The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture 103640529X, 9781036405298

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The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture

The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture Edited by

Sarah Stollman, Charlie Jorge and Catherine Morris

The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture Edited by Sarah Stollman, Charlie Jorge and Catherine Morris This book first published 2024 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2024 by Sarah Stollman, Charlie Jorge, Catherine Morris and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-0364-0529-X ISBN (13): 978-1-0364-0529-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements ................................................................................. viii Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Uncanny Origins Sarah Stollman, Charlie Jorge, and Catherine Morris Part One: Language Chapter One .............................................................................................. 15 The Vegetal Uncanny Gary Farnell Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 33 “The Language that Yer Mam Spoke”: Dialect as Unheimlich in British Writing Catherine Morris Part Two: Literature Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 67 On the Uncanny Aesthetics of Lucy Clifford's "The New Mother" Per Klingberg Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 88 The Revenge of the Uncanny: Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem and the Question of Genre Sten Wistrand Chapter Five ........................................................................................... 113 The Continually Uncanny in Kafka’s The Trial Antony Johae

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Table of Contents

Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 126 The Uncanny Dramatised in a Central Scene in Ibsen's Peer Gynt Marit Aalen and Anders Zachrisson Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 143 “Before You Were Born, I Devoted You to Him, as the Only Expiation of My Crime”: Children as Scapegoat Figures in Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer Charlie Jorge Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 155 Tracing Our Uncanny Selves in Post-Postmodern Fiction Charlotte Sweet and Othmar Lehner Part Three: Visual Language Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 177 Semantic and Cultural Interpretations of Jerzy Czerniawski’s Theatre Posters: “Whatever we touch upon in these works, we always get lost in the obscurity of secrets.” Elwira Bolek Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 187 The Uncanny Object in Magical Realist Cinema: Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie Sarah Stollman Contributors ............................................................................................ 205 Index ....................................................................................................... 209

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter Nine: Semantic and Cultural Interpretations of Jerzy Czerniawski’s Theatre Posters: “Whatever we Touch Upon in these Works, we Always Get Lost in the Obscurity of Secrets” Figure 9-1 Figure 9-2 Figure 9-3 Figure 9-4 Figure 9-5 Figure 9-6

PamiĊtnik wariata [Diary of a Madman] Wróg ludu [An Enemy of the People] Gra sáów [A Dream Play] Do Damaszku [To Damascus] Er gin gaud dem Hause [He Left the House] Wyspa róĪ [The Island of Roses]

Chapter Ten: The Uncanny Object in Magical Realist Cinema: JeanPierre Jeunet’s Amélie. Figure 10-1 Figure 10-2 Figure 10-3 Figure 10-4 Figure 10-5 Figure 10-6

Amélie discovers the tin box Bretodeau rediscovers his tin box Amélie transforms into water Goldfish rehomed to the river Amélie and Nino attempt at convergence Amélie unites with Nino

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As though to prove the points considered within this collected work, the uncanniness of life, for a while, interrupted the completion of this book. We would therefore like to especially thank all the contributors, and Adam Rummens of Cambridge Scholars, for their support and patience while we, and the world, got back to a post-pandemic norm. The origin of this collection was the result of two one-day international conferences, “The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture”, held in September 2016 and again in August 2017. The conferences encouraged an exploration into the representations of the uncanny on topics including language, literature and visual language. We are grateful to Dr Olena Lytovka and Maria Isaienkova for organising the conference through the Interdisciplinary Research Foundation (IRF) and the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (LCIR). Thank you also to hosts in Warsaw, Poland in 2016 and Birkbeck, University of London in 2017. Gratitude also goes to artist, Jerzy Czerniawski and director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet for their gracious permissions to include images, respectively, of their posters and film in this collected work. We are grateful to colleagues, family, and friends, who supported us throughout the production of this book. SS, CJ, & CM

INTRODUCTION: UNCANNY ORIGINS SARAH STOLLMAN, CHARLIE JORGE AND CATHERINE MORRIS

“Doesn’t every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn’t storytelling always a way of searching for one’s origin?” — Roland Barthes 1

The beginnings of this book were founded in, what seemed to be back then, less uncanny times. Just as the publication of Sigmund Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” in 1919 does not directly focus on the First World War through which it was conceived and written, (though Freud does make two references to it, which I will return to), nor do the essays within this book obviously reflect the historical context within which they began and were subsequently developed. However, it would be difficult now not to consider, with hindsight, the years in which “The Uncanny” was conceived, or of Freud’s personal experiences of the war, and of the changing, ambivalent world which perhaps came to haunt his ideas. He noted in 1919: “I’m not a patriot, but it is painful to think that pretty much the whole world will be foreign territory”.2 Similarly, it would be remiss not to reflect briefly on the temporality within which The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture was conceived and written, as a way of continuing to attempt to seek and underpin the origin of the uncanny. Nearly one hundred years after the publication of “The Uncanny”, the 2016 and 2017 conferences at which these papers were first presented took place during a time of increasing worldwide political uncertainty and polarisation. This was particularly the case in London, the location of the 2017 conference, as our understanding of what being “at home” meant had been disrupted by the Brexit vote one year prior. The previous conference took place in that same year, 2016, in Warsaw. The Brexit bill meant that 1 2

Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 47. Freud, as quoted in Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, 380.

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Poland, being a member of the European Union (EU), was now to be disconnected from the United Kingdom (UK). The build-up to the vote seemed to expose and bring to light an unsettling secret, but was it, as Freud expressed, a bid for “[f]reedom [as] the quiet watchword of secret conspirators, the loud war-cry of revolutionaries”,3 or an old xenophobia, “once well known [that] had long been familiar”,4 concealed and repressed for some time, now returned? The debate caused a rupture between families and friends, and communities and countries within the UK, and EU and, from the 2016 vote to the official enactment of Brexit through the withdrawal of the UK from the EU on 31st January 2020, there was a period of liminality. Britons living in European countries, and indeed Brits in Britain, having voted to leave or remain, questioned whether their home was now unhomely, as did Europeans living in Britain. What further destabilisation and strangeness, in what had previously felt so secure and familiar, was going to be exposed in order to achieve this uncertain aim? As it had been for Freud a century before, the apprehension of everything we knew becoming foreign loomed ahead. Simultaneously the worldwide Covid pandemic originated, emerging into public consciousness via news reports from China and Italy, and, by the end of January 2020, twenty-six countries had reported official cases. It would take until March before the official lockdown of most nations began, and so began an eerie and unsettling time, with anxieties of the unclean, the “hidden and the dangerous”5 and of “death, [and] dead bodies”6 coming into our homes. Images of the seriously unwell, sedated, inverted, and intubated, or else of piles of body bags in Spain, and mass graves in New York flooded our TV screens as though we were watching a film about revenants, except this was the real world. All this was taking place while the banality of work and school life was expected to continue, but from home. With the exception of key workers, who had to face the unknown danger every day outside, we worked for hours at a time at a screen, away from friends and colleagues, except occasionally seeing them over that same screen. We were also often separated from family who were only a room away doing the same thing: producing data to be shared on a cloud and stored on devices in warehouses many miles away. This almost robotic existence, with the ability to tip us into uncanny valley territory, allowed us to continue with an attempt of life as normal. Though normal life was now defined by the uncanny mechanisation and alienation of the human body and mind working toward 3

Goethe, as quoted in Freud, “The Uncanny,” 130. Freud, 124. 5 Freud, 134. 6 Freud, 148. 4

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an uncertain future and the benefit of an externalised economic machine, while people around the world died. At the same time, conspiracies circled the internet about the reality of the events taking place, creating even more division and uncertainty, reminding us of the uncanniness of our time, where deep fakes of this extent could be possible. This impact echoes Freud’s assertion that an uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary, when a symbol takes on the full function and significance of what it symbolizes.7

Outside the home, strict rules on maintaining safe distances from other people increased our isolation from others, and mask-wearing reduced us all to faceless, mumbling pairs of eyes, which for some was essential human healthcare, but to others an existential threat to humanity. Did anti-maskers consider it simply a threat to the individual right to choose, or did they regard it as something even more uncanny? The notion that someone may have something to hide, or a xenophobic reaction to those in the world who routinely wear masks for medical purposes or face coverings for religious or cultural observation, may have caused such an uncanniness. Or did the practice become something more unsettling and animistic, a hidden nonhuman threat, veiled from sight?8 This observation may return us once more to the Freudian castration complex, where a fear arises for the physical safety of our body parts, and in this case, our exposed eyes, or else a knowledge, once known to us but repressed, which returns and is revealed again before our eyes. 9 What is that knowledge and, as one of our contributors, Per Klingberg, asks, “how does one speak of the uncanny without turning it into something all too familiar then?”10 Freud points to such fears as the return of our primal fear of “secret harmful forces and the return of the dead”. 11 He explains that despite “having surmounted such modes of thought […] we do not feel entirely secure in these new convictions”. 12 Post-pandemic, the effects are still apparent in our day to day interactions with others, the changed ways in which we work and travel, and perhaps also in our approach to viewing life 7

Freud, 150. Freud, 132. 9 Freud, 139. 10 Klingberg, “On the Uncanny Aesthetics of Lucy Clifford's "‘New Mother’," 85; emphasis in original. 11 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 154. 12 Freud, 154. 8

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and the world. Even the notion of normal may be seen as uncanny as many people determine to get back to what may be considered normal. Ordinary life became, for a time, threatening and sinister, but we’re not quite sure that it isn’t still, or that it wasn’t before. These anxieties exist on a continuum; no sooner did the height of the pandemic pass, before we entered headlong into a raft of new concerns of international conflict, climate crisis, and economic instability, contributing to further expose our “wishful fears”.13 Similarly, Hugh Haughton describes the aesthetic of the uncanny in his introduction to Freud’s essay, identifying its part in the "profound remapping of the whole psychoanalytic project during and after the First World War […] increasingly conjur[ing] up a Gothic closet, an uncanny double, at the heart of modernity".14 Haughton continues to describe “The Uncanny” as “one of Freud’s strangest essays […] about a particularly intense experience of strangeness, [that suggests] it is our own and our culture’s disowned past that haunts us”.15 The aftermath of such an event supersedes any notion of the supernatural; the effect echoes the strangeness of the known world. This outcome is reflected in Kevin Aho’s paper on the Heideggerian nature of the uncanny during the Covid pandemic. He explores the impact of the pandemic in disrupting the stable and familiar “homelike mood” we normally exist within.16 The way we self-interpret our existence based on an implied expectation of understanding the world around us and ourselves within it, suggests that just as canny/uncanny is related to knowing/not knowing, “to exist is essentially […] to understand”. 17 Further, this perception requires an ability to project our future possibilities, based on this existing knowledge of our self and world, so when that worldview is disrupted, we are left with a sense of un-self, “stuck in a continuous present”. 18 Furthermore, this recognition requires us to know and understand ourselves in relation to others and the world in which we live and so, as Aho argues, the stay-at-home policy intended to keep us safe (and did, if arguably somewhat belatedly), also put us at risk, resulting in a number of psychological, behavioural, social, and emotional

13

Haughton, introduction to The Uncanny, by Freud, xlii. Haughton, xlii. 15 Haughton, xlii. 16 Aho, “The Uncanny in the Time of Pandemics: Heideggerian Reflections on the Coronavirus,” 4. 17 Heidegger, as quoted in Aho, 3; emphasis in original. 18 Aho, 8. 14

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complications.19 Again, referring to Heidegger, Aho asserts that, during the crisis, we didn’t just experience or feel the uncanny, but became it ourselves: “[the uncanny] is the basic determination of [human existence] itself” [meaning that] in the most primordial sense, the comforting and familiar experience of das Heimliche was an illusion all along, that we are not and never have been at-home in the world.20

As the contributors to this book live in disparate countries—Australia, Austria, Norway, Poland, The United Kingdom, Spain, and Sweden—the range of interpretations of the concept of the uncanny reflects the differences evident in response to the pandemic. From one affect, that of the uncanny and of the pandemic, many directions can be taken by a people and a culture. However, the essence of the experience holds disparate humans together. As Aho suggests, the loss of the familiar uncovers whether it existed at all. Through these chapters, the common human experience of the uncanny, can be seen as enfolding together many people from across the globe. In Dylan Trigg’s work exploring the role of memory and the uncanny within a sense of place, he refers to the uncanny sensation of topophopia, a condition he defines as “a form of spatiotemporal homesickness that is fundamentally disturbed in character”. 21 This universal ailment was experienced by innumerable people during the pandemic, as many remained in their homes, yet their relationship to home as place was altered. Others were obliged to go to hospital or to stay in places that became temporary homes. Many died in remote places, detached from community. These altered places rallied us to cling to what we had lost. This effect of illness and lockdown reflects Trigg’s notion of homesickness inducing “an abiding sense of derealization”.22 These sensations during the pandemic arose not necessarily from the loss of place, but of place as we knew it, further deepening the uncanny effect. Therefore, in this case, and in the case of war, the uncanny becomes a meta-concept for experiences of dislocation and the altered existence of place and self. Returning to Freud, the only references he makes of the First World War in the writing of The Uncanny are a brief mention of the “isolation”23 he felt during the war itself, and an observation of the apparent need of the populace, post-war, to connect “with the souls of the departed”,24 both of 19

Aho, 10-13. Aho, 3. 21 Trigg, Memory of Place, 194. 22 Trigg, 194. 23 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 151. 24 Freud, 148-9. 20

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which resonate with life during the pandemic. Freud describes that during his war-induced loneliness, he read a story published in 1917 in The Strand Magazine, which, though unattributed in “The Uncanny”, is known to be L.G. Moberley’s “Inexplicable”.25 The imagined “ghostly crocodiles” in the story were not at all at home in their London middle class domestic setting, but were apparently brought into the home through the lifelike carvings within a strange wooden table, left by the mysterious previous tenant. 26 Subsequently the alligators seemed to infect the minds and sensibilities of all those residing within the house, until the table was removed and burnt. The second reference Freud makes to the war is to the “[p]lacards in our big cities [that] advertise lectures […] meant to instruct us in how to make contact with the souls of the departed”,27 which has almost the opposite effect of wishing to bring home those who we believe should still be with us. In both cases, one of literature and one of culture, Freud appears to be trying to make sense of hauntings, etymologically relating to home via Old Norse and Old Norman, meaning, more specifically, to return, or to bring home. In the first sense, the sinister alligators were brought into the home, like a disease, into a place they shouldn’t be. They became a threat to all that remained within the home, necessitating exorcism and banishment. Whereas in the second sense, the departed souls were not at home where they theoretically should have been, and were wished by those who remained behind to return home. Freud speaks of the idea held that “whoever dies becomes the enemy of the survivor, intent upon carrying him off with him to share his new existence”,28 and this certainly seems to be the case with the ghostly alligators lurking with intent to drag the residents into the darkness, as they did through a character’s remembrance of the horrifying loss of a dear friend in an alligator swamp in New Guinea.29 Yet, it seems the living would wish to drag the dead back to life or, rather, know that there isn’t an ambivalent darkness after death, that there is a sense of a known future hereafter in which to join the dead. Both references suggest a sense of loneliness linked to the uncanny; the effect of The Strand Magazine story on Freud during his own isolated time, which he referred to as being “extraordinarily uncanny”,30 is writ large through the enormous sense of loss and loneliness felt by the populace following the passing of loved ones

25

Moberley, “The Inexplicable,” 572-581. Freud refers to the alligators in the story as crocodiles, “The Uncanny,” 151. 27 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 148. 28 Freud, 149. 29 Moberley, “Inexplicable,” 577-578. 30 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 151. 26

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during the war, contributing to an increased desire to make contact with the dead. The times that Freud lived through, and arguably all times of recountable conflict and crises, contribute to our collective uncanny mindset. We are, in and of ourselves, unheimlich, simply because, due to the uncertainty of life and death itself, we are never quite at home in our home, within the world, or within ourselves. In times of relative peace, we may be able to repress our ambivalence and plan for the future, but the underlying truth that we cannot possibly know what the future holds for us, collectively or as individuals, reminds us that we are not in any true control of our past, present, future, or time hereafter. Events such as the First World War, or the Covid pandemic, expose a repressed and unsettling reality that we know nothing, making the English translation of the heimlich/unheimlich duality as uncanny all the more emphatic; through “The Uncanny” Freud was able to uncover the phenomenon’s very origin—ourselves. The current volume has been organised using a system of interconnected rubrics, offering a flexible framework for analysis and a rich selection of relevant topics, resulting in a loose narrative order. This approach effectively balances competing aims of comprehensive coverage and innovative insight. The volume is divided into three parts: Part I focuses on Language, Part II on Literature, and Part III on Visual Language. The primary objective of Part I is to explore the presence of the uncanny in language elements, dialects, and other linguistic attributes. In this context, Gary Farnell’s work entitled “The Vegetal Uncanny” delves into the intriguing relationship between plants and humans, viewing humans from an alt-anthropomorphic, or even a post-human perspective. Farnell contends that plants possess an uncanny quality, appearing both familiar and strange, and notably focuses on the phenomenon of talking plants. This phenomenon, suggestive of fabled tales of screaming mandrakes, aligns remarkably well with scientific findings on a plant’s communicative capabilities. To illustrate this perspective, Farnell examines narratives featuring talking plants, such as Lewis Carroll’s “Garden of Live Flowers” from Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Through this focus, Farnell demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of the vegetal uncanny, highlighting its significance in the broader context of literature, language, and scientific discoveries. Catherine Morris’s “‘The Language that Yer Mam Spoke’: Dialect as Unheimlich in British Writing” explores the utilisation of dialect in literature, drawing inspiration from Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919) in her analysis. Morris argues that the incorporation of dialect creates a sense of tension in the text between the portrayal of familiarity and unsettling,

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uncanny elements. This tension arises from the use of non-standard language within standard literary forms, giving rise to uncertainties and anxieties related to themes of madness, rebellion, castration, feminisation, degeneration, and abjection. To examine the liminal role of dialect in the works of Tony Harrison, William Shakespeare, Emily Brontë and Irvine Welsh, Morris draws on sociolinguistic studies exploring regional and social dialects. She also incorporates psychoanalytical theories of Julia Kristeva (1982), particularly regarding the concept of the abject. Through these lenses, Morris reveals how an author’s incorporation of dialect in their work, as a literary approach, is intertwined with an unheimlich mindset shared by both writer and reader, as influenced by cultural and historical contexts. The second part of this volume delves into the exploration of the presence of the uncanny in literature, an investigation that can be traced back to Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919/2003); a discussion that remains relevant today. Freud’s essay was partly informed by themes and events in the E.T.A. Hoffmann short story “The Sandman” (1817). Building on this foundation, the following section will examine various literary elements related to the uncanny, many of which originate from the Gothic tradition, folktale and the eerie. This section commences with a focus on the cautionary tale, as analysed by Per Klingberg, in his chapter entitled “On the Uncanny Aesthetics of Lucy Clifford’s ‘The New Mother’”. Klingberg suggests that the 19th century story’s abundance of mysterious and inexplicable imagery surpasses the expected moral framework of a traditional cautionary tale. He argues that it is precisely the uncanny nature of Clifford’s imagery that enables the story to transcend its historical context, giving rise to new, unsettling interpretations for contemporary readers. Moving from the cautionary tale to the Gothic or, perhaps, esoteric, Sten Wistrand explores the theme of revenge and the question of genre in Gustav Meyrink’s novel, The Golem (1915), through an analysis of the role of the uncanny. In his work, “The Revenge of the Uncanny: Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem and the Question of Genre”, Wistrand delves into the interplay of different genres employed by Meyrink in the novel, prompting an enquiry into whether the uncanny serves as the driving force behind the narrative or as the primary objective of the story itself. Ultimately, the impact of the uncanny motifs lies more in their effects rather than in their structural function, leading to what could be described as the “revenge of the uncanny”.31 In other words, the uncanny elements assert their power and 31 Wistrand, “The Revenge of the Uncanny: Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem and the Question of Genre,” 109.

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influence over the narrative, overshadowing the traditional structural elements thereby making a significant impact on the story. In “The Continually Uncanny in Kafka’s The Trial”, Antony Johae delves into the work of the quintessential uncanny author, Franz Kafka. Johae’s focus on the novel The Trial, published posthumously in 1925, explores the various aspects of the uncanny phenomenon present in the story. The analysis is conducted from two perspectives: that of the reader and that of the protagonist. Johae’s main objective, to understand why uncanny experiences occur so frequently in Kafka’s text, is approached by delving into the unconscious states present in the narrative. By examining the strangeness of the fiction and how it is rationalised, the chapter aims to reveal how the narrative operates at the level of dreams rather than as a depiction of everyday reality. Through this investigation, Johae highlights the overwhelming prevalence of the uncanny in Kafka’s fiction, shedding light on the author’s skilful use of the unsettling and eerie elements that appear throughout The Trial. In Marit Aalen and Anders Zachrisson’s chapter “The Uncanny Dramatised in a Central Scene in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt”, they emphasise the concept that the uncanny revolves around the notion that something familiar can become frightening. According to Freud, the uncanny is understood as a process where something eerie remains hidden within the familiar, eventually breaking through and completely altering the atmosphere and its perception. Freud refers to this process as “the return of what has been repressed”. 32 With this in mind, Aalen and Zachrisson analyse a pivotal scene in Peer Gynt, demonstrating how it follows a similar dynamic as described by Freud. However, they argue that Freud’s concept of the return of the repressed is inadequate to fully explain the psychodynamic complexities at play in the scene. Turning to the uncanny within familial relationships and the archetype of the wrongly accused, Charlie Jorge’s study “‘Before You Were Born, I Devoted You to Him, as the Only Expiation of My Crime’: Children as Scapegoat Figures in Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer” examines the uncanny as a force that challenges oppressive institutions and behaviours. Jorge argues that scapegoat figures have historically been used to appease deities’ wrath, seek redemption for the sins of past generations, or fuel humanity’s insatiable desire for social and economic advancement. Throughout the Gothic novel, these sacrificial scapegoats, and their sacrificers, play pivotal roles, leaving a lasting impact on the realms of art, film, and literature. Within the chapter, Jorge delves into the family dynamics of the Monçada and Aliaga circles, to which the two central 32

Freud, “The Uncanny,” 155.

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characters of the novel belong. His analysis reveals the events that lead to the disruption and collapse of these family relationships. Ultimately, the characters find themselves in situations where they are symbolically sacrificed. Concluding the second part of this volume and its analysis of the uncanny in literature, Othmar Lehner and Charlotte Sweet delve into the concept of the uncanny as a unique psychodynamic experience that weaves together the familiar and the eerie, as manifested in non-coincidental synchronistic events. Within their chapter, “Tracing Our Uncanny Selves in Post-Modern Fiction”, Lehner and Sweet explore how the uncanny intertwines with trauma theory, themes that have seen a resurgence in postmodern narratives and that provide a guiding framework for this exploration. Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005) and Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk (2016) serve as the foundation for an investigation into the uncanny dimensions of fundamental human behaviours such as eating, sexuality, emotional bonding, and judgement. Given that these novels span fifteen years within a largely homogenous western cultural context, the analysis potentially signifies the emergence of a novel, post-modern zeitgeist. Part III of this volume focuses on visual language and begins by exploring Elwira Bolek’s study “Semantic and Cultural Interpretations of Jerzy Czerniawski’s Theatre Posters: ‘Whatever we Touch Upon in these Works, we Always Get Lost in the Obscurity of Secrets’”. Bolek posits that the visual communication of a poster involves a perception of iconic images through mental representations or concepts stored in the mind, which contribute to the transmission of meaning in the poster’s visual language. To fully dissect the visual tropes employed in Czerniawski’s distinct posters, one must possess knowledge of numerous historical and cultural contexts, while also considering both verbal associations and visual symbols, including the profound symbolism and semantics of the colours used in the works. By interpreting select examples of his posters, this study reveals that the true meaning of Czerniawski’s creations is grasped by acknowledging the intricate interplay of visual elements that portray known representation. To complete this section, Sarah Stollman examines magical realist cinema, in her chapter “The Uncanny Object in Magical Realist Cinema: Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001)”, arguing that cinema, as a visual storytelling medium, offers a sensational canvas to evoke emotions through the uncanny. In the realm of magical realist film fiction, stories are established in real and authentic contexts while interweaving moments of inexplicable magic throughout the narrative. This juxtaposition of the real and the magical aligns with the concept of the uncanny, which also critically

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contains elements both familiar and eerie. Central to this exploration is the role objects play in triggering mysterious and unsettling events within the plot of a given story. By liberating the familiar, objects satisfy a character’s fundamental need for a known and secure starting point in their sensorial journey towards a new conception of their identity formation. Stollman’s chapter delves into the connections between magical realist cinema and the uncanny, highlighting the significance of the uncanny object in narrating stories. In his attempts to define the uncanny, Freud describes this effect as being inexorably embedded in what is frightening, horrific, or other. This sensation is concurrently lodged in things domestic and familiar, suggesting a strange union between the dangerous and unknown and the supposed security of a familiar place. This unsettled feeling is emitted, not only from place and home, but from within oneself. A frisson of fear and comfort can materialise from an experience of traumatic loss. This distress often involves time disruption causing the past to resurface in the present, especially unresolved circumstances. The memory traces are revised as they are interwoven with fresh experiences producing the uncanny effect through sometimes altered recollections. The exploration of these concepts is especially relevant today as, through technology, people develop connections with other places and people, both virtually and physically, throughout the globe. This phenomenon was heavily tested during the recent worldwide pandemic, as people relied on virtual communication, even to speak to someone next door. The recent past, in these experiences, were recalled as a distinct memory as the reality of people’s life experience was so radically altered. Trigg refers to this aspect of the uncanny as “an augmented familiarity”.33 He describes that “[a]t the heart of this shiver is the sense that what has so far been thought of as inconspicuous in its being is, in fact, charged with a creeping strangeness”. 34 The resulting balance of the quotidian and the unknown contribute to the generation of the uncanny. The feeling can be tangible and ephemeral, and it is a sensation experienced in life and portrayed in literature and the visual arts. The sometimes whimsical papers in this book seek to explore the representations of the uncanny in culture through examples of language, literature, and visual language, applying the origins of the concept to experiences of the phenomenon today.

33 34

Trigg, Memory of Place, 27; emphasis in original. Trigg, 27.

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Bibliography Aho, Kevin. “The Uncanny in the Time of Pandemics.” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 10 (2020): 1-19. https://doi.org/10.5840/gatherings2020102 Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock, 121-162. London: Penguin, 1919/2003. Haughton, Hugh. Introduction to The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud, vii-lx. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin, 1919/2003. Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988. Moberley, L.G. “Inexplicable.” The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly 54 (July-December 1917b): 572-581. https://archive.org/details/TheStrandMagazineAnIllustratedMonthly/T heStrandMagazine1917bVol.LivJul-dec Trigg, Dylan. The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012.

PART I LANGUAGE

CHAPTER ONE THE VEGETAL UNCANNY GARY FARNELL

In November 2011, researchers at the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research (BIDR, part of Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) published some of their latest research. The headline was that plants talk to one another. In particular, the research posited that the common pea (Latin name Pisum sativum) is capable of communication. The Blaustein researchers discovered that pea plants under drought conditions send “stress cues” to other pea plants in the same soil.1 These cues are biochemical messages, meant to warn about a lack of moisture, and as such they have real adaptive implications. The Blaustein study is by no means the only one of its kind. Other scientific studies stress the ways in which plants communicate, sometimes not only with other plants, but also with animals.2 One might ask, who knew? It is humans who have not noticed plant communication, yet we could say that the Blaustein research programme has in fact been pre-scripted, by the “nonsense” author Lewis Carroll. The second of the Alice books, Through the Looking-Glass, published in 1871, features a wonderful “Garden of Live Flowers”. There, Alice says to the Tiger-lily “‘I’ve been in many gardens before, but none of the flowers could talk’”. The Tiger-lily replies: “‘Put your hand down and feel the ground. […] In most gardens, […] they make the beds too soft–so that the flowers are always asleep’”. The narrative continues: “This sounded a very good reason, and Alice was quite pleased to know it. ‘I never thought of that before!’ she said”.3 Plants talk to one another when the ground is relatively hard (such as during a drought). They are asleep when gardens are like soft beds; therefore, we can easily understand why humans have not noticed that plants are talking 1

Falik et al., “Rumor Has It…: Relay Communication of Stress Cues in Plants,” para. 22. 2 See the series of four essays in Gagliano, Ryan and Viera, eds., 1-100. 3 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 137.

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to one another. Think also of mandrakes that squeal when uprooted from the ground. There is a whole literature of the fabulous that is truly prescient regarding scientific discoveries about plants and speech. This prescience, better understood as a form of pre-science as imaginative expression, to say nothing of dreaming, is a type of forward-thinking towards the après coup of scientific knowledge, whereupon there is no science without fantasy. In what follows we shall see the fantasy of plant self-signification becoming real, with a vengeance. The reality of plants’ self-expression is confirmed in the name of science. Here, the truths of fiction in literature and film serve to foreshadow scientific discovery. A representation of that which is vegetal about human beings arises from a certain blurring of “science” and “fiction” associated with the Freudian uncanny. A key shift from Alice talking to flowers, to we ourselves as language users talking with them, implicitly recognises a shared vegetality. Development of a concept of the uncanny is re-read from a twentyfirst-century viewpoint on vegetal life, to illuminate the vegetal uncanny’s existence within the uncanny. In this regard, to learn about plant-speech is to learn something different about ourselves within a general economy of the strange. It is time now to take up again with the nonsense of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, to establish a proper perspective.

From Carroll to Freud Already parodic, in fact, Lewis Carroll’s “Garden of Live Flowers” in Through the Looking Glass may be seen as a witty reimagining of Tennyson’s famous poem of 1855, “Come into the Garden, Maud”, with its own series of talking flowers.4 The degree of wit exhibited in key passages like this one is such that Gilles Deleuze has assigned a privileged place to Carroll in his Logic of Sense, stating that this author has “provided the first great account, the first great mise-en-scène of the paradoxes of sense”.5 Carroll has also been seen as a forerunner of the unheimliche of Sigmund Freud, due to, among other things, that weird uncanniness of Carroll’s talking flowers.6 Carroll’s images point to those pages of Freud’s 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche”, translated as

4

Tennyson, Tennyson: A Selected Edition, 563. In particular, see Maud: A Monodrama, part 1, section 22, stanza 10 (lines 908-15). 5 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, xi. 6 See Hugh Haughton, introduction to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, by Carroll xii-xiii; Haughton, introduction to The Uncanny, by Freud, xxviii; and Haughton, introduction to The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry, by Haughton, ed., 1-32.

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“The Uncanny”, which deal with animism.7 Freud advances the thought that an experience of the uncanny occurs in the return of primitive animism, previously thought to have been surmounted by the modern or civilised mind.8 It is the idea of plants talking among themselves, perhaps also with human beings, which suggests their animism. Now the confirmation of this reality by science, evident in the Blaustein research, marks the point where we encounter what is properly understood as the vegetal uncanny. This vegetal uncanny symbolised by talking plants occurs in an encounter with primitive animism, leaving this same animism as no longer surmounted by the modern mind, and no longer regarded as primitive. The vegetal uncanny is anima mundi for a post-Enlightenment world. This notion represents a scientific breakthrough as well as a significant development in the concept of the uncanny. An incorporation of the ideas of the uncanny in human thinking has long been acknowledged as a vital component of knowledge production, a way of taking “the strange” seriously, the better to understand its meaning. This is especially the case following Freud, as the “uncanny” of 1919 is seen as drawing together and concentrating many of his major concepts (such as repression, the unconscious, the Oedipus complex).9 This complex space can then be seen as demarcating the threshold beyond which lies “the later Freud”, with the composition of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a pathbreaking 1920 text, the beginnings of which are alluded to in the 1919 text. That Freud is growing in his thinking through this essay, itself structured like a plant, is in fact suggested by Hélène Cixous. Her description of the text identifies that it “[slides a few roots under the ground […] while it allows others to be lofted in the air”, adding that “[w]hat in one instance appears a figure of science seems later to resemble some type of fiction”. 10 This account of a vegetal Freud, centring on the uncanny, is altogether intriguing, and so we shall return later to science’s uncanny interaction with fiction. For now, suffice it to say that Freud is not fully “vegetalized” in Cixous’s reading of “Das Unheimliche”; nor, indeed, is there in Freud’s essay any discussion of flowers (or of plant life more generally). Nevertheless, this same essay is a vital reference in considering the vegetal in its uncanniness, given what has just now been cited by Cixous about its structure and dynamic. 7

Freud, “The Uncanny.” This translation of “Das Unheimliche” by David McLintock. references an earlier translation by James Strachey, but removes the inverted commas from within the title of Strachey’s “The ‘Uncanny’.” 8 Freud, “The Uncanny”, 147, 155. 9 See Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny, for further discussion on psychoanalytic concepts converging in the space of the Freudian uncanny. 10 Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms,” 526.

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Inventing new forms of Unheimliche The importance of referring to Freud’s 1919 text – an essay or “attempt” – as growing like a plant, into the ground and into the air, modally alternating between “science” and “fiction”, is that its form as the very unity of structure and dynamic encourages us to take seriously this unusual (“nonsensical”) notion of a talking plant. It signals the programmatics of a science not existing without fantasy. In so doing, it validates the subsidiary notion of fable preceding fact in rational understanding. This is the case if we see Freud’s “The Uncanny” as amounting to, not so much a small scientific treatise, as “a strange theoretical novel”. 11 Cixous, through her pursuit of the Freudian adventure in “The Uncanny”, reaches an understanding of what makes fiction strange, namely its capacity for “the invention of new forms of Unheimliche”.12 Fiction is here located “at the extreme end of the uncanny”, pointing to “what is newest in the new”.13 Positioned within the uncanny’s spectrum in this way, pointing even towards the unknown (itself “[n]either real nor fictitious”), fiction is regarded as the uncanny’s “double”.14 From this opening of a key theoretical aperture, an approach to the reality of pea plants communicating with one another gains in credibility. What may then be seen more clearly and grasped more firmly is pea plants “talking” about drought, as suggested by the Tiger-lily’s description of hard and soft garden beds in Lewis Carroll; that is, in Carroll’s “nonsense”. Recall the “privileged place” assigned to Carroll in Deleuze’s own mise en scène of sense’s logic in its paradoxical structure.15 In this instance, Carroll-the-storyteller can himself be seen as the “double” of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the logician and lecturer in mathematics. A passage through the Looking-glass now enacts the precondition of ourselves pursuing what has been termed the “vegetal turn” in the arts, in the sciences and, indeed, in their interdisciplinarity. At this point, it is worth taking a closer look at Alice’s exchanges with the Tiger-lily in the Garden of Live Flowers. What she herself brings to this encounter is especially significant. The exchanges at issue get underway with Alice alone in the Garden, not so much discovering the talking plants, as inventing them. “‘O Tiger-lily,’” she says, “‘I wish you could talk!’”16 Here, there is an instance of, as Cixous might say, fiction inventing new forms of 11

Cixous, 525. Cixous, 547. 13 Cixous, 547. 14 Cixous, 548. 15 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, xi. 16 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, 135; emphasis in original. 12

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unheimliche, with the act of wishing carrying the thread of sense-making. Then, curiously, there is a dialogue with the Tiger-lily–turning into a larger conversation with a Rose, two Daisies, a Violet, and a Larkspur–where uncanniness itself appears more and more evident, but not to Alice. Why? Because it was Alice who first thought of the “live flowers”, therefore their talkativeness does not appear strange to her. Moreover, if the talking flowers (not even the Rose which shouts at her) do not appear strange or uncanny to Alice, neither is she anxious about them. Crucially, she is disburdened of anxieties during her time in Wonderland, this condition being the basis for wonder in Wonderland itself.17 Deleuze has observed something similar with his argument in Logic of Sense that “[t]he loss of the proper name is the adventure which is repeated throughout all Alice’s adventures”. 18 In connection with this focalisation of a certain “impropriety”, let us recall how a basic notion of anxiety as a component of the uncanny had first led Freud into composition of his “uncanny” essay (a metaphor of itself by its procedure), seeking to push back knowledge boundaries. It is the look at Alice in her un-anxious state, while among talking flowers, which here provides access to the notion of an anxiety-laden uncanny. This approach brings more fully into view, not so much “the uncanny”, as the vegetal uncanny.

The Uncanny and Anxiety As regards a general understanding of anxiety, it is a state often understood as having neither an obvious cause, nor an evident end, nor a tell-tale telos. It is without object. But there is nothing in this understanding with which to engage anxiety’s intricate intertwinement with the uncanny. However, in Jacques Lacan’s 1962-63 seminar on l’angoisse (“anxiety”, “fear”, “anguish”, and “angst”), he does speak in the same breath, as it were, about anxiety and Freud’s “Das Unheimliche”: he broaches the former with the latter (just as he had broached the unconscious with Freud’s Witz). The result is a direct reversal of a received understanding of anxiety as being without an object. Howsoever that may be, Jacques Lacan’s approach can still be seen as consistent with his “return to Freud”, at the same time as contributing to what is known about the uncanny. Critical in this regard is the underlying sense that 17 An astute reading of the space of Alice’s Wonderland as an anxiety-free zone was adapted by Damon Albarn and Moira Buffini into a musical, entitled Wonder.land, Palace Theatre, Manchester, UK, July 2, 2015, as part of the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland. In this version, the protagonist Alison, instead of disappearing down a rabbit-hole, goes online to escape the bullying she has experienced at school. For commentary, see Gary Farnell, “Anniversary Alice”, 38-40. 18 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 3.

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the “true substance” of anxiety is, as Lacan says, “that which deceives not”.19 This lack of deceptiveness about anxiety’s substance is due to anxiety and the uncanny beginning together in a situation where, to quote Lacan again, “lack happens to be lacking”.20 What indeed is properly Freudian about this critical lack-of-a-lack consists in its correlation with a key formulation in the text of Freud’s “The Uncanny”. At the point when his focus is sharpest on animism, with a co-existent anxiety, “an uncanny effect often arises”, Freud says, “when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary, when a symbol takes on the full function and significance of what it symbolizes”.21 Whereas in Lacan “lack happens to be lacking” at the onset of coeval states of anxiety and uncanniness, this equates with, in Freud, a symbol becoming “full”. Both these thinkers are especially acute in conveying what is, often, at once immediate and shocking about unnerving uncanny experiences. Think, perhaps, of a mute plant becoming talkative as an illustration of what is formulated here. Or consider finding oneself in a garden full of talking flowers. Carrollian nonsense, it could be said, is a construction of what Freud will come to say, as referred to, about a symbol taking on “the full function and significance of what it symbolizes”, when the boundary between fantasy and reality is “blurred”, and we face the “reality” of something until now considered “imaginary”.22 This understanding of anxiety, where a Lacanian “lack happens to be lacking” due to the uncanniness of a Freudian symbol becoming “full”, is what gets pressed into relief by Alice, the remarkably un-anxious Alice, in Wonderland. This is a situation in which there is a pronounced vegetal dimension, centring as it does on the muteness of flowers. In Carroll’s narrative it is mute flowers that lack speech which are altered into a state of full symbolic agency in the uncanny moment of their entering into a conversation with Alice. Perhaps most crucial of all, it is only Alice who can make this altering happen, her own lack, ironically of anxiety itself, being the prerequisite for her adventures in Wonderland, from moment to moment a pioneering exploration of the uncanny. To be clear, there is nothing naïve about wonder as associated with Alice. Rather, she embodies an exemplary attitude towards the unknown: she is, in a phrase, our heroine of the vegetal uncanny. That Alice is drawn heroically by Carroll is, indeed, something which is established from the outset in Through the Looking-Glass. Recall the 19

Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 76; emphasis in original. Lacan, 42. 21 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 150. 22 Freud, 150. 20

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first of her adventures after passing through the looking-glass in Lookingglass House, namely her encounter with that celebrated monster of nonsense, the Jabberwock. The adventure begins with her managing to read an “unreadable” poem. That is, she puzzles over, but eventually grasps that it is necessary to hold the writing up to the mirror to render the script legible, then discovers the Jabberwock in the poem’s content (in a moment in keeping with the Freudian blurring of fantasy and reality). Here, the monstrous Jabberwock appears as a metaphor for the difficulty of the “nonsense” poem “Jabberwocky”, a metaphor, in other words, for difficulty in any situation which seems senseless. Once more Alice is disorientated but overcomes this perplexity again. She is ultimately undeterred by the poem, actively making sense of it as a narrative form about the slaying of a dragon-like creature. Alice’s “heroism”, in this regard, is duly amplified by Carroll’s illustrator Sir John Tenniel, portraying Alice herself as a sword-bearing slayer of the Jabberwock-dragon, reminiscent even of a Pre-Raphaelite knight. Here, of course, our Pre-Raphaelite Alice, emblematic of pre-modern canons of learning, is bearing the proverbial Sword of Truth. It is, in short, an image of what can be accomplished in the face of adversity, in pursuit of sense amid apparent nonsense. What encapsulates Alice’s achievement is her response to the defeat of the Jabberwock. “‘But oh!’ thought Alice, suddenly jumping up, ‘if I don’t make haste, I shall have to go back through the Looking-glass, before I’ve seen what the rest of the house is like! Let’s have a look at the garden first!’”23 This impulse of “[l]et’s have a look at the garden first!” is what prompts Alice's adventures and, in the second chapter of Through the Looking-Glass, takes her into the Garden of Live Flowers, whereupon she has the fateful encounter with the vegetal uncanny. In this way, the narrative action of Carroll’s story centring on Alice as a heroically un-anxious protagonist, presents itself as a parable of canny enquiry in the field of the unknown. It tells a tale, one might suggest, akin to Freud’s “Uncanny” as precisely that weird, difficult-to-place theoretical fiction about a thing as strangely unknown about the uncanny itself as the vegetal uncanny.

Alice’s Wish: A Genealogy of the Uncanny “Be careful what you wish for” is a well-known expression that is, in part, a form of discouragement, somewhat laden with an anxiety of wishing itself. It is so fraught with ambivalence: it carries the suggestion that one’s anxiety might be made greater, rather than lessened, through the wished-for thing 23

Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, 134.

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coming into actual existence. It is via this thought that we return to Lacan’s Freudian understanding of anxiety, wherein “lack happens to be lacking”. Or indeed, following Lacan, Renata Salecl has formulated an account of the consumerist uncanny, in which it is noted how an uncanny sensation arises and anxiety begins when shoppers are, as the saying goes, “spoilt for choice”.24 Insofar as desire-as-lack regulates “normal” behaviour, having too much of something may be problematic as Salecl suggests, conjuring as she does a veritable Wonderland of the typical phantasmagoria that is the modern shopping experience. Or putting it differently, the other side of the ambivalence in “be careful what you wish for” is revealed by Alice’s wish, in her solitude, that the Tiger-lily, waving gracefully in the wind, might talk to her. When the wish comes true, Alice is not so much “spoilt for choice” as confronted by what will later become the scientific discovery of plant communication. She paves the way, in effect, for the arrival of that moment in uncanny logic (in Carrollian “nonsense”) when primitive animism becomes that which is no longer surmounted by the modern mind, no longer regarded as primitive. This “primitive”, rather, is merely the modern in a state of distant, dislocated, disarticulated pre-formation or pre-sublimation or preapotheosis. There is in the end a specific reconfiguration of the experience of uncanny anxiety, representing a landmark in the genealogy of the uncanny as a concept. Alice-the-adventurous, uncannily un-anxious as well as cannily heroic, points to the remarkable vicissitudes of this concept’s development from its Enlightenment origins down to Freud and, indeed, down to Terry Castle’s more recent eighteenth-century research on the historical invention of the uncanny.25 Sketching the uncanny’s conceptual shifts and contortions is where Freud begins in his 1919 essay. However, if his scholarly review of the “existing literature” looks predictable at the level of its protocols, Freud’s essay in its adventurousness quickly overtakes itself, becoming, as Anneleen Masschelein has suggested, “a model for another type of knowledge operating in the margin of a more general theory governed by ambivalence, uncertainty, repetition, haunting, and fiction”.26 Thus the question arises, as is posed by Masschelein herself, whether “the uncanny” is in fact any longer a concept. That the “unheimliche” in Freud’s text is translatable as “eerie” and “creepy”, as well as “uncanny” (without forgetting “unhomely”) indicates the play in this word’s meaning, constituting what can be seen as a concomitant problem24

Salecl, Choice, 14; see also Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Ideology after the Fall of Socialism; and Salecl, On Anxiety. 25 Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, 6-9. 26 Masschelein, The Unconcept, 156.

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for-conceptualisation with the word itself. Our attention to this methodological challenge is drawn by Masschelein in her updating of the uncanny’s genealogy. Taking note of the growing spread of uncanny experience – of, that is, the uncanny everyday (as suggested by the level of abstraction in Salecl’s analysis)–Masschelein delineates how the uncanny’s “concept”, in art, philosophy, and science, “comes to life in a process of renewal and growth, but also of failure”.27 This delineation carries through to the description of, quoting the title of Masschelein’s text, The Unconcept. Animated by renewal and growth, as well as by failure, this “unconcept” emerges towards the end of Masschelein’s uncanny genealogy, around the turn of the twentieth century. It carries a positive valence, as it provides access to “the uncanny” as belonging to the other in the sense of the no-longerhuman. Ironically, this association renders it even more uncanny–nothing less than the radical uncanny itself–as, precisely, an unconcept rather than a concept. This distinction is not without interest in connection with our own discussion of Alice’s wish in Lewis Carroll, as being that which is pivotal regarding the existence of talking flowers. What if “the uncanny”, in this regard, belonged not to Alice but to the flowers-as-others? This “uncanny” would no longer be the construction of an anthropogenic concept but, genuinely, of a positively negativised unconcept. More to the point, it would constitute, in a properly improper fashion, in a theoretical theatre and a phantom scene with spectral stage directions, the “unconcept” of the vegetal uncanny. Such is the outline of a genealogical radicalism, or “rhizomatics of roots”, which can be traced if we follow the uncanny’s development beyond Carroll and Freud. We need now to turn to the newer notions of “plantsympathy” and even of “plant-thinking”, which are today a continuation of key discoveries around plant communication.

From Plant-Sympathy to Plant-Thinking It is by turning from such classic killer-plant narratives of the 1950s as The Day of the Triffids and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the 1960 film The Little Shop of Horrors that we turn from the plant-phobias of one era to an emergent plant-sympathy of another. 28 For its plant portrayal, notwithstanding its specific zoophagous elements, the Shop of Horrors as a comedy horror directed by Roger Corman (acclaimed King of B-Movies, a close kin of nonsense literary authors) is more closely aligned with Carroll’s Garden of Live Flowers than with the killer plants on mid-century cinema 27

Masschelein, 11. See Farnell, “What Do Plants Want?”, 179-96 regarding changing attitudes to plant life from the 1950s to the 1960s, with reference to literature and film. 28

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screens. In fact, whereas Alice and the Tiger-lily talk to one another in Through the Looking-Glass, in the Shop of Horrors it is more the case that human and plant speak with one another. “Well, I’ve helped you, and you’ve helped me”, 29 is what the protagonist Seymour Krelboyne declares to the plant Audrey Junior, whom he names affectionately after Audrey, his human love-interest in the flower shop where they work. Emphasising a shift from “to” to “with” here serves to point out that, in the Corman film, human and plant represent an image of reciprocity. Seymour provides food in response to the repeated “Feed me! Fee-d meee!” from Audrey Junior, and as a result, Seymour helps the plant to grow. The flower shop also grows in popularity, with, of course, this same growing plant drawing new customers through the door. The film’s story presents what has been aptly described as “Seymour and Audrey Junior’s mutually-beneficial relationship”, to quote Stephanie Lim in her essay on “Emerging Plant-Sympathy in The Little Shop of Horrors”.30 The story explores the ethos of the mutually beneficial with an American West Coast setting, which here serves to look forward to the phenomenal and fabulous “flower power” of the later 1960s. Lim notes, rightly, how plantsympathy is “emergent” in this situation. With the further unfolding of the story in Shop of Horrors, the critical human-plant reciprocity breaks down, with Audrey Junior’s “Feed me!” growing more demanding, prompting this film’s scenes of horror. Still, what may be seen as progressive about this film’s sixties-ness (both its stylistic intertwinement and organic growing together with sixties culture) will have had to do with its staging of a key to/with differential on the plane of human-plant interchange. For at issue is nothing less than a movement from the uncanny as concept to the vegetal uncanny as unconcept, pivoting, this time, around talking plants as exceeding the status in the story of mere props or forms of brief encounter, certainly no longer an object in the sense of being simply a support. In Wonderland, of course, English (the Victorian phenomenon of standard English with received pronunciation) is the lingua franca. Such a thing as 1960s plant-sympathy– emergent plant-sympathy–is a first approach to a different destination. It takes us away from the triffids of a world where there is, indeed, plant communication, but only between the plants themselves. In fact, their peculiar fascination and frightfulness for Bill Masen who, as the narrator-protagonist in John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids, first discovers “talking triffids”.31 Whereas the Tiger-lily is “other” in relation to Alice in 29

Corman, dir., The Little Shop of Horrors. Lim, “A Return to Transcendentalism in the Twentieth Century: Emerging PlantSympathy in The Little Shop of Horrors,” 211, 197-219. 31 Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, 47. 30

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Through the Looking-Glass, Audrey Junior stands as a constitutive other towards Seymour in The Little Shop of Horrors. That is to say, the non-human plant bestows identity on human beings more strikingly in the second of these two cases (the growth of both Seymour and the flower shop, as mentioned, is contingent upon Audrey Junior). Seymour and the flower shop alike are, in this regard, markedly hetero-affected and alter-dependent. It is precisely as constitutive others that such things as talking plants–perhaps speaking a proverbial language of flowers–stand outside the domain of (remaining exorbitant to) the conceptual-anthropogenic. What they here represent is that sort of open problem that is the unconcept at play, specifically in this instance, the vegetal uncanny at play, that is, the vegetal unheimliche at home. What may be seen as typifying this vegetal uncanny or unheimliche is as follows. Plant communication in the form of biochemical messaging or biosemiotic signalling often occurs when conditions are adversely affected for the plants themselves: they tell each other to release more toxins, becoming unpalatable to Mock Turtles (in Wonderland), or plant-eating dinosaurs (in pre-historic times), or human beings (in the present day). The behaviour of these “others” is then profoundly regulated by the plants they eat, or cannot eat (as the case may be), rather than the other way round. The principle at issue is that the plant–a fortiori the talking plant–produces a mode of existence for its others, producing at the same time a sui generis form of selfdetermination, for a kind of life which, under the right circumstances, promotes growth, nourishment, and vitality among plants and others alike (ipso facto decay and general metamorphic reproduction in the sphere of the organic). What is promoted, in short, is vegetal being through human/nonhuman deconstruction – nothing less than a certain radicalisation of the social and human–from a place where in evolutionary terms, humans used to be. To establish this principle is to indicate why it is so significant for the Blaustein research on the common pea to promote, in its own way, the idea of plant communication. Further studies–on, for instance, interplant communication among tomato plants–may play a similar part as well.32 It is the notion that plants are not just communicative but also constitutive (in this sense, uncanny) vis-à-vis human others, which has latterly given rise to attempts at understanding plant-thinking at the margins of the human sciences broadly conceived. This key communicative-constitutive nexus is the linchpin of a “Philosophy of Vegetal Life”, which introduces Michael Marder’s book, Plant-Thinking. He explains at an early point, while invoking the language of Carroll’s Wonderland, that “[c]uriously enough […] the absolute familiarity of plants coincides with their sheer strangeness, the incapacity of humans to 32

See Yuan Yuan Song et al., “Interplant Communication of Tomato Plants through Underground Common Mycorrhizal Networks.”

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recognise elements of ourselves in the form of vegetal being”.33 Marder, not necessarily quite so incapacitated or alienated, is fully cognisant of the nexus of communicative and constitutive in plant-thinking, to the point where he suggests the following: “[t]he other who (or that) bestows upon us our humanity […] may well be the most mundane and unobtrusive instance of alterity, to which we do not (already or yet) dare to compare ourselves: the plant”. 34 Here, it is altogether ironic that we should reach the point in this general reckoning with first principles whereby the mute plant, of all things, occupies and thus displaces the very place of the Logos. The mute plant is not so dumb after all; vegetation is more vital than “vegetative”. It signifies a turn away from logocentrism at the end of metaphysical thought, at the end of discourse tout court, as is pursued by Marder in his essay entitled, “To Hear Plants Speak”. The language of plants is characterised here as “an articulation without saying”.35 This language is not just wordless but also without vocalisation. It is, more precisely, a form of language-difference and, as such, it is an articulation of a pointedly, gloriously, and altogether non-dualistic sense that as it grows, so it articulates. The plant, which was, in itself, within logocentrism, becomes for itself, yet this alternative form of articulation reveals itself as a multidimensional form, between plants themselves, to say nothing of the entirety of the mutually dependent organic and inorganic worlds. As a slogan for this sort of vegetal commons might have it: Our plan(e)t is our plan(e)t! From this perspective, it would be “a mistake”, as Marder suggests, “to conjecture that vegetal selfexpression is a less complex, if not a primitive, form of language and, therefore, of being”.36 Dispelling a myth of plant primitivism in this manner in fact calls to mind Freud’s affirmation of so-called “primitive” animism when characterising uncanny experience at the level of human being: the very moment of “the uncanny” is marked by a certain return of this primitive animism. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the uncanny is, at the same time, a basic component of Marder’s elaboration of plant-thinking and of plants’ language. The more we familiarise ourselves with the latter, so our attention is drawn back to “The Uncanny”, especially in Freud’s essay, curious, it could be said, 33

Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, forward to Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, by Marder, 4. 34 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 36. For further discussion on Marder’s theory of plantthinking, see Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. 35 Marder, “To Hear Plants Speak,” 119. For further discussion on Marder’s concept of “articulation without saying”, see Luce Irigaray, “What the Vegetal World Says to Us”, 126-35; and Irigaray and Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. 36 Marder, “To Hear Plants Speak,” 122-23.

