SOURCE: "Days and Nights, Novel of a Deserter," in Alfred Jarry, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 60-91.

[In the following excerpt, Stillman discusses the symbols and themes of Days and Nights: Novel of a Deserter, emphasizing the significance of the protagonist's double, or doppelgänger.]

[In Days and Nights: Novel of a Deserter] Sengle, having been drafted, loses himself in reveries of Valens, his double, to avoid the misery of life in uniform. Sengle's homoerotic, narcissistic love for his fraternal double allows him to contemplate his own image projected outside of himself: Valens is Sengle himself at a younger age, imagined by Sengle as his younger brother. Their specularity, however, is not that of the cold and immediate reflection of a mirror. It is mediated by a curvaceous and fluid space that has replaced time. By abandoning the ordinary constraints of space and time, Sengle restructures his experience and thus, in a sense, creates it and controls it. Through such timeless, absolute self-consciousness, Jarry suggests, man creates his own perfection.

Images of fluidity therefore characterize the emergency and the presence of the double. In Sengle's case the medium is hashish and the effects are hallucinatory: 'The land of hashish is in the room now, brought back by the lunar train. The air is pure glycerine, and similar to the way continents are encircled on geographical maps, Sengle and the three all have fluid halos twelve centimeters thick around their bodies." The drugged state, explicitly a superior one, is not surprisingly Sengle's normal condition. Jarry equates Sengle's hallucinations with lucidity: the recruit thus takes notes during the séance.

In "The Cyanic Dream," the novel's third of five books, Sengle stands opposite the common man with day-vision who sees only the known. The book's first chapter alludes to Confessions of an Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy, as does the chapter "Consul Romanus" of Book II, "Book of My Brother." In the opiate dream of Quincy, the enunciation "Consul Romanus" caused the sudden appearance of the tunic-clad Consul in the midst of an English celebration one thousand years after the Roman Empire's zenith. Sengle compares Valens to the Consul. The ability to live simultaneously two moments separated in time clearly intrigues Sengle: to do so is to "authentically experience a moment of eternity, of all eternity, since it has no individual moments."

Hoping to be discharged from the army, Sengle manages to take a strong dose of caffeine and be admitted to the military hospital, where he hallucinates that he ate silver nitrate crystals: "The cyanic blue radiated from his stomach to his skin like a black sun toward the circumference of the sky; his cold feet and hands harbored the heraldic azur. . . . " The hospital, naturally, became a favorite hideaway. In an untitled text related to the novel, Jarry explains, "I am in the hospital, therefore a poet." In Sengle's opinion, the hospital is the army's gayest building: no uniforms and freely dispensed drugs. It is appropriate, then, that the hashish séance ("Les Propos des Assassins," Book V, chap. 4) takes place in the office of Nosocome, the hospital resident who befriends Sengle. The hallucinations and the irrational dialogue of the participants create an eternal present—"we shall never go beyond today"—in which two distinct, even contradictory experiences may occur at the same time: one can be in the shade and the light or in fire and water. Time and space undergo a "cinematographic accommodation" to their surroundings.

Although there is no specific reference to Valens in the "Propos," the concept of the double is manifest in several ways. First, the German philosopher Herreb (whose name resembles a German transposition of "Monsieur Eb," Ubu's predecessor), one of the "Assassins"—"assassin" and "hashish" derive from the same Arabic word—becomes "the man of the woods" under the effects of the drug, and proceeds to cut the others lengthwise in two (a motif repeated in Caesar-Antichrist and in Ubu Enchained). Second, by naming another participant Pyast—the real name of the Polish royal family—Jarry meant to situate the dialogue outside of measurable time and space and inside the Ubuesque world of Poland, in other words Nowhere ("Nulle Part"). Third, the imagery of the "Propos" is replete with Jarry's symbols of homosexuality, many of which were also incorporated into Haldernablou. The foot has indirect sexual significance since it is associated with walking, Jarry's metaphor for pederasty, and one used several times in the "Propos." He compares the agitated "Assassins" to Wandering Jews, condemned to walk without rest until Judgment Day.

