[...] our Readings In The Genre: Horror class this week, the instructor, Dr. Michael Arnzen, had us each review a short story in “The New Uncanny” for his blog: Gorelets.com. The premise for the compilation is [...]

This strange little short story was nothing more than a tease. Mia, the mother, was harboring deep feelings of guilt for not having wanted her first born. She looked for danger where there was none and blamed herself whenever Felix was in harm’s way. There was a lot of foreboding and unfulfilled foreshadowing in the story for nothing to happen.

Dan, Mia’s husband, Rosie, Felix and her have come to the States for a great aunt’s funeral. Their SUV has broken down, leaving them stranded at a little third rate family owned motel. They sarcastically call the owners the Earl and Mrs. Earl. Mia is unnerved when the owner keeps coming into their room whenever they’re gone. This builds suspicion and a sense of dread.

Combine this with her overactive guilt feelings and the tension builds.

Mr. Earl speaks to Felix once and tells him to stay away from the geese because they’ll peck his eyes out. Then when the youngster tells her that Mr. Earl has no eyes, the reader is left with a sense of impending doom.

On the first morning when Mia is out for an early stroll, she thinks that Mr. Earl is floating dead in the pool, although he shocks her by popping up his head. This appears to be a foreshadowing of disaster.

The following morning little Felix is missing. The reader presumes that either the geese got him or he’s drowned in the pool. Tension mounts even higher when Mia sees the pool gate open. The child is sleepwalking by the pool, however, and she scoops him up and carries him home.

Macleod pulled us into this era by setting it in a motel in New England with an in ground pool and emergency road service. She pulled us even closer with the use of required baby seats and air conditioning. The glass baby bottle dates it into the sixties—unless they’re still using them in England.

Mia’s guilt and the Earl’s eccentric personality helped to lend an eerie feeling to this piece; however, there was nothing uncanny about it. It did not succeed in giving the reader the slightest goose bump of fear. It actually left one wondering if a few pages might be missing.

Based on Freud’s premise it had potential that was never developed. It caught the reader’s attention several time, but then lost it in the ordinary.

This story teaches us that by today’s standards, the uncanny is lost in the mundane. It only whets the appetite for more, while teasing us with less.

The fourteen writers were asked to use the essay and the tropes outlined as a guide in writing works of short fiction for the compilation. Of these eight common tropes, Woodward’s focus was primarily on Freud’s discussion of the Double and the intentional blurring between reality and imagination.

The psychological creation of The Double, as a trope or archetypal pattern outlined by Freud, is “insurance against the destruction of the ego” and is coupled with a “belief in the soul and with the fear of death.” Woodward’s narrator becomes obsessed at an early age with a doubled world he enters by viewing the real world turned upside down. He “desperately wants to explore this exotic [world]” and is “profoundly disappointed” every time he’s forced to return to reality at his parents’ behest.

As an adult, he realizes he can finally create his upside-down world and prevent his own death. The story then becomes a How-To manual for creating our narrator’s double world. He describes various features of his model room upstairs and how he goes about duplicating the doubled (and reversed) features in the room immediately beneath it. First he duplicates/reverses his model room’s dimensions, then the floor, the rugs, the furniture, and even the curtains and chandelier.

Freud says this desire for doubling springs “from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child.” The story’s narrator supports this when he says “[it] was as though my life was a reflection in a pool…as though narcissus [sic] could indeed embrace his own reflection.”

Freud goes on to discuss that the manner in which the Double operates is reversed as a child matures. “[When] this stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”

The story’s narrator follows this same maturation process as he decides to duplicate, not just a single room, but the entire house. This process will take him “many, many years, and … I may not live long enough to complete [it].” The Underhouse has become the ticking clock of the narrator’s own mortality. But Freud’s “harbinger of death” portends a death that has prospects of being a grand adventure.

And as Freud notes, “there are also all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy[sic].” And so our narrator ponders what would happen if he finished The Underhouse and it collapsed upon itself. “One must suppose that the two would cancel each other out…I would have folded myself out of existence. A rather attractive thought.” Our narrator is no longer immortal, and is now enthralled by the very real possibilities of his own impending mortality.

So how are we to make sense of the story in context? While Gerard Woodward’s “The Underhouse” is an interesting narrative that finds a clever way to implement a discussion of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the Double as outlined in “The Uncanny,” I’m not sure it elicits the unnerving or uncanny feelings that Freud identified in his essay. As a reader, I would have been willing to follow Woodward further into the story, if he were to have taken the narrative past his current jumping-off point and explored this doubling concept in greater detail, hopefully achieving the desired uncanny effect.

