THE UNCANNY
The uncanny is a concept used to describe something—an object, a place, an atmosphere—that is both strange and familiar at the same time. The overlapping of the known with the unknown generates an unsettling feeling for the reader (or viewer) that can range from discomfort to fear. The sense of what is “real” and “normal” is slightly unsettled by the presence of jarring elements in the narration, and it is uncertain, for both the reader/viewer and the characters, whether these elements have mundane, supernatural, or imaginative causes: a degree of ambiguity has to be maintained for the uncanny to exist. Borrowed from psychoanalysis, the concept has been widely used by literary criticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to analyze any type of fiction that plays on this ambiguous feeling of unease, with Gothic fiction, horror literature, and weird fiction being examples. Instances of the uncanny include déjà-vu, time-loops, repetitions, doubles, twins, doppelgängers, ghosts, moving paintings, never-ending staircases, and living dolls. The sense of the uncanny can be compared to the “odd,” the “weird,” and the “incongruous.”
One of the most well-known treatises on the uncanny is Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, of which the English “uncanny” is a loose translation. The term unheimliche is a combination in German of the adjective heimliche—derived from Heime, or “home” in English—and the prefix un. Heimliche is used to refer to the house, the family, and everyday life, but also to what is intimate as well as concealed. As Freud observes, the concept of Heimliche is twofold, with the home a space of both comfort and secrecy. The negative prefix un- makes unheimliche an imperfect opposite of Heimliche: it describes a feeling of estrangement rooted within the familiar that is both threatening and alluring for the subject that experiences it.
Freud’s essay was a response to previous theories of the uncanny, particularly that of the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in his pioneering essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906). Freud draws extensively from Jentsch’s theory that the uncanny emerges from indecipherable circumstances and that fiction is the most efficient device to create such conditions. Most of Freud’s response is dedicated to the intricate links between psychoanalysis and literature, expanding on the reading Jentsch offers of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sand-man” (1817), which features childhood monsters, doppelgängers, and a living automata called Olympia. Freud agrees with Jentsch’s opinion that Hoffmann’s story is a landmark of uncanny fiction, but the conclusions he draws are slightly different: while Jentsch sees the living doll Olympia as the locus of the uncanny in the text, Freud believes that the character of the Sandman, a creature that steals children’s eyes at night to feed them to its own offspring, is the central figure. Freud reads the haunting effects that the monster has on the main character as fictionalized versions of the psychoanalytical concepts of repression, repetition compulsion, and anxiety neurosis: repressed childhood fears and conflicts, when brought back to the surface by unexpected elements, trigger a feeling of anxiety that Freud identifies as the experience of the uncanny.
Freud’s theory was highly influential both within and without the realm of psychoanalysis. It paved the way for Jacques Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage in human psychological development, and it inspired psychoanalytical feminist philosophers such as Helen Cixous and Julia Kristeva to question the relationship between the “self” and the “other” in the cognitive space. It was also used widely in literary criticism, especially in attempts to define the genres of Gothic and horror fiction. Scholars such as Leslie Fiedler and David Punter consider it a key concept of the Gothic genre, tracing occurrences of the uncanny in foundational Gothic texts such as Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798). Later instances include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories such as “William Wilson,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat,” Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” (1926), and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925).
While written fiction was long the dedicated medium for the uncanny, cinema has also explored its potential. From the early days of the movie industry, directors such as F. W. Murnau (Nosferatu the Vampyre, Faust) and Fritz Lang (Dr. Mabuse, M, Metropolis), alongside other figures of expressionist cinema, sought to create feelings of unease through the distortion of reality on screen. Their use of oblique camera angles, stark black and white contrasts, heavy makeup, special effects, and crooked landscapes paved the way for other directors such as Emeric Pressburger (The Red Shoes), Orson Welles (The Trial, Citizen Kane, The Lady of Shanghai), Alfred Hitchcock (The Birds, Vertigo, Psycho), Stanley Kubrick (The Shining, Lolita) and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Inland Empires).
Elsa Charléty
See also: Brown, Charles Brockden; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Dreams and Nightmares; The Haunted House or Castle; Hoffmann, E. T. A. ; James, Henry; Kafka, Franz; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; “The Sand-man”; “Schalken the Painter”; Transformation and Metamorphosis.
Further Reading
Fiedler, Leslie A. [1960] 1997. Love and Death in the American Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. University Presses of California, Columbia, and Princeton.
Peel, Ellen. 1980. “Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny.” Comparative Literature Studies 17, no. 4: 410–417. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40245653.
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema: Parts 1, 2, 3. 2006. Directed by Sophie Fiennes. Written and presented by Slavoj Žižek. London: P Guide Limited. DVD.
Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. New York: Longman Publishing Group.
Tatar, Maria M. 1981. “The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny.” Comparative Literature 33, no. 2: 167.
