I am currently teaching an online horror literature course in “Psychos and the Psyche” for graduate students in our MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University. This month we are studying Freud’s article on “Das Unheimlich” and reading a fascinating new anthology of horror fiction called The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease, edited by Sarah Eyre and Rah Page (Comma Press, 2008). The book features some of the best British horror authors alive, including Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle, A.S. Byatt, Christopher Priest and many more…even Matthew Holness (whose double, Garth Merenghi, is echoed here). The book definitely deserved the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for “Best Anthology” for its ambition, and it makes for an interesting study in all things Unheimlich.

Mirrors, Doubles and Masks... Cover art for THE NEW UNCANNY designed by Sarah Eyre and David Eckersall

The book, essentially, is a literary experiment. All its contributors were challenged to read Freud’s seminal essay on “The Uncanny,” and then write a fresh fictional interpretation in order to explore what the Uncanny might mean 100 years later — today — in the 21st century, “to update Freud’s famous checklist of what gives us the creeps.”

The introduction by Ra Page is an excellent survey of “The Uncanny” in its own right, discussing how Freud provided a “literary template…a shopping list of shivers” that horror writers have managed to return to again and again over the past century. Page explains Freud’s essay in one of the most clear and careful ways I’ve ever seen in print. When discussing the tales in The New Uncanny, Page notes that the majority of the stories feature either the double or the doll most often, and turns to another essay on the Uncanny — Rilke’s “Dolls: On the Waxwork Dolls of Lotte Pritzel” (1913) — to discover convincing reasons why. I love the way Page concludes the introduction: “[The Uncanny] puts us on edge — that place we really should be from time to time — and reminds us: it’s us that’s alive.”

Keeping with the experimental spirit of this book, I thought I’d ask my “Psychos and the Psyche” class to review the book as a group. I have assigned each classmate a specific story in the book, and asked them to write a response (in a comment to this blog entry) that addresses the following three questions:

1) How does the author try to “update” the Freudian Uncanny in this story?
2) Does the story succeed as a work of uncanny literature?
3) What does the story teach us about the Uncanny in today’s culture?

[Warning: spoilers are inevitable! SURPRISES WILL LIKELY BE GIVEN AWAY. And all rights and opinions belong to the commenting students themselves. They will appear intermittently between now and the deadline of Oct 6th.]

Update: You can read MY review of this book (with fewer spoilers) on The Goreletter here: “A Double-Take on The New Uncanny” — MAA

You can order The New Uncanny directly from Comma Press online (be careful to note the different options for overseas orders).

Unconscious Drives - Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society

“Dreamland” is an amazing concept for an amusement park attraction based on literal interpretations of Freud’s theories.

I’m learning about this from Zoe Beloff’s exhibition at Coney Island museum (running till July 2010): The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle, 1926-72. I’m ordering the book that covers the history of this fascinating group, and I can’t wait to spend time with it. For now, I just want to share coverage of the exhibit in an article, “The Case of Sigmund F. and Coney I.” from The New York Times, which generously includes a slide show of images from the exhibit.

Albert Grass led the Amateur Psychoanalytic group, who proposed to restore and renovate ther “Dreamland” park area as “the first amusement park ever devoted to the elucidation of dreams in accordance with the discoveries of Doctor Sigmund Freud M.D.” Grass’ sketches of the rides and attractions of the id are compelling works of art in themselves, such as the autonomous bumper cars that function as “unconscious drives — 25 cents!” (image at the top of this post is from good coverage of the exhibit at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York blog…which also features an interview with Beloff). The textual notes (“In the unconscious nothing dies…They (the drives) are zombies!”) are at once an accurate description of Freudian thought and an unsettling literalization of anxiety and desire.

As the museum’s press release for the exhibit explains, Grass’s sketches and plans included “a working architectural model consisting of a series of pavilions (The Unconscious, Dream Works, Consciousness, The Censor), linked by a miniature locomotive (The Train of Thought)…integrat[ing the Group's]intellectual interests into its surroundings, in ways both serious and amusing.”

Grass, The Dome of the Unconscious: "Terror - In Consciousness We Experience Immediately The World Around Us"

How uncanny it would be to literally ride the unconscious and traipse along the pathways of the Dream Works. And I can only guess the horror of “The Censor” pavilion. By making the “figurative” elements of psychoanalytic theory “real,” the park attraction would have constituted an amazing fantasy adventure, but one that would resist the suspension of disbelief in that it would always already be a sort of projection of a conscious rationality in its very design. I suppose, there is a degree to which this is less an instance of the uncanny “confusion” between a symbol and what it symbolizes, and more a projection of the omnipotence of Freudian thought. Or, conversely, an artistic comment on Freudian thought as, itself, fantasy.