As the story unfolds, we begin to understand that Sue has been directly manipulated by Ruthie as another character of the game, such as when she feels her exciting new boyfriend‘s questions “[seem] like moves in a game [she] does not want to play anymore” (Cottrell, 210). Sue’s visit to their home was likely directed by Ruthie, because maybe she wanted to see Sue. She was the one responsible for showing Ruthie how to play her video game in the first place. Only because Ruthie wanted her home life to go back to the way it was and stay that way forever had she removed Sue from Peter’s life so he would remain at home. However, she does not dislike Sue so she gives her some enjoyment in the form of other boyfriends, even if Sue is unable to stay with them and find everlasting happiness.

This story could be an admonishment against disregarding the effects of major life changes on children. Everyone around Ruthie went on with his or her own life plans and had no understanding of what the things that were happening meant to her. Had someone taken the time to explain why her parents were splitting up and why her father was getting a new wife and why Peter had to leave home to attend college, perhaps her frustration would not have morphed into an obsession with her video game, where she controlled the world and the events in it. Although Ruthie’s ability would not belong to a real child in our culture, there are many more diversions available in which a kid could drown their confusion.

Works Cited:

Cottrell, Frank. “Continued Manipulation.” The New Uncanny. Ed. Sarah Eyre and Ra Page. Great Britain: Comma Press, 2008. 207-219. Print.

Freud, Sigmond. “The Uncanny.” Rohan Academic Computing. 2 October 2009. http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html

There is no specific setting given, no time period, no names of characters even. But the slight clues we are given are perhaps 18th or 19th century. The characters are perhaps a member of a Northern European or the burgeoning American aristocracy.

What is uncanny in this story, then, is not dependent on either Freud’s generation or ours. Instead, it transcends time and reminds us that what is uncanny doesn’t change with each new generation, culture, or technological advance.

In “Seeing Double,” the young protagonist finds on the back of his own head another face. This face is female, blue-eyed like his mother who died in childbirth, rather than brown-eyed like himself and his father. His first interaction with this other face is to be bitten – the pain is shocking enough to make him scream.

According to Freud, a double in childhood often “wears a friendly aspect” (pg. 389). An imaginary childhood friend, for instance, one whom a child often wishes would take on animate characteristics (pg. 386). After puberty, however, after we pass the ego in development, we repress that friendly double. The reoccurrence of it later is then uncanny, and fulfills one of two functions: to criticize and observe the ego and act as its conscious, to become “isolated, dissociated from the ego, and discernible to a physician’s eye” (pg. 388); or to engage in “all those unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all those strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition” (pg. 388).

In this sense, the double face in “Seeing Double” works perfectly as uncanny. At first, as a twelve year old, the boy enjoys her presence. She is a friend, and he’s never had one before; she’s someone to play with – the animate fulfillment of his imagination.

After puberty, however, she morphs into the first of Frued’s uncanny roles. She becomes the observer, criticizing and mocking the boy, taunting him with his own insecurities and base desires. Rather than allowing him to indulge in those baser desires, as a double in the second of Freud’s uncanny roles would have done (i.e. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray), this double reminds him how wrong and unacceptable his desires are. She screams “Freak, freak, freak!” while he masturbates, convinces him no woman will want him.

However, this is the point where I, as a reader, stopped feeling a sense of the uncanny. The last third of the story falls into cliché, finally ending with the boy killing himself to kill his taunting double. This, however, even continues Freud’s theory, as the double was, in fact, “the ghastly harbinger of death” (pg. 389).

The story I was assigned to respond to is “The Sorting Out” by Christopher Priest. For those of you that haven’t read it, I’ll give you a summary as best I can. This story is basically about the aftermath of a breakup. The female character of the story is called Melvina and she has somewhat recently broken up with her live-in boyfriend Hike. She comes home late one evening to find her front door standing wide open and bashed in. She stands on the edge of the doorway, listening for any movement inside, listens for something outside and decides that whoever broke her door down is probably gone.

Even though the house betrayed no one with a squeak of the stair or floorboard, Melvina still does a room by room check of her house, as I am sure anyone would do. As she does her room by room check, she sees little reminders of Hike, a stray painting, a misplaced magazine or two. But finds nothing more. No one is hiding in the house or in any dark corner. On top of that, she cannot find that anything is missing. In fact, at first, the front door is the only thing that appears to show any sign of a break in at all. But, she is still set on edge; something is wrong.

