before you go to sleep?” And the rest of the story is this absolutely chilling, er, gothic, classic gothic thing— it’s obviously written explicitly as gothic, that I won’t spoil in too much detail, um, and the plot’s quite complex, but our protagonist goes to a lonely French chateau, where he ends up snowed in in the dead of winter…

LB: Oh my god…

AK: Alone in this chateau, with no company but a cat and a dog, and a lot of mirrors.

LB: Oh god, that’s…

AK: Because the old man who used to own the chateau liked his mirrors, and he started to notice that, initially, with this really big mirror in an attic, but also these other, um, uh, mirrors all around the house, all by the same inscription, which is “I am your servant, feed and liberate me.”

LB: What?!

AK: “I am you.”

LB: What a— what?

AK: And, and so one day, sitting in front of the fireplace, um, looking at the reflection of the room in this big mirror, and the cat’s snoozing on his lap and the dog’s snoozing by the fire, and, er, he sees the door in the reflection is open a crack, just like in real life, but there’s this sort of thing?  That’s come through the door…

LB: Oh my god.

AK: …he thinks, like a big caterpillar, it’s sort of humping along the carpet, er, and it looks like…

LB: What, humanoid?

AK: And he looks closer and he realises it’s a hand, it’s like a yellow hand with blackened nails…

LB: Ugh…

AK: And he, he, uh, he sees it, in the mirror, and it, it’s moving, and he yields to temptation and he throws, like, a fragment of his dinner over to the door, er, and the dog bounds after it, and the hand suddenly comes to life, grabs the dog, and, like, snatches it, breaks its neck, and drrrrags it behind the door, leaving bloody fingerprints on the door.

LB: Oh my god…!

AK: And he thinks— ‘well, I’ve just, ok, this is, this is bonkers, nothing’s happened in, in, in the world— it’s just in the reflection— and he thinks he just, just was, uh, short on sleep, and imagined the whole thing, but the next time he’s going around the house…”

LB: He does not find the dog?

AK: No, the dog’s there, but the dog doesn’t have a reflection any more…

LB: Aaaaaah!

AK: So, so he, um, but he— he’s, and he still sees this— this hand in the reflection, but only in the reflection.

LB: Sorry, is— is it a hand that, that lead some— to something behind the door, is it…

AK: Yes.

LB: …Separated?

AK: Well, this is the thing: so he thinks, ‘I wonder what the thing behind the door is’, so he…

LB: So, this is just to be clear: if you are ever in a gothic—

AK: (laughs)

LB: In a gothic situation, never wonder what the thing is behind the door.  Just, just think about what you’re gonna do when you have your Domino’s pizza and sit down with your mum, that is the safest train of thought. 

AK: So obviously what he does is, in a moment of foolish temptation…

LB: Oh my god…

AK: You don’t approve of this, he scrumples up a ball of paper and he rolls it in front of the door and the cat chases it, and the hand grabs the cat…

LB: I absolutely disapprove of that!

AK: …draws it behind the door, and after this it’s just, like, OK, maybe I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t mess any more.  Um, and…

LB: Ya think?!

AK: But unfortunately he’s fed whatever’s behind the door, so the following day, in the library…

LB: I remember the quote…

AK: So, I was, I was, there was the dog and the cat and there’s also a parrot.  Um, and he’s in the library talking to the parrot, when this thing in the reflection, like, shambles in uh, and it looks like a, sort of, corpse in a winding sheet, there’s a very grisly description, it grabs the parrot, wrenches the, um, bars of the cage apart, consumes the parrot— all in the reflection— so he’s gazing in horror, and the parrot’s gazing in horror as well, ‘cause the parrot can see what’s going on…

LB: Yeah.

AK: And the parrot’s gone.  Um, but, uh, the, um, um, he’s, he’s still there, but then the thing looks through the mirror and sees him.

LB: Augh, god…

AK: And it looks at his reflection, and it goes after his reflection.  He watches his reflection try and fail to fight this thing off.  And so his reflection’s devoured as well, and this thing comes right up to the mirror and it starts beating on it…

LB: Oh my god…

AK: With its fists, and, like, Durrell says— he’s a good writer, and he’s just not used— he’s just talented at other things, ‘like somebody trapped underneath the ice in a pond, slamming on the ice’.

