by Rob Latham;
Technology, in this sense, signals both the desire for and identification with an Other, a slippage made particularly apparent in one of the media examples cited most often as relevant to the fetish, an episode from the first season of The Twilight Zone entitled “The Lonely” (1959). The story takes place in the year 2046 on a barren and desolate asteroid nine million miles from earth, which serves as solitary confinement for a convicted criminal named James A. Corry. When the episode opens, a supply ship, which makes occasional visits to the planet, is arriving, and the captain, who has taken pity on the isolated prisoner, has left behind a box that he instructs Corry not to open until after the ship has departed. When Corry does open it, he finds a lifelike female android named Alicia, programmed to keep him company. While at first he wants nothing to do with her, his need for companionship prevails and he starts to forget her mechanical nature and eventually falls in love with her. The next time the supply ship arrives, the captain informs Corry that he has been pardoned and can return home immediately. As the prisoner rushes excitedly towards the ship with his companion, however, the captain informs him that there is not enough room for the android. Corry argues with him, insisting that Alicia is not an android but a woman, his woman, but the captain stands firm and, in order to wake Corry up to reality, pulls out his gun and shoots Alicia in the face. In the final scene, the female android breaks down; her calls for Corry get slower and s-l-o-w-e-r as broken circuitry and loose wiring shoot off a few last sparks of life through the hole where her face had been (see Figure 3).
The narrative climax of “The Lonely” corresponds with the primary visual triggers of ASFRian desire—breakdown, disassembly, and unmasking. The android’s exposed inner workings are, however, not so much a revelation as a remembering; Corry already knew that Alicia was a robot, and thus what lies behind her faceplate is integrally connected to the mechanism inside him that made him forget or, to put it in terms of the fetishistic relationship, that sustained his belief that she was a woman despite the knowledge that she was a robot. This visual reminder of his own psychic split is what Lacan calls the objet petit a or the agalma (by which he means a hidden yet alluring object that animates desire, but which is, notably, the Greek word for statue and the root of agalmatophilia). Lacan associates the objet petit a with the game fort/da, claiming that the spool on the string can best be understood not as a little mother, but as “a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him while still remaining his, still retained” (Four 62). Freud associates the return of the once familiar forgotten with the uncanny, an aesthetic term on which he elaborates psychoanalytically in reference to Hoffman’s story “The Sandman,” whose climactic scene—in which the eyes of the mechanical woman, Olympia, are removed and she is revealed as an automaton—bears a distinct resemblance to the climax of “The Lonely.” The uncanny is in this way a term and an experience of particular relevance to the “who she really is” of ASFRian fantasy.
Figure 3 Twilight Zone, “The Lonely” (1959).
The uncanny gynoid
Freud uses as a starting point for his psychoanalytical inquiry into the uncanny a study entitled “The Psychology of the Uncanny” by physician Ernst Anton Jentsch, published in 1906. For Jentsch, the uncanny is a function of misoneism (the fear of the new), in which the mind becomes disoriented in relation to a phenomenon that does not conform to one’s established conceptual framework or “ideational sphere” (8). It is Jentsch who initially links the uncanny to the German word unheimlich, the opposite of that with which one is familiar, the “heimlich” (homely) or heimisch (native) in German, and who uses Hoffmann’s story as a significant example of the uncanny since:
Among all the psychical uncertainties that can become an original cause of the uncanny feeling, there is one in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate. (Jentsch 11)
Freud picks up where Jentsch leaves off but differs from Jentsch in his interpretation of the source of the uncanny. While for Jentsch the uncanny is rooted in uncertainty about something unknown, Freud insists that what makes this unknown thing frightening is the fact that it was once known, but has returned in an alienated form. While there is no more Unheimlich place than the female genitals—that “entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time in the beginning” (245)—this interpretation, interestingly, leads Freud away from the figure of the female automaton in Hoffmann’s story and the emphasis placed on her in Jentsch’s essay. According to Freud, the mystery surrounding Olympia is of less significance to the story’s ability to elicit an uncanny sensation than the theme of the “Sandman,” a mythological figure who steals the eyes of bad children while they are sleeping, and whose image haunts the protagonist, Nathanael, throughout the story. Uncanniness is based in the anxiety of losing one’s sight, which is a substitute for the fear of castration and steeped in Oedipal drama. As Freud points out, Nathanael’s anxiety about the Sandman (and losing his eyes) is intimately connected in the story with his father’s death (his father dies mysteriously in the company of the frightening lawyer Coppelius, whom Nathanael associates with the Sandman). Moreover, there is a reoccurrence and doubling of characters; Nathanael’s father is replaced by Spalanzani, the “father” of Olympia; the Sandman is Coppelius, who is also Coppola, the peddler who sells Nathanael the spyglass or “pocket perspective” through which he first sees Olympia. These doublings are linked to a theme of eyes: Coppola, whose name translates to coppo or “eye socket” in Italian, also made the eyes of Olympia, which he later steals back. All connect back, in a logically circular way, to Freud’s overall premise that the uncanny effects of similar occurrences are related to repressed infantile sexuality.