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for its vegetal modality (first traced by Cixous). As Marder himself noted, “[e]verywhere, we are surrounded by plants and even bear a trace of their orientation toward the world in our subjectivities”. 37 This remark from Marder’s phenomenology of vegetal self-expression (designed, in part, to respect plant untranslatability) duly intimates what has always already been our own vegetal uncanniness since, after all, we have long been listening to– if not hearing–plants speak and self-signify, leaving their traces in our orientation, for example, when composing uncanny texts.

Conclusion: Freud Vegetalized; or, Taking a Leaf Out of the Plants’ Book If, as was suggested earlier, Freud is not fully “vegetalized” in Cixous’ reading of “Das Unheimliche”, it is time now to take a step further in that regard by, as the saying goes, “taking a leaf out of the plants’ book”. There is no discussion of flowers or of plant life more generally in Freud’s essay. Nevertheless, there is evidence of these same unspoken plants leaving traces of their orientation in this essay’s wordlessness and non-vocalisation, that is, in its own form of “articulation without saying”, enacted via a certain unity of structure and dynamic. Michael Marder, in fact, has pointed out how logocentric the early Freud is in his discussion, in The Interpretation of Dreams, of flower symbolism, of the “language of flowers” to be precise, which, as is now clear, is contrasted with the “language of plants”. Here, the inherent meaningfulness of plant life–to say nothing of plants’ own “dreaming”–is denied first by his patients and then uncritically by Freud himself, when flowers are seen as symbolic of human phenomena (usually varieties of sexuality, including psychosexuality, as well as of spirituality.) As Marder remarks drily, “[t]here are no plants growing on the fields of metaphor, in the gardens of allegory, or in the forests of symbols–except of the metaphorical, allegorical, and symbolic kinds”.38 There is another side to this same Freud, however, when such things as flower symbols are treated as symptoms. What is implied is nothing other than, as Marder explains, “a vegetal approach to the psyche [tracing a way] back to plant life through the human psyche, for which sexuality (the classical reproductive faculty that originates in plants and is shared by all living beings) is constitutive”.39 Indeed this vegetal approach, within Freud’s own analytic resistance to a mind-body dualism, is to the Freudian unconscious specifically as, in Marder’s words, 37

Marder, “To Hear Plants Speak,” 123. Marder, “To Hear Plants Speak,” 109. 39 Marder, “To Hear Plants Speak,” 109. 38

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“an extended psychic thing entwined with the body itself–a somatic, and thus divisible, soul akin to that of a plant”.40 This formulation points to Cixous’ account of a plant-soul that is growing with the unusual above-and-belowground movement, by turns divisible as “science” and “fiction”, with manifold growth still representing unity in Freud’s later essay on “The Uncanny”. It is an essay, which may be seen not simply as a representation or a production or a staging-and-enactment of its subject, because this subject is represented, really, as a form of plant-mime–all in all, “an articulation without saying”. Fugitive in many ways, Freud’s essay presents itself as a modal exemplification insofar as it operates without a fit-and-proper, chapter-andverse definition of “the uncanny” (hesitantly reconsidering these, almost tremblingly so, as it unfolds). What exactly is it as a textual form? one could ask from its shifting genre markings: now philological, now belles-lettristic, now aesthetic in its stirrings and characterising traits (still without any splitting between “enunciation” and “utterance”). To be sure, Marder is alert to this sort of operationalisation of uncanniness as akin to vegetal growth. It stems, on his part, from his familiarity with Martin Heidegger’s thinking about language as “the house of Being”, which in turn informs his approach to the language of plants and plant-thinking.41 The “house” reference here reminds us how an interest in the unheimliche (especially its co-existence with anxiety) is shared by both Heidegger and Freud. But it is the Freudian instinct in his plant-souled and plant-miming essay to think Being not in the positive with a “house”, but in the negative with the “unheimliche”, for us as language users, which the more forcefully, so to speak, opens the door to that “other” reality which is our vegetal being. On hearing plants speak, Marder posits that “[t]he closer we come to actual existence, the more our languages and articulations resemble those of plants”, to quote Marder (from his own essay on hearing plants speak.42 It is as though Freud’s “Das Unheimliche”, as a verbal composition, was unhomely in relation to Heidegger’s “house of Being”.43

40 Marder, “To Hear Plants Speak,” 109. See also Marder, Plant-Thinking, 44, in which Marder repeats verbatim his concept of “a vegetal approach to the psyche”, signalling a heightened degree of argument. 41 Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 22, as quoted in Marder, “To Hear Plants Speak,” 117. 42 Marder, “To Hear Plants Speak,” 122. 43 Incidentally, Béla Bartók’s Szabadban (Out of Doors), of 1926, has a similar wildness and venturesomeness (out-of-doors-ness) about itself as a piano piece from the same era as both Freud and Heidegger.

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It is noteworthy that, as mentioned earlier, the language of the Freudian uncanny as well as that of Carroll’s Wonderland, form elements for the groundworks of Marder’s philosophy of living existence and vegetal being. To return to the previous quotation, here in full Marder explains: “Curiously enough, the absolute familiarity of plants coincides with the sheer strangeness, the incapacity of humans to recognize elements of ourselves in the form of vegetal being, and, hence, the uncanny–strangely familiar–nature of our relation to them”.44 The significance in this observation is not just that Marder makes explicit use of the word uncanny. What is similarly notable is that the paradoxical, even oxymoronic interplay of the “familiar” and the “strange” in this way of figuring our vegetality should so closely resemble Freud’s (more than Heidegger’s) discourse on that form of now-familiar strangeness called the uncanny. Indeed, this one statement from Marder carries a genealogical thread that takes us back through Freud to Carroll at the beginning of the statement itself. Much like Alice in Wonderland, Marder loves to use the word curious, betokening what is in fact a shared interest in vegetal being, a first glimpse of which is evident, as we have seen, in Alice’s fateful encounter with the Tiger-lily. That same encounter, incidentally, is itself referred to by Marder in a valuable brief note in Plant-Thinking.45 True to form, therefore, may well be the best manifestation of a description for Freud’s “The Uncanny” as an essay which, whether cannily or curiously (whether or not, indeed, in “strangely familiar” fashion), gives expression to the vegetal uncanny. This text in its torsions is a specific letting-be of that which is hearable from vegetal life, as has been suggested by Cixous. Her reading of the text of “Das Unheimliche”, as a network of traces branching out in different directions, is all the more exploratory for its shaping of its very matter–a predication without object–as it forms. Her remarks sow the seeds of a vegetal approach to fiction, as well as to the uncanny. However now this “branching out” and these “seeds” are no longer metaphorical. Such has been the outcome of entwining fiction (Carroll’s Garden of Live Flowers) with science (the Blaustein research on pea plants). This “entwining” can not be considered a metaphor either, for, as we might say, the world and its ordering (where syntax is ontology) is what happens in-between: in this case, in between the fictional and the scientific. This is a first law of living existence and vegetal being which–uncannily, of course–is graspable from speaking with talking plants.

44

Marder, Plant-Thinking, 4. As noted in earlier footnote, Marder refers here to his concept of “a vegetal approach to the psyche”. 45 See Marder, Plant-Thinking, 191n19.

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Bibliography Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, edited by Hugh Haughton. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Cixous, Hélène. “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’).” Translated by Robert Dennomé. New Literary History 7, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 525-548 and 619-645. https://doi.org/10.2307/468561 Corman, Roger, dir. The Little Shop of Horrors. London: GMVS Limited, 2003. DVD. Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester and Charles J. Stivale. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Falik, Omer, Yonat Mordoch, Lydia Quansah, Aaron Fait, and Ariel Novoplansky. “Rumor Has It . . .: Relay Communication of Stress Cues in Plants.” Public Library of Science: One 6, no. 11 (November 2011). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0023625 Farnell, Gary. “Anniversary Alice.” English Review 26, no. 3 (February 2016): 27-29. https://www.hoddereducationmagazines.com/magazine/englishreview/26/3/anniversary-alice/. —. “What Do Plants Want?” In Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, edited by Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga, 179-196. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin Books, 1919/2003. —. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by C.J.M. Hubback. New York: Bartleby 1922/2010. Gagliano, Monica, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Viera, eds. The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Haughton, Hugh. Introduction to The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry, 132. Edited by Hugh Haughton. London: Chatto & Windus, 1988. —. Introduction to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll, ix-lxv. Edited by Hugh Haughton. London: Penguin Books, 1998. —. Introduction to “The Uncanny” In The Uncanny, by Sigmund Freud, viilx. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

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Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Irigaray, Luce. “What the Vegetal World Says to Us.” In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, edited by Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Viera, 126-135. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Irigaray, Luce, and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Lacan, Jacques. Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by A. R. Price. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. Lim, Stephanie. “A Return to Transcendentalism in the Twentieth Century: Emerging Plant-Sympathy in The Little Shop of Horrors” In Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies, edited by Randy Laist, 197219. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. —. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. —. “To Hear Plants Speak.” In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, edited by Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Viera, 103-125. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in LateTwentieth-Century Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Ricks, Christopher, ed. Tennyson: A Selected Edition. Harlow: Longman, 1989. Salecl, Renata. The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Ideology after the Fall of Socialism. London: Routledge, 1994. —. On Anxiety. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004. —. Choice. London: Profile Books, 2010. Song, Yuan Yuan, Ren Sen Zeng, Jian Feng Xu, Jun Li, Xian Shen, and Woldemariam Gebrehiwot Yihdego. “Interplant Communication of Tomato Plants through Underground Common Mycorrhizal Networks.” Public Library of Science: One 5, no. 10 (October 2010). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0013324

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Tennyson, Alfred. Tennyson: A Selected Edition. Edited by Christopher Ricks. Harlow: Longman, 1989. Vattimo, Gianni and Santiago Zabala. Forward to Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, by Michael Marder, 4. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Wyndham, John. The Day of the Triffids. London: Penguin, 2008.

CHAPTER TWO “THE LANGUAGE THAT YER MAM SPOKE”: DIALECT AS UNHEIMLICH IN BRITISH WRITING CATHERINE MORRIS

The Language of Home Sigmund Freud introduces the notion of language as uncanny itself from the outset of his essay. After finding no immediate parallels to unheimlich in translation to sufficiently help him with his definition, he interrogates the multiple meanings of heimlich in German that in turn lead him to the paradox that is The Uncanny (1919). The heimlich, at once all that is cosy and familiar, arousing feelings of contentment and ease that being “at home” brings, is simultaneously a private place, something that is hidden or mysterious: “versteckt, verborgen gehalten, […] ‘concealed, kept hidden, so that others do not get to know of it or about it and it is hidden from them’”.1 Freud shows us how heimlich “merges with its antonym”,2 how the hidden mysteries of the home can be unsettling, seeking to undermine comfortable notions of the domestic, with the potential to destabilise, concoct, conspire, betray and usurp. Wo die öffentliche Ventilation aufhören muß, fängt die heimliche Machination an, ‘Where public ventilation has to cease, secret machination begins'. 3

Implicit too in his investigations into heimlich/unheimlich is that which is the opposite of homely, other, strange, from outside of the home, that seeks to undermine all that is homely. It is at the point where the two 1

Freud, “The Uncanny,” 129. Freud, 134. 3 Freud, 130; emphasis in original. 2

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meanings blur, where the familiar is made strange and scary and/or the strange and scary is made familiar, that our understanding of the uncanny arises. I prefer the German word, however, for its direct relation to the home, what ‘Home’ means and how something might come to be seen as ‘Unhomely’. Using The Uncanny as my basis, this essay will argue that dialect creates tension within the text between the representation of home, and the unhomely; how non-standard language is used within standard literary forms to generate uncertainties and anxieties of madness, insurgency, castration and feminisation, degeneration, and abjection. In considering the liminal role of dialect within the texts of Tony Harrison, William Shakespeare, Emily Brontë and Irvine Welsh, I will refer to sociolinguistic studies of regional and social dialects, as well to the psychoanalytical readings of Julia Kristeva in relation to the abject. Here I aim to show that an author’s choice of dialect-use within their literary style is bound up within an unheimlich mind-set of both writer and reader, and the cultural and historical contexts in which these attitudes are based. Dialect in literature is often used, whether successfully or not, to represent regional character; its speakers acting as gatekeepers to their particular world and way of life. Its use in opposition to standard English, however, suggests more than simply “local flavour”. Those who speak in dialect are often depicted as being of low social status and/or lacking in education, their world often less advanced, unstable and untrustworthy, set in juxtaposition to a more superior and reliable standard English. That which we might call a “Home Language”, or “Mother Tongue”, becomes other and wrong to us on the page. Yet the dialect of standard English, often not the prevailing dialect spoken at home, is more familiar, less threatening and accepted as correct in print as described by Norman Fairclough: A language has been jokingly defined as a ‘dialect with an army and a navy’, but this is a joke with a serious undercurrent. Modern armies and navies are a feature of the ‘nation state’, and so too is the linguistic unification or ‘standardization’ of large politically defined territories which makes talk of ‘English’ or ‘German’ meaningful. When people talk about ‘English’ in Britain for instance, they generally have in mind British standard English.

He further explains that: Institutional practices which people draw upon without thinking often embody assumptions which directly or indirectly legitimize existing power relations. Practices which appear to be universal and common-sensical can

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often be shown to originate in the dominant class […] and to have become naturalized.4

Standard English, the “national” language from outside the home, has become “naturalised” and made familiar; whereas that which is known to us, from inside the home, has become strange. The use of dialect may elicit anxieties of divergence from the “standard”, of rebellion against what is thought to be right, of the threat of human regression, and of total societal degeneration, which is to be rejected. Further, it creates a double, the reader becoming a co-owner of the other’s knowledge, of their emotional experiences: a person may identify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self; or he may substitute the other’s self for his own. The self may thus be duplicated, divided and interchanged.5

As a result, while an author’s use of dialect may seek to provide the reader with an intimate sense of place, character and time, the home from which the story is built; rather than welcoming, it can have an alienating effect and be treacherous to the reader. It crosses well-preserved boundaries and can be destabilising by bringing something that should not be within the text, into the text; our first languages, returned to us in an unfamiliar way; the private voice into public narrative.6

Gatekeepers “I played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth”, 7 recalls poet Tony Harrison in “Them & [uz]” (1974).8 The role assigned to him by school masters was based on the way he spoke; mockingly denigrating his home language, his 4

Fairclough, Language and Power, 21; emphasis in original; 33; emphasis in original. 5 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 142. 6 Catherine Morris, “The Land That Rises: Dialect as Unheimlich in British Writing.” Ideas for this chapter developed from research in my dissertation. 7 Harrison, “Them & [uz],” 122. 8 Tony Harrison is an English poet, playwright and translator. Born in Leeds in 1937, Harrison’s high art is rooted in his working class background, and his plays and poetry are known for their use of accent and depiction of Yorkshire dialect. By using the dialect voice within the standard, or as replacement to the standard, or indeed in opposition to it, the dialogic nature of Harrison’s work is suggestive of the multiplicity of social identity, and of the conflict of voice within each one person or piece of work, within British writing, and so too within British society as a whole.

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voice, as beneath that of poetry and literature while they attempted to “correct” his speech to the more acceptable dialect of standard English spoken in Received Pronunciation: Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those Shakespeare gives comic bits to: prose! 9

On the surface, Harrison equates the use of his natural voice and home language, in both literature and by those who appear to own it and control access to it, as the representation of the common man. Moreover, speaking only prose, not poetically or refined, he is the lewd comic turn in a working man’s club, not the hero, or even the obvious villain of the piece, but a fool, an inferior aside apparently not worthy of our full attention. By assigning himself to the role of Porter, Harrison points to language and its representation in writing as the designation of social role ascribed by those who have power over discourse, directing our attention to those critical, and suggesting those we should take less seriously. Though for some audiences the Porter’s ramblings are an amusing interlude in Macbeth, a break in tension from murderous events, as A.C. Bradley notes in his published lectures of 1904. 10 Yet it is not true that all those who speak prose in Macbeth are simply comical, or even of low standing, but as was customary throughout Shakespeare’s works, also those who lose status, dignity, or mind, more notably in the later demise of Lady Macbeth. As such, prose provides the audience with a verbal distinction between the acceptable public voice of stable society, that of Shakespeare’s free verse, and the internal voice usually suppressed and hidden from the outside world; our primal, unmediated voice. The Porter as metaphor (rather than contrast) for Macbeth, not only humanises Macbeth to the audience by reminding them that he is not “beyond their sympathetic understanding”, 11 as Tromley (1975) seeks to show, but also warns against dangerous, uncivilised, mad and primitive forces within that would undermine the external structures of society that those in power wish to impose and maintain, remind[ing] us of the startling proximity of the criminal and the comic. By translating the horrible into the familiar, the Porter Scene creates a complex perspective from which to view the remaining events of the play.12

9

Harrison, Selected Poems, 122. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, 388-400. 11 Frederic B. Tromly, “Macbeth and His Porter,” 152. 12 Tromly, 156. 10

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The prose letter spoken by Lady Macbeth in her opening lines, whilst foreshadowing her own final scenes of moral and mental decline, likewise indicates the nature and inner burning “desire […] of what greatness is promised” of her husband, the author of the letter she reads.13 Harrison’s choice of character in the Porter, whilst seeming to simply draw attention to the “low” working class role he was forever dismissed to play by his “masters”, also brings to the fore their fear of losing authority to some hidden power. Harrison exposes the rules and manipulations they employ: their control of language and those they allow to use it, through their attempts to silence him by not allowing for any deviation from their standards. “That shut me up”, he says, and “doffed his flat a’s”14 at the risk of exclusion from the educated, adult, literary world he hoped to one day inhabit if he did not submit. And so, in Verse I, the inarticulate and incapable schoolboy is domineered, objectified and, ultimately, alienated from himself, turning into someone who, as he later explained in an interview, learned many languages, obsessively, and also threw [himself] into becoming a poet, which is for [Harrison] a supreme and ceremonious mode of articulation.15

Harrison is finally able to “occupy” their property, their language,16 like some degenerate tenant, in Verse II. Returning to Macbeth’s Porter first, and the role of dialect as gatekeeper, we can see how the character plays a significant liminal function: physically, to the discovery of the terrible secrets within the castle walls, but also psychologically, to the primitive, less civilised person within. Both scenarios are consistent with the comparison he makes between his job and that of the gatekeeper to hell. Another such gatekeeper is Joseph, the longstanding servant to the Earnshaws in Wuthering Heights (1847). As a character of low standing and small mindedness, a wearisome and contriving “self-righteous Pharisee”,17 Emily Brontë has him speaking in almost impenetrable Yorkshire dialect. Following Emily’s death, even Charlotte, in her inconsistent second edition emendations to the text to make it less “unintelligible” to “Southerns”, 18 sought only to change the phonological presentation of the dialect on the page, but not the lexis, which, 13

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.5.1-13. References are to act, scene, and line. Harrison, Selected Poems, 122. 15 John Haffenden, “Interview with Tony Harrison,” 229. 16 Harrison, Selected Poems, 123. 17 Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights, 35. 18 Irene Wiltshire, “Speech in Wuthering Heights: Joseph's Dialect and Charlotte's Emendations,” 19-28. 14

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it could be argued, was the more impenetrable aspect of the dialect to those not from the locality of 19th century Haworth. Having only briefly met the muttering Evangelical in Lockwood’s first inspection “of the penetralium”,19 in our next encounter Joseph is barring and confrontational. With echoes of the arrival of Macduff as moral foil to Macbeth, Lockwood knocks “vainly for admittance”:20 “What are ye for?” he shouted. “T' maister's dahn i' t'fowld. Goa rahnd by th' end ut' laith, if yah went tuh spake tull him”. “Is there nobody inside to open the door?” I hallooed, responsively. “They's nobbut t' missis; and shoo'll nut oppen't an ye mak yer flaysome dins till neeght”. “Why? Cannot you tell her who I am, eh, Joseph?” “Nor-ne me! Aw'll hae noa hend wi't”, muttered the head, vanishing.21

Despite being a newcomer to the area, Lockwood does not have any difficulty understanding Joseph’s meaning. He does not ask Joseph to repeat himself, or explain anything; he simply responds appropriately, if a little frustrated with Joseph’s lack of cooperation. This, in itself, suggests the use of Joseph’s dialect as a sign to the reader, rather than as a device for Lockwood to misunderstand him, because he does not. And so, whilst, on the one hand, he is a physical obstruction to Lockwood, Brontë uses Joseph as a linguistic barrier to the reader, signalling something secret inside Wuthering Heights, something unheimlich. This secret is not only the ghost of Cathy, who will appear to Lockwood later, but also the dark character of his master, Heathcliff, who, like the usurper Macbeth, the other Porter’s master, has burning desires and a hunger for power and vengeance that lead to his committing terrible acts within its walls. Whilst keeping the secrets of his home away from prying eyes, Joseph is also fearful of external influences being brought within it, exemplified by Lockwood, and so we can see how Joseph represents both senses of the heimlich/unheimlich paradox. In the first instance, the homely is secretive and sinister, a threat from within that would undermine civil society and all that is thought to be right and good. In the second, yet concurrently, all that is known and understood within is under threat from that without: that which is strange and unfamiliar, seeking to alter the nature of domestic power and destabilising one’s notion of identity. Joseph stands on that threshold, keeping the former and guarding against the latter. Joseph’s representation through such strong dialect, even beside other local characters of a similar 19

Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 2. Brontë, 6. 21 Brontë, 6. 20

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status or age, stands out. He alone is depicted as consistently obfuscating and unchangingly incapable of learning or “improving”: his pitiless, grating language suggestive of his impoverished soul for all his sermons and gospel reading. As such, he is tied to the house, unable to leave Wuthering Heights, despite his many threats to do so, particularly when faced with any female authority or influence. The first outsider, the incomprehensible foundling, Heathcliff, is brought in by Mr Earnshaw, the patriarchal authority of the “very old”22 family that Joseph knows and recognises; as such he is treated no less favourably by him than Hindley, and usually better than Cathy. Speculations over Heathcliff’s patrilineality aside, he isn’t a threat to Joseph’s position. This holds true even when Heathcliff becomes eventual master of Wuthering Heights, as Joseph is able to retain what he has and remain as he is. When another outsider, the newly wedded Isabella, arrives at the house, Joseph, at first, ignores her completely, leaving instead to tend to the horses and lock the “outer gate, as if [they] lived in an ancient castle”.23 She steps alone and unwelcomed into the house, meeting the child Hareton, at this point of the novel destined to be as degraded and stuck at Wuthering Heights as his unofficial guardian. Hareton speaks “in a jargon she did not comprehend”, chasing her back “over the threshold”, 24 reminiscent of the young Heathcliff. Joseph continues to refuse to offer assistance, pretending, pointedly, not to understand her: “Mim! mim! mim! Did iver Christian body hear owt like it? Minchinh un’ munching! Hah can Aw tell whet ye say?” 25

Arnold Krupat attributes the title of his work, “The Strangeness of Wuthering Heights”, to the speech in the novel, though his argument tends to focus on the peculiar “normality” of both of the main narrators.26 Both are, in his opinion, “bland”, conventional and limited. He comments on how they are thus almost interchangeable despite their differing class and backgrounds. Heathcliff’s unpredictable speech, meanwhile, develops from the “not fixed […] nor […] fully formed [to] rough and violent”27 but at times polite and witty, and latterly weary. Through such examples, as well as the unfixed speech of Catherine and Hareton and the occasional silences of non-narrating characters in the face of “unspeakable” acts, Krupat asserts 22

Brontë, 29. Brontë, 120. 24 Brontë, 121. 25 Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 121. 26 Krupat, “The Strangeness of Wuthering Heights,” 269-280. 27 Krupat, 279. 23

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that the “wildness […] untamable strangeness […]” of the “vast, shapeless sense of things” is conveyed within the fixed form of the novel.28 He made clear from the beginning of his essay that he did not want to consider what such “strangeness may mean”,29 though I think by pursuing how and not why he finds the language so strange, he overlooked an important element of the effect. It is clear that the manner of speaking in Wuthering Heights represents the characters’ age, social status and ambitions.30 Those that speak to any degree in dialect are usually servants or those of inferior status. For instance, Irene Wiltshire sees Joseph’s role as “prosaic”, a realist foil to Cathy’s dramatic romanticism, but so too that his dialect marks him out as rather ordinary, limited and uninspiring, or, in another word, homely. 31 The occasional slips that Cathy’s Dad makes show that, despite his authority, he is behind the times (or perhaps, like Macbeth, represents a darker side to his nature and the secrets he keeps). Joseph’s reported speech in Isabella’s letter to Nelly Dean (its rendering consistent with those made within other character’s narration, as though such non-standardised language could be translated so unequivocally) imparts her newly degraded position. Disregarded by both “masters”, Hindley and Heathcliff, Joseph takes pleasure in demeaning her, sneering at her manners and refined ways; Isabella indignantly remarks how Joseph has a “nice house [with] pleasant inmates”. 32 In 1836, Wilhelm von Humboldt perceived that language signalled “the growth of man’s mental powers into ever new and more elevated forms”.33 It could be said that throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the intellectual aptitude for learning and adopting the standard language was regarded as reflective of one’s humanism, one’s sovereignty of mind and capacity for self-regulation to progress away from primitive or animal nature. 34 Taken this way, the 28

Krupat, 274, 280. Krupat, 270. 30 See Wiltshire’s essay, “Speech in Wuthering Heights: Joseph’s Dialect and Charlotte’s Emendations”, which discusses such use of dialect in the novel, and of the characters’ (and author’s) self-aware use of speech to denote station and power relationships, particularly as the dialect itself is reported speech within the narrations of standard speakers. 31 Wiltshire, 24. 32 Brontë, Wuthering Heights,126. 33 von Humboldt, On Language, 21. 34 See Will Abberley, English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, who builds on the writings of Linda Dowling (1986) and Christine Ferguson (2006), exploring language studies as a source of anxiety in Victorian Literature. For other detailed historical accounts, see Lynda Mugglestone, Talking Proper, and Jean Aitchison, 29

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codification of dialect and the use of language as a tool of cultural and political power and progression in Wuthering Heights is used in the same way. Standard English, as described by Fairclough, was regarded as correct English, and other social dialects were stigmatised not only in terms of correctness but also in terms which indirectly reflected on the lifestyles, morality and so forth of their speakers, the emergent working class of capitalist society: they were vulgar, slovenly, low, [and] barbarous. […] The establishment of the dominance of standard English and the subordination of other social dialects was part and parcel of the establishment of the dominance of the capitalist class and the subordination of the working class.35

The speaking of standard English then, in “Received Pronunciation”, is the speech of aspiration, of society, of leaving home and rejecting the “boundless self-love, the primordial narcissism that dominates the mental life of both the child and primitive man”. 36 This language is fearful for Joseph, who contemptuously laments: “If they’s tuh be fresh ortherings – just when Aw getten used tuh two maisters, if Aw mun hev a mistress set o’er my heead, it’s loike time tuh be flitting. Aw niver did think tuh say t’ day ut Aw mud lave th’ owld place – but Aw daht it’s nigh at hend!”37

Later, when Nelly recounts the coming together of Catherine and Hareton over a book, he takes the threat a little more seriously:

Language Change: Progress or Decay? The Newbolt Report also provides a historical account of the standardization of English from the Middle Ages, before establishing the aspirational educational aims of the committee to be rolled out throughout all schools. The report states that “the first and chief duty […] is to give its pupils speech–to make them articulate and civilised human beings, able to communicate themselves in speech and writing, and able to receive the communication of others. […] It is emphatically the business of the Elementary School to teach all its pupils who either speak a definite dialect or whose speech is disfigured by vulgarisms, to speak standard English, and to speak it clearly, and with expression”. The Newbolt Report, 60; 65. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, provides a post-hermeneutic criticism of the structures and evolution of the culture European language and discourse from Romanticism to Modernism. 35 Fairclough, Language and Power, 57; emphasis in original. 36 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 142. 37 Brontë, Wuthering Heights,124.

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Chapter Two […] Joseph came home. He, poor man, was perfectly aghast at the spectacle […]. “Tak these un tuh t’ maister, lad”, he said, “un’ bide theare; Aw’s gang up tuh my awn rahm. This hoile’s norther menseful nor seemly fur us – we mun side aht, and seearch another!”38

Joseph seeks to remove himself and Hareton from the external influence of Catherine and her books, his anxiety over his waning power evident, until at last he is overcome, the invasion now inevitable: “Aw mun hev my wage, and Aw mun goa! I hed aimed tuh dee, wheare Aw'd sarved fur sixty year; un’ Aw thowt Aw'd lug my books up intuh t' garret, un’ all my bits uh stuff, un’ they sud hev t' kitchen tuh theirseln; fur t' sake uh quietness. It wur hard tuh gie up my awn hearthstun, bud Aw thowt Aw could do that! Bud, nah, shoo's taan my garden frough me, un’ by th' heart! Maister, Aw cannot stand it! Yah muh bend tuh th' yoak, an ye will— Aw’m noan used to't, and an ow’d man doesn't sooin get used to new burthens-Aw'd rayther arn my bite, an' my sup, wi' a hammer in th' road!”39

Just as it is the female characters who are portrayed as the corrupting influence to Macbeth, Joseph believes that Catherine has “stale[n] t’sowl” of Hareton, the “flaysome, graceless quean, ut’s witched ahr lad, wi’ er bold een, un’ her forrard ways”40 Throughout, Joseph fights a battle to retain his identity and place in the world, against an invading class ideology and the unstable social trends that he fears will lead to him becoming obsolete. The use of dialect establishes his difference and independence from the society outside the home, preserving what he believes are ‘old’ values and virtues against the advancing and corrupting influence of the other. This otherness is seemingly reinforced through its representation in the more malleable female characters, and in the weakness and, so perceived, emasculated Edgar, Linton and Lockwood, who have subsumed these external values. Yet, by retaining the language of home, the private and traditional domain of the female, and by not entering and engaging with the male dominated public sphere, Joseph domesticates and feminises himself. Social dialect and linguistic studies from many different cultures and countries around the world found that patterns of non-standard speech, for example dialect or ‘rough’ speech, were more prevalent among male speakers of all classes, than among female speakers. 41 Prestige among male 38

Brontë, 280. Brontë, 283. 40 Brontë, 283-284. 41 See William Labov, “Hypercorrection by the lower middle class as a factor in linguistic change,” “The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of 39

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speakers was found to be linked to belonging among one’s own class, community or sub-culture, as though with a toughness and virility to survive invasion. Female speech was found to be more accommodating, with temporary subconscious changes to more standard forms of speech made to enable better communication, leading to more permanent changes when it could be seen to improve one’s social position. This, on the one hand, could be seen as females having “a serious and conservative acceptance of the responsibilities of adulthood”. 42 On the other hand, it could be more indicative of the social and material constraints placed on women in both sub-culture and main culture, that they must adapt and adopt whichever type of speech provides them with the most symbolic capital.43 They, in turn, encourage those around them, children in particular, to adopt these vernacular shifts themselves in order to achieve social success and security. This linguistic “tug-of-war” 44 suggests more than a simple distinction between male and female speech. What Lakoff (1975) called “women’s language” should, according to William M. O’Barr and Bowman K. Atkins (1980), instead be called “powerless language”, the correlation between the use of powerless language representative of one’s social position, irrespective of gender. Whilst identifying a higher frequency of powerless language among female speakers in their research, it was also noted that where education and/or shifts in social experience and expectation was evident, it had a decreasing effect on their use of powerless language.45 In Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990 trans.), Friedrich A. Kittler details the way in which the Mother was made into the primary instructor of speech for children. Throughout Europe, handbooks on alphabetisation and phonetic pronunciation, as well as methods on how to correctly create the sounds with the mouth, were aimed directly at mothers. The intention was to establish the standard pronunciation of words from the “national language” as natural, as Kittler articulates, “grounded in human nature and native to all the distinct regions of inner consciousness”,46 through the mouths and voices of mothers. The acquisition of correct language became essential to becoming the institutionalised “Good Mother”, both receptacle and reproducer, or else nothing at all: Linguistic Change,” and The Social Stratification of English in New York City; Jennifer Coates, Language and Gender: A Reader, and Women, Men and Language; Peter Trudgill, “Sex and Covert Prestige” and The Dialects of England, for example. 42 Edina Eisikovitis, “Girl-talk/Boy-talk,” 48. 43 Penelope Eckert, “Gender and Sociolinguistic Variation,” 64-75. 44 Jean Aitchison, Language Change: Progress or Decay? 62-75. 45 O’Barr and Atkins, “‘Women’s Language’ or ‘Powerless Language’?”, 377-387. 46 Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 29.

44

Chapter Two “I know these are just forms, but as forms they are the containers of a power that will bring intelligence and life to you and your child. Mother! The spirit and power of perfection lie with you, and for the sake of your child you should develop them into your spirit and your power. You can and should do this, otherwise you are worth nothing, nothing at all”.47

In Britain, a similar onslaught of publications emphasised the perceived high status for women that could only be achieved through polite manner and correct speech in feminine, modulated tones. 48 Through this, they would be exemplars to their families, in particular their menfolk, and, as such, of value. In her book on the rise of accent as a social symbol, Lynda Mugglestone explains how “vocal elegance [was] often presented as essential for proper womanhood”, and how, for wives and mothers at the very heart of the home, “the correct management of the voice was frequently depicted as an asset incontestable in the value it would confer” and that reading aloud would add “immeasurable […] comforts [to] the home”.49 Women suddenly became “guardians of the moral right and wrong, ladies were thus envisaged as assuming the role of guardians of the language […] As the Young Ladies Book of 1876 […] appeals, “‘will not our young ladies, stand up for their own mother tongue and, by speaking it in its purity, redeem its lost character?’” 50 As up until this point women had been allowed little or no access to discourse of any kind, let alone be deemed important enough to instruct the nation’s children in the way of words or to have any influence over their men, it is little wonder the role of promoting the primacy of correct orality was seized upon. Soon “children were all eyes and ears for the instrumental presentations of the mouth”51 and, therefore, by instructing the Mother in a standard way, under the pretext of teaching children to speak and read, and reducing dialects to subhuman noise that 47

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Das Buch der Mutter, oder Anleitung fur Mutter, ihre Kinder bemerken und reden zu lehren), as quoted in Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 54. 48 See complete list in Mugglestone, Talking Proper, 335-336, including unmistakable titles, for example: G. Vandenhoff, A Lady's Reader, with Rules for Reading Aloud; Anonymous, Errors of Pronunciation and Improper Expressions; Richard Meade Bache, Vulgarisms & Other Errors of Speech: To Which is Added a Review of Mr. G. Washington Moon's 'Dean's English' and 'Bad English’; Anonymous, Woman: As She Is, and As She Should Be.; and Anonymous, Woman's Worth: Or Hints to Raise the Female Character as well as novels, magazines and penny journals such as The Family Herald and the London Journal. 49 Mugglestone, Talking Proper, 146-147. 50 Mugglestone, 144. 51 Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 34.

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should be suppressed, a standard, nationalisation of language was promoted. Those that didn’t learn would be left behind. Through the Mother, at the time the traditionally powerless woman, the unfamiliar is made familiar. In seeking value, stability and improvement for themselves and their families, as continues to be seen in the studies of Labov, Eisikovitis, Penelope Eckert, for example, women are seen to adhere more readily to the more dominant power, endorsing the order of the class outside of the home, by bringing home another language and naturalising it: a new Mother Tongue. So, at the end of the novel, who is triumphant? Who occupies whom? Catherine and Hareton leave to take their place at Thrushcroft Grange to occupy a newly elevated position in society. In order to achieve this aspirational happy ending, the public voice had to infiltrate and dominate the private, and the home, as it was known, had to be left behind.52 Joseph, meanwhile, remains unchanged and preserves his home language, but who will hear him in the private obscurity of what is left of that which he calls home? As the only one to remain at Wuthering Heights, he retains both home and identity, but will presumably end his days there, the last of the old house dying with him. This can be seen as a success, then, for standardisation. However, dialect, like Joseph himself, has only been repressed, “buried alive, only apparently dead”. 53 Jodey Castricano cites Hélène Cixous’s observation: “I like the dead, they are the door keepers who while closing one side ‘give’ way to the other”.54 The other being the dead in us, in whose memory we live and by whose death–or at least by the 52 As in Wiltshire, “Speech in Wuthering Heights: Joseph’s Dialect and Charlotte’s Emendations”, in Gideon Shunami, “The Unreliable Narrator in Wuthering Heights”, he discusses the narrators of the novel, but focuses on their overall reliability. Shunami particularly sets out to prove how the “activities and utterances” of Nelly Dean prove her to be much more meddlesome than her air of “general reliability” and “expression of absolute normalcy” would have us believe. Shunami refers to John Hafley’s reading of Nelly as “The Villain in Wuthering Heights”, contriving to gain control over both houses and proceeds similarly to point to her dubious intentions, despite the “rigid class system she is unable to overcome” outwardly. He also illustrates Lockwood’s naivety and willingness to accept Nelly’s version of events, thus also supporting the idea that the previously powerless and uneducated woman could now influence and ultimately take over in an underhand way with a modicum of education and articulacy. However, in doing so, Shunami proves too that through her successful manipulations, Nelly manages ultimately to maintain the existing larger social hierarchy in which she believes she, the younger Cathy, and particularly Hareton, may better thrive. 53 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 150. 54 Cixous, as quoted in Castricano, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing, 3.

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possibility of whose death–the ‘within me’ or ‘within us’ becomes possible. Castricano continues to describe that “[t]his spacing is what the dead ‘give’”.55 She repeats a line just quoted from Derrida to posit that “[o]ne must always begin by remembering. And the way not to forget, says Cixous, is to write”.56 By placing the centre of learning to read, and, subsequently, to write, in the home and through the primary voice of the Mother, thereby seeking to implant culture within nature, the unintended consequence is of nature infiltrating culture; those who were once silenced could now speak and expect to be heard. Only the mother’s pointing finger retained any relation to the optic form of the letter. And when later in life children picked up a book, they would not see letters but hear, with irrepressible longing, a voice between the lines.57

So, perhaps home isn’t left behind. Instead, it remains inside, carried in the mind, through the bloodline, like inherited madness or animistic spirit, a “hidden power”58 occupying the silence, threatening to breach class lines, to occupy and destabilise the structures that put them there. When writers write dialect, therefore, they write of our remembrances, gatekeepers who open the door back home to the private, dead self within each of us.

Occupation: Where Home is Hell Opening this door doesn’t make for easy reunion, however. Whilst the door may swing both ways, as we have noted, admitting the private voice into the public space from which it has long been excluded is not shown to lead to a comfortable and peaceable co-existence. In Verse II of “Them & [uz]”, therefore, Harrison does not remain submissive; once inside, he rebels. So right, ye buggers, then! We’ll occupy your lousy leasehold Poetry. I chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones, dropped the initials I’d been harried as and used my name and own voice: [uz] [uz] [uz], 55

Castricano, 3. Castricano, 3; emphasis in original. 57 Kittler, Discourse Networks, 34. 58 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 149. 56

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ended sentences with by, with, from, and spoke the language that I spoke at home.59

By occupying the known sonnet form, quoting the classics and literary canon, Harrison destabilises literature through the use of his home language in his own voice, as though trampling coal dust from his dirty hobnail boots all over the carpeted floors of the English country houses of those who appear to control discourse. Worse, he devours language and literature cannibalistically, in order to regurgitate the structure, the entire framework, “the bones”, back at those who formed and enforced it upon him during his formative years at grammar school. The success of establishing the institution of the Mother as locus of primary orality in middle class families was understandably slower to take hold in illiterate working class families. Even as literacy levels increased, the division of labour in working class homes would leave little time for working class mothers to learn “correct” oral formations for the standardisation of words, let alone impart it upon their, often many, young. Mugglestone looks to Janet Murray, from StrongMinded Women, to explain that, despite this, they were “judged by the same standards of angelic, sheltered femininity as middle-class and upper-class women”.60 Being a Good Mother became an integral part of this appraisal and so, understandably, parents who did not have the “correct” language themselves encouraged success through “improvements” that could be achieved at school. Yet those who aspire to “correct” their own language use, such as the women in the studies of authors such as Labov and others seen above, and including D.H. Lawrence’s mother, as discussed in Mugglestone’s work, appear to make minimal impact on their families’ or wider communities’ daily speech. Similarly, despite attending grammar school and university, Harrison too retains his accent and continues to use dialect in his work, whilst concurrently, finding himself outside of his own community, he no longer speaks the same language as his mum. This usage is more overt in his later poem, v. (1985): What is it that these crude words are revealing? What is it that this aggro act implies? Giving the dead their xenophobic feeling Or just a cri-de-coeur because man dies? So what's a cri-de-coeur, cunt? Can't you speak 59 60

Harrison, Selected Poems, 122. Murray, as quoted in Mugglestone, Talking Proper, 137.

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Chapter Two the language that yer mam spoke. Think of 'er! Can yer only get yer tongue round fucking Greek? Go and fuck yourself with cri-de-coeur! “She didn't talk like you do for a start!” I shouted, turning where I thought the voice had been. She didn't understand yer fucking “art”! She thought yer fucking poetry obscene!61

Bawdy as the Porter, but as barring as Joseph, Harrison the skinhead refuses to welcome or understand Harrison the poet when they meet over their parents’ graves. The text is as confrontational to the reader as the skinhead is to the poet; punctuated with profanities, accepting and underscoring the base nature of his language in opposition to the high language of poetry, he pushes the reader away with snarling aggression, the working man without work, the anti-intellectual scorning the culture that is not of himself. The skinhead’s own xenophobia, 62 one of the translations of the unheimlich listed by Freud, is demonstrated by the way he refuses to understand the poet’s “foreign languages”, just as Joseph refuses to understand Isabella at Wuthering Heights. He fears the unhomely, external influences that may come to undermine him and his place in the world, small as it is: “So don’t speak Greek. Don’t treat me like I’m dumb”. 63 But it already has. The degradation he already feels is as a result of larger, external influences over which he has no power. The Thatcherism of the 1980s sought to boost the national economy and nationalistic sentiment through monetary individualism. While lowering taxes to reduce inflation benefitted those who had money and opportunity in the first place, the privatisation of national industries and the closing of those in decline created vast unemployment in manufacturing and mining, and so mainly among male workers, in the north, Scotland and Wales.64 Harrison reflects: Ah’ll tell yer then what really riles a bloke. It’s reading on their graves the jobs they did – butcher, publican and baker. Me, I’ll croak doing t’same nowt ah do now as a kid. ‘ard birth ah wor, mi mam says, almost killed ‘er. 61

Harrison, “v,” 241; emphasis in original. Whilst the term xenophobia is usually linked to racism and the fear of people from other countries, the Greek word xenos, ȟȑȞȠȢ, is more commonly interpreted as “stranger”, meaning anyone who is not of one’s own community. 63 Harrison, “v,” 242; emphasis in original. 64 Jamie Jenkins, “The Labour Market in the 1980s, 1990s and 2008/09 recessions.” 62

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Death after life on t’dole won’t seem as ‘ard! […] Then t’ Alleluias stick in t’ angels’ gobs. When dole-wallahs fuck off to the void what’ll t’mason carve up for their jobs? The cunts that lieth ‘ere wor unemployed?65

This supports the linguistics view of language as social symbol and of being a marker of belonging, or not, to a particular location or social class, and so too of the prestige and power associated with belonging to one or other language community. It also demonstrates that these indicators are as many and varied as the languages and dialects that arise from them, and that one may find oneself inside, and yet excluded from, many. In his excessive and aggressive use of profanity, the skinhead is reminded that he doesn’t speak the language of his mother either. Terry Eagleton notes, Harrison is a natural Bakhtinian […] the sign is a terrain of struggle where opposing accents intersect, how in a class-divided society language is cultural warfare and every nuance a political valuation.66

The drive to improve speech and literacy through education was seen as an egalitarian ideal by some, but the binaries it created in elevating one form of speech above all others caused more division than union.67 By illustrating the means by which society is meant to be united (the ‘V’ for Victory during the war, like the standardisation of language, unifying the country against threats of the other), here, Harrison instead shows how they divide. Each ‘v’, “all the versuses in life”,68 split us in two, like the letter itself, joined by, yet separated at, its vertex. That dreadful schism regrettably still exists in the British nation […] the same tensions between my background and my education, between the inarticulate on one hand, and being presented with the models of eloquence from the ancient world on the other.69 65

Harrison, Selected Poems, 242. Eagleton, “Antagonisms: Tony Harrison’s v,” 349. 67 The intention of the education committee that commissioned The Newbolt Report in 1921, and other systems of language standardisation, was to narrow “the mental distance between classes in England. […] Matthew Arnold […] claimed that ‘[c]ulture unites classes' [and] a system of education which disunites classes cannot be held worthy of the name of a national culture”. The Newbolt Report, 6. 68 Harrison, Selected Poems, 238. 69 Harrison, “Facing up to the Muses,” 438. 66

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Instead of reunification, a double-voicedness is created, where the conflict of the private and public becomes a conflict of self. Like Freud’s uncanny double, Harrison shows himself to be co-owner through the Bakhtinian skaz, as explored by Xiaodong Liang (2009). [Harrison] tends to contextualize the combats through different voices: the language and cultural combats between the bourgeoisies and the workingclass through the voices of “them” and “[uz]”, the education combats between him and his family through the voices of the silent and the eloquent; the inner combats through the forked tongue of his split-self. In these doublevoiced discourses, the dialogic interactions, the authentic sphere where language lives, are dramatically presented and all the dialogic relationships are permeated throughout all the discourses.70

Both Harrisons occupy the same liminal space “where language lives”,71 somewhere between the living and the dead. The skinhead cannot enter the “land of the living” (i.e., society) due to his lack of words, but so too may he refuse the poet re-admittance to his former home, because home, as Harrison remembers it, no longer exists. All that remains are “graveyards […] strewn with rubbish and choked up with weeds”; 72 the skinhead was left behind in a hell he cannot leave, while the poet, a linguistic exile, may only return when he is dead, and so silenced, himself: “at 75 this place will suit me fine”. 73 Harrison, a Greek scholar and dramatist, uses speech, “the primacy of the word”,74 to give voice not only to his tragedy, but ours too, “bringing dark events eis to phos, to the light of day” 75 within the text. Or, in terms of speech, it is where “silence becomes audible” 76 to the audience, through which we “also [see] each other”. 77 Through his speech, therefore, the skinhead’s colloquial entry is a “counter-rhythmic interruption, a pure word”78 to the poet’s classical musings, marking a caesura:

70

Liang, “The Conflicting Voices in Tony Harrison’s Poetry,” 106-112; emphasis mine. 71 Liang, 106-112. 72 Harrison, Selected Poems, 238. 73 Harrison, 245. 74 Harrison, “Facing up to the Muses,” 440. 75 Harrison, 441. Harrison refers directly here to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. 76 Jeremy Tambling, Hölderlin and the Poetry of Tragedy, 118. 77 Harrison, in “Facing up to the Muses,” 441. 78 Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 318.

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a very peculiar "cutting off”, for it is an interruption that, in brief, allows the tragedy to continue […] mark[ing] the place where the succession and alternation of representations […] of plot, character, action […] are cut off and “where representation itself appears […]” In other words, […] the caesura is the place where the tragedy explicitly turns upon itself, where, in short, representation represents itself as representation.79

By entering the personal voice into the public narrative, Harrison explores his own Hölderlin caesura, and asks his readers to do the same; to recognise the emotional experience of the antagonist, recalling shared personal memories to the point at which we are ‘cut off’ and to understand the person we will never be again, the dead self. In Hölderlin’s interpretation of Oedipus Rex, “it is the speeches of Tiresias which constitute the caesuras”80 suggesting that the skinhead’s arrival might then be read as that of Tiresias. In this reading, as Tiresias is summoned to reveal to Oedipus his father’s murderer, “the natural power which tragically removes [Harrison] from […] the very mid-point of his inner life, to another world, and tears him off into the eccentric orbit of the dead”.81 During the exchange, the poet’s language degenerates to that of the other: “‘Listen, cunt!’ I said”.82 Like Oedipus in his “all-searching, all-interpreting” endeavours, Harrison “succumb[s] to the rough and simple language of […] servants […] speak[ing] in a more violent configuration” 83 as he attempts to make the skinhead take responsibility for his vandalism upon the monuments, “invest[ing] in, while disavowing, the parricidal drive”.84 Of course, like Oedipus, the poet refuses to see what the blind/inarticulate man is able, until he reads it for himself: Yer’ve given yerself toffee, cunt. Who needs yer fucking poufy words. Ah write mi own. Ah’ve got me work on show all over Leeds like this U N I T E D ‘ere on some sod’s stone. “O K!” (thinking I had him trapped) “O K!” “If you’re so proud of it then sign your name […]”

79

Andrzej Warminski and Rodolphe Gasche, Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger, 80. 80 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 318. 81 Hölderlin, 319. 82 Harrison, Selected Poems, 242; emphasis in original. 83 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 323. 84 Tambling, Hölderlin and the Poetry of Tragedy, 119.

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Chapter Two He took the can, contemptuous, unhurried and cleared the nozzle and prepared to sign the U N I T E D sprayed where mam and dad were buried. He aerosolled his name. And it was mine.85

Here poet becomes vandal, defacing the edifice of poetry and classical literature with his base-born words, like the skinhead’s vulgarities sprayed onto tombstones. Yet, Tambling’s discussion of André Green’s reading of Hölderlin sees “Teiresias [sic] become […] the father, the god”. 86 That being so, the ghost of his unemployed-skinhead-self becomes Harrison’s father, but in this configuration so too does the articulate, educated, poet, looking for the wrong in himself; 87 his connection to the long line of working-class men before, “butcher, publican, and baker”,88 and so too this connection to himself, is severed either way, through a lack of work or a lack of words.89 One half of me ’s alive but one half died when the skin half sprayed my name among the dead. 90

It is a split that “reveals unconscious horrific unspeakable desire”, 91 for Harrison to be “U N I T E D” once more with himself and with his father– “the heart that can’t be whole till they unite”. 92 This split also allows Harrison to “regress […] to times when the ego had not yet clearly set itself off against the world outside and from others”,93 for instance before the split 85

Harrison, Selected Poems, 244. Tambling, Hölderlin and the Poetry of Tragedy, 119. 87 nefas, which is the Latin word to describe a ‘wrong’ or ‘wickedness’ or forbidden act; contrary to divine law, describes this relationship and is discussed by André Green in Tambling, 119-120. 88 Harrison, Selected Poems, 236. 89Haffenden, “Interview with Tony Harrison,” 230. Harrison has written extensively about his father (as well as uncles and grandfathers) and the disconnection he has experienced due to his possession of language; his attempts to “surmount [it] by acquiring education all the more intently, […] only served to accentuate the problem, setting [him] apart from [his] parents”. John Lucas reads Harrison’s poems as “pointing a disconnection, […] the issue of connection between educated poet and working class family, especially the father, is one that preoccupies Harrison to the point of obsession”. Lucas, “Speaking for England?”, 358. 90 Harrison, Selected Poems, 244. 91 Tambling, Hölderlin and the Poetry of Tragedy, 119. 92 Harrison, Selected Poems, 244. Harrison refers to the split as “a middle slit to one daubed V”. 93 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 143. 86

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of private v. public occurred. And while Harrison the exile goes in search of “[h]ome, home to my woman, home to bed”94 and of “LOVE” [that his] “alter ego […] would baulk at”,95 Freud recounts a “jocular saying [that] has it that ‘love is a longing for home’”.96 Harrison’s desire for home, as Freud describes, “something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed”, 97 instead reveals itself inside the speech of the caesura, through the mouth of the mother both Harrisons share and fight over. Harrison writes: “can’t—you speak / the language that yer mam spoke”, versus “she didn’t talk like you do for a start!”98 But as he has already concluded, he cannot truly return until he is dead, so instead he is tempted back to life again, the despairing struggle to find himself; and also the degrading, almost shameless attempt to gain control of himself, his foolishly wild search for consciousness.99

While the self, “only apparently dead”,100 is already buried alive inside the poet, “half versus half, the enemies within”, 101 the poet looks forward to the day when he can lay, reunited with himself, and as one with his fathers, in their Beeston Hill grave. His mother, meanwhile, remains conspicuous by her absence: Beneath your feet’s a poet, then a pit. Poetry supporter, if you’re here to find how poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind. 102

According to Freud, such ideas of the grave relate to “a certain lasciviousness; […] the fantasy of living in the womb. […] the entrance to man’s old ‘home’, the place where everyone once lived”.103 By returning repeatedly to his private voice, within his public works, to his mother tongue, Harrison reveals the yearning to live fully within that voice, which may be perceived psychoanalytically as childish, mad, or even 94

Harrison, Selected Poems, 246. Harrison, 248. 96 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 151. 97 Freud, 148. 98 Harrison, Selected Poems, 241; emphasis in original. 99 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 321. 100 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 150. 101 Harrison, Selected Poems, 244. 102 Harrison, 249; emphasis in original. 103 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 150, 151. 95

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“demonic”. 104 In this sense, Harrison’s return reveals a rejection as “radically separate, loathsome” as death.105

Dialect as Abject The phobic little girl presented in a section of Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror entitled “Devouring Language”, was described as speaking “with a rural accent, […] talkative [and had] ‘an extensive vocabulary, express[ing] herself with ease and enjoy[ing] repeating strange and difficult words’”.106 Harrison similarly displays his rural voice in discourse that Kristeva might describe as his own “extreme nimbleness” and “vertiginous skill”,107 with words he only gained through having experienced original loss, or rejection, of the mother, and therefore, his mother tongue. The little girl’s linguistic ability increased and became more apparent the more phobic she became, in this instance of being eaten by a dog. For Harrison, British, class-based society is the dog that threatens to consume him. Or else it is the “dreaded” father of Freud108 that would cut him off from the public sphere, as he saw it reject his own inarticulate father and anyone left behind through lack of education and opportunity.109 Their want of words is self-destructive: “what can defilement become if not the negative side of consciousness – that is, lack of communication and speech?”110 The public Harrison, therefore, lives the emotional experience of one who has come to understand the power of 104

Freud, “The Uncanny,” 145. The context of Freud’s use of this word clarifies further the usage here: “In the unconscious mind we can recognize the dominance of a compulsion to repeat, which proceeds from instinctual impulses […] strong enough to override the pleasure principle and lends a demonic character […] manifest in the impulses of small children and dominates part of the course taken by psychoanalysis of victims of neurosis”. 105 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. Kristeva elaborates: “do we not find a whole gradation within modalities of separation: a real deprivation of breast […] a symbolic castration inscribed in the Oedipus complex […]?”, 33; emphasis in original. 106 Kristeva, 40. 107 Kristeva, 40. 108Freud, “The Uncanny,” 140. 109 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 34. Kristeva suggests that “[s]poken fear, hence subsequent to language and necessarily caught in the Oedipus structure, is disclosed as the fear of an unlikely object that turns out to be the substitute for another. [noting that Freud believes, in the case of Hans, that the boy] detects the fear of castration– of his mother’s missing sexual organ, of the loss of his own, of the guilty desire to reduce the father to the same unmanning or to the same death”. 110 Kristeva, 30.

