Freud's Uncanny Narratives

Author(s): Robin Lydenberg

Source: PMLA, Vol. 112, No. 5 (Oct., 1997), pp. 1072-1086
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/463484
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Freud's Uncanny Narratives
ROBIN LYDENBERG, professor
of English at Boston College, is
the author of Word Cultures:
Radical Theory and Practice in
William S. Burroughs' Fiction
(U of Illinois PE 1987) and a co-
editor, with Jennie Skerl, of Wil-
liam S. Burroughs at the Front:
Critical Reception, 1959-1989
(Southern Illinois UP, 1991). She
is working on a critical study of
the uncanny and a larger proj-
ect on Freud and narration.
conscious and unconscious effects.'
1072
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Robin Lydenberg
I N THE ESSAY "Delusions and Dreams in Wilhelm Jensen's Gra-
diva" ("Der Wahn und die Traume in W. Jensens 'Gradiva"'; 1907),
Freud claims that Jensen's characters embody the "laws which the activi-
ties of [the] unconscious must obey" 'Gesetzen die Betatigung dieses Un-
bewul3ten folgen muB3' (92; 363). To demonstrate this assertion, Freud
summarizes Jensen's novella, retaining the essential content but depriving
the story of its narrative "charm" 'Reiz' (10; 276). In "The Moses of Mich-
elangelo" ("Der Moses des Michelangelo"; 1914), Freud repeats this effort
to separate content from form, declaring himself more interested in the
"subject-matter of works of art" 'Inhalt eines Kunstwerkes' than in "for-
mal and technical qualities" 'formale und technische Eigenschaften' (21 1;
257). In these and other texts, however, Freud does not merely reduce the
verbal and visual arts to a set of psychoanalytic laws; he shows himself to
be a consummate practitioner of narrative. His adept treatment of thematic
content is inextricable from his awareness and manipulation of stylistic
strategies and effects. In this essay, I explore not only Freud's potential
usefulness to contemporary theories of narrative, as Peter Brooks has done
(Psychoanalysis 47), but also the importance of his work to an understand-
ing of the more general relation between literature and psychoanalysis.
The initial working definition by which I identify sites of narrative is
that generally used in narratology: the communication of a sequence of
events (real or fictional) connected by chronology and causality and held
together by some unifying human interest. Structural narratologists like
A. J. Greimas and Tzvetan Todorov emphasize the stabilizing function
of narrative elements such as binary opposition, hierarchy, linearity, clo-
sure, and wholeness. But such stabilizing effects are exposed as illusory
by theorists like Paul de Man who assert the problematic nature of read-
ing and the "autonomous potential of language" to subvert the control-
ling structures of narrative, to void "aesthetic categories," and to generate
an irreducible "something often referred to as literariness" (10, 9). In
reading Freud, I take into account both the stabilizing structures and
destabilizing literariness of narrative, which emerges as a hybrid of con-
vention and innovation, law and transgression, logic and nonsense,
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 Robin
Although many of Freud's essays provide fer-
tile ground for exploring this conception of narra-
tive, the text that has most strikingly influenced
critics working at the intersection of narratology
and psychoanalysis is "The Uncanny" ("Das Un-
heimliche"). In that 1919 essay, Freud analyzes the
particular kind of fear provoked "when infantile
complexes which have been repressed are once
more revived by some impression, or when primi-
tive beliefs which have been surmounted seem
once more to be confirmed" 'wenn verdrangte in-
fantile Komplexe durch einen Eindruck wieder
belebt werden, oder wenn uiberwundene primitive
Uberzeugungen wieder bestatigt scheinen' (249;
403). The ambiguity of the uncanny as both fa-
miliar and unfamiliar is reinforced by Freud's ex-
amination of the German word unheimlich: the
root, heimlich, carries the primary signification
"familiar and agreeable" 'Vertrauten, Behaglichen'
(224; 375), but in its secondary meaning it coin-
cides with its opposite, unheimlich, "concealed and
kept out of sight" 'Versteckten, Verborgengehal-
tenen' (224-25; 375). What is most intimately
known and familiar, then, is always already divided
within by something potentially alien and threaten-
ing. Such a blurring of boundaries is characteristic
of those phenomena that give rise to uncanny fear,
including "animism, magic and sorcery, the om-
nipotence of thoughts, man's attitude to death, in-
voluntary repetition and the castration complex"
'[der] Animismus, [die] Magie und Zauberei, [die]
Allmacht der Gedanken, [die] Beziehung zum
Tode, [die] unbeabsichtigten Wiederholung und
[der] Kastrationskomplex' (243; 396).
The uncanny confusion of "imagination and
reality" 'Phantasie und Wirklichkeit,' "a symbol
... [and] the thing it symbolizes" 'ein Symbol ...
[und der] Symbolisierten,' "the over-accentuation
of psychical reality in comparison with material
reality" 'die Uberbetonung der psychischen Real-
itat im Vergleich zur materiellen' has a particular
relevance to narrative fiction (244; 398). Critics
such as Homi Bhabha, Joan Copjec, and Mary
Jacobus apply to literary works Freud's theoreti-
cal explanation of the uncanny blurring of such
boundaries, but others, like Helene Cixous and
Patrick Mahony, have also found "The Uncanny"
illuminating as an example of uncanny narrative.
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lydenberg 17073
Some of these critical readings suggest that per-
haps the most essential quality of narrative is un-
canniness, a notion that in turn illuminates the
more general uncanniness of language and of the
speaking subject. My discussion of Freud's essay
also considers the large body of criticism provoked
by "The Uncanny" during the past two decades.
The fertility of this critical field testifies to a gener-
ative power that is a characteristic effect of the un-
canniness of narrative.
Like recent theorists of the uncanny, Freud finds
himself somewhat uncomfortably situated at the in-
tersection of psychoanalysis and literature. He
opens his essay by acknowledging that "only rarely
[does] a psycho-analyst [feel] impelled to investi-
gate the subject of aesthetics" '[d]er Psychoanalyti-
ker verspurt nur selten den Antrieb zu asthetischen
Untersuchungen' (219; 369). Not quite at home in
this aesthetic territory yet "impelled" to enter it,
Freud develops a psychoanalytic interpretation of
the uncanny using supporting examples from litera-
ture. He analyzes E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story
"The Sandman" ("Der Sandmann"), for example, to
illustrate the uncanny psychic effects of oedipal
conflict and castration anxiety. At the end of the
essay Freud is still troubled by something in the un-
canny that resists a psychoanalytic approach, and he
suggests that "what remains probably calls for an
aesthetic enquiry" 'der Rest erfordere warscheinlich
eine asthetische Untersuchung' (247; 401).
However, the elusive "something" that inhabits
language and literature cannot be reduced to a sys-
tem of aesthetics, as de Man argues (8), any more
than to a theory of psychoanalysis. In fact several
readers of "The Uncanny" have pointed out that in
reducing "The Sandman" to its themes (or to his
own themes), Freud ignores the complexity of the
narrative framework and obscures the elements that
constitute the story's literariness. Cixous refers to
this literary remainder as the "something else" be-
yond thematics (528), and Neil Hertz senses it in
the "something else again" (108) that cannot be at-
tributed entirely to demonic or to psychological in-
fluences.2 Focusing on the narrative frame of "The
Sandman," Hertz unites the story's hero (the poet
Nathaniel), the narrator, Hoffmann, and ultimately
Freud and the literary critic through the shared
compulsions "to leave a lasting mark" and to "make
 1074 Freud' UncannyNarratives
a story out of [disconnected elements]" (110, 117).
Hertz calls the first the "desire for representation"
(110); the second might be called the desire for
narration. By focusing on the themes of "The
Sandman" to the exclusion of its narrative form,
Freud overlooks the aspects of his role as a story-
teller that connect him to the tale's principals: the
struggle with the limitations of language to express
intellectual and emotional conflict, the desire to
sweep readers up in his own way of seeing.
Instead of focusing on these authorial struggles
and desires, Freud perceives the fiction writer in
general as exercising the "right" 'Recht' to con-
struct the world at will, while readers must "bow to
his decision" 'ihm darin nachgeben' and "put [them-
selves] into his hands" 'fur die Dauer [ihrer] Hin-
gegebenheit' (230; 382). Freud confesses that his
own response to certain writers' manipulation of
him as a reader is a "feeling of dissatisfaction, a
kind of grudge against the attempted deceit" 'Ge-
fuhl von Unbefriedigung, eine Art von Groll uiber
die versuchte Tauschung' (251; 406). Writers like
Hoffmann, he concludes, wield an almost demonic
power over their audience. In an apparent effort to
reassert the control he loses as a reader, Freud ex-
ercises in "The Uncanny" the "privileges" 'Vor-
rechte' (251; 406) of story writers: he manipulates
his audience by giving expression to the uncanny
in a series of personal anecdotes. Brought to life in
narrative form, these incidents exceed their func-
tion as illustrations of a theory; thus Freud un-
leashes that irreducible something associated with
the literariness of the text.
If one can avoid the error that Freud makes in in-
terpreting "The Sandman"-that is, if one can re-
sist reducing Freud's essay to its themes-perhaps mahnt. Als ich einst an einem heifen Sommernach-
the literariness he obscures in Hoffmann's narrative mittag die mir unbekannten, menschenleeren StraBen
can be illuminated in his own. To that end, I focus
on the moments in "The Uncanny" when Freud
takes on the storyteller's role both as a deliberate
rhetorical strategy and as an irresistible compul-
sion, those moments when, as Barbara Johnson
might say, he "falls" into narrative.3
Framed by Narrative
The story in "The Uncanny" most often discussed
by critics is Freud's account of an experience he
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had while traveling in Italy (see esp. Engle; Gins-
burg; Mahony). In the introductory frame, Freud's
text shifts suddenly from a tone of cautious and ob-
jective reasoning to the distinctly stylized register
of recit:
The factor of the repetition of the same thing will per-
haps not appeal to everyone as a source of uncanny
feeling. From what I have observed, this phenomenon
does undoubtedly, subject to certain conditions and
combined with certain circumstances, arouse an un-
canny feeling, which, furthermore, recalls the sense of
helplessness experienced in some dream states. As I
was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the
deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was
unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose
character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing
but painted women were to be seen at the windows of
the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow
street at the next turning. But after having wandered
about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly
found myself back in the same street, where my pres-
ence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried
away once more, only to arrive by another detour at
the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feel-
ing overcame me which I can only describe as un-
canny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at
the piazza I had left a short while before, without any
further voyages of discovery. (237)
Das Moment der Wiederholung des Gleichartigen
wird als Quelle des unheimlichen Gefuhls vielleicht
nicht bei jedermann Anerkennung finden. Nach
meinen Beobachtungen ruft es unter gewissen Bedin-
gungen und in Kombination mit bestimmten Umstan-
den unzweifelhaft ein solches Gefuihl hervor, das
iuberdies an die Hilflosigkeit mancher Traumzustande
einer italienischen Kleinstadt durchstreifte, geriet ich
in eine Gegend, uber deren Charakter ich nicht lange
in Zweifel bleiben konnte. Es waren nur geschminkte
Frauen an den Fenstern der kleinen Hauser zu sehen,
und ich beeilte mich, die enge StraBe durch die nach-
ste Einbiegung zu verlassen. Aber nachdem ich eine
Weile fuhrerlos herumgewandert war, fand ich mich
plotzlich in derselben Straf3e wieder, in der ich nun
Aufsehen zu erregen begann, und meine eilige Entfer-
nung hatte nur die Folge, daB ich auf einem neuen
Umwege zum drittenmal dahingeriet. Dann aber er-
faBte mich ein Gefuhl, das ich nur als unheimlich
 Robin
bezeichnen kann, und ich war froh, als ich unter Ver-
zicht auf weitere Entdeckungsreisen auf die kurzlich
von mir verlassene Piazza zuruckfand. (389)
Freud acknowledges the difficulty of arriving at a
consensus with his audience about what circum-
stances give rise to uncanny feelings. His abrupt
shift into narrative operates as a rhetorical strategy
to capture the readers' agreement by making them
experience those circumstances more directly. No
longer a critical audience weighing evidence and
argument, Freud's readers are repositioned as con-
sumers of a story who must give themselves over
to his control. Although the personal nature of the
events described draws the reader closer to the text,
Freud maintains his distance as a narrator. Thus he
locates himself both inside and outside the un-
canny, and that structural doubling adds a further
uncanny effect to the narrative.
Early in the essay Freud proclaims himself
particularly immune to uncanny sensations (con-
fessing to a "special obtuseness in the matter"
'besonderen Stumpfheit in dieser Sache'), and he
acknowledges a need to "translat[e] himself into
that state of feeling" 'sich ... in das Gefuhl hinein-
versetzen' more susceptible to the effects of the un-
canny (220; 370). In personal anecdotes such as
the Italian tale, Freud may invoke a past self more
open to uncanny feelings, but he also maintains a
present self, a storyteller who manipulates such
feelings. The past, narrated self is subject to repre-uncanny.4 Indeed, narrative often seems to be initi-
sentation by the narrator, who in turn is subject to
the discursive conventions on which his authority
depends. Despite the appearance of distanced con-
trol the narrator conveys, his present self is as
much a product of linguistic effects as is the past
self conjured up by the narrative.
The narrating self maintains a certain advantage,
however. Although the Italian episode exposes
Freud in an embarrassing personal moment of vul-
nerability and confusion, the formulaic style in
which it is described renders it impersonal. Al-
ready marked as narrative by the classic cadences
of the storyteller's opening ("As I was walking,
one hot summer afternoon"), the episode is further
bracketed as more literary than lived when Freud
self-mockingly labels it a "voyage of discovery."
The protagonist rarely emerges from the passivity
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Lydenberg 1075
of his uncanny helplessness ("I found myself in a
quarter.... I suddenly found myself back in the
same street . .. only to arrive .. . at the same place
yet a third time"), but the narrator maintains an
aloof and controlling distance that partially con-
tains and diminishes the episode's uncanny power.
Freud's narrative choices reinforce this dimin-
ishment in several ways. He is lost not in some
threatening metropolis but merely in "a provincial
town" where disorienting foreignness is kept to a
manageable scale. The event's temporality is simi-
larly manipulated in the telling; the vaguely expan-
sive duration ("for a time") of Freud's wandering is
abruptly reduced so that when he returns safely to
the piazza, he has been gone only "a short while."
The story concludes with a variation on the con-
ventional form of narrative closure in which events
are framed as a dream or hallucination from which
both protagonist and reader awaken into reality (or
in this case, into the piazza). This framing device
serves to limit the uncanny imaginative expansion
the Italian experience calls up.
On Foreign Ground
Despite these techniques of framing and control,
Freud's Italian anecdote retains a certain disruptive
power because it is provoked by and constructed
on the uncertain ground of foreign territory, a
ground particularly fertile for the production of the
ated by forces that threaten its structural integrity
or that divide it within from its inception.
Of special relevance to Freud's provincial adven-
ture in "The Uncanny" is his complex relation to
the foreign, to Italy in particular. In a study of
Freud's accounts of his travels, John Paul Russo il-
luminates Freud's obsession with Italy in the con-
text of the uncanny. Freud describes Rome as a
place where he feels "quite natural," where he has
"no sense of being a foreigner" (Jones 96). During
one visit he is so attracted by the panorama of
"[f]oreigners and natives mix[ed] in the most nat-
ural way" in the Piazza Colonna that he returns
there nightly (Letters 262). Even in the midst of this
"natural" and pleasing assimilation, however, there
persists an uncanny impression: "strangely enough"
he finds all the Roman women and none of the
 1076 Freud's Uncanny Narratives
foreign (non-Roman) women beautiful (263). In the
Roman piazza-a site for the intersection of native
and foreign, natural and strange, attraction and re-
pulsion-Freud is "spellbound" by the uncanny in
its foreign and feminine form (262). In The Inter-
pretation of Dreams, as Russo notes, Freud himself
suggests the association of Italy and sexuality by
pointing to the similarity between the German for
"to Italy" 'gen Italien' and "genitals" 'Genitalien'
