The Uncanny by Nicholas Royle
PART TWO OF MY REVIEW CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/the-uncanny-by-nicholas-royle/
MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS (2003)
My previous review of this author’s novel QUILT: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/novel-doodlings/
…and his THIS THING CALLED LITERATURE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/this-thing-called-literature-andrew-bennett-nicholas-royle/
….and his AN ENGLISH GUIDE TO BIRD-WATCHING: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/an-english-guide-to-birdwatching-a-novel-by-nicholas-royle/
…and his THE TRANCE OF READING and ELIZABETH BOWEN AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE NOVEL: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/12/the-trance-of-reading/
DAVID BOWIE, ENID BLYTON AND THE SUN MACHINE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/11/29/david-bowie-enid-blyton-and-the-sun-machine-nicholas-royle/
When I continue to read this book, I intend to comment on it in the comment stream below…
9. Inexplicable
“: the uncanny undoes any certainty about what is real and what is not, about where literature ends and real life or science or psychoanalysis or philosophy or literary criticism begins.”
Indeed!
My next job, as result of this book, is somehow to read the story INEXPLICABLE by L.G. Moberly from the Strand Magazine 1917 (importantly factored in by Freud to his essay entitled ‘The Uncanny’). I shall then add a review of it to my reviews of other Uncanny stories listed HERE and then return to this review of the Royle book to further discuss.
I have now managed to read and review it in ironically double-quick time:
10. Buried Alive
The first few pages of this chapter bring back to what I said about Ligotti, the exhumation from burial-in-utero forced out by Mummy, then life and pain via light against darkness towards a different Mummification of nothingness, making the whole thing worth nemonisimg ab initio as never happening in the first place? And, now, Ligotti’s leitmotif of ‘soft black stars’ is here in the Royle re-arranged from the Freud Uncanny essay as section breaks!
Before continuing reading this chapter further, I shall re-read and review Poe’s ‘The Premature Burial’ to be set alongside all my previous reviews of Poe. (A po is what I remember my mother and grandmother using when caught short at night or because they did not want to visit the cold outside loo. Me, too.)
And so it has been:
This chapter by Royle is deep and detailed, and I sense it is a temporary sleep or sloop, before the ‘magic pinions and wizard wheels’ start turning again 20 years after THE UNCANNY was first published, not Freud’s but Royle’s: a ‘Premature Burial’ within this topic of study. Still buried by the casket of his name but flirting with the freedom of anonymity via voluntary severance or even sharing a relatively celebrated name with another person in a different but similar field of fiction writing or non-fiction study – and I see from the contents list, this book has a chapter later entitled THE DOUBLE.
Anyway, after dealing, in this current chapter, with Dostoevsky and Harold Bloom as well as with Poe, I relished that many other literary figures with celebrated name-traps have also been given textual Premature Burial references on these pages within diagrammatic caskets or coffins!
11. Déjà Vu
“Excluded, déjà vu is more uncannily active in Freud’s essay than if it were included.”
Both a Freudian slip, as explicitly mentioned here, and not a Freudian slip. As this expression when defined in dictionaries, seems to be its own version of the ‘double’, but a double of opposite meanings, a fact of which I was unaware until now. Another deep and detailed chapter, one about this expression vis à vis the nature of returns in the uncanny and the Uncanny, and all the nuances and paradoxes of false and real memories including their preternatural sense that one might find, I guess, in ghost stories etc.
My own very recently written fiction miniature, ‘The Gruesome Guestroom’, that features this expression from outset: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/08/14/the-gruesome-guestroom/
Having put out feelers to the hive mind of Facebook friends regarding any well-known ghost stories that deal with the ‘déjà vu’, I was offered, among others, two stories I have reviewed, viz. THE SIGNALMAN by Charles Dickens and the THE BUS CONDUCTOR by E.F. Benson, and although I do not mention this expression in these reviews (just re-read), déjà vu as an expression is the elephant in their proverbial rooms, I guess, just as Freud meaningfully omitted the expression. in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’. I leave you to make your minds up and perhaps counter-comment below in due course.
EF Benson: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/35138-2/#comment-24735
Charles Dickens: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/17/the-signal-man-charles-dickens/
12. The Double / 13. Chance Encounter
You can fool me some of the time, but you can’t fool me all of the time.
Depends on which of me you attempt to fool at any point of pointless rhyme.
Two writers rhyming: a Nicholas of the ‘Royle we’. I always thought they were two people, and I am now leaning in the opposite direction, because of the perceived MUP connection and a story called ‘Chance Encounter’, published as if by one Nicholas reprinted here by the other Nicholas, does not seem to exist other than here. The photograph published here of both of them together is a mock-up I claim, as the film star image of the one Nicholas I have not met does not match up with the prior image of him in my mind’s eye.
I guess I need face to face advice as to whether to blend together these two separate pages below of my reviews of Royle’s work:-
The death of the heart surely doesn’t matter
If another can host the next ‘knit and natter’.
