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 read this book, I intend to comment on it in the comment stream below…
Published barely post-9/11…
“A feeling of uncanniness may come from curious coincidences, a sudden sense that things seem to be fated or ‘meant to happen’.”
Via Russsian Formalism (that I studied with Anne Cluyensaar in 1967) and Stonehenge (that I visited with my two children at a time you could still clamber over the stones) to two ‘strangers’ or ‘pilgrims’ on page 9 of the introduction. (See my review of ‘Strangers and Pilgrims’ in my reviews of all Walter de la Mare stories HERE.)
With all the definitions of ‘uncanny’ shown here, I’d rather suggest ‘preternatural’ as the mot juste.
“We have from the beginning been doing something strange with Freud, ventriloquising him into an English speaker.”
I won’t re-rehearse the journeys of philosophical, aesthetic or literary thought in this book, but merely some of the destinations – as if journeying from the foggy railway station that is shown in my reading today at the start of ‘Party Going’ by Henry Green.
Another such destination: “What makes a work canonical or ‘great’ is its uncannineas.”
Written today alongside, if not necessarily influenced by, this book…
THE UNCAN-OPENER
Writing about the Uncanny is like being stuck at a foggy railway station and ending up overnight in a waiting-room rather than at your intended destination. Whether you reach some conclusion on the nature of the Uncanny, however, depends upon who spends the night with you. The brand new year today that I have already airbrushed from history seems unfair to blame for the fog because this year has only just started and has had no chance to re-configure itself as our present moment. The trains had already been running late, in any event. And the nearest hotel was more than even a trek away. This is exactly what happened, but nobody would later own up to being party to the company they kept nor to being the soul of that selfsame party, let alone its star. Whatever the case, everyone in the waiting-room turned out to have one thing in common. They happened to be travelling to the same destination, i.e. to a party hosted by me, and I sat alone, surrounded by the congeries of seasonal decorations wilting on the walls, now become the spectral guest in my own empty mansion waiting for all the hosts to arrive.
I blew a squeaky toy that failed to squeak.
I took up a dummy that failed to speak.
I dressed as a ghost with a veil and pique.
Perhaps they’ll all arrive next Sunday week.
Until then, let’s play Sardines, not Hide and Seek.
“The uncanny is always ‘meta-uncanny’.”
Many examples cited in Introduction so far I think should have Robert Aickman added first and foremost!
Another of my inspired miniatures today:
Yet another DFL miniature written alongside, if not influenced by, this book…
More on Freud and Derrida.
“…the uncanny is as much concerned with the question of computers and ‘new technology’ as it is with questions of religion.”
…which leads to footnote 79 of the many fulsome footnotes to AN INTRODUCTION (which I have finished reading today) that relates, I think, to the intrinsic ‘uncanniness’ of my ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’ of hyper-imaginative fiction books: “shared thinking” in the uncanny.
SUPPLEMENT: ‘THE SANDMAN’
Before reading this chapter, I have re-read my review that was placed HERE in 2019….
=============================================
THE STORY OF THE HARD NUT
by E.T.A. Hoffmann
Translated by Major Alex. Ewing
“O, cousin, cousin, what extraordinary stories are these!”
A review as a hard nut to crack, a near uncrackable nut called Krakatuk, not Krakatoa nor even a word ending in ‘uk’ to describe an intractable Brexit! The story needs an audit trail, one starting with a “sausagebrew”, a King whose bacon is stolen from around the sausages by a sort of Mrs Mouserinks who is possibly a mouse or a monster, and then the King’s beautiful new-born daughter needs protecting from the monster by a young man with a strengthened wooden under-jaw cracking the Krakatuk and possibly later marrying the princess if successful — with much more in each link of the audit trail so that you can audit it… no spoilers from me, notwithstanding any kernel’s further sausagebrewing.
“… disastrously haunted by childhood memories of the Sandman coming to tear out children’s eyes and who compounds the disaster by falling fatally in love with the beautiful Olympia, an automaton. ‘The Sandman’ [by E.T.A. Hoffmann] employs a series of narrators, switches back and forth in time, and presents a number of characters, whose features seem weirdly to blend into one another:”
Much else about the Uncanny vis à vis Henry Green’s ‘Blindness’, and, more generally, castration and being Queer, and about a writer far less famous to me than Aickman (cf his ‘Ai’ name and Olympia in SOLAGE?), a writer seemingly called CIXous. (109?) Read so far up to p 42. (In fact, until I picked up this book. I had never heard of the Cixous name!)
“‘The Sandman’ is mad. It is a work of madness.”
My past reviews of three works mentioned in this chapter:
M.R. James’ Oh Whistle: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/09/oh-whistle-and-ill-come-to-you-my-lad-m-r-james/
Conrad’s The Secret Sharer: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/30/joseph-conrad-the-secret-sharer/
Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/tales-of-mystery-and-imagination-edgar-poe/
3. LITERATURE, TEACHING, PSYCHOANALYSIS
Read up to: “…’The Uncanny’ gets more cunningly (and cannily) tangled up in itself:”
My whole ‘intellectual’ life of reading and writing (literary matters and linguistics and intentional fallacy at University in 1960s, small press horror mags etc, Weirdmonger, 70s-90s, and anthologies of ghost stories and dark fiction about haunted houses &c. and Cthulhu and titles like The Unexpected, followed in the Noughties by Nemonymous and Gestalt real-time reviewing and in recent months by my many miniatures headed Mansions with Roofs linked HERE) seems equally tangled up with factors here, too. Who knew an essay by Freud was to blame!
