Dear Steve, Matt and List:

MR's past contribution: "A case of this kind was Ansel Bourne, an American preacher... When he was sixty-one, he lost his sense of identity, wandered off into a distant town, and set up as a store-keeper under another name. After six weeks he suddenly reverted to his old self and came back home. (Donald James West, Psychical Research Today, 58) , led me to a short-story, unrelated to Beauchamp but similar to Ansel Bourne's. For those interested in variants about "and individual leading two lives", in fiction, I recommend Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Wakefield".

After I posted the comment on "doubles" as indicators of "a farse" ( and not an actual "mirror duplication"), I realized that the term "farse" was not as precise as "mimetism" ( as pointed out by SB and Matt in relation to VN' stylistic effects). Now, here, I don't mean mimetism in general ( about which I know very little) but one aspect of its effectiveness: VN might describe a scene where what is shown only apparently mirrors another object, as in mimetism. In that instance the "mirroring" effect is not "dual" because it doesn't establish semblances or correspondences.

Its reflections may lead one atray because it one expects to encounter the original object and its precise copy in reverse. And yet, there is no original object or, perhaps, there are actuallly two which we fail to see... In the example of mimetism I have in mind ( a water droplet or dangerous watching eyes on a butterfly wing), the wing image copies ("mirrors") an absent object, perhaps one that never existed, that may still frighten its predator or mislead it. Quite obviously, the living butterfly is only disguised because it reproduces, or doubles very exactly, something that is external and alien to it, never itself. A similar effect is often created by VN. So, when I imagine some of VN's doubles [ like the pair in "Despair" (dis-pairs), or some occurrences in "KQK", even certain fantasmatic correspondences bt Sybil& Disa or Shade&Kinbote in PF and "Jekyll's and Hyde's" transmutations with their unexplained difference in size ] although I usually conclude that they are never "similar", even so I still keep on trying to find their analogues!

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