ABSTRACT
Just as Disney’s Peter Pan, forever young, flies from aging and time, which constitute life, his shadow takes leave of the ball and chain of the person.1
Recapturing his shadow, Peter has it sewn back to his soles, by the maternal Wendy with a needle and thread. Earlier, Peter tries in vain to “glue” back the shadow by rubbing soap on his toes. A male stereotype unaccustomed to domestic chores, Peter Pan mistakes cleansing, purging by means of soap, for affixing, conjoining. Perhaps, subconsciously, Peter wishes to be done with the shadow as much as the shadow wishes to be done with him. Therefore, the final act of coupling continues to uncouple, until Wendy the “Little Mother” and embodiment of social obligations shackles them together. Figuratively, Wendy is Peter Pan’s shadow, and vice versa, wedded for mutual needs: humans like Wendy want to fly, but the high-flying Peter cannot bear the loss of his shadow. To cast no shadow, that is, to leave no traces under the sun, lies dubiously between immortality, as the bodyless Tripitaka crosses Reach Sky River at the end of The Journey to the West,2 and death, as ghosts are shadows of the living.3 Wendy and Peter Pan are the pair of the kite flyer on the ground and the flying kite in the sky, a mere dot in the distance to each other that form a symbiotic coexistence. Theirs is the human condition: we are forever sewn at the heels with
our own shadow. To live means to be tagged along, scarcely aware of the unfamiliar familiar, the presence by oneself that is absent in one’s consciousness, in part because of the shadow’s shape-shifting elusiveness. However, the master-slave relationship of person and shadow reverses when the person becomes an empty shell to hold flights of fancy, or when the physical, bodily existence is there in order to sustain out-of-body reveries. The negligible shadow becomes a poetic trope for fleeting yet ceaseless waves of human desires. Shadows externalize the metamorphosis of internal mental constructs, the stream of consciousness in modernist terms. The psychic screen, like the sea, is never blank and still, perpetually reflecting the sky and in flux. Seemingly irrelevant and amorphous, such psychic, even archetypal images dictate human behavior, frequently projecting inner longings and anxieties in the form of doppelganger, double, alter ego, and shadow. Does an imaginary shadow in literature and art cast its own shadow? What would a shadow’s
shadow be? Shadows of a shadow; dreams within a dream; flashbacks within a flashback; desires conjured up by another desire; clicks to enter, again and again, the labyrinthine virtual reality, perhaps, virtually, our reality. Before its postmodern, self-reflexive turn to shadow’s shadow, the notion of
shadow has existed for centuries, certainly pre-dating Walt Disney. In both West and East, the centrality of human is a late invention of Enlightenment and modernity. The Old Testament decrees that God made man “in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26), that “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). Adam is thus a shadow of the divine, Eve a shadow of the patriarchal Adam. The Jewish tradition tells of the giant Golem created out of, like Adam, clay or dust, one blessed by God, the other not. Golem is likewise a shadow of Adam. More fundamentally, these living, animate creatures and their lifeless, inanimate source, dust or death, reflect each other.4 The Eastern literary tradition abounds as well with the motif of shadows. The contemporary and kindred soul to Plato, who writes of shadows on the cave wall,5 Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (369?–286? BC) allegorizes and blurs reality and dreamscape. Waking up from a butterfly dream, Zhuangzi muses that he is uncertain whether he dreamed of the butterfly or the butterfly dreamed of him. Subsequent exegeses never question the human apriority of Zhuangzi’s dream, the butterfly being Zhuangzi’s shadow. Conceivably, though, the butterfly’s dream could proceed apace, with Zhuangzi awakening within rather than from that dream. Zhuangzi, therefore, is the shadow to the shadow. After all, it is disingenuous to decenter humanity while never unseating the pre-eminence of Homo sapiens, from the ancient time to present-day animal studies. Zhuangzi would have been far more subversive to the value system had
he had a David Cronenberg fly dream or a William Burrough cockroach dream.6 An un-poetic metaphor is perhaps an oxymoron to a classical philosopher, unimaginable until the existentialists. Classical dream within a dream crumples into modernist nightmare within a nightmare when human beings are conceived not by a butterfly, but by Kafka’s vermin. Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis (Kafka 1915) does not wake up to find himself transformed into a beetle; he has been one all along, shrouded in residual human image. In the words of Jeff Goldblum playing the human-fly, mad scientist protagonist in Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986): “I am an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. Now the dream is over and the insect is awake.” Given that the pronoun “who” refers only to human beings, the grammatical glitch denotes a transgression against boundaries of species and systems, in effect dehumanizing God’s look-alikes, now insect look-alikes. Lest the charge of oneupmanship be leveled against my coinage of shadow’s shadow in view of the plethoric literature on shadow, I am in fact guilty of one-downmanship for undoing human-centric discourse. Shadow’s shadow destabilizes the relationship between person and shadow,
shifting away from the supremacy of personhood. To valorize shadow as the
originator renders the person shadowy. Indeed, humans have willingly turned their bodies into shadows or reflections of desire, such as Trekkies or Star Trek aficionados and anime fans’ cosplay (costume play or masquerade). A drastic self-erasure or -makeover is East Asian plastic surgery to simulate youth and beauty, of a singularly Caucasian strain. Despite the illusion of a new self in sci-fi and cosmetic idealizations, a cosplayer wears a mask rather than natural skin, and even a skin graft begins to age once it heals from plastic surgery. Take, for instance, cosmetic surgery perpetrated in East Asia. Reluctant to accept bodies in their natural state, patients have bones fractured and flesh slashed to reflect youth or an essentialized Caucasian facial feature and physique, which is but a shadow of actual Caucasianness. The patient then becomes the shadow of a shadow. Asia subliminally sheds the old and traditional self for a shade fairer, literal in the cosmetic transformation of piaobai (bleaching), whereby a face is the dirty linen to be whitened like the tragic Michael Jackson (1958-2009). Extreme form of fandom or seeker of the fountain of youth come to resemble religiosity-inflected trance when a possessed human mind and body lend themselves to an outside spirit that no longer exists physically, thus a shadow of a previous self. That shadow then casts its spell over a medium in trance, who is to echo an echo of a being that is now a non-being. The phenomenon of psychic shadow is theorized by Sigmund Freud (1919)
in “The Uncanny.” Parsing the etymology of the German word heimlich, Freud argues that its meaning of familiar and home-like turns, in due course, into “concealed and kept out of sight” (375), or private and secretive. Heimlich thus mirrors its antonym of unheimlich (unfamiliar, strange, uncanny). “[T]his uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (394), Freud concludes: “[T]he unheimlich is what was once heimlich, home-like, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ is the token of repression” (399). Other than the word play, Freud draws heavily from the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816). Freud analyzes Hoffmann’s obsessive, paranoid, feverish “dream-text,” equating the recurring motif of eye-gouging or blinding with castration. Hoffmann describes the beautiful automaton in the words of the protagonist Nathaniel’s disinterested friend:
She [Olimpia] would be beautiful, but that her eyes seem to have no ray of life; they always seem to lack the power of sight. Her gait is always curiously measured, as though her every movement were produced by some mechanism like clockwork. She plays and sings with the disagreeably perfect, soulless timing of a machine, and she dances similarly. Olimpia gave us a very weird feeling; we wanted nothing to do with her; we felt that she was only pretending to be a living being, and that there was something very strange about her.