LB: (gasps)

AK: And he thinks he starts to see cracks in the glass— and so does the thing…

LB: Break the mirror?

AK: And the thing…

LB: …Maybe don’t?

AK: And the thing looks at him, looks at the cracks, looks back at his body, and… it notices there’s a heavy ebony-handled cane lying by the body, because he was using this— he’s still holding this ebony-handled cane in the reflection…

LB: Uh-huh…

AK: So it lurches over and picks up the ebony-handled cane and comes over towards the mirror, and then, uh, he, he picks up a chair in terror and smashes the mirror.  And it’s gone, you can’t see the thing any more, and then he realises that he’s now completely alone in this mansion, which contains at least a dozen other mirrors, scattered over the whole of a sprawling chateau.  That’s about 2/3 of the way through the story and I won’t spoil the rest…

LB: Oh my god!  I want to read it!

AK: It’s very very good, it’s called The Entrance…

LB: That’s the one.

AK: And it’s…

LB: Amazing.

AK: Um, heh, in a collection called The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium.

LB: (laughs)

AK: But everything else in there is super-wholesome, but, yeah, “I am your servant…”

LB: That’s brilliant!

AK: “…”Feed me and liberate me.  I am you.”  There’s a resolution to the story, which is also, sort of, troubling, and uncertain in its, its meaning…

LB: Well, mirrors is, is a trope of the writer that I wanted to briefly talk about.

AK: Uh-huh…

LB: Which is my final example of, um, doppelgängers in literature.  And it’s a much maligned part of literature.  Um, I know we talk a lot about, like, the classical canon, um, and, and traditional books, and this is a webcomic artist by the name of Emily Carroll.  Um, and she is most famous for two collections of her comics, one is Through the Woods, and one of which is, um, When I Arrived at the Castle.  And that one is particularly mirror-orientated, it’s a very, um, sort of, Angela Carter-esque, um, feminist vampire thing.  But, um, Through the Woods is what shot her to fame.  It, um, she actually began with her first comic, I think, that went viral, is called His Face All Red.

AK: Mm.

LB: And I love this story, it haunts me more than, like, most other things that I’ve ever read, um, and it uses a lot of very traditional fairy-tale motifs, so the premise is, there are these two brothers, who exist in this, you know, unnamed village, um, very rural, I think they’re all shepherds, um, and there’s the elder brother, who’s handsome and strong and popular and he’s married to, um, I think she’s described as, like, a plump wife with starry eyes, and everyone loves him, and he’s very brave.  And he has lots of sheep.  And his younger brother is not as handsome, and not very popular, and quite quiet, doesn’t have any sheep, and there’s this sort of intimation that maybe he kind of envies what his brother has, as you might, being obviously the less good version of a brother-pair.  And this village begins to be terrorised by something that comes to steal sheep in the night.  Um, and, you know, the first couple of nights it happens, people think ‘Oh, well, this happens, you know, wolves come out, whatever’, and of course the village is, by the way, next to a forest, as you would expect, um, but I think there’s one night where something like four sheep are taken at once, and the villagers think, you know, ‘this can’t be— can’t go on, we’ve got to send somebody into the forest to hunt this monster down and kill it, so we can continue with our lovely idyllic…’

AK: Mm.

LB: ‘…rural life’.  And of course, the brave noble elder brother says, um, ‘I’ll do it’.  Um, I think that the younger brother might actually have decided to, to offer himself initially, because he’s finally, like, this is my moment to prove that I’m worthy, and then the elder brother says ‘I’ll help you.’  And the younger brother’s like, ‘Yaaaay.’  And everybody’s like ‘Oh, you’re so brave, elder brother (and I guess younger brother too, whatever)’.  So they go off into the woods together to hunt this creature.  Um, and, again, I’m not gonna ruin the story, because it’s so good, and it’s actually available online— you can read the whole thing in its utter glory, um, if you just Google—

AK: You should buy the book, though, to support…

LB: You should buy the book, and they’ll— these links will be in the podcast notes, um, but it’s just genius.  Um, but something happens in the woods, which means that, um, the younger brother is the only one who comes back to the village.  And he tells everybody that this thing has happened, and everyone’s very sad.  And they all, obviously, miss this elder brother, but the younger brother feels, like, you know, ‘I finally did something good’, and everyone’s kind of grudgingly respectful of him.  And then, a couple mornings later, he wakes up, and everyone seems really happy.  And they’re really happy because the elder brother has appeared back in the village.

