Freud’s uncanny

WHAT FOLLOWS is a piece I wrote last year about Sigmund Freud and the uncanny. It coincided with the 100th anniversary of the great psychoanalyst’s essay on the subject.

He almost apologised for giving his views on the concept, but that he did indicates its importance in thinking and writing. Especially the latter; the uncanny as a concept is used not just by Gothic storytellers and Hollywood scriptwriters. It’s fundamental to all great literature, which is written, as literary sages have averred, in foreign languages that somehow or other we understand. The uncanny is itself uncanny–impossible to pin down. But here’s my piece.

Freud’s Uncanny

IN THE European autumn a century ago, “Prof. Dr. Freud”, as the nameplate on his apartment in Vienna identifies him, published a study that tried to understand a key attribute of the greatest literature. Fewer than 40 pages long (in the Penguin Modern Classics edition), he called the essay The Uncanny. From the outset, he wasn’t sure he should be writing it. Or, indeed, what he was saying. Rarely did psychoanalysts feel compelled to investigate “aesthetics”, he began, especially if the concept applied to feelings. His contribution would be “modest”, he wrote, and present its readers with “no claim to priority”.

Freud doesn’t specifically say why he’s bothering to investigate the uncanny, other than to write that there was “virtually nothing” on it in aesthetical studies. So here is his shot at it, he seems to be saying. In Freud’s typically opinionated way, The Uncanny meanders around and about a concept of immense scope. Reading it, one imagines that it can’t really be Freud, or that he’s dabbling in something he has only a passing interest in. That perhaps he shouldn’t really be writing about the uncanny at all. The essay has attracted comments and criticism ever since.

The uncanny was ever controversial, impossible to pin down. Said to have originated in Scotland and northern England, the concept is supposed to do with the “supernatural or occult”, says the Shorter Oxford. It could be “baleful”, “malignant”, “malicious” even. Only in a fifth category of definition does the uncanny’s popular notion appear; it’s related to the “[s]eemingly supernatural; uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar, weird […]”. Writing in German, of course, Freud tied the concept to an equivalent in his native language, das Unheimliche, which is best described as “unhomely”, the opposite of das Heimliche or that which is familiar to us, the domestic, the comfortable. In seven dense pages, the analyst of psyches looks at the etymology of das Heimliche and its supposed antonym, concluding that they are, in a sense, one and the same.

Research begins by defining terms, but you wonder why Freud spent so many words worrying over what might be described in a simple way. Then he comes out with his principal idea: the uncanny “applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open”.

Without wanting to upset Freud scholars, repression and the unconscious were the great man’s big shticks, and he understood almost everything about us by referring to them. (He wrote in The Uncanny that the negative prefix un was an “indicator of repression”.) They were the walking poles that helped him to trek to the mind’s deepest recesses. The uncanny just had to originate in the unconscious.

Thirteen years before Freud wrote The Uncanny, however, the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch contributed a pioneering paper on the phenomenon that was far more down-to-earth. For Jentsch, the uncanny caused those who experienced it a “lack of orientation”. They weren’t “at home” and “at ease”. People felt it at different times in different ways and to different degrees. They experienced what he called “psychical uncertainties”. Wax models of humans in semi-darkness were uncanny, as were machines that could “blow trumpets, dance and so forth”. Jentsch made no reference to the uncanny’s unconscious sources. For him, experiences in the here and now provoked uncanny feelings.

But it’s Jentsch’s views on the uncanny’s effects on fiction that remain especially valuable. While in real life we don’t like “emotional blows”, he said, in books and at the theatre “we gladly let ourselves be influenced in this way […]”. The “powerful excitements” they induce “awake [sic] in us a strong feeling for life […]”. Even if Jentsch did not spell it out, I take this to mean that the uncanny renews us, in short, reminding us that real, down-to-earth life—canny life, which we retreat to after experiencing its often frightening opposite—is worth living and can be enjoyable.

Being fairly dismissive of Jentsch’s paper—it did not venture beyond “relating the uncanny to the novel and the unfamiliar […]”— Freud attempted in 1919 to shopping-list the phenomenon. Coincidences were uncanny; repetition of events, too. Superstition about an afterlife and the effects caused by the “residual traces” of animistic ideas that modern man should have left far behind also caused the uncanny. Severed hands and limbs were uncanny, as were ghosts, revenants, spirits and anything to do with death and dead bodies. People were “as unreceptive as ever” to the idea of their mortality. He cast his net widely.

But, once again, it was how the uncanny affected creative writing that is of most importance to readers and writers. If his attempts to define the uncanny were at best theoretical, at worst tentative, Freud was adamant about its importance to writers. They, he said, had “many opportunities to achieve uncanny effects that are absent in real life”. The uncanny in fiction was different from its real-life counterpart because of the “validity” of readers’ imaginations, which tended to exempt made-up narratives from reality-testing. Writers were able to intensify the uncanny “far beyond what is feasible in normal experience […]”, he wrote. Uncanny literature betrayed us to superstition, those who penned it promising “everyday reality” then going beyond it.

And there, apart from shorter commentaries, the uncanny rested for 84 years. Then in 2003, British writer and academic Nicholas Royle ran a scalpel over it, dissecting the affect in 328 entertaining yet scholarly pages. These days, Royle is Reader in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School, part of Manchester Metropolitan University. He has written seven novels, two novellas and several volumes of short fiction, says a bio. His first interest is, you’ve guessed it, the uncanny. Nightjar Press is his own small publishing outfit. (Twice a week he plays football, and is always looking for players, he says.) Cheekily, but probably also respectfully—you’d have to ask him—he entitled his monograph The uncanny, with a lower-case “u”.