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and need for articulation, but in so doing, recognises his own abjection; he has departed from home and family, from his own voice, from himself. He knows both “selves”, and the losses of both and the alienation that being one or the other self brings. For Harrison, home is hell, as Kristeva states: “the abject is the violence of mourning for an ‘object’ that has always already been lost”.111 He recognises the violence that exists as one tries to occupy the other, the mirroring of cultural antipathy in every ‘v’, and how we turn on ourselves in times of trouble. Kristeva observes that a writer “never stops harking back to symbolization mechanism, within language itself, in order to find a process of eternal return, and not in the object that it names or produces, the hollowing out of anguish in the face of nothing”.112 Through the use of dialect in his poetry, a discarded language nationally, and a dead or taboo language in accepted literary terms, Harrison creates “particularly favourable conditions for generating feelings of the uncanny if [according to Ernst Jentsch] intellectual uncertainty is aroused as to whether […] the lifeless bears an excessive likeness to the living”. 113 And while familiar standard words can be read and internalised silently, unfamiliar dialect words lay cold and unrecognisable on the page. This forces readers to speak them aloud to recognise them again and hear how they truly sound, inviting us into that world and compelling us to revive what has been cast off culturally; “something that has been repressed and now returns”. 114 Kristeva expresses that our mouths are now “fill[ed] with words instead of my mother whom I miss from now on more than ever. I elaborate that want, and the aggressivity that accompanies it, by saying”.115 In both poetry and prose, what was once symbolic of the pastoral ideal and homely domesticity, becomes the angry voice of the alienated, those that should be dead and buried imposing themselves, returning with linguistic and political force, back into national dialogue. In the 1990s, new economic concerns and global conflicts arose to create new anxieties for a new generation. Political and cultural change, as well as technological innovations, allowed for greater physical and social mobility, the boundaries between home and the world outside it blurring. Further education reforms and greater access to student grants enabled more children from working class families to go onto further and higher

111

Kristeva, 15. Kristeva, 43. 113 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 141. 114 Freud, 147. 115 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 41; emphasis in original. 112

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education.116 Though the ideals of equality of education leading to social and economic supposed good for the entire nation still held, old prejudices and anxieties of what counter-cultural harms might come along for the ride remained. The multiplicity of working class voices was not only demanding to be heard, it was being heard extensively for the first time, adding to concerns that the old English standards might actually be rejected, and the old “vulgarities” accepted.117 In the midst of these anxieties, Irvine Welsh presents his affirmingly bleak picture. Polluting the “pure” bloodline of British writing in standard English by mainlining “schemie” dialect, like skag, through it, Welsh fouls and disfigures the novel of the English Literature tradition and brings the British reading public face to face with their abject selves by making them mainstream in his novel, Trainspotting.118 If Harrison’s use of dialect introduces the reader to the abject self in British writing, Welsh plunges us headfirst into the dirty toilet of discarded communities, where profanities and not-dead-yet provincialisms live side by side. The Porter invites us, not into the castle of his masters, but into his own council flat, decaying, but not yet dead. We find that, instead of attempting to better himself or to fight the overriding class-consciousness he is situated within, he has become a junkie, ambivalent about what he can expect from life. He favours the “Mother Superior” over any other mother, one that allows for deep withdrawal and a quest for silence from public discourse:

116 See Paul Bolton, Education: Historical statistics, 14. Here he explains that “Overall participation in higher education increased from 3.4% in 1950, to 8.4% in 1970, 19.3% in 1990”. 117 Mugglestone, Talking Proper, 40, 41. Mugglestone quotes Francis Newman who, in 1869 in reference to “England, declares, [it] is ‘a nation which desires to eliminate vulgar provincial pronunciation, to educate and refine its people’. By doing so, it will ‘get rid of plebianism, and fuse the orders of society into harmony.’” Mugglestone also quotes Noah Webster, who also posits that “[w]hile all men are on a footing and no singularities are accounted vulgar and ridiculous, every man enjoys perfect liberty. But when a particular set of men, in exalted stations, undertake to say, ‘we are the standards of propriety and elegance, and if all men do not conform to our practice, they shall be account vulgar and ignorant’, they take a very great liberty with the rules of language and the rights of civility”. 118 Welsh’s novel, Trainspotting was longlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize but was rejected when two judges threatened to walk off the panel if it was considered alongside the other novels. See Alan Bissett, “The Unnoticed Bias of the Booker Prize.” In 1996 it was released as a highly successful film to critical acclaim, winning, among other awards, a British Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and nominated for others, including at the Academy Awards.

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Mother Superior’ wis Johnny Swan; also kent as the White Swan, a dealer whae wis based in Tollcross and covered the Sighthill and Wester Hailes schemes. […] Johnny Swan hud once been a really good mate ay mines, back in the auld days. We used to play fitba thegether fir Party Thistle. Now he wis a dealer. Ah remember um saying tae us one: Nae friends in this game. Jist associates. […] Ah sais nae mair. Whin ye feel like he did, ye dinnae want tae talk or be talked at. […] Ah didnae either. Sometimes ah think that people become junkies just because they subconsciously crave a wee bit ay silence.119

It is perhaps unsurprising that dialect finds itself at home in Scottish writing. Since the nation building days of the Middle Ages and subsequent wars of independence from the English, as well as sectarianism arising from Scottish Reformation and the later arrival of Irish immigrants (creating further internal divisions), writing of distinct Scots origins, from Gaelic to Doric to Lallans to Glaswegian, has helped define Scottish culture and nationalistic fervour. This should be read within a wider hegemonic context; early writings in both Scots and English languages adopted a particularly French style in an attempt to mark both as elite and civilised, despite being opposing nations. The growing imposition of a standard, dominant language across the British Isles, along with the idea of English Literature as an entirety in itself, lumped all works of the British Isles, Empire, and former colonies within the Anglosphere, keeping them in the family, so to speak, whilst their use of the vernacular set them at odds with such unifying aims and, as such, kept them apart. This equally generalising and particularising effect influences both writer and reader, revering mythological ideals of people and place whilst reinforcing racial stereotypes, even within their own language. Therefore, the proud Scot, the fierce Scot, the heroic, wild and free Scot, are as well-known as the drunken Scot. As Gerard Carruthers writes, even when “vernacular revivals” are hailed as a vigorous “returning to a kind of cultural and literary authenticity”, they instead appear to “exist[..] within a rather limited and ghettoised space”,120 Writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978), Tom Leonard (b. 1944), and James Kelman (b. 1946), continued the tradition of viewing the Scottish condition through this clouded lens; their characters often acquiring prosaic clarity 119

Welch, Trainspotting, 7-8. Carruthers, Scottish Literature, 47. Carruthers’ book traces the foundations, construction and development of Scottish literature, from a “broken and compromised tradition” to being seen as “nationalistically formulated and politically loaded” within generalist Anglocentric criticism, to looking at theoretical approaches to Scottish Literature beyond nationalism and outside of its position within the Anglosphere. Carruthers, 1.

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about the state of the nation, of their community, of the self, just like the Porter before them, while looking through the bottom of an empty bottle. Trainspotting abandons the more noble Scottish characteristics and introduces us to a disjointed crowd of the unequivocally dismal, deviant, and debased. Instead of trying to be part of society, even their own, Renton and his addict friends accept their abjection and pull back to selfish solitude. To trust in other people and to share, whether it be experiences or needles, even among friends, is destructive: Sick Boy shakes his heid. – Ah dinnae share needles or syringes. Ah’ve goat ma ain works here. –Now that’s no very social. […] Ur you tryin to insinuate that the White Swan, the Mother Superior, has blood infected with the human immunedeficiency virus? 121

The drunken Scot still exists, but is as obsolete as the inane social rituals to which he is allied, in danger of becoming a sadistic inferiority complex, compromised by way of his prior association with being a figure of amusing Scottishness, in turn, by his lowly relation to the English. These burds ur gaun oantay us aboot how fuckin beautiful Edinburgh is, […] aw they tourist cunts ken though, the castle n Princes Street, n the High Street. Like whin Monny’s auntie came ower fae that wee village oan that Island oaf the west coast ay Ireland, wi aw her bairns. […] This wifey’s fuckin scoobied likes, speaks that fuckin Gaelic is a first language; disnae even ken that much English. Perr cunt jist liked the look ay the street whin she came oaf the train, thoat the whole fuckin place was like that. The cunts it the council jist laugh n stick the cunt n one ay they hoatline joabs in West Granton, thit nae cunt else wants. Instead ay a view ay the castle, she’s goat a view ay the gasworks. That’s how it fuckin works in real life, if ye urnae a rich cunt wi a big fuckin hoose n plenty poppy.122

Thick with his Edinburgh housing scheme dialect, another character, Begbie, illuminates the issue in his own inimitable way; aspirations are fine for those already in a position to seek better, but are a joke to those who are not. He exposes his own compromised identity, recognising the fake Scotland on display for the tourists, the acts of historical pomp and commercial prestige created for those outside his real community. But he does not see how he too is moulded by these external stereotypes, in which speech is used as a marker, not only of class, but also of intellect, authority,

121 122

Welsh, Trainspotting, 13. Welsh, 146-147.

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and agreeability. By perceiving “that fuckin Gaelic”123 as something other to him, but by subsuming English as the lingua franca whilst he himself talks in a dialect that cannot be understood by the Canadian tourists, he speaks his occupied body and through this, is silenced. Female characters fare little better than the girls in Eckert’s research, referred to earlier in this essay, who are observed only in relation to prevailing social codes.124 Whether filtered through third person narratives in standard English, or even when allowed to speak for themselves, their adherence to the narrative that provides them with the most cultural capital dominates, whether in the face of abuse or in the pursuit of something better: –That’s terrible. Lassies talkin like that to the laddies, one sais. –It’s no terrible at aw. Thir bloody pests. It’s good to see young lassies stickin up for thirsels. Wish it happened in ma day. –The language though, Hilda, the language. The first wifie puckers her lips and shudders. –Aye, well what aboot their language? ah sais tae her. […] […] morality is relative. That’s if ah was being honest with masel. This is not Dr. Lamont’s view though, so ah may stick wi absolutes in order to curry favour and get high marks.125

While appearing to occupy the English literary space with abandoned, discordant voices, the novel itself adheres to prevailing structures of discourse too. Through Renton’s variable modes of speech, the use of established literary techniques such as free indirect discourse, favoured by other “dialect writers” such as James Kelman, James Joyce, and D.H. Lawrence, and stream of consciousness, as seen in chapters including the heroin-induced “Junk Dilemma”, and psychotic cold-turkey “House Arrest", provide constructs that provide the reader with something familiar to hold onto while they navigate the unfamiliar. More significantly, the occasional third-person narratives in standard English, such as those of the girls and Stevie, whose heart (and female influence) is in London, give the reader a break from the relentless dialect voice. Notably, it is in one of these 123

Welsh, 147. Eckert, 64-75. In her study of pupils in a Detroit High School, she asserts that female speech is more polarised than that of their male counterparts, irrespective of which particular social and vernacular group they belong to, because their roles as females within those groups are in themselves polarised. She furthermore argues, however, that the working class girls, or “burnouts”, have to work the hardest of all linguistic communities to prove their belonging, due to their particular marginalisation and limited opportunities. 125 Welsh, Trainspotting, 345, 381. 124

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passages where the novel concludes. This ending accompanies Renton’s rejection of all he associates with home, in search of “life”,126 which after all, out there in the world, reassuringly still exists.

Conclusion Where language use has long been an indicator of a person’s development, intellectual capabilities and moral standing, their ability to be understood and to evolve, it is not surprising that the use of dialect within writing plays to those biases. Using dialect within fiction signals to the reader that they are home, but not home as it “should” be, not a particularly “good” home. By accepting dialect as pollution of the private voice in the public narrative, or as invasive or in any way lowly, even when depicted in a seemingly positive light of homeliness, we accept our own linguistic self-abasement. This abjection being that through the representation of language in this way, our homes and who we are, are essentially flawed, laughable at best, destructive at worst. Yet, like Freud’s unheimlich, the use of dialect might also lead to a revealing: “Uncanny is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open”.127 Therefore, the systems, structures, rules and, indeed, languages, that denote “society” are in fact invasive themselves, dominating and marginalising the multiplicity of voices that truly exist in the world and excluding uniqueness and variety from discourse. As Tony Harrison reminds the reader: “[uz] can be loving as well as funny”. 128 Like love pairings throughout Shakespeare, who in shared intimacy speak prose instead of free verse, and the noble characters who similarly let their guard down in order to make personal and genuine connections with others, dialect also has the ability to remind us that when we are able to be our most natural and speak as ourselves, we are truly at home.

Bibliography Abberley, Will. English Fiction and the Evolution of Language 1850-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 126

Welsh, Trainspotting, 430. F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie [Philosophy of Mythology] 2.2, 649, as quoted in Freud, “The Uncanny,” 132. 128 Harrison, “Them & [uz],” Selected Poems, 123. 127

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Aitchison, Jean. Language Change: Progress or Decay? 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Anon. Errors of pronunciation and improper expressions, used frequently, and chiefly by the inhabitants of London, to which are added, those in similar use, chiefly by the inhabitants of Paris. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones, Finsbury Square, 1817. Anonymous. The Vulgarities of Speech Corrected; with Elegant Expressions for Provincial and Vulgar English, Scots, and Irish; for the use of those who are Unacquainted with Grammar. London: James Bulcock, 1826. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HWFgAAAAcAAJ&printsec=fro ntcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false Anonymous. Woman: As She is, and As She Should Be. Vol. 1. London: James Cochrane and Co., 1835. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112047349920&seq=9 Anonymous. Woman's Worth, Or, Hints to Raise the Female Character. London: H.G. Clarke & Co., 1844. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9OsDAAAAQAAJ&printsec=fro ntcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false Bache, Richard Meade. Vulgarisms & Other Errors of Speech: To Which is Added a Review of Mr. G. Washington Moon's “Dean's English” and “Bad English”. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger, 1869. Bissett, Alan “The Unnoticed Bias of the Booker Prize.” The Guardian, July 27, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2012/jul/27/bookerprize-bias-english. Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1905. Bolton, Paul. Education: Historical statistics. London: House of Commons Library, 2012. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/researchbriefings/sn04252/#fullreport. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 2005. Taylor and Francis eLibrary. Britain, David, ed. Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Carruthers, Gerard. Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Castricano, Jodey. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.

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Cheshire, Jenny. Variation in an English Dialect: A Sociolinguistic Study. London: Cambridge University Press, 1982. —. “Linguistic Variation and Social Function.” In Language and Gender: A Reader, edited by Jennifer Coates, 28-41. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Coates, Jennifer, ed. Language and Gender: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. —. ed. Women, Men and Language. 3rd ed. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 2004. Dowling, Linda. Language and Decadence in the Fin-de-Siecle. Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1986. Eckert, Penelope. “Gender and Sociolinguistic Variation.” In Language and Gender, edited by Jennifer Coates, 64-75. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Eisikovitis, Edina. “Girl-talk/Boy-talk: Sex Differences in Adolescent Speech.” In Language and Gender, edited by Jennifer Coates, 42-54. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Eagleton, Terry. “Antagonisms: Tony Harrison’s v.” In Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies 1: Tony Harrison, edited by Neil Astley, 348-350. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1991. Ferguson, Christine. Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-siecle: The Brutal Tongue. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin, 1919/2003. Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. Harlow, UK: Addison Wesley Longman Ltd., 1989. Haffenden, John. “Interview with Tony Harrison.” In Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies 1: Tony Harrison, edited by Neil Astley, 227-246. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1991. Hafley, James. “The Villain in Wuthering Heights.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 13, no. 3 (1958): 199–215. DOI: 10.2307/3044379 Harrison, Tony. “Them & [uz].” In Selected Poems, 122. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1987. —. “v.” In Selected Poems, 235-249. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1987. —. “Facing up to the Muses.” In Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies 1: Tony Harrison, edited by Neil Astley, 429-454. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1991. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Essays and Letters. London: Penguin Classics, 2009. Kindle.

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Hughes, Arthur, Peter Trudgill and Dominic Watt. English Accents and Dialects: An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of English in the British Isles, 4th ed. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species. Edited by Michael Losonsky. Translated by Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Jenkins, Jamie. Office for National Statistics. “The Labour Market in the 1980s, 1990s and 2008/09 Recessions.” Economic & Labour Market Review 4, no. 8 (August 2010): 29-36. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/elmr.2010.110 Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Translated by Michael Metteer and Chris Cullen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Krupat, Arnold. “The Strangeness of Wuthering Heights.” NineteenthCentury Fiction 25, no. 3 (December 1970): 269-280. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933434 Labov, William. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. 2nd Ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1966/2006. —. “Hypercorrection by the Lower Middle Class as a Factor in Linguistic Change.” In Sociolinguistic Pattern, 122-142. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968/1990. —. “The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of Linguistic Change.” Language Variation and Change 2, no. 2 (1990): 205-54. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394500000338 Liang, Xiaodong. “The Conflicting Voices in Tony Harrison's Poetry.” Journal of Cambridge Studies 4, no. 4 (2009): 106-112. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.1329 Lucas, John. “Speaking for England?” In Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies 1: Tony Harrison, edited by Neil Astley, 351-361. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1991. Morris, Catherine. “The Land That Rises: Dialect as Unheimlich in British Writing.” PhD diss., Kingston University, 2018. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/42578 Mugglestone, Lynda. Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Murray, Janet. Strong-Minded Women, and Other Lost Voices from Nineteenth Century England. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.

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The Newbolt Report: The Teaching of English in England. London: HM Stationery Office, 1921. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/newbolt/newbolt1921. html O’Barr, William M. and Bowman K. Atkins. “‘Women’s Language’ or ‘Powerless Language’?” in Language and Gender, edited by Jennifer Coates, 377-387. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Schelling, F.W.J. Philosophie der Mythologie [Philosophy of Mythology]. London: Forgotten Books, 1857/2018. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Shunami, Gideon. “The Unreliable Narrator in Wuthering Heights.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 27, no.4 (March 1973): 449-468. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933519 Tambling, Jeremy. Hölderlin and the Poetry of Tragedy: Readings in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Benjamin. Sussex: Academic Press, 2014. Tromly, Frederic B. “Macbeth and His Porter.” Shakespeare Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Spring, 1975): 151-156. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2869244 Trudgill, Peter. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. London: Cambridge University Press, 1974. —. “Sex and Covert Prestige.” In Language and Gender: A Reader, edited by Jennifer Coates, 21-28. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1983/1998. —. The Dialects of England. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000. Vandenhoff, G. The Ladies Reader: with some plain and simple Rules and Instructions for a good style of Reading Aloud and a variety of Selections for Exercise. London: Sampson Low, Son, & Co., 1862. Warminski, Andrzej and Rodolphe Gasche. Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Welsh, Irvine. Trainspotting. London: Vintage, 1993/1999. Wiltshire, Irene. “Speech in Wuthering Heights: Joseph's Dialect and Charlotte's Emendations.” Bronte Studies 30, no. 1 (2005): 19-28. https://doi.org/10.1179/147489304x18821

PART II LITERATURE

CHAPTER THREE ON THE UNCANNY AESTHETICS OF LUCY CLIFFORD’S “THE NEW MOTHER” PER KLINGBERG

Introduction While well regarded as a novelist in her time, Victorian writer Lucy Clifford’s fame, such as it is, today largely rests on a handful of children’s stories. Among these, the best known is without a doubt “The New Mother”, an unsettling story that originally appeared in Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise, a collection comprised of tales initially told to the author’s own daughters.1 The book’s subtitle, “Moral Tales and Otherwise”, quite aptly describes the tension often inherent in Clifford’s writing for children. Her stylistic register ranges from dry didacticism and the sentimentally drab, to being eerily unpleasant and downright disturbing, sometimes in the space of just one story or poem. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, Clifford is presented as a “strikingly original writer for children [who] often forbears to offer comforting platitudes to her readers, preferring worlds in which alienation and anomie predominate”.2 Uneasily, the author of the entry notes that some “superficially child-friendly poems” seem to “imply the cannibalism of a baby boy and the gleeful butchery of birds”.3 The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales devotes their entry on Clifford almost exclusively to “The New Mother”, describing it as “a remarkable fantasy about adult corruption of children which seems to anticipate Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw”. 4 Although Clifford has been the subject of a critical and scholarly reappraisal in the 20th century, then, it is clear that it is hardly her 1

Clifford, Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise. Zipes, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, 317. 3 Zipes, 317. 4 Zipes, ed., The Oxford Companion to Fairy, 100. 2

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achievements as a writer of morality tales that is valued. The qualities that are repeatedly emphasised are instead those that might strike a modern reader as “otherwise”. An illustrative example is seen in her author’s description on the back of a modern edition of Clifford’s tales. Here, she is presented as a writer of “unique fables of existential dread and alienation, worthy (at their best) of a Kafka or Borges”, a “precursor to 20th century and 21st century surreal literature”, and best compared with names such as Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst, rather than more benign Victorian fairytale writers such as John Ruskin or James Barrie.5 Nevertheless, the author’s own suggestion that her stories could be neatly divided into the categories of “moral” and “otherwise” seems to over-simplify things. Surely, “The New Mother”, the most frequently anthologised and re-imagined of Clifford's stories, could be said to belong to both categories? Clifford presents us with yet another cautionary tale urging children not to talk to strangers and to obey their parents and yet, as Stephen Prickett points out, the story “clearly draws on something much more archetypal than normal Evangelical zeal”.6 While the message may be an all too familiar one, it is given to us through a plethora of strange imagery that does not yield easily to interpretation. The result is a text that strikes the reader as both weirdly familiar and recognisably strange, uncanny, as it were.

Disposition and Research Questions In his seminal essay “Das Unheimliche” (1919), Sigmund Freud attempts to define the evasive concept of the uncanny more clearly, noting that das Heimliche can be taken to signify both “what is familiar and comfortable” and that which “is concealed and kept hidden”.7 In Freud’s reading this is no mere case of homonymy but rather highlights a deeply significant relation between the two: they are interdependent. The suppression of secrets is the necessary condition for the idyllic state, and the familiar holds the potential to its own undoing through the unveiling of that which ought to remain hidden away. Furthermore, Freud points out that das unheimliche holds a much more complex relation to das heimliche than that of a simple negation. Quoting a passage from Friedrich Schiller’s play Wallensteins Lager (1798), where the word heimlich is seemingly used to signify something terrifying (“des Friedländers heimlich gesicht”, roughly translated as “the terrifying face of the Friedlander”), Freud concludes: 5

See Clifford, “The New Mother.” Prickett, Victorian Fantasy, 93. 7 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 132. 6

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Heimlich thus becomes increasingly ambivalent, until it finally merges with its antonym unheimlich. The uncanny (das unheimliche, “the unhomely”) is in some way a species of the familiar (das heimliche, “the homely”).8

This sentiment is echoed in Nicholas Royle’s The Uncanny (2003), where Royle observes that the uncanny is not “simply an experience of strangeness or alienation” but rather consists of the “peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar”. 9 Facing the uncanny, then, we do not only encounter something alien and frightening, but, at the same time, also something that we know intimately, or, at least, that we, up until now, thought that we knew intimately. It is precisely this “peculiar commingling” that constitutes one of the key aesthetic features of Clifford’s story. In this article I will discuss how the text explores and makes use of this tension between the familiar and the strange, the heimliche and the unheimliche. After a brief plot summary, I will first examine this as an intratextual phenomenon, arguing that it is precisely this interplay between the homelike and the unhomelike that constitutes one of the governing aesthetic principles of the story. Secondly, I will discuss this tension as a question of genre, arguing that the story holds a somewhat uneasy relationship to the conventions of the cautionary tale. In Clifford’s story, the reader finds an abundance of seemingly unmotivated details and odd asides that does not seem to serve to further the story’s moral message. This creates a more profound sense of uncanniness, which may also explain why late 20th century readers, as well as writers, have been able to appropriate the story to their own ends: re-casting it as a horror story, a faux folk tale, or an example of “weird fiction”. (I will return to examples of such appropriation.) Finally, I will briefly discuss what it means to read and interpret such a genuinely puzzling text as Clifford’s story; how does one account for all the oddities of the text in a way that does not do away with the fundamental strangeness that arguably gives Clifford’s story its aesthetic distinctiveness?

Plot Summary The protagonists of “The New Mother” are two girls, nicknamed the Turkey and Blue-Eyes.10 They live in an isolated cottage together with their mother and their infant sibling. Although the absence of the father, a sailor away at 8

Freud, 134. Royle, The Uncanny, 1. 10 A somewhat disturbing detail is that these evidently were the bona fide nick names for Clifford’s own two daughters. 9

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sea, lends a tinge of melancholy to the story, the children’s life together with their hardworking, loving (and possibly exhausted) mother is described as thoroughly idyllic. The story proper begins when the children are sent to town on an errand. Before they leave, their mother warns them not to talk to strangers, a warning that, this being a darkly didactic tale of sorts, they will of course fail to heed. Returning home, the children encounter a strange girl by the wayside. Her behaviour and appearance are puzzling in numerous ways, but most significantly, she shows the children her pear drum, a mysterious instrument with a small box attached to the side. She tells the children that inside the box, a miniature man and woman live, and when she plays her instrument, the pair come out of the box to dance and to share their wonderful secrets with the audience. The Turkey and Blue-Eyes are gripped by a strong desire to see these dancers for themselves, but are rebuked sharply by the girl when they insist that they are good children; this is a sight reserved for naughty children only. The girl tells them to go home and misbehave and to meet her again tomorrow. The Turkey and Blue-Eyes go home to their loving mother and tell her of their newfound desire to be truly naughty children. Astonished, their mother replies that, surely, they cannot be naughty if they really love their mother. The children persist by asking what would happen if they misbehaved even if they loved their mother. In that case, the mother sobbingly explains, she would have to go away and send a new mother in her stead; one with glass eyes and a wooden tail. Although initially terrified, the children, having consulted the girl by the wayside, decide that this warning is too absurd to be true and proceed to misbehave anyway. Throughout the remainder of the story the children are thus repeatedly warned of the consequences of their behaviour by their frustrated mother, while the mysterious girl constantly chides them for not being naughty enough. In one last desperate effort to prove themselves truly wicked children, the Turkey and Blue-Eyes wreck the cottage completely, finally driving their mother away, weeping over the fate that awaits her daughters with their new mother. After the mother has left them, the strange girl dances by outside their window and tells them that they still have not been naughty enough and that they “did it all wrong”. She shows them that the box with the dancing couple is empty, and taunts them with a song about how their new mother is coming for them, eventually dancing away into the horizon. Still hoping to turn things right, the children clean up the defiled house, and wait for their mother to return home, in order to make amends. But as night falls, they suddenly hear “a sound as of something heavy being dragged along the ground outside [and] a loud and terrible knocking at the

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door”.11 They realise that this is the new mother coming for them, and try to barricade the door to prevent her from coming in. However, this is in vain; she breaks open the door with her wooden tail and forces her way into the cottage, causing Blue-Eyes and the Turkey to flee in a panic through the back door and into the woods. The story concludes with the children living alone in the forest, pining for the return of their old mother and the life that they shared together. But, alas, the story offers them no such consolation: And still the new mother stays in the little cottage, but the windows are closed, and the doors are shut, and no one knows what the inside looks like. Now and then, when the darkness has fallen and the night is still, hand in hand Blue-Eyes and the Turkey creep up near to the home in which they once were so happy, and with beating hearts they watch and listen; sometimes a blinding flash comes through the window, and they know it is the light from the new mother’s glass eyes, or they hear a strange muffled noise, and they know it is the sound of her wooden tail as she drags it along the floor.12

The children’s home has turned into an un-home, a familiar place inhabited by the genuinely strange.

Homeliness and Unhomeliness And yet, matters are not quite so simple. Although the children’s life in the cottage is depicted as comfortable and loving, there is an elegiac tone already present in the very first paragraph of the text, where the children’s somewhat peculiar nicknames are explained: The children were always called Blue-Eyes and the Turkey. The elder one was like her dear father who was far away at sea; for the father had the bluest of blue eyes, and so gradually his little girl came to be called after them. The younger one had once, while she was still almost a baby, cried bitterly because a turkey that lived near the cottage suddenly vanished in the middle of the winter; and to console her she had been called by its name.13

On the plot-level, the story slowly but inevitably builds up towards a climax of irreparable loss, more specifically the loss of a parent. However, upon rereading, it is clear that this loss has been thematically established in the story 11 Clifford, “The New Mother,” 211. For this article I am quoting Clifford’s story as published in The Oxford Book of Children’s Stories, edited by Jan Mark. 12Clifford, 213. 13Clifford, 193.

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from the very start. The children’s tragic fate is inscribed in their very names; the story’s tragic end is curiously present in the idyllic beginning. In the description of the cottage where Blue-Eyes and the Turkey live, the interplay between the heimliche and the unheimliche becomes more explicit. At a first glance, the home may come across as all domestic bliss: The cottage room was so cosy: the walls were as white as snow inside as well as out, and against them hung the cake-tin and the baking dish, and the lid of a large saucepan that had been worn out long before the children could remember, and the fish-slice, all polished and shining as bright as silver. On one side of the fireplace, above the bellows hung the almanac, and on the other the clock that always struck the wrong hour and was always running down too soon, but it was a good clock, with a little picture on its face and sometimes ticked away for nearly a week without stopping. The baby’s highchair stood in one corner, and in another there was a cupboard hung up high against the wall, in which the mother kept all manner of little surprises. The children often wondered how the things that came out of that cupboard had got into it, for they seldom saw them put there.14

As Elizabeth Thiel points out in her reading of the story, the cottage is “metaphorically a pure and unsullied female space in which nurturing and childcare are prioritized” and the loving mother “seemingly epitomizes the Victorian angel in the house”.15 And yet, this idyll comes across as frail and seemingly under threat even before the children are tempted into naughtiness by the mysterious girl. The lonely cottage is a liminal place, located in the intersection between civilisation and nature, where the exact boundary between the family’s cultivated garden and the dark forest is unsettlingly unclear. And surely, there is a threatening dimension to the depiction of how the trees’ “big black arms stretched over the little thatched roof”.16 Furthermore, the description of how “their tangled shadows were all over the white-washed walls” at night creates a contrasting image, where darkness invades a cottage that is otherwise “white as snow inside as well as out”.17 It is clear that there is a menacing quality to this depiction of the homelike from the very outset of the story. In Chloe Buckley’s reading of 14

Clifford, 194. Thiel, The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal, 80-82. 16 Clifford, “The New Mother,” 193. 17 Clifford, 193. This has also been noted by Thiel, who interprets the cottage as “bordering both realism and fantasy” as well as Chloe Buckley who argues that the presence of the shadow creates “an uneasy undertone to the subsequent description of genteel domestic bliss”. See Thiel, The Fantasy of Family, s.82; Buckley, “Neil Gaiman’s ‘New Mother’ 1882-2002,” 38. 15

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the story, she describes that an “unheimlich transformation of the home happens unconsciously in the text, which seeks to represent a fairytale [sic] loving family home, but cannot avoid the unheimlich kernel of that very home”. 18 Buckley sees this transformation as achieved through the introduction of the secret cupboard, filled with delightful surprises, but beyond the children’s naïve understanding, arguing that it represents “the angel-in-the-home’s sexuality”, the very secret that needs to be suppressed in order for the idyll to be maintained. While this interpretation is plausible enough (there does seem to be a sexual dimension to much of Clifford’s imagery and phrasings, such as the girl’s insistence that “the pleasures of naughtiness are many and varied”19), I would also claim that one does not need this kind of symbolic interpretation in order to pinpoint the uncanny qualities of the text. In fact, the text is composed in such a way that the images initially associated with the homelike will later return, but in an inverted form, now representing something strange and alien. As Freud points out, the uncanny cannot simply be reduced to the fear of that which is unknown and strange, but rather consists of the discovery that the wellknown has always held a residue of strangeness. This is precisely what happens at the end of the story, when the Turkey and Blue-Eyes, having driven their mother away, look at a cottage that now comes across as simultaneously strange and familiar: Then the children turned, and looked at each other and at the little cottage home, that only a week before had been so bright and happy, so cosy and so spotless. The fire was out, and the water was still among the cinders; the baking-dish and cake-tin, the fish-slice and the saucepan lid, which the dear mother used to spend so much time in rubbing, were all pulled down from the nails on which they had hung so long, and were lying on the floor. And there was the clock all broken and spoilt, the little picture upon its face could be seen no more; and though it sometimes struck a stray hour, it was with the tone of a clock whose hours are numbered. And there was the baby’s highchair, but no little baby to sit in it; there was the cupboard on the wall, and never a sweet loaf on its shelf; and there were the broken mugs, and the bits of bread tossed about, and the greasy boards which the mother had knelt down to scrub until they were white as snow.20

The two passages quoted above concerning the interior of the cottage show just how thoroughly Clifford works with the technique of contrast. The second passage is an almost exact mirroring of the first in its description 18

Buckley, “Neil Gaiman’s ‘New Mother’,” 38. Clifford, “The New Mother,” 203. 20 Clifford, 209. 19

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of the interior of the cottage, and yet it gives rise to a radically different experience. Whereas the cottage was previously “so cosy and so spotless”, it now comes across as sad and eventually frightening. The kitchen utensils have been defiled, the cupboard emptied and when the clock once again strikes the wrong hour the effect is no longer comforting. Rather, the clock’s strike is now perceived as an ominous sound and as the premonition of doom, having previously been used to mark the departure of the old mother and to herald the coming of the girl, who tells them that the new mother is indeed coming for the children. The aesthetic effect that Clifford achieves here is entirely dependent on the likeness and the difference that this passage holds to the idyllic scene in the beginning, giving rise to precisely the “peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar” that Royle aptly describes as a hallmark of the uncanny.21 Furthermore, the description of the cottage sets the stage for an even more frightening inversion, namely, the transformation of a familiar parent into a terrifying monster. As novel and truly strange as the new mother may strike us, wielding her wooden tail and glass eyes, there is also something curiously familiar about her. In fact, the text goes to some length to establish a clear connection between the old mother and the new mother in the reader’s mind. As the old mother prepares to leave her children, we are told that “her eyes filled with tears” as she put on her “new sun-bonnet” and picked up a “little bundle in which she had tied up her cotton apron and a pair of old shoes”.22 When the Turkey, frightened, peeps out through the window and beholds their new mother, the first thing that she sees is “a black satin poke bonnet with a frill round the edge, and a long bony arm carrying a black leather bag”.23 Under the bonnet “there flashed a strange bright light, and Turkey’s heart sank and her cheeks turned pale, for she knew it was the flashing of two glass eyes”.24 The most obvious connection between the two mother-figures is, of course, the bonnets. Furthermore, both have gleaming eyes, in one case from tears, and in the other because her eyes are made of glass, and they both carry luggage before departing from respectively entering the cottage. Although the old mother is a source of comfort and the new mother is perceived as a threat by the children, they are remarkably similar. The fact that the old mother announces her departure in precisely the same moment that the Turkey breaks the looking glass seems to hint at the doppelgänger motif; one commonly associated with the uncanny. The new mother comes across as the old one, but as seen 21

Royle, The Uncanny, 1. Clifford, “The New Mother,” 206–207. 23 Clifford, 212. 24 Clifford, 212. 22

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through a glass darkly. One would almost be forgiven if one were to toy with the idea that the two are, after all, one and the same, in much the same way as the heimlich and the unheimlich merge and intermingle.25

An Uncanny Fairy Tale? It is clear, then, that the text’s oscillation between the homelike and the unhomelike constitutes one of the governing aesthetic principles of the story, and, in many ways, the story reads like a veritable checklist of motifs traditionally identified with the uncanny. Not only is the new mother a doppelgänger of sorts, but also a liminal creature with her wooden tail and glass eyes, casting the boundaries between human and machine in doubt. And, although we never get to see them, the dancing couple described by the girl do seem to be automatons, assuming that they exist. Surely, Freud would take great interest in the substitution of glass eyes for human eyes, but would he find Clifford’s story truly uncanny? Returning to his essay we find that he would not. Throughout the text, Freud finds it easier to discern what the uncanny is not, rather than to reach any definitive and positive conclusions. In fact, one of the important points of Freud’s essay is that the mere presence of certain motifs in a text is not enough for a text to qualify as uncanny. A reader may well read about talking tea pots, a miraculous return from a deathlike state, or a particularly gruesome maiming without experiencing the story as particularly unsettling or weird. All these motifs are, after all, par de course in fairy tales and yet, Freud states, “I cannot cite one genuine fairy tale in which anything uncanny occurs”.26 One reason that leads Freud to this conclusion is that he views modernity and rationalism as necessary preconditions for this particular sentiment. According to Freud, the uncanny may occur when the suppressed convictions that we held in our childhood, or in the “primitive” stages of civilisation, suddenly seem to operate in an allegedly rational and modern world; making us doubt the rationality of the view of the world that we took for granted. Thus, the uncanny effect of a motif “may be lost where the setting is a fictive reality invented by the writer,”27 although it would certainly have been perceived as such if it were to occur in real life or a mode of fiction closer to our consensus reality. This is very much the case here, since the fairy tale “abandons the basis of reality right from the start and openly commits itself 25 Anna Krugovoy Silver, “The Didactic Carnivalesque in Lucy Lane Clifford's ‘The New Mother’," 735. Silver has argued that the girl by the wayside and the mother could be interpreted as doubles. 26 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 153. 27 Freud, 157.

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to the acceptance of animistic beliefs”. 28 Given that Freud exemplifies his argument through the writings of Hans Christian Andersen, he does not seem to view the distinction between folk tale and literary fairy tale as a meaningful distinction in this context. At the very end of his essay, Freud claims that in the case of the fairy tale, “feelings of fear, and therefore of the uncanny, are totally ruled out”,29 taking his point even further. Judging from the documented reactions of numerous readers throughout the 20th and the 21st centuries, however, “The New Mother” would seem to be a fairy tale very much capable of instilling fear in its readers.

Receptions and Retellings Although F.J. Harvey Darton did not consider “Mrs W. K. Clifford” an author important enough to merit an entry of her own in his seminal study, Children’s Books in England (1932), the ominous figure of the new mother seems to have stuck in his mind, as he repeatedly uses her as a metaphor for cruel and unlikeable women in general. In a footnote explaining his reference, Darton testifies to the impression the story made on him as a boy: “Getting on for fifty years after I met her first, I still cannot rid my mind of that fearful creation”. 30 And, although the name of Lucy Clifford was turning into an increasingly obscure reference, her monstrous creation seemed to be taking on a life of its own. In 1955, a variation of the story was discussed in the academic journal Folklore. A reader of the journal was trying to find the original source for a tale that his daughter was told as a child, apparently “the most horrific of the tales she heard”.31 Here the story is presented as an oral tale, handed down by generations of women: the reader’s daughter “has written it out as she remembers hearing it from her mother, and she in her turn had it from her mother but this has always been by word of mouth”.32 What follows is an oral re-telling of Clifford’s story, compressed but surprisingly close to the literary original. The correspondent speculates that it is a German folktale in origin, but has been unable to confirm that this is the case. Two issues later, another correspondent writes to Folklore, stating that she is positive that “this story did not have its origin in folklore, but in the imagination of the writer”, although she does not remember the name of the author. However, she does remember reading it as a child “with fascinated horror” and states that the original was “far more 28

Freud, 156. Freud, 158. 30 Darton, Children’s Books In England, 196. 31 J.Y. Bell, “Correspondence,” 302. 32 Bell, 302. 29

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horrifying than that quoted in “Correspondence”.33 Despite this, the version given in Folklore found its way into noted folklorist Katherine Briggs’s A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language (1970), presented as “a family story” of unclear origin, probably “invented by the first teller in the family”, rather than a literary fairy tale.34 Even as one could discern a re-awakened interest in Clifford’s authorship in academic circles in the seventies, “The New Mother” continued to live a life of its own in oral storytelling tradition, as made evident by the inclusion of another variant of the story in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, albeit radically shortened and modernised. In this context it is presented as “a story which was passed down by several generations of an English family” that later “migrated to America with another family member” .35 Although there is a mention of “a literary version of such a story”, Clifford is not named nor identified as the one who originally conceived of the story. 36 The original version was included, however, by David Hartwell in the classic horror anthology The Dark Descent (1987), tracing the evolution of the horror genre, billing Clifford alongside canonical authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. Today, her influence on modern writers can be seen in the fantastic genre work of Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison. Indeed, the monstrous mother has been an acknowledged influence on Gaiman’s “Other Mother” in the celebrated novella Coraline (2002), and Anyhow Stories is referenced in an issue of Morrison’s pop-surrealist comic Doom Patrol.37 This expose of readings and re-tellings of Clifford’s story reveals an increasing tendency to understand and appreciate “The New Mother” (or a version thereof) more as a prime example of the weird tale rather than as a moral tale that instils children with the importance of obedience. In short, the tale has been re-functioned and is no longer necessarily understood as a piece of children’s literature. Including the story in The Oxford Books of Children’s Stories, Mark describes it as “probably the most frightening story for young children ever written” and finds it “significant that no one has thought to make it available to children for a very long time, perhaps because grown-ups find it so very upsetting”.38 Although the story was included in an anthology series aimed at children, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, it bears pointing out that the series held 33

Lilian Hayward, “Correspondence,” 431. Briggs, A Dictionary of British Folk-tales in the English Language, 555. 35 Alvin Schwartz, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, 100. 36 Schwartz, 101. 37 For example, see Grant Morrison, Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero, 221-222. 38 Mark, The Oxford Book of Children’s Stories, 441-442. 34

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the somewhat dubious honour of being among the most challenged books at American libraries in the 1990s. 39 It is apparent that feelings of fear cannot be ruled out in the case of “The New Mother”, despite Freud’s claim. Could it be said to be uncanny as well?

Discussing “The New Mother” as a Cautionary Tale What I would like to suggest here is that there is an evasive quality to Clifford’s text, and more specifically how the story relates to genre conventions of the cautionary tale that has enabled or simplified its refunctioning. Furthermore, I would suggest that this quality is indeed– uncanny. So how does the text relate to genre conventions regarding moral message and imagery? Comparing “The New Mother” with Coraline, Buckley finds Gaiman’s novella to be canny, “with its playful and deliberate use of Freud”,40 whereas Clifford’s tale moves into the regions of the truly uncanny, depicting the collapse between the Real and Symbolic, to use Lacanian terms. Buckley views the difference between the two texts as partially a question of genre; whereas Gaiman’s text self-consciously plays with Freudian ideas and genre conventions, Clifford’s text “does not seem quite sure of what genre or form it belongs to”.41 In relation to what starts out as a moral tale, Buckley finds “it’s no longer clear what we are supposed to have learned”, leaving us with an unresolved ending as well as a number of unanswered questions. It is this uncertainty, then, that in Buckley’s reading lends the story an uncanny character. 42 While Buckley’s observation that Clifford’s story transcends the genre of the cautionary tale, it could be argued that the moral would seem very clear (if not necessarily particularly palatable to a modern reader): children who persist in misbehaving, risk being bereft of their parent’s love and, furthermore, no second chances are given once that line is crossed. It is a grim message, to be sure, but far from unique in a historic perspective. According to Maria Tatar, the pedagogy of fear has been a frequently recurring theme in fairy tales aimed at children. In Tatar’s view, cautionary tales “masquerade as educational tales but are in reality sadistic stories aimed at controlling behavior […] equally intent on venting adult anger about childish willfulness and on controlling behavior”, as on providing children with

39American

Library Association (ALA), “100 most Frequently Challenged Books: 1990-1999.” 40 Buckley, “Neil Gaiman’s ‘New Mother’ 1882-2002,” 37. 41 Buckley, 44. 42 Buckley, 44.

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useful life lessons.43 Clifford’s tale, terrifying as it is, does not differ all that greatly from those of her contemporaries–if you only consider what message is being conveyed and not how it is given in regard to its genre, that is. As Tatar points out, the genre of the cautionary tale is to a high degree a phenomenon of the 18th and 19th centuries. Although the earlier folk tales that writers and compilers frequently drew on may have been just as brutal and grim, they served a different purpose than the cautionary tales. The idea that fairy tales were primarily intended for children is after all a fairly recent idea and the protagonists that were now re-cast as unruly children in want of punishment were often originally conceived of as daring adventurers. If they occasionally came to a horrible end for trespassing on haunted castles or deep dark woods, that was to be understood as the name of the game, rather than as a well-deserved lesson. 44 Tatar also suggests that the excessive brutality and many deaths in folk tales simply mirror the harsh reality to which pre-modern Europeans were subjected. However, this would change. With its need to find a motive for everything, the Age of Reason hastened the process of identifying psychological causes for brutal or tragic effects. It is no accident that fairy tales underwent a profound metamorphosis in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That era marked the rise of the cautionary tale as we know it today. Everything became motivated: A child devoured by a wolf was guilty of self-indulgence, idleness, and disobedience. […] Representations of what had previously functioned in many cases as the random, senseless violence of a world in which human beings were hostage to powers beyond their control were mobilised to serve the purpose of moral education.45

Elizabeth Newbery’s publication of Vice in Its Proper Shape, or, The Wonderful and Melancholy Transformation of Several Naughty Masters and Misses into Those Contemptible Animals which they most resemble in Disposition with author noted as Anonymous, is often described as the first cautionary tale in the English language, and is a striking example of just to how high a degree every single detail was woven into a pattern of moral cause and effect. The book describes an exhibition in which a number of children, which have met a premature death, have been reincarnated into the 43

Tatar, Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood, 31-34. Tatar, 39. 45 Tatar, 49. 44

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bodies of animals put on display for other children, in accordance with the notion that “Example is more powerful than precept”.46 What immediately strikes a contemporary reader is just how carefully the author has guarded herself against any interpretational freedom on the reader’s behalf. The Anonymous author names one of the characters Jack Idle, a lazy ne’er-dowell, who is reborn into the shape of a donkey. His moniker and new animal shape could be read as a transparent enough message, but the book’s didactic fervour is so great that the Brahman guide, arguably the embodiment of the moral norm of the work, explains how every single part of the donkey represents a specific moral shortcoming: His rough coat of hair is a very suitable emblem of the ruggedness of his disposition; and his long and clumsy ears not only denotes his stupidity, but, as they afford a very secure and convenient hold to anyone who has occasion to catch him when he runs loose in the fields, they sufficiently intimate that he was always open to the ill advice of his play-fellows.47

Although the cautionary tales of the 19th century may have taken a slightly more relaxed approach to the exact degree in which every image of the story should be imbued with a moral message, the general idea is the same; the reader of a cautionary tale should not be left wondering as to how the punishment relates to the crime. Heinrich Hoffmann’s protagonists persist in sucking on their thumbs or playing with matches, and consequently have their thumbs cut off with giant scissors or simply burn to death. In “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf”, Andersen allows his protagonist to sink to the gates of hell and be consumed with hunger, in order for her to learn the importance of respecting food. Flies crawl on her eyes, but when she tries to blink them away, she finds out that they cannot fly–a nasty consequence of the cruel games she has played with insects, pulling their wings off for fun. In other words, vice really should be cast in its proper shape. Clifford’s approach to the cautionary tale differs in this aspect. While the message of the story may be perfectly clear, the reader is also presented with a plethora of mystifying and seemingly inexplicable imagery that does not clearly relate to the moral of the story. While there is an undeniable logic to the notion that a loving mother is replaced by an evil mother when her children misbehave, it is not apparent why she should wield a lizard tail or have glass eyes. Nor does Clifford care to offer us an interpretative guide, as Newbery does, explaining how every aspect of the new mother relates to a moral scheme and is meant to punish 46 47

Anonymous, Vice in Its Proper Shape, 16; emphasis in original. Anonymous, 19-20.

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a specific transgression. In short, the moral and the imagery of the story do not work towards the same end. If the cautionary tale aims to put vice in its proper place, then, one would do well to recall Royle’s observation that the uncanny could be understood as precisely “a crisis of the proper” when approaching Clifford’s curious text. 48 Furthermore, he describes the uncanny as that which “is destined to elude mastery, it is what cannot be pinned down or controlled”.49 Clifford’s imagery is, as we shall see below, consistently polyvalent and mystifying in a way that undermines the predictable stability of the cautionary tale. I would argue that it is this aspect, rather than a breaking off from the animistic world view, that gives the text its uncanny quality.

Reading the Strange This tension between message and imagery in “The New Mother” has been noted by several theorists. Anita Moss observes that Clifford’s story contains “buried subtexts which modify, contradict, and sometimes unravel the threads of moral tapestry altogether”, counting her among a group of Victorian female writers “who set out to write moral tales in the mode of fantasy and fairy tale but in whose writings are embedded truly liberating messages deeply at odds with the prevailing moral tone of the narrative”.50 Silver, on the other hand, reads “The New Mother” as a deeply conservative text, warning of the dangers of inviting the chaotic and carnivalesque into ordered society. Rather than discussing Clifford’s tale in terms of the subversive and the reactionary, however, I would like to focus on the fundamental strangeness of the text. We may, of course, attempt to articulate a symbolic interpretation in order to make sense of the new mother, something that Silver does when she suggests that her “dragonish shape, particularly her serpent-like-tail, clearly allies her with the devil” and that her glass eyes mirror the children’s desire to see the forbidden, namely the contents of the girl’s box.51 But she notes that this is just one possibility among many, and that the tail could also be understood as a phallic symbol, which makes the action of the mother breaking through the door “symbolic of brutal sexual violation and initiation”.52 In any case, the image remains a polyvalent one, 48

Royle, The Uncanny, 1. Royle, The Uncanny, 13-14. 50 Moss, “Mothers, Monsters, and Morals in Victorian Fairy Tales,” 47. 51 Silver, “The Didactic Carnivalesque in Lucy Lane Clifford's ‘The New Mother’,” 732. 52 Silver, 733. 49

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continuingly offering up new possible meanings, and the narrative structure and didactic framing of the story do little to delimit these possibilities. In fact, Clifford introduces some ambiguities that frustrate the simple moral of the story. The children’s motivation for talking to the girl by the wayside is a genuine concern for someone who seems sad and lost, “for they were kind children and sorry indeed for any one in distress”,53 echoing the example set forth by goodhearted fairytale protagonists such as young Gluck in John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River (1851). But, whereas Gluck is amply rewarded for his compassion, the Turkey and Blue-Eyes are lead into temptation and, ultimately, tragedy. In a sense, the children are doubly punished in the end. While they have certainly been bad enough to lose their mother and home, the girl still chides them for having failed at being naughty, assuring them that she will never show them her secrets now. In fact, we are left in uncertainty as to whether her box ever held any secrets at all, or if she simply lied to the children, another puzzling element to the story that is left unexplained. There is certainly an abundance of strangeness in Clifford’s tale, with numerous elements that seem to serve no discernible purpose either for advancing the plot or for driving any specific moral lesson home. Why, for example, does the girl by the wayside urge the children to be calm? Because “calmness gathers in and hides things like a big cloak, or like my shawl does here, for instance”.54 It is an odd aside that is never followed up. And what does it mean when she sings that she is going home to the land where she was born, as she dances by the children? No clue is offered to the reader, and it is hard to believe that any interpretational effort would yield any meaningful insight in this case. The aesthetic effect that is achieved is mystifying and to some degree unsettling precisely because we are not able to lay the strangeness of the text to rest. It is noteworthy that the retellings of Clifford’s tale are, in fact, more conventional than the original. Although the terrifying figure of the new mother is kept intact, other oddities are played down. In the version presented in Folklore, the children are still named the Turkey and BlueEyes, but the Turkey’s odd name is explained with the fact that she used to wear a red dress. Not only does this make her nickname slightly less peculiar, but it also adds a poetical symmetry to the names of Blue-Eyes and Turkey. In the version published in More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the girls were given the modern names of Dolores and Sandra. And whereas both versions positively identify the mysterious girl by the wayside as a gypsy girl, Clifford’s text makes sure that we perceive her as a truly strange 53

Clifford, “The New Mother,” 195. 205.

