Etymology
Canny is from the Anglo-Saxon
root ken: “knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception: an idea
beyond one's ken.” Thus the uncanny is something outside one's familiar knowledge
or perceptions.
The German word for uncanny,
"unheimlich" has frequently been misinterpreted in psychoanalytic literature
as meaning "un-homely" (that would be "unheimelig", a word
that does not exist). However, the correct meaning is "un-secret",
which, similar to the misinterpreted term, also expresses the inherently
paradoxical, "undecidable" (in Derrida's sense) nature of the term uncanny.
German idealism
Schelling raised the question
of the uncanny in his late Philosophie der Mythologie of 1835, postulating that
the Homeric clarity was built upon a prior repression of the uncanny.
In The Will to Power
manuscript Nietzsche refers to nihilism as "the uncanniest of all
guests" and, earlier, in On the Genealogy of Morals he claims it is the
"will to truth" that has destroyed the metaphysics that underpins the
values of Western culture. Hence, he coins the phrase "European nihilism"
to describe the condition that afflicts those Enlightenment ideals that
seemingly hold strong values yet undermine themselves.
Uncanniness was first explored
psychologically by Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, On the Psychology of the
Uncanny. Jentsch defines the Uncanny as: being a product of "intellectual
uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one
does not know one’s way about in. The better oriented in his environment a
person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in
regard to the objects and events in it."He expands upon its use in fiction:
The concept of the Uncanny was
later elaborated on and developed by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay The
Uncanny, which also draws on the work of Hoffmann (whom Freud refers to as the
"unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature"). However, he criticizes
Jentsch's belief that Olympia is the central uncanny element in the story (The
Sandman): I cannot think — and I hope
most readers of the story will agree with me — that the theme of the doll
Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or
indeed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite
unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story.
Instead, Freud draws on a
wholly different element of the story, namely, "the idea of being robbed of
one's eyes," as the "more striking instance of uncanniness" in
the tale.
Freud goes on, for the
remainder of the essay, to identify uncanny effects that result from instances
of "repetition of the same thing," linking the concept to that of the
repetition compulsion. He includes incidents wherein one becomes lost and
accidentally retraces one's steps, and instances wherein random numbers recur,
seemingly meaningfully (here Freud may be said to be prefiguring the concept
that Jung would later refer to as synchronicity). He also discusses the uncanny
nature of Otto Rank's concept of the "double."
Freud specifically relates an
aspect of the Uncanny derived from German etymology. By contrasting the German
adjective unheimlich with its base word heimlich ("concealed, hidden, in
secret"), he proposes that social taboo often yields an aura not only of
pious reverence but even more so of horror and even disgust, as the taboo state
of an item gives rise to the commonplace assumption that that which is hidden
from public eye (cf. the eye or sight metaphor) must be a dangerous threat and
even an abomination - especially if the concealed item is obviously or
presumingly sexual in nature. Basically, the Uncanny is what unconsciously
reminds us of our own Id, our forbidden and thus repressed impulses –
especially when placed in a context of uncertainty that can remind one of
infantile beliefs in the omnipotence of thought. Such uncanny elements are perceived
as threatening by our super-ego ridden with oedipal guilt as it fears symbolic
castration by punishment for deviating from societal norms. Thus, the items and
individuals that we project our own repressed impulses upon become a most
uncanny threat to us, uncanny monsters and freaks akin to fairy-tale
folk-devils, and subsequently often become scapegoats we blame for all sorts of
perceived miseries, calamities, and maladies.
What interests us most in this
long extract is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word
heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich. What is
heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. [...] In general we are reminded that the
word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which,
without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means
what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept
out of sight. Unheimlich is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only
of the first signification of heimlich, and not of the second. [...] On the
other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new
light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not
prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have
remained secret and hidden but has come to light.
Hitchcock was the master in
the art of conducing art into the world of Unheimlich. He used simple, everyday
objects who may suddenly lose their familiar side, and become the messenger of
beyond narcissism.