Freud’s marginalization of Olympia has been a point of great contestation, and many have argued that Olympia represents the repressed within Freud’s theory of the uncanny. As Nicholas Royle puts it:
Freud’s reading of “The Sandman” is a violent attempt to reduce or eliminate the significance of Jentsch’s work on the Uncanny, and in particular the importance of the figures of the doll and automaton for an understanding of the uncanny. It is also a violent attempt to reduce or eliminate the place and importance of women. . . . Freud failed to see that the question of woman is inextricably connected to Nathaniel’s fear of castration. (41)15
An intentionality begins to take shape, however, when we consider that Freud is drawing our attention away from the visual ambiguity of Olympia’s physicality towards the psychic register of the story’s (imaginary) Sandman. Freud, in a sense, replaces vision with the symbolism of eyes, in this way moving within the etiology of hysteria, an illness that serves as the backdrop of Olympia’s behavior and Nathanael’s madness. Our first clue to the importance of hysteria in Freud’s reading of the uncanny is his rationale for dismissing Olympia as a symbol of infantile sexuality. While Freud acknowledges that Olympia does evoke a sense of the uncanny, he suggests that it arises not from the return of the repressed, but from the return of the surmounted. The return of the repressed involves the revival of infantile complexes, or amputated aspects of oneself, which had been buried in the unconscious. The return of the surmounted involves discarded beliefs that are “primitive” or “animistic” in nature. When something happens that we cannot explain—for example, a coincidence of events, the manifestation of secret desires or thoughts, the animation of an inanimate body—it revives and brings into expression these old beliefs, raising doubts about our current material reality and creating a sense of the uncanny. Accordingly, the return of the surmounted tends to operate in the realm of reality more than fiction, where supernatural events are less unusual.
Olympia is, of course, fictional, but to the extent that her mechanical behavior strikes a supernatural chord, it evokes the real uncanniness of the hyster
ical body, whose paroxysmal and repetitive gestures seem animated by unseen forces. Jentsch draws an explicit association between the two, suggesting that while the automaton strikes some people more than others as uncanny, the uncanniness of a mental and nervous illness, such as epilepsy or hysteria, is nearly universal, since it renders the autonomous human subject mechanical or puppet-like:
It is not unjustly that epilepsy is therefore spoken of as the morbus sacer, as an illness deriving not from the human world but from foreign and enigmatic spheres, for the epileptic attack of spasms reveals the human body to the viewer—the body under normal conditions is so meaningful, expedient, and unitary, functioning according to the direction of his consciousness—as an immensely complicated and delicate mechanism. This is an important cause of the epileptic fit’s ability to produce such a demonic effect on those who see it. (14)
It is because of its mechanical seizures, paradigmatically associated with grotesque body movements—such as spasms, convulsions, and catalepsy—that hysteria inspired varying interpretations about its animating force over the course of its history, reaching a low point in the late fifteenth century with the publication of the handbook for witch-hunters and Inquisitors, Malleus Maleficarum (1487), in which it was interpreted as a form of Satanic possession. Although the etiology of hysteria began to shift with the birth of modern medicine, the man who freed it, once and for all, from its association with animist superstition was the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), whose theatrical displays of hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris in the late nineteenth century became legendary and with whom Freud studied between 1885 and 1886.16 There is, in fact, a significant parallel between Freud’s redirection of our attention from the mechanical body of the female automaton in “The Sandman” and his shift in emphasis from the external symptoms of hysteria charted by Charcot to an exploration of internal psychic processes, a shift that directly paved the way for his development of psychoanalysis.
Charcot is, perhaps, most remembered as the man who not only tamed hysteria but also theatricalized it, transforming a cacophony of symptomatic gestures into a choreographed ballet whose movements could be anticipated and, as was often the case, provoked. His legacy includes both the unprecedented photographic document of hysterical symptoms, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1876-77, 1878, 1879-80), and the famous Tuesday lessons in which he hypnotized patients, who then dutifully performed their symptoms before an audience of “literary men, artists, art critics, actors and politicians” (Schade 505). If, in fact, fetishism is grounded in condensing and fixing that which causes anxiety in a form that can be performed repeatedly for visual pleasure, then Charcot could be called hysteria’s pornographer. As Freud would later state in his obituary for Charcot:
He was not a reflective man, not a thinker: he had the nature of an artist—he was, as he himself said, a visuel, a man who sees. Here is what he himself told us about his method for working. He used to look again and again at the things he did not understand, to deepen his impression of them day by day, till suddenly an understanding of them dawned on him. In his mind’s eye the apparent chaos presented by the continual repetition of the same symptoms then gave way to order. . . . He called this kind of intellectual work, in which he had no equal, “practicing nosography,” and he took pride in it. He might be heard to say that the greatest satisfaction a man could have was to see something new. (qtd in de Marnaffe 92; emphasis added)17
Charcot’s nosography, dedicated as it was to an unflinching vision that saw “something new,” an intelligible order, within the unknown and visually chaotic, poses an answer not only to the indecipherability of hysterical symptoms, but to the uncanny as misoneism (the fear of the new) through which they are rendered demonic.
