This is Part 2 of a two-part article. Read Part 1 here.

As a brief exercise in automultiplication, imagine that you’re on a boat. From there you can look out the portholes toward the sea and the shores of countries that go passing by. The first mariner and the second mariner won’t see exactly the same thing. The boat, although it has a much broader view than they do, still won’t enjoy the view as seen from the shore. So there’s a choice. You can adhere to your view as first mariner, or you can imagine yourself as the second mariner (another animal or plant), as the captain (a stranger drinking martinis in her cabin), as the boat (God), even as the shore (dark matter). You can transcend your own limited and claustrophobic point of view.

In theology, to “transcend” means to go beyond the self, beyond mere survival and the placation of instincts. It is something that many do naturally, curious about the worlds beyond themselves. Religion, throughout history, has helped humans to avoid getting stuck in their own self narratives and acknowledge larger truths. The question of how to transcend isn’t a novel one, but perhaps it is a more pressing one now that God is possibly moribund, silent, or just another heteronym.

Reading is an especially beautiful form of self-transcendence and automultiplication. It isn’t the only one. I suspect that many translators do what they do partly to be absorbed into somebody else, to get out of their own heads. Writing, at its best moments, also allows one to enter into this state of absorption, this imagination that involves more than the burning of one’s own mental fuel. Absorption doesn’t mean a further penetration into the “self”—which proves elusive anyway, a chimera made of impressions about and by others—but involves becoming those others. It is a liquidity of movement, a pulsation, an unloosening, an identification with Q or R or S. A freedom.

“Getting stuck” is the opposite of absorption. It occurs when the self lays traps for its own being, when it cheats itself out of a full and meaningful inquiry into its own definition and avoids the process of imagining other points of view. A trap is a shortcut through a complex reality, a tasty piece of cheese placed on the block to distract the “I” from creating other beings and symbols. Hacerse trampas in Spanish preserves this dual meaning, since “hacer trampa” means to cheat and “hacerse trampas” means to set traps for oneself, that is, to engage in self-deception. (See the interview with Gastón Gómez Lasa in Iván Jaksic’s La vocación filosófica, Universidad Diego Portales, 2021.)

Perhaps the most common trap of all is to simplify the infinite possibilities of the universe to a single self, to describe one self rather than be absorbed into many selves. It is impossible not to set some kind of trap, to think within some kind of boundaries. And of course to some extent (in “real life”) we are confined to the possibilities and limits of our pasts and physical bodies. But it is also true that we impose so many false snares, from which we can release ourselves to be more free.

A final question, perhaps the essential one: what do invented fictional bodies have to do with the many bodies in the real community? Can imagining bodies lead one to ignore the real bodies that surround one, to get swept up into created worlds and forget about real people? Didn’t Pessoa suffer from anguish and alienation, isn’t this a path to unhappiness? Possibly so, as possibly with autofiction. As possibly with living: this is a risk. But ideally it is possible to live a life of automultiplication in which one lives through many bodies in a community, multiplying in order to engage with the surroundings more richly and fully. Not as one self now, but as many, entering the fertile soil of reality as the seeds of so many different plants.

Automultiplication, the creation of a multiple self, ultimately creates a new kind of agency within not just personal but universal History. It challenges the idea of a single linear history (parallel to a single line through the autobiography in a life), to favor a proliferation of stories, fragmented, disjointed, episodic, multiple. Time is no longer a single bulky and monolithic unit. As José Santos-Herceg puts it in his book Conflicto de representaciones: América Latina como lugar para la filosofía (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013):

The continuity of historical development understood as a succession of periods supposes the existence of a permanent and unique subject that sustains the process and upholds changes. Likewise, a ‘historical subject’ would be one who exists through successive ‘periods’, giving them ‘continuity’. One suspects that this subject of history is an invention-imposition: that in fact there is a plurality of historical subjects, and that the line of continuity therefore does not exist. There is only a multiplicity of developments, a plurality of parallel histories, interlaced. (…) History is conjugated in the plural.

History, both personal and universal, is after all the narrativization of past events, as autofiction writers know well. Automultiplication proceeds along the same lines. It is limiting and sometimes even damaging to take a single account as truth, within a community of individuals (my self exists alongside yours), but it is also limiting and damaging to do so within one’s own experience (my self contains many selves).

The possibilities for critical work grow more exciting when viewed in the plural. In his essay “Where to Begin?”, Roland Barthes writes that behind structuralist thought was not the search for “truth” but rather the opposite, the desire to “dissipate, extend, multiply, mobilize the initial contents”. The practice of inventing alternate lives and personalities for ourselves is often pathologized or seen as destabilizing instead of liberating, but why should this be so? Why not invent more beings, why not make art from their voices, why not create a rich and interconnected world of the imagination into which one is taken up, entering other bodies, an abundance in conversation with the abundance of existence itself? Why not make today the start of a proliferating life?

You can see part 1 of this essay here.