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The Double (Doppelangelganger): An Annotated Novel, written & illustrated by Greg Boyd, Leaping Dog Press, Chantilly, VA, 2002, $14.95; ISBN 1-58775-007-4; Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2001092552
Greg Boyd has produced an extraordinary one-of-a-kind work.
The Double reads like a novel of real terror about the psychic disintegration of contemporary life. But it doubles as a trompe l'oeil of illustrated appendices, intersecting fairy tales, meta-fictive footnotes and surreal cul-de-sacs. It mocks the notion of autobiography while doubling as a midrash on the mythology of the self.
To call his lampoon of what is most unknowable about our own natures "tongue-in-cheek" is only half the pun. Boyd's wicked satire reads as scary as it is funny. It's less a single story with a beginning-middling-end and more like a chthonic garland, an anthology of many slippery serpents swallowing their own tails in telling their tales. The ouroboros is his connecting master trope, and it's the psychic force of impulses we marginalize that fascinates Boyd. It is the power of what is hidden that delivers the chill in this deceptively structured narrative that turns progressively in on itself until it assumes the urgent shape of a question mark the reader must answer.
"Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull," Salman Rushdie wrote in The Satanic Verses. It aptly captures the corner of the carnival that Boyd has painted us into, a charade not only of smoke and mirrors but of dread, a world where vision flattens into two dimensions and depth disappears. Boyd seems to be saying that the life we are living is more complex and demanding that the attention we give it!
Like the cover woodcut illustrating a man in a suit getting strangled by a frightening angel more out of Rilke than out of Raphael, Boyd's artistry uses negative space to trick the eye. And like his photomontages that appear throughout the book, our brains are forced to gestalt these images without the clarifying help of a fore- and back- ground. It's as if the pre-conditions that shape our understanding were pulled out from under us without our knowing.
Examine the plot. An Everyman wrestles his double above a hole they have both just dug for the other in the cemetery. But in Boyd's indeterminate, flattened prose we can't be sure who's doing the narrating, who's doing the dying and who's doing all the evil: nebischy Jeff or his doppel(angel)ganger.
Jeff is an unexceptional, surface-only, go-with-the-flow schmo with both a job and a gal pal he seems barely related to, an unexamining guy to whom horrible things keep happening, the kind of monosyllabic American male Kenneth Kenniston prophesied in The Uncommitted. All he remembers is waking up from sleep drained (his previous night's reading was from Lies and Annotations written by George Body, the name of a writer-on-the-hustle who appears in Greg Boyd's earlier work, Modern Love and Other Tall Tales, coincidentally). Like the characters in that collection, Jeff putters around without a sense of humor or irony to help him cohere his subconscious. In any case, the story he reads before bed is called "The Tale of Two Hugos" (yes, a previously published Boyd fable!), about a writer fearing his ideas are being stolen via telepathy.
With so little sleep Jeff cuts himself at work the next day and is told by the boss to leave early, only to find that the fellas in the shop are harboring weird feelings about him. Over beers, he discovers the trouble. Some other version of him has appeared at the shop to quit his gig and call the biker bad boy Iron John a pussy.
What's next? While he takes a beating for provoking Iron John in the john, his double calls his girlfriend Gina to tell her he finds her roommate Tina more attractive. True to her cardboard character cliché, Gina retaliates by never speaking to him again. By the time Tina calls Jeff to deliver the most banal of erotic chatter, sex seems the worst of bad jokes. By now the page we are reading is getting more and more "eaten away" by long, illustrated footnotes that tell the stories Jeff reads at night, stories of the surreal which eventually "overwhelm" the narrative and "grow" appendices. It's only when Iron John's long-suffering wife Frieda contacts Jeff does his condition improve. After he has been fired from his job, evicted from his apartment and booked at the precinct, they meet at a donut shop where she reads to him from her own book of fairy tales, The Goat-King, chock full of double-takes on the Brothers Grimm and Jung, Hildebrand and Bly.
In pure dream logic, it turns out that: a) divided Jeff buys a gun and a harp at a pawn shop; b) the shrink his mother recommended is none other than Tina's boyfriend who has him repeat, "I'm not my father"; c) Iron John is schtupping his former girlfriend Gina; d) Freida walks in with the double. And yes, among other tales (like "Books" whose narrator confronts a world he finds less real than the one he reads about), we read that the double is reading the opening sentences of The Double to Jeff, its protagonist!
Well, you see what I mean.
Underneath the surface of these flattened characters' impotent and incomplete responses to one another lurks the blackest sense of humor ever to write in the American grain. Black like the Baudelaire (whose La Fanarlo Boyd has translated) of Les Fluers du Mal. The blurbs in the front of The Double compare Boyd to Robert Louis Stevenson (whose The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is way too tame for comparison), Italo Calvino (too gnostic and whimsical) and Franz Kafka (too gloomy and unfunny). To me Boyd is closer to the Borges of "The Circular Ruins" who wrote, "In relief, in humiliation, in terror, he understood that he, too, was an appearance, that someone else was dreaming him."
If this print-maker/painter/collagist/writer and former publisher has an American contemporary, it's probably David Lynch, whose latest film Mulholland Drive explores the same noirish nightmare known as Los Angeles from which Boyd's fictions seem to emerge as well. Like Lynch who loves to extend the extended metaphor of his films, which gain momentum long after you've left the theatre, Boyd remains at the top of his game.
That his novel, wisely published in cloth, paperback and electronic editions by Jordan Jones's new press Leaping Dog, hangs on a literary shelf populated by market-sampled, demographically driven, corporate-printed pulp only underlines the urgency The Double reveals and revels in. Like his own invented persona George Body or the actual body of his work that The Double quotes, the conditions he writes in are inextricable from the joke he is telling. It's a joke whose punch line is our own lives, a celebration that, like all great literature, needn't wait for him to be dead for the rest of us to get.
For serious readers of serious books about serious things, this novel is a wonderful and frightening gift.
Kirpal Gordon
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