Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

It Walks: The Ambulatory Uncanny

2003; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 118; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2004.0001

1080-6598

Susan David Bernstein,

Themes in Literature Analysis

"Das Unheimliche"—the uncanny—has been with us for some time. Freud's famous essay began to attract critical attention in the early seventies as psychoanalysis became important in literary studies. Samuel Weber's essay, "The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment," first published in MLN in 1973 and reprinted in the expanded edition of The Legend of Freud in 2000, is now a classic in the literature of the uncanny. Reading Freud's essay "Das Unheimliche" along with Hoffmann's "Sandman" and Villier de l'Isle-Adam's novel l'Eve future, Weber makes an important intervention in arguing against the many prior approaches to this topic which had tended to understand it solely as an "emotive phenomenon" identified with feelings of fear, anxiety, weirdness, etc. "Such a position," he writes, "misconstrues the peculiar structure of the uncanny, or more precisely, ignores the fact that the uncanny has a particular structure, which, however intimately bound up with subjective feelings—above all anxiety—is nonetheless determined by a series of 'objective' factors that in turn stand in a certain relation to literary discourse" (208). 1 He thus joins in the discussion that begins to understand Freud's text as itself a case of the uncanny, 2 and indeed of the literary uncanny. Weber points to Freud's failure to define the uncanny in a final or complete way, suggesting that this is not an error on Freud's part, but rather tells us something about the uncanny itself. At the same time, Weber steers clear of defining the uncanny as an "object." Rather, what characterizes the uncanny is precisely the impossibility of looking it "straight in the eyes, as it were . . . peeling and paring [End Page 1111] away its external layers to get at the 'conceptual kernel' within and yet unable to ever eliminate the (growing) shadow of doubt—all this indicates that even if the uncanny is not conceived as an irreducibly subjective sentiment, its objective structure cannot be determined solely in thematic terms" (1115). The uncanny calls not for a definition, a collection of thematic terms, but rather, as a "'formal,' textual structure," demands reading. This insistence on reading, foregrounding the textuality of the uncanny, points to the ways in which the uncanny functions as a critique of identity. "The reading that I now propose to undertake," Weber writes, "seeks . . . to avoid the impasse of interpretations which—like Freud's Musterung—conceive and organize their own activity, consciously or unconsciously, in terms derived from a notion of perception ('vision') which in turn is based upon ontological presuppositions that the problematic of castration precisely and decisively dislocates: namely, upon the presence and identity of the 'object' in question" (1115).