In domesticating and aestheticizing the unassimilable and frightening, Charcot produced the kind of theater through which the uncanny is rendered both pleasurable and cathartic; and this is precisely the role of the fictional uncanny, according to Ernst Jentsch, of which Hoffmann was a master:
In life we do not like to expose ourselves to severe emotional blows, but in the theatre or while reading we gladly let ourselves be influenced in this way: we hereby experience certain powerful excitements which awake in us a strong feeling for life, without having to accept the consequences of the causes of the unpleasant moods if they were to have the opportunity to appear in corresponding form on their own account, so to speak. In physiological terms, the sensation of such excitements seems frequently to be bound up with artistic pleasure in a direct way. (12)
The theatrical framing of the uncanny, through which the spectator experiences dissimulation as pleasure, is related to the fetishistic pleasure that Nathanael experiences in his encounter with the female automaton, whose embodiment of both the human and artificial, the living and dead, strikes profound chords within him. In a similar manner to ASFRians, Nathanael is erotically drawn to those qualities in Olympia that others find inhuman: her stiff and measured gait and mechanical movements appear to him as ciphers of hidden meaning; her repetitive and vacuous utterances strike him as “genuine hieroglyphs of the inner world of Love and of the higher cognition of the intellectual life revealed in the intuition of the Eternal beyond the grave” (Hoffmann 207-208). Unlike ASFRians, however, he is driven mad by the revelation, at the end of the story, of the subjectivity that he has invested in the object of his love, a revelation that leads to his suicide. It is this madness, which Jentsch celebrates in Hoffmann’s work, that Freud is interested in extracting from the visual and the aesthetic in his theorization of the uncanny. Freud is, in a sense, attempting to isolate that which leads to Nathanael’s death rather than the mediated experience of death enjoyed by the viewer (or reader).
Moreover, Freud’s insistence that we ignore the automaton in our attempt to understand the causes of the uncanny is, I would suggest, related to the extent to which Charcot’s visual approach to hysteria occluded the real causes of the ailment. Although Charcot was able to find meaning in visual disorder, he discounted that which was most meaningful—what his patients were saying—as delirious banter. Freud, however, subsequent to his studies with Charcot, began in his private practice to listen for the psychological content of what his patients were saying, ultimately concluding that their hysterical symptoms were the result of sexually-based trauma that was repressed, displaced from the lower body regions, and somatically converted into motor activity.18 And in lieu of hypnosis, which Charcot had so theatrically induced in his patients before a crowd of onlookers, he prescribed “the talking cure” through which access was gained to the analysand’s “private theatre” only within the context of the psychoanalytic relationship.19
Aside from its larger implications in the development of the field of psychoanalysis, this core insight about the etiology of hysteria serves as the backdrop for Freud’s interpretation of the uncanny as the return of repressed infantile sexuality and his insistence that we turn our attention away from the visual signs of Olympia’s ambiguous nature, suggestive of supernatural influences, towards the symbolic register of Nathanael’s castration anxiety, enacted through a narrative doubling in the form of the Sandman.
Unlike Jentsch, who is interested in the aesthetics of the uncanny and how something frightening in real life can be rendered pleasurable within art and literature, Freud is interested in linking the uncanny to a psychological drive that overrides the pursuit of pleasure. He will call this the “death instinct” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), a book that served as the impetus for his essay “On the Uncanny” (1919)—the latter was written between drafts of the former and published the year before—as well as a reworking of his theory of the drives. Early in the book, he states that while the enjoyment derived from “painful experiences” in the theater or art hints at that which he is addressing, they “are of no use for our purposes, since they presuppose the existence and dominance of the pleasure principle; they give no evidence of the op
eration of tendencies beyond the pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more primitive than it and independent of it” (17; emphases in original). In elaborating on the compulsion to repeat at the heart of the death drive, Freud once again passes over the mechanical body of hysteria and uses as an example the traumatic dreams of soldiers returned from battle (with whom he had direct experience following World War I). Freud concludes that the repetitive war dreams of the soldiers were attempts at preparing for and mastering retrospectively traumas that, at the time they were experienced, had caught them by surprise, or of developing after the fact the shielding “anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis”: “They thus afford us a view of a function of the mental apparatus which, though it does not contradict the pleasure principle, is nevertheless independent of it and seems to be more primitive than the purpose of gaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure” (37).
To extrapolate from this to Freud’s interpretation of Hoffmann’s story: the uncanny as a repetition compulsion that overrides the pleasure principle is better represented by the imaginary Sandman, who inspires revulsion and fear in Nathanael in every form in which he is repeated, than by Olympia, whose mechanical movements, however much they hint at the “death instinct” lurking beneath Eros, are marked by a vacillation between life and death, beauty and its shadow, that is experienced by Nathanael (and the reader) as both compelling and pleasurable.
