The subject of the ‘uncanny’ is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’; certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening.
The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [‘homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’] the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion.
We can only say that what is novel can easily become frightening but not by any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar to make it uncanny.
...find out what meaning has come to be attached to the word ‘uncanny’ in the course of its history; or we can collect all those properties of persons, things, sense-impressions, experiences and situations which arouse in us the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what all these examples have in common....both courses lead to the same result: the uncanny is that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.
....relation of uncanny to the novel and unfamiliar. He ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.
From the idea of ‘homelike’, ‘belonging to the house’, the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something concealed, secret; and this idea is expanded in many ways...
Heimlich – various interpretations and meanings:
1. Adj. And adv. Vernaculus, occultus; MHG, heimelich, Heimlich
2. A place free from ghostly influences... familiar, friendly, intimate.
3. Familiar, amicable, unreserved.
4. Heimlich councillors; officials who give important advice which has to be kept secret in matters of state.
5. Used of knowledge – mystic, allegorical: a Heimlich meaning, mysticus, divines, occultus, figuratus.
6. That which is obscure, inaccessible to knowledge
7. The notion of something hidden and dangerous.
Heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of Heimlich.
‘In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automation and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.’
The source of uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile fear in this case, but rather an infantile wish or even merely an infantile belief. There seems to be a contradiction here; but perhaps it is only a complication, which may be helpful to us later on.
...the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.
...the discovery that whatever reminds us of this inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ is perceived as uncanny.
...the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ [‘un-‘] is the token of repression.
...the uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is secretly familiar [Heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition.
...our proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that fulfils this condition – not everything that recalls repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory of the individual and of the race – is on that account uncanny.
...what is the origin of the uncanny effect of silence, darkness and solitude?
...these preliminary results have satisfied psycho-analytic interest in the problem of the uncanny, and that what remain probably calls for an aesthetic enquiry. But that would be to open door to doubts about what exactly is the value of our general contention that the uncanny proceeds from something familiar which has been repressed.
The uncanny as it is depicted in literature,......is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life. The contrast between what has been repressed and what has been surmounted cannot be transposed on to the uncanny in fiction without profound modification....
The somewhat paradoxical result is that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place that there are many more means of creating uncanny effect in fiction that there are in real life.
FREUD, S. 1919. The Uncanny.
FREUD, S. 1919. The Uncanny.