54Clifford,

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figure, introducing several mystifying features that are never followed up or satisfactorily explained. To be sure, she is presented as alien and exotic to the children; they note that she does not wear a bonnet, like respectable people, and as Silver points out, Clifford “repeatedly mentions her darkness”. 55 Nevertheless, her exact identity remains unclear, and she cannot be conclusively identified as a gypsy girl. When the children first encounter the girl, she is a vague figure, whom they find hard to even discern properly: At first, they thought it was someone asleep, then they thought it was a poor woman ill and hungry, and then they saw that it was a strange wild-looking girl, who seemed very unhappy, and they felt sure that something was the matter.56

Having talked to the girl, the children find her even more puzzling. She insists that she lives in the village, something that they find strange because they thought they knew all the village people by sight. When the children encounter her the third time, the girl is still sitting by the wayside and “looked just as if she had not moved since the day before”.57 Further on in the story, they find her “sitting by the heap of stones, just as if it were her natural home”, 58 increasingly identified with the landscape. At other moments, the girl seems to possess ghostly or downright devilish qualities. She suddenly vanishes after one of their dialogues and the music that she plays on her pear drum in the end renders the children paralysed. The girl’s adherence to a radically different set of norms is continually baffling to the Turkey and Blue-Eyes. She insists that a little shabbiness is very respectable, that everyone of good society has heard of a pear drum, and when they declare that they are good children she looks at them “as if they had accused themselves of some great crime”.59 The girl by the wayside is in many ways just as strange a figure as the new mother, though portrayed with subtler means, and the fact that she continuously keeps spouting mystic, possibly nonsensical, lines does not make her easier to decode. As suggested earlier, Alison Lurie also speculates that James, an acquaintance of Clifford, may have been inspired by “The New Mother” when writing The Turn of the Screw (1898), since both stories portray “two innocent children in late Victorian England who encounter a strange, 55 Silver, “The Didactic Carnivalesque in Lucy Lane Clifford's ‘The New Mother’," 729. 56 Clifford, “The New Mother,” 195. 57 Clifford, 201. 58 Clifford, 205. 59 Mark, ed., 198.

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attractive young woman who may be either a devil or a damned soul”, her exact identity remaining unclear.60 To some extent, this strangeness carries over to the other versions of the tale. As Briggs notes, discussing the version issued in Folklore, if the girl is to be understood as a representation of Satan in folk tradition, then she “is falser than Satan, for she does not perform her side of the bargain”.61 In her attempt to salvage a liberating message from Clifford’s puzzling story, Moss goes to some length to make sense of and de-mystify the girl. In Moss’s reading, the girl by the wayside is to be understood as tragic rather than devilish. Possibly she is an abused girl caught up in a misguided rebellion against Victorian norms and patriarchy by simply inverting societal norms. According to Moss, the womb-shaped pear-drum is “a provocative emblem of woman's creativity taken over, assaulted, and controlled by patriarchal culture”, a tragic example of “female creativity and sexuality gone terribly wrong”.62 In much the same way, the mystic box with the mechanical dancing couple can be taken to represent “the Victorian family whose every move is controlled by convention—in public and private”.63 Such a reading does not do justice to the aesthetic complexity of Clifford’s tale–and Moss gives little textual evidence that we are to understand the girl as a victim of patriarchy. In fact, such a reading seems to ignore much of what, in fact happens in the text, namely, that the girl malevolently tricks the children into believing that new mothers do not exist, dooming them to their tragic fate. The figure of the girl does not easily conform to any given tradition, and this evasiveness is an aesthetically significant feature of the text, that an interpretation should highlight rather than attempt to dispel. Nor do we have to assume the existence of a definite meaning to be ascribed to the mystic pear drum, the wooden tail of the new mother or the tempting box. Rather, these objects are presented to us seemingly in a deliberately mystifying, and at times contradictory way, generating an atmosphere of mystery and uncertainty. Attempting to apply a fixed meaning to the objects and their imagery runs the risk of denying the very quality that has drawn readers to “The New Mother” throughout the years–namely, the elusiveness and weirdness of the text.

60

Lurie, Not in Front of the Grown-Ups, 91. Briggs, A Dictionary of British Folk-tales, 555. 62 Moss, “Mothers, Monsters, and Morals in Victorian Fairy Tales,” 57. 63 Moss, 58. 61

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Summary and Concluding Discussion It is safe to say that Freud’s essay, to a large degree, has come to define the uncanny as the concept is understood today, but it could also be said to illustrate the dilemma that every academic faces when dealing with the uncanny. Freud’s attempt to interpret the particular meaning of uncanny motifs often comes across as strangely redundant in comparison to the unsettling feeling that the term is taken to signify–in the end, the nightmarish and profoundly enigmatic quality of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1817) turns into yet another parable of the castration complex in the hands of the psychoanalyst. So then, how does one speak of the uncanny without turning it into something all too familiar? The question seems particularly relevant for those working within academic discourse, a language that strives for the well-defined and clearly delimited, in short, precisely that which the uncanny calls into question. Clifford’s “The New Mother” illustrates this dilemma unusually well. Whereas the artistic responses of contemporary authors and readers allow themselves to indulge in the weirdness of the text, many scholars seem to feel obligated to come up with a definitive interpretation and to present conclusive answers. The approach I have followed differs somewhat in this respect. Rather than deduce a single and cohesive meaning from the strange images of the story, I have attempted to show how the text has been constructed in order to achieve strangeness, both through its composition and through its relation to previously established genre conventions. In regard to the plot, the story offers no particular resistance to any reader who is familiar with the basic conventions of the fairy tale, and yet, there is a lingering strangeness to the text that just does not seem to go away. Although scholarly attempts to interpret the details of the text may yield interesting and insightful results, I would also like to stress the importance of viewing this fundamentally enigmatic quality of the text as an asset rather than as a problem to be solved. After all, this seems to be precisely what has kept the story alive in the minds of readers. In interpreting the uncanny, we would do well not to seek to replace the strange with the familiar.

Bibliography American Library Association (ALA). “100 most Frequently Challenged Books: 1990-1999.” Accessed July 22, 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20101026202623/http://ala.org/ala/issuesa dvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedbydecade/1990_1999 /index.cfm

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Anonymous. Vice in Its Proper Shape, or, the Wonderful and Melancholy Transformation of Several Naughty Masters and Misses into Those Contemptible Animals Which They Most Resemble in Disposition. Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, 1789. Bell, J.Y. “Correspondence.” In Folklore 66, no. 2 (1955). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0015587X.1955.9717477 Briggs, Katherine. A Dictionary of British Folk-tales in the English Language. London: Routledge, 1970. Buckley, Chloe. “Neil Gaiman’s ‘New Mother’ 1882-2002: How Coraline ‘Translates’ Victorian Fantasy.” In Peer English, no. 5 (2010). Clifford, Lucy. Anyhow Stories Moral and Otherwise. London: Macmillan, 1882. —. “The New Mother.” In The Oxford Book of Children’s Stories, edited by Jan Mark, 193-213. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. —. The New Mother (and other stories). Milton Keynes, U.K.: Oneiros Press, 2012. Darton, F.J. Harvey. Children’s Books in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. New York: Penguin Books, 1919/2003. Hayward, Lilian. “Correspondence.” In Folklore 66, no. 4 (1955). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0015587X.1955.9717477 Lurie, Alison. Not in Front of the Grown-Ups. London: Cardinal, 1991. Mark, Jan, ed. The Oxford Book of Children’s Stories. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Morrison, Grant. Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero. London: Random House, 2011. Moss, Anita. “Mothers, Monsters, and Morals in Victorian Fairy Tales.” In The Lion and the Unicorn 12, no. 2 (December 1988): 47-60. Prickett, Stephen. Victorian Fantasy. Waco, TX.: Baylor University Press, 2005. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Schwartz, Alvin. More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. New York: Harper, 2010. Silver, Anna Krugovoy. “The Didactic Carnivalesque in Lucy Lane Clifford's ‘The New Mother’,” in Studies in English Literature 15001900 40, no. 4 (Autumn 2000): 727-743. https://doi.org/10.2307/1556248 Tatar, Maria. Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

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Thiel, Elizabeth. The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal. New York: Routledge, 2008. Zipes, Jack, ed. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. —. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

CHAPTER FOUR THE REVENGE OF THE UNCANNY: GUSTAV MEYRINK’S THE GOLEM AND THE QUESTION OF GENRE STEN WISTRAND

Introduction Gustav Meyrink’s novel The Golem has been presented as a Gothic classic of horror, however certain critics have objected to this genre classification and it is often absent from surveys on Gothic fiction.1 On the other hand, no one less than Howard Phillips (H. P.) Lovecraft gives it credit in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, writing that the novel ”with its haunting shadowy suggestions of marvels and horrors just beyond reach, is laid in Prague, and describes with singular mastery that city’s ancient ghetto with its spectral, peaked gables”. 2 You might perfectly well use words like creepy and uncanny when characterising the book, but still its genre is a bit tricky to determine. Then again, genre in itself is an amorphous concept. For some it is simply a question of classification, while others find it more valuable to regard it as an instrument in coming to terms with a work. In this sense, genre can be seen as part of the author’s rhetoric in his communication with the reader. 1

The Golem is missing, for example, in Anne Williams, The Art of Darkness: A Poetic of Gothic, Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook to Gothic Literature, Yvonne Leffler, Horror as Pleasure: The Aesthetics of Horror Fiction, Jerold E. Hogle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Fred Botting, Gothic, Angela Wright, Gothic Fiction, Clive Bloom, eds., Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers, David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic , and David Punter, ed., A New Companion to the Gothic. In their biographies of Meyrink, Mike Mitchell (VIVO: The Life of Gustav Meyrink) and Hartmut Binder (Gustav Meyrink: Ein Leben im Bann der Magie) do not discuss the matter. 2 Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, 51. Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s author name used for his novels is H.P. Lovecraft.

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In discussing The Golem, I will focus on Meyrink’s use of both the uncanny and Gothic effects and explore their function in the story. I make no claims of presenting a thorough analysis of the novel, but I will endeavour to answer the question of whether it is reasonable to categorise the story as horror or as Gothic and if so, on what grounds. It is critical for this discussion to make a distinction between effect and function, and between the immediate function and the structural function of an episode. The same uncanny episode that momentarily puts you in a state of terror might, in the perspective of a narrative theme, exemplify a ridiculous belief in the supernatural. As opposed to the spontaneous and emotional reaction, there might then be an intellectual and reflective understanding of the function of a thematic motif. For example, we speak of Gothic motifs in Northanger Abbey as well as in Jane Eyre, but, unlike Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë is not making fun of the genre. On the other hand, one could claim that Austen takes advantage of the Gothic, creating uncanny effects solely to excite the reader.3 For that reason, Angela Wright describes the novel as “both Gothic critique and Gothic romance”.4 The Golem raises a similar genre question. Focusing strictly on motifs, not regarding effect and function, is problematic when discussing genre, as similar motifs can have different narrative functions across works. This would create an impossible process of distinguishing a parody from what is parodied. Despite its horror motifs, Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Predicament” is hardly a horror story but a comic story, as it makes you shiver with laughter rather than fear. In cases like these, the Russian formalists and Roman Jakobson would ascertain the dominant in the text; that is the overarching function which “rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components”, and “guarantees the integrity of the structure [and] specifies the work”.5 Jan MukaĜovský points out that: “The dominant is that component of the work which sets in motion, and gives direction to, the relationships of all other components”.6 When published as a book in 1915, Der Golem was an immediate bestseller and arguably has had greater significance than the works of Kafka in establishing Prague, using the words of the surrealist leader André

3

E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800, 106–130, Clery problematises “the supernatural explained” in using Austen as one of his examples. 4 Wright, Gothic, 5. 5 Jakobson, “The Dominant,” 82. 6 MukaĜovský, “Standard Language and Poetic Language,” 23.

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Breton, as the “magical capital of old Europe”.7 The title refers to the Jewish legends of Rabbi Loew who died in Prague in 1609 and was said to have created a living being out of clay. Golem is often mistaken for the being’s name but is a noun that describes this being. The Hebrew word golem means “the unformed, amorphous” and could be used as a term for a being without soul, like Adam before, as Gershom Scholem articulates, “the breath of God had touched him”.8 Since Medieval times it is used to describe manmade creatures that come to life by some sort of magic. The stories of Rabbi Loew and his golem had a renaissance in the beginning of the 20th century, not least due to the Polish Rabbi Yudl Rosenberg and his widespread book, The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague. Since then, the golem has figured in works by writers such as H. Leivick, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Cynthia Ozick, and Jorge Luis Borges, and in director Paul Wegener’s classic silent movie Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam. The latter is often wrongly referred to as an adaptation of Meyrink’s novel. Even Franz Kafka tried to write a story, in his diary (April 20, 1916), about the Rabbi and his creature but it was never completed. Today the golem is part of popular culture acting, for example, as a monstrous giant in computer games. Meyrink, on the other hand, used him for his own esoteric purposes.

Horror and Gothic Fiction and the Concept of Genre The concept of genre is utilised for different purposes. Tzvetan Todorov makes a distinction between theoretical and historical genres. The former can be defined in a purely logical manner and for that reason does not require reference to existing works that exemplify the genre. His definition of the fantastic is theoretical and based on the way in which we understand an unnatural occurrence or thing in a story. According to Todorov we only have three options in categorising such a moment. If we understand the odd and supernatural as actually occurring, the genre is marvellous, but if we understand it as only seemingly occurring (because we understand it to be a dream, for example) the genre is uncanny. If we cannot decide between these two interpretations, the genre is fantastic. The historical genres, on the other hand, are based on existing works interconnected by common traits such as certain motifs, moods, narrative devices, etc. Historical genres as opposed to theoretical ones cannot be defined, only tentatively described or

7 Breton, as quoted in Peter Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold: The History of a City, 351. The Golem was first published 1913–1914 as a serial in the magazine Die Weissen Blätter. 8 Scholem, On Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 161.

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characterised. They are porous and open for discussions and alterations.9 In short, to define and close a historical genre, like Gothic fiction, would be to deal with it as if it were a theoretical genre. When John Bowen describes the Gothic as a “particularly strange and perverse family of texts” with more or less ““uncertain and illegitimate members”,10 he echoes the genre theorist Alastair Fowler’s standpoint that genres “appear to be much more like families than classes”. Fowler is referring to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblances and holds that genre must be viewed upon as “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing”. He concludes that strict genre classifications are impossible to make and uninteresting; genre, rather, is a tool we use when our aim is to discover the meaning of a work.11 Jonathan Culler seems to agree with Fowler when he speaks of genre as “a conventional function of language, a particular relation to the world which serves as norm or expectation to guide the reader in his encounter with the text”. 12 For him genre is not simply a taxonomic class, it is a question of the sets of expectations which have enabled readers to naturalise texts and give them a relation to the world or, if one prefers to look at it in another way, the possible functions of language which were available to writers at any given period.13

René Wellek and Austin Warren express a similar opinion: “The genre represents, so to speak, a sum of aesthetic devices at hand, available to the writer and already intelligible to the reader”.14 Genre can thus be regarded as an important tool for the author when it comes to rhetorical strategy in the communication with the reader. The author can trust that his intentions will be understood both when he follows and when he breaks genre conventions and expectations. Meyrink is playing with different genres in The Golem, not only the Gothic and the esoteric. We can recognise fantastic traits in the tradition of E.T.A. Hoffmann, romantic realism as in the novels of Dickens and symbolism close to that of Andrei Bely in Petersburg; and sardonic satire 9

Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 3–23. Bowen, “Gothic Motifs,” para 2. 11 Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes, 38–41. 12 Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, 136. 13 Culler, 136. 14 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 235. 10

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when Meyrink deals with the police and judicial system. From Fowler’s and Culler’s point of view this is no problem; different devices generate different genre expectations which in turn might help you to encounter the discourse and different parts of the discourse. A novel is a lengthy piece of text and may jump from one type of rendering and concern to another. Noël Carroll is mainly concerned with affections in The Philosophy of Horror. He points out that horror, mystery, and suspense novels, unlike many other genres, “are denominated in respect of their intended capacity to raise a certain affect”.15 According to Carroll, as opposed to a Gothic story based on terror, a horror story requires a supernatural monster, which has to be “not only lethal but–and this is of utmost significance–also disgusting”. 16 This would exclude The Golem since the golem figure in Meyrink’s novel is not treated as this kind of monster. The figure might be seen as supernatural and in a way frightening, but not as lethal and definitely not as disgusting. The main focus of Yvonne Leffler’s book, with the telling title Horror as Pleasure, is to explore different ways in which a work can provoke the desired horror experience. However, as opposed to Carroll, she is reluctant to define the genre: All studies of genre place the scholar in the absurd position of finding that it is impossible to determine which works belong to a particular genre without having defined it, and just as impossible to define the genre without reference to a number of genre-typical works.17

Some critics hold that an element of horror belongs to the Gothic, but this view is disputed and a generally accepted definition of the Gothic is a challenge to pinpoint. Jerold E. Hogle speaks of it as a “highly unstable genre”, and Wright declares that “the Gothic remains as nebulous a genre as the shadowy veiled figures which haunt its pages”. 18 E.J. Clery and Robert Miles “want to emphasise the permeable nature of Gothic, and indeed of any literary category”, and Bowen states that “there is no essence or a single element that belongs to all Gothics”. 19 However, they all obviously take for granted that they will be understood when talking of 15

Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or Paradoxes of the Heart, 14. Carroll, Philosophy, 15, 22. For a complete definition, see Carroll, 27. 17 Leffler, Horror, 14. I am in agreement with Leffler’s argument outlined in her “Introduction”. 18 Hogle, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 1; Wright, Gothic, 1. 19 Clery and Miles, introduction to Gothic Fiction: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, 1; Bowen, “Gothic Motifs,” para. 2. 16

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something as “Gothic”. It is evident that we expect the Gothic genre to evoke feelings such as fear and terror and a sense of the sublime. Fred Botting refers to motifs and effects of this kind, but also states that it is “impossible to define a fixed set of conventions”.20 When discussing the Gothic, Wellek and Warren speak of “a stock of devices” and “an aesthetic intent, an intent to give the reader a special sort of pleasurable horror and thrill”.21 All this said, attempts of course have been made to define the Gothic. In his dissertation, “De mörka labyrinterna” (“The Dark Labyrinths”), the Swedish scholar and expert on Gothic, Mattias Fyhr claims that Gothic literature can be seen as a semiotic system based on certain categories. Fyhr argues for what might be considered a hardcore definition, demanding six categories to be present if a text is to be designated as Gothic. He explains that: “A Gothic text, depicts one or more subjective worlds which lack a higher order, are characterized by an atmosphere of decay, doom and unsolvability, and contains devices that lend the text labyrinthine qualities”.22 The benefit of this definition is that it is short and clear-cut; on the other hand, definitions of this kind can be problematic. Fyhr stresses that horror really has nothing to do with the Gothic, instead claiming that the genre is permeated with a mood of melancholy, 23 though this is not explicitly part of his definition. He mentions The Golem briefly, stating that “Meyrink’s novel is not Gothic, it is solely fantastic”.24 This statement is a bit surprising, as the novel actually can demonstrate all six categories in Fyhr’s definition. I will elaborate on this later.

The Sublime and the Uncanny According to Harold Bloom “the only major contribution that the twentieth century has made to the aesthetics of the Sublime” is Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” from 1919.25 Obviously, Bloom draws a line from Edmund

20

Botting, Gothic, 1–17. Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 233. 22 Mattias Fyhr, De mörka labyrinterna, 338. I am quoting here from the English summary. Fyhr’s vantage point is grounded theory and for that reason he uses the concept “categories” instead of, for example, “motifs”. 23 Fyhr, 18–26. 24 Fyhr, 235; my translation. It seems unlikely that he, in this case, uses “fantastic” in Todorov’s way. 25 Bloom, “Freud and the Sublime,” 182, as quoted in Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny, 14. 21

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Burke to Freud and establishes a connection between the sublime and the uncanny. As early as 1759 Burke remarked that it is “one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination”.26 He notes that anyone “whose business it is to affect the passions” must never forget that the sublime, the ‘ruling principle’ of which is terror, is the most effective when it comes to affecting the soul. 27 To make something terrible, he argues, “obscurity seems in general to be necessary”. 28 For that reason darkness can be seen as “a cause of the sublime”, since “in utter darkness, it is impossible to know in what degree of safety we stand”.29 Ann Radcliffe elaborates, stating that obscurity “leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate” and for that reason she connected obscurity as opposed to horror. She explains that “the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them”.30 Wellek & Warren posit another approach when they speak of “pleasurable horror” in connection with the Gothic.31 Freud mentions neither Burke nor Radcliffe but the uncanny in his reasoning is in line with terror, in the sense Radcliffe suggested, and can be discussed in relation to Burke’s remarks on obscurity. But if Burke is rooted in 18th century physiology, Freud is, not surprisingly, more Freudian. This becomes very clear in his analysis of Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”, which according to Freud actually deals with castration anxiety. The essence of the uncanny is directly expressed in the German word unheimlich, meaning something being familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Freud says he is seized by the romantic author and philosopher Friedrich von Schelling’s remark “about the meaning of unheimlich, namely that the term ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich) applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open”.32 Freud’s most important forerunner, however, is the psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch. In the article “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, Jentsch tried to “investigate how the affective excitement of the uncanny arises in psychological 26

Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 54–55. Burke, 113–114. 28 Burke, 54–57. 29 Burke, 130. 30 Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry”, 168, 169. 31 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 233. Also see Wright, Gothic, 29. She refers to a “pleasurable terror” possibly in order to distinguish Gothic fiction from horror fiction. 32 Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie [Philosophy of Mythology] 2.2, 649, as quoted in Freud, “The Uncanny,” 132. 27

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terms”.33 As opposed to the triad old/known/familiar he lists new/foreign/ hostile and holds that the uncanny easily emerges in situations where we have lost our orientation.34 Jentsch comes close to Burke when he holds that the breakdown of an important sense organ can increase sensations of uncertainty and remarks that in the night “there are thus many more and much larger chicken-hearted people than in the light of day”.35 He goes on mentioning situations that can cause uncanny feelings, like when we are in “doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate [---]. As long as the doubt as to the nature of the perceived movements lasts, and with it the obscurity of its cause, a feeling of terror persists”.36 Jentsch mentions wax figures, automatons and so on as causal examples of such terror. Freud finds it clear that the uncanny belongs to the realm of the frightening, but it is a fear of a certain kind with a “specific affective nucleus”.37 He criticises Jentsch for relating the uncanny solely to the novel and unfamiliar and argues that something “must be added to the novel and the unfamiliar if it is to become uncanny”.38 Freud’s conclusion is that “the uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”.39 In other words it is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. This could be exemplified by the double, who according to Freud is one of “the most prominent of those motifs that produce an uncanny effect” whether it is a question of lookalike or “a transmission of mental processes from one of these persons to the other– what we would call telepathy–so that the one becomes co-owner of the other’s knowledge, emotions and experience”.40 As we will see, both these aspects of the Freudian uncanny are prominent in The Golem. The concept of the unfamiliar familiar and the familiar unfamiliar is crucial for all later discussions of the uncanny. In his vast investigation, The Uncanny, Nicholas Royle takes stock of situations and motifs from which a sense of uncanniness might arise. Most of the events and phenomenon that he listed can be found in The Golem, which are expounded below.41 This 33

Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” 8. Jentsch, 9. 35 Jentsch, 10. 36 Jentsch, 11; emphasis mine. 37 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 123. 38 Freud, 124. 39 Freud, 124. 40 Freud, 141–142. 41 Royle’s initial compilation of possible uncanny motifs is useful however his further examination of these elements later in the book is problematic and of less relevance to this article. 34

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said, it is important to stress that, as already recognised by Freud, the presence of a subject or motif alone is empty.42 Its effect is triggered based on its treatment and genre expectations. Royle hints at something similar when he writes that the uncanny “is never simply a question of a statement, description or definition, but always engages a performative dimension”.43 For example, a double can play an important part in a farce or sitcom just as well as in a Gothic or horror story; being comic in the former, scary in the latter.

The Golem and the Uncanny The Golem is a first-person narration. Meyrink does not give the narrator and experiencing “I” a name, so I will refer to him as X. In the first chapter X lies half asleep in a hotel room and beholds the moonlight “shining on the foot of my bed, lying there like a large, bright, flat stone”.44 It reminds him of a parable, in a book of Buddha, about a crow who mistakes a stone for a lump of fat and disappointed flies off, like “we–we, the tempters–leave Gautama, the ascetic, because we have lost our pleasure in him”. 45 The vision of the stone keeps haunting X but he feels powerless as he cannot figure out what it is trying to tell him. As he falls asleep, his senses are detached from his body and in chapter two he suddenly finds himself “standing in a gloomy courtyard” in the ghetto and becomes “aware that I had been living in this neighbourhood for a long time now”.46 In the first chapter we already find examples of what Royle calls “strangeness of framing and borders, an experience of liminality”47 with the narrative’s blending of animal and human, repulsion and temptation. X recognises the Jewish junk-dealer Aaron Wassertrum, described as disgusting with his “horrible, expressionless face, with its round, fish’s eyes and gaping hare-lip, [a] human spider that can sense the slightest touch on its web”.48 There is also the tempting, lascivious young Rosina, red-haired and with “white, bloated flesh, like the axolotl”. 49 She is chased by the “deaf and dumb” Jaromir who is roaming “like a wild animal” howling “so 42 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 153–158. Freud refers, for instance, to the lack of uncanny effects of that accompany seemingly uncanny motifs in fairy tales. 43 Royle, The Uncanny, 17. 44 Meyrink, The Golem, 23. 45 Meyrink, 23. 46 Meyrink, 26. 47 Royle, The Uncanny, 2. 48 Meyrink, The Golem, 28. 49 Meyrink, 26–27.

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eerie that it freezes the blood in your veins”.50 Other examples of a beastlike man are the “gentleman with a puffy, frog-like face”51 who turns out to be a paedophile, and the medical student Charousek who talks of the inhabitants of the ghetto as “toothless predators, who’ve lost their strength and claws”.52 Suddenly a woman, later identified as Angelina, rushes into what seems to be X’s room in the ghetto, addressing him as “Herr Pernath”, and asking him to hide her somewhere. Obviously, she knows who he is, while she is a stranger to him. Then we return to the hotel room of the sleeping man who asks himself where he might have read that name, Athanasius Pernath. He remembers a hat he once took for his own, remarking that he was “surprised that it fitted […] so well, since [his] head has a very individual shape”, now reading on the lining, “Athanasius Pernath”.53 Referring to Royle, this event might be seen as an example of “curious coincidences, a sudden sense that things seem to be fated or ‘meant to happen’”.54 X does not know why the hat frightens him–and suddenly the question of the stone that looks like a lump of fat flies towards him like an arrow. He avoids it by quickly imagining Rosina’s “sickly-sweet grin” and concludes to himself that he soon will be back, “safe and sound”, in his home in the ghetto and has nothing to worry about.55 We can observe that right from the start Meyrink puts several potentially uncanny motifs into play, treating them in a way that fulfils their potential. The main focus is on X’s strange relation to Pernath, which relates clearly to at least four of Royle’s uncanny-markers, namely the double, the experience of being a foreign body, disturbance of what is inside and what is outside, and the eerie feeling of déja vu.56 Pernath is introduced as a kind of double to X and at the same time X seems to become Pernath, making the border between them unclear. The ghetto is strangely familiar to X, as if he has seen and experienced it before and we do not really know if we are to understand what is happening as X’s dreams or not.

50

Meyrink, 30. Meyrink, 41. 52 Meyrink, 43. 53 Meyrink, 32. See Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 47–48 as he refers to this episode discussing hats as “something that epitomizes the head”, drawing the conclusion that by putting on Pernath’s hat X “becomes involved in a strange experience” in terms of “an emergence of the unconscious”. 54 Royle, The Uncanny, 1. 55 Meyrink, The Golem, 33. 56 Royle, The Uncanny, 2. 51

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The next chapter marks a dissolving, and the narrative perspective shifts to that of Pernath.57 X now sets out to find Pernath in order to return the hat. He discovers that Pernath is living in the Street of the Alchemists in the Castle area, but obviously in another dimension, being immortal. X gets a glimpse of him, and the doppelgänger-motif is accentuated: “His face is so like mine, that it is as if I were looking into a mirror”.58 An old servant takes care of the hat, saying: “Herr Pernath hopes that his [hat] has not given you a headache”,59 a comment easy to understand as also directed to the, by now, presumably confused reader of the novel. Only in the final chapter do we return to X in his hotel room, and learn that everything we have experienced in between took place thirty-three years ago. Elizabeth Baer maintains that “providing any kind of plot summary here is a challenge”. 60 The plot of The Golem is complicated with different, yet intertwined storylines full of what Royle might call “curious coincidences”,61 which seem to suggest a hidden meaning. The story layers include a love affair, a kind of detective mystery, and Pernath’s quest for his suppressed memories and past; we encounter demoniac villains and angelic women as well as lunatics and men of esoteric wisdom. The material world throughout the novel is described as dark, gloomy, and distasteful–“the uncertainties of […] darkness” being another of Royle’s uncanny markers.62 The joyless ghetto with its narrow and dirty lanes is repeatedly compared to a sanctuary with houses like gravestones, and its place of entertainment, Salon Loisitschek, appears as a combination of Auerbach’s Keller and Walpurgisnacht in Goethe’s Faust. Royle highlights death and dolls as possible uncanny motifs,63 and the world in which the characters are living in The Golem is associated with death; humans are compared not only with animals but also with dolls like puppets and chessmen. Pernath’s friends can be seen “sitting round the worm-eaten old table like a trio of dead men”, one of them looking “like some drowned 57

Dissolving is a term used to describe a shift in film fiction from one story level to another. For example, in director Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County two siblings arrive at the house of their deceased mother. When they find her diaries and letters there is a dissolving, and we are brought back in time to encounter the love story of their mother. Director James Cameron’s Titanic begins with the old Rose Dawson Calvert telling her story, but as she speaks, there is a dissolving and the events of the past unfold in front of our eyes. 58 Meyrink, The Golem, 262; emphasis in original. 59 Meyrink, 261; emphasis in original. 60 Elizabeth R. Baer, The Golem Redux, 39. 61 Royle, The Uncanny, 1. 62 Royle, 2. 63 Royle, The Uncanny, 2.

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Dutchman from a bygone century”.64 In prison Pernath shares a cell with the “corpselike”65 somnambulist Herr Laponder, who has been sentenced for murder and rape, and possesses telepathic abilities. According to Royle, both corpses and telepathy can be seen as belonging to the sphere of the uncanny.66 When Laponder recounts his crime, he does it in a way that turns him into a kind of tool for mystic forces: When I committed the rape and the murder I had no choice. Even though I was fully aware of what I was doing, I still had no choice. There was something inside me, the presence of which I had until then never suspected, that woke up and was stronger than I.67

Laponder, as seen here, also functions as one of the many doubles to Pernath. Just as humans are likened to lifeless objects, the latter can be described as living creatures. When Pernath beholds the houses in the ghetto he notices: Beneath the dreary sky, they looked as if they were asleep, and you could feel none of the malevolent, hostile life that sometimes emanates from them when the mist fills the street on an autumn evening, partly concealing the changing expressions that flit across their faces.68

In the night, he is convinced, they can “confer together, in mysterious noiseless agitation” and in his dreams he has often discovered to his “horrified surprise that in secret they are the true masters of the street”. On the other hand, there are “all the strange people who live in them, like phantoms, like people not born of woman who, in all their being and doing seem to have been put together haphazardly”.69 Such dreams, he is inclined to believe, “carry with them dark truths which, when I am awake, glimmer faintly in the depths of my soul”.70 Meyrink also hints at a spiritual world of eternal life where we are in command of ourselves. He indicates this notion in an obscure way, as if he were well aware of Burke’s opinion that it is our ignorance that causes our admiration and wakes our passions and might excite a sense of the sublime,71 especially as this spiritual world can 64

Meyrink, The Golem, 189. Meyrink, 227. 66 Royle, The Uncanny, 2. 67 Meyrink, The Golem, 235; emphasis in original. 68 Meyrink, 42. 69 Meyrink, 42. 70 Meyrink, 42. 71 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 54–57. 65

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also be perceived as threatening and fearful because it is closely related to our corporal death. The golem in Meyrink’s text is not the usual figure made out of clay but presented in an evasive and obscure manner. For example, he can be seen as a terrifying incarnation of those parts of the self we suppress and dare not recognise. In this sense he is acting as anyone’s double. When the late wife of the archivist of the Old-New synagogue once met the figure face to face she was paralysed as long as the mysterious being was in the vicinity” but “was firmly convinced that it could only have been her own soul, which had left her body for a moment and confronted her for a brief second with the features of an alien creature.72

Yet that is not the final word on the matter. The golem is also said to appear every thirty-three years when something happens, “which is not especially exciting in itself and yet which creates a sense of horror for which there is no justification nor any satisfactory explanation”.73 On these occasions a completely unknown person is seen in the streets only to suddenly disappear. He is not described as a lethal and repulsive monster but instead as “smooth-faced” and characterised by the fact that one knows what he looks like but yet cannot describe him. 74 He can be seen as a kind of materialisation of the psychic tensions in the ghetto, a spiritual explosion blasting our unconsciousness dreams out into the light of day, [creating] a phantom that in expression, gait and behaviour, in every detail, would reveal the symbol of the soul of the masses, if only we were able to interpret the secret language of forms.75

In other words, the golem makes us apprehend what Royle describes as “something that should have remained secret and hidden but has come to light”.76 It demonstrates that although the uncanny, as Royle explains, “is a feeling that happens only to oneself, […] its meaning or significance may have to do, most of all, with what is not oneself, with others, with the world ‘itself’”.77

72

Meyrink, The Golem, 61. Meyrink, 57. 74 Meyrink, 57. 75 Meyrink, 59. 76 Royle, The Uncanny, 2. 77 Royle, 2. 73

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At this point in the story, it seems clear that an earlier episode when a strange figure hands a book to Pernath, actually is his first encounter with the golem, establishing a connection between them. After the figure has left, Pernath has “a curious idea like an irresistible inspiration” that he should imitate the unknown man, although he has no clue as to what he looked like.78 He observes: But what happened was different, completely different from what I imagined. My skin, my muscles, my body suddenly remembered, without revealing the secret to my brain. They made movements that I had not willed, had not intended. As if my limbs no longer belonged to me!79

He realises that he walks exactly the way his visitor walked and that he is “looking at my room out of slanting eyes”,80 that is the eyes of the unknown man. “I wanted to scream out loud that that was not my face, wanted to feel it with my hand, but my hand would not obey me”. Then, suddenly, he becomes himself again, “shaking with terror”, his heart pounding, knowing “that ghostly fingers had been poking round the crevices of [his] brain”.81 In other words, Pernath feels as if he has been possessed by the golem. One of the most uncanny episodes in the book, which also confirms the golem as Pernath’s double, is when Pernath’s mind is being captured in a doll that the puppeteer Vrieslander is carving, which turns out to be a copy of the golem. Pernath recounts that “I had turned into it and was lying on Vrieslander’s lap, peering round. My gaze wandered round the room, someone else’s hand moving my head”.82 It ends with Vrieslander opening a window, throwing the puppet’s head down into the street and Pernath, overwhelmed by total terror, losing consciousness.83 Royle speaks of “the experience of oneself as a foreign body”,84 and the “sense of ourselves as double, split, at odds with ourselves”85 as significant for the uncanny and as well, the presence of “dolls and other lifelike or mechanical objects”.86 The novel keeps coming back to the idea of people believing themselves free but in fact being commanded by obscure forces outside themselves, making 78

Meyrink, The Golem, 38. Meyrink, 38. 80 Meyrink, 39. 81 Meyrink, 39. 82 Meyrink, 66. 83 Meyrink, 66–67. 84 Royle, The Uncanny, 2; emphasis in original. 85 Royle, 6. 86 Royle, 2. 79

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them flutter like litter in the wind or acting like puppets or chessmen, examples of what Royle calls “forms of what might appear merely mechanical or automatic life”. 87 Pernath’s friend the composer Prokop recalls an experience of this kind, which is truly uncanny: Isn’t it strange the way the wind makes inanimate objects move? Doesn’t it look odd when things which usually just lie there lifeless suddenly start fluttering. […] I remember once looking out onto an empty square, watching huge scraps of paper whirling angrily round and round, chasing one another as if each had sworn to kill the others; and I couldn’t feel the wind at all since I was standing in the lee of a house.88

The already mentioned connection between Pernath and the golem is carried further when Pernath finds himself trapped in the attic of the Old-New synagogue where rabbi Loew, according to the legend, had put his clay creature to rest. Here Pernath’s eyes fall on a Tarot card, The Juggler, which he recognises as one painted long ago by himself. He is terrified and Meyrink has staged the scene in a way that also sends shivers down the spine of the reader. Pernath tries to convince himself that it is just a playing card he is looking at: I sent the scream echoing round my skull, but in vain … now it was … was taking on human form … the Juggler … and was squatting in the corner and staring at me with vacant eyes out of my own face! Mute and motionless, we stared into each other’s eyes, the one a hideous mirror-image of the other.89

He eventually manages to escape the room, clothed in some old rags he has found in the attic, and when he dashes through the streets of the ghetto, people are horrified, believing him to be the golem. In his listing of uncanny situations, Royle mentions manifestations of insanity, watching epileptic or similar fits, fear of losing one’s eyes or genitals, gruesome or terrible things like death, corpses, cannibalism, live burial, the return of the dead, and strangely beautiful experiences, bordering on ecstasy. 90 You can find examples of nearly all these matters in The Golem, barring cannibalism and the loss of one’s genitals. Pernath is afraid of falling back into insanity and the medical student Charousek seems at times to be bordering on madness: “I stared at Charousek in horror. Was the 87

Royle, 1. Meyrink, The Golem, 54. 89 Meyrink, 110; emphasis in original. 90 Royle, The Uncanny, 1–2. 88

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man mad?” 91 Wassertrum’s son, the unscrupulous doctor Wasary, takes advantage of peoples’ fear of losing their sight and the story is full of gruesome and terrible things. But there is also an episode bordering on ecstasy. When Pernath starts reading the book handed to him by the golem figure he gets a vision of strange beauty, which at the same time is frightening, with “ecstatic dancers echoing all around” and people, “some arisen from graves”,92 that want to tell him something he cannot understand. We even have a case with a man being buried alive, namely the earlier mentioned paedophile, who is trapped in an underground room and left to starve to death. As the above examples show, Meyrink takes the doll-and-automaton motif a step further than Jentsch and Freud, not only raising doubts whether something is a living creature, but also arousing fear that you yourself, without knowing it, might be an automaton. The examples also make clear that the uncanny does not only occur as isolated manifestations in the novel but permeates it as a whole. Reading The Golem is to dwell in a constant feeling of the kind of uncanniness described by Royle as ghostly [and] concerned with the strange, weird and mysterious, with a flickering sense (but not conviction) of something supernatural. The uncanny involves feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of who one is and what is being experienced. Suddenly one’s sense of oneself […] seems strangely questionable.93

Meyrink knows how to take advantage of the special effects of fear and terror. The uncanny is experienced not only by the characters but by the reader as well. However, that does not mean that the uncanny has a special function in the story or for the theme of the novel, nor does it necessarily turn the book into a Gothic novel. Therefore, we might pose the question whether the uncanny is a means or an end in itself, if it is supposed to support some idea that Meyrink wants to convey, or if we are only to enjoy the eery effects as pure entertainment in their own right.

The Golem and the Gothic According to Royle the uncanny is not possible to accommodate within the Gothic. This is based on the contention , referring to Clery, that a Gothic story in the end explains away supernatural occurrences as the product of 91

Meyrink, The Golem, 50. Meyrink, 36. 93 Royle, The Uncanny, 1. 92

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natural causes.94 But such a genre restriction is by no means self-evident; on the contrary, the uncanny might just as well be seen as part and parcel of the Gothic. To say, as above, that The Golem is permeated with the uncanny would, by no means, preclude discussing it as a Gothic novel. Fyhr’s earlier mentioned attempt to define a historical genre like the Gothic is, from Todorov’s point of view, dubious. Nevertheless, it is rewarding to use his definition as a kind of touchstone in a discussion of The Golem as a Gothic text, since everything constituting it could function as a kind of Gothic genre trigger for the reader who will recognise the different elements from earlier encounters with Gothic fiction. Fyhr concretises and specifies the “stock of devices”, as referred to by Wellek and Warren, generally associated with the Gothic.95 On that basis I will discuss the ways in which The Golem answers to Fyhr’s demands. Let us revisit his definition: A Gothic text, depicts one or more subjective worlds which lack a higher order, are characterized by an atmosphere of decay, doom and unsolvability, and contains devices that lend the text labyrinthine qualities.96

Fyhr’s first demand on a Gothic text is, then, that it should be characterised by “subjective worlds”. As Baer puts it, the narrative in The Golem “seems to drift in and out of wakefulness, sleeping, dreaming, and hallucinating”.97 We have a two-layered first-person narration, which is all the more complicated as the character, Pernath could possibly be seen as dreamt by X. The description of the ghetto is highly subjective and turns the whole place into a repulsive vision of the shabbiness and pettiness of the material world. There are several episodes which are hard to determine as being dream visions of Pernath or not – or rather dream visions of Pernath dreamt by X. I will come back to this issue below in a discussion of the Kabbalist concept of ibbur, or the impregnation of souls. More problematic is the second category “lack of higher order”. It is unclear how high this higher order is supposed to be, according to Fyhr. For example, in discussing Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, he refers to the capricious way Manfred wields his power. But we could just as well, or 94

Royle, The Uncanny, 30-34. Actually, this kind of naturalisation is exactly what Todorov maintains signifies the uncanny genre as opposed to the marvellous and the fantastic. 95 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 242. 96 Fyhr, De mörka labyrinterna, 338, as cited from the English summary. The corresponding passage in Swedish is followed by a lengthy discussion of the six categories delineated in his definition, Fyhr, De mörka labyrinterna, 63. 97 Baer, Golem Redux, 39.

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better, argue that a higher order does exist, namely the order of God, which eventually sees to having Manfred deposed and the castle returned to its legitimate owner. There is a similar issue in The Golem, despite the fact that no God is operating here. The ghetto is governed by the despotic Wassertrum and the legal system is corrupt–but at the same time there seems to be a higher spiritual order that permeates everything. An “atmosphere of decay”, Fyhr’s third category is found on several levels. The ghetto in itself is a slum district– symbolically enough controlled by a repulsive junk-dealer–and it is compared to a churchyard. Even the important and mystical book, with a chapter on ibbur, that is handed over to Pernath, is damaged and in need of repair. The high society and the administration of justice constitute a swamp of moral decay and as demonstrated earlier, the novel is crowded with characters who represent both physical and mental decay. We also have the stories of the murderer Babinski and of Dr Hulbert and his regiment of “beggars and vagrants, pimps and whores, drunks and ragmen”.98 On top of this there are examples of fragmentation in the form of obliterated words marked by asterisks, a device Fyhr calls textual decay. An “atmosphere of doom”, the fourth category, sometimes coincides with the atmosphere of decay. It is accentuated when the whole ghetto is eventually pulled down in a kind of apocalypse and X gives the ferryman a coin in order to cross the Moldau, as if he were heading for the Kingdom of Death. However, we are also confronted with mystical murders and a constant creepy feeling that something is going to be destroyed. The atmosphere is marked as doomed with many scenes taking place at night, in darkness and gloom. Adding to this sombre state, Pernath is afraid of falling back into mental disease and his friend Charousek is ill and doomed to die. Pernath is a riddle for himself and afraid of being confronted with the truth as it might lead to mental derangement, something which contributes to Fyhr’s fifth category, an “atmosphere of unsolvability”. There are a great many mystical events, like screaming from beneath the ground, which seems to lack natural explanations, and the golem creature is discussed but never fully elucidated. Neither is it self-evident who the father of Rosina is or what kind of a mystic wax doll Wassertrum harbours in his house. The strange relation between X and Athanasius Pernath can also be regarded as an unsolvable riddle. The sixth category, “devices that lend the text labyrinthine qualities”, can be exemplified by the agglomeration of houses and narrow streets, which makes the ghetto literally a labyrinth. This is even more pronounced when it comes to the underground pathways and tunnels, which Pernath 98

Meyrink, The Golem, 75.

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travels in, and that Baer calls “a very Gothic scene”.99 These pathways lead to the closed attic in the house where the golem is reported to disappear after his appearances – which in turn is a perfect example of the secret room. The story structure itself is labyrinthine with a forking plot, the reader not knowing if a path will lead somewhere or will turn out to be a cul-de-sac. The memories of Pernath are but disconnected fragments, and that is exactly as Fyhr describes the hero experiencing himself as being in a psychic labyrinth. The mystical double is an important and frequently used motif and there are also examples of documents hidden in secret places and a variant of the mysterious painting. Finally, the narration that sits within a narration and dreams found within dreams contribute to a Chinese box structure. The last words of Pernath’s servant, quoted earlier in this article, can be understood on a metafictional level as directed to the reader from the author, just as well as to the character X from the servant. Reading the novel has, so to speak, been like putting the hat of Athanasius Pernath on your own head, inducing a strange experience signed Gustav Meyrink. It is a bit surprising that Fyhr does not accept The Golem as Gothic as it fits perfectly within his own definition of the genre, including his demand for melancholy. Does this mean that his definition is not comprehensive enough and should be extended with further categories? On the contrary, I would say that the problem, as Todorov has demonstrated, is that it is logically impossible to attempt to define a historical genre like the Gothic. As Meyrink treats motifs in an uncanny way, both making the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar, a constant eerie feeling is engendered that things are not what they seem to be. The Golem contains more creepy moods and effects of terror, generating a sense of the sublime, than many generally recognised works of Gothic fiction, so one might wonder why it is excluded from surveys of the genre. However, it is not impossible to understand why, as we have seen, Fyhr, seemingly paradoxical, rejects The Golem as Gothic and why it has not found its way into the Gothic canon. Though the answer to that is not to be found within Fyhr’s categories or other attempts to define the Gothic.

The Golem and the Dominant If The Golem is rejected as Gothic, it is not due to its lack of Gothic motifs and uncanny effects. Rather it is probably because the Gothic is not regarded as the dominant in the framework of the novel. Jakobson, in the tradition of the Russian formalists, looks upon a piece of art as “a structured system, a 99

Baer, Golem Redux, 41.

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regularly ordered hierarchical set of artistic devices”. 100 As previously noted, he describes the dominant as the focusing component which determines and transforms the remaining elements, providing a function in accordance with the overarching structure of the work. This does not mean that Jakobson regards a work as monolithic; the concept of the dominant is an alternative to “one-sided monism and one-sided pluralism”. 101 As a concept, the dominant “combines an awareness of the multiple functions of a poetic work with a comprehension of its integrity, that is to say, that function which unites and determines the poetic work”.102 From this point of view, it could be reasonable to consider The Golem as esoteric rather than Gothic and to argue that the dominant is refunctioning the Gothic ingredients by giving them a metaphorical meaning. We do react to the effects of terror and horror and the uncanny generated by the text, but we are also aware that these effects have yet another function, which must be seen in relation to what we understand as the theme of the novel. Although this is not the place to plunge into the occult and esoteric matters of The Golem, it is relevant to understand the relation between X and Pernath, which may be aided by exploring further the concept of ibbur.103 In Kabbalistic tradition, the term means “soul impregnation” and Rabbi Chaim Vital (1542–1620), disciple of Isaac Luria, describes the phenomenon as “when a secondary soul comes down into this world and enters into a person who has already been born in the world”.104 Either the impregnating soul does it for its own sake or “for the sake of the person himself, to aid him, to give him merit and to guide him, while this extra soul does not actually lack anything for itself”.105 In this sense you might say that the soul of Pernath, in Meyrink’s novel, has impregnated that of X in order to help him come to terms with the crucial questions of life by letting him re-experience, in a dream-like state of the mind, the experiences of Pernath. This phenomenon is an example of Freud’s previously mentioned remark on the double as “a transmission of mental processes from one of these persons to the other–what we would call telepathy–so that the one becomes

100

Jakobson, “The Dominant,” 85. Jakobson, 82. 102 Jakobson, 84. Although Jakobson does not explicitly discuss genre, the idea of the dominant is highly relevant in this context. 103See Sten Wistrand, “Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem.” In this article I discuss The Golem as an esoteric novel. 104 Vital, as quoted in Alan Unterman, ed., The Kabbalistic Tradition: An Anthology of Jewish Mysticism, 260. 105 Unterman, 261. 101

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co-owner of the other’s knowledge, emotions and experience”.106 However, in the Kabbalistic tradition to which Meyrink refers, this is taken literally. When it comes to the golem concept, Meyrink has observed and taken benefit of the metaphorical potential of the original figure being a creature without a soul and a free will, a kind of automaton. To meet him is frightening because we do not want to be reminded that we are all in a way golems, a kind of living dead. But to overcome this inner golem, and to become free, the golem must be confronted. In Meyrink’s esoteric worldview, the material world is subordinated by the spiritual world. The former is connected to death and the latter to life. The ignorant crow, in the earlier mentioned Buddhist parable, only interested in a lump of fat, represents the way of all flesh. Those striving for eternal life and becoming masters of their own life know that to be in the world is to be dead, and to die is to be born. This analysis illuminates why, in The Golem, the ghetto is compared to a sanctuary and many scenes take place in darkness, why the world and our earthly living is described as a labyrinth, why people are compared to whirling litter in the wind, flouncing dolls and pieces in a game of chess, and why the prison seems a true hell. Meyrink believes that we are meant to reject living in the world and strive for something else, something better. All the above passages produce effects of terror, a creepy mood, and a feeling of the uncanny. At the same time the uncanny and terror are both part of a rhetoric that serves the sublime when exposing the material world as a frightening and hostile kingdom of death, and further, hints at an eternal existence beyond earthly limitations. Meyrink has been able to utilise certain literary techniques, associated with the Gothic and the uncanny, that have been proven effective in evoking distinct reactions and emotions in the reader and in expressing a vision of the world as estranged, uncertain, fearful, revolting. By drawing upon genre, in this case the Gothic, he benefits from what Jonathan Culler calls its “particular relation to the world which serves as norm or expectation to guide the reader in his encounter with the text”.107 However, it is also apparent that Meyrink deviates from the traditional Gothic and uses the well-known motifs and techniques for his own particular purposes. For Meyrink, the uncanny relates to esoteric questions, as opposed to psychological questions, as attributed by Freud. What is hidden is not mainly suppressed parts of ourselves, but rather a hidden wisdom. It will generate fear when it becomes visible, because it challenges our whole lives and tells us that we have to cut off our ties to the world and risk our carnal life in order to achieve eternal life. This esoteric 106 107

Freud, “The Uncanny,” 141–142. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 136.

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theme gives the novel its structure and for that reason can be said to constitute the dominant. Using Jakobson’s vocabulary, it is the focusing component, which specifies the work and transforms the remaining components to function in a coherent aesthetic composition. Although being subordinated, the dominant theme does not mean that the uncanny and Gothic effects in The Golem are weakened or dissolved. In that case they would also cease to fulfil their specific function in the story as a whole since they are part of Meyrink’s strategy to evoke an esoteric vision of the world. Nevertheless, the uncanny can be a troublesome tool to work with.

