First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Comma Press
www.commapress.co.uk
Copyright © 2008 remains with the authors
This collection copyright © Comma Press
All rights reserved.
The right of the authors to be identified has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patent Act 1988
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
This collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors’ imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental. The opinions of the authors are not those of the publisher.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from the Arts Council England North West, and also the support of Literature Northwest.
Contents
Introduction
Ra Page
Double Room
Ramsey Campbell
Possum
Matthew Holness
Seeing Double
Sara Maitland
The Underhouse
Gerard Woodward
The Dummy
Nicholas Royle
The Sorting Out
Christopher Priest
Ped-o-Matique
Jane Rogers
Dolls’ Eyes
A. S. Byatt
Tamagotchi
Adam Marek
Family Motel
Alison MacLeod
The Un(heim)lich(e) Man(oeuvre)
Ian Duhig
Long Ago, Yesterday
Hanif Kureishi
Continuous Manipulation
Frank Cottrell Boyce
Anette and I are Fucking in Hell
Etgar Keret
Contributors
Recommended Read
Introduction
I HAD A dream last night (but then I have it most nights) in which I found myself back home. Standing on the front lawn that’s now a patio, or in the bushes now cleared to make a widened drive, or from some other angle, I gazed trying to take in the usual four-square comfort of the sight: my parents’ house. Somehow though, for all its reassurances – the well-worn doorstep, the re-pointed wall – its familiarity saddened me. I knew it was a fake.
Beyond the obvious, certain features began to stand out as altered, their deformations almost spreading as I looked. The back garden seemed flatter, lower, quarried away somehow. Old familiars like the toolshed were left on stilts of bedrock, like museum pieces. Nothing about it was mine or belonged to the house I grew up in. The walls themselves seemed to thin and dry in front of me, mortar dropping from their cracks.
In happier versions of the dream I stay under long enough to realise it’s not all bad; this place is a duplicate. The real house remains preserved, some miles behind this one, in someone else’s keeping. But even knowing this, and having no sense of danger or threat to point to, I would still call it a nightmare.
In and of itself, this may not be an uncanny dream. In his famous essay of 1919 – the reason we’re all here – Freud listed eight officially uncanny tropes, that is to say eight irrational causes of fear deployed in literature:
(i) inanimate objects mistaken as animate (dolls, waxworks, automata, severed limbs, etc.),
(ii) animate beings behaving as if inanimate or mechanical (trances, epileptic fits, etc.),
(iii) being blinded,
(iv) the double (twins, doppelgangers, etc.),
(v) coincidences or repetitions,
(vi) being buried alive,
(vii) some all-controlling evil genius,
(viii) confusions between reality and imagination (waking dreams, etc).
What were these manifestations of exactly? To paraphrase, the uncanny is that which may be familiar, or ordinary, but somehow disturbs us, makes us uncomfortable, and in some cases gives us the full on willies. A murderer leaping into view unexpectedly in a horror film is not uncanny. The fear that we, the audience, feel is perfectly rational, empathetic fear for the character’s safety (and through them for our own). Nor is straightforward gore or gruesomeness uncanny – again our aversion to it is rational, natural. The uncanny is rather that subtler, added texture in a film or story (in the best cases, the only texture) specially applied to instil an inexplicable air of unease, a cognitive dissonance that mounts and mounts until we are almost literally ‘unnerved’. Freud, being a self-confessed interloper in the realm of aesthetics, grabbed what literary precedents he could, added a handful of his own experiences to flesh the list out, and then threw a single tarpaulin-theory over all of it: that these phenomena or situations scare us because they remind us of repressed belief-systems; either from childhood (like the belief that dolls can come to life, or the yearning to return to the womb), or from primitive stages of human development (like the belief in a protective twin-spirit accompanying us through life and death). Being reminded of these old, repressed ideas by an uncanny event or object, sends a shudder of recognition through us which we instantly revolt against. The fear of losing one’s eyes is a sublimation of the childhood castration complex. The fear of being buried alive indicates a repression of the childhood desire to return to the womb, and so on.