(Freud, Interpretation 232; Traumdeutung 234).
In constructing narrative accounts of his Roman
experience, Freud attempts to control its uncanny
effect by using the category of foreignness as a lin-
guistic shifter. He denies foreignness in himself but
projects it onto others. While he feels in "no sense
... a foreigner," his countrywomen are counted
among the "foreign" women in the piazza: "The
women in this crowd are very beautiful (foreigners
its incendiary content yet keeps the fire under con-
excepted); the women of Rome, strangely enough,
are beautiful even when they are ugly" (Letters
263). The totalizing division Freud makes between
the two groups of women imposes order on the
field of sexual desire: only those who are unrelated
to him by nationality remain alluring, while those
with whom he shares a native affinity are denied as
objects of desire. However, this defensive narrative
structuring of desire is built on shaky ground be-
cause of his own shifting position in relation to the
categories of native and foreign.
A similar confusion of native and foreign occurs
in the lexical digression at the beginning of "The
Uncanny." Freud declares his disappointment that
little can be gleaned about the uncanny from dic-
tionaries in other languages (Latin, Greek, English,
French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese). With a can-
did but disorienting self-consciousness, he grants
that this disappointment may stem from his own
limitation, "because we ourselves speak a language
that is foreign" 'weil wir selbst Fremdsprachige
sind' (221; 372). The paradox of the native-foreign
tongue appears in condensed form in Freud's ob-
servation that one meaning of heimlich coincides
with the primary meaning of unheimlich. Freud
subscribes to the theory that "antithetical double
meanings" 'antithetischen Doppelsinnes' are not
unusual in the "oldest roots" 'altesten Wurtzeln' of
the "oldest languages known to us" 'altesten uns
bekannten Sprachen'; and he notes that such ar-
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chaic effects persist in current usage ("On the Anti-
thetical Meaning" 158, 156; "Uber den Gegensinn"
225, 222). Quoting the philosopher Alexander
Bain in English, Freud concludes that the "essen-
tial relativity of all knowledge, thought or con-
sciousness cannot but show itself in language"
(159; 226). Narratives constructed of shifting lan-
guage will therefore have a similarly divided foun-
dation. And the conservative function of narrative,
its stabilizing of the familiar, will be subverted by
the antithetical effects of the unfamiliar.5
Women on the Market
Such antithetical effects are evident in the way
Freud's Italian tale simultaneously represses and ex-
presses highly charged material, fans the flames of
trol.6 Freud's handling of the story's sexual content
is marked by the ambivalence of his double role as
actor and narrator, as one both touched by and im-
mune to the uncanny. Whereas Freud describes in
travel letters his assimilation in the Roman piazza,
he insists in this anecdote on his status as a for-
eigner in the unfamiliar territory of the Italian town,
thereby providing an alibi for his misguided wan-
derings and denying interest in the prostitutes he en-
counters. He emphasizes that the prostitutes are
confined to a single "narrow street" in a particular
"quarter"-more specifically, to their "small houses,"
where they are framed by windows that display and
immobilize them. Like painted dolls enclosed in
miniature domestic spaces, the prostitutes present a
sexual otherness that is rendered unthreatening.
In his conventionally euphemistic reference to
"painted women" and to "a quarter of whose char-
acter [he] could not long remain in doubt," Freud
replaces his involuntary wandering in the town with
a deliberate linguistic circling around the prosti-
tutes. As a protagonist, he may be embarrassed to
be seen returning repeatedly to the women, but as
a narrator he uses rhetorical circumlocutions to set
a witty tone that shields him from vulnerability
and exposure.
Even though such narrative techniques enable
the writer to distance and diminish powerful mate-
rial, the risk of putting such material into circula-
tion remains. The framing gesture that contains the
 Robin
women in their little houses also contaminates the
domestic sphere with forbidden eroticism. As do-
mestic ornaments and sexual merchandise, these
women are simultaneously heimlich and unheim-
lich. Their narrative confinement takes on gesta-
tional overtones, operating like an incubator that
causes them to multiply until they completely fill
Freud's field of vision: "Nothing but painted wo-
men were to be seen." No longer restricted to a par-
ticular quarter or domicile, female bodies seem to
spread out over the entire town. Thus the disturb-
ing elements dismissed as foreign or reduced to a
witty anecdote turn out to constitute the very at-
mosphere Freud inhabits-until he escapes again
into the light of the piazza. Ironically, Freud's de-
scription in earlier travel letters of deliberately re-
turning to the Piazza Colonna in the evenings
might recast his final escape into the piazza in this
anecdote as another surreptitious return.
Maternal Origins and Multiplicity
The structure of "The Uncanny" reproduces this
inadvertent return to the essentialized image of
woman. Following the Italian anecdote, for exam-
ple, Freud's argument brings him back twice to the
uncanniness of the mother's body through the same
textual sequence: a disquieting multiplicity of ex-
amples of the uncanny leads to a reference to the
maternal body, whereupon Freud ends the para-
graph and inserts a break in the text.7
In the first sequence, Freud attributes the uncan-
niness of several anecdotes about dismembered
limbs to "proximity to the castration complex"
'Annaherung an den Kastrationskomplex.' He then
turns to a seemingly unrelated example of what
some consider "the most uncanny thing of all" 'die
Krone der Unheimlichkeit'-the terrifying notion
of being buried alive. Marshaling the knowledge
that "psycho-analysis has taught us" 'die Psycho-
analyse hat uns gelehrt,' Freud reveals behind this
unheimlich idea of living entombment an earlier
positive and heimlich desire for "intra-uterine exis-
tence," rendered less clinically in the German as
"Leben im Mutterleib" (244; 397). Although the
recourse to theoretical knowledge has the rhetori-
cal effect of containment, Freud has also inadver-
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Lydenberg 1077
tently returned, as in the Italian town, to the site of
dismemberment, castration, and the uncanny.
Freud returns yet again to the mother's body
only one page later, as he attempts to conclude a
"collection of examples [of the uncanny], which is
certainly not complete" 'gewiB3 noch unvollstandi-
gen Beispielsammlung [des Unheimlichen].' Again
he defends himself against the uncanny effects of
the maternal body by turning to "psycho-analytic
experience" 'psychoanalytischen Arbeit' and the
defensive strategy of a joke:
To conclude this collection of examples, which is cer-
tainly not complete, I will relate an instance taken
from psycho-analytic experience; if it does not rest
upon mere coincidence, it furnishes a beautiful confir-
mation of our theory of the uncanny. It often happens
that neurotic men declare that they feel there is some-
thing uncanny about the female genital organs. This
unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the for-
mer Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place
where each one of us lived once upon a time and in
the beginning. There is a joking saying that "Love is
home-sickness"; and whenever a man dreams of a
place or a country and says to himself, while he is still
dreaming: "this place is familiar to me, I've been here
before," we may interpret the place as being his moth-
er's genitals or her body. In this case too, then, the
unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the
prefix "un" ["un-"] is the token of repression. (245)
Zum Schlusse dieser gewiB noch unvollstandigen
Beispielsammlung soll eine Erfahrung aus der psy-
choanalytischen Arbeit erwahnt werden, die, wenn
sie nicht auf einem zufalligen Zusammentreffen
beruht, die schonste Bekraftigung unserer Auffas-
sung des Unheimlichen mit sich bringt. Es kommt oft
vor, daB neurotische Manner erklaren, das weibliche
Genitale sei ihnen etwas Unheimliches. Dieses Un-
heimliche ist aber der Eingang zur alten Heimat des
Menschenkindes, zur Ortlichkeit, in der jeder einmal
und zuerst geweilt hat. "Liebe ist Heimweh," be-
hauptet ein Scherzwort, und wenn der Traumer von
einer Ortlichkeit oder Landschaft noch im Traume
denkt: Das ist mir bekannt, da war ich schon einmal,
so darf die Deutung dafuir das Genitale oder den Leib
der Mutter einsetzen. Das Unheimliche ist also auch
in diesem Falle das ehemals Heimische, Altvertraute.
Die Vorsilbe "un" an diesem Worte ist aber die Marke
der Verdrangung. (398-99)
 1078 Freud' Uncanny Narratives

