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

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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
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Page 3: his great book European Literature

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

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