The Effect of the Uncanny Through Narrative Structures - Case Study Example

The Effect of ‘The Uncanny’ Through Narrative Structures The uncanny is often a reverse of what is known to us, and according to Freud, it is a situation where something can be familiar and foreign simultaneously (Bartnæs 2010, p.33), thereby yielding the feeling of it being disturbingly strange or unnervingly familiar. In this respect, the uncanny may seem familiar, but its familiarity will always be unsettling, troubling, and frightening at the same time; Freud proposes that such familiarity could be attributed to the repressed emotions in the unconscious mind, and the worry over the reoccurrence of such trauma. Elements of the uncanny include doubles/repetition, robots/automatons, a focus on the eyes, and a feeling eeriness that results from seeing ones likeness; Freud argues that the uncanny feeling arises from the repressed anxiety of castration (Bresnick 1996, p.114), when something that has been considered imaginary before appears to us in reality. Doubling is a crucial motif in literature, and the uncanny presents a way to understand not only the splitting of characters in literature, but also a way to frame what the uncanny may say concerning psychological issues. This paper will discuss the effect of the uncanny through narrative structures by using the narratives of ETA Hoffman and Edgar Allan Poe, The Sandman and Fall of the house of Usher respectively, for illustration. The uncanny in ETA Hoffmann’s The Sandman Published in 1816, The Sandman is a short story written by the German E.T.A Hoffmann about a young man known as Nathaniel and his disturbing childhood memories of the sandman, who was said to tear out children’s eyes; Nathaniel is engaged to Clara, but falls dangerously in love with Olympia, the automaton. As the story progresses, Nathaniel associates the eerie Coppelius who conducts experiments with his father with the sandman; during one of the alchemical experiments, Nathaniel is discovered observing the events by Coppelius who threatens to burn his eyes out but is quickly saved by his father, who later dies in an explosion on one of the subsequent encounters with coppelius. While studying, Nathaniel later meets an optician Coppola from whom he buys a spyglass that he uses to see the automaton Olympia, who has been produced by Spalanzani and Coppola; whereas the former is a double of Nathaniel’s father, the latter is in fact a double of Coppelius (Hoffmann, 1816, p.97). Nathaniel witnesses Spalanzani and Coppola fight over the automaton with its eyes pulled out of its head, a fight that is reminiscent of the earlier fight that Nathaniel’s father and Coppelius had over Nathaniel when he was caught observing the alchemical experiments. Soon afterwards, Nathaniel is beleaguered by insanity, but later he recovers and tries to marry his fiancée Clara, whom he later tries to hurl from the steeple in yet another bout of madness when he sees Olympia through his spyglass; on seeing Coppelius, Nathaniel yells ‘beautiful eyes!’ and leaps to his own death. Freud considers Hoffmann’s The Sandman to be the quintessential uncanny text since the writer alters its structure of the story to add to the uncertainty that the uncanny creates. In the short story, ETA Hoffmann employs a series of narrators and the plot of the story goes back and forth in time; as the story unfolds, a number of characters with oddly similar features are also revealed with time (Royle 2003, p.39). Beginning with Nathaniel, it is not so clear whether or not he is human, particularly because the writer chooses not to clarify that point in the tale; the uncertainty revolving around the status of Nathaniel’s being is enforced by various subplot-instances within the short story. For instance, Coppelius dislocates Nathaniel’s joints and intends to burn out his eyes while at the end of the story, Nathaniel’s head shatters like glass; apart from that, Nathaniel also suffers constant confusion and apparent malfunction as the story winds u to the end, yelling “Beautiful eyes!” before leaping to his own death. These instances, particularly the unhinging of Nathaniel’s parts, seem to lend credence to the theory that Nathaniel could very easily be an automaton as opposed to being human as one might think at the onset of the short story. The idea of being robbed one’s eyes is very central to the source of the uncanny in Hoffmann’s short story and Freud compares the loss of eyes in this story to the fear of castration in psychoanalysis; Coppelius is a powerful castrating father who inhibits all love relationships and even kills the good father that first protected Nathaniel’s eyes. Taking Freud’s thesis to its logical conclusion, the castration complex, which informs our infantile sexuality, is re-invoked by the fear of loss of the eyes in The Sandman. The loss of eyes in the story is, therefore, the primary source of the uncanny in the story while Nathaniel the protagonist of the story is the anchor character around which all other events and people in the fictional world revolve. The structure of the text takes on a dreamlike quality that has manifest and latent content intricately woven together; the real and the fantastic content are unified in the consciousness of Nathaniel, the anchor character. In this respect, some of the events strike as merely symbolic since there is uncertainty as to whether they are real or imagined by the anchor character; nevertheless, the story switches between objective and subjective narrative styles, which give accounts