Each item on Freud’s list offers a kind of literary template, and together they provide writers and filmmakers with an ever dependable shopping list of shivers, a ‘goth-kitty’ to keep returning to indefinitely. Freud, and fellow psychoanalyst Ernst Jentsch, drew the beginnings of the list from the work of just one writer, E T A Hoffman, and largely from just one short story, The Sandman. But the vestiges of Freud’s list can be traced backwards or forwards in time, far beyond this one story. Clarence’s famous nightmare speech, in Richard III, chalks up three uncanny archetypes in almost as few lines with its talk of jewels lying in skulls on the sea-bed, crept ‘where the eyes did once inhabit […] as ‘twere in scorn of eyes’; there being much of Freud’s fear of being buried alive in his ensuing, sub-aquatic inability to ‘yield the ghost.’ Likewise, ninety years after the publication of Freud’s ideas, cinema’s love affairs with science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, and indeed the zombie genre, are all still in bloom, carrying forth an undiminished obsession with automatons, doubles and the living dead. Parallel to this, film’s fixation with the eye and its mutilation could be used to tell the story of cinema itself; from the eye-slitting of Un chien andalou, to the eye-gorging of Hitchcock’s The Birds, to the eye-replacing of Minority Report. It’s hard to find a sci-fi flick these days or a technologically assisted thriller that doesn’t have a retina-scan popping up in it. And every month a new film seems to arrive to play the uncanny card ever more explicitly: David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s The Eye (2008), Alexandre Aja’s Mirrors (2008), etc. There are even uncanny comedies like Graig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl (2007).
But to get back to my dream for a moment – as the narcissistic patient might say. The homestead remains central to all this. The haunted house is iconic in the oldest and newest of ghost stories (Freud confessed he would have made it number one in his list if it weren’t that, so often ‘the uncanny in it is too much intermixed with what is purely gruesome’). And away from horror, SF writers like Asimov and Dick always knew that robots aren’t all that menacing, until you invite one home.
But it’s more than this. The home is not just the setting and target of the threat. The uncanny is somehow of the home, or under it. It squats in the very w
ord Freud used for ‘uncanny’ in German, ‘unheimliche’, meaning literally ‘un-homely’. It lies beneath the house, under that heavy architecture of habit and belief, buried. And for a reason. As for my particular dream, there remains something peculiarly uncanny about the anxiety in it – I’m convinced. Indeed this act of interpreting my own dreams – splitting the self and subject, with half of me climbing off the couch to look down – is also uncanny. Even more so, the facsimile of Freud that I, and so many other self-diagnosers, habitually refer to: that 2D cut-out of Freud, the blow-up effigy of him we call upon at parties or in the pub when making our almost evangelic deference: WWFS? (‘What Would Freud Say?’).
Some claim that we live in a uniquely uncanny age. Computer games and the internet provide more and more opportunities to duplicate ourselves – Facebook profiles, Flikr accounts, Second Life avatars – not to mention more opportunities to find ourselves duplicated by others: spoofed emails, identity theft, and so on. Other critics insist that the uncanny cuts much deeper than current fads and neuroses, and is timeless. The uncanny is a ‘crisis of the natural,’ argues Nicholas Royle (the literary theorist, not his uncanny namesake featured here). The uncanny destabilises ‘the reality of who one is, and what one is experiencing.’ It disturbs any straightforward sense of what is within and what without, and alerts us to the ‘foreign body’ within us. Or worse, makes us regard ourselves as a foreign body, a stranger.
Seeing as Freud took a single short story as his case study, rather than a patient, it only seems right for the editors of this anthology to test his theories on a sample of similarly unassuming short stories. This was our plan. Fourteen established writers were sent copies of the original essay (though many were familiar with it) and asked to respond directly and consciously, in any way they wished, with a new story. We were curious to see which archetypes still rang true and which, if any, paled. As it transpired, the earlier items on Freud’s list proved the most popular (dolls/automata, sleepwalking/epilepsy, blindness and doubles). As expected new technology provided plenty of confusion between the animate and inanimate, not just through computers, but also tactile, mechanical devices like Jane Rogers’ Ped-o-Matique. The eye found itself new spectacles – like the all-seeing ‘i’ of the internet in Ian Duhig’s story. But there were almost as many un-technological stories here too. Further down the list, the responses thinned. No stories came back about confusions between imagination and reality, or being buried alive. Only one writer explored the idea of a greater, controlling intelligence – namely Christopher Priest in his exposition of that seemingly modern threat, the stalker. And one writer, Etgar Keret explored a cause rather than a symptom of uncanny anxiety: Freud’s ‘fear of sex’.
Our sample size is too small to prove anything of course. But it’s interesting all the same to note the overwhelming emphasis here on two phenomena in particular: the double and the doll. In conversation with several authors, it transpired that another essay, by a contemporary of Freud’s, came to bear heavily on their story, this being Rilke’s exhibition-review-cum-thesis, ‘Dolls: On the Waxwork Dolls of Lotte Pritzel’ (1913). For Rilke, dolls weren’t so much a reminder of that time in childhood when we did ‘not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects,’ as Freud puts it, or when we might have fancied that the doll ‘would be certain to come to life [if looked at] in a particular, extremely concentrated way.’ For Rilke, it was more personal. To see an old, familiar doll, as an adult, provokes a layered reaction in us. Firstly, he claimed, we feel anger – at the doll’s betrayal and its ‘horrible dense forgetfulness’ of that ‘purest affection’ we once squandered on it. Secondly, it scares us, for it reminds us of the first time we had to assert our own identity, rather than let our identity be steered and lost under the overcoat of others’. We had to be ourselves, that is invent ourselves, when left alone for the first time with a doll.