The Canadian literary journal, Descant, is calling for submissions on the theme, “Ghosts and the Uncanny” (deadline: March 01, 2010):

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken
to a little before it will explain itself.
– Charles Dickens

For this special issue, Descant turns ghost hunter and dares to explore the murky connections between life and death, science and superstition, folk beliefs and fictions. We are looking for apparitions of all kinds. Do you have paranormal poetry? Are you haunted by the past? Do you have a ghost of an idea? Perhaps you’d like to address the role of ghosts in literature and film. We want to document the existence of ghosts, both literal and metaphorical, on our pages. – Guest editors, Alex Maeve Campbell and Christina Francisco

Visit Descant’s website for more information.

Vytorin is a single pill — a drug that combines two different medicines (Zetia and Zocor) to combat the two kinds of cholesterol (generally called “good” and “bad” cholesterol”) which they identify as coming from two different sources (“food & family”). As Time magazine reports, there may be truth in these claims, and also problems with it — but the effectiveness of the drug is not my interest. Instead, I want to focus on how all these “dualities” — of medicine, cholesterol, and its origin — are overdetermined in the advertising, repeating some strangely familiar structures of the Uncanny that we often find in consumer culture. Similar to products like Wrigley’s “Doublemint” Gum, Vytorin lends itself to a marketing campaign that actively employs the figure of the double (der doppelganger) to draw the attention of the consumer. As I argue in The Popular Uncanny, in mass marketing and advertising the structures of the Uncanny often become ambiguously attractive and repulsive representations, reflecting our ambivalent anxieties about consumer culture. Here, the idea that “you are what you eat” is taken quite literally. It’s kind of cute, the first time you see it, but in the endless stream of associative pairings between people and food, one becomes progressively convinced that there is something universal about these claims, and that, perhaps, all food mirrors people (and vice-versa). While this ad — like most pharmaceutical advertising — projects a wish for a miracle cure, the use of doubling is so overdetermined that is also uncannily disturbing, if only because these matings feel predestined and beyond our control.

In the YouTube video above — from Vytorin’s infamously clever television campaign a few years ago — the ad showed a series of screens in which a diversity of overtly costumed actors are associated (first by “dissolves” into a single universal plate, then in panels, side by side on screen) with tasty foods and fancy dishes. The overt correspondences between body morphology, fashion choices, and food dishes is quite striking; the symmetry in design and the patterned replication of color schemes across the frame is orchestrated in a way that one simply cannot overlook the “double” message: people are food. Physical traits as well as personality are “naturally” reflected by our choice in food products. We are what we eat; and in the case of cholesterol, it can kill us, because we can’t help ourselves, and the inheritance of our family lines only affirms this.

This visual personification of ice cream and waffles and hot dogs is more than just clever ad design. Here we have an example of uncanny doubling, but it is different than the traditional “doppelganger” in that we are presented with a live human being whose “alter ego” is the food product — an inanimate (or in the case of meat, dead) object on a plate…a double which the living implicitly consume.

There is a subtle cannibalism at work in the dreamlike psychology here. If you see a scrumptious pile of pancakes in one shot, you probably don’t want to eat the person they associate with it, but the implied message is that these people consume these projections of themselves (and perhaps more subtly, vice-versa). Vytorin is suggesting that some people are “naturally” attracted to foods, no matter how artificial or prepared they might be — and by showing these associations in a lengthy series, subtly argues that this compulsory food choice can be generalized as a “compulsion to repeat” that is, simply, human nature.

The double is the “harbinger of death” and Vytorin presents itself as a cure not for cholesterol, per se, but for our anxiety about our predestined fate. If it is “natural,” moreover, then it is “healthy,” and a manufactured pharmaceutical company obviously benefits from framing itself as a “natural” cure or preventative medicine. Commercial pill brand names often pun on our desire for infinite life and health (as I have argued elsewhere about the pain reliever, Aleve). The name “Vytorin” even sounds life-giving in its prefix (“Vyt-”, implying “vital,” as in “vitamin”), before it battles choles-”tor”-al with its “statIN”-based formula. But beyond that, in the ad, the focus on the communion of “food” and “family” transforms the scary point it makes about the origin of cholesterol into a story of “organic” harmony and healthy wish-fulfillment. All these implicit health claims drive home the subtle message that Vytorin is a healthy choice, enabling you to go ahead and eat whatever you like, because it is your destiny, your nature, and the pill fits into this schema as natural law.

Of course, no matter how healthy and uplifting the product might sound, or even be, the ad benefits, too, from fear, as all advertising does — and with most medical advertising, the fear being alluded to here is the fear of death. If you look like a egg salad, and you compulsively eat egg salad, you are only one step away from becoming the equivalent of egg salad. The blurring of boundaries between signifier and signified is an ambivalence that is both cutely humorous and darkly scary. The harbinger of death is the uncanny double.