When Melvina finally comes to terms that there is no one in the house she decides to look closer, and as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. Through the searching of the house, we find out that Melvina is a book collector of sorts. She is very meticulous about the order in which she stores her books and more importantly how they are stored. She discovers that her order, the thing she holds on to so dear, is interrupted. Instead of finding her books lined up on bookshelves, the books are stacked in random order and the ones with dust jackets are put back together the wrong way, the jackets are on upside-down.

The most bazaar thing that happens occurs when she is in her office. She thinks she hears someone hiding behind the curtain. She can tell by the way the curtain is moving that something is there, something that shouldn’t be there. She hears breathing or some other noise. On top of that, the something has one of her books. She creeps over, wooden ruler in hand and smacks at the book, it goes flying but she isn’t done. She rips the curtain back only to find nothing. Only the window is ajar and a breeze is coming through.

While she’s at the window she sees a car and thinks that the person that has messed up her order is waiting in the car. She runs out to investigate only to find the car empty. She turns back to her house and realizes that she left the door open. She does another check of the premises and is finally satisfied that no one is in the house. She finally drifts off to sleep only to be awoken by a book smashing into her face. As she wakes, she sees no one, but hears a car speeding off. She goes to the window and watches the car drive off. Because of the scare, she is now fully awake. She decides it’s time to move forward and clean out her ex’s mess.

So, now that you’re more or less up to speed let’s look at how this relates to Freud. One of the points Freud highlights in his essay is coincidences and repetitions. The reason coincidences and repeated values can be considered uncanny is the frequency in which these coincidences or repetitions occur. In short, there’s something off about repetition. For example, if you go into a store and happen to see someone in the same aisle, you’d think nothing of it, even if they were an unsavory character. But if you saw that same person in every other aisle and they always seemed to be the same distance from you, you’d feel a little worried, perhaps thinking you were being stalked.

I think that this particular point is highlighted wonderfully in this story. Priest uses the repetition of the misplaced books to bring about a feeling of unease. Someone had to place the books that way, otherwise Melvina wouldn’t be scared. I can relate to her, I am someone that likes my books in order and I have occasionally found my hardbacks with the dust jacket on upside-down. This is strange when I find this because I am the only one who reads my hardbacks, but if I found every single hardbound book with a messed up dust jacket, I’d be a little freaked out. Priest uses this freaky feeling to put the reader on edge. He ramps up the tension by slowing down the scenes and letting us peek, just a little, into Melvina’s thoughts. We get to see how this is affecting her.

Because of that off putting feeling, I think this story adequately demonstrates uncanny literature. I felt unease; I was on edge because there was too much repetition of the book order for it to be a coincidence or accident. I found myself feeling her fear and paranoia, hoping she’d remembered to lock the door and check the hall closet. The strange thing is that this fear came from something small, something we wouldn’t think of if we found it in our own house once, a misplaced book.

I really think this story teaches us that the Uncanny still exists. We don’t need some high tech robot like in “The Sandman” to bring us a state of fear. We don’t need some elaborate set up to frighten us; all we need is our imagination. Our minds can fill in the blanks. I do think that if someone with just a slight case of the crazies were to read Freud’s essay, they might be able to conjure some scheme to scare whomever they pleased.

A couple elements of the uncanny, the double, and unreality being confused with reality, come into play after he leaves the bar and arrives in his room for the evening. Edwin discovers, in a rather discomforting scene in the bathroom, that every action creating a sound he makes is mimicked by someone or something on the other side of the wall in the next room. Even the words he speaks are replayed back. As it continues, he becomes increasingly unnerved.

Edwin cannot believe that this is anything but the neighboring guests tormenting him, even after he is informed the room is unoccupied and a search of room by hotel staff reveals that no on is or has been in there. He begins to talk to the wall but instead of being mimicked, similar sounding phrases are returned but with words slightly different, accusing him of loathing his ill wife and wishing her to die. Even when he desperately tries to turn off the voice in the next room by not speaking, it continues with accusations he eventually tries to deny. He finally can’t take it any more and admits out loud to secretly wishing and praying for her death, “but only for her sake”.

I felt the unease of the uncanny on a couple of levels. Before we find out that the room is unoccupied, I wondered who whoever it was in the next room was able to copy his sounds and movements – could the room be bugged or fitted with a camera? This certainly was too practical. More fitting was the idea that he was mixing reality with imagination due to paranoia resulting from his loneliness, jealousy and inability to be accepted by the revelers of the conference. Even though he was the one being tormented, he now was also “the center of attention”.