***
I note that the next as yet unread chapter deals with ‘cannibalism’ and I thought I might pre-empt it with this link to my old controversial article on ‘Cannibalism in Robert Aickman’ (small echoes of which theme I later publicly identified in Elizabeth Bowen): https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/robert-aickman-and-cannibalism/
CHANCE ENCOUNTER by Nicholas Royle
“Coincidences become significant only when close together in time.”
First published NEON LIT (Time Out 1999) or by Nemonymous No-One Unlit…
I am beginning to believe this was a real publication and one by the Nicholas Royle version whom I have not met, but about this I am still unsure.
Potentially, a prophetically ‘trans’ man or woman in a restaurant obsessed with the nature of coincidences and numbers, unsightly areas between his or her toes, and what Freud plainly said about the number 62. Writing this on my birthdate anniversary of 18.01.48.
14. Cannibalism: for starters
A secret starter… (love the theme and variations here on ‘starters’!)
I reviewed the ‘Secret Sharer’ (body sharing as in cannibalism?) by Joseph Conrad here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/30/joseph-conrad-the-secret-sharer/, with a further link to my review of his ‘Amy Foster’ in the comments thereof. Secret Sharer as an expression seems uncannily as well as cannily cannibalistic as what I also see as ‘sin-eating’ in Dickens’ Magwitch and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain witches. I shall have to re-read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Freud’s UNCANNY essay itself to appreciate further this truly fascinating Royle chapter that mentions them both.
An alternative title? — UNCANNIBALS!
Just received another book written by Nicholas Royle that will be my next reading of his work:
15. Manifestations of Insanity: Hunger and contemporary fiction
“I’m going to talk about literature. Serious literature.”
– from THE LECTURE TOUR by Knut Hamsun (my review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/30/a-lecture-tour-knut-hamsun)
This chapter is a sort of ‘mad’ Shandyesque monologue on something called ‘contemporary fiction’ that I deem to be literature that can work for me in canny synergy with genre fiction of the uncanny old and new. The chapter deals, inter alia, with Knut’s Hunger and Paul Auster and a novel I’ve never heard of: The Trick is To Keep Breathing (1989) by Janice Galloway.
“Studies in Literature. Full Semester (in lieu of required Freshman Composition course because of F.’s good score on A.P. exam): A seminar focused on the study of one book: ‘Tristram Shandy’.”
— Paul Auster (4321) – my old detailed review of the huge 4321 here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/4-3-2-1-paul-auster/ where I wrote: ‘Hank & Frank, due to become perhaps the most substantial double-act digression in all literature.’ and ‘This novel is becoming seriously great literature, if it hasn’t already become so. And my using the word ‘literature’ should not be a put-off to anyone.’
(My old detailed review of ‘Tristram Shandy’: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/tristram-shandy/)
“What did this mean about the world? That everyone in it was more or less hidden, and because we were all other than what we appeared to be, it was next to impossible to know who everyone was. You wonder now if that sense of not knowing wasn’t responsible for making you so passionate about books — because the secrets of the characters who lived inside novels were always, in the end, made known.”
— from ‘Report from the Interior’ by Paul Auster
Ironically, even then, we can never know who is who. And what we think we know.
Just discovered I have earlier reviewed two stories by Janice Galloway…
DISTANCE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/best-british-short-stories-2016/#comment-12701
‘last thing’: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/35138-2/#comment-24790 — ‘An effective horror story that also should be anthologised as such.’
16. A crowded after-life
“‘Birth was the death of him’: so ‘A Piece of Monologue’ begins.” – Nicholas Royle
This, for me, is another monologue itself, a talk on Samuel Beckett, as a Cane Asylum bed-fellow to the previous chapter’s monologue. My old review of all Beckett’s shorter fiction: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/the-complete-samuel-beckett-short-prose/ Some quotes from Beckett quoted in this review.
“Into what nightmare thingness am I fallen?” — “, watch out for the genuine death-pangs, some are deceptive, you think you’re home, start howling and revive,…” —“What mattered to me in my dispeopled kingdom, that in regard to which the disposition of my carcass was the merest and most futile of accidents, was supineness in the mind, the dulling of the self and of that residue of execrable frippery known as the non-self and even the world.”
17. To be announced
The lengthy chapter that is next, I am afraid, seems mostly above my head, as if I had already missed the train that was announced, or failed to make due connections, via various points, to the nature of dream and death. Or was it cancelled due to last night’s Storm Isha?
It does, however, short of being awakened by Storm Osmo to a fuller understanding, seem associated with my earlier aforementioned concept of Zeno’s Paradox (often mentioned in my past reviews of uncanny fiction) and here such a concept is related to The Uncanny posited by this book. Never ever quite reaching death, of which I am an example?
18. Mole
Starting with a quote from Hélène Cixous, this further Shandyesque meditation by Royle — with typographical containers looser than the previous caskets — precedes child-rearing references to MOLE in his ‘Enid Blyton, David Bowie and the sun machine’ (2023) which was in turn a possible retroactive upon how it was used in the past when this Uncanny book was published or before? Whack a Mole, each mole a synchronicity, like the girl with a mole on her back in Elizabeth Bowen and my earlier review of the quite famous MOLE KING story here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/the-big-book-of-modern-fantasy-3/#comment-1132 and the now covid-forgotten ‘The Rule of Six’ (aka ‘the Sixous’) mentioned, again regarding the Mole King, about another story in the same book here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/807-2/#comment-682, and more.
