The Uncanny: Its Origin and Implication

Asst. Prof. Yasir Mutlib Abdulla

Freud’s “The Uncanny”, preceded by the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch’s (1867-1919) Das Unheimliche, explores the location of the strangeness in the ordinary. Freud’s argument becomes significant in the last part of his essay. Based on Freud’s concept, it is argued that the uncanny in literature “is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life” (Roman Selden 2005, 155). The uncanny is thus significant in narratives, like gothic, horror and science fiction. In such genres the uncanny take place by the technique of writing itself. As this term looks into and expose the unfamiliar in the familiar it could therefore almost be related to the concept of defamiliaraiztion coined by Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky although this concept is interested more in language. For Freud the uncanny is associated with psychology (Selden 2005, 155).  

Yet Freud initially explores the German use of the uncanny by studying its essential meaning of by juxtaposing the two words “das Heimliche” and “das Unheimliche”, “we can understand why the usage of speech has extended das Heimliche into its opposite das Unheimliche” and concludes that “uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old - established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression”. (“The Uncanny”, 429). Freud exposes his interest in some literary texts especially the German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale of “The Sandman”. Hoffmann’s tale is a story of a student who is afraid of losing his eyes. He used to visit his childhood home of a family lawyer. His fear is originated in him by his father who threatens him there that if he does not go to bed the sandman would pull out his eyes. The boy associates the lawyer, and subsequently other men (an oculist, an eye-glass salesman), with the sandman and goes to his death fearing he has been trapped by this figure. “Freud reads the story in terms of the Oedipal complex, seeing the boy’s fear of the loss of his eyes as a displaced expression of the fear of castration. The boy and the reader therefore experience the repressed but familiar anxiety over castration as a now displaced, ‘uncanny’ fear of the loss of eyes” (426). According to this tale and Freud’s association it might be true to mention James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist where the child Stephen is also threatened by his aunt Dante at early age that if he does not apologize, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes. This is revealed later when Stephen is mature when the fearful is associated with the anxiety associated with the ordinariness of the eagle image.  Freud argues that “As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to support the old, discarded beliefs, we get a feeling of the uncanny; and it is as though we were making a judgment something like this” (426).

This is exactly what Stephen Daedalus experiences in the novel. Almost all the repressed bad and uncomfortable experiences at his childhood are crystalized and haunt him as he grows up in an uncanny association.  Freud’s argument of the uncanny moreover originated in idea of how the child’s repressed fear of his or her dolls and waxwork figures that might come to life remains even if at maturity up to be connected with the sudden renewal of this fear in form of strangeness (recurring of repressed fear) in the ordinary (the lifeless object). It might be significant to mention the famous horror movies “Chucky” and “Annabelle”. The uncanny is represented by the repressed fear or anxiety that these dolls arouse.

References:

Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson and Peter Brooker. A Reader’s Guide to Cotemporary Literary Theory. UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2005.

Ryan, Julie Rivkin and Michael. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.