What scares us?
What keeps us up at night after we watch a horror movie or has us rushing to lock our
doors after reading a scary novel?
If we run through a catalog of stock horror characters, we might come up with an easy
and obvious answer to this question: we are afraid of things and people we don’t understand.
We all can probably agree that the creatures in the Ridley Scott movie Alien are terrifying,
and this is largely due to the fact that they don’t look or act like us (they pop out
of our stomachs, after all!)
This tendency to view “alien” others as evil or frightening is, of course, often itself
evil and frightening, as countless stories from history and literature remind us.
But this depressing tendency isn’t what I want to get into today.
Instead, I want to discuss a different (and, to my mind, more interesting) kind of fear,
one that is generated by things that are NOT unfamiliar to us.
I’m thinking here of things that have been with us since our childhoods, like dolls,
for example, or clowns, or televisions.
What is it about these old familiar things that, under certain circumstances, raises
the hair on the backs of our necks?
Sigmund Freud takes up this question in a 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” and his thoughts
on the subject are still useful 100 years later.
In this lesson, I want to sketch out his definition of this special kind of fear and then show
you how you might apply it to your own readings of literature.
Freud begins his essay with a strange observation.
The word for uncanny in Freud’s native language of German is “unheimlich,” which means
not from the home.
In other words, not familiar.
This definition seems to repeat what I just said about alien others—we fear that which
is not from the home.
But Freud also notes that unheimlich (or uncanny) has, in certain situations, been used to mean
something hidden inside the home that was never meant to come to light.
This is very strange, as it suggests that the meaning of unheimlich and heimlich, or
uncanny and canny, overlap.
Like the word buckle, which can mean to break apart or to come together, uncanny thus means
itself and its opposite at the same time.
Weird, right?
To resolve this paradox, Freud turns to his general theory of the self and asks what might
be hidden within us that suddenly comes to light and frightens us.
As you may already know, Freud was absolutely obsessed with changes that take place in our
minds as we move from childhood to adulthood.
When we are children, Freud suggests, we are fiercely devoted to our mothers, because they
nurture and protect us.
Anything or anyone who gets in the way of this devotional love becomes, in our irrational
baby minds, a threat that should be eliminated—even if that threat happens to be our father.
What I’ve just described is a version of Freud’s famous Oedipus complex, in which
a male child, echoing the actions of the famous Greek king Oedipus, wants to kill his father
and marry his mother.
Freud isn’t suggesting that our adult rational selves want to carry out these actions—Oedipus,
after all, is so horrified by his actions that he blinds himself when he discovers what
he has done.
Instead Freud is suggesting that the self we once were as a child still remains within
us, hidden underneath our new rational, adult self.
And sometimes, like the alien in Scott’s movies, that hidden self pops out.
As he writes, “Nowadays we no longer believe [in childish fantasies], we have surmounted
such ways of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new set of beliefs, and the old
ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation” (241).
So now we’re getting somewhere!
The uncanny seems to be related to beliefs we once held when we were children that we’ve
repressed or covered over or hidden away to become adults.
We cover over these beliefs because, of course, those beliefs are wrong and we don’t want
to be wrong.
We want to be grown up.
We want to be rational people with proper attitudes about the world.
(Clowns aren’t scary, Ray, stop behaving like a child!)
And this process of maturation, of giving up our childish things, takes a lot of time
and effort on our part.
It would be absolutely horrifying to imagine, as adults, that our child-self had a better
understanding of the world than we do.
This, for Freud, is the uncanny—it is the dread we feel in situations in which our childish
fantasies and fears appear more real and more true than our adult worldviews.
If we have this idea in mind, the difference between familiar things that delight us and
familiar things that terrify us start to make sense.
In the movie Toy Story, the talking dolls on screen are funny and sympathetic characters
because they are written within a genre that makes it ok for them to come to life.
I don’t go to a Pixar movie and expect reality.
In the realist setting of horror, however, those same dolls become terrifying to adult
audiences [insert Chuckie image].
Along similar lines, if I were a child, I might imagine, say, Dora the Explorer as someone
who is actually inside of my tv asking me for advice on her travels.
As an adult, well, that would also be pure terror (right?
You—right there, yes, I’m talking to you) [Insert The Ring image]
Both of these examples suggest one final necessary property of the uncanny—realism.
Fairy tales and children’s cartoons cannot be uncanny, because those genres never ask
us to believe that what we are watching relates in any way to our reality.
“The situation is altered,” Freud writes, “as soon as the writer pretends to move
in the world of common reality…
He takes advantage, as it were, of our supposedly surmounted [or overcome] superstitious-ness;
he deceives us into thinking that he is giving us the sober truth, and then after all oversteps
the bounds of possibility.”
Freud’s phrasing might sound confusing, so let’s clear it up with a simple example.
Here’s one from the opening to Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem, “The Raven.”
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
”’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this, and nothing more.”
It is, of course, terrifying to hear an unexpected knock at your door at midnight.
It would be even more terrifying and uncanny if your significant other, Lenore, had just
died and you were saddled with immense grief, as we later discover is the case with Poe’s
speaker.
The knocking might remind you of strange noises you heard at night when you were a child that
you thought were ghosts or demons.
Or it might encourage you to imagine that Lenore could return from the dead, even though
your rational self knows that is impossible.
The speaker considers both uncanny scenarios after a mysterious talking raven appears,
which leads the speaker to descend into madness.
But before any of this happens, (and before the uncanny can therefore operate), Poe’s
poem must “pretend to move in the world of common reality.”
Poe does this by having his speaker insist that there is a rational explanation for the
tapping.
It is a visitor, he mutters to himself, “Only this, and nothing more.”
In other words, Poe and his speaker here are insisting that he (and the readers along for
the ride) have no cause for concern—there is a perfectly rational explanation for the
strange noise at his door.
Even after the raven appears and starts squawking “Nevermore,” the speaker still maintains
his faith in his rationality:
“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—
Till the dirges of his Hopes that melancholy burden bore
Of ‘Never—nevermore.”
I won’t go any further into an interpretation of this poem, other than to say that Freud’s
model works quite well within it.
If you have any thoughts on how the analysis could proceed, I hope you’ll share them
in the comments section below.
You could also, incidentally, consider how the uncanny might work in the first example
I mentioned at the start of this video—the Alien movie—in which what appears on the
surface to be wholly unfamiliar phenomena—aliens bursting out of bodies, for example—might
actually, with a bit of thought, be understood as events our child selves were quite familiar
with.
And our mothers, too.
Freudian readings of literature are obviously old and problematic in a variety of ways,
and they need to be reworked for the 21st century.
But as his theory of the uncanny itself suggests, leaving Freud’s ideas behind or covering
them over carries its own risks, too.
Reading his theory and making it relevant for our very different times can help us to
gain a better insight into what we fear and, more importantly, what that fear can tell
us about who we are.