5. the Uncanny

AIT_C05.qxd 13/05/2004 14:43 Page 34 . 5. The uncanny iterature is uncanny. What does this mean? To try to define the uncanny L is immediately to encounter one of its decisive paradoxes, namely that ‘the uncanny’ has to do with a troubling of definitions, with a fundamental disturbance of what we think and feel. The uncanny has to do with a sense of strangeness, mystery or eeriness. More particularly it concerns a sense of unfamiliarity which appears at the very heart of the familiar, or else a sense of familiarity which appears at the very heart of the unfamiliar. The uncanny is not just a matter of the weird or spooky, but has to do more specifically with a disturbance of the familiar. Such a disturbance might be hinted at by way of the word ‘familiar’ itself. ‘Familiar’ goes back to the Latin familia, a family: we all have some sense of how odd families can seem (whether or not one is ‘part of the family’). The idea of ‘keeping things in the family’ or of something that ‘runs in the family’, for instance, is at once familiar and potentially secretive or strange. As an adjective ‘familiar’ means ‘well acquainted or intimate’, ‘having a thorough knowledge’, etc.; but as a noun it carries the more unsettling, supernatural sense of ‘a spirit or demon supposed to come to a person esp a witch, etc, at his or her call’ (Chambers Dictionary). We might think here, for example, of the demonic ‘familiar’ that is said to haunt Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) or, more comically, of the 12-year-old Maud’s ‘supernatural companion’ in Elizabeth Bowen’s superb novel A World of Love (1955). Here are a couple of examples of the uncanny. First: you walk into a room in a house you have never visited before and suddenly you have the sense that you have been there before and that you even seem to know what will happen next. This kind of experience has even developed its own name, déjà vu. Or, second example: you are in some public place (a shop perhaps or a train) and AIT_C05.qxd 13/05/2004 14:43 Page 35 . The uncanny 35 you catch sight of someone whom you think looks rather disturbing, and then you realize that you have caught sight of this person reflected in a window or a mirror and that this person is yourself. These examples could be described as so-called ‘real life’ occurrences. But are they in fact ‘real life’? If, as we shall see, the uncanny is especially relevant to the study of literature, it also has to do with how the ‘literary’ and the ‘real’ can seem to merge into one another. On the one hand, uncanniness could be defined as occurring when ‘real’, everyday life suddenly takes on a disturbingly ‘literary’ or ‘fictional’ quality. On the other hand, literature itself could be defined as the discourse of the uncanny: literature is the kind of writing which most persistently and most provocatively engages with the uncanny aspects of experience, thought and feeling. In some ways this is in keeping with the sort of conception of literature theorized by the Russian formalists of the early twentieth century, especially Viktor Shklovsky. Literature, for the Russian formalists, has to do with defamiliarization (ostranenie): it makes the familiar strange, it challenges our beliefs and assumptions about the world and about the nature of ‘reality’. Bertolt Brecht’s argument that theatre should produce ‘alienation effects’ is an obvious analogy here. For Brecht, no actor is supposed to identify completely with the character he or she plays. Likewise the spectator is encouraged to feel dissociated, uneasy, alienated. In accordance with this, Brecht’s concern is to demonstrate that the ‘real’ is not something that is simply a given: it is not something definite and immutable, but is constructed through human perception, language, beliefs and assumptions, and consequently it is something that can be changed. In Brechtian terms, the alienating or defamiliarizing power of drama – and art and literaturemore generally – lies in its capacity to transform us and the world around us. In this chapter we shall argue that these ideas about the power of art to disturb, defamiliarize or shake our beliefs and assumptions are intimately bound up with the uncanny. The uncanny – in particular as first elaborated by Freud, in his essay of that title (Freud 1985b) – is central to any description of the literary. The uncanny has to do with making things uncertain: it has to do with the sense that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity, that they may challenge all rationality and logic. Nevertheless, it is possible to suggest a few forms that the uncanny takes: 1. Repetition. For example, strange repetition of a feeling, situation, event or character. Two obvious examples of the uncanny, in this respect, would be the experience of déjà vu (the sense that something has hap- pened before), and the idea of the double (or doppelgänger). AIT_C05.qxd 13/05/2004 14:43 Page 36 . 36 An introduction to literature, criticism and theory 2. Odd coincidences and, more generally, the sense that things are fated to happen. Something might happen, for example, that seems ‘too good to be true’ or that suggests, despite the fact that you do not believe in God, that someone or something is pulling the strings. 3. Animism. This is the rhetorical term referring to a situation in which what is inanimate or lifeless is given attributes of life or spirit. In the last sen- tence of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), for example, we read of ‘the soft wind breathing through the grass’ – a potentially uncanny instance of animism. 4. Anthropomorphism – that is to say, a more specific (because specifically human) form of animism. It is the rhetorical figure that refers to a situation in which what is not human is given attributes of human form or shape: the legs of a table or the face of a cliff would be examples of anthropomorphism, though they might not immediately or necessarily provoke a feeling of uncanniness. In a similar fashion, children’s toys and fairy tales present many possibilities for thinking about anthropomorphism: we may think of such things (dolls or household utensils coming to life and talking) as decidedly not uncanny, but there is perhaps also a strange, potential slipperiness here. It is perhaps not by chance that children and children’s toys loom large in certain books and films about the supernatural. (A fairy tale is not as far from a horror story as we might initially suppose.) An uncanny story frequently involves a mingling of such elements. It is crucial to the strange and disturbing atmosphere of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) that the room in which the narrator is confined is a former children’s nursery. More immediately and more obviously uncanny, however, would be the anthropomorphic character of the wallpaper in this room. There is, for example, the moment when the narrator tells us about the ‘kind of sub- pattern’ in the wallpaper: ‘in the places where [the wallpaper] isn’t faded and where the sun is just so – I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind’ (18). 5. Automatism. This is a term that can be used when what is human is perceived as merely mechanical: examples of this would be sleepwalking, epileptic fits, trance-states and madness. The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper would clearly fit into this category (especially when she is ‘creeping’ round and round her room at the end), but a sufficiently care- ful reading of, say, Keats’s trance-like ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) might also prove interesting in this context. The question at the end of Keats’s poem is about trance and, perhaps, madness. In a sense it is a question AIT_C05.qxd 13/05/2004 14:43 Page 37 . The uncanny 37 that haunts literature in general: ‘Do I wake or sleep?’ To suggest briefly one other example, the writing of D.H. Lawrence is full of people in states of trance and seizure. Towards the end of ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ (1912), for instance, there is a description of Paul and his mother: ‘The Derby was drawing near, and the boy grew more and more tense. He hardly heard what was spoken to him, he was very frail, and his eyes were really uncanny. His mother had sudden seizures of uneasiness about him’ (745). Robots and other automata (such as Terminator), on the other hand, are also potentially uncanny, for the opposite reason: what is perceived as human is in fact mechanical. 6. A sense of radical uncertainty about sexual identity – about whether a person is male or female, or apparently one but actually the other. This is made dramatically clear, for instance, in the uncanny revelation in the course of Neil Jordan’s film The Crying Game (1992), when an apparently female character turns out to have the genitalia of a man; but we could also think of the uncanniness of gender in, for example, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1927), Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) and Written on the Body (1992), and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2002). 7. A fear of being buried alive. This may seem a somewhat refined example of the uncanny, but it is relevant insofar as it is related more broadly to images or experiences of claustrophobia, of being unexpectedly and unpleasantly stuck (for instance in an elevator, or in a swamp, or simply in a room with the last person in the world you would like to be left alone with).

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