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Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity by John Zilcosky

2018; Austrian Studies Association; Volume: 51; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/oas.2018.0035

2327-1809

Katherine Arens,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

Reviewed by: Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity by John Zilcosky Katherine Arens John Zilcosky, Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2016. 264 pp. John Zilcosky offers in Uncanny Encounters another of his fresh, original scholarly projects, a worthy addition to his ongoing attempts to rescue the study of Germanophone culture from the isolation of the salon and library and to make the texts of modern literature speak not only to their eras, but out of their eras, as he did in his first major study of travel literature, Kafka's Travels (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), which argued that Kafka found the exotic within Europe, a point made by setting Kafka's reading habits into historical context and by wedding cultural critique and psychological analyses (tying Kafka's psychological issues into the era's relationship with exoticism). That volume outlined the relevance that Europe's imperial imagination had for Central European identity politics. Uncanny Encounters builds directly on the questions raised there, now by situating a broad palette of Germanophone colonial encounters within and outside of Europe's colonial imagination. His goal is to substantiate a more encompassing claim that a considerable body of Germanophone travel literature reflects general skepticism about exoticism and alterity in the European vein, and that the mental geography used at the late colonial moment of 1900 in this corpus is quite different from that of the rest of Europe. Most significantly, he includes Freud's work as a kind of travel literature to argue that this Germanophone literature documents experiences of being unsettled in identity rather than being reaffirmed in contact with colonial others—an experience of the unheimlich—traditionally "the [End Page 119] uncanny," but probably better "the discomfiting"—that triggers aggression rather than self-affirmation. Zilcosky introduces his work over the question of experiencing the blank spaces on imperial maps and their correlates in the unconscious (his own and that from the turn of the century, reacting to the rapidly filling map spaces of globalized Europe). He finds documentation for these experiences first in a popular 1911 novel by a Germanophone Belgian author, Norbert Jacques, Heißes Land: Eine Reise nach Brasilien (Hot Land: A Journey to Brazil). Around that text, Zilcosky builds a context of modernist travel literature (including Joseph Conrad, Hermann Keyserling, Ernst Jünger, Stefan Zweig, Waldemar Bonsels, and Max Pechstein). His German travelers do seek out these "blank spaces" on Europe's maps in the hopes of discovery, but they ultimately find nothing but themselves and so experience a particular type of discomfiture (uncanniness): they have sought out "the other" in these exotic places, but have ultimately found only reflections of themselves. These travelers have been jolted out of their (mental) homes rather than finding themselves as "not the other," as the paradigm of orientalism would have it. The second chapter turns to Hermann Hesse's writings from his voyages to "India" (Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia) and his Robert Aghion as examples of the colonial-orientalist desire to find "the other" absolutely thwarted by the discovery of red light districts and souvenir shops. The "natives" that Hesse found are not just thoroughly dependent on colonialist economies—they essentially resemble westerners. Chapter 3 emerges as the linchpin for Zilcosky's argument as he ties these experiences to "the uncanny" as defined in Freud's 1919 essay, as this theoretical work implicates his own identity as a Jewish-Austrian citizen from the East. Most striking is that Freud in fact used as partial basis for his insights a popular colonialist short story by L. G. Moberly, entitled "Inexplicable," published in the Strand Magazine in 1917 (which, this reviewer notes, also published Sherlock Holmes). As in the Kafka case, the colonial images to which Freud had recourse resemble nothing so much as H. Rider Haggard's She (serialized 1886–87), drawing on an imperialist map that Freud took to heart. But then Zilcosky reminds us that Freud's patients do indeed use in their dreams those tropes of Victorian travel and that it is possible to read Totem and Taboo as a kind of adventure story (107). Chapter 4...