Narrating the Uncanny – Uncanny Narration Freud’s Essay and Theories of Fiction Christoph L e i t g e b (Vienna)
The uncanny “seems to be bound up with […] a compulsive storytelling” (Royle), while at the same time resisting to be put into words. This essay investigates how the uncanny is linked to narration. The investigation starts off with a survey of how early theories of the uncanny (Freud, Jentsch) implicitly deal with narrative fiction and how these deal- ings were radicalized and made explicit by French deconstruction (Cixous, Kofman). A change of perspective then focuses on a theory of fiction (Iser) and its repercussions on a theory of the uncanny. This double approach tries to make a case for introducing speech- act-theory into the analyses of the uncanny. The conclusion of the essay thus tests this stipulation, interpreting a scholarly text on the uncanny events of 9/11 as an example.
The strait-laced narrator is a recurring figure within the literature of the -un canny. Following the pattern of Thomas Mann’s Dr. Phil Serenus Zeitblom, he finds himself in a quandary. This narrator, frequently a scientist, feels overwhelmed by his fascination with the uncanny. The uncanny urges him to tell its story, but at the same time the story somehow resists being told. It comes as no surprise then that scholarly theories about the uncanny – who feels uncanny about what and why – invariably deal with narration, either implicitly or explicitly. “The uncanny seems to be bound up with a compul- sion to tell, a compulsive storytelling.”1 The question of how a theory of the uncanny connects to a theory of narration often becomes entangled with a second, more general question: How does the original framework of a theory of the uncanny, i.e., psycho- analysis, relate to a philosophy of language? Is psychoanalysis a scientific metalanguage describing a certain type of storytelling or is it itself a certain type of storytelling? Even though it is quite clear that answering the second question will not directly impose solutions for a theory of the uncanny (and vice versa), the attempt to answer these questions produces seeming plausi- bilities about what the “essence” of the uncanny could be.
Jentsch and Freud
In one of the first theories of the uncanny, “On the Psychology of the Un- canny” by Ernst Jentsch (1906), the writer warns the reader right at the top not to assume “that the spirit of language is a particularly acute psy-
1 Nicholas Royle, The uncanny(Manchester etc.: Manchester Univ. Press, 2003), p. 12. 116 Christoph Leitgeb chologist”.2 Jentsch only indirectly connects this general statement about psychology with his further conception of the uncanny: According to him, objects will appear to be uncanny if their appearance cannot be classified into conventional linguistic categories. “Intellectual uncertainty”3 pre- vents establishing what a later linguistic tradition calls “frames”.4 The con- sequence is a crisis of linguistic representation. Jentsch’s example for the uncanny is E.T.A Hoffmann’s novella “The Sandman” (1816) and its -de scription of the doll Olympia, which blurs the categories of dead and alive. Freud’s essay on the uncanny (1919)5 further complicates Jentsch’s thoughts on how the uncanny and language depend on each other. Freud uses the etymological ambiguity of German “heimlich”, the meaning of which points both to “homey” and “secretive” only as a means of collecting evidence. In the end, the uncanny for Freud is not just a problem of lin- guistic representation, but a reaction of a psychic apparatus. The uncanny is the recurring of a repressed drive; its surfacing from the unconscious causes anxiety. For Freud, the core of the uncanny in “The Sandman” is not the doll Olympia, but the motif of being robbed of one’s eyes, which Freud interprets as a symbol of the repressed fear of castration. Freud gives a different reason than Jentsch for the urge and the anguish in narrating the uncanny. His explanation does not stress the experience that linguistic categories seem to be inadequate, but rather, the resistance of consciousness to recall the repressed. And yet, Freud admits that something in “The Sandman” resists the “interest” of his psychoanalytic description. This “something” calls for “an aesthetic investigation”6, in which language returns as a main topic. This something also justifies Freud’s use of fiction in the first place and why he does not quote case stories or dreams as evi- dence for a psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny. Instead, Freud highlights a paradox that is symptomatic of the tricky relationship between narration
2 Ernst Jentsch, On the Psychology of the Uncanny, translated by Roy Sellars.