of realistic and fantastic events respectively. The theme of uncertainty has been explored deeply in the story, as there are various instances in the plot when the writer simply leaves certain things unclear without further clarification and the reader is forced to second guess his intentions. For instance, it is not so clear whether the events of the narration are purely fantastic or real as the lines between reality and fantasy are extensively blurred; on top of that, some characters like Nathaniel are portrayed as almost human but not exclusively, leaving room for doubt as whether they are human or automaton. Unlike Freud, a remarkable critic called Ernst Jentsch in his On the Psychology of the Uncanny puts forward an argument that the source of the uncanny in lies in the sense of what he terms ‘intellectual uncertainty’, thus, implying that the uncanny feeling is a fear of the unfamiliar. Jensch believes that the uncanny is due to the lack of orientation, or the feeling of doubt concerning the true nature of an unknown phenomenon, which ultimately denies the subject any form of intellectual control of the situation. The uncanny in Edgar Allan Poe’s Fall of the house of Usher Published in 1839, Edgar Allan Poe’s Fall of the house of Usher is yet another tale that belongs to the uncanny; the gothic haunted house represents a metaphorical embodiment of uncanniness since it possesses both the home-like features as well as the secret or supernatural features (Nadal 2009, p.58). The haunted house is the height of terror of the soul since an air of inevitable gloom pervades it (Poe 1839, p.151), a fear that is merely imagined rather than explicit and Poe employs the double nature of the human mind to execute the uncanniness in his tale of The Fall of the House of Usher. The structure of the narrative is distinguishable into the conscious and the unconscious levels, which represent both the real and the fantastic content respectively; at the conscious level, the writer narrates the story of the twins whose hereditary illness restrains them in the house while at the subconscious level, Poe presents the real source of horror in the text. The narrator in the text is the embodiment of the conscious text and a reflection of the reader’s perspective since he maintains a logical attitude towards Usher’s ravings and opposes all supernatural facts in the story. The reader identifies with the narrator of the text due to his sceptical position that enables him to give credibility to the various descriptions and surprising reactions that abound in the tale; the rational perspective of the narrator enables the reader to appreciate the chain of elements that are supernatural. Having established both the conscious and the unconscious levels of his tale, Poe goes further and establishes various frames or peepholes through which the readers can perceive the shadow text, which is the text’s main source of horror. For instance, the mirror image on the tarn and the striking resemblance between the tangled network of fungi on the roof and the web-like hair of Usher are specific clues that hint at the existence of the shadow text. Nonetheless, the illuminated vault painting that is aimed to abate the curse, the coincidence between reading the Mad Trist and Madeline’s escape from the vault, as well as the eventual concurrence between the fall of the house and the death of the twins are also windows through which readers can perceive the shadow text. Poe’s goal in presenting these events is to preserve the aspect of familiarity as much as possible by merely falling short of breaking the barrier of reality; in other words, Poe conceals his supernatural text as natural to the extent that what the narrator seeks as real can only be explained as fantasy thereby achieving the balance of uncanniness. The narrator in Poe’s story is never explicit why he tells his story but he reveals his intentions indirectly from the beginning; this narrator speaks using a conversational tone that shows he has a listener or at least imagines someone to be listening to his tale (Heller, 1987). As a result, the implied close contact between the narrator and the implied listener, Poe imposes a distance between the narrator in the present time and his earlier experiences; the narrator further emphasizes this distance by interpreting his earlier experiences as imagined or ultimately explicable, and by the verbal device. As the story progresses, the effect of the uncanny in this tale is that the narrator tries to resist his own story by dissociating or distancing himself from it rhetorically from time to time, due to the oppressive memory of its events. For instance, the narrator frequently asserts the present at crucial points in the plot like when he is recounting his perceptions of the atmosphere as well as while discussing Usher’s artistic products but such assertions are suddenly disappear following the death of Madeline. One crucial opposition that is established early in the narrative is that between the narrator and the house; the narrator later learns that the house and Usher mirror each other as living corpses. A series of images of Usher’s imprisonment in his world, and of the almost futile attempts of the narrator’s resistance to becoming yet another image of Usher emerge and dominate the rest of the story. The root cause of Usher’s problem, according to Usher himself, is the fear of transformation and going mad since in his mind, the house is alive and it wills his transformation, and by extension, it wills that all its inhabitants mirror