lemongrass

One of the most misunderstood critics of all time is our dear friend Freud. Freud, commonly recognized for his derogatory “studies” and theories about child rearing is also quite the significant critic in literary theory. Freud introduces for us the concept of the uncanny…the creepy deja vu, the reason why dolls are creepy. As such, I feel that it is important to give Freud his own little piece.

            The primordial cry of humans remains “more light;” Light as a metaphor, light as God, light to push away and illuminate the crevices of our caves, our minds. We have polluted the sky with street lamps as a defense against the night, and with light, there is nothing we cannot control. So it follows naturally that a great many of the ideas behind successful horror films synthesize from the idea of something “lurking.” The idea of something following us in an intimate way is both familiar and frightening. In some ways, it’s our inner core, the thing that knows us best, a sensualized secrecy. But this thing still knows us better than we know ourselves, and it’s just outside of our periphery. This is a truly frightening prospect because it leaves us floundering and aware of the darkness that we cannot illuminate within ourselves.

            Such is the case with Freud’s “uncanny,” a concept woven in such a way as to be familiar yet lurking, as described by the term “heimlich.” “…heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different:…what is familiar and agreeable, and…what is concealed and kept out of sight”(Freud 933). The idea here is that familiar repressed content makes itself known at a level of dread and compulsion: nothing is more frightening than the sense that inherently we are out of control.

            The fear of the uncanny, this general loss of control, can be examined in more finite terms. The uncanny aims straight for the core: preservation. Fundamentally, whether we exist in fate or in malleable reality, we want to survive. Perhaps, Freud suggests, we even create the subconscious as a second self to allow for primitive preservation: the more of you there are, the harder to dispose of your essence. But the when the subconscious seems to take control over our realities, we experience the uncanny, and a particular dread arises due to the hostility we perceive: there are now two of you, and one is perhaps hostile. Which one is real? We don’t have enough perspective to illuminate and eliminate the question. Did we even have enough control to create our second self in alignment with our own terms? To that effect, socialization could be the equivalent to “fate.” It is a dynamic which we create, that second self of culture, and yet we have very little control over its effect upon our lives. And so we create the uncanny and cannot escape it in the same way that we cannot escape culture.

The uncanny is not an unfamiliar concept in this sense. The days when an individual experiences déjà vu, or continually encounters a concept are a demonstration of the uncanny. But these experiences would not be odd or familiar if they were not somehow inherently previously engrained within our psyche. These oddly familiar encounters lead us to question our control on a deeper level, and in a sense, cause us to relinquish our grasp of an entirely malleable reality: life becomes fate, in a more spiritual sense, or really, life becomes socialization and culture: the individual is at a loss.

            Granted, in an examination of reality, the truth of whether we or some mystical fate has control makes very little difference, considering that whatever the situation, reality will continue forward within those rules without our consult. The issue is not the loss of touch with reality but rather the sense that our familiar reality is falling away from us, and it’s this sense that creates and drives the uncanny.

            Existing perhaps in the grasp of a hostile self, our ideas of a freedom of longevity vanish. In dealing with whatever hardships we may experience, we cling to the idea of unfulfilled futures, and the possibility of these futures pushes us forward: this is the preservation of self through hope. But if we are run by an all knowing fate, or even a hostile self as an all encompassing culture, then how is hope a possibility? Our sense of the uncanny deconstructs the light at the end of the tunnel and leaves us hanging in the middle of the darkness, waiting to be whipped around to whatever this “other” may see fit.

Works Cited

1. Freud, Sigmund.“The ‘Uncanny’.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: New York, 2001.929-952.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS