(b) Short story as doubling of one sort or another, or several sorts all at once:
In his essay-cum-flowchart ‘Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories’ (which bears more than a passing resemblance to Borges’s Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge), Roberto Bolaño boils it down to ‘just read everything by Poe.’ If you want to boil that down further, just read ‘William Wilson’, a story which manages to be both the essence of Poe and at the same time, somehow, something quite different from the Poe most people have read. It’s a perfect short story that shouldn’t be nearly as good as it is. It’s a deadly serious comedy and a life story in ten pages.
Mainly though, it’s a doppelgänger story. I’d argue it’s the doppelgänger story, except I haven’t read all the other doppelgänger stories ever written, so I can’t. But it feels like it should be, and has certainly been claimed as prime influencer for many subsequent doppelgänger tales by many different writers. A man relates the sorry tale of his life, and for the purposes of convenience (he says) he’ll call himself William Wilson, his real name being, by now, absolute dirt. At school he discovers there is another William Wilson (presumably also not his real name), whose birth and school-starting days exactly match his own. This other WW becomes both friend and foe, equal and superior, until a final yet ambiguous confrontation sends them both on their individual ways. Years pass. Their paths cross again, and again, and then again, and while the narrator slides inexorably towards debauchery and dissolution, his enigmatic double never fails to shine a searing light on his sins. It doesn’t go well, not least because Poe’s narrator is, as so many of Poe’s narrators are, clearly bonkers. But he tells his tale as a sort of one-sided diacritical discourse with himself playing both parts, and it’s too rationally told to be a straightforward case of madness à la Tell-Tale Heart. As more than one commentator has noted, ‘Will I am, offspring of Will’ is hardly a randomly chosen pseudonym under the circumstances.
First published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, October, 1839. Collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Lea & Blanchard, 1840, and The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, Penguin Classics, 2006. Available to read online here
A Personal Anthology 