The dense meshwork of such imagery in the "Propos" intertwines many of Jarry's preferred symbols. Sengle, when approached by Herreb brandishing a wooden beam, reacts by raising his arms to eye level and projecting his spread fingers toward his adversary's eyes. The effect is immediate: Herreb's outcry of being penetrated by green nails combines two images associated with creative phallic sexuality. The chameleon (a literary symbol representing Léon-Paul Fargue in Haldernablou) and especially its eyes are characterized as green. Throughout Jarry's oeuvre green and greenish tints symbolize sex, death, and creation: "And the caresses of his hands on my white satiny skin permitted the green serpents of the spasms to convulse." Nails, too, symbolize death: those who undergo homosexual death have their eyes nailed shut. Herreb notably ends up with a nail in his foot; a walking nail had been equated to a corn that could be cured by a horizontal bar, reminiscent of the bâton-à-physique. Indeed, it is the bâton or walking-stick that, like a magic wand, renders Herreb "man of the woods." The "cure" made possible by the potent object, it would seem, is the autotransformation into one's double. The fact that the double is depicted here as "the man of the woods" reconfirms the notion suggested, for example, by instinctual Ubu or the Indian (in The Supermale) that this process corresponds to a regressive movement toward a more primitive stage of psychosexual development.

Another commanding image (further developed in The Supermale), the locomotive, epitomizes Jarry's interest in mechanization. Such reduction of intense emotions to pure physical force accounts for his portrayal of women as dolls whose speech is merely "wails of the thorax" (Haldernablou), and his description of people as "mannequins" (Haldernablou). He develops this motif with Ubu's henchmen, the half-human Palotins, with the "inorganic siren" of the phonograph, and finally with the locomotive. In the "Propos," Nosocome simulates the rhythmic noise of a train by jumping in place. Sengle's imaginary train brings back the "land of hashish." Because of undischarged sexual tension, machines—especially the phonograph and the train—have the ability to hypnotize. The metallic cruelty and inflexibility of the phallic, penetrating train, combined with its power to entrance, establish its identity with the double. This is the hostile component of narcissism projected upon the double; it endows him with terrifying and anguishing aspects. Significantly, after the conclusion of the séance, Sengle composes a letter to Valens.

Ill-adapted to army routine, he is thus a "deserter" in more than one sense of the term: his desertion is military, narcotic, and psychological. While his regiment—with Sengle present—practiced their maneuvers, "Sengle was completely asleep and was walking in the meadow for himself alone." Jarry's disdain for the military (which he felt demanded blind obedience and constant submission, and worst of all, suppressed intelligence in favor of brute force) was based on firsthand experience. In spite of and because of the intolerable monotony and conformity of army life, the "hypersensitive" Sengle felt obliged to follow the "noble instinct .. . the instinct to keep one's self intact and to maintain one's individuality impenetrable to exterior forces." Sengle escaped the "brutalizing degradation" of the military by means of his dreams. After learning the date of his conscription—"Sengle, free, is condemned to death, and he knows the date"—Sengle dreams of a walk he took with Valens during which he felt as if he had smoked hashish:

His body walked beneath the trees, material and well articulated; and something unidentifiably fluid flew above, as if a cloud had been an icy mirror, and it must have been the astral being; and something more tenuous was shifting more toward the sky three hundred meters away, perhaps the soul, and an imperceptible string linked the two kites.

"My brother," he said to Valens, "do not touch me, because the string will get caught in the trees [ . . . ] and it seems to me that if that happened, I would die."

And he had read, in a Chinese book, an ethnology of a people foreign to China, whose heads could fly up to the trees to seize their prey, connected by the unwinding of a red ball of string, and then return to fit into their bloody collars. But should a certain wind blow, the cord would break and the head would fly back overseas.

This vision of his astral self attached tenuously to his terrestrial self and the image of his head detached from his body, both under the aegis of a stroll in the woods with Valens, translates an obsession with the double. The comparison of the experience to a drugged state marks it as exceptional. The "astral body" holds a special fascination for Jarry, who adopted the tripartite theory of man expounded by occultists. The fact that it fluidly and freely traverses space glorifies the spatial at the expense of the temporal: past and future need no longer be distinct. Sengle's psychic dissociation becomes concrete in the image of his two bodies, his detached head, and his projection of Valens, his powerful, immortal double. The process of doubling in Days and Nights negates Sengle's weakness and spatializes an identity not subject to the flux of reality: Valens's name denotes "strength." Valens permits Sengle to escape the crushing reality of societal conventions, substituting a coherent and fulfilling existence in the place of psychosocial persecution. It is a question of transvaluation between Sengle and his double in a spatial modality.