Conclusion The Golem is, to a high degree, characterised by the employment of uncanny effects to affect the reader’s mind and evoke emotions of terror and the sublime. For that reason, I have no qualms in describing the novel as Gothic, particularly as Meyrink utilises motifs that are generally associated with Gothic fiction. Despite that, he clearly wants to convey something more complex and layered than most Gothic entertainment, namely an esoteric vision of the world. His main purpose is not to offer horror as pleasure, but to let the uncanny demonstrate the material world as terrifying and revolting and thereby encourage us to search for a deeper wisdom and another kind of existence beyond the borders and limitations of earthly life. Coming back to the initial question whether or not Meyrink’s novel is Gothic, I prefer a pragmatic and non-taxonomic answer avoiding the word “is” because this “is” implies that a particular genre is a distinct category instead of something to be negotiated. Meyrink does explore different genres in The Golem, and this allows us to understand the rhetorical strategies he uses. The reader can both enjoy the individual uncanny effects and understand their function and overarching significance for the novel’s theme. If we abandon the need for clear-cut classifications, we could suggest that The Golem would satisfy a reader looking for a novel dealing with esoteric questions and also cater to those who want to subside in Gothic moods, experience moments of terror and horror and rejoice in the uncanny. For Jakobson, it was obvious that the dominant is determined by the structure of the work. An ordering principle may be revealed, such as the dominant, that maintains a unified scope in the work. In this perspective, the Gothic and the uncanny are a means and not an end in the narrative of The Golem, establishing the work as esoteric rather than Gothic. The effects of the uncanny and the Gothic are not altered by their function in the story or their connection to the theme. The narrative effects continually affect our mind and emotions. These experiences even might, in an uncanny way, be

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more persuasive than the more intellectual apprehension conveyed by the compositional structure. If so, it is also possible that these effects will, in a subversive way, dominate the reading experience. The structure and the theme of the novel might escape you, but not its impalpable mood. The problem, if you choose to regard it as a problem, is about the same as many have experienced reading Dante’s Divine Comedy: hell, rather than heaven, moments of terror and horror rather than moral messages, tend to stick in your mind. Let us call it the revenge of the uncanny.

Bibliography Baer, Elizabeth R. The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012. Binder, Hartmut. Gustav Meyrink: Ein Leben im Bann der Magie. Prague: Vitalis Verlag, 2009. Bloom, Clive, ed. Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 2007. Bowen, John. “Gothic Motifs.” Discovering Literature. Romantics and Victorians. British Library, May 15, 2014. https://www.bl.uk/romanticsand-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Cameron, James, dir. Titanic. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1997. DVD. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror: Or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990. Clery, E. J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Clery, E.J. and Robert Miles. Introduction to Gothic Fiction: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, edited by E.J. Clery and Robert Miles, 1-4. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976. Demetz, Peter. Prague in Black and Gold: The History of a City. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Eastwood, Clint, dir. The Bridges of Madison County. USA: Warner Brothers, 1995. DVD. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock, 121-162. London: Penguin, 1919/2003.

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Fyhr, Mattias. De mörka labyrinterna. Lund: Ellerströms, 2003. Hogle, Jerrold E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hogle, Jerrold E. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, 1-20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Jakobson, Roman. “The Dominant.” In Readings in Russian Poetics. Formalist and Structuralist Views, edited by Ladislav Matejka & Krystyna Pomorska, 82–87. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Translated by Roy Sellars. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2, no. 1 (1906/1997): 7-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697259708571910 Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. London: Routledge, 1981. Leffler, Yvonne. Horror as Pleasure: The Aesthetics of Horror Fiction. Translated by Sarah Death. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2000. Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Dover Publications, 1973. Meyrink, Gustav. The Golem. Translated by Mike Mitchell. Sawtry: Dedalus, 2005. Mitchell, Mike. VIVO: The Life of Gustav Meyrink. Sawtry: Dedalus, 2008. MukaĜovský, Jan. “Standard Language and Poetic Language.” In A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style. Selected and translated by Paul L. Garvin. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1955. Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, ed. The Handbook to Gothic Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Punter, David and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2013. Punter, David, ed. A New Companion to the Gothic. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” In Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820. Edited by E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, 163– 172. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rosenberg, Yudl. The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague. Translated by Curt Leviant. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

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Schelling, F.W.J. Philosophie der Mythologie [Philosophy of Mythology]. London: Forgotten Books, 1857/2018. Scholem, Gershom. On Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Schocken Books, 1996. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Unterman, Alan, ed. The Kabbalistic Tradition: An Anthology of Jewish Mysticism. London: Penguin Books, 2008. Wellek, René and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1970. Williams, Anne. The Art of Darkness: A Poetic of Gothic. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Wistrand, Sten. “Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem: A Sensationalist Shlock Novel or an Esoteric Vision of the World?” LIR. journal, 12 (2020), 10– 51. http://www.divaportal.org/smash/get/diva2:1426466/FULLTEXT02.pdf Wright, Angela. Gothic Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

CHAPTER FIVE THE CONTINUALLY UNCANNY IN KAFKA’S THE TRIAL ANTONY JOHAE

In his 1919 essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud draws on literary texts for the majority of his examples, notably E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale, “The Sand-Man”, Schiller’s narrative poem, “The Ring of Polycrates”, Albrecht Schaeffer’s novel, Josef Montfort, and Goethe’s creation of Mephistopheles in Faust. Freud references such examples because, as he observes, “there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life”.1 And in the same essay he argues for an “enquiry” into the aesthetic of the uncanny as distinct from a psycho-analytic analysis of the phenomenon.2 We shall pursue Freud’s proposed aesthetic by focussing on the fiction of Franz Kafka, first, by citing work by scholars who have remarked on the presence of the uncanny in his short stories and novels. We shall then narrow the compass of our enquiry by carrying out an analytical study of the uncanny in Kafka’s novel, The Trial, with a view to gaining an understanding of the phenomenon as an intrinsic aesthetic component of the artefact. In a wide-ranging deconstructive and interdisciplinary study of the uncanny, Nicholas Royle has briefly drawn attention to the appearance of the uncanny in Kafka’s oeuvre. 3 However, he does not elaborate on its application to specific Kafka texts. Similarly, Mark Falkenberg, in his book on the uncanny in the fiction of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck, makes passing reference to Kafka.4 This no doubt because the emphasis of the study, as indicated in the title, is on elements associated with the fiction of

1

Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” 249; emphasis in original. Freud, 247. 3 Royle, The Uncanny, 57. 4 Falkenberg, Rethinking the Uncanny in Hoffmann and Tieck, 192, 240. 2

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the German Romantic Movement rather than on the modernism of writers like Kafka. Charles Bernheimer, in his study of psychopoetic structures in the fiction of Flaubert and Kafka, refers specifically to the uncanny in Kafka’s short story, “The Judgement”, although this does not appear to be the central concern of the exegesis.5 In another comparative study, Călin D. LupiĠu has traced what she calls the “labyrinths of the uncanny” in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Kafka’s short story, “Metamorphosis”. 6 However, instances of uncanny experience are not provided, the emphasis of the essay having more to do with societal alienation than the evocation of particular psychological moments associated with the uncanny. A rather more detailed study of “Metamorphosis” has been undertaken by Scott Freer, who in Modern Mythopoeia has devoted an entire chapter to what he calls “Kafka’s Sick Ovidian Animals”.7 In it he includes a subsection entitled “Uncanny Metamorphosis” 8 in which he gives special emphasis to the uncanny features of Kafka’s story in relation to Freud’s theory. However, Freer’s view of the uncanny conflicts with Freud’s approach, because Freer argues from a neo-mythological perspective with particular reference to the transformation of humans into animals in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whereas Freud’s philosophical orientation is towards positivism. Apart from “Metamorphosis”, the uncanny aspect of other short works has also attracted the attention of scholars. Michito Oki, for example, has drawn on Benjamin and Adorno’s observations of Kafka’s “creature” called Odradek in “Troubles of a Householder”9 and has cited them in a discussion of the sensation of dread and the uncanny in Kafka’s “The Burrow”. In tune with Benjamin and Adorno, Oki interprets the story as signalling the problematic relationship of the individual subject with the collective society.10 Olga Touloumi has also analysed “The Burrow”, although not sociologically, but rather in terms of the psychological tension between space and borders in parallel with Freud’s comfortable “homely” (heimlich) and his uncomfortable uncanny (unheimlich). 11 In a study of the gothic

5

Bernheimer, Flaubert and Kafka: Studies in Psychopoetic, 167-88. LupiĠu, “Labyrinths of the Uncanny in Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis”, 276-283. 7 Freer, Modern Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods, 78-107. 8 Freer, 97-107. 9 Kafka, “Troubles of a Householder,” 45-59. 10 Oki, “Hearing/Seeing Dread,” 16-26. 11 Touloumi, “The ‘Uncanny’ in Franz Kafka’s Der Bau.” 6

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elements in Kafka’s fiction, Patrick Bridgwater draws attention to the protagonist mole’s “lack of control” in “The Burrow”, where the creative burrower finds his womb-like citadel of security transformed into a Gothic prison-vault-cum-tomb, for in the German language the idea of the grave (Grab) is contained in that of digging (graben); there could hardly be a better example of how das Heimliche (the familiar) is transformed or perverted into das Unheimliche (the uncanny).12

“The Great Wall of China” is another of Kafka’s stories which has elicited an evaluation of the uncanny. In Jiayan Mi’s postcolonial reading in which she makes comparison with the “China” narratives of Borges and Kafka, she contests the notion of the fantastic/uncanny in its application to the two stories, seeing in them examples of what she terms “the labyrinthinization of a cultural/exotic Other”. 13 And in an overarching study of European Modernist fiction – “from the sublime to the uncanny” – David R. Ellison has aligned Kafka with Proust in a chapter entitled “uncanny narrative openings”. In it, he has selected a passage from Kafka’s novel, The Castle, in order to illustrate an uncanny affect experienced by the protagonist, and in so doing appears to employ Freud’s criteria in his description without naming him.14 In the majority of the secondary works thus far mentioned, references to particular Kafka texts have tended to be brief and comment on the uncanny in them cursory. For this reason, I have selected for detailed examination The Trial (1925), a novel, as will be argued, riddled with features of the uncanny to the point of ubiquity. Our task, therefore, will not be to delve into the mind of the author, via his novel, in order to get at his psyche, but to shed light on the formation and function of uncanny features in the artefact qua artefact, and further to fathom their signification in terms of artistic discourse. As far as literature is concerned, and fiction in particular, Freud insists on a precondition for an effective and expressive narrative uncanny, namely, that an illusion of “common reality” is sustained.15 For this reason, fairy tales generally forfeit uncanny effect, because the bounds of real life are transgressed throughout, whereas the occurrence of the uncanny in a recognisably realistic context is dependent on a momentary, or an extended, 12

Bridgwater, Kafka, Gothic and Fairytale, 49; emphasis in original. Mi, “The Fantastic/Exotic Uncanny: Kafka’s and Borges’s Labyrinthine Narratives of China”, 127. 14 Ellison, Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny, 151-52. 15 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” 250. 13

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loss of distinction between the imagination and reality, giving rise to feelings associated with anxiety and fear.16 Freud makes it clear that we need to distinguish between the experience of the uncanny in real life and the effect of the uncanny as it occurs in a literary text;17 and he points out that “a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life”,18 meaning that in fiction the reader suspends, to a certain extent, disbelief. If we take the case of The Trial, the protagonist, Joseph K. (also referred to as K.), is “arrested” and responds to the call of the Court even though no specific charge has been made against him; the reader accepts this while at the same time recognising the unsettling strangeness of the situation. In his exposition of the uncanny in fiction, Freud does not make a clear distinction between the phenomenon as it makes itself felt on a reader and how it is experienced by a fictional character. These are not necessarily synchronised; Joseph K.’s peculiar behaviour in his office at the Bank in the presence of the Deputy Manager and his client, the Manufacturer in Chapter 7, may be seen as symptomatic of the protagonist’s distressed and exhausted state of mind, but not necessarily as an uncanny moment: it seemed to K. as though two giants of enormous size were bargaining above his head for himself. Slowly, lifting his eyes as far as he dared, he peered up to see what they were about, then picked one of the documents from the desk at random, laid it flat on his open palm, and gradually raised it, rising himself with it, to their level. In doing so he had no definite purpose, but merely acted with the feeling that this was how he would have to act when he had finished the great task of drawing up the plea which was completely to acquit him.19

While K. does not query the weirdness of the moment as experienced through his eyes, the distanced reader is struck by the oddity of K.’s behaviour, the distorted scale conveyed in the imagery, and the prevailing mood of futility. The narrative may strike the reader as uncanny, whereas the protagonist/subject is so thoroughly immersed in his humiliation that he is accepting of his condition without qualification. Therefore, we need to make a distinction between the uncanny as it is experienced by the protagonist, and the uncanny as it affects a reader. These are not always synchronised in spite of the fact that the reader “accompanies” Joseph K. all the way through the one year of his ordeal. 16

Freud, 244, 246, 250. Freud, 247. 18 Freud, 249. 19 Kafka, The Trial, 145-46. 17

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Focalisation is for the most part set from Joseph K.’s perspective; we enter into his private thought processes to the exclusion of others. When Freud observes: The storyteller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another.20

This point shows a clear understanding of the central role of the narrator in relation to the reader, the emphasised word “peculiarly” hinting obliquely at the author’s ability to create uncanny effects. Freud recognises that the author is able to manipulate the narrative to create an effect, or, as he puts it: He can keep us in the dark for a long time about the precise nature of the presuppositions on which the world he writes about is based, or he can cunningly and ingeniously avoid any definite information on the point to the last.21

In an essay concerned with Kafka’s textual deletions while he was drafting the manuscript of his novel, The Castle, Mark Harman maintains that Kafka’s aim was to “preserve an aura of ineffable mystery by making everything sound ‘ein wenig unheimlich,’ (a little uncanny)”. 22 The reference to the uncanny occurs in the original manuscript of the novel, but was deleted by the author because, as Harman surmises, to have left it would have made the story “more transparent than uncanny”.23 Harman concludes from this that Kafka, to a large extent, calculated the effects he was trying to create.24 What we are talking about here is a technique of the uncanny; that is to say, a predetermined writing strategy aimed at making strange to the point of ubiquity. The resultant effect on the protagonist and the reader, furthermore, is achieved not merely by lexical displacement, but by the withdrawal and withholding of crucial information from the narrative. 25 This is precisely Kafka’s strategy in The Trial. Joseph K. is “arrested” without being charged, thus the narrator keeps both the accused and the reader “in the dark” as to identifying the crime which K. is supposed to have committed. When Freud refers to “definite information” being withheld “to 20

Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” 251; emphasis in original. Freud, 251. 22 Harman, “Making Everything ‘a little uncanny’,” 325. 23 Harman, 344fn1. 24 Harman, 326. 25 Harman, 251. 21

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the last”, one could infer that the narrator will eventually supply explanatory detail through the action, calculated to fill the lacuna, as would be the case in a detective story where the unknown criminal is at last exposed. However, in Kafka’s The Trial, the lacuna is never filled; the accused is executed and never learns of what he has been indicted; nor does the reader. It is to a large extent this aporia, this disparity between rhetoric and logic, which determines the continually uncanny atmosphere of Kafka’s narrative, for every action is predicated on the fact that the protagonist (and the reader) has no knowledge of the charge. Anxiety, loss of reason, fear, depression, frustration, confusion, feelings of disorientation, and a sense of threat, caused by Joseph K. and the reader’s “not knowing”, compound a strangeness which could frequently be experienced as uncanny. Relevant here is Walter H. Sokel’s citing of Tzvetan Todorov’s position vis a vis Kafka’s short story, “Metamorphosis”, which Todorov designates “prototypal” of the fantastic in literature. Sokel summarises Todorov’s definition: The fantastic […] presents the penetration of empirical reality by an enigmatic event, which remains unexplained, but might eventually find either a natural or a supernatural explanation. A text remains fantastic as long as the cause remains undecided and the explanation is withheld.26

The enigmatic event in “Metamorphosis” is Gregor Samsa’s transformation, in bed, into an insect, the cause of which is never explained; likewise, in The Trial it is Joseph K.’s arrest, in bed, the reason for which is also never accounted for. This does not mean to say that the fantastic in Kafka’s fiction always carries uncanny affect, but rather that the fantastic may give rise to it. To take another example of the uncanny in Kafka’s novel, in the second chapter, “First Interrogation”, K. is summoned to the Law Court and the reader is surprised to be told that the proceedings are to take place on the fifth floor of a tenement building in a poor quarter of the city. However, K. takes this incongruous Court setting in his stride (whereas the reader probably does not) and is apparently only “baffled” by the Sunday black worn by the crowd, in spite of the fact that the hearing takes place on a Sunday. This is an oddity in itself, since the presence of a cathedral in the town would signal a society in which Sunday is passed as a day of rest.27 On the other hand, he is increasingly oppressed by the crowded room and the close atmosphere, which prevents him seeing clearly, and is struck by 26 27

Sokel, “Beyond Self-Assertion: A Life of Reading Kafka,” 35. see Chapter 9, “In the Cathedral.”

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the lowness of the gallery ceiling which causes those assembled to bend, and some to place cushions “between their heads and the ceiling, to keep their heads from getting bruised”.28 For the reader, this is bizarre to the point of absurdity, and is in tune with Ernst Jentsch’s hypothesis, cited by Freud, that the experience of epileptic fits and appearance of insanity often convey a sense of the uncanny.29 In his second visit to the Law Court in Chapter 3, again on a Sunday, K. goes on his own as he has not been called, and he discovers that the offices of the Court are located in a tenement garret. Here, he is again oppressed by the narrow confines of the rooms, the noise made by the occupants, and by the closeness of the air, which he finds increasingly difficult to breathe. In the build-up to K.’s increasing discomfort, an affect of fear of being enclosed in a confined space is evoked. As Freud notes, “[t]o some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all”.30 Conversely, when K. exits the Court into the clean air outside, the man and the girl who have escorted him to the door experience the same breathing difficulty K. has suffered in the Court rooms: “Many thanks”, he said several times, then shook hands with them again and again and only left off when he thought he saw that they, accustomed as they were to the office air, felt ill in the relatively fresh air that came up the stairway. They could scarcely answer him and the girl might have fallen if K. had not shut the door with the utmost haste.31

It is almost as though those that work at the Court live permanently on the premises indoors because they experience fear of open spaces outdoors (agoraphobia) as, inversely, K. has suffered in the close quarters of the garret Court (claustrophobia). In this mirror imaging of opposite morbid states, the narrative has captured a two-fold uncanniness. Moving forward to Chapter 7, after K. has been advised to seek help from Titorelli, the Court portrait painter, the narrative proceeds: “He drove at once to the address where the painter lived, in a suburb which was almost at the diametrically opposite end of the town from where the Court held its meetings”.32 There, as he mounts the narrow stairway, K. again suffers from breathlessness in the “stifling” air,33 his discomfort increasing in the close

28

Kafka, The Trial, 47. Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” 13-14; Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” 226, 243. 30 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” 244. 31 Kafka, The Trial, 84. 32 Kafka, 156; emphasis mine. 33 Kafka, 157. 29

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quarters and stuffy atmosphere of the painter’s attic studio. 34 When his protracted interview finally comes to an end and the painter opens a back door to let him out, to K.’s amazement, he is confronted by the Law Court offices, a replica of the ones he had attended on the other side of town.35 Here we are presented with two of the elements which can call forth the emotional effect of fright contained in the uncanny: sight of the familiar— in this case the Law Court offices—combined with the unfamiliar and incongruous—their inexplicable removal from the other end of town to Titorelli’s tenement building, thus giving K. the uncanny impression that the Court’s presence is ubiquitous.36 We can see here that repetition of a certain kind, containing both familiar and unfamiliar, can induce the uncanny, both as literary effect and as emotional response (affect) in the literary character and in the reader, but not necessarily simultaneously, as has already been asserted. If the text is studied closely, one can see that the chapter under scrutiny is marked by repetition. This may be accepted without question by the protagonist, because preoccupation with his case has likely overridden his sense of the uncanny. On the other hand, the reader is struck by the oddity of the hardly differentiated likeness of Titorelli’s portrait paintings of the Court Judges,37 and then by the identical duplication of the landscape paintings he offers K., who can only think of escaping from the confines of the painter’s garret studio.38 In point of fact (or should we say, in point of fiction), Titorelli offers K. three landscape paintings. On the same occasion, he describes three types of acquittal open for K. to choose from,39 and prior to this, the three apprentices on K.’s arrival at the tenement building, to which K. gives only a “fleeting glance”.40 This type of repetition might alert the reader to a symbolic value inherent in the number, especially if one has already noted its frequency earlier in the narrative. A recurrence of the number three may be observed in the episode at the bank where K. keeps his three gentlemen clients waiting; and even earlier, the three young men at the arrest who turn out to be clerks at K.’s bank; and the three spectators who see what is going on from their window in the building opposite to K.41 There is no indication 34

Kafka, 164, 172. Kafka, 182. 36 For Freud’s thoughts on the frightening and the familiar, see Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” 220. 37 Kafka, The Trial, 161. 38 Kafka, 181. 39 Kafka, 169. 40 Kafka, 156. 41 Kafka, 153-154; 22; 17, 20. 35

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in the text to suggest that K. has noticed the frequency of the number repetition in spite of the fact that his own point of view predominates in the narrative. And if he has, it is unknown whether he has registered the peculiarity of the recurring number three. The reader, on the other hand, cannot help being puzzled by the frequency of the number image as it accumulates in the form of a bizarre leitmotif. In realistic fiction one would expect recurring non-verbal images to act as semiotic signifiers; in a fiction purporting a Christian Weltansschauung, for example, it would not be difficult to designate a transcendental symbolic value for the number three. But in Kafka’s work, it is a challenge to attribute meaning to this repetition of the cipher, if meaning is what the reader is seeking. After all, the German word for symbol is Sinnbild meaning literally, sense picture; but if one can only sense it (that is, see it) without making sense of it, one could conclude at the level of aesthetics that Kafka has presented us with an uncanny conundrum. We may refer to Freud’s essay in support of our thesis. In the category of what he calls “involuntary repetition”, Freud gives the following example: We naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together—if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number—addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains—invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the same figures. We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man [or a woman] is hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number. He will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.42

The key words here for our purposes are “secret meaning”. In The Trial, meanings are kept secret throughout; signs are esoteric and, frequently, do not reveal their signification, neither to the literary subject, nor to the objective reader. The point is reached at which the reader finds the text so perplexing that it defies interpretation and, concurrently, where the subject no longer knows his way through the labyrinth of legal process. When Freud says of repetition: “[…] subject to certain conditions and combined with certain circumstances, [repetition can] arouse an uncanny feeling, which, furthermore, recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in

42

Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” 237-38.

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some dream-states”,43 he is perhaps pointing us in another direction. Rather than a narrative set in “common reality”, which he postulated as a prerequisite for an effective uncanny in fiction, perhaps he is hinting here at an alternative possibility: that stories eliciting experience of the uncanny may also operate at the level of the unconscious. K.’s continual sense of helplessness, and his inability to overcome it, could then be seen to resemble the experience of dream. A dream-state would also account for the dreamer accepting so much without question, which is not always the case as far as the reader is concerned. If, for the sake of argument, K. had woken up at “The End”,44 , he would have been able to heave a sigh of relief that the “trial” and execution he had lived through had been no more than a nightmare. In the assorted, unnumbered chapters of the text which Kafka’s friend, Max Brod, put together and ordered from the uncompleted manuscript, there exists a fragment, entitled “A Dream”. Brod mentions this briefly in an explanatory note in the “Epilogue”, concerning his editorial role, but he did not include the fragment in the final version of the published text.45 The fragment begins “Joseph K. was dreaming”,46 and ends “Enchanted by the sight he woke up”.47 Not only is Joseph K. the subject in this short narrative, but we are also told that what he has experienced is a dream. We are therefore driven to conclude that the entire novel was constructed along the lines of a dream paradigm, but that Kafka withheld the key to the technique he was using by omitting dream markers—for example, “Joseph K. was dreaming” and “he woke up”—so that the reader would, to use Freud’s words, be kept in the dark. Had the first chapter of The Trial opened with “Joseph K. was dreaming”, the protagonist’s sense of helplessness would have been explicable to the reader in terms of unconscious states, while K., unaware of his condition in dream, would have been accepting of the eccentricities and absurdities of his situation until such time as he had woken up. But because the reader is not told that Joseph K. goes to sleep, nor wakes up, it cannot be assumed that the novel is meant to be read as though it were a dream. Indeed, Theodor Adorno has remarked on Kafka’s “liquidation of the dream through its ubiquity”.48 This paradox implies that, rather than reading the text as dream qua dream, we might recognise its 43

Freud, 237; emphasis mine. See Chapter 10. 45 Brod, epilogue to The Trial, 256. 46 Kafka, “A Dream,” 167. 47 Kafka, 269. 48 Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” 261. For more on this point, see Antony Johae, “Towards a Theory of Kafka’s Dream Narratives,” 102-117. 44

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oneiric character as an artistic device employed as a way of creating an aesthetic effect designed to capture the cognitive experience of the uncanny. One might call this technique a trope, in that instances where external stimuli in the diegetic fictional world, such as location or situation, precipitate a reaction to, and merging with, the consciousness of the protagonist, resulting in an apparent loss of control. Furthermore, the effect of continuous disjunctions of logic with a consequent disorientation of the protagonist (and the reader) have the effect of rendering the narrative uncanny.49 It offers the reader a different kind of reality more akin to dream and nightmare than to the world of waking life. If we view Kafka’s text as following the logic of dream life, there should be no difficulty for the reader in understanding why the narrative is so permeated with the strange, why it is so unsettling and uncomfortably arresting, why it generates anxiety, and why a sense of the uncanny is so frequently experienced. It is not until we have “woken up” to Kafka’s dream technique that we shall be able to account for the continually uncanny in his fiction.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. “Notes on Kafka.” In Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber, 243-72. London: Neville Spearman, 1967. Bernheimer, Charles. Flaubert and Kafka: Studies in Psychopoetic Structure. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982. Bridgwater, Patrick. Kafka, Gothic and Fairytale. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Brod, Max. “Epilogue.” In The Trial, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, 252-56. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Ellison, David R. Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Falkenberg, Mark. Rethinking the Uncanny in Hoffmann and Tieck. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005. Freer, Scott. Modern Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods. Houndsmill: Palgrave Brown, 2015. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny’.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XVII, An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 1917-1919, translated and edited 49

Similarly, Jentsch says of the uncanny that “the word suggests that a lack of orientation is bound up with the impression of the uncanniness of a thing or incident”. Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, 2; emphasis in original.

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by James Strachey and Anna Freud, 217-56. London: The Hogarth Press, 1919/2023. Harman, Mark. “Making Everything ‘a Little Uncanny’: Kafka’s Deletions in the Manuscript of das Schloȕ and What They Can Tell Us About His Writing Process.” In A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, edited by James Rolleston, 325-346. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Translated by Roy Sellars. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2, no. 1 (1906/1997): 7-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697259708571910 Johae, Antony. “Towards a Theory of Kafka’s Dream Narratives.” Journal of the Kafka Society of America 40, no. 41 (2016-2017): 102-117. Kafka, Franz. “The Burrow.” In Description of a Struggle and The Great Wall of China, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, and Tania and James Stern, 176-220. London: Secker and Warburg, 1960. —. The Castle, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. —. “A Dream.” In In the Penal Settlement: Tales and Short Prose Works, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, 167-69. London: Secker and Warburg, 1973. —. “The Judgement.” In In the Penal Settlement: Tales and Short Prose Works, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, 45-59. London: Secker and Warburg, 1973. —. “Troubles of a Householder.” In In the Penal Settlement: Tales and Short Prose Works, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, 4559. London: Secker and Warburg, 1973. —. “Metamorphosis.” In Metamorphosis and Other Stories, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, 7-63. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. —. The Trial, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. LupiĠu, Călin D. “Labyrinths of the Uncanny in Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.” In Diachronia. Târgu Mure‫܈‬: Universitatea Petru Maior, 2012. www.diacronia.ro/ro/indexing/details/A2926/pdf Mi, Jiayan. “The Fantastic/Exotic Uncanny: Kafka’s and Borges’s Labyrinthine Narratives of China.” Tamkany Review 36, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 106-136. www.academia.edu/12294056/the_fantastic_exotic_uncanny_kafka_s_ and_borgess_labyrinthine Oki, Michito. “Hearing/Seeing Dread: Thought of Distortion and Transformation in Kafka’s The Burrow and Odradek.” Journal for Cultural Research 22, no. 1 (2018): 16-26.

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Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Sokel, Walter H. “Beyond Self-Assertion: A Life of Reading Kafka.” In A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, edited by James Rolleston, 3360. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006. Touloumi, Olga. “The ‘Uncanny’ in Franz Kafka’s Der Bau.” Thresholds 44, no. 30, (2005): 38-41. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00283

CHAPTER SIX THE UNCANNY DRAMATISED IN A CENTRAL SCENE IN IBSEN’S PEER GYNT MARIT AALEN AND ANDERS ZACHRISSON

“They come with the darkness, they knock and they rattle: Open, Peer Gynt, we’re as nimble as thoughts are!” 1 —Henrik Ibsen

Introduction This article explores a central scene in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in light of Sigmund Freud’s concept of das unheimliche, typically translated as the uncanny. 2 Peer Gynt is a work where the story twists and turns as it proceeds, alongside the protagonist’s volatile mind. Anchored in a close reading of a central sequence, this analysis will focus on striking scene shifts and remarkable changes in atmosphere. Based on Freud’s thorough examination of the concept unheimlich, and its opposite heimlich, this exploration will call attention to the dynamics of one of these shifts in Peer Gynt. More precisely, what occurs previous to the shift will be highlighted to demonstrate how both the sequence and content can be understood in light of Freud’s description of the transformation from heimlich to unheimlich. Freud understands the uncanny as “the name for everything that ought to have remained […] secret and hidden but has come to light”. 3 This definition is inspired by the romantic philosopher F.W.J. Schelling. Schelling was concerned with the “mythology of mind”, and Freud was

1

Ibsen, Peer Gynt, 101. A main reference for this paper is Marit Aalen and Anders Zachrisson, “The Structure of Desire in Peer Gynt’s Relationship to Solveig.” 3 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 223. 2

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inspired by this romantic view of the unconscious.4 However, Freud goes further and defines the uncanny as a result of the return of something repressed: “What is involved is an actual repression of some content of thought and a return of this repressed content”.5 From these specifications, we can conclude that Freud deals with central aspects of mental material. First, the uncanny is secret in a distinct way; it is repressed. Second, it contains thoughts. Third, the content of the thoughts ought to have remained repressed, but returns. The last point means that Freud adds a normative dimension to his idea on repression. This is interesting because repression is a crucial term in Freud’s theory, and he does not otherwise treat it as a normative phenomenon. Repression is an automatic procedure, carried out in the unconscious.6 So far, we have the following definition: Uncanny refers to a content of thoughts that ought to be repressed, but returns. As we see, uncanny is not just a literary term, it is also a psychological concept. In psychoanalysis, psychological content is characterised by unconscious activity, called psychodynamics. This is a collective term for all the forces operating in the unconscious, unconscious motives, mechanisms of defence and a wide range of other forces and mechanisms. When something repressed recurs, it is due to psychodynamics operating outside the person’s control. This is the reason for Freud’s claim that man is not master of his own house.7 Although Freud is concerned with the uncanny as a feeling evoked in the reader, he elaborates on the term, suggesting it relates to a sequence of mental phenomena. Peer Gynt does not evoke dread and horror in the reader, but Peer himself is exposed to such feelings. Hence, our focus is on Peer’s own experience of the uncanny. The return of what has been repressed usually arouses anxiety and displeasure, followed by efforts to get rid of the disturbing thoughts and feelings. We will look closer at Freud’s exploration of the uncanny and try to apply this to the scene where Peer is building a hut in the woods, struggling with frightening thoughts. A crucial step in Ibsen’s development of this scene is that the uncanny is evoked due to Peer’s conflicted experience of cosiness. He tries to build such an atmosphere into his hut, though at the same time, he cannot stand it. It seems that for him, an atmosphere associated with maternal qualities immediately makes him overwhelmed by dread and aggression. This effect

4

See Schelling (also known as Friedrich von Schelling), Philosophie der Mythologie [Philosophy of Mythology]. 5 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 248. 6 Freud, “Repression.” 7 Freud, “The Ego and the Dream.”

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occurs even though it is Peer himself who projected these qualities onto the scene.

Synopsis of Peer Gynt Peer Gynt is a drama in verse in five acts, which, according to Harold Bloom, is the Norwegian national epos. 8 We follow Peer from his late adolescence (the first three acts) through his grown-up life as a businessman abroad (act four) to his arrival back home as a retired man (the fifth act). Act One At a traditional peasant wedding, Peer meets Solveig and is moved by her young and bright innocence. His reputation as a drunkard and a womaniser has preceded him, and she refuses to dance with him. Peer then realises that he can approach the bride instead, and thus find an outlet for the desires that Solveig has aroused, but not satisfied. Therefore, he abducts the bride, seduces her, rejects her and is sentenced an outlaw for this crime. Act Two Peer strays alone in the mountains and comes across a woman clad in green. She appears attractive, arousing his desire, and lures him into the mountain hall where her father, the Dovre-King, tries to change Peer into a troll. According to Norse mythology, it is a common belief that being lured into a mountain can represent a psychotic episode. Peer resists the DovreKing’s efforts and avoids being caught forever in a psychotic state, but he attains the intent of the Trolls’ motto, “to thyself be enough”. Outside the mountain, he faces a new challenge: the mythological Boyg, in Ibsen analyses considered to be an undeveloped and formless part of Peer’s personality. 9 The Boyg surrounds Peer with an intangible vagueness, claiming to be “myself”. Peer escapes the Boyg, but follows his maxim to “go roundabout”. From now on, Peer avoids personal and ethical challenges until he, in the last act, is confronted with deeper parts of his self. Act Three Peer is an outlaw, building a hut in the forest. He works hard to install a lock to keep out angry “mischief thoughts”, which threaten to break through 8 9

Bloom, The Western Canon. See Rolf Fjeld, Peer Gynt, Naturalism, and the Dissolving Self.

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the timber walls, and therefore into his mind. However, they are already inside. To his surprise, Solveig arrives to stay with him in his hut. After her arrival, the “hobgoblin-thoughts” are made concrete in the form of the green-clad woman, the king’s daughter from the Dovre-hall. She claims to have built a hut at the same time as Peer was building his. It appears that she builds her hut out of the disturbing material Peer was struggling to keep outside his own building. Peer cannot sort out this tangle in his mind; Solveig, waits for him in the hut, while the witch, threatening to disturb them, demands her part of him. He “goes roundabout”, following the Boyg’s motto, and leaves. On his way travelling abroad, he visits his dying mother, a scene made famous by the romantic music of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. Act four Peer spends many years abroad, trying various occupations, mostly involved with dirty money. He adopts different roles, trying them out and then throwing them away as empty shells, true to his acquired maxims: “to thyself be enough” and “go roundabout”. At the end of the act, Peer finds himself placed in a mad house. Act five Returning to Norway on board a ship, Peer has attained “a somewhat harder expression” [et haardere Udtryk].10 Back in his native district, he is facing his life story and his psychic reality; the reality he has denied all his life. Ibsen composes these scenes as catastrophic landscapes, which seem to represent states of Peer’s psychic reality. In psychoanalysis this refers to the reality of deeper states of self. 11 Repeatedly, Peer first recognises and acknowledges the phenomena he encounters as parts of his own self; then he denies and rejects these potential insights. He seems unable to cope with these intolerable feelings arising in his mind. Finally, without conscious intention, Peer approaches the hut he built as a young man, where Solveig has been waiting for him since he left. She, now old and mother-like, welcomes him to what seems to be a new beginning for him.

10

The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume IV: Peer Gynt, a Dramatic Poem, 193; Peer Gynt. In Henrik Ibsens Skrifter, 671. 11 See Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams.”

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Other Scholars’ Analyses The Norwegian scholar Atle Kittang has explored Ibsen’s Brand with the uncanny as a key to interpretation.12 He has connected the notion of the urge in Ibsen’s men to transcend the boundaries that reality puts on them with “its paradoxical affinity with death, the ghostly, and the unreal; in short, its uncanniness”.13 Brand was published a year before Peer Gynt and is a story of a vicar who sacrifices his family for a calling to work in a far off mountain valley. Kittang notes that strong contradictory forces with devastating consequences seem to motivate Brand, the protagonist in Brand, when he sacrifices his child and wife for a higher calling. His argument is in line with the main view of recent Ibsen scholars, though instead of focusing on pathology, Kittang argues that the uncanniness of Brand’s life expresses a contradiction build into modernity itself. This contradiction is an “irreducible conflict, which will always exist in a world where God is dead, between the incompatible ontologies of man […] with a knot so solidly tied that any hermeneutical untying seems out of question”.14 Knut Brynhildsvoll notes that a modern view on subjectivity keeps such paradoxes in sight.15 He uses the term grotesque to characterise a series of contradictory phenomena throughout Peer Gynt, but he never uses uncanny as a literary term. The phenomena he points to have many similarities with Freud’s examples of uncanniness, for instance, text sequences that arouse insecurity in the protagonist whether he is dealing with something real or unreal, dead or alive. Unlike the uncanny, the term grotesque usually aligns with phenomena that prompt a combination of confusion and laughter, not confusion and horror as the uncanny does. With respect to Peer Gynt, interpretations of uncanniness can be also found in the music, also entitled Peer Gynt, composed in 1875 by Edvard Grieg for the premiere of the play. The music has accompanied the staging of Peer Gynt ever since, and is arguably better known than Ibsen’s text. Wojciech StĊpieĔ applies Freud’s concept of the uncanny to his interpretation of Grieg’s composition that is played as Peer enters Dovre Hall, where he stays. This piece is the so called “troll music” with respect

12

Kittang, “Ibsen, Heroism, and the Uncanny.” Kittang, 308. 14 Kittang, 309-310. 15 Brynhildsvoll, “Identitetskrisen i Peer Gynt, belyst fra groteskestetiske synspunkter.” [Identity crisis in Peer Gynt, in the light of grotesque and ethical points of view]. 13

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to what StĊpieĔ calls “tonality of the Uncanny”.16 In analysing the music, he writes: “This sense of an ambiguous tonality which is neither B minor, nor E minor qualifies the passage for membership in the category of the Uncanny”. 17 StĊpieĔ also shows how an atmosphere that is strange and familiar at the same time may be created with the use of ambiguous musical means. Unlike these interpretations, rather than focusing on the simultaneity of opposite elements, we will focus here on transformations based on the exchange Freud claims to find between heimlich and unheimlich. Freud elaborates that this transformation bears both philological and psychological meaning. When relevant, we will draw on other scholars who have delivered crucial contributions to analyses of the uncanny in literature, such as the influential work of Nicholas Royle.18 He examines a range of contributions to the understanding of the uncanny, including philosophical and psychological, and concludes: “Of all texts published on the subject of the uncanny […] the most indispensable is Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay ‘Das Unheimliche’”.19

Freud’s Unheimliche–Two Points Freud’s essay starts with a philological examination of the German words unheimlich and heimlich. However, it is not possible to translate their contrary character into English. Uncanny, for unheimlich, is widely used, but does not have a related word with the opposite meaning. In Norwegian, Ibsen’s language, hyggelig and uhyggelig (homelike and ominous, respectively) keep central aspects of the meaning intact, although they do not contain the built-in dynamics that Freud claims to find between the German words. In his philological analysis, Freud describes the uncanny as resulting from a sequence of phenomena that starts with the homelike, homely or cosy (heimlich). While referencing dictionaries, he demonstrates that heimlich also contains the meaning of something concealed, secret or hidden (heimlich/heimisch). Freud firstly specifies the primary meaning of heimlich, quoting from a dictionary: “Intimate, friendlily comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness

16

StĊpieĔ, “Musical categories of the Uncanny in Edvard Grieg’s ‘Troll Music’.” 50. 18 Nicolas Royle, The Uncanny. 19 Royle, 6. 17StĊpieĔ,

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and security as in one within the four walls of his house”. 20 Further, he shows that the word heimlich belongs to two sets of ideas, which “without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight”.21 Finally, Freud demonstrates how heimlich shifts into its opposite, unheimlich: “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of Heimlich”. 22 Based on semantic aspects of the word, he claims that its meaning approaches the uncanny (unheimlich). It is worth noticing that the sequence of this semantic transformation only moves in one direction; there is no way back again when the uncanniness is established. However, Freud, in presenting his second anxiety theory, observed that an increased tolerance to anxiety, as a signal of unpleasure, may reduce the tendency of the repressed to return as uncanny.23 The other point in Freud’s elaboration is the emphasis of something familiar that returns from a repressed state: “It may be true that the uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is secretly familiar [heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it”. 24 We can conclude that the uncanny in Freud’s view is a psychological state that occurs because of a transformation from cosy, via the repressed, to uncanny. It contains something once familiar, and represents the content of thoughts that return from repression, where it has been associated with dread. We argue that these points contribute to an uncanny effect on the protagonist Peer in the scene with the Dovre King’s daughter. After applying Freud’s philological analysis, we will also draw on what character Freud attributes to the repressed. A touchstone for our interpretation is that the scene must be meaningfully contextualised within Ibsen’s text in order to illustrate the transition to the uncanny.

Analysis of the Text After the bride abduction, Peer has been outlawed and escapes into the wilderness. The farm he shared with his mother has been confiscated, and, after staying in the Dovre King’s Hall and having been seduced by the 20

Freud, “The Uncanny,” 221. The dictionary, as quoted in Freud is Daniel Sanders, Worterbuch der Deutschen Sprache. 21 Freud, 224. 22 Freud, 226. 23 See Freud, “Inhibitions.” 24 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 245.

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King’s daughter, he has to build a hut in the woods. Now the story turns from fantastic to realistic. As he is building his hut, he struggles with aggressive and intruding thoughts penetrating his mind–and his building. It becomes dark when he finishes the construction and he makes a big wooden lock to try to keep the frightening thoughts outside his hut. He realises that it is of no use: PEER GYNT staar udenfor Døren og slaar en stor Trælaas fast. PEER GYNT ler imellemstunder Laas maa der være; Laas, som kan binde Døren for Troldtøj, og Mand og Kvinde. Laas maa der være; Laas, som kan lukke For alle de arrige Nissebukke. – De kommer med Mørket; de klapper og banker: lukk opp, Peer Gynt, vi er snygge, som Tanker! Under Sengen vi pussler, i Asken vi rager, gjennem Piben vi russler som gloende Drager. Hi-hi! Peer Gynt; tror du Spiger og Plankerkan stænge for arrige Nissebukktanker?25

PEER GYNT is standing outside the door, fastening a large wooden bar to it. PEER GYNT [laughing betweenwhiles] Bars I must fix me; bars that can fasten the door against troll-folk, and men, and women. Bars I must fix me; bars that can shut out all the cantankerous little hobgoblins. — They come with the darkness, they knock and they rattle: Open, Peer Gynt, we’re as nimble as thoughts are! ’Neath the bedstead we bustle, we rake in the ashes, down the chimney we hustle like fiery-eyed dragons. Hee-hee! Peer Gynt; think you staples and planks can shut out cantankerous hobgoblinthoughts?26

This scene can be understood as the second step in Freud’s sequential qualification of uncanniness; the secret content of Peer’s thoughts that lurks inside the hut that is to become his home. However, the first step, the cosy or homelike, is not established yet. We notice the way Peer describes his 25

Ibsen, Peer Gynt. In Henrik Ibsens Skrifter, 575-576. Ibsen, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume IV: Peer Gynt, a Dramatic Poem, 101-102. 26

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phantasies, intimidating elements intruding from chimney to floor, as if it is a leak from outside that he cannot stop.27 This scene is reminiscent of a sequence in Anthony Vidler’s “The Architecture of the Uncanny”, where he describes a fissure that runs from roof to foundations: “The house was than a crypt, predestined to be buried in its turn, an event prefigured in the ‘barely perceptible fissure’ that ran vertically from roof to foundations”.28 Vidler refers to very old and rotten buildings, which figure in romantic literature. These buildings are abandoned, and become reminders of something familiar, contributing to the feelings of uncanniness aroused in the reader. Peer Gynt is constructing a brand-new building, however, it also leaks. Thus, what Peer is trying to shut out penetrates the hut from roof to foundation: “down the chimney we hustle [and] Neath the bedstead we bustle”.29 So, what type of thoughts is Peer so intensely struggling to keep outside? He names them cantankerous hobgoblin-thoughts [nissebukktanker], which act like fiery-eyed dragons [gloende dragger].30 What must be shut out seems to be mental content; these are thoughts of an aggressive and intimidating nature. These contemplations are associated with trolls, and also with men and women. Therefore, these fantasies appear to stem from Peer’s dealings with the Dovre King’s daughter, who soon will return in an ominous way. The disturbing thoughts form part of Peer’s mind and his efforts to shut them out are doomed to fail, which he himself notices.

Establishment of the Homelike In Freud's three-step qualification, (a transformation from cosy, via the repressed, to uncanny), the cosy and homelike must be established before the transformation to uncanny can take place.31 Peer strives to establish a home, but for now, it is only a hut with pipe, pit, bed and lock, where the secret lurks. The distinctly homelike quality is missing until Solveig suddenly arrives to move in with Peer, and he experiences the first step: the homely. The young and idealised Solveig has left her family to settle with Peer in the woods. Peer becomes happy and asks her into the cabin, exclaiming with joy:

27

Peer is actually standing outside the hut when he is constructing a lock to protect him from what is already inside, which in itself seems a contradictory phenomenon. 28 Anthony Vidler, “The Architecture of the Uncanny,”18. 29 Ibsen The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume IV: Peer Gynt, a dramatic poem, 101. 30 Ibsen, 102; Peer Gynt. In Henrik Ibsens Skrifter, 576. 31 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 245.

The Uncanny Dramatised in a Central Scene in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt

Saa har jeg dig! Ind! Lad mig se dig i Stuen! Gaa ind! Jeg skal hente Tyri till Gruen; lunt skal det varme og bjart skal det lyse, blødt skal du sidde og aldrig skal du fryse. Han lukker opp; Solvejg gaar ind. Han staar en Stund stille, da ler han højt af Glæde og springer ivejret.32

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You are mine then! In! In the room let me see you! Go in! I must go to fetch fir-roots for fuel. Warm shall the fire be and bright shall it shine, you shall sit softly and never be acold. He opens the door; SOLVEIG goes in. He stands still for a while, then laughs aloud with joy and leaps into the air.33

Solveig has arrived, and Peer describes the atmosphere around her as warm, cosy, bright and soft. This welcoming atmosphere seems to stand in contrast to the drive, as Freud used the term, of the intimidating character of Peer’s unconscious desire. We need to mention that drive is the preferred translation of Freud’s Trieb. According to John Mills, who has recently contributed to clarifying the concept, Trieb is the driving force behind the mind compelled and fuelled by unconscious desire. 34 However, for the atmosphere to remain soft and comfortable, Peer has to keep his sexual desire from his relation to Solveig. Therefore, when Solveig comes to live with Peer, his first impulse is to keep her on “outstretched arms”.35 His desire feels dangerous, and there is no place for it in the homelike atmosphere he is working to establish as Peer feels that his desire will taint Solveig. Peer’s emphasis in the atmosphere around Solveig on maintaining a homely, warm and pleasant feel, gives the reader a sense of something being conjured. He exaggerates the cosiness to protect him from the intimidating thoughts that a moment ago intruded his mind and home. Vidler, in his writing about the uncanny in houses, underlines that an outbreak of the uncanny is often preceded by an exaggeration of cosy elements,36 just as we find in Peer’s protective actions with Solveig. We get the feeling that Peer, with the help of Solveig’s presence, tries to conjure 32

Ibsen, Peer Gynt. In Henrik Ibsens Skrifter, 579. Ibsen, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume IV: Peer Gynt, a Dramatic Poem, 105; emphasis in original. 34 Mills, “Clarifications on Trieb: Freud’s Theory of Motivation Reinstated,” 674. 35 Ibsen, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume IV: Peer Gynt, a Dramatic Poem, 105. 36 Vidler, “The Architecture of the Uncanny,” 18. 33

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comfort and cosiness, achieved in a manner as described by Vidler. As Peer emphasises the cosiness, he utters: “No need now for bars against hobgoblin-thoughts”.37 However, as in Vidler’s examples, the secret rustles due to the exaggeration of cosiness, approaching a breakthrough. In Freud’s view of the uncanny, the content of thoughts is what lies hidden and threatens to return as uncanny; not the type of thought itself. This means that the content attains a character that is more difficult to cope with than the classification of thought; the content of the disturbing thoughts does not fade away, instead, the opposite occurs. Peer’s exaggeration of the cosiness seems to activate the repressed content of his mind; it returns as uncanny. These forces are in line with the way Freud qualifies the dynamics between heimlich and unheimlich.

The Repressed Returns – as Something Uncanny In the very moment that Peer has assured himself that protection against “hobgoblin-thoughts” is no longer necessary, he leaves the hut to fetch firroots for fuel. It seems as if this action activates a sensation of flaming up, thus changing the atmosphere from warm and cosy to an intimidating sexual desire. Since it is crucial for Peer to keep Solveig on outstretched arms, the uncanny that soon appears seems to adhere to a forbidden, greedy and offensive sexual impulse. It is primarily forbidden not because it is sexual, but because it is aggressive and destructive, and devours all that comes in its way.38 What is returning as uncanny appears as a hallucination of the woman from the Dovre Hall. She arrives immediately after Peer has happily invited Solveig to live with him in the hut. In the moment Peer lifts the axe to chop wood, the Dovre King’s daughter appears as an old witch with their illegitimate child. She represents what is “returning”, a greedy and demonic sexual desire, ready to devour what it desires. KVINDEN Alt som Hytten din byggtes, byggte min sig med. PEER GYNT vil gaa Jeg har Braahast –

37

THE WOMAN Even as your hut was built, mine built itself too. PEER [going] I’m in haste —

Ibsen, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume IV: Peer Gynt, 102. See Marit Aalen and Anders Zachrisson, “The Structure of Desire in Peer Gynt’s Relationship to Solveig.” 38

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KVINDEN Det har du altid, Gut; men jeg trasker nu efter og raaker dig tillslut.39

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THE WOMAN Yes, that you are always, my lad; but I’ll trudge behind you and catch you at last.40

First, the witch says that her cabin was built exactly at the same time as Peer built his, thus in a parallel process. It seems, as the building material is the substance Peer desperately tried to keep outside his hut: the intimidating and angry troll-thoughts, stemming from the greedy desire characteristic of the Dovre Hall, a desire that devour all that comes in its way. That is why he has to keep Solveig at arm’s length, to protect the caring elements he so deeply needs. Second, the woman says that the hut built itself, implying that forces beyond her have performed the construction process. It seems as though the content of Peer’s fantasies were used as a building material for another hut that was built in a parallel process, but in an uncanny, ghostly dimension, housing the witch and their common offspring. This may be conceived as a way the content of Peer’s thoughts are preserved and returning out of temporary repression. The third point we note in the quotation is that the witch says: “I’ll trudge behind you and catch you at last”.41 She refers to their common stay in The Dovre Hall, and to the fact that she now returns with the unreal and hallucinatory reality of the hall. Freud is concerned with a similar sequence of states; the uncanny is something temporarily suppressed that returns. It is not possible to escape from it. In his analysis of Brand, referred to above, Kittang refers to Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of Freud’s uncanny. Hauntology, as opposed to ontology, is a concept coined by Derrida, which considers a hauntological existence, something non-existent which recurs.42 It refers to the situation of temporal and ontological disjunction in which the apparent presence of being is replaced by an absent or deferred non-origin, represented by the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead, nor alive. Kittang writes: "Ghost is a sensuous apparatus that is not real. The

39

Ibsen, Peer Gynt. In Henrik Ibsens Skrifter, 579-580. Ibsen, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume IV: Peer Gynt, a Dramatic Poem, 105-106. 41 Ibsen, 106. 42 Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. 40

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ghost appears to our senses, we hear or see it, but what we hear and see is not. A ghost is something non-existent that ‘re-curs’".43 Here we will emphasise that the phenomenon that returns only exists in the sense of the one who perceives its sensation, as a pure mental character. According to psychoanalysis, what is mental is real, but in a different way from that of the external world. In order to understand this kind of existence, we can draw on Freud's ideas of psychic reality.44 What only exists in the mind has, according to Freud, an existence, even if it is of a different nature than the outer and tangible. If this internal reality is perceived as external reality, we call it a hallucination; a mental content that is so difficult to cope with that it transgresses the border of reality.

