The Uncanny and Monstrosity: Still More on the Tropology of SF

<strong>The</strong> <strong>Uncanny</strong> <strong>and</strong> <strong>Monstrosity</strong>:
<strong>Still</strong> <strong>More</strong> on the Tropology of SF
ICFA, Orl<strong>and</strong>o, March 2011
Neil Easterbrook
Department of English
TCU
Fort Worth, TX 76129
n.Easterbrook@tcu.edu
“We ourselves speak a language that is foreign.”
—Freud, “Das Unheimliche” 1919
Early in William Gibson’s Spook Country, our heroine Hollis Henry recalls hearing
about one of technoscience’s more recent engineering innovations, the square oyster:
“She’d once read an article about Starck that said the designer owned an oyster farm
where only perfectly square oysters were grown, in specially fabricated steel frames”
(3). Unlike many of the more exotic phenomena to be found in science fiction, square
oysters actually exist. But they do nicely capture something specific to sf—its invocation
<strong>and</strong> conflation of two particular sorts of trope: the uncanny <strong>and</strong> belatedness, which
Freud named unheimlichkeit <strong>and</strong> Nachträglichkeit, respectively. <strong>The</strong> “square oyster”
captures beautifully the exquisitely <strong>and</strong> sometimes disturbingly engineered mongrel,
monstrous hybridity of sf.
In sf, we find enormous numbers of such uncanny figures. “How strange, I
thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects!” —OR— “It was a
bright, cold day in April, <strong>and</strong> the clocks were striking thirteen.” Slow glass. <strong>The</strong> U-Bomb.
“<strong>The</strong> king was pregnant.” “<strong>The</strong> sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
<strong>The</strong> Eusa Show. Retrocausality. “I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city <strong>and</strong>
the city.”
Even unengineered, the oyster, of course, is also itself a figure of the uncanny
hybrid, at least in the classical catalog of <strong>The</strong> Great Chain of Being, where the oyster
appears as the transitional crux separating the organic from inorganic, the conscious
from the material: it is, the ancient doctors told us, one half animal <strong>and</strong> the other half
rock. <strong>The</strong> oyster is caught in-between, liminal, interstitial, always uncannily displaced in
attempts to be itself.
Various sorts of tropes seem more common in some genres than others. While
unlike topoi, tropes are not genre-specific, sf does rely quite heavily on the uncanny, on
cognitive defamiliarization, on literalization (which actually functions as a trope, too!),

<strong>and</strong> on certain other tropes of thought, such as the “sf synecdoche,” which Anthony
Easthope defines as text “in which a single feature or group of features empirically
plausible in our present world becomes extrapolated to occupy the whole space of an
imagined future” (54).
It’s probably obvious that my thinking about tropes is part of a much larger
project on literature <strong>and</strong> rhetoric, a good portion of which will be directly, perhaps even
exclusively, about SF. At ICFA in 2009, I pontificated about the tropes of narrative time,
ending up saying something like within fiction, all temporal structures are examples of
achrony (anachronism), <strong>and</strong> then tried to provide something of a catalog of the types.
For instance, in distinguishing between analepsis <strong>and</strong> prolepsis, projecting backward or
projecting forward, I followed the book About Time, where Mark Currie argues there are
three forms of prolepsis—narratological prolepsis (the flash-forward within a particular
plot); structural prolepsis (the temporal difference between narrator <strong>and</strong> narratee); <strong>and</strong>
rhetorical prolepsis (“the anticipation of an objection to an argument” [29]). If I tell you
that my paper now will conclude with a reference to the philosopher Avital Ronell, you
have an example for the first, narratological prolepsis; if I speculate that right now you
are muttering sotto voce, just what the hell does this have to do with anything?, then
you have an example of the third, rhetorical prolepsis. But it’s structural prolepsis that
aligns most clearly with the distinctive quality of the literary, <strong>and</strong> especially so with sf.
<strong>The</strong> difference between the text’s time <strong>and</strong> the reader’s time is always proleptic,
since even if today yr reading China Miéville’s <strong>The</strong> City & the City, there’s a temporal
difference between when the book was written <strong>and</strong> the now of your reading. Structural
prolepsis is thematic in SF: use Greg Bear’s City at the End of Time, <strong>and</strong> its retrocausal
sum-runners as a paradigmatic instance.
My general interest is that all of these textual features have tropological
structures. But I’m still very much at that cataloging phase, <strong>and</strong> if I fail here to give a
thrilling inferential claim I hope you’ll forgive me. (Please note: that was just an example
of rhetorical prolepsis.)
