Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

Or is it our fantasy?

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Imagine Judy Barton during the period she is supposed to be playing Madeleine, how careful she must have been, how careful she must have been required to have been. She cannot be seen by any of Elster’s friends or her relationship with Elster will be revealed (“Gavin, you scamp! How long have you been keeping this one from us?”). And she cannot be seen by Scottie, perhaps a much easier task (there is only one of Scottie), but one that is easier said than done because, after all, she is being followed by Scottie. We can assume that this period is relatively short, but it is longer than a day or two, and life goes on, doesn’t it? She must eat, sleep, wash up. Where? Judy cannot be seen at Elster’s house (except outside of it), because she is not his wife — presumably, at least the staff and her neighbors will know what the real Madeleine Elster looks like — but neither can she be seen at her own apartment. If Scottie caught her there, he would know she was not Madeleine Elster. Where can she go when she is not being Madeleine Elster? Is it possible that, because she had no opportunity not to be Madeleine, she was Madeleine during those days or weeks, 24 hours a day (meaning, in effect, she was Madeleine)? Or did she simply disappear when no one is looking, somehow cease to exist?

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A person may identify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self; or he may substitute the other’s self for his own. The self may thus be duplicated, divided, and interchanged.

(Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”)

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For our second anniversary, my wife’s sister bought us a baby name book. It was supposed to be a joke. I read part of the introduction — stupid writing that tried too hard to seem “fun”—and then I turned to my name, to find out what it “meant.” There was never any thought of using the book to name a baby. My name was listed under the heading “Unusual Names.” Of course I knew about the angel (though I didn’t know that angels were neither male nor female, but (possibly) both; there are gendered versions of my name, Gabriel/Gabrielle, but maybe they aren’t necessary?). There was also this encouraging sentence: “There is no reason to think that unusual or unattractive names are associated with deficits in academic or social functioning.” This came under a subheading, “Unusual names make for unusual people?” The idea seemed to be that, in naming your child, you were helping to create them. Like my name itself, the idea is biblical. Adam, naming the animals. God, creating light.

I had never thought much about my name before; I mean, thought about what it really was. My parents had named me “Gabriel Blackwell” and put that name on my birth certificate, but I hadn’t really been born with that name, had I? It was not “mine” in the same way as my hair is mine or my hands are mine. It was just a name. (Do I really need to quote Shakespeare?) If I were to change my name, I wouldn’t become someone else. My memories wouldn’t change. If I renamed myself “O.J. Simpson,” I would not be O.J. Simpson. Or I would be, but in name only. I would simply be another O.J. Simpson. If, when I went to renew my license, I discovered that my parents or the state had misspelled my name on my birth certificate, nothing about my life would change except for the name on my driver’s license. But, the flipside of all of this was that my being “Gabriel Blackwell” was not really different from Jimmy Stewart being Scottie Ferguson. My name, I mean, was not a unique marker of my existence, not in the same way my body was — my body was me. My name wasn’t. When someone met me in person, they came to know me; when someone heard a story about me, I became a fiction.

No matter how badly a novice butchers the words of Shakespeare, she will still be Ophelia for whatever time she spends on stage. No matter how badly I act out “Gabriel Blackwell,” I cannot be any less Gabriel Blackwell.

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The gothic horror and romantic terror of the Doppelgänger is the horror and the terror of a Siamesed bond: a life contravening yours, but its fate your fate.

(Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy )

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But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, and one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it. Nothing could be without its opposite that was bound up with it. Each was what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved. there was that duality permeating nature.

Two people in each person. There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.

(Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train )

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“One shouldn’t live alone.”

“Some people prefer it.”

“It’s wrong.”

(00:50:30)

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Chronology is not the same as causality.

(Jan Kjaerstad, The Seducer )

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Let the cause follow the effect, not accompany it or precede it.

(Bresson, Notes )

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In Vertigo one learns as much about Alfred Hitchcock from the complex dualities of the Kim Novak character as from the tormented, doomed lover played by [Jimmy] Stewart.

(Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock )

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Two facts are obvious: everybody knows Alfred Hitchcock, and nobody knows him.

(John Russell Taylor, Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock )

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Einstein seems to have said that if one went to the trouble (not to mention the expense) of devising an infinitely powerful telescope, a telescope that could also somehow penetrate any celestial body it met, and then trained its sights straight out along the horizon, one would see the back of one’s own head. However, he later admitted that such an enterprise would be ridiculous; after all, the barber routinely offers us this view for free.

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Searching for “Gabriel Blackwell” using Google returns ~10,000 results — the quotation marks are important, since, without them, you get pages where both those words appear but not in that order, i.e., pages with a Blackwell somewhere and a Gabriel somewhere else. It seems significant that, in order to get Google’s algorithm to register that you mean what you say, you have to put what you say in quotes, which is the opposite of what happens when you put a word or words in quotes in print.

The exact number of results depends on the day. I noticed a probably imperceptible-to-anyone-but-me fluctuation of around one hundred results, +/-, like some distant star winking in the sky; still, over 10,000 iterations of me. I couldn’t think about them as I always had before. They no longer seemed so benign. Now, each one was a direct competitor, even the ones that were obviously me.

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If two identical people meet, it’s only natural that they should want to know everything about each other, and the name is always the first thing we ask, because we imagine that this is the door through which one enters.

(Saramago, The Double )

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For Catholics, christening, a baptism, is meant to cleanse the child of original sin. The child must be given a name (i.e., “christened”) before the baptism, as that name is then used in the ceremony. The original sin is exorcised during the baptism — the child is born into a type of possession and, if it dies before this ceremony, it cannot be admitted into Heaven but will instead spend eternity in Purgatory. Without a name, there is no baptism. Without a baptism, there is no salvation. On the other hand, in sailing lore, to name a boat once she is already afloat is very bad luck, and there are many superstitions regarding the renaming of boats.