AK: Mm.

LB: Which, we know that he should not have, um, and this sparks this whole, very traditional kind of growing horror doppelgänger trope, of, there’s this one character, the protagonist, who knows that this sh— cannot be, the person that he appears to be, although physically he’s exactly the same, and the only difference, and only the protagonist notices this, is the coat he is wearing is not torn and bloodied.  And no one else notices that.  He’s just back to where he is, and the only thing that he does that’s a bit odd, and, again, nobody notices this, is he’s perfectly normal, he talks, he eats, he sleeps, he’s happy… he will not look at the younger brother.’

AK: Mmmm.

LB: So eventually  the younger brother gets so stressed out about this, as you would, even though there’s nothing, you know, actually threatening going on, that he goes back into the woods and he retraces their steps and he goes back to the place where the event occurred, um, to finally have this last look, and I’m not gonna tell you what had happened— what happens, it’s a very short comic, that you should read— but the final panel is one of the most haunting things ever, and it doesn’t explain it, but it gives you this very complete finale, and, and just the idea of, of, ah— it’s pretty clear that this rep—represents more than just a, a, a face-forward tale of somebody coming back who shouldn’t be able to come back.  It’s quite clear it is psychologically orientated, that there is definitely an element of envy, of guilt, of probably other things going on, and the, um, protagonist’s mind, or, I suppose, the antagonist, depending on how you feel about it, um, and this is a great example of the doppelgänger being a reflection of the individual’s personal issues, rather than being this, sort of, separate entity, um, that actually just comes on the scene like, you know, a dog or a cow, or, or, or a monster.

AK: Hm.

LB: Um, and it’s absolutely fascinating, and I never thought that I would find such an interesting and nuanced of doppelgängers and gothic tropes in a webcomic, but that’s Emily Carroll for you, she’s utterly brilliant.

AK: It occurs to me that one of the— we star— we started out saying what, what are doppelgängers, and the, the myth is very, uh, easily described, you know, it’s, if you, sometimes you see somebody who looks like you but isn’t you.  And it’s not clear what it is, and sometimes it means you’re gonna die.  And there’s– that, that, that’s nothing, but it’s the jumping off point that’s interesting, and, of course, doppelgängers went into a bunch of other fantasy contexts, most notably in D&D, as humanoid creatures that can take the shape of other creatures.

LB: That is a shapeshifter!  They’re different.

AK, Well, this is the thing, I, er, doppelgängers in D&D are perfectly, um, good, in fact they’re a good, um, basis for a story, because, you know, things that shapeshift and, um, take people’s place are interesting, but at the same time, it’s the classic RPG problem of taking something non-specific and strange that is deliberately not finally explained…

LB: Mmm.

AK: And having to render it in a coherent, specific way, where you can ask questions about the life-cycle of the beings, because it’s difficult to maintain that deliberate imprecision and ambiguity, when you’ve got a bunch of players sitting around a table, who say things like ‘I poke it with a stick!  Does it turn back into its original form?  Is the blob the same?’  You know, it’s just harder to do that in that context…

LB: Yeah.

AK: …That’s one of the things that, um, that you can do with, with, um, some kinds of game, but you can’t do with others.

LB: Well, I think that wraps it up for our brief run-through of doppelgängers and ka and generally spooky things that look like other things that they shouldn’t, and mirrors, um, but if we’ve missed anything out, let us know, if you know of any doppelgänger tropes that you think are unusual or unique, um, ping us.  

AK: If it is— it even is us at all.

LB: That’s true, you never know, our voices could just be the voices of people who’ve come, eaten our brains, and taken over our mortal form… HAVE A SPOOKY DAY!