The Thing by Dylan Trigg

Author:Dylan Trigg [Trigg, Dylan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-076-1
Publisher: John Hunt (NBN)
Published: 2014-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

The Uncanny Body

To help us conceptualize the sense of the body as a site of conflicting temporalities, we can formulate our understanding of the concept with an appeal to the uncanny. Of course, this move to the uncanny is not only helpful in terms of identifying the structure of the body, as a composite of the immemorial and the present, it is also helpful in terms of accenting the thematic quality of bodily nature as characterised by an abiding sense of strangeness. This sense of the body as the bearer of a past, older than thought itself, and at odds with our existing ideas of what constitutes selfhood, finds a special place in Freud’s celebrated essay on the uncanny (Freud 2003).

Freud’s definition of the uncanny remains exemplary: “That species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (124). Following an etymological analysis of the term “heimlich,” he notes that there is an increasing ambiguity between the heimlich and the unheimlich, or the homely and the unhomely, such that neither can be considered in isolation from the other. That which is the most familiar—not least the “home” of the body—is precisely that which engenders itself to estrangement and the intrusion of the unfamiliar.

Following Ernst Jentsch’s analysis, for Freud, this dialectic between the homely and the unhomely is evident in objects such as waxwork figures, childhood dolls, and automata, all of which Freud considers by way of Hoffmann’s short story, “The Sandman.” In addition, the uncanny presents itself in conditions such as epilepsy, given that an epileptic fit “arouse[s] in the onlooker vague notions of automatic—mechanic—processes that may lie hidden behind the familiar image of a living person” (135). What is important to Freud’s analysis of such phenomena is that the surface presentation of a familiar thing—in the case of Freud’s analysis of Hoffmann’s story, the eye—belies another level, in which another meaning resides. It is this other level of meaning that induces an element of intellectual uncertainty, such that despite the best attempts at rationalization, something exceeds reason and thus marks the scene of an ongoing anxiety.

The structure of the Freudian uncanny—characterised as an element of subjectivity repressed into the unconscious while at the same time innocuously persistent in conscious existence—has a particular relevance for the temporality of the body. Indeed, Freud’s point of departure for developing his account of the uncanny is the figure of the double, or the doppelgänger.

Following Otto Rank, he observes a shift in meaning of the concept, from its conception as an immortal counterpart of the body to its role as an “uncanny harbinger of death” (142). What is uncanny about such ideas is not simply the factual prospect of encountering oneself as an omen of one’s mortality, but rather the very persistence of these ideas, which ought to have been consigned to a relic of a “primitive phase in our mental development” (143). This persistence of the mythical past in our present existence marks the point

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