Since I’ve found that many critics <strong>and</strong> scholars use various terms
interchangeably, that that will cause considerable equivocation. So let’s have a little
semiological hygiene. I want, as the classical rhetoricians did, to make rigorous
distinctions between tropes <strong>and</strong> topoi, <strong>and</strong> I think conflating these two terms causes
much confusion in literary study, especially when we are trying to characterize <strong>and</strong>
define genres. Most of the time when people like us use the word trope, we probably
should use topos. Topos is a Greek noun that can mean place or topic; for Aristotle, it
was topic, <strong>and</strong> part of the first canon of rhetoric, inventio. This sort of topos concerns
the types of approach in argument. But the other kind of topos that came to be
important in literary study is the “common place” (koinos topos): these are the common
place objects, events, settings, or stock characters; as regards SF, here’s one of each:
spaceships, conceptual breakthrough, a laboratory, the mad scientist. As one instance
of our typical equivocation, take Gwyneth Jones, in <strong>The</strong> Cambridge Companion to SF,
who calls these the “icons” of SF—that’s a very different idea. That her essay is
otherwise excellent doesn’t change the overdetermination of the terms.
1600 years after Aristotle, another kind of topos became important (you’ll find this
in Aristotle too, both in <strong>The</strong> Rhetoric <strong>and</strong> <strong>The</strong> Topics, but the meaning has shifted
radically): This is the eidos topos (literally “idea topic”), which Ernst Robert Curtius, in

his great book European Literature <strong>and</strong> the Latin Middle Ages translates as “intellectual
theme.” Here’s an SF example: the mad scientist, because of his misanthropic ardor
<strong>and</strong> immodest hubris, will be clobbered by Nemesis. Being precise here with the
terminology has tremendous practical value to us, because maybe the most common
way to define a genre is simply to count topoi <strong>and</strong> then check a generic box. That’s
certainly how I make decision about what movie to see or what TV channel to watch.
Test case: Star Wars. Darko Suvin <strong>and</strong> Samuel Delany would say no way!, but most of
us say: hey, here’s a critical mass of the topoi, so check the box. Amass enough
submarines <strong>and</strong> enough cavorite <strong>and</strong> enough BEMs <strong>and</strong> enough light sabers, <strong>and</strong>
check the box. QED.
Topoi are either present or not, <strong>and</strong> they are drawn from the catalog of previous
usage, as Victor Frankenstein is drawn from the Faust figure, who is a medieval version
of Prometheus. But topoi are to tropes, at least analogically, what constative language
is to performative language: constative language, the topoi, declare states of affairs;
performative language, the tropes, actually change the discourse, tho here the analogy
breaks down, because a trope requires an audience as an active participant to produce
the twist or the turn in the discourse.
Actually, that’s basically what the Greek word means, a turn or twist. Sometimes
you’ll see tropes defined as a “swerve” from common usage, revealing the general
western prejudice in favor of topoi <strong>and</strong> against tropes. For tropes belong to a completely
different linguistic order than do topoi: a topos is an instance of literal language, a trope
is an example of figural language.
So what’s figural language when it’s at home? Here cognitive linguistics gives
perhaps the best description. In a metaphor, say Carl S<strong>and</strong>berg’s the fog crept in on
little cat feet, the audience maps a source domain, the insidious behavior of cats,
natural ninjas if there ever were such, onto a target domain, fogs. This mapping is a
superimposition of one set of qualities <strong>and</strong> characteristics for the audience to produce a
comparison, a new thought, so it’s typically called “cognitive mapping.” Something new
is produced—this is the crucial bit—in metaphor, the comparison is produced by
audiences, not found. <strong>The</strong> comparison is not already present. In a topos, it is: Victor is a
Faust figure. Topoi say what they mean <strong>and</strong> mean what they say, but tropes are
allophonic, they say one thing <strong>and</strong> mean something else. This is especially crucial since
literature is made up of entirely tropological language.
Just as there are two kinds of topoi, there are two kinds of tropes, tropes of
speech (sometimes simply called rhetorical figures) <strong>and</strong> tropes of thought. Tropes of
speech twist the discourse of limited phrases; tropes of thought reconfigure an entire
discourse. Think, for example, of the difference between America as a melting pot or as
a spicy gumbo. Me, I don’t want to live in a fondue, but that’s one trope of the American
mythos. Henry Louis Gates Jr writes that, in America, race is a trope: it does not
designate a thing or essence, so the biologists tell us, but instead a rhetorical
transfiguration of our thought. But in lived experience, these figures are monsters, as
real as can be.