In both instances, the proliferation ofrecourse

courses. While the uncanny
to psychoanalytic theory
prompts Freud to look for closure at the very site of and clinical experience seems to produce moments
reproduction-the mother's genitals. He trans-
(however fleeting) of closure, the narrative register
forms that most unsettling and uncanny thingFreud
of alladopts seems to evade closure by spawning
into a source of reaffirmed authority, "a beautiful more stories. The Italian adventure, for example, is
confirmation of [his] theory." As several critics followed immediately by two more tales that illus-
have observed, however, Freud veils the full signif- trate the uncanniness of repetition. The disturbing
icance of the mother's body in "The Uncanny." By multiplication of women that disorients Freud in
focusing on the maternal genitals as the longed-for
the Italian street is displaced by a reassuring multi-
but repressed Heim, he avoids the more disturbing
plication of narrative examples that are designed to
specter of the pre-oedipal phallic mother, who
solidify his position. While the generative power of
threatens castration, and of the mother as envied
the maternal body eludes Freud's control, the gen-
source of plenitude and procreation (Ginsburg;
erative power of narrative is harnessed to serve pa-
M0ller; Rubin; Todd).
ternal mastery.
Feminist readings of "The Sandman" emphasize
In the stories that spin off from the Italian tale,
the efforts of male characters to appropriate the
Freud shifts from the first to the third person ("one"
maternal and divine secrets of procreation. This
'man')-a rhetorical move that establishes the
theme is evident in the demonic rivalry Nathaniel's
father and Coppelius engage in with God, the cre- common ground with which he is trying to gain his

ator of life, and in Coppola and Spalanzani's battle readers' agreement. The stories have much more

over Olympia, their artificial creation. As Sarah "in common" 'gemein' with the Italian adventure
Kofman points out, these scenes recast the primal than just the "unintended recurrence" 'unbeab-
scene of procreation as an all-male enterprise.8 sichtigte Wiederkehr' and "feeling of helplessness"
Since the structure of the scenes is repeated in the'Gefuihl von Hilflosigkeit' Freud underlines (237;
narrator's and Nathaniel's struggles to bring certain 389). There is something else in the stories that ex-
events to life in language, narration seems to be ceeds their logical and rhetorical function as exam-
linked (for some male characters and authors) to ples of repetition:
envy of, desire for, and identification with the ma-
ternal function.9 Freud's euphemistic reference to So, for instance, when, caught in a mist perhaps, one
intrauterine life in the redundant phrase "once has lost one's way in a mountain forest, every attempt
upon a time and in the beginning" might prompt to find the marked or familiar path may bring one
further speculation about the relation between nar- back again and again to one and the same spot, which
ration and the uncanny maternal. one can identify by some particular landmark. Or one

As some scholars of the uncanny have argued, the may wander about in a dark, strange room, looking

desire to narrate arises from the illusion of lost ma- for the door or the electric switch, and collide time

ternal plenitude. The impossibility of returning to after time with the same piece of furniture-though it
is true that Mark Twain succeeded by wild exaggera-
the beginning, of restoring the imagined union with
tion in turning this latter situation into something irre-
the mother, is compounded by the equal impossibil-
sistibly comic. (237)
ity of realizing an ending. While narrative desire is
thus denied final satisfaction, that deferral protects
Zum Beispiel, wenn man si
against the danger of coming too close to satisfac-
Nebel Uiberrascht, verirrt
tion, a proximity that threatens to shut down narra-
mUihungen, einen markier
tive and destroy the subject.10 Narrative survival finden, wiederholt zu der
depends, then, on careful navigation between ex- Formation gekennzeichneten Stelle zurUickkommt.
tremes: the uncanniness of uncontrolled desire and Oder wenn man im unbekannten, dunkeln Zimmer
fertility and the uncanniness of their annihilation. wandert, um die TUir oder den Lichtschalter aufzu-
This cautious itinerary emerges in Freud's text suchen und dabei zum xtenmal mit demselben Mobel-
as an oscillation between scientific and literary dis- stUick zusammenstoBt, eine Situation, die Mark Twain