On page seven, he begins lambasting Freud. The psychoanalyst’s apology for writing about the uncanny is itself uncanny, he posits. Freud, in this instance, “has found himself in an unfamiliar place or [is] someone who, apparently without quite knowing why, has chosen to venture into such a place”. Freud’s essay, Royle claims, fails “to conform to its own specified principles or methodological procedures […]”. It’s an extraordinary text for what it doesn’t say as well as what it says. The Uncanny is uncanny.

The phenomenon can’t be “nailed down, collated, taxonomized”, says Royle. One uncanny thing leads to another. Supporting Jentsch, Royle writes that the phenomenon “involves feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of who one is and what is being experienced”.

But Royle’s biggest contribution to understanding the uncanny are several chapters about its effects on the arts. He proposes an idea quite beyond the Jentsch-Freudian notion that writers use it only to gull us. Co-opting the esteemed American academic and critic Harold Bloom, Royle argues that great works of literature have an uncanny quality. They are held in the highest regard—become members of literature’s canon—for the same reason. They’re written in a “foreign yet strangely recognizable language” and exude an elusive attribute that we are unable to define.

In The Western Canon, Bloom argues, for instance, that Kafka’s A Country Doctor has “something close to daemonic force […] and reminds us that the authentically uncanny always achieves canonical status”. Bloom says that great literature has a “strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies”.

But a fascinating question arises? Is literature uncanny and therefore canonical only because of its idiosyncrasies? Does idiosyncrasy—blatant or subtle—equal uncanniness? All fiction is peculiar to its author, of course. So is it degrees of peculiarity that count? The more singularity of style you expose on the page the more uncanny—and therefore canonical—your texts become?

They’re notions that I believe are worth exploring. After researching recently W. G. Sebald’s use of the uncanny, I partly agree that idiosyncrasy equals uncanniness. Forty-two pages into Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for instance, we’re confronted by this strange description of the manager of the Central Station, a trading post in the heart of Africa.

When he went home on leave he rioted on a large scale—pompously. Jack ashore—with a difference— in externals only. This one could gather from his casual talk. He originated nothing, he could keep the routine going—that’s all. But he was great. He was great by this little thing that it was impossible to tell what could control such a man. He never gave the secret away. Perhaps there was nothing within him.

Conrad’s narrator Marlow has already noted that the manager was a man of “ordinary build” and “commonplace” in features, manners and voice. He had “usual blue” eyes, and possessed a faint “stealthy” smile that got flashed at the end of his speeches “like a seal applied […] to make the meaning of the commonest phrase appear absolutely inscrutable”. (Inscrutable. No other word better signals Conrad’s pursuit of the uncanny. As we know, he drew it often from his vocab kit.) Within minutes, it seems, the manager is complaining to Marlow, whose vessel is wrecked, about a “very grave” situation. There were rumours that Mr Kurtz, his best agent and chief of an important upriver station, was ill, the station in “jeopardy”. The mysteries compound, the reader’s discombobulation increases, and it is the contrast of these half-truths and uncertainties with the weirdness of the manager’s adumbrated on-leave behaviour that potentiates the text’s uncanniness. And we’ve all felt the uncanny relief on learning that Mr Kurtz “he dead”.

Or this.

Near bronze from anear near gold from afar they chinked their clinking glasses all, brighteyed and gallant, before bronze Lydia’s tempting last rose of summer, rose of Castille. First lid, De, Cow, Ker, Doll, a fifth: Lidwell, Si Dedalus, Bob Cowley, Kernan and Big Ben Dollard.

Yes, Ulysses, of course. Intensive idiosyncrasy, peculiarity that we take in our stride, that stands simultaneously within and without a context.

Bloom’s canon is enormous, of course, and you could probably argue that there’s not a lot of uncanniness in Kipling’s and Maugham’s stories. They’re matter-of-fact narratives with beginnings, middles and ends, just ripping yarns. Ditto the four Evelyn Waugh books Bloom cites. (In Bloom’s canon, Waugh’s works include Scoop and Put Out More Flags. Isn’t the Sword of Honour trilogy and its romance and lack of action amid action stranger, more idiosyncratic?) Oodles of other novels by Hardy, Forster, Durrell and so on that Bloom names appear, on the face of it, to lack weirdness. All of us can see the peculiarities in Beckett and Harold Pinter, and Joe Orton’s plays define laugh-out-loud idiosyncrasy. (Erpingham quizzes Chief Redcoat Riley about maintenance problems at the holiday camp. Has he removed whatever was causing the “disturbance” in the paddling pool? asks Erpingham. Yes, says Riley: “Two ducks. Made of plastic. They were stuck together”. “Beak to beak?” ask Erpingham. “Was the joinery smutty?” The engineer had to perform “surgery”, says Riley. “Did the kiddies see?” asks Erpingham.)

Obvious peculiarity jumps right out at you. But the strangeness of many of the canonical works that Bloom cites are felt only in the days and weeks and months (and sometimes years) after we read them for the first time. We can’t explain them and the holds they have on us. We need to go back to them. They infect us with the uncanny, a literary sepsis that is persistent and enjoyable. We fail to recover from it, and like addicts we return for more by re-reading. We never crack the works’ codes, never completely understand the tongues in which they’re composed. But each time we indulge in them we recognise their uniqueness, their dissimilarity to any other written work. As a bonus secondary effect, they tell us something about ultimate truths and the nature of human beings and ourselves.

One is tempted to ask whether anyone can write anything, anyhow with any amount of weirdness to produce canonical literature. You may try, of course, but be warned. Readers and critics will decide if your work is uncanny. Or that, on the contrary, it’s unmagical from page one.

A century after Freud put down his thoughts on the uncanny, its meaning and relevance in today’s literature—in the era of fact-fiction collusion—is considerably greater than the limits inside which the psychoanalyst tentatively circumscribed the phenomenon.

© Stephen Downes 2019