‘Eventernal Slumber’: https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=8476&page=3
19. The ‘telepathy effect’: notes toward a reconsideration of narrative fiction
“There is uncanny knowledge. Someone is telling us what someone else is thinking, feeling or perceiving. That someone else may not even be aware of experiencing these thoughts, feelings or perceptions. The history of criticism of the novel is the history of the attempts to deal, or avoid dealing, with this seemingly mad scenario.”
Judging by my ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’ on this very website and my own earlier thoughts on it (see the ‘earlier thinking’ link about such reviewing here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/navigation-backstory/), any regular readers of my reviews will readily understand that I have been particularly interested by this chapter, as a discussion of ‘omniscience’, ‘point of view’, ‘clairvoyance’, telepathy’ and ‘mole-like’ ‘tunnelling’ regarding narrative fiction and literary criticism.
This chapter mentions, inter alios, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Salman Rushdie.
Arguably relevant to this chapter:
My truncated review of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/06/10/mrs-dalloway-virginia-woolf/
My various detailed reviews of Salman Rushdie novels: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/salman-rushdie/
The George Eliot connections in my review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/07/10/survivor-song-paul-tremblay/
And I can’t resist quoting my favourite quotation from Robert Aickman in his ‘Notes on Delius’ regarding ‘clairvoyance’ in literary criticism:-
“As there is no intrinsic virtue in denigration, the critic who resorts to it, should be required to pass a test of qualification and sensitivity, at least twice as stringent as that imposed upon a critic who loves. Normally, love is not blind but clairvoyant. […] Moreover, there is some degree of absolute nobility in praise; and a high degree of ignominy in belittlement, even in justified belittlement. The capacity for praise that is at once warm and discerning implies a degree of fineness in the critic that is, alas, rare in anyone. These truths are so simple and obvious as to call for unfailing repetition.”
20. Phantom Text
“Nihilism stands at the door, whence comes the uncanniest of all guests?” – Jacques Derrida
You are my guests, says Thomas Ligotti, the famous fiction writer and anti-natalist, while Derrida, Marxism, Gnosticism, Nag Hammadi texts are his guests — mutual guests, arguably without even meeting? (My thoughts, not necessarily this chapter’s.)
More fascinating considerations in this chapter that affect, for me, what I have done with ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’ as well as my own fiction, and hopefully vice versa, all by means of an uncannily canny form of retrocausal osmosis on both sides?
This chapter mentions FINNEGANS WAKE. My old detailed review of it: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/finnegans-wake-james-joyce/
Cf Today’s fashion for PURE CREMATIONS, as advertised often on many TV channels!
21. The Private Parts of Jesus Christ
“Concerned with ‘founding another religion’ or ‘refounding all of them . . . playfully’ (C, p. 222), Derrida’s autobiothanatoheterographical ‘Circumfession’ is one of his most bizarre texts.”
This chapter will blow your mind or frustrate your understanding or offend your religious or phallic sensibilities or all of these at once! Or it may additionally be just another day’s routine reading in the Uncanny. Or it may seem to be a university academic article with footnotes taken to its own extreme self-satirical limits. Whatever the case, you need to experience it at least once in your reading life, if only to maintain your life in existence till you decide upon the act of reading it, a decision dependant upon the way you seem to have been persuaded to do so by this review.
22. Book end: déjà vu (reprise)
“In fits and starts we have to speak with ghosts, in order to begin to learn to live.”
A treatment, inter alia, of the word ‘fit’ that only this author could attempt. If the choice of the Nicholas Royle cap fits, wear it. This is the end of my review about a book that is likely to change my death, if not so much my life, and I still hang about not finishing this review at all but speculating what else I can say about my take on the ‘uncanny’ in its light, its study of Freud, Derrida, etc., viz. to embrace this book or to shout ‘Uncannibals!’ at it. To recognise that I was already on to something when Aickman’s strange stories taught me more about the gluiness of Zeno’s Paradox than philosophy. Not forgetting Thomas Ligotti’s uncanny anti-natalism. And that my own only novel ‘Nemonymous Night’ already possessed an instinct or an osmosis about such matters — and thus we reach the elbow of today’s déjà vu. Remarkably someone ‘hit’ an ancient post of mine today on my site about this novel’s stretching of age and character, a very rare event that anybody hits on it with a clicking finger heretofore, here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/authors-statement/
And today, in this final chapter of the Royle book, we recall Dickens’ earlier cannibal in Magwitch and now we’re reminded of the original déjà vu-ist in the character of Mr Micawber in one of Dickens’ serialised real-time novels….Something will turn up. This Royle book’s greatness surely will. Until the final clinching grasp or gestalt of what it is still teaching me….’in order to begin to learn to live.’
“A book is not published when it is published.” – nor a real-time review.