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 Robin Lydenberg 1079

allerdings durch groteske Ubertreibung in eine un- and toward an anonymous "you," he succeeds in
widerstehlich komische umgewandelt hat. (389-90) "palming off his own death" on the reader (541)."
The confusion of the traveler, the wandering
The first story demonstrates clearly the tendency of consciousness of one not quite at home with one's
narrative to generate multiplicity: the subject's dis- surroundings, oneself, or one's death, migrates in
orientation is intensified by superfluous details- these stories from character to narrator to reader."2
the wanderer is lost not just in a forest but also in a Such rhetorical drifting, a characteristic effect of
mist and on a mountain. Confusion is caused not narrative, is one reason Freud's personal and liter-
by an absence but by an excess of signs: looking ary anecdotes are never merely static examples.
for the "marked or familiar path," one is led to a While Freud may deliberately multiply stories to
mistaken but "particular landmark" to which one reinforce a theoretical argument, the generative
involuntarily and repeatedly returns. That familiar power and the potential for contagion within narra-
but rejected landmark serves the same function as tive exceeds his purposes, propelling him to the
the painted women, who are marked with the next tale and the next. The power of storytelling
familiar but rejected signs of female sexuality. draws on both maternal fertility and the death
Freud's relieved emergence into the light and clar- drive, and Freud's circular wanderings in the Ital-
ity of the piazza in his Italian adventure constitutes ian town reflect the structure and experience of
a recovery of the properly marked path leading narrative as a convergence of origins and ends.13
away from the mystery, the uncontrollable fecun-
dity, the sexuality of woman and into the light of Doubling and the Disintegration of the Subject
reason, realm of the father, end of the story.
As each story ends, however, the next follows on Narrative often appears to be motivated by the ef-
its heels; the attempted flight from the unfamiliarfort to condense and frame disruptive material, but
once a narrative begins, it threatens to proliferate
street or forest is reenacted finally in an unheimlich
without stopping, generating that something else
domestic interior. This mock-heroic adventure of
beyond stabilizing structures and concepts that
being lost in a "dark, strange room" retroactively
constitutes its irreducible literariness. One of the
diminishes the effect of the preceding examples.
basic stabilizing concepts simultaneously sup-
The sequence of short narratives ends not with illu-
ported and threatened by narrative is the narrator's
mination of the dark room, which would provide a
autonomous subjectivity. In "The Uncanny" Freud
sense of closure, but instead with the defensive
defensively doubles himself in his personal anec-
strategy of a joke-the same strategy Freud uses to
dotes, splitting into controlling narrator and help-
transform the mother's genitals into a "beautiful
less protagonist. However, the essay's theoretical
confirmation of [his] theory."
argument asserts that doubling (like storytelling)
has a tendency to betray its initial purpose and
Wandering, Contamination, Dissemination
often transforms a positive function into a negative
effect. The double as an immortal part of the self
Among the instances of uncanny repetition that fol-
that transcends death evolves into the double as
low these tales, Freud includes the hypothetical ex-
ghost, a threatening harbinger of death.
ample of a traveler's superstitious response to the
As Cixous observes, Freud's lengthy discussion
recurrence of the number sixty-two on his hotel-
of the uncanny phenomenon of the double is over-
room or train-compartment door (238; 390). In
crowded with examples, theories, and theorists.
these additional examples, repetition is tied not toAdded to that already cumbersome array of material
fertile multiplicity but to the death drive, more spe-
are three anecdotes about encountering one's double
cifically, according to Cixous, to Freud's anxiety that appear in the marginal territory of a footnote.
about his own death. Cixous argues that in the nar-
rative sleight of hand by which Freud directs a pro- Since the uncanny effect of a "double" also belongs to
phetic warning away from the "reprieved author" this same group [of occurrences that may call up the

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 1080 Freud's Uncanny Narratives

primitive belief in the omnipotence

tell. As of thoughts]
in the it is
Italian tale, Freud maintains an ironic
interesting to observe what the effect is of meeting distance from his "adventure," but the subject here
one's own image unbidden and unexpected. Ernst is not just lost in unfamiliar territory; he is lost and
Mach has related two such observations.... On the
unfamiliar to himself. While structural doubling
first occasion he was not a little startled when he real-
enables the writer to distance himself from the
ized that the face before him was his own. The second
story's events, the subject who is surprised by his
time he formed a very unfavourable opinion about the
own double experiences the vulnerability of self-
supposed stranger who entered the omnibus, and
alienation. Mladen Dolar's Lacanian reading of
thought "What a shabby-looking school-master that
man is who is getting in!"-I can report a similar ad-
this encounter emphasizes its restaging of mirror-
venture. I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compart- phase meconnaissance: "When I recognize myself
ment when a more than usually violent jolt of the train in the mirror it is already too late. There is a split: I
swung back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, cannot recognize myself and at the same time be
and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a one with myself" (12). For Dolar, Freud's en-
travelling cap came in. I assumed that in leaving the counter with his mirror image is an "intrusion of
washing-cabinet, which lay between the two compart- the real" that can be relieved only by reentering the
ments, he had taken the wrong direction and come into symbolic (14).
my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the in- In the story of Freud's double, as in the previous
tention of putting him right, I at once realized to my
examples, the setting is domestic, but the intimate
dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own re-
space of bedroom and washroom is even more con-
flection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can
densed than the small houses or the dark room. The
still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance.
train compartment is a heimlich place where the
(248)
traveler is installed in comfort and privacy, but
Da auch das Unheimliche des Doppelgangers von Freud describes this miniature dwelling (enclosed
dieser Gattung ist, wird es interessant, die Wirkung and
zu complete like a neat little story) as part of a
erfahren, wenn uns einmal das Bild der eigenen Per- "Schlafwagen," a word that evokes sleep, dreams,
sonlichkeit ungerufen und unvermutet entgegentritt. and thus the loss of control. In translating "Schlaf-
E. Mach berichtet zwei solcher Beobachtungen.... wagen" as the French "wagon-lit" rather than an
Er erschrak das eine Mal nicht wenig, als er erkannte,English equivalent, Strachey represents the image
daB das gesehene Gesicht das eigene sei, das andere of a bed hurtling through space on the rails and re-
Mal fallte er ein sehr unguinstiges Urteil uiber den an- stores an inherent Unheimlichkeit to the familiar
scheinend Fremden, der in seinen Omnibus einstieg, coziness of the train compartment. In this incident
"Was steigt doch da fur ein herabgekommener Schul-
Freud has moved beyond the uncanniness of being
meister ein."-Ich kann ein ahnliches Abenteuer er-
on foreign ground; he is on no ground at all.
zahlen: Ich saB allein im Abteil des Schlafwagens, als
All three anecdotes of the double narrate the dis-
bei einem heftigeren Ruck der Fahrtbewegung die zur
turbing loss of the familiar ground of the self.
anstoBenden Toilette fuhrende Tur aufging und ein al-
Freud's initial failure to recognize his reflection de-
terer Herr im Schlafrock, die Reisemutze auf dem
Kopfe, bei mir eintrat. Ich nahm an, daB er sich beim rives from a mental image of himself as vigorous
Verlassen des zwischen zwei Abteilen befindlichen and certain, bearing no resemblance to this befud-
Kabinetts in der Richtung geirrt hatte und falschlich dled old man who appears lost. Freud "[jlump[s] up
in mein Abteil gekommen war, sprang auf, um ihn with the intention of putting him right," of restor-
aufzuklaren, erkannte aber bald verdutzt, daB der Ein- ing clarity and designating each to his own and
dringling mein eigenes, vom Spiegel in der Verbin- proper place. But since the drama is played out in a
dungstuir entworfenes Bild war. Ich weiB noch, daB mir moving train, none of its actors can be secured.
die Erscheinung gruindlich miBfallen hatte. (402-03) This anecdote, like the others, concludes with the
disturbing discovery that the outsider is always
Freud's own personal anecdote is offered merely as already within, that the uncanny "stranger" or
a "similar adventure" to the two already related, a "intruder" is the self. Nevertheless, the other is
superfluous story that Freud seems compelled to ghettoized in its separate quarter or compartment

