Re-creating the doppelganger in Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Abstract

Peter Ackroyd in his 2008 novel The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein establishes a freeplay intertextual world through adopting Mary Shelley’s canonical novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) as his palimpsest where he reworks the tradition of the doppelganger (evil twin) whose depiction has its roots in the Gothic. In Ackroyd’s version, the doppelganger changes into the inventive incarnation of the repressed desires of his pivotal character, Victor Frankenstein, and the novelist is able to offer his “genuine” narrative of a postmodernist serial murderer gothic—this time given in the form of a casebook that psychologically disturbed Victor keeps. In The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, Ackroyd manages to give way to a new weltanschauung satisfying the intellectual needs of the twenty-first century by problematizing the relationship between the real and the hallucinatory, and also between the author and the text to question the role of the author as the creator.

Keywords

• Ackroyd
• the doppelganger
• Gothic-postmodernism
• intertextuality

Peter Ackroyd’un Victor Frankenstein’in Vaka Defteri Adlı Romanında doppelganger

Öz

İngiliz çağdaş romancılarından Peter Ackroyd, Victor Frankenstein’in Vaka Defteri (2008) adlı eserinde, Mary Shelley’nin 1818’de yazdığı ve artık kanon olarak kabul edilen İngilizce adıyla Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus romanını yeniden kaleme alarak gotik eserlerde karşımıza çıkan kötücül ikiz karakterler (doppelganger) yaratma geleneğine yeni bir yorum getirmiştir. Bu kötücül ikiz, Ackroyd’un eserinde roman kahramanı olan Victor Frankenstein’ın bastırılmış dürtülerinin bir dışa vurumu olarak kendisini gösterir. Psikolojik sorunları olan kahramanının yaşadıklarının anlatıldığı bir vaka defteri olarak sunulan bu eserinde romancı, post-modern döneme ait gotik cinayet romanı örneği sunmaktadır. Bu yönüyle, Ackroyd’un romanı gerçek ile kurmaca arasındaki ilişkiyi sorunsallaştırması bakımından günümüz okurunun beklentilerini karşılayan ve bilinen bir öykünün yeniden yorumlanması da olsa “özgün” kabul edebileceğimiz bir eserdir.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Ackroyd
• doppelganger
• Gotik-postmodernizm
• metinlerarasılık

Kaynakça

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