“If the name has capacity for generating uncanny effects, so does its absence. We expect a work of literature to have an author, to be identifiable with an authorial name; and yet the link between a work and an authorial name is never absolutely certain… […] There is, perhaps, some quasi-essential link between anonymity and literature, between fiction and ‘the absolute proximity of a stranger whose power is singular and anonymous’. As E.M. Forster suggested, in a fascinating essay called ‘Anonymity: An Enquiry’…”
As well as the aspects on the uncanny — in ‘literature(,) teaching(,) psychoanalysis’, and in what I have long felt about ghosts and haunted houses, and horror genre fiction works, as well as Derrida and Freud, as in Royle here — we have above in the passage in ‘The Uncanny’ that starts as above quote, arguably, by dint of an uncanny imagination, a seminal observation in this book published in 2003 about my first edition, in 2001, of a literary journal of anonymous slipstream stories entitled ‘Nemonymous’ (its Wikipedia HERE) that broaches Nemonymity as another form of Anonymity in Literature, plus my interest in E.M. Forster’s ‘Only Connect’ dictum (viz. my later ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’) from ‘Howard (Lovecraft)’s End’, and his ‘The Machine Stops’ near the turn of the century 19th into the 20th century of what was to become the Internet, and all the Internet’s own varieties of Nemonymity and ghosts and haunted dark webs!
Pingback: The Uncanny and the Nemonymous | Nemonymous Night
Just thought, in line with Royle’s ‘Bacon and Shakespeare’ example airbrushed by my […] within the above quote about Authorial Anonymity, I suddenly thought the example of Nicholas Royle and Nicholas Royle, and then passed on thinking about dopplegängers, and to Otto Rank’s Doubles referenced in the next chapter of this book…
4. Film
…which seems to be a freewheeling academic, almost poetic prose-incantatory, meditation on film and photo in the context of this book’s subject matter, much of which material is above my head, but I duly absorbed many of the chapter’s elements by creative osmosis for which I am thankful. It also made me remark to myself that there is some sort of flip-photo filmic linkage to the six pareidoliac images (HERE) that I took on my iPhone this very morning *before* I read this chapter!
Cross-referenced this review with that of SOLAGE here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/01/06/solage-by-nimbus-a-4o/#comment-28006
5. The Death Drive
Just started reading this chapter, set out in ‘bullet points’. Starting with the whys and wherefores of bullet points being called bullet points in the first place.
Time only today to pretentiously quote this statement as from a post earlier today on Facebook:
To instil the uncanny into a reader through words, it adds to the uncanniness for the words themselves to be couched within an uncanny style unacknowledged that the style is uncanny at all. — D.F. Lewis
I am most grateful to this chapter for the alert to many things that may have already been part of me by means of some angel guardian or daemon muse or unknown kindred spirit as ‘concursor’ of which I have, until now been unaware, one of these many things being the word ‘concursor’ itself here connected with D.H. Lawrence, whose ‘Women In Love’ novel invoked in me an essay in 1967 of which I was most proud as a student. More recently, I reviewed (with two further links to my reviews of ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Daughters of the Vicar) HERE: ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ story by Lawrence that is mentioned in this chapter.
Also while absorbing this chapter’s thoughts about returns, recurrences, repeats, doubles, silences, blanks etc. (also see the aforementioned Nemonymous) in connection with the DEATH DRIVE contextualised by the subject matter and references in this Royle book on the uncanny and the eerie as now differentiated (and dare I also mention a further slant known as the ostranenie?), I thought of the work of Thomas Ligotti, a great writer of Weird Fiction, comprising Horror and Ghost Story and Uncanny and Philosophical Anti-Natalism, the latter Emil Cioran type aspect actually denying the experience of the death drive by not being born at all! Something here seems to generate the ultimate gestalt of the Uncanny and Literature and La Vie Inconnu and the Blank of Silence, i.e. this inability to repeat or return by not doing it once? (I started reading Ligotti many years before the Penguin Classics edition of his work and my reviews are linked HERE.)
And the ‘concursor’ sensibility extends, for me, into the very brief chapter….
6. Silence, solitude, and…
And somehow I am ironically reminded of the Zeno’s Paradox-creeping-slowly
ethos in Aickman and in some other Weird Literature I have discovered in recent years, and whether ‘The Creepy’ as category could be put alongside The Uncanny, The Eerie, The Ostranenie, The Spooky, and even The Oblique or The Literary Gauche.
Due notice: I soon intend to seek out THE SANDMAN by ETA Hoffman to read and review it.
I managed to obtain THE SANDMAN today as a Kindle only containing itself, and I have given it a first reading, and HERE are my thoughts to rest alongside my review of Hoffman’s HARD NUT story as reproduced above from a few years ago.
7. Darkness
Yet the light is even more terrifying? –
“The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.” – John Fowles (from ‘The Necessity of Nemo’ in ‘The Aristos’ 1964)
8. Night writing: deconstruction reading politics
At my age and after my stellar career in insurance and later administering benefit claimants, I am basically a non-academic so I needed much of my ability of osmosis with this chapter on Blanchot, Derrida and, I infer, the ‘stars’ of Academic politics. I can’t recall the P.O. ‘night letter rate’, but much of this chapter reminded me of the vibes and interactions in the P.O. Sub-postmaster scandal raging in this very moment of real-time while I write this review, and I felt a frisson as if from a glance at me through a theatrical 4th wall, like one of the people here is doing with a horrific mien — this being an ancient Aimage of ‘mine’, soon to be deleted forever.