The Motif of the Siamese Twins and the Motif-Theme Tradition of the Doppelgänger

Abstract

This paper discusses the motif of the Siamese twins in modern artistic production, partly using a film by Aleksei Balabanov and a short story by Adolf Muschg, and primarily Lojze Kovačič’s “Zgodba o dvoglavem sinu” (“The Story of the Two-Headed Son”). Relying on psychoanalytic interpretation and Freud’s and Mladen Dolar’s explanation of das Unheimliche (the Uncanny), it shows that this motif is placed within the tradition of the romantic Doppelgänger. However, referring to Tzvetan Todorov’s hypotheses in his Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Introduction to Fantasy Literature), he establishes that during the twentieth century, during the period of rationalizing the unconscious, this motif experienced typical modifications. The major one is that the motif of the Siamese twins from the realm of das Unheimliche is transferred to the domain of the real or, from the viewpoint of literary genre, from fantasy to the vicinity of allegory. Kovačič’s narrative can thus be understood either as a some sort of allegoric depiction of the Slovenian political environment before and especially during the Second World War or, for instance, as an allegory of the rationalized image of the modern, split, and identity-hybrid subject of oneself.