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 Robin
because it is perceived to be closely entangled with
sexuality and death.
As the double of lived experience, mimetic nar-
rative echoes birth, death, and the wandering be-
tween them that constitutes life. Indeed, mimesis is
a "mortal supplement" that enables survival in an
existence that "always already implies death"
(Kofman 137). The proliferation of Freud's double
stories is a reminder that accounts of human expe-
rience are always added on. They provide an illu-
sion of mastery that momentarily obscures the
imminence and immanence of death. Kofman
warns, however, that the double "cannot but evoke
what man tries in vain to forget .. . the indissoluble
bond between life and death" (148). Just as the
double evolves from a protection against death to
death's emissary, narrative doubling of life as a
method of protection also unleashes a threat. Fic-
tion, as Cixous puts it, "is a secretion of death, an
anticipation of nonrepresentation" (548).
Writing and Reading Fictions
Some critics have argued that the uncanny double
Freud encounters in the train episode (and at other
times throughout his life in various guises) is his de-
nied creative or literary self (Rubin). In what Mark
Kanzer classifies as ambivalent friendships, Freud
first acknowledges admired literary figures such as
Arthur Schnitzler, Romain Rolland, and Thomas
Mann as his uncanny doubles and then insists on
their difference from himself.'4 He projects his ownsort. It was a naive enough story, but the uncanny
imaginative creativity onto these literary doubles
but envies their narrative capacity to create the hyp-
notic effects that his science has renounced (Kanzer
291). Although Freud wants to enjoy the writer's
" poetic license" 'Freiheiten,' he remains deeply am-
bivalent about venturing into the alien territory of
aesthetics, literature, and narration (251; 406).
Shortly after confining the story of his mortal
double to a footnote, for example, Freud expresses
a desire to segregate literature to a "separate dis-
cussion" 'gesonderte Betrachtung' (249; 404). A
"more fertile" 'reichhaltiger' province of the un-
canny than real life, literature's "stories and imagi-
native productions" 'Phantasie [und] Dichtung'
provide an overabundance of examples that "open
the door to doubts" 'dem Zweifel das Tor bffnen'
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Lydenberg 1081
and force him to keep revising his theory (247;
401). Although Freud cannot contain the literari-
ness that has spread throughout his text, he tries to
impose further structures, distinctions, divisions;
for instance, he separates out those literary genres
that do produce uncanny effects from those (such as
fairy tales) that do not.15 The flaw in this taxonomy
is the same one that blinds Freud to the literariness
of Hoffmann's story: a reluctance to acknowledge
that the writing and reading of any narrative is po-
tentially an uncanny experience and that uncanni-
ness stems from a reader's encounter with a story's
linguistic structures and rhetorical effects, not just
from its contents and context.
Freud's encounter with literary uncanniness is
vividly revealed in an interpolated narrative that re-
lates his own experience as a reader of fiction:
In the middle of the isolation of war-time a number
of the English Strand Magazine fell into my hands;
and, among other somewhat redundant matter, I read
a story about a young married couple who move into
a furnished house in which there is a curiously
shaped table with carvings of crocodiles on it. To-
wards evening an intolerable and very specific smell
begins to pervade the house; they stumble over
something in the dark; they seem to see a vague form
gliding over the stairs-in short, we are given to un-
derstand that the presence of the table causes ghostly
crocodiles to haunt the place, or that the wooden
monsters come to life in the dark, or something of the
feeling it produced was quite remarkable. (244-45)
Mitten in der Absperrung des Weltkrieges kam eine
Nummer des englischen Magazins "Strand" in meine
Hande, in der ich unter anderen ziemlich uiberfluissi-
gen Produktionen eine Erzahlung las, wie ein junges
Paar eine moblierte Wohnung bezieht, in der sich
ein seltsam geformter Tisch mit holzgeschnitzten
Krokodilen befindet. Gegen Abend pflegt sich dann
ein unertraglicher, charakteristischer Gestank in der
Wohnung zu verbreiten, man stolpert im Dunkeln
uiber irgend etwas, man glaubt zu sehen, wie etwas
Undefinierbares uiber die Treppe huscht, kurz, man
soll erraten, daB infolge der Anwesenheit dieses
Tisches gespenstische Krokodile im Hause spuken,
oder daB die h6lzernen Scheusale im Dunkeln Leben
bekommen oder etwas Ahnliches. Es war eine recht
1082 Freud' Uncanni Narratives
einfaltige Geschichte, aber ihre unheimliche Wirkung
verspuirte man als ganz hervorragend.'6 (398)
Even as Freud acknowledges the story's "quite re-
markable" effect on him, he attempts to surmount
his susceptibility, dismissing the story as "naive"
and the surrounding material as "redundant." As a
reader he has been beguiled into a momentary be-
lief in animism or in the omnipotence of thoughts,
but as a narrator he denies the story's power with
the contemptuous phrase "or something of the
sort," which masks the mysterious something that
haunts this (perhaps all) fiction.
To control his encounter with that "something
more besides" 'noch anderes' evoked by literature
(249; 404), Freud feels compelled, as Hertz might
say, to make a story out of it. He adds to his pre-
sentation of the Strand story a narrative frame that
describes the circumstances in which he read the
tale-a self-doubling that extends beyond narrator
and protagonist to include writer and reader. The
uncanniness of the story derives not just from its
content-from the idea of wooden crocodiles com-
ing to life in the dark-but also from its dramatiza-
tion of the uncanniness of writing and reading.
Freud dismissively explains that this story "fell
into [his] hands," minimizing its importance, yet it
bears a remarkable resemblance to the other narra-
tives Freud has interpolated in "The Uncanny": a
domestic space is rendered unfamiliar, its interior
invaded by something primitive and abject that
bears the marks of sexuality and death. Just as the
couple's search for a heimlich domestic enclosure
ironically leads to isolation and vulnerability,
Freud seeks in the Strand a temporary respite from
"the isolation of war-time," which presumably has
put him in a state of vulnerability and distress. The
effects of the war are introduced in the opening
pages of "The Uncanny," where Freud elliptically
blames the paucity of scholarly references in his
essay on the difficulties of "the times in which we
live" 'in der Zeit' (220; 370)-times of war, haun-
ted by danger and death. Like the Italian prosti-
tutes, these threats are kept at a distance by
euphemism and indirection.
Although Freud is confident that he can map the
Strand story's significant landmarks, the territory
that remains uncharted by Freud's summary is the
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story's evocation of sexuality and death and of the
ties that bind them to storytelling. As in his discus-
