Dailey applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book falls toward the end of the third chapter, which is a study of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part I, titled “Dummies and Doppelgängers.” The chapter observes how living characters like Lord Talbot appropriate, script, and puppeteer dead or zombie-like characters as theatrical doppelgängers through whom they conjecture hypothetical and future action. The lengthy paragraph that occupies most of page 99 analyzes an exchange between Talbot and the Countess of Auvergne in which the Countess attempts to entrap Talbot in her castle to end his martial domination of France. Talbot responds to her plot by declaring that she “ha[s] aught but Talbot’s shadow” (2.3.45). “I am but shadow of myself,” he tells her; “my substance is not here” (2.3.48-49). Summoning his army to rescue him, he insists again that “Talbot is but shadow of himself” and posits his men as Talbot’s “substance, sinews, arms, and strength” (2.3.62-63).Follow Alice Dailey on Twitter.
My analysis of this scene on page 99 reads Talbot’s dualism—his division of himself into “shadow” and “substance”—in the context of a series of doppelgänger moments in the play in which a character appears as doubled—as self and other-self. The Countess likens the captured Talbot to a portrait she owns of him that she describes as a “shadow”—a dead image whose inert containment in both its frame and her gallery prefigures the impotence and paralysis of the Talbot she has under arrest (2.3.35). The painting, as she describes it, is Talbot’s doppelgänger, prefiguring his death. This version of the doppelgänger is coherent with that aspect of the doppelgänger tradition in which the double (such as the picture of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s novel) is a figure of the self’s future death—of the dead or decaying self to come. However, an earlier aspect of the doppelgänger tradition is also dramatized in this scene through the appearance of Talbot’s troops, doubles for him whose arrival ensures his transcendence of death. From page 99:[In his important work on the doppelgänger, Otto] Rank writes, ‘Originally conceived of as a guardian angel, assuring immortal survival to the self, the double eventually appears as precisely the opposite, a reminder of the individual’s mortality, indeed, the announcer of death itself.’ The English soldiers who emerge at the sound of Talbot’s horn to rescue him from the Countess’s plot not only ensure Talbot’s immediate survival but represent the impossibility of subduing him through his physical person. Talbot’s troops are produced as the transcendent doppelgänger or ‘guardian angel’ by which he negates the deadly threat posed by the Countess, proving that Talbot exceeds his mortal body. While the doppelgänger represented in Talbot’s picture associates the double with death, the inverse meaning of the doppelgänger as the immortal part of the human being is also potently operable in this scene, exposing how the double can likewise be a figure of perpetuity.This is one iteration of the central claim of my book: the dead in Shakespeare’s history plays—and in the transhistorical array of technologies I set in conversation with the plays—are not simply past or still, nor are they merely sites of mourning or nostalgia. They are figures with ongoing potential—material for imagining what is yet possible and for constituting futurity and perpetuity. The argument on page 99 about the doppelgänger’s double figuration as both the dead and the immortal self is a compact iteration of a phenomenon that the book traces through an expansive range of other technologies, such as photographic double exposure, Warholian silkscreening, X-ray imagery, Derridean hauntology, the last video of David Bowie, and my child’s experiments with dress-up. If readers were to open the book to this page, they would indeed glimpse something essential about how the book thinks about how to do things with dead people.
--Marshal Zeringue
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