ABSTRACT
In Seeing Red (2012/2016), the fourth novel by Chilean writer Lina Meruane, the protagonist suffers from an ocular trauma which has left her in a state of blindness. Lucina herself describes this new condition of visual impairment in terms of an alter ego or a dual status that facilitates the simultaneous experience of being asleep and awake, and which triggers the dynamics of multiple splittings in the novel. The aim of this chapter is to analyze how Seeing Red becomes a literary Doppelgänger which fluctuates between the conventions of autoficción and those of Gothic writings, at the same time that the protagonist struggles between vulnerability and ferocity. The motif of the double permeates the family sphere, love relationships, and the experience of ethnic, linguistic, and national crises represented in a human being torn between Manhattan and Santiago de Chile; between contemporary, anglophone violence and a violence of the past, articulated in a Spanish language that is not entirely her own. Meruane uses the motif of the double as well as Gothic aesthetics to explore the uncanny, the monstrosity, the loneliness of ill people and, at the same time, articulates forms of resistance in the face of infantilizing narratives associated with illness or mestizaje/hybridity. The cultural doublings in the novel are rooted in the experience of exile and reinforce a post-memory type of writing.