Sengle's creation of Valens is concomitant with a subversion of time, specifically the opposition between day and night, whence the novel's title which combines the elements of time and desertion. The contrast between solar and lunar hours suffers a definitive destruction. Not only does day become night and night day, but the day and night of Sengle's imagination utterly confuse all standard notions of chronology. The novel opens with events that occur during the night: Sengle's efforts to achieve absolute fatigue through heterosexual sex in order to fail his army physical; the chapter's title is, however, "First Day." The second chapter's title, "First Night," is equally perplexing since Sengle's physical for the draft board must have taken place during the day. Thus, for Sengle, "normal" day and night are reversed. In addition, Sengle dreams during the day—to escape reality—and functions lucidly at night. His dreams become his only reality. The third chapter, "Other Day," plays with these new standards, creating the "day of Sengle's night," that is, the period when Sengle dreams lucidly, as he did during the soldiers' maneuvers. "Dream" time neutralizes the distinction between day and night, past and future: Sengle

did not at all distinguish his thoughts from his acts nor his dream from his waking state; and perfecting the Leibnizian definition, that perception is true hallucination, he did not see why one could not say: hallucination is a false perception, or more exactly: feeble, or entirely better: foreseen (remembered sometimes, which is the same thing). And he especially thought that there are only hallucinations, or only perceptions, and that there are neither nights nor days (despite the title of this book, which is why it was chosen), and that life is continuous. . . .

In exchange for his assurance of allayed anxiety and escape from the rigors of the uniform, Valens controls Sengle. One of the cardinal rules of the double requires that no physical contact taint his purity. The love Sengle denies women—associated with impure sexuality—is channeled into platonic friendship with Valens, the image of himself: "the word Adelphism would be more just and less medical than uranism, despite its exact sidereal etymology. Sengle, not sensual, was capable only of friendship." Sengle prides himself on his absolute chastity. Evidently, his sexual exploits with women are incommensurable with homosexual activity. Probity in masculine relations defines his chastity.

Sengle suffers the consequences when he attempts to materialize his double and to become one with him. He "loses his head," so to speak, and the metaphor of the head/kite becomes all too real. Insanity is the penalty for trying to bring the pure, continuous world of the spirit into the discontinuous material world: Sengle could not become his double without first destroying him. Sengle's effort to capture Valens in a plaster head and to kiss the mouth-become-flesh leads only to a double fratricide. The plaster fell off the wall, hitting Sengle violently on the head and causing permanent damage: Sengle "groped in the dark night toward his missing Self." "He destroyed Valens and Valens destroyed him. His dream is ruined forever. The sexuality that he rejected and that he did not know how to harness would henceforth render it impossible, no longer by dominating his senses, but the reverse, by the outrageousness of imagination" [Noël Arnaud, Alfred Jarry, d'Ubu roi au Docteur Faustroll 1974]. Days and nights must also undergo further conflation. Sengle enters the "night of his night," that is when his dreams forfeit their lucidity.

The relationship of Sengle and Valens is parodied by an infratext, "Amber," a prose piece written by Officer Vensuet, where erotico-symbolic discourse caricatures the experience of doubling. In this case, the plight of two lesbian sisters adrift in a violent sea offers useful insights into Jarry's manipulation of the double. Separated by their father's trident, Phoebe (one of the sea-nymphs) is imprisoned on an island surrounded by glass walls, while Cymodocé (her sister) is thrown into the deep, suspended by her hair.

The story takes the form of a letter written by island-bound Phoebe to Cymodocé. She seals her letter in an amphora that a sea-eagle will carry off. The letter in the amphora, the lesbian sister on the walled island, and the amber formed deep within a whale's barrel-shaped body (comparable to Ubu's) respectively symbolize—and establish equivalence among—the written word, the double, and a mysterious, precious substance. All three (Word, Double, Jewel) eventually emerge from confinement. The double is also linked to the written word in the form of an inscription on the glass wall. The message addresses someone who "passionately kisses the Double through the glass," and for whom "the glass comes alive at one point and becomes a genital, and the being and the image make love through the wall. . . . "