sion of "The Sandman," Freud overlooks the nar-
rative elements that self-reflexively point to the
uncanniness of literature and its effect on the
reader. This "naive" story about wooden crocodiles
that come to life is also about the proliferation of
storytelling and the ways stories can haunt their
readers or listeners.
Freud's summary omits the opening scene of
the Strand story, in which the wife approaches
the house for the first time and remembers half-
forgotten tales she has read: "[t]hat clanging sound
[of the gate] drew from the depths of my subcon-
scious self some old stories of prison doors and
turnkeys" (Moberly 183).'7 Once the couple is in-
stalled in the house, the cook and maid tell "silly
servants' tales" about mysterious creatures repeat-
edly invading their sleeping quarters (195). Freud's
retelling leaves out these internal tales as well as
those of the visiting friend whose years of foreign
travel have made him an "inexhaustible" and en-
tertaining raconteur (189). When this visitor is
provoked by the smell of the crocodiles to recount
a gruesome death he witnessed in New Guinea,
the wife is again reminded of "just such an inci-
dent in a book [she] once read" (191). Just as the
wife in the Strand story is haunted by textual
memories of forgotten or outmoded genres, Freud
is haunted by a "naive" tale whose effects he can-
not dismiss. The visiting friend and the servants
have in common a liminal status-they are in the
house but not of the family; they represent an
alien otherness inhabiting the home. Like Freud,
the couple dismisses these outsiders' tales of sex-
uality and death, drawing a defensive and isolat-
ing domestic circle tightly around themselves.
However, they ultimately discover that the other
who brings sexuality and death into the home has
always already been inside, part of the home's
furniture. In the Strand story this metaphor is
inscribed literally: the crocodile table defines
Heimlichkeit by representing its opposite and then
disrupts it from within. Like many of the dictio-
nary citations with which Freud's essay opens, the
story confirms that the boundary between inside
and outside cannot hold yet cannot be obliterated:
no enclosure can offer absolute protection against
 Robin
invasion, and no effort to penetrate can proceed
without risk (Engle 112).
The complex relation between inside and out-
side, domestic and foreign, familiar and unfamiliar
reflects both the paradoxical nature of the uncanny
and something about the origins of the speaking
subject and of narration. Bringing a Lacanian per-
spective to bear on these issues, Joan Copjec de-
scribes the process of subject construction as the
rejection of our "nonselves" and the subsequent
"inclusion within ourselves" of whatever is re-
jected (34). Lacan calls that constitutive negation
the "extimate," a term Copjec (following Jacques-
Alain Miller) uses to designate something that
though "in us" is "not us" (35). Analogously, nar-
rative might be said to function as a supplementary
extimate that both sustains and alienates subjects
inside and outside their life stories.
Lost in the Uncanniness of Language
The life story in which Freud situates his reading
adventure suggests that he seeks relief from the
threat of wartime violence in the banality and
redundancy of a popular literary magazine. The
Strand issue provokes a blank mental wandering
that leaves Freud open to the unexpected advent of
the uncanny. As in the Italian town and in the
wagon-lit, Freud is geographically estranged, but
in this instance his alienation stems from wander-
ing through the territory of a language that is famil-
iar yet foreign. Freud's account of his reading of
the story could be taken as a parable of narrative as
the uncanny experience of wandering around in
someone else's words, of being led by unconscious
desires and fears that undermine sober judgment.
In a time of uncertainty Freud may derive from lit-
erary narrative a writer's control and a reader's
pleasure, but such engagement ultimately betrays
his wishes and gives voice to the anxieties he had
hoped to silence.
In "The Uncanny" Freud attempts to limit that
betrayal to the manipulations of a fiction writer who
tricks his unsuspecting audience into adopting su-
perstitious beliefs (250; 405). But in a more general
sense, both writer and reader are betrayed by a
symbolic order that seems to promise some defense
against the human realities of desire and death.
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Lydenberg 1083
Critics who explore the uncanniness of literature
and language return repeatedly to this impossible
promise, arguing that "stories are all that stands be-
tween us and the unraveling of identity" (Jacobus
272); that rhetoric is an "art of defense" against the
"catastrophe of our creative origins" and the death
drive (Bloom 98, 97); that in "'turn[ing] the tables'
on ... the lure of narcissism" the writer can "cre-
atively [convert] the fear of death (and evil) associ-
ated with the uncanny into the source of his literary
art" (Hutch 383); or that writers, readers, and
speaking subjects can "make a narrative home of
homelessness" (Kimball 529).
Yet as a "rampart against the real" (Copjec 28),
language is riddled with fault lines, and narrative
can provide no stable resting place. Samuel Weber
argues, for example, that the structure of repetition
that shapes our "necessary fictions" must follow
the "laws of articulation in which repetition [is] ...
never entirely reducible" to an ultimate referent
(1132). Confronting this essential uncanniness of
language, philosophical inquiry highlights the
strangeness of language acquisition (Cavell), clini-
cal experience records the child's potentially es-
tranged relation to written symbols (Denis), and
literary analysis elaborates on the uncanniness of
reading narrative. Mary Jacobus, for example, con-
templates the "hysterical process" of reading a first-
person narrative, an experience that requires the
reader to substitute a "bodily figure" (the narrator)
for the words on the page (246). Another critic de-
scribes how a poem may appear to "become the
poet's body, something that can be reanimated only
through a transfusion of life from the reader, the re-
animation of the words on the page" (Hopkins 38).18
Animism-which finds its rhetorical expression
in apostrophe-is the basis of narration, for it gives
bodily form to the disembodied. And animation de-
fines the work both of the writer, whose imagina-
tive creativity animates what is not there, and of
the reader, who animates the figure and voice of
the narrator. Ghostwriter and ghost reader partici-
pate in the same magical procedure: "the con-
cretization of a missing presence, a sign of what is
there by not being there" (Garber 129).
There is a price to pay, however, for engaging in
such rhetorical magic. Freud may reduce literature
to the status of an illustration (of the laws of the
1084 Freud's Uncanny Narratives
unconscious in Gradiva or of castration anxiety in
"The Sandman"), but the uncanny threat of the word
always returns. Hertz finds it lurking in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle behind other themes to which