it. As the story draws to the end, the narrator’s desperate effort to flee into the present of the narration sells him out since the past awaits him in the future. At this point in the plot, the narrator seeks acknowledgement from the implied reader but the reader is under acute pressure to deny the narrator’s rhetoric, which is no longer satisfactorily convincing; in other words, the narrator is narrating his story to deny the very essence upon which the story is based on. Eventually, at the end of the story, the narrator embodies the voice of Usher, addressing the implied reader, and though he tries not to mirror Usher, he does mirror him all the same. Problems arising from the narrative structures of the texts Eventually, the main problem with Poe’s narrative structure is that it does not offer any form of internal mechanism of closure since it leaves the readers in suspense and any form of interpretation of the text entails attempting to find closure for the tale. The tale leaves the reader anxious and entrapped in an endless search for resolutions, which are never forthcoming; in this respect, the tale imposes an intolerable and obsessive role to the implied reader by withholding resolutions and refusing to be read. Similarly, the same problem presents itself in the reading of Hoffmann’s tale The Sandman since there is no consistent point of view that can be considered to be account of events. Lines between the real and imagined are blurred to the extent that one cannot tell whether they are in the supernatural realm or in the phantoms of the self; the reader is torn between believing Nathaniel’s recollections as a child and Clara’s analytical reconstruction of these accounts. The narrator too, fails to provide the reader any insight that is helpful in distinguishing the real from the imaginary by becoming yet another distorting mirror that merely reflects the initial ambiguities inherent in the narrative. The narrator in Hoffmann’s tale is merely implicated in the story he narrates even though it seems to have no place for him since like all other elements of the tale, the narrator is neither properly inside nor outside the story he is telling. Additionally, whereas the death of Nathaniel in Hoffman’s The Sandman should dictate a contrast between the protagonist and the narrator, the protagonist manifests through the narrator, who becomes the voice of the protagonists desire to animate rather than the voice of truth (Moller 1991, p.129). Ironically, the narrator also implicates the implied reader in this desire by addressing him through the rhetoric devise; by beginning his tale with a series of letters, Hoffmann plunges the reader into an endless search for meaning and uncertainties akin to Nathaniel’s dilemma of the different interpretations of the Sandman. Criticism of the Freudian Uncanny Ruth Ginsberg faults Freud for repressing the uncanny female in his interpretation of Hoffmann’s tale; she asserts that women and the feminine play a fundamental role in The Sandman, not only thematically, but also figuratively and structurally. Helene Cixous, in her criticism of Freud’s uncanny, sees something savage that can catch the author unawares; she describes Freud’s text as a net that is tightly drawn to catch the uncanny only for the uncanny to turn on Freud in a vicious interchange. According to Cixous, the uncanny is linked to the gap between western ideas of phenomenon and the fear associated with the experience of interconnecting apparent opposites; in this respect, Cixous asserts that it is the in-between that is tainted with strangeness (Cixous 1976, p.543). Brook Hopkins on the other hand bases expounds Freud’s theory, that the temporal structure of the uncanny is that of deferred action; Brook supports Freud that phenomenon is experienced as uncanny if it was familiar in the past but was previously repressed and lost to the conscious level, but later recovered in a new setting (Hopkins 1989, p.28). Richard A Hutch, in response to Henry Jame’s “Turn of the Screw”, argues that the uncanny feeling may result from a breakdown in the relationship with others; the force of the breakdowns emanates from a cycle of misconstrued accounts of the nature of reality, which reduce ordinary discourses with others to mere dialogue with oneself. References Poe, E.A. 1839. The Fall of the House of Usher. [Online]. Available at: http://www.online-literature.com/poe/31/ Hoffmann, E.T.A. 1816. The Sandman. [Online] Available at: http://germanstories.vcu.edu/hoffmann/sand_e.html Royle, N. 2003. The Uncanny. The Manchester University Press. Manchester. Bresnick, A. 1996. Prosopoetic compulsion: Reading the uncanny in Freud and Hoffmann. The Germanic Review, 71(2), 114.  Moller, L. 1991. The Freudian Reading: Analytical and Fictional Constructions. Pennsylvania: The University of Pennsylvania Press. Heller, T. 1987. The delights of terror: An aesthetics of the tale of terror. University of Illinois Press. Nadal, M. 2009. “The Fall of the House of Usher”: A Master text for (Poes) American Gothic. Journal of English Studies 7, 55-70. Bartnæs, M. 2010. Freud’s ‘the “uncanny”’ and deconstructive criticism: Intellectual uncertainty and delicacy of perception. Psychoanalysis and History 12(1); 29-53. Cixous, H. 1976. Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freuds Das Unheimliche (The "uncanny"). New Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 525-548+619-645. Hopkins, B. 1989. Keats and the Uncanny: This Living Hand. The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 28-40. Read More