However, once it is disclosed that the room is empty, and that the voice does not mimic but accuse, the unease of the double enters the picture. It was his conscience picking at his guilt of desiring to seek a carnal fantasy, just after the death of his wife whom he secretly wanted to be free of. We are also left with another possibility: was it his deceased wife haunting him? The voices presented are always muffled, in several cases he can’t determine the gender. I thought it interesting that in the first instance of a dream utterance, he heard the voice say “Livadeth” instead of Elizabeth, i.e., live-a-death.

On last aspect of the uncanny in the story is the hotel itself. While being familiar and perhaps once comfortable to Edwin, it became stark, cold and uninviting (unfamiliar) during this stay without his wife.

It is this initial feeling of the dolls being alive that Byatt uses to create an uncanny feeling in her story. Freud speaks of the use of dolls or automatons as “recollections” of childhood, and that “the idea of a ‘living doll’ excites no fear at all; the child had no fear of its doll coming to life it may even have desired it” (386). And Fliss, who’s only friends are the dolls she lives with, is a prime example of this behavior. She does not fear the ‘aliveness’ of her dolls. Fliss is, in fact, rather doll-like herself. She lives in solitude with these dolls; her only contact is with the children she teaches and her co-workers. She does take in boarders, which is how she meets Carole Coley, a woman who seduces her. Once Carole comes into the story another of Freud’s inferences of the uncanny is introduced, that of the “eyes.” Byatt stresses the strangeness of Carole’s eyes, “large and round, dark and gleaming like black treacle” (109). Even Carole’s dog Cross-Patch is named for the “eye-patch in black on a white face” (109). It isn’t until Cross-Patch destroys the baby doll Polly that the doll’s eyes take effect in the story. Polly is an “alive doll” and the dog completely destroys her. The destruction of Polly’s eyes is described in great detail: “The rattling noise was Polly’s eyes, which had been shaken free of their weighted mechanism, and were rolling round inside her bisque skull. Where they had been were black holes. She had a rather severe little face, like some real babies. Eyeless it was ghastly” (113).

Later in the story after Carole’s betrayal of the love that Fliss has for her, the first love she has ever felt towards anyone, Fliss calls on the ‘spirit’ of the doll for vengeance. This is a bit of irony in the story when Fliss initially asked the doll to bring Carole back to her, when Carole says she needs to go away for awhile and takes Polly with her, “Before she left, in secret, Fliss kissed Polly and told her ‘Come back. Bring her back’,” and later she curses Carole by saying, “Polly…Get her. Get her”(119).

Byatt updated the Freudian uncanny in this story by making it about two women, one who has never loved, but wants to, and one who is a manipulator and deceiver. She uses popular television shows, such as “Antiques Roadshow” and uses independent women with careers as main characters. Byatt uses Fliss’s innocence to capture the horror and dread of the final act of the story. Fliss, in her childlike love for her dolls, recaptures her childhood by believing that the dolls have life in them. Only a childlike imagination can justify belief that certain dolls have life while others do not.

I believe this story definitely succeeds as a work of uncanny literature. It is the dread that Byatt evokes in the innocent belief that Fliss has of some of the dolls being alive:
“She knew, but never said that some of them were alive in some way…” (108)
“You could even distinguish, tow with identical heads under different wigs and bonnets, of whom one might be alive…and one inert” (108-109)
“This doll was called Priddy, and was not, as far as Fliss knew, alive. She also borrowed the rigid Sarah Jane, who certainly was alive.” (111)
“Polly was Polly again, only fresher and smarter. She rolled her eyes at them again…” (115)
“The dolls made an inaudible rustling, like distant birds settling.” (121)
I found the use of the word “inaudible” interesting. Byatt again stresses an uncanny feeling by using Fliss’s ability to hear an inaudible rustling sound which the dolls have made in acquiescence to the knowledge of Carole’s misfortune.

In today’s culture we like to say that we have seen it all and not much is as horrifying as it used to be, but I disagree. Yes, we probably have seen and read it all in one form or another, but we keep going back for more. This is why I disagree and why I think this story works as uncanny literature. Some may find this story does not create dread or terror for them, but there are others who may read this story and find it unnerving. These are the people who will wake up one night and pull the covers a little tighter around themselves, because they know they heard something moving in the dark. These are the ones who are going to go room to room and make sure their children’s dolls are where they are supposed to be. The uncanny in our culture has not changed as much as we think it has, our fears and dreads are still there when the darkness comes.