Throughout the text tension exists between images of sexuality and of the desire for sublimation, that is the substitution of a nonsexual goal for a sexual one. This process of desexualization of libidinal energy is recognizable in the symbol of the soaring eagle. The bird's flight expresses the "dynamic desire of elevation and of sublimation." Winged flight is associated with air, "celestial substance par excellence," and symbolizes a "psychic aspiration toward purity" [Gilbert Durand, Structures anthropologiques de l' imaginaire, 1969]. The link between sublimation and writing is significant; an eagle carries off the inscribed story. The upward movement of the bird and the buoyancy of the amphora also characterize Phoebe (specifically in her desire to escape from the island and to reunite with her sister) and the jewel offered by the whale to the sea's surface.

Eventually, the floating body of Phoebe, recovered by her sister, is equated metaphorically to rare, buoyant ambergris issuing from intestinal secretions of sperm-whales (not unlike merdre from the gidouille). This is an appropriate symbol of the double emerging from the depths of a violated Self, and creating a sacred domain of irrational space, represented in the Lieutenant's "Prose" by ovoid shapes (turtle eggs, ship's hull, glass-walled island, vase, belly, amphora) associated with menacing—female—aquatic depths.

The thematics of the island, as illustrated in this tale of sapphic desire, is important because it underscores the homosexual structures of the narcissistic libido at work in the novel. For psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, "the island, surrounded on all sides, from which there is no evasion, represents the absolute anal mastery (utilized to defensive ends) that the subject exercises on the object tightly restrained in the ring of the anal sphincter" [cited by Anne Clancier in Psychoanalyse et critique littéraire, 1973]. In Caesar-Antichrist the anal sphincter appears explicitly in the form of the heraldic emblem Orle, a character who is clearly more important than his limited role in the play might suggest. "Orle" is the subtitle of the "Heraldic Act" in which Caesar-Antichrist cedes to the reign of Ubu, and the character plays the "closed ring of a vile sphincter" opposite Caesar-Antichrist-as-Phallus.

Between this act of Caesar-Antichrist and the following, subtitled "King Ubu," the stage directions indicate that "whales appear at the sea's surface." This imagery and symbolic movement prefigure (by two years) those of "Amber" in Days and Nights. In the latter it is no longer the whales themselves that surface but the jewel fabricated, according to the text, by their love-making. It is not surprising that Orle should be transmuted into the symbol of the island which functions as an unconscious image of the anal sphincter. In the case of the lesbian sisters, the island is the resting place of the dead Micromegas, referred to as "the giant man." Phoebe loves the "dead giant of whom and on whom it is written in Ionian letters that it is astonishing to see that this large body stays stretched out in a small island." Overlaid onto the story of the sisters, the coupling of the "giant dead man" and the "small island" (the large male buried and stiff in the restricted circle) adds a decidedly anal-sadistic and masculine homosexual aspect to the creation of the precious amber.

By means of a complex series of metaphors, the island is equated to the whale, metamorphosing into a vase when its crystal wall cracks and allows sea water to enter. The oval hole in the glass, at once sharp-toothed (a switch to oral sadism) and a "wound," is likened to the blow-hole of the whale. The jagged glass cuts Phoebe, covering her belly with blood to match that covering her fingernails: trying to escape and rejoin her sister, she desperately scratches at the "terrestrial silver mirror-backing of the window on the other side of the sea."

It is clear the double is one's Other, one's image not reflected in a pool of water but on the other side of the water's surface. This implied configuration of (paradoxical) duality-in-unity explains the quadruple reference to the columns of Herakles: the island's itinerary leads it slowly toward these two pillars, the equivalent of those of the Latin Hercules, or the Jachin and Boaz columns of the Cabala. They constitute a "symbol deriving from the great myth of the Gemini" [J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, translated by Jack Sage]. This third sign of the Zodiac, the figure of all symbolic twins, has two manifestations. It is apprehended either as a fusion of opposites into "Oneness," depicted by the sphere (cf. Ubu); or as a split into conflictual or dissident opposites, represented by twoheaded Janus or triform Hecate. "Amber" is clearly under the sign of the split twin. Hecate (also a symbol of evil femininity responsible for obsession and lunacy) appears in the story in the form of a priestess dancing around the island.