Thirdly it saddens us, because it reminds of the time we first learnt of the non-responsiveness of the world, the first time our questions and demands were met only by silence – an answer we grew all too used to as adults – and of the wider hollowness of things (including ourselves). Finally, the sight of such a doll in adulthood fills us with a feeling of estrangement, Rilke claimed. We no longer recognise it as this protagonist of our imaginary world, nor do we recognise ‘the confidences we heaped over it and into it,’ nor the child that did the heaping.
There is nothing in Rilke’s rich and moving essay that speaks of repression or denial. His subject is the re-evaluation of objects with which we now have a different relationship; and the realisation that the identity of both parties has shifted, drastically. As a child, Rilke hardly seems to have believed his dolls would awaken and come to life, as Freud claims. His sense of betrayal is rather that the doll no longer awakens something in him: the passion, the engagement they once had. Rilke’s reaction is a projection of a disappointment in himself, for his own ‘dense forgetfulness’, not a suppression of some old belief.
As for the double, Freud is again frustratingly cursory. Citing fellow psychoanalyst Otto Rank, he compares the double to that immortal twin-spirit of ancient mythologies, the ‘ka’ accompanying us through life and transporting our soul after death. Carl Jung – deferring to mythology, but one can’t help thinking buoyed up by Dostoevsky’s The Double and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – constructed a more elaborate thesis for the double, calling it ‘The Shadow’. This he claimed was one of the first ‘archetypes’ to reveal itself in psychotherapy: a subconscious embodiment of a lesser, more imperfect version of oneself, a vessel for the shortcomings and baser instincts one hopes or pretends one does not have.
Looking at the stories collected here, though, there seems to be much more synergy between the dolls and doubles than can be found in the diametric opposition between what Rilke said about the former (lost friends) and what Jung said about the latter (concealed, darker selves). In these stories they almost overlap. Take Adam Marek’s beautiful ‘Tamagotchi’. At first glance this is a technological update of the doll story, deserving to sit on the same bedroom shelf as A. S. Byatt’s collectible antique, echoing its function. But told from the father’s point of view (not dissimilar from a psychanalyst’s), the toy also becomes a repository for a more dangerous, contagious version of the child’s malady, that is it becomes Jung’s Shadow. Come the end of the story, however, it switches back to a simple doll, that which only a child can release, only a child can betray. A similar synergy unfolds in the ‘imaginative play’ of Frank Cottrell Boyce’s story, where the ‘doll’ in question – the computer game The Sims – invites a doubling from the off. In some stories, like Nicholas Royle’s ‘The Dummy’, the double remains pure Jungian Shadow, but more often it is grafted on in childhood, beginning life with a doll-like speechlessness, such as the chilling companion in Sara Maitland’s ‘Seeing Double’.
The doll and double are two faces of the same coin, these stories seem to suggest. The former reminds us of the person we no longer are, and of that first identity we asserted in a doll’s presence. The latter, or rather that tingle of unease we get from a double (receiving a spam email from ourselves, for example) makes us shiver for a moment and ask, Who is this? Who am I? In both cases, identity slips, becomes fallible. To take my house dream: the older version of the house, the original, feels more sturdy in the dream than the flimsy present-day duplicate, no matter how inaccessible the former has become. The house we grew up in, or the dolls we played with as children, though lost to us, are still more real. As are, perhaps, the people we were growing up with them. There are two versions of the doll, or the house, and two of us.
Crucially, Freud is right when he talks of the division of the self, as necessary for the development of a conscience – that agency able to ‘stand over the rest of the ego,’ observe, criticise and censor the self. The fallacy of a split-self is something that must also accompany the acquisition of language and its progression into thought. Here, we see
the double as much the same thing as the doll: an older, disembodied inheritor of the doll’s role in our mental universe; that is to say the addressee of our thoughts. Whereas once the doll enabled us to play the language game to ourselves, and create worded, spoken thought, now the double sits speechless in the fallacious dialogue of adult consciousness, the audience of our internal speech. To see a doll is to be reminded of the fallacy’s beginning, to see a look-a-like of oneself is to be jolted into the fallacy itself.
But it’s fun, this fallacy, with its various triggers – doll or double, eyeball or living machine. As the stories commissioned here will attest, it quickens the heart, raises the neck hair, makes us squirm, writhe, or even feel physically sick. In a good way. It puts us on edge – that place we really should be from time to time – and reminds us: it’s us that’s alive.
Ra Page
Oct, 2008
Double Room
Ramsey Campbell
‘YOU AREN'T WITH us, are you?’
‘I’d like to be.’
‘What’s your name?’ the other girl said, looking impudently quizzical. ‘You’ve seen ours.’
The New Uncanny Page 1