UNRELIABLE NARRATOR
The term “unreliable narrator” refers to a narrative technique used in fiction when the story is told solely or partially through the single viewpoint of a first-person narrator who proves at some point to have failed to tell the entire truth, either intentionally or unintentionally. An unreliable narrator gives information to the reader that is biased, incomplete, fabricated, and/or insufficient. This type of narrator is especially common to, and significant in, Gothic romanticism, horror literature, and crime fiction.
Even though literary critic Wayne Booth coined the term “unreliable narrator” in his 1961 essay The Rhetoric of Fiction, the technique has existed as long as authors have written stories in which the narration, or part of it, is told from a subjective point of view. Early uses of a narrator’s unreliability can be traced as far back as Homer’s Odyssey (ca. eighth century BCE) and The Arabian Nights (ca. ninth century). With the rise of first-person narration in the eighteenth century and the publishing of novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (French: Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, 1761), the question of the narrator’s reliability would become central in Western literature.
The fallibility of a narrator can be spotted through incongruities in his or her account such as repetitions, memory gaps, contradiction with other characters’ versions, and apparent discrepancies between the narrator’s statements and his or her actions. When made apparent, this unreliable quality of the narrator often leads to a complete overturn of the plot. It usually finds the narrator guilty of some dark deeds while he or she had painted himself or herself as innocent. It challenges heavily the reading experience, as a first-person narrator is the sole source of information for the reader.
Because such a narrator delivers skewed perspectives and heightens plot ambiguities, this technique offers a privileged way for authors to challenge the limit between reality and fantasy and intensify the mysterious atmosphere of a text. It allows exploring not just the moral failings of individuals, but also psychological instability. Indeed, in Gothic fiction, the first-person narrator is often proven to be unreliable due to being in a state of mental distress that makes him or her incapable of giving a trustworthy account of events.
For example, a narrator can be unreliable because he or she is a liar or delusional. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), the character of Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, is presented to the reader as a mere chronicler of the drama that unfolds in the plot. However, she plays a greater role than what she says she does, as she is blinded by her emotional attachment to the family she works for. It takes a second narrator, an outsider, to show the cracks in her logic and have the reader question her impartiality.
An unreliable narrator can also be emotionally unstable, as in the case of Roderick Usher in Edgar Allan Poe’s iconic Gothic tale “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Described by the main narrator of the story as a feeble, depressed hypochondriac, Roderick Usher is a tortured man haunted by the memory of his dead sister Madeline. He is the only one to know the truth about her death, but his precarious emotional state forces the reader to compensate for his fallibility when he (Roderick) describes Madeline’s death, and come up with his or her own interpretation of the mystery. It is also unclear, by the end of the novel, if the main narrator is completely trustworthy or, in fact, as mad as Usher himself. The reader, as is often the case with Poe’s stories, has to draw his or her own conclusions.
Additional instances of mad narrators can be found in Poe (“The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” “Berenice”), with the most representative being the “murderous maniac” of the “Tell-Tale Heart,” a narrative tour de force that uses the whole potentiality of an unreliable narrator to delve into the depth of human madness. A short text written solely from the point of view of an unidentified “I,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” sees the multiple attempts made by this anonymous narrator to convince the reader of his sanity as he sits in jail, accused of murdering his landlord. As the narration progresses and the narrator tells of the carefully calculated murder, as well as the dismembering and concealing of the body under the floorboards, he seems to have a harder time keeping his story in check. He eventually breaks into a hallucinatory rant and claims to have heard the beating heart of his dead victim through the floorboards. The first-person narrative makes it impossible for the reader to know where the truth lies: either the narrator is indeed mad, and his guilt-ridden conscience has made him fall into an acute paranoiac episode; or the narrator is, as he claims, not insane but the victim of some supernatural trick. Or he may be neither mad nor sane, but merely an avatar of Poe himself, who is playing with the conventions of narration and has invented the whole story from scratch.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” was the precursor for many other figures of “mad” unreliable narrators, including Humbert Humbert, the pervert maniac of Nabokov’s Lolita; the haunted governess of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw; and the murderous German submarine commander of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Temple.” Movie directors such as Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, Vertigo), Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, The Trial), Stanley Kubrick (The Shining, Lolita) and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway) have also relied on the point of view of unstable characters to challenge viewers’ assumptions about the plot and create an atmosphere of mystery and fear through the medium of cinema.
Elsa Charléty
See also: The Brontë Sisters; Doubles, Doppelgängers and Split Selves; Faulkner, William; Gothic Hero/Villain; “The Horla”; The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Other; The Shining; The Turn of the Screw; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”
Further Reading
Booth, Wayne C. 1983. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nünning, Ansgar. 1997. “‘But Why Will You Say That I Am Mad?’ On the Theory, History, and Signals of Unreliable Narration in British Fiction.” In AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 22, no. 1: 83–105.
Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Longman Publishing Group.