The island's movement indicates the dynamic aspect of opposites rather than integration into a perfect being. The dual columns connected by a rainbow are another form of the inverted image of the double split by the water's surface. The rainbow possesses the strange power to change the sex of those who pass beneath it. In this particular form and function the columns and rainbow recall the image of the hourglass (fundamental in Les Minutes de sable mémorial), which is an avatar of the image inverted beneath the sea's surface. Because of dynamic polarity—inherent in the aspect of the Twin manifested in "Amber" (and in Days and Nights as a whole)—"the world of phenomena becomes a system of perpetual inversions, illustrated, for example, in the hour-glass which turns upon its own axis in order to maintain its inner movement: that of sand passing through the central aperture—the 'focal point' of its inversion. The Gemini, in essence a symbol of opposites is, in its dynamic aspect, then, a symbol of Inversion" [J. E. Cirlot]. The center of the rainbow supported by the two columns is identical to the focal point of the hourglass. Here the "inversion" is explicitly sexual: specifically, in the terminology of psychopathology, "inversion" signifies homosexuality. Indeed, Cymodocé watches the island advance toward her, suspended by her greenish tresses from a point between the two columns of Herakles. Homosexuality operates on two levels in the text: first, the tale literally recounts the mutual love of two members of the same sex; second, this relationship refers to symbolic twinship or doubling of the self.

As long as he is permitted to exist independently, Valens functions as a friend and provides Sengle (whose name derives from "singulum: without having left me all alone") with an escape from solitude. By creating his powerful companion, Sengle negates the boredom and emptiness of daily life. In an effort to "preserve" his Self, he paradoxically expands himself, goes beyond himself, and engenders a tragicomic, hyperbolic world of "lucid delirium." Sengle, however, does not content himself with that world and pays the consequences. He loses his Self (the mouth of Valens's mask drinks his soul, in a manner similar to the exchange of being between the women in Absolute Love) and thereby his lucidity, a loss which for Jarry was analogous to death. Shattering the barrier separating the fragments of the self results only in permanent damage since love of the double expresses the impossible desire to unite one's fragmented self. Ultimately, Jarry's philosophy presumes that the psyche can never exist as a coherent entity.

Countless primitive societies, folklore, and modern superstitions posit the soul as the equivalent of a second body or alter ego (or mirror-image). In The Double, A Psychoanalytic Study, Otto Rank describes the two main defenses against narcissism, or self-love, in the form of love of one's double, whatever its manifestations: on the one hand, "fear and revulsion before one's own image"; on the other hand (and the most common reaction) the loss of the shadow-image or mirror-image or soul. Sengle has a fear of mirrors, and when he does look into his mirror, he rereads "the story of Sisyphus." Discussing the essence of the tragic, André Green constructs two models of reversal or peripeteia. In the first, the "hero of the tragedy is fortunate, his desire seems to have a chance of being realized, he is on the side of the phallus, the possessor of power, of objects of jouissance" [The Tragic Effect, translated by Alan Sheridan, 1979]. The reversal precipitates his fall. In the second model of the tragic, the hero begins "deprived of honors and pleasure, and is a pariah in the city; the development of the tragedy will see him overcoming many difficulties, appearing to prevail over the curse impending on him. Yet, like Sisyphus, his efforts will be in vain and he will rush headlong again down the slope to disaster."

A descent into madness and suicide frequently combines with pursuit by the double who personifies narcissistic self-love, and specifically fixation in an early phase of ego development. Connected with this are two factors clearly at work in Sengle's relationship to Valens, one of which is homosexuality. Rank writes that "the homosexual love object was originally chosen with a narcissistic attitude toward one's own image" and that "the double is often identified with the brother." The other factor is the narcissistic wish to remain eternally young. Sengle's fear of aging, manifested in the novel by his creation of a brother who is forever young (Valens), expresses a "fear which is really a fear of death" [Rank]. The death of the double is thus, unconsciously, suicidal. The butterfly which in psychoanalytic terms symbolizes rebirth, further illustrates the motif of the youthful double: Valens's soul is "a large brownish blue butterfly."