Freud gives more prominence (such as anxiety about
originality). Antecedent to such themes is an un-
canny something in language, an "irreducible figura-
tiveness" that renders it incapable of grasping "first
principles" (Hertz 121, 120). Writing as a scientist
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud might wish
to transcend the obstacle of "figurative language."
Many literary theorists, on the contrary, emphasize
figuration as a shield against the abyss. One "func-
tion of figuration," Jacobus argues, is managing anx-
iety; figures may multiply like some "fungoid
growth" resistant to any order or meaning, but fi-
nally "any figuration is better than none" (246).
The Strand story ends with the husband taking
control; he removes the table from the house, bums
it, and restores normalcy. In writing "The Un-
canny," Freud reveals his desire to restore his own
house to order, but this desire is both supported and
frustrated by his engagement with narrative. Led
into aesthetics by his predilection for vivid illustra-
tive myths and stories, Freud is overwhelmed by
literature's excess, by its untamable otherness. He
makes his escape at the end of the essay by refer-
ring the reader to another text where the uncanny
remainder of "silence, solitude and darkness ...
[is] discussed from a psycho-analytic point of
view" '[d]ie psychoanalytische Forschung hat sich
mit [Einsamkeit, Stille, und Dunkelheit] an anderer
Stelle auseinandergesetzt' (252; 408). But for those
who approach such mysteries from a literary point
of view, there is no exit from the uncanny. All that
can be done is to make a story out of them-a
story, for example, about uncanny narratives.
Notes
I wish to thank many friends, colleagues, and students for their
support of this project, including Paul Doherty, Anne Ferry,
David Ferry, Anne Fleche, Judith Gurewich, Humphrey Morris,
Kristin Morrison, Frances Restuccia, William Richardson, Kal-
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pana Seshadri-Crooks, Susan Suleiman, Andrew Von Hendy,
and Judith Wilt. For their generous support and invaluable help
with revisions of this essay, my thanks to Charles Bernheimer,
Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Adele Dalsimer, James Dalsimer,
Susan Fairfield, Steven Lydenberg, Peter Schwenger, and Jennie
Skerl. The essay was completed under a generous faculty fel-
lowship provided by Boston College. I could not have written it
without the inspiration of the work of Neil Hertz.
'For a useful overview of the field of narratology, see
Mitchell; Martin. For essays focused more narrowly on psycho-
analysis and narration, see Smith and Morris. Coste has co-
gently elaborated the elusive concept of literariness as the text's
solicitation of a particular kind of reading that challenges domi-
nant discursive conventions and the irreversibility of time and
logic; that unleashes the unconscious, affect, and aesthetic and
erotic pleasure (83-96); and that through an "active polysemy"
confers meaning even on the meaningless (91).
2Many literary readings of Freud's "The Uncanny" follow
Cixous and Hertz in attempting to restore the literary qualities
of Hoffmann's story and in identifying those neglected aspects
as additional sources of uncanniness (see M0ller; Wright).
3In an analysis of Melville's Billy Budd, Johnson plays on the
multiple meanings of plot and fall to speculate that perhaps "all
stories necessarily recount by their very existence the subver-
sion of the father, of the gods, of consciousness, of order, of ex-
pectations, or of meaning" (88). When Freud enlists narratives
to illustrate his theory, then, he invites that theory's subversion.
4Bhabha ("Articulating," "DissemiNation," and "World");
Engle; and Kristeva, among others, have explored the political
aspects of the relation between foreignness and the uncanny.
Because of space constraints I do not discuss the political un-
canny here.
5On the role of this primal linguistic instability in generating
narrative, see Hertz; Kimball.
6One critic argues that the Italian anecdote inadvertently
stages the uncanny return of the female figures Freud represses
in his analysis of "The Sandman" (Ginsburg); another finds
such figures lurking in the many literary allusions Freud calls up
to illustrate other uncanny themes (McCaffrey). Although Freud
ultimately proposes that the uncanny is produced not by a par-
ticular recurrent content but by repetition itself, many critics be-
lieve that the Italian tale "cries out for interpretation in terms of
a repressed wish" (Engle 1 13).
7I have discovered that my reading of the relation between
the Italy story and the subsequent returns to the mother's body
corresponds to Ginsburg's interpretation in many ways.
8In the name Spalanzani, Kofman sees a possible allusion to
an Italian biologist who experimented with artificial insemina-
tion in Hoffmann's time.
9As both Todd and M0ller observe, the uncanniness of the
maternal genitals derives less from the male's repressed desire
to reclaim that home than from the desire to be the mother, to
be female.
'0On maternal loss as an initiator of narrative, see Spreng-
nether; on the threat of annihilation, see Copjec's and Dolar's
Lacanian analyses of the uncanny.
 Robin
1'This point is less Coste, Didier.in
obvious
impersonal "one" 'man' or "who" 'wer,' not the more direct
"you" Cixous mentions or the more inclusive "we" of Stra-
chey's translation.
'2Applications of the uncanny in literary criticism often asso-
ciate narrative with geographic wandering. See McNeil on Eliz-
abeth Bishop's "deliberate wandering" in the world and in the
text (420), Foster on the urban wanderings of the surrealists,
and Kristeva on the ontological wandering of the cosmopolitan
foreigner.
13Peter Brooks's theory of narrative (Reading), developed Gordimer." Yale Journal of Criticism 2.2 (1989): 101-27.
from Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, follows the pattern
of this convergence of beginnings and ends. On the relation
among narration, dissemination, and the death drive, see Dolar.
14Cixous sees Hoffmann as a particularly haunting literary
double who posthumously "incite[s] Freud to produce a kind of
fiction" of his own (540).
15Zipes counters Freud's denial of the uncanny effect of fairy
tales, arguing that the "very act of reading a fairy tale is an un-
canny experience in that it separates the reader from the restric-
tions of reality," an estrangement that can be both "frightening
and comforting" (309).
16The story Freud summarizes is "Inexplicable," by L. G. Mo-
berly (1917). I am grateful to Phillip McCaffrey for alerting me
to the reprinting of the story in Strange Tales from the Strand.
17Critics have identified certain outmoded forms of popular
literature as carrying the threat of an uncanny return of the re-
pressed (see Foster; Goodwin; Jacobus; Webber).
18According to Schwenger, transformations in the practice of London: Hogarth, 1953-74.
reading undermine the familiarity of the process and expose its
inherent uncanniness.
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M. C. Escher (1 898-1972), Rep-

tiles. ? 1997 Cordon Art, Baarn,
Holland. All rights reserved.

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