There Is No Way Back from the Uncanny Ibsen’s dramatisation of the uncanny woman makes it clear that she represents an element in Peer’s mind. She corresponds to a demonic sexual drive, giving rise to Peer’s intimidating thoughts in the hut, his “cantankerous hobgoblin-thoughts”. After this meeting, Peer knows that he cannot return to the cosy life he wanted to build with Solveig; the witch’s appearance has invoked the uncanny, and this cannot be reversed. As Freud notes, what has returned from the supressed cannot be repressed again by a conscious effort.45 The palace he tried to build as protection for what now has become evident has collapsed. As Peer realises this, he utters: Der faldt Kongsgaarden min med Braak og Rammel! Det slog Mur om hende, jeg var saa nær; her blev styggt med et, og min Glæde blev gammel.46

There fell my fine palace, with crash and clatter! There’s a wall around her whom I stood so near Of a sudden all’s ugly – my joy has grown old.47

The new situation of his hut is comparable to the crypt Vidler describes, where the “barely perceptible fissure” in a haunted house has expanded, in 43

Kittang, “Ibsen, Heroism, and the Uncanny,” 315. Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” 613. 45 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 226. 46 Ibsen, Peer Gynt. In Henrik Ibsens Skrifter, 583. 47 Ibsen, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume IV: Peer Gynt, a Dramatic Poem, 106. 44

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this case, causing the hut to collapse.48 Peer soon realises that there is no way back to the homely, cosy life that he imagined with Solveig; the witch demands to participate in their love life. He has tried to kill her, but that is not possible. As a hallucination, she fades away, but the reality she and her offspring represent has moved into Peer’s mind. With the vocabulary from Freud, we can say that the content of Peer’s thoughts now has become conscious to him. However, this new situation of Peer’s mind makes his previous way of coping with frightening material unattainable to him. Peer realises that the homely atmosphere is unattainable, and tries to find a way through the uncanny and back to the cosiness. His first idea is to appeal to the process of remorse as a way to re-establish the relation to Solveig and thereby to cosiness, but he cannot sort out what the process demands from him. 49 The uncanny has become part of Peer’s conscious mind. He cannot get rid of it by any means, and he leaves the hut and Solveig behind, saying that he has something “heavy to catch”. In summary, Freud writes that the uncanny is something that “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light”.50 Peer has tried with all his might to ward off his disturbing fantasies. When alone, he made a large lock out of wood, but it did not protect him from the intimidating thoughts that intruded into his hut and mind. With Solveig’s arrival, he abandons the need of a lock. Instead, he tries to persuade himself that the atmosphere is warm, light and pleasant. However, what lies hidden in his thoughts returns as an uncanny fantastic figure. It is as if Peer’s conjuring of a cosy atmosphere is crucial in activating what lies hidden in his home and mind. In Freud’s conception of the uncanny, the structure of the elements is crucial. It is through the progression of these dynamics from the cosy, through the secret, to the creepy and uncanny, that the suppressed content of mind returns. This is central to Freud’s definition of the uncanny, and we have shown that it is relevant in understanding the dynamics of this scene in Peer Gynt.

Conclusion In “The Uncanny”, Freud establishes a distinct sequence between the homely, the secret and the uncanny. He understands these phenomena both as literary concepts and as phenomena of psychological depth, where the return of the repressed plays a pivotal role. Furthermore, he defines what is 48

Vidler, “The Architecture of the Uncanny,” 18. See Aalen, “Tears, Remorse and Reparation in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.” 50 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 245. 49

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repressed as longing for the first home of all human beings, the archaic mother-bosom, made uncanny and unattainable through a repression that transforms longing into anxiety. This element is latent in the material we have presented, and appears fully developed in the last scene of Peer Gynt. Although Ibsen created his work decades before Freud’s essay, similar connections between phenomena can be traced throughout Peer Gynt. Freud was influenced by Ibsen’s later plays, though no records indicate that he had read Peer Gynt. However, one of his colleagues, Wilhelm Reich, devoted his entire membership paper to the Psychoanalytic Society in Vienna in 1920 to Peer Gynt. Here he analyses Peer’s relationship with his mother as incestuous.51 It is reasonable to believe that Freud attended the presentation of Reich’s paper, though there is no concrete evidence of this. With Freud’s analysis of the uncanny as this chapter’s point of departure, we have gathered diverse phenomena into one consolidated idea where repressed feelings of belonging act as the source of the uncanny. Our interpretation includes basic narrative elements of Peer Gynt, which have been analysed differently in various literature about the work. Some maintain an interpretation that Peer cannot accept anything good without being corrupted.52 Others primarily interpret the dramatic poem in terms of Peer’s incestuous sexuality and his anxiety towards women.53 A third focus has been dedicated to the paradoxical phenomena that characterise the whole epos. This third concern particularly allows for a wealth of interpretations and analyses, to which ours is but one worthy addition.54

Bibliography Aalen, Marit. “Tears, Remorse and Reparation in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt: A Reading Inspired by Melanie Klein.” The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 37, no. 2 (2014): 113-124. https://doi.org/10.1080/01062301.2014.962323 Aalen, Marit and Anders Zachrisson. “The Structure of Desire in Peer Gynt’s Relationship to Solveig. A reading inspired by Melanie Klein.” Ibsen Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 130-160. https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2013.849029 51

Reich, “Libidinal Conflicts and Delusions in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.” See Bruce G. Shapiro, Divine Madness and the Absurd Paradox: Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and the Philosophy of Kierkegaard. 53 See Georg Groddeck, “Peer Gynt fra psykoanalytisk synspunkt.” [Peer Gynt from psychoanalytic point of view]. In Omkring Peer Gynt.” 54 See Brynhildsvoll, “Identitetskrisen i Peer Gynt, belyst fra groteskestetiske synspunkter.” 52

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—. “Peer Gynt and Freud’s the Uncanny.” Ibsen Studies 18, no. 2 (2018):

169-193. https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2018.1550877 Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994. Brynhildsvoll, K. “Identitetskrisen i Peer Gynt, belyst fra groteskestetiske synspunkter.” [Identity crisis in Peer Gynt, in the light of grotesque and ethical points of view]. Edda 89, no. 2 (May 4, 2002): 161-171. https://doi.org/10.18261/ISSN1500-1989-2002-02-05 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London: Routledge, 1993. Fjeld, Rolf. “Peer Gynt, Naturalism, and the Dissolving Self.” The Drama Review: TDR 13, no. 2 (1968): 28-43. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144408. Freud, Sigmund. “The Interpretation of Dreams.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams (II) and On Dreams, Vol. 5. Translated by James Strachey, 610-621. London: Hogarth Press, 1900/1994. —. “Repression.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Meta-psychology and Other Works, Vol. 14. Translated by James Strachey, 141-158. London: Hogarth Press, 1915/1994. —. “The Uncanny.” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, Vol. 17. Translated by James Strachey, 217-253. London: Hogarth Press, 1919/1994. —. “The Ego and the Id.” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: The Ego and the Id and Other Works, Vol. 19. Translated by James Strachey, 12-66. London: Hogarth Press, 1923/1994. —. “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Lay Analysis and Other Works, Vol. 20. Translated by James Strachey, 87-172. London: Hogarth Press, 1926/1994. Groddeck, Georg. “Peer Gynt fra psykoanalytisk synspunkt.” [Peer Gynt from psychoanalytic point of view]. In Omkring Peer Gynt, edited by O. Hageberg, 95-111. Oslo: Gyldendal, 1967. Ibsen, Hendrik. Brand. In Henrik Ibsens skrifter, no. 5. Oslo: Aschehoug, 1866/2007.

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—. Peer Gynt. In Henrik Ibsens skrifter, no. 5. Oslo: Aschehoug, 1867/2007.

http://www.edd.uio.no:8087/cocoon/ibsenarkiv/DRVIT_PG|PG42869.xh tml?facs=Ja —. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume IV: Peer Gynt, a Dramatic Poem. Translated by William Archer and Charles Archer. New York: Charles Scribner, 1867/1907. Kittang, Atle. “Ibsen, Heroism, and the Uncanny.” Modern Drama 49, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 304-326. https://doi.org/10.1353/mdr.2006.0081. Mills, John. “Clarifications on Trieb: Freud’s Theory of Motivation Reinstated.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 21, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 673-677. Reich, Wilhelm. “Libidinal Conflicts and Delusions in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.” In Wilhelm Reich Early Writings, edited by Philip Schmitz, 3-64. New York: Farrar, Straus and Girou, 1920/1975. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. London: Routledge, 2003. Schelling, F.W.J. Philosophie der Mythologie [Philosophy of Mythology]. London: Forgotten Books, 1857/2018. Shapiro, Bruce. G. Divine Madness and the Absurd Paradox: Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and the Philosophy of Kierkegaard. London: Greenwood Press, 1990. StĊpieĔ, Wojciech. “Musical Categories of the Uncanny in Edvard Grieg’s ‘Troll Music’–In memory of Prof. Finn Benestad (1929-2012).” Studia Musicologica Norvegica 38, no. 1 (November 12, 2012): 46–64. https://doi.org/10.18261/ISSN1504-2960-2012-01-04 Vidler, Anthony. “The Architecture of the Uncanny: The Unhomely Houses of the Romantic Sublime.” Assemblage, no. 3 (July 1987): 6-29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171062

CHAPTER SEVEN “BEFORE YOU WERE BORN, I DEVOTED YOU TO HIM, AS THE ONLY EXPIATION OF MY CRIME”: CHILDREN AS SCAPEGOAT FIGURES IN CHARLES MATURIN'S MELMOTH THE WANDERER CHARLIE JORGE

The origin of the uncanny as a tool of literary criticism, and its connection to the literary genre of the Gothic, was explored in Sigmund Freud's essay, “The Uncanny”, in 1919, where he developed the theme of the heimlich and unheimlich.1 Freud describes the ways in which feeling may shift into its opposite, and at the same time he links the uncanny to the Gothic, through an examination of the uncanny themes present in “The Sandman”, an 1816 short story by E. T. A. Hoffmann.2 These themes and their topos are later elaborated further in the work of authors including Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, 3 who produce a list of forms that the uncanny takes in literature, such as repetition (where the figure of the doppelgänger, so often used in Gothic literature, is prevalent), fate and doom, animism and anthropomorphism, automatism, uncertainty about sexual identity, fear of being buried alive, silence, telepathy, and death. These ideas form the phenomena of the uncanny and, therefore, as David Punter and Glennis Byron state, “the background and indeed the modus operandi of much

1

Freud, “The Uncanny.” See David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic, 283; Hoffmann, “The Sandman.” 3 See Bennett and Royle, Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory; Royle, The Uncanny. 2

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Gothic fiction”.4 One of the main topics Gothic fiction deals with is, in Robert Miles' own words, is the “dysfunctional nuclear family”.5 This theme is perhaps one of the uncanniest matters due to its potential to turn the most familiar and homely of institutions, the household itself and all its members–the heimlich–, into an estranged unwelcoming place full of dangers–the unheimlich.6 This genre is prolific in heroes and heroines who suffer at the hands of patriarchal parents (most commonly fathers) who want to use them as a way to gain aristocratic, economic, or any other kind of power.7 These victims, sacrificed to this uncanny blood-thirsty idol that is power, family estate and name, follow what can be termed the Scapegoat Archetype pattern, as defined in René Girard’s work.8 I will consider the characters in Charles Robert Maturin's uncanny Gothic masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) in regard to the uncanny and the notion of the Scapegoat Archetype. It is critical to examine the features that can turn a hero, in this case, Alonzo de Monçada, and a heroine, Immalee–later known as Isidora di Aliaga–into the victims of an uncanny sacrifice to the greedy blood-thirsty idols of power, prestige and patriarchy. Immalee, for instance, apparently looks like the innocent, persecuted through labyrinthine passages, convents, inquisitorial settings, forests and mountains in a church-governed Spain. I will try to define Alonzo and Immalee as scapegoat figures, as shown in “Tale of the Spaniard” and “Tale of the Indians”, both stories which make up part of the matryoshka structural composition in Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. Born in Dublin in 1780, Charles Robert Maturin was the descendant of a Huguenot family that fled France during the persecution against the Protestants, and found shelter in a less fanatic Ireland. His leanings towards the Church and literature were historical, as his grandfather, Gabriel Jacques Maturin, was Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, replacing the renowned Irish author Jonathan Swift in his position in 1745. After his graduation from Trinity College, Charles Maturin started his career as Minister of the Anglican Church first in the small parish of Loughrea, Co. Galway, and later in St Peter's Church, Dublin. Maturin's literary hopes often clashed with his religious career, which eventually prevented him from advancement within 4

Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 283, 286. Miles, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress, 4. 6 See Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order, 18. 7 See Jerrold E. Hogle, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 2. 8 Girard, The Scapegoat. 5

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the Anglican Church, as most of his works were described as blasphemous, especially his play Bertram (1816) and his novel Melmoth the Wanderer. Maturin's landmark Gothic novel, Melmoth the Wanderer, is a compendium of Gothic and uncanny features, exemplified amongst its pages in the repetitive structure of the recurrent appearances of the Wanderer throughout his lengthened period of life. He suggests a clear model of the living dead, indicating fate and foreknowledge in Melmoth's powers of omniscience.9 The story begins at the start of the 19th century with a young Trinity College student, John Melmoth, returning to the family home in Co. Wicklow, Ireland, as his uncle is about to die. At his uncle's deathbed, young John Melmoth sees a man who resembles, in an unmistakable uncanny manner, another person in a portrait under the name of “Jno. Melmoth anno 1646”.10 He later learns that he is his own ancestor, John Melmoth, who, after making a pact with the Devil, has been wandering the world for more than 150 years. However, this uncanny wanderer is tired of the world around him and seeks someone to exchange his terrible destiny with, thus crossing seas and continents in search of a suitable victim. In his multiple wanderings he meets his potential victims in states of desperation and horror in some of the most terrifying scenarios, such as the Englishman Stanton in a mental asylum, a young Englishwoman in the midst of religious fanaticism and madness, and the Spaniard Alonzo de Monçada. de Monçada recounts his insane story of persecution along the dark corridors of a monastery and then imprisonment by the Spanish Inquisition. He then describes the life of naïve Immalee, who is rescued from her paradisal island to end up in the hands of her not-so-loving family, the Aliagas, who see her value solely as a way to prosper and gain power in Catholic Spain. It is precisely on these two characters, Alonzo and Immalee, and their uncanny victimisation, that this chapter will focus, analysing their common features as potential scapegoats in an uncanny situation, that of persecution by entities and forces beyond their power and understanding. All attempted for the mere reason of economic, religious and political growth of the Monçada and Aliaga families, and the institutions that support them in the shadows. Some scholars, such as Richard Kearney and James G. Williams, have redefined what we call the Scapegoat Archetype as figures that have the same recurring predications in common, what Girard called his stereotypes, as guidelines established to detect a figure who follows similar patterns in myth, literature and history,.11 Not only does Girard, and the members of his 9

Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 284. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 18. 11 Richard Kearney, “Myths and Scapegoats: The Case of René Girard,” 1-2; René Girard and James G. Williams, The Girard Reader. 10

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school of theory, provide abstract ideas extracted from old myths in the Bible and literature, but they suggest examples of victimisation and persecution in history, early and recent, in which victims were chosen following, in a particularly uncanny manner, the same “scapegoating” pattern.12 The first stereotype I focus on here is that arising from the initial crisis a community faces, that ultimately leads to the sacrifice of the scapegoat.13 In the case of the Monçada family, at the beginning of “Tale of the Spaniard”, the order of the world is clear and the boundaries within it are well defined; everything belongs where it should be in a “homely” way. In the first years of his life, Alonzo is kept locked in a house in the suburbs of Madrid, under the care of an old woman; both his parents make evening visits, enclosed in the secrecy of capas and veils.14 This archetypal paradisal state of innocence, where Alonzo, like Adam in the Garden of Eden, has not yet eaten of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, and is still unaware of the terrible secret of his birth, the uncanny reality he has been estranged from. He is happy with the care of his attendant, and the lavish visits of his parents. It is, in words of Northrop Frye, “a world that God made to put man into”.15 It is a world reminiscent of the Paradisal island where Immalee, in “Tale of the Indians”, matures and looks after her nurse for a short period of time before her death. The young Immalee “grew up a wild and beautiful daughter of nature, feeding on fruits,–and sleeping amid roses,–and drinking the pure element”.16 Immalee was put on that island as one of the primeval parents of the human race, by an invisible hand that saved her from a shipwreck: The nurse and the child were supposed to have perished in a storm which wrecked the vessel on an isle near the mouth of a river […] It was said that the nurse and the child alone escaped; that by some extraordinary chance they arrived at this isle.17

Maturin tells us at the beginning of Immalee's story that her little Indian island had been feared by the locals, as it was where “the first temple to the

12

Girard, The Scapegoat. Girard offers, throughout his work, a series of examples from different mythological figures, such as Balder, Jesus, Nanauatzin or Dionysos, and historical events, such as the persecution the Jews suffered. 13 Girard, The Scapegoat, 24. 14 Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 73. 15 Frye, A Fearful Symmetry, 31. 16 Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 503. 17 Maturin, 502-503.

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black goddess Seeva, had been erected”.18 However, all that changed as the forces of nature–an earthquake first, and then a fire caused by lighting–left the island to grow wild, as if preparing for Immalee's arrival by that invisible power. The island was than described as a true Edenic paradise: thus left to itself, [it] became vigorously luxuriant, as some neglected children improve in health and strength, while pampered darlings die under excessive nurture. Flowers bloomed, and foliage thickened, without a hand to pluck, a step to trace, or a lip to taste them.19

Alonzo's and Immalee's lives appear to be peaceful and happy, but soon these idyllic and harmonious lives start to crumble down when they are mingled with the different affairs of their families and their uncanny reality. For example, they are made aware of the duties of a child, as Donna Clara makes clear to Immalee –now called by her Spanish name, Isidora– as they travel back home in the family carriage: “Your duties as a child as easily understood–they are merely perfect obedience, profound submission, and unbroken silence except when you are addressed by me, your brother, or Father Jose”.20 Until this point, the boundaries between these two separate worlds were clearly stated, the world of innocence and naivety, where the children of two of the most powerful families of Spain ignore the destiny that awaits them, and the grim world where their families live; now the two worlds come to live together. It is in this daily life where we can appreciate both the blurring of boundaries in the cultural orders and hierarchies, and the beginning of a sinking of the established institutions Girard talks about.21 It is at this point when the community recognises that its status quo is threatened, and they must act to grant its survival. In Alonzo's case, he is seen as a threat to the balance of the wellestablished order of the world to which his family belongs. As one of the most important families of Grandees of Spain, the Monçadas are meant to abide by the laws of God and preserve the purity of holy blue blood by marrying amongst the noble families of the country. However, Alonzo is living evidence that these laws were broken by the late Duke de Monçada's son and heir, Alonzo's father. As a young boy of sixteen, the heir of the House of Monçada fell in love with a young girl from a lower rank in society, as we learn from Alonzo's mother, the result of this love affair being a son born outside marriage: “I am of rank far inferior to your father, –you 18

Maturin, 272. Maturin, 273. 20 Maturin, 331. 21 Girard, The Scapegoat, 22-23. 19

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were our first child. He loved me, and forgiving my weakness as a proof of my devotion to him, we were married”. 22 Immediately following their marriage, Alonzo's parents beget another child, Alonzo's brother, Juan: the legally rightful heir to the House of Monçada, as his mother calls him “our lawful child”.23 Alonzo is seen as the unsettling proof of his parents' sinful disobedience to God and to hierarchy, a history that allowed his mother not a moment's respite, an uncanny remembrance of their crime. Her conscience nagged her continuously for her breach: “The lie I had dared to utter before God and the world, and to a dying parent […] the convulsions of my conscience, that heavily upbraided me, not only with vice and perjury, but with sacrilege”.24 Her reaction to this situation prompted a desperate decision to devote Alonzo's life and soul to monastic life in compensation for her crimes against God and mankind: “Before you were born, I devoted you to [God], as the only expiation of my crime”.25 Alonzo is thus sacrificed to atone for his parents' crimes. After receiving the news of his fate, Alonzo also learns the method of this atonement as the sacrifice goes beyond his own reparation. Alonzo is forced to intercede for his mother: “While I yet bore you in my bosom without life, I dared to implore his forgiveness only on the condition of your future intercession for me as a minister of religion”.26 His mother informs him, in a rather ecstatic way, that she had dreamt of him praying for her soul, of her kneeling by his confessional and receiving from him forgiveness, on behalf of God: I relied on your prayers before you could speak. I proposed to intrust my penitence to one, who, in becoming the child of God, had atoned for my offence in making him the child of sin. In imagination I knelt already at your confessional, –heard you, by the authority of the church, and the commission of Heaven, pronounce me forgiven.27

Her uncanny visions go beyond these events as she imagines her son at her dying bed, giving her the last rites: “I saw you stand beside my dying bed, –I felt you press the cross to my cold lips, and point to that heaven where I hoped my vow had already secured a seat”.28 22

Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 90. Maturin, 90. 24 Maturin, 90. 25 Maturin, 90. 26 Maturin, 90. 27 Maturin, 90; emphasis in original. 28 Maturin, 90. 23

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Turning from Alonzo's misfortunes, we see Immalee/Isidora in her new home in Spain, seen as a threat to the balance of her own family, and the religion of which they are the flagship, the Catholic Church. Towards the end of her period on the Indian island, Immalee/Isidora receives the visit from Melmoth the Wanderer, who, with the initial aim of making her fall into temptation and accept his pact with the devil, teaches her about the world and its customs. As part of this process of teaching, Melmoth, using a type of telescope, shows her the different religions around them, and how bloody and merciless they are–all but one. Almost on the brink of despair, Immalee/Isidora does not see goodness in any of them until she asks Melmoth to show her more closely a little Catholic monastery in the coast of Goa that she had noticed in his brief lecture. There, she discovers the religion most akin to her natural beliefs, acquired in her Edenic world: the religion of universal love. These beliefs are represented by that little community in the East Indies: The religion they profess […] requires them to honour their parents, and to cherish their children. […] their religion enjoins them to be mild, benevolent, and tolerant; and neither to reject or disdain those who have not attained its purer light. […] they know that God cannot be acceptably worshipped but by pure hearts and crimeless hands.29

It is then when she decides, as if victim of an angelic vision, to become a Christian: “Immalee bowed her glowing face to the earth, and then raising it with the look of a new-born angel, exclaimed, ‘Christ shall be my God, and I will be a Christian!’”30 But like Alonzo with his family, her world is soon to clash, in an uncanny way she would not expect, with the reality of her family and the world they belong to. After Immalee/Isidora’s upbringing in the little paradisal island in the Indian Ocean, and being rescued by a Portuguese ship that brought her back to her home in Spain, she finds herself in a strange, uncanny country with religious views that differ from those she learnt from Melmoth. She recounts one of their many encounters to him at night: “I remember catching a glimpse of that religion so beautiful and pure; and when they brought me to a Christian land, I thought I should have found them all Christians. […] And what did you find them, then, Immalee?”– “Only Catholics”.31

29

Maturin, 296. Maturin, 297. 31 Maturin, 344. 30

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After this dramatic reflection on the different views on religion, Melmoth reminds her that her ideas could class her as a heretic, following by portraying a gruesome image of her as a potential sacrifice to a blood-thirsty God: Do you know that in this country to hint a doubt that Catholicism and Christianity being the same, would consign you to the flames as a heretic incorrigible? Your mother, so lately known to you as a mother, would bind your hands when the covered litter came for its victim; and your father, though he has never yet beheld you, would buy with his last ducat the faggots that were to consume you to ashes; and all your relations in their gala robes would shout their hallelujahs to your dying screams of torture.32

It is precisely Immalee/Isidora’s mother who deems her mentally deranged, and a potential heretic, due to her beliefs and reactions to the religious traditions of her native land, and social status. In a lengthy letter that she addresses to her absent and business-minded husband, she tells him that “our daughter is deranged [and that] she hath strange fantasies swimming in her brain, such as, that heretics and heathens shall not be everlastingly damned […] which must clearly proceed from madness”.33 She is seen by those around her as a free-thinker, a kind of Illuminati–much feared by the Catholic Church, and persecuted by the Inquisition. Her crime is to be, like Alonzo's, a reminder of her family's and, by extension, her society's, crime against the true commandment of Christianity: the commandment of universal love. In atonement for that crime, and rather to tame a misfit, her plotting family, with the cooperation of the establishment as represented by Fra Jose and the Church, decide to arrange an advantageous marriage, to their own benefit, with the noble Montilla. Immalee/Isidora has never seen this man before, a fact which turns her into a saleable object, estranging her in her own house. As her own brother, Don Fernan, who she innocently believes to be loving and caring, asserts when Fra Jose dares pose the possibility of her taking the veil, he has the right to profit from that union: “‘I will never hear of it, Father,’ said Fernan; ‘my sister's beauty and wealth entitle me to claim alliance to the first families in Spain’”. 34 Again, as in the case of Alonzo's mother, we see how the purpose of the sacrifice is not totally selfless; there are other, more selfish, intentions hidden behind it. Don Fernan's intentions might not be as highly divine and mystical as the Duchess of Monçada's, though they are as egotistical as hers. One uses her 32

Maturin, 344. Maturin, 378, 379. 34 Maturin, 336-337; Emphasis in original. 33

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son's love to attain God's, and the world's forgiveness; the other uses her sister's attributes to gain wealth and prestige. The uncanny House of Aliaga, with all the twists and turns and religious fanaticism, creates the scene where Immalee/Isidora becomes the scapegoat for her society's crimes, and is fed to the ever-hungry monster of mercantilism and greed. Another stereotype of victimisation is what Girard calls the “Stereotyped Accusations”. 35 These are crimes attached to the potential victims of persecution which, in spite of not being true, the persecutor and next-to-be “sacrificer” believe them to be right enough to carry out such a pursuit. This is an uncannily recurring motif of pursuers, not only in literature and myth, but also in history: their believe in the total legitimacy of their persecution.36 The aim of these accusations is not only to estrange the victim so as to make them outcasts, or foreigners, as we have already seen in the previous paragraphs, but also to attempt to destroy any social links they have within the community.37 Both Alonzo and Immalee/Isidora suffer from these accusations and, as a result, become estranged within their own family and social circles. As mentioned above, Immalee/Isidora is accused of being deranged by all around her, including her own mother. The only aspect that prevents them from accusing her of heresy and forcing her to take the veil, as we saw, is her brother Fernan's thirst for power and aggrandisement–seeing her married to one of the greatest families in Spain. This mismatch in her social circle results in her isolation, which is mirrored in the last scenes of “Tale of the Indian”. At this point, everybody at her wedding with Montilla discovers that she had been married to the “enemy of mankind” in an uncanny satanic rite and setting– even a devil-worshipping monk is raised from the dead. She is than sent to the prison of the Inquisition, where “She was left in solitary confinement for many days, undisturbed and unvisited”.38 As for Alonzo, he is repeatedly accused by all around him of not loving his parents as he is reluctant to take the vows of a monk. When he learns he has been offered up to religion and the priesthood from an early age, if not before, as a devotion to atone for his parents' crimes, he holds an internal fight between his love of his parents and his rejection of monastic life. This moment of doubt is used by those around him, represented by the imposing and uncannily almighty figure of the religious Director of the family, who uses this fight against him by stating that his parents make the sacrifice out of love and care: 35

Girard, The Scapegoat, 27. Girard, 15. 37 Girard, 25. 38 Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 525. 36

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“Seriously, then, my dear child, do you not believe that your parents love you? Have you not received from your own infancy every mark of affection from them? Have you not been pressed to their bosoms from your very cradle?” At these words I struggled vainly with my feelings, and wept, while I answered, “Yes”. […] “can you suppose that parents, who have treated you with such tenderness, who love you as they do their own souls, could act (as your conduct charges them) with causeless and capricious cruelty towards you?”39

With the Director’s words in mind, it is difficult not to see how Alonzo's relations turn his own feelings against him, making him feel guilty if he does not accept becoming the scapegoat to be sacrificed. This guilt is only intensified when the young boy learns that he is seen as the only hope for the family. Their welfare and the future of the House of Monçada, and by extension the whole social order, rests on his shoulders. Alonzo is to become the ultimate sacrifice, a Messiah brought to the cross on Golgotha; he looks with horror at the images of the uncanny and terrible destiny that lies ahead of him, drawn by the skills of such a painter, as the Director calls himself. Alonzo has to face the entirety of this responsibility alone: “Then imagine to yourself the honour of one of the first houses in Spain; the peace of a whole family, –the feelings of a father, –the honour of a mother, –the interests of religion, –the eternal salvation of an individual, all suspended on one scale” […] “My father, I am perpetrated with horror at what you have said, –does all this depend on me?” “It does, –it does all depend on you”.40

These victims are isolated by their supposed crimes, or, rather, the crimes committed by their families and their whole communities. They are set apart by these very same communities, and so, liable to be sacrificed. It is a common feature, as Girard points out, in myth, literature and history to find the lonely scapegoat, or scapegoats, who, mostly unwillingly, bear upon their shoulders all the weight and responsibility of the welfare of the citizens.41 This individual, or group of individuals, is considered destructive and dangerous within the community; and so, if the community aims to resolve their critical situation, it is the scapegoat[s] who must be destroyed. It is better that just one person carries the burden and responsibility for the survival of the whole family, our community. 42 Therefore, it is better 39

Maturin, 82. Maturin, 83. 41 Girard, The Scapegoat, 60. 42 Girard, 150. 40

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Immalee/Isidora is sacrificed to a not-loved husband, or Alonzo buried into a monastery–a destiny that we can call death in life – than the whole family suffer an economic, social, religious or political standstill. The juxtaposition of the stereotypes in myth, literary text and even history leads us to the conclusion that victimisation is not casual, although uncanny forces act behind it. The aim in these cases is always the same: blame the innocent victims for the emerging crisis and use them to repair it, regardless of the methods employed. In the instance of Melmoth the Wanderer, we have seen how both Alonzo de Monçada and Immalee, later known as Isidora di Aliaga, uncannily fit in the different stereotypes of persecution and victimisation. Their sacrifice is made for the economic, religious and political good of the Monçada and Aliaga families, at least from the persecutor’s and sacrificer’s points of view. We could say that these narratives reveal Alonzo and Immalee/Isidora as perfect examples of the Scapegoat figure, which forms part of a more global Scapegoat Archetypal pattern.

Bibliography Backus, Margot Gayle. The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order. London: Duke University Press, 1999. Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle. Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. 5th ed. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock, 121-162. London: Penguin, 1919/2003. Frye, Northrop. A Fearful Symmetry. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1947. Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Girard, René and James G. Williams, The Girard Reader. New York: Crossroad, 1996. Hoffman, E.T.A. The Sandman. Translated by J.Y. Bealby, B.A. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1885. eBook http://manybooks.net/ Hogle, Jerrold E. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 1-20. Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kearney, Richard. “Myths and Scapegoats: The Case of René Girard.” Theory, Culture & Society 12. No. 4 (1995): 1-14. Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Miles, Robert. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Punter, David and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. London: Routledge, 2003.

CHAPTER EIGHT TRACING OUR UNCANNY SELVES IN POST-POSTMODERN FICTION CHARLOTTE SWEET AND OTHMAR LEHNER

This chapter examines the “Uncanny” as a psychodynamic experience in human existence, involving that which is familiar, yet uncomfortable, and spookily mirrored for us in a synchronicity of events that is more than coincidental. Aptly analysed by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, the concept of the uncanny is also strongly connected to trauma theory. It is brought to life in post-postmodern narrative in novel and distinct ways. The storylines of Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001), Hot Milk by Deborah Levy (2016) and Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel (2005) serve as starting points to explore the uncanny aspects of the human soul as it presents itself in our most instinctual behaviours–eating, sexuality, forming emotional bonds and judging what goes on inside and all around us. Conceptions of trauma and its effects on the human psyche are the lens and source of underlying theory for this inquiry. Since this selection of fictional oeuvres for analysis spans a period of 15 years, from 2001 to 2016, and the authors are operating in a somewhat homogenous “western” cultural environment, the analysis may be used to speculate about the dawn of a new, post-postmodern zeitgeist. Cathy Caruth draws on Freud and Lacan in her examination of the correlation between trauma and post-modern literature, and embraces Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as an explanatory construct. 1 In agreement with Freud and Lacan that the processes of the collective resemble that of the individual psyche, this analysis traces trauma on historic, national and personal levels. Ruth Leys’ genealogy of trauma, JeanFrançois Lyotard’s discussion in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, and, more recently, Danielle Mortimer, examine the link between the postmodern condition in the West and collective traumata, such as Hiroshima, the 1

Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory; Unclaimed Experience.

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Holocaust, WWII and 9/11.2 According to Caruth, following Freud, trauma can be considered as a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self and the world [and as an event that] is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known […] not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in […] nightmares and repetitive actions.3

Freud already recognised that the uncanny manifests itself when the repressed aspects of trauma, buried in our unconscious, suddenly return.4 Responding to these considerations, Anne Whitehead elaborates that traumatic knowledge cannot be fully communicated or retrieved without distortion.5 She identifies the three key features of the traumatised voice in postmodern texts as intertextuality, repetition, and a dispersed or fragmented narrative voice. Thus, the familiar turns into something strange by means of literary techniques, creating a feeling of unease or obscurity in the reader, while being authentic to the traumatised protagonists. The above characteristics structure our examination of the three novels, including a fourth characteristic: the power of language. This fourth characteristic is used to create what Michel Foucault calls a “heterotopia that dissolves our myths and sterilises the lyricism of our sentences”, anticipating what Brian McHale calls the postmodern “zone”.6 In all three books, language is used to exert disciplinary power when considered necessary and “normal”. In postmodern fiction, unreliable narrators, rapidly changing scenes with temporal distortions and multi-layered narrations typically lead to fragmentation.7 While this structure is still omnipresent in all three novels, Hot Milk and Beyond Black, as the most recent examples, have somehow lost their awareness-raising metafiction. 8 By contrast, fragmentation and ambiguity have become a new norm in the age of information-overload and post-truth. The reader may even accept a multitude of parallel narratives– thus, the constructed nature of any given narrative is exposed by virtue of their parallel existence, but there is no attempt at conscious deconstruction. This marks a significant departure from postmodern literary devices. If 2 Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy; Lyotard, The Inhuman; Mortimer, “Trauma and the Condition of the Postmodern Identity.” 3 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 4 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 132. 5 Whitehead, Trauma Fiction. 6 Foucault, The Order of Things, xviii; McHale, Postmodernist Fiction. 7 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. 8 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction.

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postmodern literature embraced meta-fiction 9 to expose stereotypes of heroes and villains, current literary approaches seem simply to accept them and focus on stereotypes that are gleaned from everyday life. Instead, the reality of everyday situations is used as the basis for the “new unreal”, creating uncanniness as a part of everyday life for normal people. The unreal is firmly rooted in the real. Uncanniness results from highly detailed descriptions leading to manifold sensory impressions and allusions to synesthetic experiences, much like in the contemporary “experience economy”.10 On the personal, individual level, uncanniness is experienced when the familiar meets the unfamiliar, the unprocessed, the unknown. It is a dark landscape harbouring our biggest fears, many of them of social origin. Anthropologists as well as psychologists have suggested that they are the gate through which we must actively walk to grow and mature as personalities.11 As a result of the renewed interest in trauma discourse in the 1990s, and perhaps connected to the sudden recurrence of the now almost buried historical traumata in the genocides in Rwanda or Bosnia, uncanniness has even been identified as the master trope of the 1990s. 12 Treatises, for example, from Mladen Dolar, Anthony Vidler, Jacques Derrida and Terry Castle, take on a range of perspectives on the uncanny, including a feminist perspective. 13 Nicholas Royle further elaborates on the uncanny with its different implications of darkness, mysteriousness, arousal of the death instinct, or premature burial in order to connect to Freud’s theories and continues to apply these as an interpretative frame for our understanding of literature of the uncanny itself.14 Although a new zeitgeist has risen in the early 21st century, critical novels still incorporate trauma and uncanniness as a major trope. This exploration is an opportunity to discuss what uncanny situations, perspectives and/or projections exist in recent literary artefacts now, some thirty years after the apparent prime of uncanniness as a master trope. How do contemporary writers connect to the mindset of the post-postmodern, post-fact, 21st century reader? 9

Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism.

10

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, Experience Economy. See Reed A. Morrison, Trauma and Transformative Passage. 12 Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” 13 Dolar, "I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night": Lacan and the Uncanny; Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny; Derrida, Spectres of Marx; Castle, The Female Thermometer. 14 Royle, The Uncanny. 11

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The Distorted Mirror: Uncanniness and Representation Atonement by Ian McEwan might represent the culmination of postmodernist literature in the West. It was received favourably enough by a widespread audience that it was adapted to the cinema only a few years after its publication as a novel. It is a story with a straightforward message, thus modernist in its fundamental approach. Yet, the novel shows obvious hallmarks of the postmodern, such as a female narrator reflecting on her real-life guilt, her omnipotent position as a narrator, and the impossibility of any ultimate moral judgment upholding the traditional dichotomy of good and bad. She asks how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination, she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists.15

Atonement, as a literary artefact and story, represents the narrator's attempt to turn the seemingly unsatisfactory outcomes of two lives into what she considers a palatable tale of meaningful love. Besides, it appears to be the author´s attempt to reflect on the inherent meaningfulness of narratives and narration as a psychodynamic experience. Quite possibly, this is an uncanny achievement. Its success relies on turning the tables on the idea of an allknowing modernist God. Hesitantly and paradoxically the narrator resorts to the reassurance that comes from believing that a conscious attempt is more important than reaching a goal and that a narrative is almost, but not quite, as powerful as reality. Her limited control over the power of narration and her lack of desired consistency is the ultimate traumatic experience in the narrator´s life, culminating in her actual cognitive decline–perhaps an attempt on the part of the universe to finally soothe the memory of her existence as an individual. Besides the traumatic events experienced by individuals, WWII provides an undisputed historical source for collective trauma (with the evacuation from Dunkirk as a national trauma). It is also the setting for the novel’s part II and III, in which McEwan provides ample uncanniness by merging reality and unreality to create a postmodern “zone”.16 To support this, his writing style remains largely realistic, with great attention to detail, thus depicting the atrocities and personal confrontations as very real and 15 16

McEwan, Atonement, 371. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction.

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first-hand experiences. Often, emotion is conveyed only through language that evokes vivid pictures. As examples in part II: An exhausted voice murmured close to his ear, “Fuck. Where’s the RAF?” Another said knowingly, “They’ll go for the Frogs”.17

Or, A Stuka carried a single thousand-pound bomb. The idea on the ground was to get away from buildings, vehicles and other people. The pilot was not going to waste his precious load on a lone figure in a field. When he turned back to strafe it would be another matter. Turner had seen them hunt down a sprinting man for the sport of it.18

The seemingly stoic acceptance of these uncanny situations, for example the female protagonist comforting a dying soldier and the male protagonist getting up and walking on after witnessing the death of a woman and her child by a German bomb, illustrates how traumatised patients try to cope by reverting into normal routines despite the distorted picture. Yet, they cannot truly escape, as traumatic memory eventually needs to resurface. In a double entendre in part II, the male protagonist is woken up by his fellow soldier because he was constantly shouting “No”, which everyone understands as being related to the war experiences. Yet, later in the text it becomes clear that the shouting was in reference to an earlier traumatic memory of being wrongfully accused of a crime. 19 McEwan’s use of intertextuality in his explicit war scenes during the retreat (part II), is notable in the implicit analogies to W. H. Auden’s Museé des Beaux Arts, largely dealing with the apathy of individuals towards the suffering of the others, which can be compared with the indifference of the soldiers and even civilians to the severed leg of a boy hanging on a tree.20 This dialogue can be understood as metaphorical representations of the narrator’s trauma. In a similar fashion to Auden’s depiction of a ploughman sturdily following his plough, McEwan sees the people slowly moving in a convoy, concentrating on achieving their survival and not paying attention to the suffering of their kin. The main protagonist realises that regardless, “the ploughing would still go on”.21

17

McEwan, 183. McEwan, 201. 19 McEwan, 223. 20 McEwan, 192. 21 McEwan, 235. 18

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Part I of Atonement unfolds slowly, focusing on intricate details to create verisimilitude. The young narrator, Briony, experiences multiple traumas. Repeatedly, she witnesses seemingly violent encounters which, in turn, represent violations of her controlled and ordered world. This is alluded to by a meticulous description of her neatly arranged room; her despise of the “illogical” leaves “no room” for flexible interpretive structures but, as she points out herself, brings with it the need for “consequences”. The truth was in the symmetry, which was to say, it was founded in common sense. The truth instructed her eyes.22 These supposedly manifold traumatic events can be structured applying Leys’ mimetic and anti-mimetic perspectives on post-traumatic reactions. The latter referring to trauma as an external event without the active participation implied by mimesis, thus leading to a different level of autonomy and responsibility of the victim.23 This perspective also explains the duality in the narrator’s voice, as mimetic protagonist, and as antimimetic author, who describes that “now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky”. 24 In part III, the narrator addresses two characters realising how inadequate her language is: “She spoke slowly. ‘I’m very very sorry. I’ve caused you such terrible distress.’ They continued to stare at her, and she repeated herself. ‘I’m very very sorry”.25 Thus, by embracing literature as her voice, the narrator seeks to reconstruct her trauma and attempts to achieve atonement through the language of fiction. Significantly, key passages in the novel are told from three different narrators’ perspectives, using a mixture of modernist techniques of free indirect style and more direct accounts: the respective protagonist at hand, Briony as the main narrator, and an omniscient observer. Briony, who is introduced as an impassioned writer, openly reflects on this practice: She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral.26

It appears as if Briony’s mutinous reason, fuelled by the stringent logic of enlightenment, gradually surrenders to creative narration in its search for 22

McEwan, 169. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 37. 24 McEwan, Atonement, 76. 25 McEwan, 348. 26 McEwan, 40. 23

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salvation. It realises that different perspectives lead to different realities that are equally valid as a basis for judgment: It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.27

Different perspectives lead to different truths – an uncomfortable insight for a traumatised mind seeking consistency. Throughout the book, Briony struggles with these constructivist tendencies, which she fails to be able to reconcile with her intrinsically realist worldview: The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse […] now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her […] In a spirit of mutinous resistance, she climbed the steep grassy slope to the bridge, and when she stood on the driveway, she decided she would stay there and wait until something significant happened to her.28

As soon as Briony realises that she cannot control events and people around her in the same way that she can the subjects and objects of her narrations, she feels insignificant, reduced to a self she is unwilling to view realistically, much less embrace emotionally. Perhaps this explains why, in her narrations, sensual perceptions and descriptions have a tendency to turn into uncanny projections. While getting ready for a family gathering, for instance, her sister Cecilia repeatedly must change outfits to be able to pass the stairway mirror without eerie unease: But the public gaze of the stairway mirror as she hurried towards it revealed a woman on her way to a funeral, an austere, joyless woman moreover, whose black carapace had affinities with some form of matchbox-dwelling insect. A stag beetle! It was her future self, at eighty-five, in widow’s weeds.29

One might interpret these visions as manifestations of well-suppressed emotions, as spooky reflections produced by events synchronous with Cecilia’s inner workings. As a female in a patriarchal society, she may have realised that her professional training is a vain effort doomed to fruitlessness. The scrutinising look into the mirror, therefore, might be 27

McEwan, 40. McEwan, 76-77. 29 McEwan, 97. 28

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interpreted as an opportunity to face her Jungian shadow self. For Cecilia, her compulsive looks in the mirror are reflections of irrational selfperception: There was no confusion in her mind: these too vivid, untrustworthy impressions, her self-doubt, the intrusive visual clarity and eerie differences that had wrapped themselves around the familiar were no more than continuations, variations of how she had been seeing and feeling all day. Feeling, but preferring not to think.30

Later, we are told that Cecilia has overcome the uncanniness of her mirror self: Cecilia followed at a slow pace, passing the critical mirror with a glance and completely satisfied with what she saw. […] her thoughts had broadened to include a vague resolution which took shape without any particular content and prompted no specific plan; she had to get away. The thought was calming and pleasurable, and not desperate at all.31

It would appear that Cecilia’s decision to take action, to take control of matters even without a specific plan, has restored her equilibrium. An equilibrium set off kilter only too easily when she has to face Robbie and the sexual feelings he has awakened in her: I´ve been seeing strangely, as if for the first time. Everything has looked different–too sharp, too real. Even my own hands looked different. At other times, I seem to be watching events as if they happened long ago. And I´ve been furious with you–and with myself.32

It is not easy for Cecilia to face her instincts and surrender to them. Much like her sister Briony, Cecilia seems inclined to analyse her situation rationally and find the “nettles”, desiring desperately to eradicate every single one until the picture is clear and unmistakable, until she is in full control: “Flaying the nettles was becoming a self-purification, and it was childhood she set about now, having no further need for it”.33 This is said about Briony, but it also applies to Cecilia´s view of the world and her otherwise spooky self in it. Briony longs to stay in control even beyond her death, when she realises that Lola and her husband are likely to outlive her, “I know I cannot publish until they are dead. And as of 30

McEwan, 98. McEwan, 102. 32 McEwan, 133. 33 McEwan, 74. 31

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this morning, I accept that will not be until I am”.34 Thus, Atonement can be read as a novel focused on uncanny reflections of inner workings. For its narrator and characters, these reflections open space for personal development. As they choose to apply the logic of enlightenment–reason–in a desperate attempt for control, they are nonetheless forced to engage with the irrational and experience uncanniness. The characters are not, at first, willing to give in to a large variety of narratives but forced to do so as events unfold. By contrast, Sofia, the protagonist in Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, is much more willing to throw herself into the uncanny abyss opened up by her inner struggles: “I haven’t a clue about my own logic. Suddenly that was the best thing that ever happened to me”.35 She has developed a morbid sense of humour regarding her life circumstances. Essentially, Sofia feels used and emotionally blackmailed by her mother´s apparent ailments and her obviously punitive criticism. “You remind me of a beggar who breaks a leg so people will give her money”. After that she turned on me. It was a hymn of violence and she sang it to me like a full-throated, evil nightingale. My un-brushed hair repulsed her. I had wasted my intelligence. I suffered from an excess of emotion, while she was restrained and stoic.36

Complicating the problematic relationship she has with her mother, Sofia feels abandoned by her father for the sake of his new family, thus seemingly obliterating part of her identity. When my father and his new wife gazed down at Evangeline I could see the truest love in their eyes, the sort of love that is naked and without shame. They were a family. They looked as right together as a 69-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman can possibly look. Mostly they looked wrong, like a father and daughter and grandchild, but as wrong goes, the affection between them was right. My father, Christos Papastergiadis, was caring for two new women. He had made another life, and I was part of the old life that had made him unhappy.37

A little later, when she finds out that Alexandra, the new wife, speaks fluent Italian, Sofia comes to the conclusion that “Identity is always hard to

34

McEwan, 370. Levy, Hot Milk, 39. 36 Levy, 208. 37 Levy, 132. 35

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guarantee”. 38 This statement had already been previously uttered by Mr Gomez, her mother´s Greek healer of choice, during their first introduction. Identity construction under these influences appears to be a traumatic experience for Sofia, and probably the reason her narrative descriptions are laced with sardonic commentary: My mother has abdicated, resigned, relinquished, declined, waived, disclaimed everything and she has taken me down with her. My love for her is like an axe. She has grabbed it from me and is threatening to chop off her feet.39

Sofia obviously feels confused, constrained and rendered helpless by her mother's and father´s behaviours, and henceforth often bewildered by a given turn of events. Later, Sofia seems to make reference to Freud and his concept of distorted time experienced in trauma: “I confess that I am often lost in all dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened”.40 Nonetheless, her sense of humour provides the necessary distance to endure a lot of emotional pain, opening up a perspective which is, by comparison to Briony´s attempt to rationalise and control, inclusive of options and avenues that might lead into unusual realms of inquiry and discovery. One way this humour is expressed involves Sofia accepting and thinking about the judgement she receives from others by re-applying their categorisations from her own vantage point. This is illustrated by the following lines from the text: “Ingrid wipes the sand out of her eyes. ‘You are obsessed with me’, she says. I am certainly obsessed with her power to confuse me”.41 A little while later, Ingrid asks Sofia what she thinks a myth is, and internally, Sofia comments, “That is a big question. It would be true to say that I was probably obsessed with it”.42 In a way, one might argue that the reader is invited to play with vantage points by picking up the trail of frequently repeated words, phrases, images and situations. Much like the narrator, the reader can experience uncanniness regarding integrity and identity through repeatedly invoked images of severed body parts and emotional baggage “swirling” and “circling” – creating a terrifying emotional vortex. From a developmental perspective, it is this play with vantage points that represents a major step in the process of self-maturation. The human 38

Levy, 135. Levy, 189. 40 Levy, 188. 41 Levy, 171. 42 Levy, 173. 39

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being learns to appreciate how others can have a different view of reality, and, through insight and an innate capacity for empathy, it becomes an actively social creature. 43 The title of the book itself, Hot Milk, is reminiscent of active rearing, of feeding a human being that is not yet capable of taking care of its own existential needs. It is not clear, however, who in the narrative is rearing whom: the daughter the mother, the mother the daughter, the lover the beloved, the doctor the patient, who is in control, who is being cared for or subtly manipulated? To complicate this question further, the story is riddled with references to paralysis. The use of the Spanish word for jellyfish, medusa, establishes a clear reference to Greek mythology, where Medusa is one of three Gorgon sisters. She is a female monster whose gaze can turn the onlooker to stone. In line with this myth, in Hot Milk there are female characters with a clear sting, actual stings from jellyfish, talk of people staring at each other, and people feeling paralysed by someone else’s actions or simply by their observational gaze. For example: If I were to look at my mother just once in a certain way, I would turn her to stone. Not her, literally. I would turn the language of allergies, dizziness, heart palpitations and waiting for side effects to stone. I would kill this language stone dead.44

“Everyone is a field study to you. It makes me feel weird. Like you are watching me all the time. What is the difference between studying anthropology and practising it?”45

“You have such a blatant stare,” she said. “But I have watched you as closely as you have watched me. It’s what mothers do. We watch our children. We know our gaze is powerful so we pretend not to look”.46 In the end, we are left with the realisation that our own dynamic, complex nature invariably impacts on our environment and inversely mirrors our thoughts and actions. It has the capacity to confine or even paralyse us unless we embrace the mirror image. This may be a spooky process, in analogy with Albert Einstein’s realisation that quantum particles are linked producing “spooky action at a distance”. In Jungian terms, the outside mirror demands our engagement with its reflection, uncanny as the image may be. Engaging with this idea, Levy writes, 43

Cf. Jean Piaget, “The Theory of Stages in Cognitive Development.” Levy, Hot Milk, 55. 45 Levy, 85. 46 Levy, 218. 44

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The tide was coming in with all the medusas floating in its turbulence. The tendrils of the jellyfish in limbo, like something cut loose, a placenta, a parachute, a refugee severed from its place of origin.47 This process most definitely includes a major transformation we all instinctively fear, yet there is no choice, only the question of how, when and where. If we cannot manage to embrace life, the universal mirror quite readily serves up the inverse option: “Is it easier to surrender to death than to life?”48

It is precisely the realm of (non-)existence–of the metaphysical–that is the focus of the story and characters in Beyond Black, by Hilary Mantel. Beyond Black, beyond the point in our consciousness, occurs when physical existence goes black. Alison, a psychic medium and the novel’s main protagonist, frequently takes a literal look in the mirror, sometimes to rectify distortions: Carefully, she took the mint out of her mouth. The action left her lips sulky; in the mirror, she edged them back into a smile, using the nail of her third finger, careful not to smudge. The face does disarrange itself; it has to be watched.49

At other times, Alison feels the need to hide the distortions in her life by turning away from a mirror: She looked away from the mirror so Colette wouldn't see her lips moving. Bless all my great-grandmothers, whoever and wherever they may be. May my dad rot in hell, whoever he may be; whatever hell is and wherever, let him rot in it; and let them please lock the doors of hell at night, so he can´t be out and about, harassing me. Bless my mum, who is still earthside of course, but bless her anyway; wouldn't she be proud of me if she saw me in chiffon, each inch of my flesh powdered and perfumed? In chiffon, my nails lacquered, with my lucky opals glittering–would she be pleased? Instead of being dismembered in a dish, which I know was her first ambition for me: swimming in jelly and blood.50

Indeed, what we find out early on about Alison’s family background and childhood is all distortion-a reality as fragmented and at irrational angles as a cubist painting. “Colette: when you were a child, did you ever suffer a

47

Levy, 218. Levy, 218. 49 Mantel, Beyond Black, 13. 50 Mantel, 12. 48

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severe blow to the skull? Alison: Several…Why, didn´t you?”51 Besides Alison’s individual trauma, we may find a much subtler grand trauma as background in Beyond Black. The static tristesse of the London Orbital motorway, for example, in which the living and the dead dwell without much difference as a result of a slowly dying consumerist society, can perhaps best be interpreted as a representation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). This cleverly sets the tone, as Eliot introduces themes of disillusionment and despair, similar to trauma-induced processes. As with Atonement, this collective trauma is an analogy to Alison’s personal trauma. She and her assistant Colette are repeatedly depicted driving on the Orbital with no desire for the worlds inside or outside of it. This represents a mirroring of the traumatised victim who constantly needs to repeat the traumatic event in order to comprehend the “un-comprehensible”. Symbols connected to the Orbital such as the constant road blockages allow the characters to reflect on their own, inner blockades and the need to find “diversions”. Returning to our protagonist’s background, we are informed that in Alison’s mother’s house outside Aldershot “the front room was the place where men had a party” and Alison “might as well have been a beast in the jungle”.52 Apparently, these men paid to have sex with her mother, beat her, and engaged in a multitude of criminal activities including sex with Alison– with her mother well in the know. By the time Al was ten, she had begun sleepwalking. She walked in on her mum, rolling on the sofa with a squaddie. The soldier raised his shaven head and roared. Her mother roared too, and her thin legs, blotched with fake tan, stood straight up into the air. Next day her mum got the squaddie to fix a bolt on the outside of Al’s bedroom door […] A few nights later she woke suddenly. It was very dark outside, as if they had been able to shut off the street lamp. A number of ill-formed, greasy faces were looking down on her. One of them seemed to be in Dixie, but she couldn't be sure. She closed her eyes. She felt herself lifted up. Then there was nothing, nothing that she remembers.53

Even though we are not told precisely what the men did to Alison, her lack of a clear memory immediately suggests a traumatic experience and sends our imagination on a search for answers. An omniscient narrator also recounts a significant afternoon when “Alison was eight years old, or maybe

51

Mantel, 96. Mantel, 97. 53 Mantel, 116. 52

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nine or ten”.54 It is mentioned that she “could see men going to and fro from the garages, carrying boxes”.55 When Alison approached the boxes “sick came up into her throat”.56 When told to look in the mirror and clean up her sweaty face, Alison did as she was told and looked at herself in the mirror. She didn´t recognise the person she saw there. It was a man, with a check jacket on a tie skew-whiff; a frowning man with a low hairline and a yellowish face. The she realised that the door was open, and that the men were piling in behind her […] She ran. For always, more or less, she was afraid of the men.57

Later, we find out that the uncanny image in the mirror is Alison’s spirit guide, Morris. As for the boxes, Alison tells Colette, “I don't know what was in those boxes, but sometimes I feel as if it´s me. Does that make sense to you?” To which Colette replies, lifting herself into the metanarrative in good postmodern fashion, “I think the big question is, will it make sense to our reader?”58 Alison has been introduced as a victim of childhood neglect and abuse who is now haunted by the gift to communicate with the dead. The reader may speculate about the significance of boxes, but likewise, traumatic experiences can be boxed up in an attempt to forget, and dead bodies are essentially packed up in a box, but at this point in the story, the reader does not know in any concrete terms what happened to Alison. Therefore, the remark produces an eerie sense of foreboding, as does Morris’ strange behaviour: Morris was sprawled in Al’s chair when she came into her dressing room. He had his dick out and his foreskin pushed back, and he´d been playing with her lipstick, winding it up to the top of the tube.59

Throughout the narration, Alison seems to be under the impression that her debased childhood is the reason she has to put up with such an undesirable spirit guide. However, it is intimated that there are gaps in our understanding of agency in this story:

54

Mantel, 108. Mantel, 108. 56 Mantel, 108. 57 Mantel, 109. 58 Mantel, 113. 59 Mantel, 30. 55

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When she was packing for their trip to Nottingham, Colette came in. Al was wearing just a T-shirt, bending over the case. For the first time, Colette saw the backs of her thighs. “Christ,” she said. “Did you do that?” “Me?” “Like Di? Did you cut yourself?” Alison turned back to her packing. She was perplexed. It had never occurred to her that she might have inflicted the damage herself.60

This play with perspectives on agency has the effect of estranging the reader from the protagonist. It is confirmed later that the occasionally painful scars on Alison´s body are the product of the men´s attempt to teach her a lesson. It is not until towards the end of our story that we find out where agency was actually – surprisingly – reversed: we eventually discover that Alison has already taken revenge on the men for repeatedly violating her physical and psychological integrity. Another ghost figure finally fills in Alison’s own and our gaps. She reveals that Alison cut off one of the men´s testicles for not paying up and that she also carved out another man’s eye with a spoon, presumably for leering at her. In addition, we are told that Alison is the biological daughter of a man who is described as the devil in the afterlife. The story leaves the reader entirely uncertain regarding Alison’s personality and what she might be capable of enacting. In sum, if Atonement was the story of a maturing protagonist halted by death, and Hot Milk was a description of a pubescent self, trying to face death by embracing the risk it poses to life, then we might view Beyond Black as a coming-of-age story transcending the boundary of death. A hellish childhood leads our protagonist down a path in life that forces her to relive her trauma and face her demons over and over. She patiently endures constant torture by her own sins–for some, a traditional idea of hell. Alison is a creature oscillating between life and death, outfitted with a fluid self that lacks definite boundaries. Instead of being clearly outlined, hers is an identity that bounces off the boundaries of others. From very early on, she has experienced herself mainly through being told what she is not allowed to do, or what others want and take from her as a matter of course. The people around her, including her mother, the men they lived with and the people at school, assumed a consistent, reliable identity from her, even before she had a chance to develop one. This explains why Alison is used to experiencing her boundaries as a result of them being overstepped. Colette, arguably an individual who is quite overbearing while honestly believing she is only protecting herself and others from harm, is a natural pairing for Alison. Fighting with her own body and its health needs, Alison has the following realisation: 60

Mantel, 158.

