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In a fatal hour Robert Wringhim, the protagonist of James Hogg's novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), meets a stranger who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to himself. Not only to himself: ‘I observed several times, when we were speaking of certain divines and their tenets, that his face assumed something of the appearance of theirs; and it struck me, that by setting his features into the mould of other people's, he entered at once into their conceptions and feelings’. The stranger, who calls himself Gil-Martin, explains the ‘cameleon art […] of changing [his] appearance’:
‘My countenance changes with my studies and sensations,’ said he. ‘It is a natural peculiarity in me, over which I have not full control. If I contemplate a man's features seriously, mine own gradually assume the very same appearance and character. And what is more, by contemplating a face minutely, I not only attain the same likeness, but, with the likeness, I attain the very same ideas as well as the same mode of arranging them, so that, you see, by looking at a person attentively, I by degrees assume his likeness, and by assuming his likeness I attain to the possession of his most secret thoughts.’
Such a virtuoso pitch of observation assumes ‘likeness’ in order to empty it: draining the other person's interiority, rendering him as a set of surface effects, erasing his integrity and uniqueness.
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