ABSTRACT
A text is most precisely and satisfyingly collaborative if it is composed by two writers who admit the act by placing both of their names on the title page. A double signature confers enormous interpretive freedom: it permits the reader to see the act of collaboration shadowing every word in the text. It is difficult to speak about double entendre, that portal through which sexuality mercurially enters words, without turning to a psychoanalytic vocabulary. This chapter deviate from this poststructuralist reading, crudely sketched, because it believe that double authorship attacks not primarily our dogmas of literary property, but of sexual propriety. It describes double writing as an intercourse; it is also a scene of analysis, in which the active collaborator hypnotizes his passive mate. This dynamic appears most prominently in The Waste Land; but many other double writers, searching for the power to speak, share with the hysteric a primary alienation from language.