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Too much pizza. She felt a low, seeping fury, as if something inside her had broken and was leaking black blood into her mouth. I need to be with Colette, she thought. I need her for protection. I need to sit with her and watch the TV, whatever she’s watching will be all right. I want to be normal.61

Significantly, this entire scene follows a fairly frank phone conversation between Alison and her mother. The conversation ends courtesy of an evasive manoeuvre on her mother's part. One of the few consistencies in her mother´s behaviour is that she likes to avoid setting and respecting clear boundaries, thereby infuriating her daughter and leaving her lonely without a clear sense of self. For a period, while Alison and Colette are living together in a suburban community with its normative regulations, Morris disappears and Alison’s health improves: “After Morris left, their life was like a holiday. For the first time in years Alison went to bed knowing she wouldn’t be tossed out of it in the small hours”.62 Then, Alison’s sense of self becomes more stable, and Colette´s perception that Alison is strange and unable to change, as well as unwilling, hardens, causing significant strife between them and eventually derailing their partnership. Alison, on her part, gets comfortable with her mirror image and realises what function Colette serves for her. She viewed herself from all angles, but she couldn’t produce a better effect. I try my best with the diets, she said to herself; but I have to house so many people. My flesh is so capacious; I am a settlement, a place of safety, a bombproof shelter […] she could see the raised, silver lines of her scars […] In her imagination, someone said, “The tricky little bitch. We'll show her what a knife can do”. Cold sweat sprang out across her back. Colette was right, Colette is right, she has to take me in hand, she has to hate me, it is important someone hates me.63

And Colette does hate her with a passion. When she realises Alison will not be changed, she readily leaves her behind: Across the landing, Colette’s door opened. She stood in her bedtime T-shirt, very white and severe. “That’s it”, she said. “I don't intend to spend another night under this roof. How can I live with a woman who has rows with people I can’t see, and who stands outside my bedroom door shouting ‘What testicles?’ It's more than flesh and blood can stand”.64

61

Mantel, 213. Mantel, 253. 63 Mantel, 348. 64 Mantel, 413. 62

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Alison, however, must let her demons return in order to uncover and integrate her traumatic childhood experiences. The question that is purposely posed but only partially answered is, ironically, about purpose and meaning in life. The story questions ideas of consistency, morality, death and the afterlife. It illustrates how people are constantly at crosspurposes in life, how violence is handed down from generation to generation, and travels from one interaction to another. The use of language, rhetoric styles and means of communication (such as the voice recorder) in Beyond Black changes in its dynamic over time, triggered by events such as the appearance of the ghosts of Alison’s tormentors. The dispersed and fragmented voices in her testimonies lead to an epiphany for the reader, as they need to process and match the various bits and pieces in order to understand and uncover the many layers of trauma, from childhood abuse to her more vaguely insinuated revenge. This is substantiated by Whitehead, when she states that “trauma returns in disjointed fragments and the role of the listener is to […] make sense out of the broken fragments that emerge”.65

Concluding Thoughts The three protagonists have very different ways of dealing with life’s challenges. In Atonement, the narrator applies reason in her attempt to control and alter the reality of her actions and their consequences. In Hot Milk, the protagonist embraces her uncanny feelings and confronts decay and death in her search for a self-determined life. Finally, in Beyond Black, the main character, a psychic medium, obviously transcends the boundary of physical existence: “If the universe is a great mind, it may sometimes have its absences”. 66 This statement introduces the idea of informed sentience into our view of the world, or even a form of prescient cognition and of pre-cognition before the rational mind with its conscious processing enters the stage. Perhaps, this is the ushering in of the era of postpostmodernity–an era where narrators and narrations appear to focus on the individual microcosm of their protagonists, no longer on the deconstruction of grand narratives. Fragmentation and awareness of narration are the norm but meaning arises from a focus on individual experience within a naturally fragmented macrocosm of ideas and events. It is naturally fragmented, because the realisation has set in that rational thought and scientific methods are descriptive rather than exploratory in terms of existential questions: 65 66

Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, 34. Mantel, 451.

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Why are we here? What is life? What is death? What is consciousness? We have some answers but keep ending up with causal statements that are tautological: we are the way we are because this is our universe. The laws of physics are what they are because this is the physical reality of our universe. We have pushed the boundary of physical existence, death, further into the background and further into the future, but we have not transcended it, though we believe ourselves to be at the cusp of such a development. The convergence of prescience, sentience and cognition in a new representation of uncanniness seems timely and apt to make meaning of the complexities of the world in the early 21st century. Quite possibly, this is an era of borderline existence, of crashing up against an existential boundary that no longer appears completely absolute, it is crumbling. As individuals are abandoned by the certainty of the scientific, rational, modern era, but also by traditional, irrational values and structures such as family and organised religion, they are thrown back on themselves in their search for a clear identity and for answers to questions integral to existence. What will it take to become fully sentient, while integrating the entire body of knowledge and various types of knowledge humankind has produced so far? This is the question narrators seem to be asking in a dawning era of what one might consider sentient cognition. The following passage from Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel serves as a perfect illustration of this attitude: “I see and hear you, but how can I believe it, when it's against the laws of nature?” “Oh, those,”Al said. “Are you sure we have them anymore? I think it’s a bit of a free-for-all these days”.67 Clearly, it is the tension between sentience and reason, or our conception of the two as exclusive separate concepts, that keeps these characters occupied. In post-postmodern times, the two may converge and allow humankind to develop a new vision and new methods of enquiry. Jean Piaget suggested that a young human being overcomes egocentrism by developing awareness of other people´s perspectives and also through selfreflection.68 Post-postmodern society may overcome its egocentric focus on reason, efficiency, and feasibility to include that which still seems eerie and irrational. It would be an uncanny achievement.

67 68

Mantel, 153-154. Piaget, “The Theory of Stages in Cognitive Development.”

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Bibliography Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995. —. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. “Spectres of Marx.” New Left Review 205 (May/June 1994): 31-58. Dolar, Mladen. “‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny.” October 58 (Autumn 1991): 5-23. https://doi.org/10.2307/778795 Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock, 121-162. London: Penguin, 1919/2003. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. London: Routledge, 1966/2002. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2004. Jay, Martin. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” In Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster, 3-28. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988. Levy, Deborah. Hot Milk. London: Penguin, 2016. Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Mantel, Hilary. Beyond Black. London: Harper Collins, 2013. McEwan, Ian. Atonement. London: Vintage Penguin, 2016. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 2001. Morrison, Reed. A. “Trauma and Transformative Passage.” International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 31, no. 1 (2012): 38–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.24972/ijts.2012.31.1.38 Mortimer, Danielle. “Trauma and the Condition of the Postmodern Identity.” In Trauma Imprints: Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice, edited by Catherine Barrette, Bridget Haylock and Danielle Mortimer, 137-144. Oxford: Brill, 2011. Piaget, Jean. “The Theory of Stages in Cognitive Development.” In Measurement and Piaget, edited by Donald R. Green, Marguerite P. Ford, & George B. Flamer, 1-11. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. Pine II, B. Joseph and James H. Gilmore. Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.

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Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in The Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

PART III VISUAL LANGUAGE

CHAPTER NINE SEMANTIC AND CULTURAL INTERPRETATIONS OF JERZY CZERNIAWSKI’S THEATRE POSTERS: “WHATEVER WE TOUCH UPON IN THESE WORKS, WE ALWAYS GET LOST IN THE OBSCURITY OF SECRETS” ELWIRA BOLEK

Jerzy Czerniawski’s posters conjure up a number of sensations for the viewer; at first, they intrigue, next, as in the process of interpretation, the feeling shifts into intellectual uncertainty, then they begin to irritate. The contact with Czerniawski’s works causes us to “get lost in the obscurity of secrets”.1 We seem to notice the familiar graphic signs in the visual layer, and the verbal layer redirects us to the titles of the recognisable dramatic works, yet the incredible interaction of verbal and non-verbal signs causes a cognitive dissonance. When trying to discover the sense hidden in Czerniawski’s artistic theatre posters, this feeling experienced by the viewer is that of uncanniness, linked, as Sigmund Freud explains, with experiencing intellectual uncertainty. 2 The sensation of the uncanny is further articulated by Freud as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”.3 Czerniawski’s artistic history and approach to his creative practice can help in answering the question: why is his work covered in an aura of mystery? Czerniawski was born in Kwiatów in 1947. He studied in Wrocáaw at the PWSSP (The State Higher School of Fine Arts), graduating in 1973. He lived in Germany from 1981-1983, where he worked as a 1

Jacek Szelegejd, “Miejsce Ğni sowicie,” 89; my translation. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 124. In reference to Ernst Jentsch’s description of the uncanny. 3 Freud, 124. 2

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scenographer and poster artist. After his return to Poland, he distanced himself from the outside world and–as observed by his friend, Jacek Szelegejd–“he settled down inside himself”.4 Czerniawski, an erudite and well-read man, finds inspiration for the visual representations in his theatre posters from many sources including minutia stemming from stage directions. Through his painted images, which at times are seemingly disconnected from the main subject of the dramatic work, he mocks the viewer and at the same time objects to demands to depict subject matter in a poster that is simultaneously surprising, informing, and commercial in nature. When designing a poster, Czerniawski uses an individual technique and visual style while crossing the borders between genres of art. He creates an unusual painting surface, the thick texture of which imitates organic surfaces. Hence, the viewer’s attention is focused not only on the content of the image, but also on the manner in which it has been presented. In Czerniawski’s posters, the viewer is confronted by images that combine different types of matter, deformed parts of the human body, animals, and objects. Often, the depicted items are covered in fog or appear as if sprinkled with fine sand. The artist also utilises typical literary devices of the symbol and the metaphor. The use of the metaphor is particularly poignant in his work; according to the artist, the main advantage of this type of expression is its openness to an infinite number of interpretations.5 In the process of understanding a poster, images are read simultaneously with words in the form of the titles of the performances. As a result, the interpretations of artistic theatre posters are a process of negotiation of the meanings of multilayered metaphors, in which the verbal and graphic information is not communicated stemming from definitions, but rather from the connotations of verbal and graphic signs. When the viewer interprets multimodal messages, comprising of various sign systems, metaphorical links are made in their mind. The meaning of a theatre poster is therefore not a simple sum of particular signs, but a resultant of an integration of different parts of the message, which enter into multi-stage interactions, by the viewer. Metaphors that are both monosemiotic and transsemiotic (visual and text) are perceived: “The building up of metaphorical relations and, as a result, the creation of multilayered metaphors results in metaphorical discourse, in which the metaphorical meanings are reinterpreted because of they are entering into metaphorical relations with new elements of the message”.6 The conflation 4

Szelegejd, “Miejsce Ğni sowicie,” 92; my translation. Janina Fijaákowska, “Jerzy Czerniawski,” 94. 6 Ewa SzczĊsna, “Metafora transsemiotyczna,” 169; my translation. 5

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of well-known words and images into unusual and mysterious metaphors, open to interpretation, evokes a sense of intellectual uncertainty in the receivers of the information. The starting point for this analysis of Czerniawski’s work is an assumption that “recontextualised” linguistic methodologies can be used in the semantic and cultural interpretation of theatre posters. The conceptual blending theory presented by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner in The Way We Think is a useful tool in a thorough semantic and cultural interpretation of posters. Their theory describes mechanisms used in creating certain messages and the possibilities of differing receptions of such meanings. Agnieszka Libura explains that, according to Fauconnier and Turner, conceptual blends “are created as a result of merging the conceptual framework of two (or more) mental spaces into a new entity: the effect of such integration is the creation of a new meaning which was not present in any of the original spaces”.7 An in-depth dissection of the visual tropes used in Czerniawski’s unique posters is only possible as read in relation to the numerous historical and cultural contexts; taking into consideration the associations of textual and visual signs that are unique for a given linguistic and cultural community with a common set of values. The rich symbolism and semantics of the colours used are also recognised as part of this visual language. In interpreting representative examples, it is clear that the meaning of artistic theatre posters can be found only by recognising their blended structure, a product of integration of visual and textual components. The semantic and cultural interpretations of these posters and the coexistence of elements creates a unique conceptual framework for the recipient of the message. The communicated content, merged into a single interpretation of a poster, is comprised of the following elements: objectoriented, visual and textual. These object-oriented elements comprise of the title of the advertised play, the name of the playwright, the venue, the name of the poster’s author, and the year of creation. The visual elements include graphic signs and symbols, form and colour. Some of the textual signs might become independent of the object they refer to, in the context of the advertised theatrical play, and the element may begin to play on meanings. When words do not point to the designate, but rather create associations, they enter the textual domain. For example, the title may simply refer to the text of the play or its particular performance, but it might also create connotations through the actual words used. We encounter such a situation when interpreting the meaning of the 7

Libura, Amalgamaty kognitywne w sztuce, 18; my translation.

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poster for PamiĊtnik wariata [The Diary of a Madman] (fig. 9-1). The visual elements are comprised of an image of a human head, some parts of which (eyes, nose, mouth, chin) are twisted 90°. This measure corresponds with the Polish word wariat (translated as “madman”), as derived from the Latin word variatus, meaning “twisted”. The deformed face illustrated in the poster is illuminated by warm light coming from the left side, as if the light’s source is that of a lamp, which the “madman” uses to write his diary. Nikolai Gogol’s play explores the subject of dignity and keeping “one’s face” in a world where the man is not valued, but rather his social standing. In this sense, a world without lies can only be seen by a crazy person. The madman might be a twisted person, someone who watches from a different perspective or from the sideline, yet at the same time he is a genuine person, someone “with a face”. Madness is expressed here as a sign of knowledge, and of perceiving the world from a different point of view. An abnormally deformed face is also a visual motif in Czerniawski’s poster for Ibsen’s Wróg ludu [An Enemy of the People] (fig. 9-2). We can only see part of the face, with its numerous and clearly marked wrinkles, eyes drawn out of proportion and finger touching the forehead. Through an analysis of the texture and the light in Czerniawski’s works, one can see how his painterly technique are often the key to interpretation. The face of the figure depicted has thick skin. The viewer’s interpretation connects the image to the definition of phrases embedded in the language; thick-skinned, meaning “not delicate, not subtle, uncouth, coarse, deprived of feelings” and armour as “a thick outer layer”, and metaphorically, as “a layer that does not allow for the reception of stimuli”. These associations are motivated by the meaning of the phrase enemy of the people as “a person who is an adversary of the general public”, as well as suggesting connotations of “evil”, “ruthlessness”, and being “deprived of human feelings”.8 Although the viewer easily perceives a human face, a visual object often portrayed in art, its depiction–through the composition of the poster–presents just a fragment of the face, which lends a message of an aura of mystery. As the viewer observes something familiar, but, at the same time, foreign, they have the sense of something uncanny. Does the inclusion of a new interpretive thread–the layer of the drama text–also correspond with what the viewer sees on the poster?In Ibsen’s play, the character in the title, An Enemy of the People, is Doctor Thomas Stockmann. He discovers that the local water, which is the basis of therapy in the local hydropathic institution, is polluted and harms, rather than helps, the patients. The doctor’s discovery, contrary to his expectation, is not welcomed by the townspeople, who are afraid of losing their jobs in the 8

My definitions.

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institution and the income from hosting patients. The local community (lead by the authorities) is against distributing the information about the noxious substances, however, Stockmann does not intend to conceal his findings. Despite being an honest person, he is called an enemy of the people, because he has not surrendered to the hypocritical consistent majority. Therefore, two interpretations of Czerniawski’s poster are possible in the context of knowing (or not knowing) the content of the play. When we take into consideration the visual element and the play on words used in the title only, the visual and the textual layer are in harmony. In this case, an enemy of the people is an evil person, a ruthless one, one whose sinister stare has been visualised. When the content of Ibsen’s play is taken into account, the viewer’s perspective changes. In the play, the enemy of the people is a man who opposes the hypocritical community, who believes in the ideals of truth and a clear conscience, and who values honesty more than material goods. At this point, it is worth noting that the phrase “the people” is not randomly used in the title. In addition to its basic primary meaning of “a body of persons, a crowd”, a series of negative connotations is triggered, such as a “rabble” or “mob”. The enemy of the people is a dissenter whose body is covered by armour acting as a layer to protect him from the temptation to enter a clique of liars, which would grant him financial benefit. Although the posters for Gra sáów [A Dream Play] and Do Damaszku [To Damascus] are composed of very different visual elements, the plays share themes and can be interpreted together (fig. 9-3 and fig. 9-4). The posters both represent August Strindberg’s oneiric plays, and vex the viewer with similar subjects: watching, perception, the change of perception, curiosity, illusion, falsehood. Once again, the viewer is looking at something very familiar, depicted in such a way that it evokes the feeling of uncanny. In the visual layer of the poster for A Dream Play, the viewer’s attention is caught by a big, blue eye watching through a keyhole. The voyeur behind the eye does not know that on the other side of the wooden door there is a key hanging from a hook. This is not a typical key in either appearance or function. It is a spike, which, if put in the keyhole, could pierce the voyeur’s eye. The metaphor is therefore visualised as a “keyspike”. The object of a key, used for unlocking, is deprived of its definitional function, but also of the connotation of “solving”. Instead, the functions of inflicting pain, hurting and injuring are inherent in this key’s form. Such an image might be motivated by the content of the play. In this case, the subject of A Dream Play is a dream, understood as a state in which a human is spying on himself, his own problems, and questions. For Strindberg, a dream “is a type of a commentary on life, usually even more painful than

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life itself”. 9 A multi-layered metaphor comprised of two overlapping images/themes, a “key-spike” and a painful dream, become a commentary on life. The key, deprived of the connotation of “solving”, and the dream understood not as state of resting, but as a time of pain and continuous suffering, are both connected by the quality of danger. Similarly to Czerniawski’s imagery in A Dream Play, the poster for Strindberg’s earlier oneiric play, a trilogy entitled To Damascus, employs visual metaphor motivated by the play’s themes. The design technique of interpenetrating and overlapping images, by layering image and text, is also used in conjunction with the title of this play. In the second part of Strindberg’s trilogy, when the character of the Stranger learns that he has fallen victim to fraud, “a real chaos of decorations–landscapes, palaces, rooms–behind which characters and furniture disappear, is lowered and moved” within the scene.10 In the poster, the image of a road surrounded by a double row of trees is depicted, which at the same time suggests a tree crown. These two elements of the visual metaphor, road and tree, interpenetrate and overlap creating an optical illusion. These visual components also interact with the textual element–the title. Together, the visual image and text can be read as “the road to Damascus”. To Damascus is also a play about conversion: the protagonist–the Stranger–is in search of his own transformation in each part of the trilogy. In this play Strindberg makes Biblical references to The Acts of the Apostles, which show the transformation of the Christian-prosecuting Saul into the faithful Paul on the road to Damascus, as described in the poster. There is, however, an important difference between Strindberg’s protagonist and Saint Paul as doubts constantly return to the Stranger. The overlapping of textual and visual signs creates a number of linguistic associations, references and intertextual references, as solidified in the conceptual metaphor of human life as a road. This interpretation is articulated by Kazimierz OĪóg: “come into this world, walk through life, come of age, enter a phase in life, go through a lot in life, the walk of life, the end of one’s earthly journey”.11 The motif of the road is present as a metaphor of human life and, all throughout the play, as a road to nowhere, a road without a destination, an anti-road. The anti-road depicted in the visual domain acts as a metaphor of those who are seeking, undirected and wandering, not surrendering to

9

Lech Sokóá, “WstĊp,” 83; my translation. August Strindberg, as quoted in Sokóá, “WstĊp,” 80; my translation. 11 OĪóg, “Metafora Īycia ludzkiego jako drogi – aspekty jĊzykowe i kulturowe,” 1725; my translation. 10

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rational thought.12 This human condition mirrors Strindberg’s Stranger. The visualised phenomenon is well known–it is a road. However, its depiction– a road to nowhere–evokes a feeling of mystery, uneasiness and fear. For the viewer, Czerniawski’s poster, To Damascus, is again an experience of uncanny. Two of Czerniawski’s posters for Polish drama, Wyszedá z domu [He Left the House] 13 and Wyspa róĪ [The Island of Roses] use similar visual references and will be discussed together (fig. 9-5 and fig. 9-6). The connecting element here is not the writer, the stage and film version of which is advertised by the posters, but the similarity of the visual language.14 By exploring the context of the He Left the House poster, the impact of the unpublished graphic work for the poster of The Island of Roses can also be analysed. In the visual layer of the poster for He Left the House, we see a part of a man’s head, in which the face is replaced with stairs. Three devices characteristic in literature, metonymy, metaphor, and symbol, are evident in use in the image. The face/head is a metonymy of a human figure (cf. in language, charged $50 a head = charged $50 per person). The visual metaphor replacing the face with stairs, creating face-stairs, could be interpreted in a wide range of meaning, and many symbols connected with stairs are relevant to the play’s themes. Knowledge of the content of Tadeusz RóĪewicz’s play, further focuses these interpretations. He Left the House tells the story of Henryk, a father who left his house one day and did not return from work at the usual time. It eventuates that Henryk slipped on a banana peel, fell down, and lost his memory: Middle-class habits, stereotypical judgments, everything that has been defining the functioning of the family thus far becomes forgotten, null and void in a way. The man suffering from amnesia is happy because he is unaware of the burden of the bleakness of his previous existence.15

12

Piotr Kowalski, Leksykon – znaki Ğwiata: omen, przesąd, znaczenie, 90; my translation; Anna Chudzik, “Droga jako metafora jĊzykowa,” 35; my translation. 13 This poster uses the German translation of the play’s title, Er gind aus dem Hause von Tadeusz RóĪewicz, however, I shall interpret the design intent with reference to the symbols and connotations characteristic of Polish verbal and non-verbal signs. I refer to another poster by Czerniawski that is identical with the published version in terms of his graphic concept, and has been provided with a Polish title. 14 He Left the House is a play by Tadeusz RóĪewicz, while The Island of Roses is not a theatrical piece, but a television screenplay by Sáawomir MroĪek. 15 Ninateka, “Wyszedá z domu”; my translation.

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In the context of the play, mental images are triggered in the viewer’s mind, and in the process of interpreting the face-stairs metaphor, stereotypical notions of the face as the part of the body, externalise not only emotions, but also individual features of character. Mental images are at the same time a reflection of what has been preserved through language, in phrases such as, to lose face, to keep face, faceless. One can say that Henryk has literally kept face (understood as his personality), which he had lost along with his memory, and now he is faceless–anonymous. The face in Czerniawski’s image has been replaced with stairs, which in this particular message might connote “exit”, “entrance”, or “movement”, but also “problems”, and “difficulties”. Zaczynają siĊ schody is a Polish idiom meaning “things are beginning to get difficult”, “problems appear”, or “the situation is getting difficult”. (The phrase is literally translated as the stairs begin here.) This interpretation of the visual metaphor supports the play’s message exploring the hardships of finding one’s identity and individuality. The staircase image in the poster for The Island of Roses bears a striking resemblance to that in He Left the House. The primary difference is that the shape of the human head is not built out of organic matter, but out of a stone wall. The process of layering the subject of the visual metaphor is apparent; face-stairs, face-wall, stone face, stone stairs. This image of Czerniawski’s is far more compelling due to the unfamiliarity of the texture of the skin of the face. This difference creates anxiety in the viewer and results in a feeling of intellectual uncertainty and uncanny affect. The narrative motivation for using the same visual metaphor face-stairs, when analysing the content of Sáawomir MroĪek’s film screenplay for The Island of Roses, is, however, a challenge to find. The screenplay follows the characters, Old Man, Man, and Boy, the last members of the Rosicrucian Order, and Alien, a woman who suddenly appears on the deserted island. Therefore, the interpretation of the poster’s imagery is open ended; it is seemingly not supported by the textual elements, either through the title or the story’s content. The references in this design are not to story, but to structure; Czerniawski’s poster image and MroĪek’s story are both multi-layered, ambiguous, and metaphorical. It is likely that Czerniawski’s second use of the face-stairs metaphor is indicative of his personal philosophies. He once confided in his friend, Szelegejd, that he was tired of looking for links and metatextual motivations and he only wants to surprise himself with his projects.16 This insight demonstrates that the motivation for his visual depiction may be to bring applied art to the level of uninhibited artistic creative work. Perhaps the reason the poster was never published was that it constitutes an 16

As discussed in my conversation with Szelegejd in 2016.

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extremely personal artistic reflection on the subject of the film, rather than one of general interpretation. It could be argued that Jerzy Czerniawski’s theatre posters do not necessarily provide the viewer with a pleasant aesthetic experience. This effect may be due both to colour choice, as images are often grey and monochromatic, and because visualised objects are frequently deformed, such as parts of a human face or other elements from nature, seemingly suspended in the void. Moreover, the layering of visual metaphors, not always possible to interpret even when utilising numerous historical and cultural contexts, creates a feeling of intellectual uncertainty. However, Czerniawski’s use of devices characteristic of literature – the metonymy, the metaphor, or the symbol–cause the surprised, intrigued, or even irritated viewer, who is lost in the obscurity of secrets, to remain tempted to discover the uncanny meanings behind the ambiguous messages.

Bibliography Chudzik, Anna. “Droga jako metafora jĊzykowa.” In Droga w jĊzyku i kulturze. Analizy antropologiczne, edited by Jan Adamowski and Katarzyna Smyk, 27-36. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 2011. Fijaákowska, Janina. “Jerzy Czerniawski.” Creation, no. 20 (1994): 94-105. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock, 121-162. London: Penguin, 1919/2003. Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Kowalski, Piotr. Leksykon – znaki Ğwiata: omen, przesąd, znaczenie. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Naukowe PWN, 1998. Libura, Agnieszka. Amalgamaty kognitywne w sztuce. Kraków: Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych Universitas, 2007. Ninateka. “Wyszedá z domu.” Accessed February 8, 2017. https://ninateka.pl/ OĪóg, Kazimierz. “Metafora Īycia ludzkiego jako drogi – aspekty jĊzykowe i kulturowe.” In Droga w jĊzyku i kulturze. Analizy antropologiczne, edited by Jan Adamowski and Katarzyna Smyk, 17-25. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 2011. Sokóá, Lech. Introduction to A Selection of Dramas (Wybór dramatów), by August Strindberg, translated by Zygmunt àanowski and edited by Lech Sokóá. Wrocáaw: Zakáad Narodowy im. OssoliĔskich – Wydawnictwo, 1977.

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SzczĊsna, Ewa. “Metafora transsemiotyczna.” PamiĊtnik Literacki, no. 95/2 (2004): 167-177. Szelegejd, Jacek. “Miejsce Ğni sowicie.” Odra, no. 6 (1998): 84-92. Tokarski, Ryszard. ĝwiaty za sáowami. [Worlds behind words]. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 2013.

Figure 9-1. Jerzy Czerniawski, PamiĊtnik wariata [Diary of a Madman], theatre poster, 1974.

Figure 9-2. Jerzy Czerniawski, Wróg ludu [An Enemy of the People], theatre poster, 1979.

Figure 9-3. Jerzy Czerniawski, Gra sáów [A Dream Play], theatre poster, 1978.

Figure 9-4. Jerzy Czerniawski, Do Damaszku [To Damascus], theatre poster (unpublished), 1992.

Figure 9-5. Jerzy Czerniawski, Wyszedá z domu [He Left the House], theatre poster, 1978.

Figure 9-6. Jerzy Czerniawski, Wyspa róĪ [The Island of Roses], theatre poster (unpublished), 1992.

Figure 10-1: Amélie discovers the tin box. Screenshot from Amélie (Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001).

Figure 10-2: Bretodeau rediscovers his tin box. Screenshot from Amélie (Dir. JeanPierre Jeunet, 2001).

Figure 10-3: Amélie transforms into water. Screenshot from Amélie (Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001).

Figure 10-4: Goldfish rehomed to the river. Screenshot from Amélie (Dir. JeanPierre Jeunet, 2001).

Figure 10-5: Amélie and Nino attempt at convergence. Screenshot from Amélie (Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001).

Figure 10-6: Amélie unites with Nino. Screenshot from Amélie (Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001).

CHAPTER TEN THE UNCANNY OBJECT IN MAGICAL REALIST CINEMA: JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET’S AMÉLIE SARAH STOLLMAN

In experiencing the banal alongside the extraordinary in life, magical or uncanny occurrences are experienced but not always recognised. Many may recall experiencing the phenomenon of dust floating through the air catching light rays with the appearance of glitter, seeming magical and unreal. The sight of this phenomenon subconsciously triggers otherworldly feelings, sometimes from childhood. Sigmund Freud defines the uncanny, in German unheimlich, meaning unhomely, as what was once familiar that, after a period of repression, re-emerges as something unfamiliar or magical. He describes an uncanny effect as one that blurs the border between fantasy and reality.1 This explanation also well describes the magical in film fiction that is portrayed in the mode of magical realism. In all artistic mediums of storytelling, magical realism can be defined as an approach to narrative that delves into questions of identity through the exploration of the magical, parallel, and indivisible to the everyday realities of life. 2 These stories employ an authentic context as a base, such as place, time or culture, and intertwine an irreducible magic, typically propelling the protagonist’s journey in a changed direction. The exploration of the preternatural world indivisible from the everyday realities of life is a characteristic that indicates the complex mode of magical realist storytelling. Filmic magical realism, as opposed to that in visual art and literature, enables a narrative to utilise both 1

Freud, “The Uncanny.” This definition of magical realism, and its application to film fiction is explored further in my PhD Dissertation. See Stollman, “Magical Props: The Cinematic Object and Narrative Magic in Poetic Realist, Surrealist and Magical Realist Film.” 2

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visual and aural means to create an uncanny effect. Due to this characteristic, the medium coaxes objects to drive this uncanny affect autonomously within a work. Such magical props possess uncanny properties that prompt both character and plot. Significant cinematic objects often motivate magic, and their uncanny properties contribute to the progression of a magical realist story. Such objects are a reoccurring agential element of magical realist cinematic stories including, for instance, the box of nostalgic souvenirs in Amélie (2001), which will be explored in this paper, Ophelia’s book in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and the small door with crystal knob in Being John Malkovich (2000). These nostalgic and tactile objects liberate the familiar, fulfilling the character’s fundamental need for a known and secure starting point. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris posit “that magical realism is a mode suited to exploring–and transgressing–boundaries”. 3 Such movements across lines of demarcation, as a common characteristic in both magical realism and the uncanny, are examined here alongside the significance of the object in formulating these cinematic narratives. These ideas are explored here through an analysis of uncanny objects operating in the magical realist feature film, Amélie, directed by French filmmaker JeanPierre Jeunet. The fundamental need in these stories for a familiar base to seize and hold onto, in order to accept other worldly occurrences, demonstrates the mode’s affiliation with the uncanny. This requirement of magical realism aligns with Nicholas Royle’s description of the uncanny as “not simply an experience of strangeness or alienation. More specifically, it is a peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar”.4 He explains that this dual nature occurs “with a sense of ourselves as double, split, at odds with ourselves”.5 Royle’s interpretation of the experience of the uncanny is one that generates a feeling that may be physically queasy, uneasy, unsteady, but also euphoric. This sensation is described by Dylan Trigg as “not so much a nostalgia for a given object in the world […] but the roles these things play in my conception of who I am”.6 Similarly, this experience is typical of filmic magical realism as the impact of uncanny effects within an exploration of identity formation is a significant characteristic of the mode. The operation of a remembered sense of self is in part responsible for the significant impact of the visual representation of objects through 3

Parkinson Zamora and Faris, “Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s,” 5. 4 Royle, The Uncanny, 1. 5 Royle, 6. 6 Trigg, Memory of Place, 186.

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sensorial effects. The recollection of memories and nostalgic feelings can be triggered by the tactile qualities of texturally explicated objects. When the viewer encounters an object on screen, personal stories or sensations may be recalled, thereby enabling these things to become dynamic devices in storytelling. This effect is prompted by the visual image being linked to memories of a time, a place, a person, a history. The emotional impact of objects is considered by Sara Ahmed explaining that “[t]o experience an object as being affective or sensational is to be directed not only toward an object, but to ‘whatever’ is around that object, which includes what is behind the object, the conditions of its arrival”.7 The objects to which she refers are those in a lived life, not a narrative one, however, the ideas are transferrable, as the conditions within a film’s mise-en-scène magnify or prioritise things within a scene. Furthermore, the story behind an object, and its relation to characters and other props, also provides information that contribute to the sensations it emits. In magical realist cinema, the object is utilised to convey this information as a means to generate or signpost magic, while utilised in the narrative to suggest an uncanny sensation. Theoretical writing exploring magical realism as a mode of cinema is scarce, therefore, any study of magical realist film fiction typically also considers the extensive analysis of this mode in literature and the slim output examining magical realism in visual art. Franz Roh’s essay on the post-expressionist period of visual art is generally considered the first recorded use of the term magical realism.8 This mode in visual art is distinct from that of both literature and cinema, as extreme magic does not often appear to exist in the content of the work; the emphasis is on delineating the real and the work’s muted disturbed affect. The magic is typically more ethereal and atmospheric and, therefore, subtle, rather than emanating from time shifts or magical occurrences, for instance. The magic in the paintings Roh describes is understated in comparison with that in literature, which sometimes emphasises the magical facet at the expense of the realism. According to Lois Parkinson Zamora, Roh articulates “a correlation between the verisimilitude of the visual image and its magical quotient […] Roh’s ‘other side’ is impelled by the strangeness in plain sight”. 9 For example, in Government Bureau, a painting by George Tooker, a scene of bureaucratic reality reveals a detailed portrayal of objects including clothing, lighting fixtures, desks and people, yet the faces behind the desks are obfuscated, therefore creating an uneasy and uncanny feeling. 10 The 7

Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 33. Roh, “Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism.” 9 Parkinson Zamora, “Swords and Silver Rings,” 33. 10 Tooker, Government Bureau, 1956. 8

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painting prompts the viewer to question what they are actually seeing, for instance, what is real and what is not, yet the real and unreal exist in parallel. The effect of being faced with two simultaneous realities, in this case, is one of discomfort as the naturalism of the scene may link to a viewer’s memory of bureaucratic experience, and the hollow feeling of repeated anonymity may recall memories of anxiety. The very elements that define magical realism in a painting such as clarity in texture, colour, the evocative nature of objects and their juxtaposition to other objects and figures, portray a visually subtle magic. These traits, when read in literature, may seem more aligned with realism, seeming to reveal little or no magic. This differing focus across mediums of magical realism suggests that visual art prioritises the real, and literature, in general, centres on the magical. The operation of narrative magic in magical realist literature is described by Faris: [f]irst, the text contains an “irreducible element” of magic; second, the descriptions in magical realism detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world; third, the reader may experience some unsettling doubts in the effort to reconcile two contradictory understandings of events; fourth, the narrative merges different realms; and, finally, magical realism disturbs received ideas about time, space, and identity.11

As in visual art, literature in this mode grounds the narrative in an environment of reality, but unlike a magical realist painting, a novel typically transforms reality into a more overtly magical, uncanny, or unreal event. Speaking from a Latin American literary perspective, Luis Leal describes these stories as portraying extraordinary elements in the everyday that “seize the mystery that breathes behind things”. 12 The magic is, therefore, recognised as being encompassed within the real and not peripherally fastened to a palpable materiality. In a similar manner to this notion of the magical element, the uncanny cannot necessarily be extracted from the real within its effective operation. In magical realist literature, rich language describes highly detailed objects and settings that allow magic to emerge, and the reliance on written description to convey these effects seems to motivate a more extreme version of magic than in visual art. Cinematically, the concurrent portrayal of the real and the magical prioritises the emphasis of each extreme, sitting across a sliding scale in a range of film fiction. The affect emerging from an event or moment, that impacts characters and the viewer, can extend from the subtle examples of 11 12

Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 7. Leal, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature,” 123.

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visual art to some of the often more fantastical examples in literature. As a visual medium, cinema provides a sensorial canvas to create a diversity in the level of intensity of the uncanny, a quality evident in film fiction described as horror, fantastical, surreal and also magical realist. In arguably the first significant book on magical realism in film fiction, Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe,13Aga Skrodzka explains that painters in this mode created work “with a cool and meticulous photographic image of reality focused on the commonplace, the most familiar elements of everyday life, which, paradoxically in the creative process became imbued with mystery and Freudian uncanniness”.14 This shared fundamental need for a familiar base to grasp onto in these stories exposes the significance of the effect of the uncanny in magical realism. In both Freud’s essay and an earlier essay on the uncanny by Ernst Jentsch, the concept is explored through examples both of life experience and of narrative. Crucially, Jentsch asks “how the psychical conditions must be constituted so that the ‘uncanny’ sensation emerges”.15 An investigation of this question through thematic elements of Amélie reveal that the title character’s psychological state of repression and aloneness, which instigates her journey of transformation, in part stimulates the uncanny occurrences in the film’s narrative. As can be applied to the modal description of magical realism, Freud explains “that an uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary”.16 This observation suggests that some thing or sensation that was once familiar or homely, now, after a period of repression, re-emerges as something magical, eerie, disturbing or feared. The narrative operation of the uncanny in cinema is similarly described by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein who posits that in a film’s self-sufficient structure formed by a paradoxical overlapping of normality and strangeness is that the strange needs to have become strange by itself. To be uncanny is a state of Being and not one of construction. Disautomatization in the uncanny is “self-disautomatization”.17

This notion, when applied to the properties of an object, as part of normality, may also engender an uncanny and agential quality. This type of object 13 Since the original date of this paper’s presentation and writing, Felicity Gee has published Magic Realism, World Cinema, and the Avant-Garde (2021). This paper references her PhD Dissertation (2013). 14 Skrodzka, Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe, 19-20. 15 Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” 3. 16 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 150. 17 Botz-Bornstein, Films and Dreams, 120.

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functions not only a generic practical prop, but also as a specific, discrete and tangible thing. These are objects that may exist, outside of the narrative, for an individual or community at a pivotal time in their development, whether positive or negative. Their impact may be triggered by the sensorial cinematic portrayal of their material characteristics or their placement within a sequence’s mise-en-scène. In his foundational essay, “On Magic Realism in Film”, Fredric Jameson observes that in magical realism, there exists an “absence and presence” of the simultaneous articulation of thematic ideas based in reality and the intense visual portrayal of experience that presents a magicality of such a narrative.18 The definition articulated at the start of this paper describing magical realism as a narratively layered mode of storytelling that seamlessly embeds magic into the everyday realities of life, reflects Jameson’s theory. The seemingly oxymoronic phraseology, “magical realism”, mirrors the diametric concept of the uncanny explored in both Freud’s and Jentsch’s essays. Though many theorists do refer to the mode’s name as an oxymoron, it is clear that its very nature embraces two extreme narrative approaches, weaving them together, as with the uncanny, allowing the unreal to be experienced almost imperceivably within the real. Magical realist stories typically explore a protagonist’s questioning of identity and human purpose by simultaneously relating their journey to a real corporeal experience and a magical unknown. In all mediums of storytelling, magical realism utilises an authentic context as a basis for the narrative, for instance, place, time or character, and intertwines within that reality an irreducible magic that typically functions to suggest an altered direction in a protagonist’s journey. An anchor of familiarity within the real enables the narrative to introduce inexplicable magical events that appear to occur seamlessly. Jameson suggests that “the way in which narrative elements can be intensified and marked from within by an absent cause undetectable empirically but read off their sheerest formal properties” exposes the operation of the uncanny within magical realist film. 19 His analysis of cinematic magical realism reveals thematic moments of socioeconomic transitions and the differing but parallel perceptions of space and physical reality. Jameson describes the mode through an exploration of character’s journeys in three films 20 that “enjoin a visual spell, an

18

Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film,” 209. Jameson, 198. 20 The films analysed by Jameson are Fever (1981), directed by Agnieszka Holland; La Casa de Agua (1984), directed by Jacobo Penzo; and Condores no entierran todos los dias (1984), directed by Francisco Norden. 19

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enthrallment to the image in its present of time”.21 Each primary character that he examines experiences a magical moment prompted by the activation of an object’s effect through its qualities or juxtaposition to other objects and characters in the film’s mise-en-scène. Similar events occur in Amélie, the analysis of which further illustrates these concepts. Critical objects typically motivate magic by holding uncanny properties that are key to the progression of a magical realist story. These often nostalgic and richly tactile objects liberate the familiar, fulfilling the character’s fundamental need to base themselves in a known starting point. In Tzvetan Todorov’s exploration of the narrative mode of the fantastic, he draws a distinction that “in the uncanny […] we refer the inexplicable to known facts, to a previous experience, and thereby to the past”. 22 For instance, Katherine Fowkes applies Freud’s theory of the uncanny to The Wizard of Oz (1939), directed by Victor Fleming suggesting that the film creates “a feeling of estrangement, a contradictory feeling of being simultaneously home/not home, a paradox at the heart of this film”.23 This characteristic of the uncanny is also present in Amélie, a story of a woman who never learned to socialise comfortably and feels lost in her purpose in life; her mother died when she was a young child, while her father sequestered her from regular interaction, concerned for her health. Amélie begins with rapid narration and images outlining historical markers in Amélie’s life and the personality preferences of her mother, father and herself, hence establishing factual details within the story world. In the dramatically narrated profile of Amélie, a few factors expressing the vacuum in her life in experiencing intimacy, as well as her love of tactile sensations, are revealed. The character’s memories and sensorial experiences are presented immediately to establish the personal base of her story. Significantly, her father never gave her hugs or reassuring physical contact, and a narrated sequence reveals the consequences: Amélie is six years old. Like all little girls, she would like her father to take her in his arms from time to time. But the only time he touches her is during her monthly physical check-up. Overwhelmed by this exceptional moment, the little girl’s heart races a mile a minute. Her father, therefore, is convinced she suffers from a heart condition.24

21

Jameson, 303. Todorov, The Fantastic, 42. 23 Fowkes, The Fantasy Film, 56. 24 Laurent and Jeunet, Amélie, 4. 22

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This assumption leads Amélie’s father to determine she is too ill to attend school and thus is tutored alone by her mother. Her father’s repression of the gesture of tactile familial love has the follow-on effect of obstructing Amélie from developing friends, but also potentially contributes to her lifelong attraction towards textural satisfaction, such as the sensation of putting her hand in a barrel of dried beans. Her silent urge for love is locked in her intimate memories, which harbour her outward interaction with reality. The narrative link between the tactile and visual qualities of objects as expressed in cinematic stories is significant in the operative connection of memory to nostalgia as triggered by texturally explicated objects. The tactile objects on screen may trigger a recollection of personal stories or sensations; thereby enabling objects to become dynamic devices in film fiction. A visual image may be associated with the memory of a time, a place, a person, a history. Although the viewer may or may not be able to relate their own histories to that of the character and film narrative, the qualities of a nostalgic object still garners an ability to recall memories through similarly experienced sensorial tactile sensations. As discussed, magical realism relies on an outline of the past on which to hinge current events and uncanny sensations. Laura U. Marks explores the operation of sensorial communication in film by applying the concept of a haptic experience to that of a filmic visuality. According to Marks, “haptic visuality inspires an acute awareness that the thing seen evades vision and must be approached through other senses—which are not literally available in cinema”. 25 In exploring the element of tactile articulation within film fiction, she identifies the critical characteristic of nostalgia. Marks explains that the evidence of this quality in the experience of recollection “need not mean an immobilizing longing for a lost past: it can also mean the ability of past experiences to transform the present”. 26 This effect is attained in part through the articulation of nostalgia through the object’s sensorial characteristics. These sensations are utilised in magical realist films to convey an uncanny affect, through objects, to both character and viewer. In early reviews, Amélie was criticised in the film’s portrayal of Paris as a sanitised, generic version of itself that glamourised the city.27 This Paris is a personal, almost fairy-tale version that, although exteriors and some interiors were filmed on location, conveys a mixed-up and otherworldly version of the city. Everything looks familiar, but the geography is not 25

Marks, The Skin of the Film, 191. Marks, 201. 27 Ezra, “The Death of an Icon: Amélie,” 86. According to Ezra, Serge Kaganski, reviewer and editor, accused Jeunet of presenting a right-wing centric view of Paris. 26

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always clear, reflecting Amélie’s state of mind. The portrayal of a real place that displays a limited representation of a city’s characteristics creates an uncanny effect through its sensation of being familiar and also unfamiliar. This approach operates similarly, however for differing narrative purpose, to Jacque Tati’s portrayal of Paris in his film, Playtime (1967), which constructs a view of the city that exposes the role and effects of modernism in its development. Tati’s concentrated representation of Paris presents only the new, modern Paris, with historical buildings revealed only as reflections in their glass. The edited Paris of Amélie, a very distinctive interpretation of the city, allows Jeunet, in his words, to “re-create the atmosphere of his childhood: ‘I was born in 1953 and I have retained some nostalgia for the France of my childhood, or rather for its images, its fashion, and its objects’”.28 Perhaps by setting this story in a real city, but portraying details in a manner that are not quite historically correct for the present day of the narrative, this technique achieves two sensations. One result is to cause the audience to experience disorientation, as affects Amélie, along her journey; a similar discomfort can also be felt in Playtime. The second impact mirrors an operation of nostalgia, as a recollection of memories, not as they were, but as one thinks they were. The occurrence of these alterations of perception reflect Vivian Sobchack’s notion that [w]ithout either an abstract or local standard of measure, worldly space and the objects within it lose their meaning and become hermeneutically ambiguous, indeterminate, and disorienting. Furthermore, one begins to doubt one’s own body.29

When disorientation occurs, a person can feel lost in their body, lost in their environment, or lost in their purpose. Through nostalgia, memories are actively edited, leaving bad or dull recollections aside and remembering, often incorrectly, events, instances and objects that are thought to be developmentally pivotal. As an adult, Amélie lives in solitude until one moment, as chronicled by the narrator, that alters the direction of her life. Prompted by her shocked reaction to a television report of the actual moment of Princess Diana’s death, a series of mundane occurrences allow Amélie to find a treasure that gives her life purpose. By situating her at home, listening to an authentic broadcast on television, this uncanny moment emerges seamlessly from the mundane sequence showing Amélie getting ready for the day. The ability to accept the uncanny as a facet of the real functions, as Hélène Cixous 28 29

Vincendeau, “Café Society,” 23. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 18.

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explains, because “[t]he better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it”.30 Therefore, the news report in Amélie signals a historical reality in the narrative. The following sensory experience, both visual and auditory, launch the uncanny events that prompt Amélie to choose a new path in her approach to life, through this seemingly quotidian moment. The motion of each physical movement causes the next to occur, echoing the cause-and-effect theme within the film’s background narration and each step of Amélie’s journey. Each step of this critical narrative event is accompanied by a sound indicating the material of the object, which forms part of a chain of events, likening the sequence to a “Rube Goldberg” effect. When Amélie becomes riveted by the news report, she is holding the hard round top of a perfume bottle, which she drops onto the hard tile floor; it rolls across and hits a base tile, which is dislodged. Amélie, peeking into the hole that is revealed, looks through the dark dirt that lines the wall cavity to discover a tin box hidden away by a former tenant. This discovery acts not only as a motivator for the character and the film’s plot, but also as a sensory trigger for the viewer. The unearthing of this box operates similarly to Felicity Gee’s description that “the strongest sense of the uncanny occurs when something that is not part of conscious everyday lives suddenly appears in front of us, by whatever coincidence or timing, and seems familiar”. 31 Individual textural elements generate sensual reactions to memories that the viewer, and Amélie, may hold onto. In this case, the characteristics include the feel and smell of the nostalgic tin box, which once held sweets, the dust and dirt that fall away when the box is retrieved and the patinaed red and gold of the worn graphics on the tin. When Amélie opens the box, all else in her world, particularly the information about Princess Diana, loses significance and falls away; the nostalgic objects inside the box consuming all her interest. The things collected include a metal toy with original patina, the vision of a photograph once treasured, and the smoothness of a playing marble; the qualities of which portray the objects’ history. Through the detailed visual description of these textures, Jeunet evokes not only tactile memories, but also olfactory memories arising from recalled materials and their condition, such as remnants of the previously contained sweets, rusted metal and the patina of worn surfaces. This return to a past encapsulates an uncanny notion of the familiar and unfamiliar and expresses a collision of past and present. Trigg explains that when things fulfil a function beyond the practical, “objects not only become an extension of the body, they also become possessed by the 30 31

Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms,” 620. Gee, “The Critical Roots of Cinematic Magic Realism,” 61.