After Sengle sees himself as Sisyphus, he closes the two panels of his mirror to cover his image in the third. The two outer panels are likened to wings and to hands: the connotation of this action becomes clear in The Other Alceste. . . . Butterflies endure torturous treatment in other texts, for example, in Absolute Love where a sleeping Miriam is compared to a butterfly pinned down and labelled. On a semiotic level, the first syllable of papillon ("butterfly") repeats the word pas (the second component of a negation): "Je ne veux pas . . . pas . . . papillon!" Thus, love of the double also implies pain and the negation of the self. As Rank aptly observes, the "fable of Narcissus combines the ruinous and the erotic."

Sengle and Valens present a special case of doubling. Four of Jarry's five major doubles (Ubu [Ubu Roi], Faustroll [Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician], Emmanuel God [Absolute Love], and Marcueil [The Supermale]) are "powerful": they nullify a painful existence and incarnate a powerful Other. Ubu, for example, symbolizes instinctual drives while Faustroll represents the pataphysical quest for unlimited knowledge and Emmanuel God the desire for absolute love. Marcueil fulfills the wish for inexhaustible virility unlike Sengle who alone constitutes a weak double. Rather than offer the possibility of letting the Other speak freely, Sengle exaggerates the negative magnitude of repressive reality. Officer Vensuet's parody ("Amber") of Sengle's torment accomplishes within the novel the same exaggeration as the production of Sengle himself vis-à-vis ruinous, debilitating conventions (personified by the story-writing Lieutenant).

Vensuet writes poetry as well as prose. Sengle pronounces his superior's poem "officers' verse" just as he dismissed "Amber" with the disdainful "officers' prose." Entitled "Pastorale," the poem has certain similarities to Jarry's The Beloved Object, Pastoral in One Act, and especially calls to mind the pathetic and ridiculous deformation by Monsieur Vieuxbois of his beloved's delightful song. Compare "Regardent vibrer l'air aux trilles du gazon" from "Pastorale" to "Perle son trille:/Comme il gazouille" (the Beloved Object's refrain) and "Perle son trouille/Comme il gazille!" (her suitor's deformation). Two lines from "Pastorale" also correspond to two poems in The Revenge of Night: "Rain of War" and "X" (the number 10). "Le tonnerre tombant tintamarre ses tôles" ("Pastorale") alludes to "L'ours a tonné le gong tintamarrant des fasques,/Et voici les démons dormant sous les tonnerres" ("Rain of War"); the closing line of "Pastorale" duplicates the opening line of "X": "L'ivoire courbé pair au front bas des taureaux." These intertextual references suggest humiliation and fear and link them to the active, dangerous phallus. They also make clear the importance of an apparently insignificant portion of the novel.

Vensuet, subsequent to his poetry reading, tries to persuade Sengle of his own literary acumen. He professes admiration for Pierre Loti's Le Livre de la pitié et de la mort. In a chapter of Faustroll dedicated to Loti, Jarry demolishes—linguistically and ideologically—Loti's text. Sengle launches into a long description and defense of pantomime; Vensuet feigns comprehension. Sengle flees this mediocre mind, compared to "an old lady," who knows "art history and Latin quotations and vague ideas." The vignette "Visiting the Old Lady" in Love Goes Visiting, makes clear that Sengle considered the Lieutenant vulgar and grotesque.

Both the poem and the prose piece function in the same way. They incorporate into the fabric of the novel a hyperbolic negative value system of weakness, psychic and physical pain, mediocrity, vulgarity, pretension, and so forth, manifested in the super-symbol of military authority so detested by Jarry. In stark opposition—stylistic and semantic—stands "Hashish Rap Session," written in dialogue and highly theatrical. Jean Gillibert theorizes (citing Freud) that when one has suffered unbearably, one can no longer sublimate [Gillibert, "La travestissement: Jean Genêt," cited by Anne Clancier]. The only way to hang on, the life-saver, is to "theatricalize" one's life. Another game must be substituted for the "game of the world": theatricality. During the hashish séance, the voice of the Other speaks unfettered. This dramatic episode signals the passage from Sengle to Valens, whose name connotes power, strength, value, and courage. Valens, then, plays the same role—a double of power—for Sengle as Ubu, Faustroll, Emmanuel God, and Marcueil fulfill for Jarry, and, in a general sense, the same role as the act of writing itself. Significantly, during the rap session, Sengle takes notes, that is, he is the scribe for the experience of provoked hallucination, of the theatricalized emergence of the Other.