Twins and the Couple: Surviving Sameness in Novels of Twin Lives

Abstract

They say truth is stranger than fiction. In any case, the same narrative problems arise in the telling of it. Let me start with the tale of the identical Bloomfield twins, William and John, who lived, worked and died together. Born three minutes apart, they died only two minutes apart, aged 61, of almost simultaneous heart-attacks. But how do you tell a story of resemblance, a story where nothing manages to drive the two apart or dialecticise the relation into an opposition between contrasting twins?