ENC1102.5865
notes on the "Uncanny"


Warning: even though I offer brief explanations/definitions of "uncanny"/Unheimlich below, do not use them or quote them back to me in your paper. Define/explain those terms in your own words, or use Freud or Cixous' words and cite them.
Given the relative complexity of the material we covered on Wednesday, I offer here some additional/supplementary notes to those you took in class on the Paper 2 assignment and Freud and Cixous' sense of "the Uncanny" (das Unheimlich). These notes are deliberately informal, and I write them with the intention that you use them to supplement your own notes. Read through the excerpts of Freud's essay and Cixous' book that I handed out in class to see how they state their ideas as well.

I'll try to take a different tack from yesterday. First, reread the assignment and rationale for Paper 2.

Next, reread your own notes from yesterday's class.

Ok, now go ahead and read my additional notes below.

I've asked you to select three "uncanny" instances you encountered/experienced in your chosen literary text (either "The Lottery" or "The Yellow Wall-Paper"). Those instances may consist of a particular event described in the text, a particular phrase, even the use of a particular word that evoked an uncanny sensation when you read them. (You can pick three of the same kind of instance -- such as three specific words placed just so in the text - or you can "mix and match" instances -- such as word placed just so, and a particular scene, and a particular event.) Once you've done that, your task is set:

  • Identify your instances for your reader by either quoting directly if it's a word or phrase, or by paraphrasing if it's a scene. (See your grammar text on the difference between quotation and paraphrase or summary.) Explain the word/phrase/scene to your reader -- if it's a word, indicate its context and/or its location within its sentence, or its ¶, and/or on the page; if it's a scene, explain it in context of the story and/or the text. (Our old friend Eco might come in handy here -- remember him?) Remember, you'll do this step three times, once for each instance -- each should take about a ¶, maybe two.
  • Then, explain the uncanny/Unheimlich sensation you experienced when you read that instance. What was the sensation -- shock? errieness? creepiness? general unease? just sort of "what the &%@#"? This step should also take about a ¶, maybe two. (With three instances, you're already up to six paragraphs, and that's without the introduction ¶! Bye-bye five-¶ essay! Hello 4-5 pages!)

    But what's this uncanny/Unheimlich business? In current general use, "uncanny" or Unheimlich describes a sensation of strangeness, unease, or discomfort within our comfortable situation that brings our situation to our attention (whereas we'd otherwise just happily exist in it without thinking about it). We suddenly become aware of our situation and of ourselves in that situation.

    Sigmund Freud's essay "The Uncanny" (Das Unheimlich) posits such an experience as the realization of strangeness-in-the-familiar. He shows how even those concepts of "familiar" and "strange" remain not opposed, but actually include each other. In German, heimlich denotes both hidden/secret/unknowable/unfamiliar, and home/knowable/familiar -- the word remains ambivalent. At face value, Unheimlich would seem to denote the unfamiliar/strange/foreign/other . . . but heimlich already includes that. Linguistically and conceptually, any distinction between the two remains illusory. For Freud, the falsity of this distinction reveals a deeper false assumption: the distinction between "self" and "other," between "home" and "foreign," between "normal" and "strange," etc. Freud thereby suggests that when we experience something uncanny/unheimlich, or when we have an "uncanny"/Unheimlich experience, we experience the familiar suddenly becoming strange; that is, we cease to just do whatever it is we're doing, and become very oddly aware of what we're doing and that we're doing it. We become aware of ourselves almost as if we were strangers to ourselves. (Freud goes off in another direction from here, nattering on about repression and neurosis, etc., that we're not concerned with here -- if you want, ask me for a copy of the entire essay for that business; it's an excellent read, and really quite easy to understand.)

    The French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and feminist thinker Hélène Cixous takes Freud's idea and applies it to those experiences in reading when we become aware of ourselves as readers reading -- when suddenly we're not paying attention to the story that the text tells anymore, but instead experience some uncanny sensation that makes us aware of our surroundings and ourselves. To explain, Cixous first compares, and then contrasts, the experience of dreaming to that of reading. With dreams, she suggests, we don't experience an "entrance" or "exit"; rather we're just suddenly there, in the dream, and then suddenly not there when we awake. We do not experience any "border" to dreams because, well, they're dreams. We accept the "logic" of dreams, no matter how illogical (so there's the strange-familiar of the Unheimlich already!). We only ever "exit" dreams and their weird comfort-zone when we awake -- which does not mean that the dream "ends," but rather that we've stepped out of it into wakefulness.

    Cixous posits that reading works similarly: we "enter" the stories we read arbitrarily, wherever we happen to enter them (on page one, or wherever we left off), and there's no border between us experiencing our own world and us experiencing the story-world --we're just suddenly "there" with the characters and their events (even though we're still sitting in our own "real" world-- more ambivalence!). Reading, in Cixous' words, is like dreaming: we're "here" but also "there"; we're in ourselves but also not in ourselves. And we just accept it, we go with it, we seldom if ever question it . . . until the uncanny. Here, dreaming and reading differ: in reading we sometimes experience an odd sensation -- because of a word, a phrase, an image, an idea -- a sensation of ourselves. Our involvement with the story grinds to a screeching halt, and suddenly we're no longer "in" the story, but become aware of ourselves reading a story. It's almost like becoming aware of your own skin -- you're in it all the time, but how often do you think of it as skin? The uncanny/Unheimlich experience suddenly distracts us from the story and focuses us on ourselves as readers having a reaction induced by the act of reading. We've ceased "reading," per se, and started doing or experiencing something else. That "something else" is, taa-daa!, our old friend "the uncanny"/das Unheimlich.

    This experience, my fellow literary sojourners, comprises the subject of Paper 2. A few classmates indicated yesterday that "gee, this sounds an awful lot like the assignment for Paper 1!" I suggest that such a conclusion is only half right: Paper 1 asked you to focus on specific instances of explicitly definable ambivalence and ambiguity and how you negotiated them. Paper 2 asks for something related, something analogous, but different: the experience of the uncanny/Unheimlich can often be triggered by an ambiguity or an ambivalence, but not necessarily so. That's the other part of the uncanny:

  • it's a highly individual experience -- what's uncanny to you could be boring and normal to the next person
  • you cannot anticipate, predict, or foresee the uncanny: it's unexpected, aleatory, it "arrives" without warning (which is part of the experience, that sensation of "woah, didn't see that coming!" that is not part of the story itself, but is instead a sensation that only you could experience in exactly that way).

    So, Paper 2 asks you to consider whatever three uncanny/Unheimlich sensations you experienced, no matter how mild or violent, in reading your chosen text.

    Go forth. Reread. Think. Write.

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