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bodies that dwelled within them. […] When worldly things exist for long enough alongside the owners, then a reversal of nature occurs”.32 In this case, although the memorabilia were separated from their living owner, their absence has allowed what Trigg describes as an uncanny reversal of possession, where an object “assumes the controlling role” 33 actively prompting Amélie in a quest to find its original owner. When the box and its contents are finally returned to the now adult Dominique Bretodeau, his boyhood memories, triggered by the sight of the interned objects, are revealed through a black and white montage, once again narrated. This visual approach, through its quality of a documented communication, relates this moment back to the news report of Princess Diana’s death. The significance of the uncanny in filmic magical realism is described by Gee as “a link between magic realism and modernism in which unconscious desires are revealed in the form of strangely juxtaposed objects”.34 The tangible objects of the container and the childhood souvenirs within are viewed in relation to one another physically, but also by their position within the composition of the scenes described above. Amélie and Bretodeau are both portrayed perusing the discrete objects, and the various toys and ephemera are again present in Bretodeau’s flashback of his childhood experiences (fig. 10-1 and fig. 10-2). The historical insight expressing the significance of the objects from the past endow the objects with a further uncanny agency, which results in Bretodeau determining to reunite with his estranged daughter and grandson. This autonomy creates, as Alison Frank explains, a “sense of inanimate objects making deliberate choices [that] draw[s] out the terror of the uncanny”. 35 These moments utilise a type of dread to generate an uncanny effect, which acts to prompt Amélie towards her goal of helping people by attempting to resolve their psychological and emotional impediments. In this case, the “terror of the uncanny” becomes a positive, though equally surprising, energy. Other uncanny objects populate Amélie’s journey, such as copies of a Renoir painting, duplicated yearly by a neighbour, her father’s garden gnome, another neighbour’s letters from her disappeared husband, and the photo booth photographs found and reassembled by Amélie’s love interest, Nino, which are collected into an album. Each of these objects significantly represent the related character’s history and their current emotional state, and also provide a vehicle for Amélie in prompting each character’s narrative progression. Frank explains that “[b]y disrupting expectations, 32

Trigg, Memory of Place, 295-96. Trigg, 296. 34 Gee, “The Critical Roots of Cinematic Magic Realism”, 241. 35 Frank, Reframing Reality, 97. 33

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[…] Amélie creates uncanny and/or defamiliarising effects” for all her intended recipients through the manipulation of ordinary processes such as photography and communication via telephone, mail, and deliveries.36 Her strategies for helping people attain a level of gratitude and resolution utilise acts of well-intentioned trickery. For instance, when Amélie returns the tin box of Bretodeau’s childhood treasures to him, she leaves them in a phonebooth and while hiding in a nearby bar, she phones the booth as he walks down the street. Curious, Bretodeau enters the booth and answers, later attributing agency to the telephone suggesting that it was the object itself calling him. When he looks down to see his familiar box, he tears up and upon opening it, as described earlier, those recreated memories fill the screen, captured in black and white. This moment has an uncanny effect on Bretodeau, although the machinations operate within Amélie’s realitybased strategy. The use of recognised processes to create uncanny events, therefore, engenders within these sequences a simultaneous quality of familiar/unfamiliar that is critical in the emergence of the uncanny. Gee explains that for Freud, “the uncanny is tied to animism and magic (the transformation of the object world through the mechanics of the mind), just as for Jameson cinematic affect can be both uncanny and magical”.37 In this sense, the functionality of both Amélie’s filmic narrative and the title character’s strategies to help others, take on uncanny traits that engage objects to execute outcomes. Within many magical realist films, a discrete and highly magical moment may share characteristics with the surreal. One such instance in Amélie is manifested in an uncanny effect that transforms the protagonist into water, which flows onto the floor of the café where she works. This transition occurs in reaction to a fear of intimate social interaction, representing the panic towards social communication that envelops Amélie. This reaction points to her simultaneous desire and fear of her primary object, the character Nino. Amélie’s goal of discovering her life’s purpose is complicated by this pursuit of Nino, a man she continually sees by chance at the Metro. Their primarily silent relationship suggests his role akin to an object, which in her psychological state, eases her ability to relate to his person. In this café sequence, Nino arrives at Amélie’s place of work by her invitation. She creates a photo booth photo of herself, tears it up, and hides it under the booth for Nino to find. The photo, in black and white, presents Amélie dressed in a Zorro costume holding a card with information to meet her at the café. When he does arrive, she busies herself at work, afraid to interact. When Nino approaches her asking questions to confirm her identity 36 37

Frank, 164. Gee, “The Critical Roots of Cinematic Magic Realism,” 241.

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as the woman in the photo, his attention overwhelms Amélie and drives her to search out solitude. At the back of the café, folding tablecloths, she ultimately escapes further into a stream of water, allowing her to avoid Nino through a created invisibility. Gee points out a further expansion of Freud’s notion of the origins of the uncanny: “[w]hether the emotional impulse derives from a childhood trauma, […] sexual anxiety or desire, the eerie sense of the uncanny is a result of the process of repression followed by return”.38 This reading suggests that the water attempts to protect Amélie by enabling her disappearance from a challenging situation. This action of water taking over Amélie’s body, utilising a surreal transformation of human body to water, exemplifies the operation of a surreal moment inserted into magical realist film fiction. The uncanny may be experienced as a sensation that hovers over modal borders that share thematic characteristics. The uncanny is described by Anthony Vidler as “[s]haring qualities with [many] allied genres of fear, the uncanny reveled in its nonspecificity”.39 The theme of fear is particularly apparent in Amélie’s transformation into water, clearly engaging a surrealist perspective. The “nonspecificity” of water itself, as an object that is a changeable substance, also produces an uncanny effect. This sensation is generated through water’s natural physical attribute of allowing reflection and simultaneous clarity. The film’s image represents Amélie’s face as if melting into water leaving traces on screen of the green, yellow and red colours on her persona and the background (fig. 10-3). This image is reminiscent of an earlier moment in the film when Amélie is forced by her mother to give up her pet goldfish, and her mother empties the contents of the fishbowl into a nearby river. The colours in the water as the fish emerges to look at Amélie, and its condition of simultaneous transparency and reflection, are echoed in this later scene (fig. 10-4). This dual moment has the effect of connecting the repressed fears of Amélie in the café to her childhood event. The surreal moment is duplicated, serving to punctuate the narrative and tie together thematic moments expressing loss and fear. The enchantment of water to provide safety for Amélie, and her goldfish, simultaneously suggests the uncanny element of fear in human interaction. In Amélie, the consistent theme of lost and returned objects echoes the uncanny process of absence, or repression, and presence, or expression. This theme reoccurs through the reappearance of uncanny objects such as Bretodeau’s forgotten tin box, the water Amélie loses herself in, and also Nino, who Amélie continually attempts to find. Other critical objects, previously mentioned, each hold an attachment to those she attempts to 38 39

Gee, 61. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 22.

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help, reverberating the uncanny function of props. These repeated events reinforce Freud’s description of the uncanny as a familiar feeling or thing “that has been repressed and then reappears”.40 A reminder of this condition of loss permeates the film through the narrative’s continuous return to various locations and characters. This pattern is evident in Amélie’s frequent returns to Paris Metro stations, which occur as part of her expected daily routine. It is at the Metro that she repeatedly runs into Nino and several other characters that, although secondary, impact her journey of discovery. A continual presence in the film of absent objects serves to mirror Amélie’s personal journey as she is driven not only by her desire to find purpose in her life, but also to connect to her own evasive uncanny object, the character Nino. Freud suggests that “[w]e can also call a living person uncanny, that is to say, when we credit him with evil intent”.41 Amélie’s object of desire is certainly not evil, however, his existence does encapsulate and test her fear. The film introduces Nino by describing childhood happenings that reveal parallels to Amélie’s experiences and expose their comparable eccentricities. As a layer to Nino’s objectlike qualities, the casting of Nino also presents an uncanny sensation for viewers familiar with director Mathieu Kassovitz’s film La Haine (1995), a feature film both visually real and lyrical that portrays the Paris riots of the early 1990s. Kassovitz acts in Amélie in the role of Nino, a connection that allows the film’s mise-en-scène to reach outside the construct of its narrative. La Haine’s visual approach is stylised while also imparting a journalistic documentary effect through its presentation in black and white and use of actual news footage to introduce the film. The different but equally dramatic visual approach of Amélie bears a strangely tangential association with La Haine. Although the films follow divergent narrative and stylistic paths, there remains an echo, in part due to Jeunet’s casting of Nino, shared themes such as isolation, and also each films’ edited presentation of Paris. As in Amélie, La Haine’s progression relies on the impact of an object, a found police revolver, whose presence “lend[s] a sense of near-palpable foreboding” to the film. 42 Although certainly many viewers of Amélie are unaware of this connection, Kassovitz’s presence in the film does contribute a layer of real-life uncanniness that potentially may have imparted an impact on the outcome of the film through the production process. The final scenes of Amélie portray Amélie and Nino’s silent meeting and embrace at her apartment, followed by their ride on his moped through the 40

Freud, “The Uncanny,” 152. Freud, 149. 42 Ide, "La Haine,” 3. 41

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streets of Montmartre (fig. 10-5 and fig. 10-6). This silence reiterates Nino’s functionality within the mise-en-scène, as equalised with that of an object. In this case, the notion of person as object does not denote a negative sense of a body being objectified, but the removal of a prioritisation of human to thing. Nino is the object who gives Amélie a sense of resolution, as is the role of the tin box for Bretodeau. As the final sequence presents the two lovers first in Amélie’s space (in the apartment) and then in Nino’s world (on the moped), the narrative reiterates this equalisation, romantically suggesting that both characters played a part in their uncanny union. In other fantastical modes, Gee explains that the viewer may stop to consider why events occur, but they “ultimately suspend […] disbelief. The uncanny, or the magical real, on the other hand, may also cause hesitation and momentary disbelief, but is ultimately reconciled with reality”. 43 This observation suggests the significance in cinematic magical realism of embedding uncanny, or magical, effects and events within familiar or quotidian situations, and in the generation of such moments by ordinary objects. Magical realist film fiction utilises objects that can be described as having uncanny properties that drive both character and the progression of a film’s plot. These filmic objects attain agency through everyday occurrences that, through intensification of sensorial and nostalgic detail, enable them to prompt events or signpost significant characters, places or things. In Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film, Amélie utilises a number of objects in motivating characters to resolve personal issues and lead their best lives. Similarly, she encourages herself to alter her own attitude to life, prompted in part by a newfound success in helping others. The stylised visual approach of Amélie portrays Jeunet’s nostalgic personal recollection of Paris, as expressed in part through the film’s locations and objects that retain a familiar reality of place while injecting an otherness into the city’s character. This operation of placing the unfamiliar within the familiar is a critical facet of the uncanny, which empowers ordinary things to become agential objects in filmic magical realism.

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Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, and Wong Kar-wai. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. Cixous, Hélène. “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’).” New Literary History 7, no. 3 “Thinking in the Arts, Sciences, and Literature” (Spring, 1976): 525548+619-645. https://www.jstor.org/stable/468561. del Toro, Guillermo. Pan’s Labyrinth. Blu-ray. Spain: Estudios Picasso, Tequila Gang and Esperanto Filmoj, 2006. Ezra, Elizabeth. “The Death of an Icon: Amélie.” In Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 85109. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. Fleming, Victor, dir. The Wizard of Oz. USA: Warner Brothers, 1939. DVD. Fowkes, Katherine A. The Fantasy Film. Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Frank, Alison. Reframing Reality: The Aesthetics of the Surrealist Object in French and Czech Cinema. Chicago: Intellect, 2013. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock. New York: Penguin Books, 1919/2003. Gee, Felicity. “The Critical Roots of Cinematic Magic Realism: Franz Roh, Alejo Carpentier, Fredric Jameson.” PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2013. shttps://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/the-criticalroots-of-cinematic-magic-realism-franz-roh-alejo-carpentier-fredricjameson(d5f4e662-5126-4f9f-9c47-ea71d62af630)/export.html Gee, Felicity. Magic Realism, World Cinema, and the Avant-Garde. London: Routledge, 2021. Holland, Agnieszka, dir. Fever (Goracszka). Poland: Film Polski Film Agency, 1981. http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/15 Ide, Wendy. "La Haine." The Times, T2, 2-3, August 19, 2004. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/la-haine-6t9k9x3hmsb Jameson, Frederic. “On Magic Realism in Film.” In Signatures of the Visible, 176-209. New York: Routledge Classics, 1986/1992. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Translated by Roy Sellars. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2, no. 1 (1906/1997): 7-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697259708571910 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, dir. Amélie. France: Claudie Ossard Productions and UGC, 2001. DVD. Jonze, Spike, dir. Being John Malkovich. USA: Propaganda Films, 1999. Blu-ray.

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Kassovitz, Mathieu, dir. La Haine. France: Canal +, 1995. DVD. Laurant, Guillaume and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Amélie Screenplay, English translation. 2001. https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/amelie2001.pdf. Leal, Luis. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 119-124. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967/1995. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Norden, Francisco, dir. Condores no Entierran Todos los Dias (A Man of Principle). Columbia: Procinor, 1984. DVD. Parkinson Zamora, Lois and Wendy B. Faris. “Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 111. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Parkinson Zamora, Lois. “Swords and Silver Rings: Magical Objects in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez.” In A Companion to Magical Realism, edited by Stephen M. Hart and WenChin Ouyang, 28-45. Suffolk, UK: Tamesis, 2005. Penzo, Jacobo, dir. La Casa de Agua (House of Water). Venezuela: Fundación Cinemateca Nacional, 1984. DVD. Roh, Franz. “Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 15-31. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1925/ 1995. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Skrodzka, Aga. Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2004. Stollman, Sarah Ellen. “Magical Props: The Cinematic Object and Narrative Magic in Poetic Realist, Surrealist and Magical Realist Film.” PhD Diss., Curtin University, 2023. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/94397. Tati, Jacques, dir. Playtime. France: Specta Films, 1967. DVD. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Tooker, George. Government Bureau.1956. Egg tempera on wood, 19 5/8 x 29 5/8” (49.8 x 75.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum, New York.

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https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/488943 Trigg, Dylan. The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992. Vincendeau, Ginette. “Café Society.” In Sight and Sound 11, no. 8 (August 2001): 22-25, 2001. https://www.proquest.com/magazines/cafesociety/docview/237105308/se-2?accountid=10382

CONTRIBUTORS

Marit Aalen is an associate professor in mental health work at Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), lecturing primarily in psychoanalysis, ethics, and philosophy of science. Aalen holds a master's degree in the history of ideas and is a trained psychologist. In 2016, she defended her doctoral thesis on Henrik Ibsen's drama Peer Gynt. She has been a visiting researcher at the Humboldt University in Berlin and has delivered a number of lectures around Europe. She has written several articles on psychoanalysis and literature and has been editor for specialist books in psychology and philosophy at Gyldendal publishing house in Oslo. Elwira Bolek has a PhD in the field of linguistics and is an assistant in the Department of Semantics, Pragmatics, and Language Theory at the Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Maria Curie-Skáodowska University in Lublin. In her research, she applies linguistic methodologies to the analysis of Polish posters. Gary Farnell is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Winchester, UK. His teaching addresses the relations between literature, film and psychoanalysis. He has published widely in this field, as well as on fantasy life more generally. In the field of vegetal studies, he has contributed a study of plants’ desire-in-speech in Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, edited by Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Antony Johae gained his PhD from the University of Essex: a comparative study of the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka. He then went on to teach literature in Ghana, Tunisia, and Kuwait. While in Kuwait he ran a weekly writers’ workshop for sixteen years, during which time his collection of poetry and prose, After-Images, was written. His poetry has appeared in issues of Poetry Salzburg Review, and he has also published Poems of the East (2015), based on his experiences living in the Arab world and visiting further east–both literal and imagined.

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Charlie Jorge holds a BA in English Philology and an MA in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of the Basque Country. He obtained his PhD in 2018, completing his thesis on the figure of the hero in Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). He specialises in 18th and 19th century Gothic Literature and his research focuses on Irish Gothic authors and literary production. This research has led to publications in international indexed journals, such as Caliban and Imaginaries. Per Klingberg is a PhD student in Language Studies, with a focus on Comparative Literature, at Örebro University, Sweden. His dissertation is focuses on the Scottish writer George MacDonald and the emergence of fantasy literature in the 19th century as a reaction to the Victorian Crisis of Faith. Klingberg has previously published cultural journalism and essays in Swedish and Finnish newspapers and cultural magazines, including a number of essays for Sweden’s second biggest daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Othmar Lehner is a professor and authoritative voice in the fields of sustainability and societal change at the ACRN Oxford Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and at the University of Oxford. He is convinced that we need to include the human, narrative voice in social and managerial research and is thus an advocate for a link between the social sciences and the humanities. In his works he tackles critical epistemological issues surrounding the bridging of disciplines, for example by looking at the dualisms of agent and structure, of realism and idealism, and of normative and strategic action. His latest publication is the T&F Routledge Handbook of Social and Sustainable Finance that provides alternative avenues in our post-capitalist, narrative society. Catherine Morris has a PhD in English from Kingston University, London, with a combined creative and critical dissertation considering the use of dialect as unheimlich in British writing. She was awarded the Faber and Faber MA prize in 2010, also at Kingston University, for her dissertation on identity and consciousness in the novel. Her research and publication interests range from the use of dialect, the Uncanny, Gothic Literature, Science Fiction, and the works of J. G. Ballard, viewed mostly, but not exclusively, through a cultural material and psychoanalytical lens.

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Sarah Stollman holds a PhD from the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. The thesis considers the role of the magical object in poetic realist, surrealist and magical realist film fiction. Stollman is a production designer, artist and educator. Her design work prioritises narrative interconnections with objects, colour, texture and form. She has collaborated with many filmmakers including Rachel Perkins, John Hughes, Todd Haynes and Hal Hartley. Stollman applies her research to her work in filmmaking, art installation and the mentoring of future screenmakers. Charlotte Sweet is a professor of English at the University of A.S. Linz with an academic background in American Culture Studies and German Linguistics and Literature. Taking on a pragmatist ontology that stretches the boundaries of simple epistemological considerations, she is keenly interested in individual life trajectories and how intersubjective narrations can do justice to substance and complexity in a post-postmodern society. Sten Wistrand is associate professor in comparative literature at Örebro University, Sweden. He is mainly interested in fiction theory and in discussing theoretical and methodological questions in relation to the interpretation of specific literary works. He has written a lengthy article on Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem and the esoteric (LIR journal 2020) and extensive introductions to three Swedish translations of his works. He is also a theatre and literary critic and has published two children’s books. Anders Zachrisson is training and child psychoanalyst in the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society, and associate professor emeritus, Psychological department, University of Oslo. He was editor-in-chief of The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 1993-1997, and president of the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society 2002-2006. He has been lecturing and supervising at the School for child and adolescent psychoanalysis in the Psychoanalytic Institute for Eastern Europe and in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis training programmes in Beijing and Wuhan. He was also member, first of the Sponsoring, and then of the Liaison Committee for Moscow Psychoanalytic Society Study Group, and is author of 25 articles on psychoanalysis. A selection of these were published in 2021 in the book Psychoanalysis my way. Complex Oedipus and other issues.

INDEX

A Aalen, Marit, 126n, 136n, 139n Abberley, Will, 40-41n abject, 8, 34, 55-56, 58, 60 absence (also see lack, spaces), 53, 69, 137, 150, 171, 192, 197, 199, 200 Adorno, Theodor, 114, 122 Ahmed, Sara, 189 Aho, Kevin, 4, 5 Aitchison, Jean, 40n, 43n alienation, 3, 26, 35, 37, 55, 67-69, 73, 83, 100, 114, 188 ambivalence, 1, 6-7, 21-22, 56, 69, 132 Amélie, 10, 188, 191-201 anima mundi, 17 animism, 3, 17, 20, 22, 26, 46, 76, 81, 143, 198 anthropogenic, 23, 25 anthropology, 157, 165 anxiety, 19, 20-22, 28, 40n, 42, 94, 116, 118, 123, 127, 132, 140, 184, 190, 199 architecture building, 118, 120, 127-129, 133134, 137, 159, 195 castle, 37, 39, 56, 58, 79, 105 convent, monastery, 144, 145, 149, 153 hut, 127-129, 133-134, 136-139 palace, 138, 182 tenement, 118-120 Atkins, Bowman K., 43 Atonement, 10, 155, 158, 160, 163, 167, 169, 171 Auden, W.H. Museé des Beaux Arts, 159

Austen, Jane Northanger Abbey, 89 automatons, 2, 75, 84, 95, 101-103, 108 B Backus, Margot Gayle, 144n Baer, Elizabeth R., 98, 104, 106 banal (everyday, mundane, ordinary), 2, 4, 9, 26, 40, 157, 187, 190-192, 195-196, 198, 201 Barthes, Roland, 1 Bernheimer, Charles, 114 Beyond Black, 10, 155-156, 166-172 Binder, Hartmut, 88n Blaustein Institute for Desert Research, 15, 17, 25, 29 Bloom, Harold, 93, 128 Botting, Fred, 88n, 93 Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten, 191 boundaries, 3, 19-20, 35, 55, 72, 75, 130, 146-147, 169-172, 188, 191 borders, 72n, 96-97, 109, 114, 138, 172, 178, 187, 199 intersect, 49, 72 thresholds, 17, 38, 39 Bowen, John, 91, 92 boxes, 70, 81, 84, 106, 161, 168, 188, 196-201 Bradley, A.C., 36 Brexit, 1 Briggs, Katherine, 77, 84 Brod, Max, 122 Brontë, Charlotte, 37, 89 Jane Eyre, 89 Brontë, Emily, 8, 34, 37-42 Wuthering Heights, 37-48 Brynhildsvoll, K., 130, 140n

210 Buckley, Chloe, 72-73, 78 Burke, Edmund, 94-95, 99 Byron, Glennis, 88, 143-145 C Cameron, James Titanic, 98 cannibalism, 47, 67, 102 Carroll, Lewis, 15-16, 18, 23, 29, 92 "Jabberwocky", 21 Alice, 15-24, 29 Through the Looking-Glass, 7, 15, 18, 20-21, 24, 25 Tiger-lily, 15, 18, 22, 24, 29 Carroll, Noël, 92 Carruthers, Gerard, 57 Caruth, Cathy, 155-156 Castle, Terry, 22, 157 castration (also see uncanny dismemberment), 3, 8, 34, 54, 85, 94 cut-off, 51, 80, 108, 169 cutting, 51 genitals, 102 Castricano, Jodey, 45-46 children, 39-46, 54-55, 67-84, 130, 136, 146-149, 152, 159, 165-166, 193 daughter, 67, 69n, 70, 76, 129, 132-136, 146, 150, 163, 165, 169-170, 197 son, 103, 147, 148, 151 Chudzik, Anna, 183n Cixous, Hélène, 17, 18, 27-29, 45, 46, 195, 196n class, 6, 35, 39, 41-58, 183 middle class, 6, 42, 47 upper class, aristocracy, 47, 144, 147, 150, 152 working class, 35, 37, 41, 47, 52, 55, 59 Clery, E. J., 89n, 92, 103 Clifford, Lucy, 8, 67-85 Blue-Eyes, 69-83 "The New Mother", 8, 67-85

Index Turkey, the, 69-83 Coates, Jennifer, 43n coincidence, 10, 26, 29, 97-98, 105, 132, 155, 196 colour, 10, 179, 185, 190, 199 communication, 7, 10, 11, 15, 18, 22-26, 41n, 43, 54, 88, 91, 156, 168, 171, 178, 179, 194, 197, 198 contradiction (also see simultaneity of opposites), 81, 84, 130-134, 190, 193 control (including lack and loss of), 7, 36-37, 45, 47, 53, 78-79, 81, 84, 105, 115, 123, 127, 158, 160165, 171, 197 Corman, Roger, 23, 24 Audrey Junior, 24 Seymour Krelboyne, 24-25 The Little Shop of Horrors, 23-25 Culler, Jonathan, 91-92, 108 Czerniawski, Jerzy, 177-178, 183 Do Damaszku [To Damascus], 181 Gra sáów [A Dream Play], 181 PamiĊtnik wariata [The Diary of a Madman], 180 Wróg ludu [An Enemy of the People], 180 Wyspa róĪ [The Island of Roses], 183 D danger, 2, 58, 81, 144, 182 dangerous, 11,36,135,152 Darton, F.J. Harvey, 76 Das Unheimliche ['The Uncanny'], 1-10, 16-20, 27-29, 33-35, 41, 45-46, 52-55, 60, 68-69, 74-75, 81, 93-104, 108, 113, 126, 127, 131-132, 134, 138, 139, 143, 156-157, 177, 187-188, 191, 200 death, 2, 6, 7, 45-47, 49-55, 79, 80, 98, 100, 102-103, 105, 108, 129130, 137, 143-148, 150-153, 157159, 162, 165-172, 195, 197

The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture afterlife, hereafter, reincarnate, 6, 7, 79, 169, 171 return of the dead (also see haunt, uncanny returns), 3, 45, 53, 102, 108, 145 decay (also see fragmentation), 25, 56, 93, 104-105, 171 degeneration, 8, 34-37, 51 del Toro, Guillermo Pan’s Labyrinth, 188 Deleuze, Gilles, 16-19 Demetz, Peter, 90n derealization, 5 Derrida, Jacques, 46, 137, 157 destruction, 54, 58, 60, 105, 136, 151-152 Devil, 81-84, 145, 149, 151, 169 dialect, 7, 34-47, 55-60 first language, 35, 58 home language, 34 Mother Tongue, 34, 44-45, 53, 54 provincialism, 56 regional, 8, 34 vernacular, 43, 57, 59 disfigurement, deformity 41n, 56, 178, 180, 185 Do Damaszku [To Damascus], 181 Dolar, Mladen, 157 dolls, 98, 101, 103, 105, 108 puppet, 101 puppeteer, 101 dominant, the (concept, combining awareness of multiple functions that unite and determine a poetic work), 35, 89, 106, 107, 109 doom, 74, 84, 93, 104-105, 134, 143, 161 doors, doorways (also see gates), 11, 24, 28, 38, 45-46, 71, 81, 119-120, 133, 135, 166-168, 170, 181, 188 Dowling, Linda, 40n dreams, 9, 16, 27, 90, 97, 99-100, 104, 106-107, 122, 123, 148, 161, 181-182 dream-state, 122

211

nightmare, 122-123, 156 dualism, 26, 27 duality, 7, 160 commingling, merging, simultaneity, 33-34, 69, 73-75, 120, 123, 131, 158, 178, 179, 188-193, 198-199 duplication (also see uncanny double), 35, 101, 120, 197, 199 repetition, 19, 22, 24, 38, 54, 68, 70, 76, 78, 83, 98, 120-121, 143, 145, 151, 156, 160-161, 164, 167, 169, 190, 200 E Eagleton, Terry, 49 Eastwood, Clint The Bridges of Madison County, 98n Eckert, Penelope, 43n, 45, 59 eerie (also see spooky), 2, 8-11, 22, 67, 97, 106, 161-162, 168, 172, 191, 199 Eisikovitis, Edina, 43, 45 Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land, 167 Ellison, David R., 115 enemies, 6, 53, 151, 180-181 esoteric (also see genre), 8, 90, 91, 98, 107-109, 121 evil, 80, 163, 180-181, 200 exclusion, 37, 46, 49, 60, 92, 106, 117 eyes (also see castration), 3, 42, 44, 70-71, 74-75, 80-82, 96, 98, 101102, 116, 160, 164, 167, 180 Ezra, Elizabeth, 194n F faces, 56, 68, 96-98, 100-102, 149, 166-169, 180, 183-185, 189, 199 clock face, 72-73 face coverings, 3 faceless, 3, 184 Fairclough, Norman, 34, 35n, 41

212 Falkenberg, Mark, 113 familiarity, 2-11, 25, 28-29, 33-38, 45, 53, 55, 59, 68-74, 85, 94-97, 106, 115, 120, 131-134, 144, 155-157, 162, 177, 180-181, 187, 188, 191-198, 200-201 family, 2, 9, 39, 50, 52, 55-57, 73, 77, 84, 91, 130, 134, 144-152, 161-163, 166, 172, 183 breakdown, 10 dysfunctional, 144 fantastic, 77, 90-93, 104, 115, 118, 133, 139, 191-193, 201 fantasy, 3, 16, 18-21, 53, 67, 72, 81, 187, 191 Faris, Wendy B., 188, 190 Farnell, Gary, 19n, 23n fathers, 52-54, 69, 71, 105, 128, 144, 147, 150, 152, 163-164, 183, 193-194 Fauconnier, Gilles, 179 fear, 3-4, 11, 19, 37-38, 41-42, 48, 48n, 54n, 73, 76-78, 89, 93, 95, 100, 102-103, 108, 116, 188-119, 143, 146, 150, 157, 164, 166, 183, 191, 198-200 feminisation, 8, 34, 42, 44 Ferguson, Christine, 40n Fijaákowska, Janina, 178n Fjeld, Rolf, 128n Fleming, Victor The Wizard of Oz, 193 forbidden, 52n, 81, 136, 146 foreshadowing, 16, 37 Foucault, Michel, 156 Fowkes, Katherine A., 193 Fowler, Alastair, 91, 92 fragmentation, 105, 106, 122, 156, 166, 171, 180 Frank, Alison, 197, 198n Freer, Scott, 114 Freud, Sigmund, 1-11, 16-20, 22, 27-29, 33, 35, 41, 45, 46, 48, 5255, 60, 68, 69, 73-78, 93-96, 103, 108, 113, 115-122, 126, 127, 129,

Index 131-140, 143, 155, 156, 164, 177, 187, 191, 198, 200 “Repression”, 127 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 17 Das Unheimliche [”The Uncanny”], 1-10, 16-20, 2729, 33-35, 41, 45, 46, 52-55, 60, 68-69, 74, 75, 81, 93-104, 108, 113, 126-127, 131-132, 134, 138-139, 143, 156-157, 177, 187, 188, 191, 200 Frye, Northrop, 146 Fyhr, Mattias, 93, 104-106 G Gaiman, Neil, 72n, 73n, 77, 78 Coraline, 77, 78 Gasche, Rodolphe, 51n gate (also see doors), 39, 80, 157 gatekeeper, 34, 37, 46 Gay, Peter, 1n gaze (also see eyes), 2, 101-102, 161-163, 165, 170, 181 Gee, Felicity, 191n, 196-201 gender conservatism, 43, 81, 84 female authority, 39 female characters, 42, 159, 165 female writers, 81 gendered space (also see spaces), 72 gendered speech, 42, 44, 59, 61, 165 genre, 8, 28, 69, 77-79, 85, 88-93, 96, 104-109, 143-144 ghosts (also see haunt), 6, 38, 45, 52, 83, 101, 103, 130, 137-138, 169, 171 Gilmore, James H., 157n Girard, René, 144-147, 151-152 The Scapegoat, 144-147, 151-152 God, 52, 90, 105, 130, 146-151, 158 gods, goddesses, 77, 147 Gogol, Nikolai

The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture The Diary of a Madman, 180 golem (also see uncanny double), 90, 92, 100-108 Golem, The (Der Golem), 8, 88-109 Gothic (also see genre), 4, 8-9, 61, 88-96, 103-104, 106-110, 114115, 143-145 Gra sáów [A Dream Play], 181 Grieg, Edvard, 129-130 Groddeck, Georg, 140n grotesque, 130 H Haffenden, John, 37n, 52n hallucination (also see psychic reality), 136-139 Harman, Mark, 117 Harrison, Tony, 8, 34-37, 46-54, 60 "Them & [uz]", 35, 46, 50, 60 "v.", 47-53 Haughton, Hugh, 4 Introduction to The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry, 16 Introduction to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, 16 Introduction to The Uncanny, 4, 16 haunt (also see death, uncanny returns), 1, 4, 6, 22, 88, 92, 96 hauntology, 137 Hayward, Lilian, 77n Heidegger, Martin, 4, 5, 28, 51n On the Way to Language, 28 heimlich, 7, 33, 38, 68-69, 75, 114115, 126, 131-132, 136, 143-144 homely (also see home), 33, 38, 40, 55, 60, 69, 72-74, 114, 127, 131-139, 144, 146, 191 hyggelig [homelike] (also see thoughts), 131 Hell, 37, 46, 50, 55, 80, 108, 110, 166, 169

213

hidden, 2-3, 9, 33, 36, 37, 46, 60, 68, 94, 98, 100, 106, 108, 126, 131, 136, 139, 150, 177, 196 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 8, 85, 91, 94, 113, 143 “Der Sandmann” [“The Sandman”), 8, 85, 94, 143 Hogle, Jerrold E., 88n, 92, 144n Hölderlin caesura, 50-53 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 50-53 home (also see heimlich), 1-7, 11, 25, 33-38, 41-47, 50-57, 60, 7073, 82-83, 97, 128, 133-135, 139, 145-149, 193, 195 domestic, 6, 11, 33, 38, 55, 72 haunted house, 138 homelike, 4, 69, 72, 75, 131-135 homesickness, 5 house, 6, 28, 39-40, 45, 47, 70, 72, 98-99, 102, 105, 127, 132, 134-135, 146, 150, 152, 167, 170, 183 horror (also see genre), 23-24, 69, 76-77, 82, 88-90, 92-94, 96, 100, 102, 107, 109-110, 127, 130, 145, 152, 191 Hot Milk, 10, 155-156, 163, 165, 169, 171 Huguenot, 144 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 40n Hutcheon, Linda, 156n, 157n I ibbur - Kabbalist concept of impregnation of souls (also see possession), 104-107, 197 Ibsen, Henrik, 126, 128-130, 133140, 180-181 An Enemy of the People, 180 Brand, 130, 137 Peer Gynt, 9, 126-140 The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, 129, 133-138 Ide, Wendy, 200n

214 identity, 11, 25, 35n, 38, 42, 45, 58, 83-84, 130, 143, 163-164, 169, 172, 184, 187-188, 190, 192, 198 lack or loss of, 3, 184 illusion, 5, 115, 181, 182 imagery, 8, 68, 73, 78, 80-81, 84, 116, 182, 184 images, 2, 10, 16, 73, 85, 121, 152, 164, 178-179, 182, 184-185, 193, 195 imaginary, 3, 20, 191 infection, 6, 58 innocence, 83, 128, 144, 146-147, 150, 153 insecurity, 130 insurgency, 34, 46-47 invade, invasion, invasive, 42-43, 60, 72 Irigaray, Luce, 26n J Jakobson, Roman, 89, 106-107, 109 Jameson, Frederic, 192-193, 198 Jay, Martin, 157n Jentsch, Ernst, 55, 94-95, 103, 119, 123, 191 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 188, 193-196 Amélie, 10, 188, 191-201 Johae, Antony, 122n Jonze, Spike Being John Malkovich, 188 Jung, C. G., 97n, 162, 165 juxtaposition, 10, 34, 153, 190, 193, 197 K Kafka, Franz, 9, 68, 89, 113-122, 181-182 Joseph K., 43, 86, 116-122 Castle, The, 115, 117 Trial, The, 9, 113-122 Kassovitz, Mathieu, 200 La Haine, 200 Kearney, Richard, 145 Kittang, Atle, 130, 137, 138n

Index Kittler, Friedrich A., 41-46 Kowalski, Piotr, 183n Kristeva, Julia, 8, 34, 54-55 Powers of Horror, 54-55 Krupat, Arnold, 39, 40n L Labov, William, 42n, 45, 47 labyrinths, 93, 104-105, 106, 108, 114, 115, 121, 144 Lacan, Jacques, 19-20, 22, 155, 157n Lacanian, 20, 78 lack (also see absence, spaces lacuna), 15, 20, 22, 34, 50, 52, 54, 93, 96, 104-107, 115, 123, 158, 167, 169 language, 1, 7, 16, 25-29, 33-60, 77, 79, 85, 89, 91, 100, 115, 131, 156, 159, 160, 165, 171, 179, 180, 183, 184, 190 first language (also see dialect), 35, 58 national language, 43 philology, 28, 131-132 powerless language, 43 translation, 7, 17, 33, 131, 135, 177-179, 182-183 visual language (also see semantics, semiotics), 10-11, 162, 177-201 Leal, Luis, 190 Leffler, Yvonne, 88n, 92 Levy, Deborah, 155, 163-166 Hot Milk, 10, 155-156, 163, 165, 169, 171 Leys, Ruth, 155, 160 Liang, Xiaodong, 50 Libura, Agnieszka, 179 light, 50, 71, 74, 95, 96, 100, 149, 180, 187 Lim, Stephanie, 24 liminal, 2, 8, 34, 37, 50, 72, 75, 96 Logos, 26 logocentrism, 26-27

The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture loneliness, 6, 72, 152, 170 loss, 5-6, 11, 19, 54, 71, 102, 116, 118, 123, 199-200 love, 24, 41, 53, 60, 70, 78, 98, 98n, 139, 147-152, 158, 163-164, 193, 194, 197 displaced, 193-194 familial, 47, 52, 68, 70, 78, 144152, 163 spousal, 37, 53, 100, 130, 150, 153, 162, 163, 197 Lovecraft, Howard Phillips, 77, 88 Lucas, John, 52n LupiĠu, Călin D., 114 Lurie, Alison, 83, 84n Lyotard, Jean-François, 155, 156n M madness, 8, 34-37, 46, 53, 102, 119, 145, 150, 180 asylum, 129, 145 magic, magical 11, 90, 187-193, 198 Magical Realism, 10, 187-194, 197198 mandrake, 7, 16 Mantel, Hilary, 155, 166-172 Beyond Black, 10, 155-156, 166172 Marder, Michael, 26-29 Marks, Laura U., 194 Masschelein, Anneleen, 22-23 master, masters, mastery, 35-40, 56, 79, 81, 88, 99, 108, 127, 157 Maturin, Charles Robert, 144-152 Alonzo de Monçada, 9, 144-147, 152-153 Immalee (later known as Isidora), 144-153 Melmoth the Wanderer, 9, 144153 McEwan, Ian, 155, 158-163 Atonement, 10, 155, 158, 160, 163, 167, 169, 171 McHale, Brian, 156, 158n melancholy, 70, 93, 106

215

Melmoth the Wanderer, 9, 144-153 memory, 5, 11, 45, 51, 98, 106, 158159, 167, 183-184, 189-190, 193198 Meyrink, Gustav, 8, 88, 90-91, 96109 Athanasius Pernath, 97-107 The Golem (Der Golem), 8, 88109 Vrieslander, 101 Mi, Jiayan, 115 Miles, Robert, 92, 144 Mills, John, 135 mirroring (see also uncanny double, shadow self), 21, 55, 73-74, 79, 81, 98, 102, 119, 151, 155, 161162, 165-170, 183, 192, 195, 199-200 misbehaviour (also see naughty), 70, 78, 80 mise-en-scène, 16, 18, 189, 192, 193, 200-201 Mitchell, Mike, 88n Moberley, L.G., "Inexplicable", 6 modernism, 114-115, 158, 160, 195, 197 monsters, monstrous, 21, 74, 76, 90, 92, 100, 151, 165 morality, 8, 37-38, 41, 44, 59-60, 68, 69, 77-82, 105, 110, 158, 160-161, 171 Morrison, Grant, 77 Morrison, Reed A., 157n Mortimer, Danielle, 155, 156n Moss, Anita, 81, 84 mother (also see Other Mother), 34, 43-49, 53-56, 69-75, 80, 98, 129, 132, 140, 147-152, 163-170, 193194, 199 maternal, 127 Mugglestone, Lynda, 40n, 44, 47, 56n MukaĜovský, Jan, 89 Murray, Janet, 47

216 N narrative, 1, 7-10, 15, 20-21, 35, 51, 59, 81-82, 89-90, 96, 98, 104, 109, 113, 115-123, 140, 155-158, 163-165, 184, 187- 201 narrator, 24, 96, 117, 158, 160, 163164, 167, 171, 195 unreliable narrator, 156 nationalism, 48, 57 naughty, bad, wicked (also see misbehaviour), 52, 70, 82, 158, 160, 195 "New Mother, The", 8, 67-85 Ninateka, 183n Newbolt Report, The, 41n, nonsense, 15-16, 18, 20-23, 83 Norden, Francisco, 192n nostalgia, 188-189, 193-196, 201 nurture, 72, 147 O O’Barr, William M., 43 objectification, 37, 201 objects, 11, 84, 99, 101, 102, 161, 178, 185, 188-201 obscurity, 45, 94-95, 156, 177, 185 occupation, 26, 37, 45-46, 50, 55, 59 Oedipus, 1, 17, 50n, 51, 54 Oedipus complex, 17, 54 Tiresias, 51 Oki, Michito, 114 omniscience, 145, 160, 167 ontology, 29, 130, 137 oppression, 9, 118-119 other, 11, 23-25, 28, 33-34, 38, 42, 45, 49, 51, 55, 59, 95, 102, 107, 115, 188, 194 Other Mother (also see mother), 45, 56-58, 71, 74-77, 80-84, 129 otherness, 42, 201 otherworldly, 187, 194 Ovid Metamorphoses, 114

Index ownership, 35, 47, 50, 95, 105, 107, 197 OĪóg, Kazimierz, 182 P painting, 102, 106, 119-120, 152, 166, 178, 180, 189-190, 197 PamiĊtnik wariata [The Diary of a Madman], 180 pandemic, 2-7, 11 Covid 19 pandemic, 2, 4, 7 paradox, 18, 29, 33, 38, 106, 122, 130, 140, 158, 191, 193 Parkinson Zamora, Lois, 188-189 patriarchy, 39, 84, 144, 161 Peer Gynt, 9, 126-140 Solveig, 126, 128-129, 134-139 phobia, 54 agoraphobia, 119 claustrophobia, 119 plant-phobia, 23 xenophobia, 2, 3, 47-48 Piaget, Jean, 165n, 172 Pine II, B. Joseph, 157n plants, 7, 15, 17-18, 24-29 flowers, 15-20, 23, 25, 27 garden, 18, 20-21, 42, 72, 197 killer plants, 23 Pea (Pisum sativum), 15, 18, 25, 29 plant-speech, 16, 24, 27-28 plant-sympathy, 23-24 plant-thinking (also see thoughts), 23, 25-26, 28 seeds, 29 talking plants, 7, 17-18, 24, 29 tomato, 25 poetry, 16, 21, 35-37, 47-48, 50-55, 67, 82, 107, 114, 140 free verse, 36, 60 pollution, 56, 60, 180 possession, 7, 10, 83, 188, 196, 197 postmodernism, 158

The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture power, 9, 24, 34, 36-46, 48-51, 54, 79-80, 96, 104, 117, 144-145, 147, 151, 156, 158, 164-165 hidden, 37, 46 power relations, 34, 40 powerless, 43, 45, 96 pre-apotheosis, 22 pre-formation, 22 preservation - 'doubling as a preservation against extinction' (also see uncanny double), 35, 117, 137, 147, 184 pre-sublimation, 22 Prickett, Stephen, 68 primal, 3, 36 primitive, 17, 22, 26, 36-37, 40-41, 75 primordial, 5, 41 props, 24, 188-189, 192, 200 prose, 36-37, 55, 60 psychic reality (see also hallucination), 129, 138 psychoanalysis, 4, 8, 17, 22, 34, 54, 85, 127, 129, 138, 140 psychodynamics, 127 psychology, 4, 79, 94, 108, 114, 127, 131-132, 139, 169, 191, 197-198 psychosis, 59, 128 Punter, David, 88n, 143-145 R Radcliffe, Ann, 94, 144n realism, 91, 189-190 reality, 3, 7, 9, 11, 16-21, 28, 75, 78-79, 103, 115-116, 118, 122123, 129-130, 137-139, 146-149, 157, 158, 161, 165, 166, 171-172, 187, 189-192, 194, 196, 198, 201 rebellion, 8, 35, 46, 84 Received Pronunciation (RP) (also see dialect), 24, 36, 41 Reich, Wilhelm, 140 religion, 3, 144-145, 148-153, 172 fanaticism, 144-145, 151

217

heresy, 150-151 repression, 2-3, 7, 9, 17, 45, 53, 55, 127, 132-140, 156, 187, 191, 194, 199 roads, 167, 182 dead-ends, anti-roads, road to nowhere, cul-de-sac, 42, 106, 167, 182 Roh, Franz, 189 Rosenberg, Yuxl, 90 Royle, Nicholas The Uncanny, 17, 69, 74, 81, 93104, 113, 131, 143, 157, 188 RóĪewicz, Tadeusz Wyspa róĪ [The Island of Roses], 183 Wyszedá z domu [He Left the House], 183 S sacrifice, 9, 130, 144-153 Salecl, Renata, 22-23 “Sandman, The” (“Der Sandmann”), 8, 85, 94, 143 scapegoat, 9, 144-146, 151-152 Schelling, F.W.J., 60n, 94, 126-127 Scholem, Gershom, 90 Schwartz, Alvin, 77n science, 7, 15-18, 22-23, 28-29, 171-172 secret, 2-3, 33, 37-38, 40, 60, 68, 70, 73, 82, 94, 99-101, 106, 121, 126-127, 131-134, 136, 139, 146, 177, 185 self, 4-5, 16, 25-26, 35, 37, 40-41, 46, 50-60, 78-79, 100, 104-105, 118, 128-129, 156, 161-162, 164, 169-172, 188 self-expression, 16, 26 self-harm, 169 self-signification, 16 semantics, 10, 179 semiotics, 3, 10, 20, 25, 27, 43-44, 49, 51-55, 73, 81, 93, 100, 105, 120-121, 177-185

218 sexuality (incl. desire, identity, anxiety, abuse), 7, 9-10, 27, 37, 52, 54, 70, 73, 81, 84, 128, 135140, 143, 155, 162, 167, 198, 200 incest, 140 shadow self (see also mirror, uncanny double), 162 Shakespeare, William, 8, 34, 36-37, 60 Macbeth, 35-42 Porter, the, 35-37, 48, 56, 58 Shapiro, Bruce. G., 140n Shunami, Gideon, 45n Silver, Anna Krugovoy, 75n, 81, 83 Skrodzka, Aga, 191 sleep, 15, 83, 96-99, 104, 122, 146 somnambulist (also see dreams), 99 Sobchack, Vivian, 195 social, 4, 8-9, 25, 34-36, 40-45, 49, 55, 58, 59, 150-153, 157, 165, 180, 198 society, 35-38, 41-42, 45, 49-50, 54, 56-60, 81, 83, 105, 114, 118, 147, 161, 167, 172 Sokel, Walter H., 118 Sokóá, Lech, 182n solitude, aloneness, 22, 58, 191, 195, 199 soul, 28, 39, 42, 84, 90, 94, 99, 100, 107-108, 148, 155 spaces, 114 confined, 119 confined - buried alive, 45, 53, 102-103, 119, 143, 157 English literary, 59 female, 72 ghettoised, 57, 88, 96-100, 102, 104, 105, 108 lacuna - withholding information (also see absence, lack), 82-83, 117-118, 122 liminal, 50 mental, 179 open, 119 perceptions, 192, 195

Index personal, 201 public, 46 Spain, 2, 144-152, 165, 190 Spanish Inquisition, 145, 150151 speaking (speech, to speak, speakers), 3, 6, 16, 20, 25, 28-29, 34-54, 57-60, 85, 89, 91-92, 94, 98, 101, 106, 148, 163 articulation, 26-27, 37, 41, 52, 55, 81, 192, 194 inarticulation, 37, 49, 51, 54 orality, 44, 47, 76 pronunciation, 43, 56 correct language or speech, 34, 36, 41-47 spooky (also see eerie), 155, 161, 162, 165 stability, 4, 36, 45, 63-64, 81, 170 destabilise, 33, 35, 38, 46 instability, 4 unstable, 34, 42, 92 standard English, 24, 34-36, 41, 56, 59 status, 24, 34, 36, 39, 40, 44, 147, 150 StĊpieĔ, Wojciech, 130-131 stereotypes, 57-58, 145-146, 151, 153, 157 storytelling (also see speaking, tales), 1, 10, 77, 187, 189, 192 strange, 2, 4-11, 16-19, 21, 26, 29, 33, 35, 38, 40, 54, 68-74, 81-85, 91, 96-97, 99, 101-106, 116-118, 123, 131, 149-150, 156, 162, 168, 170, 188, 189, 191, 197 Strindberg, August, 181-182 A Dream Play, 181-182 To Damascus, 181-183 sublime, the, 93-94, 99, 106, 108109, 115 suffering, 119, 144, 146, 151, 153, 159, 163, 166, 182-183, 193 supernatural, 4, 89-90, 92, 103, 118 suppression, 36, 45, 68, 73, 75, 98, 100, 108, 137, 139, 161

The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture surreal, surrealist, 68, 77, 89, 191, 198-199 survival, 43, 147, 152, 159 preservation, 35, 42, 45, 117, 137, 147, 184 synchronicity, 10, 116, 155, 161 SzczĊsna, Ewa, 178n Szelegejd, Jacek, 177n, 178, 184n T tale (see also genre, storytelling), 8, 21, 68-70, 75-82, 84, 113, 158, 194 cautionary tale, 8, 68-69, 78-81 fairy tale, 73, 75, 77-82, 85, 96, 115 folk tale, 8, 69, 76, 79 Tambling, Jeremy, 50-52 Tatar, Maria, 78, 79 Tati, Jacques Playtime, 195 telepathy, 95, 99, 107, 143 telos, 19 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 16 terror, 68, 70, 74, 79, 82, 89, 92-95, 100-103, 106-110, 145, 164, 197 texture, 178, 180, 184, 190, 196 Thiel, Elizabeth, 72 thoughts (as transformative, activating repressed content for uncanny effect), 26, 126-129, 132-139, 149, 162, 165 intrusive thoughts, 133, 135, 138139 Through the Looking-Glass, 7, 15, 18, 20-21, 24-25 Todorov, Tzvetan, 90, 91n, 104, 106, 118, 193 tombs, 115 crypts, 134, 138 graves, graveyards, 2, 48, 50, 53, 103, 115 Tooker, George Government Bureau, 189 Touloumi, Olga, 114

219

Trainspotting, 56-60 transformation (from heimlich to unheimlich), 73-74, 114, 118, 126, 131-134, 143, 166, 182, 191, 198-199 transgression, violation, 81, 115, 138 trauma, 10-11, 155-161, 164, 167171, 199 Trial, The, 9, 113-122 Trieb [drive, urge, desire] (see also sexuality), 135 Trigg, Dylan, 5, 11, 188, 196-197 troll, 128, 130-134, 137 Tromly, Frederic B., 36n Trudgill, Peter, 43n Turner, Mark, 179 U uncanny canny - to know, 4, 6, 7, 15, 33, 44, 69, 71, 79, 94, 97, 101, 103, 108, 149-150, 158, 162, 165, 166-170, 181 dismemberment, severing (also see castration), 52, 159, 164, 166 not knowing, 4, 97, 106, 118, 168, 181 tonality (music), 131 uhyggelig [ominous] (also see thoughts), 131 uncanny double, 4, 18, 35, 50, 95-97, 100-101, 106-107, 120, 137, 159, 182, 188, 197, 199 doppelgänger, 74-75, 98, 143 splitting, 28, 49-50, 52, 101, 188 uncanny returns (also see death, haunt, repression), 3, 6, 9, 17, 26, 35, 50, 53, 55, 57, 70-71, 102, 127, 132, 136-139, 156, 167, 171, 196, 199

220 womb (also see mother), 53, 84, 115, 140, 148 uncanny valley, 2 unconcept, 23, 24 unheimlich, unheimliche, 7-8, 16, 18-19, 22, 25, 28, 33-34, 38, 48, 60, 68-69, 72-73, 75, 94, 114-117, 126, 131-132, 136, 143-144, 187 unhomely, 2, 22, 28, 34, 48, 69, 71, 75, 187 unconscious, 9, 17, 19, 28, 52, 54, 97, 100, 122, 127, 135, 156, 197 Unterman, Alan, 107n V vegetal, 7, 16-29 victim, 84, 145-146, 149-153, 160, 167-168, 182 Vidler, Anthony, 134-139, 157, 199 Vincendeau, Ginette, 195n violence, 39, 51, 55, 79, 160, 163, 171 voice, 35, 35n, 36, 43-48, 50-56, 5960, 156, 160, 171 double-voicedness (also see uncanny double), 50 fragmented, 171 internal, 36 natural, 36 own voice, 46-47, 55, 185 private, 35, 46, 53, 60 public, 35-36, 45, 51, 54, 56, 60 trauma, 156

Index genocide, 156-157 Warminski, Andrzej, 51n Warren, Austin, 91, 93-94, 104 weird, 16, 21, 69, 75, 77, 84-85, 103, 116, 165 oddities, 69, 82, 116, 118, 120 Wellek, René, 91, 93-94, 104 Welsh, Irvine, 8, 34, 56-60 Trainspotting, 56-60 Whitehead, Anne, 156, 171 Williams, Anne, 88n Williams, James G., 145n Wiltshire, Irene, 37n, 40, 45n wish (see also thoughts), 6, 18-23, 36 Wistrand, Sten, 8n, 107n witch, 129, 136, 137, 139 woman angelic woman, 47, 72-73, 98, 149 uncanny woman, 138 woman's creativity, 84 woman's worth, 44, 61 women (collective), 43, 44- 45, 47, 76, 133-134, 140, 163 wordlessness, silence, 26-27, 37, 39, 46, 50-59, 143, 147, 201 World War I, 1, 4-5, 7 Wright, Angela, 88-92, 94n Wróg ludu [An Enemy of the People], 180 Wuthering Heights, 37-48 Wyndham, John The Day of the Triffids, 23-24 Wyspa róĪ [The Island of Roses], 183

W Walpole, Horace The Castle of Otranto, 104 war, 1-2, 5, 43, 49, 156, 159

Z Zachrisson, Anders, 126n, 136n