Uncanniness <strong>and</strong> belatedness are examples of such tropes of thought. Freud's
often-cited but infrequently-read essay on this subject, "<strong>The</strong> <strong>Uncanny</strong>," proves pivotal
for underst<strong>and</strong>ing the semiotic structure of SF. My touchstone example is Lem’s Solaris,
with the Phi-creatures appearance(s) <strong>and</strong> the dread they engender through repetition.

Let me be clear in saying I invoke Freud not as a psychologist but as a theorist of
narrative; when I use his terms, I’m not referring to psychological states but only to
narrative devices—just tropes, <strong>and</strong> they won’t bite you, ok? Published in 1919 (when
Freud was 63), "Das Unheimliche" examines "that class of the frightening which leads
back to what is known of old <strong>and</strong> long familiar" (220). <strong>The</strong> "uncanny" is the
displacement or ironized inversion of the familiar (the homely, domestic, evident) <strong>and</strong>
the unfamiliar (the foreign, alien, occult). What most interests Freud—<strong>and</strong> us—is that
"heimlich...comes to be unheimlich," that the single word signifies two very different but
not altogether contradictory things: "on the one h<strong>and</strong> it means what is familiar <strong>and</strong>
agreeable, <strong>and</strong> on the other, what is concealed <strong>and</strong> kept out of sight" (224-25). Freud's
discovery is that "heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of
ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich" (226). When the
feeling of belonging becomes estranged, alienated, or displaced onto the alien, it results
in the uncanny. And vice versa, when the alien is domesticated. Uncanniness can
occur only in the recurrence of "discarded belief" (248), <strong>and</strong> so only those beliefs
repressed (not refuted or discredited) from conscious thought can return to evoke
monstrosity—uncanny dread, fear, or loathing. Here, repression is to be understood in
its strict psychoanalytic sense, for Freud will exploit the fact that in German, unheimlich
also means "concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it,
withheld from others" (223).
Freud closely studies several textual examples, most notably E.A. Hoffmann's
tale "<strong>The</strong> S<strong>and</strong>-Man," his novel <strong>The</strong> Devil's Elixir, <strong>and</strong> Friedrich von Schiller's poem
"<strong>The</strong> Ring of Polycrates." <strong>The</strong> uncanny problematics of these texts "are all concerned
with the phenomenon of the 'double'" (234); in every instance, the "extraneous" double
repeats features of the protagonist's life, creating a certain ambiguity between self <strong>and</strong>
other, original <strong>and</strong> copy, primal event <strong>and</strong> psychic repetition. After tracing "the manifest"
meaning of doubling within psychoanalytic interpretation, Freud goes on to identify its
specific function in creating uncanny dread: it is "the repetition of the same" (236), of
"involuntary repetition" (237) that uniquely marks the unheimlichkeit. How "involuntary
repetition" determines the uncanny derives from "infantile psychology," which becomes
a mechanism as familiar as the uncanny itself: "the compulsion to repeat" (234). Four
pages of "Das Unheimliche" (234-38) condense <strong>and</strong> repeat the larger argument,
displaced from Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
In psychoanalytic thought (either in Freud or Lacan), the circuit of desire is
irremediably (ineluctably?) linked to repetition, for it is only in the repetition of Oedipal
triangles that desire structures itself; <strong>and</strong> it is only the repetition of desire that structures
the need for repression—an originating gesture that opens the unconscious; <strong>and</strong> only in
repetition/recovery of the repressed can desire be realized or relieved. Beyond the
Pleasure Principle traces that "infantile psychology." <strong>The</strong> general structure of the
repetition compulsion can be understood in the child's pleasure in playing the fort/da
game with an empty wooden spool. It is a staged repetition of the mother's coming <strong>and</strong>
going. First gone (fort) then here (da), the spool vanishes <strong>and</strong> returns—a yo-yo pattern
that precisely doubles the mother's appearance <strong>and</strong> disappearance—<strong>and</strong> both events
are delightfully exclaimed to any onlooker. Where desire—following Barbara Johnson's
analogy—"is located 'in' a symbolic structure, a structure that can only be perceived in
its effects, <strong>and</strong> whose effects are perceived as repetition" (141), Freud identifies the

hidden mystery of the repetition compulsion with the death drive, a desire to regain a
lost past. It is not my current purpose to assess Freud's connection, only to explain why
the compulsion to repeat has a "demonic" or monstrous character. In "<strong>The</strong> <strong>Uncanny</strong>,"
Freud discusses exactly this demonic or terrifying character of repetition, as manifest in
literature's (or phantasy's) articulation of the phenomenon of the double. <strong>The</strong> third
section of "<strong>The</strong> <strong>Uncanny</strong>" begins with a recapitulation of the first two sections, then
turns specifically to address the uncanny in literature, which is "a much more fertile
province than the uncanny in real life" (249). As Derrida reminds us, "Das Unheimliche"
continually indicates "literary fiction's eternally renewed resistance to the general law of
psychoanalytic knowledge" (Post Card 426-27). In fact, that turn toward ambivalence
articulates the literary problematic of the double, which Derrida defines as "unheimliche
relations of duplicity which unfold without limit within a dual structure" (460).
In "<strong>The</strong> <strong>Uncanny</strong>," we therefore seem to have an economic model for Kelvin's
situation, his dread, the reemergence of his repressed guilt, <strong>and</strong> his final loss. In the
case of Solaris, it’s easy to see the relevance of Freud’s claim. But other than the SF
that foregrounds dread <strong>and</strong> doubling—Solaris certainly, but also everything in the postgothic
mode, including much of the work of China Miéville—it might be hard to see the
absolute relevance of the term to SF specifically, or the fantastic more generally. <strong>The</strong>
reason for this, I think, is that in SF, the uncanny is always linked to belatedness,
Freud’s trope of Nachträglichkeit, often translated as retroactivity. In his famous study
of "<strong>The</strong> Wolf-Man," Freud called "retroactivity" (Nachträglichkeit) that operation which
transforms the repetition of an event into a simulacrum by recasting the original as an
instance of the repetition—inverting the temporality of events according to the
metaphoric law of displacement. Retroactivity is therefore metaleptic, unlinking the
causal chain but opening up a field of semiotic <strong>and</strong> hermeneutic play, the sort of
affirmation, if one can call it that, we know as deconstruction. Another name for this
uncanny retroactivity is literature.
Now with 20 or so more pages what I would do is develop the exposition of
retroactivity as monstrous doubling, <strong>and</strong> I’d illustrate that with an analysis of Bear’s how
City at the End of Time engages time, especially time as a technology. That analysis
would also help me make a transition to SF’s treatment of technology. Let’s take it as a
given that I’ve provided that analysis, which would end with a beautifully compact,
beautifully belated quotation from Pat Cadigan’s Synners: “change for the machines.”
<strong>The</strong>re’s considerable distance now in both the genre <strong>and</strong> the species from our
foundations. Homo sapiens was lately homo faber but now perhaps is homo significans.
Maybe we have passed beyond the Great Chain of Being, but the poor belated oyster
remains. In the retrocausal or achronos causality that has us change for the machines,
our relation to technology has ceased to be homo faber’s tool making. Instead it is
marked by the multiple ambiguities <strong>and</strong> ambivalences created by the two tropes under
discussion. Avital Ronell, in her still astonishing <strong>The</strong> Phone Book, says: "Technology ….
no longer has anything to do with tools, but it provides an uncanny deracinating grid
whose locality is a literalization of the Unheimlich, two … shapes spying on one another,
the earth seeing itself from the moon, ripped out of its socket, axially dislodged,
bleeding, rendering the … effect … aconceptual" (39-40).
—while it would certainly take a good deal of time to properly unpack all the
spectacular resonances of this passage, I think she’s on to something, she’s really on to

something. Moving this to the discourse of sf so that I can suggest something of an
inferential claim: perhaps it was true, at the beginnings of SF, with Shelley <strong>and</strong> Verne
<strong>and</strong> Wells, <strong>and</strong> through the edisonaide <strong>and</strong> the engineer paradigm, that technology was
a tool, <strong>and</strong> so when Freud discusses the uncanny he pairs it against fantasy, horror,
<strong>and</strong> the gothic.
But in SF today, technology is a condition, a trope not a tool. After the bomb, that
most monstrous of modern realities, says Roger Luckhurst, there is “no being outside
technology,” no being that is not through <strong>and</strong> through both shaped <strong>and</strong> violated by
technology, axially dislodged, <strong>and</strong> bleeding, monstrously denigrated <strong>and</strong> perhaps even
ennobled, because of it. <strong>The</strong> square oyster isn’t an exception but the rule, <strong>and</strong> the
literature most engaged with tracing the diverse, dynamic, dialectical consequences of
engineered difference is that deracinating grid called science fiction. <strong>The</strong> effect is
visceral, aconceptual—real.