The Uncanny Reader (2 page)

The story Freud chose as his focus is Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann's 1817 tale “The Sand-man,” which you will find at the beginning of this anthology. Every reader—Freud included—will be distressed by something slightly different in it. But perhaps its most universal feature is the childhood fear of the legendary figure gone real. The terrifying Sand-man is at first the boy's proudly imagined creation and, in that way, stands in for creativity itself. It's when the
real
Sand-man shows up—the advocate Coppelius, a friend of young Nathanael's father, with his creepy hair-bag and habit of touching the children's favorite foods with his hairy hands—that the real terror sets in. A terror entirely earthly and one that threatens to foul childhood's last pure sanctuary: the creative imagination itself, that place from which we learn to perceive the world.

*   *   *

E. T. A. Hoffmann and his contemporaries (among them Heinrich von Kleist, Jean Paul, and Ludwig Tieck) called their stories
Kunstmärchen—
art fairy tales—and revolutionized literary fiction by setting their tales in the market squares and coffeehouses, at the homely firesides and sleeping alcoves of their own towns and cities, and then, like crazed chemists, injecting a trace of the extraordinary into those known places, sending their heroes and the reading public on a journey into the unmapped terrains of our own minds. A new sort of fictional hero emerges: a flawed, rather sensitive figure—often an artist or student—a young idealist, a morose dreamer. The grown-up Nathanael, the student-poet at the heart of “The Sand-man,” cannot reconcile his inner vision with that of the world. His vulnerability—however foolishly he behaves—is heartbreaking and spookily contemporary.

It is that irreconcilable feeling, as it expresses itself from 1817 to the present, that binds these thirty-one stories together. As I followed the trail of authors chronologically from Hoffmann to the most recently born, I tried to honor the tradition of the
Kunstmärchen
and, whenever possible, listened for the expression of something from Freud's catalogue. As a result, most of the stories you'll find here take place in a recognizable world, in which something, or someone, begins to go unfamiliar. And because the German word
unheimlich
and the Scots word “uncanny” come from far away, I aimed for as international—and geographically diverse—an atmosphere as I could. So you will find here writers from Egypt, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Russia, Scotland, England, Sweden, the United States, Uruguay, and Zambia—although their birthplaces are not always the terrains they plumb in their stories, nor do they confine themselves to their own eras.

From E. T. A. Hoffmann we move on to Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and Guy de Maupassant, all of whom were in some way influenced by the writers of
Kunstmärchen
and all of whom have their own distinctive ways of showing us just how unknown we are to ourselves. The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's “Berenice” has, like Nathanael, a rising terror of his own slipping consciousness as he sits in his library, wondering how that “little box … of no remarkable character” made it to his lamp table. In “One of Twins,” Ambrose Bierce takes us to the night streets of San Francisco and into our fear of doppelgängers and their sinister acts. Acts that might—or might not—be attributed to us. Or are they ours? In Guy de Maupassant's “On the Water,” a local fisherman finds his beloved home river transformed overnight as he sits trapped in his boat, its anchor held fast by a mysterious weight from below.

And because I don't think of the uncanny as a literary genre so much as a genre buster, a kind of viral strain, I have included here a story of Anton Chekhov's with nothing remotely supernatural about it. The Russians—through early-twentieth-century critic Viktor Shklovsky—have a word for what Chekhov does in “Oysters”—
ostranenie,
“to make strange,” to defamiliarize. This aesthetic principle lies at the heart of this anthology: Every writer in this collection strips away the armor of familiar, overused language. They pass through walls; they silence the numbing din out there; they make us
see
and
hear
anew.

As we make our way across the border of the twentieth century, the uncanny burrows deeper into that sacred institution called home. Edith Wharton traces the fragile path of a new marriage haunted by an old one, just as the new century roars in with its telephones and motorcars, its “devouring blaze of lights.” The perfect marriage and the perfect house go suspect in Marjorie Bowen's “Decay.” H. P. Lovecraft leads us into a warren of old Paris and up under the eaves of an ancient apartment house; only then can an impossible music begin to haunt the listener. Our megalomania and our dreams of safe escape play themselves out on increasingly dream-like stages: in the Schulzian universe a father is slowly turning the family home into an aviary, while Kafka tugs us, along with his adolescent hero, ever deeper into “the uncertain hold of a ship moored to the coast of an unknown continent.”

*   *   *

It's been said that what is frightening to one generation will not be to the next. Virginia Woolf put it thus in her essay “The Supernatural in Fiction.” “If you wish to guess what our ancestors felt when they read
The Mystery of Udolpho,
you cannot do better than read
The Turn of the Screw
.” So it's no wonder that the nearer we get to our own age, the more the shapes and shadows of uncanniness reflect our contemporary fears. It gets harder to locate the source of the disturbance. Who is our “Sand-man”? and where is he hiding? For like Nathanael, we still feel watched by a force much larger than ourselves and we still ask, Did I have something to do with its dark making? That feeling—of being watched, listened in on, followed all the way home—is timelessly rendered in Shirley Jackson's “Paranoia,” while Joan Aiken's “The Helper” takes us into the haunted space of a grief shadowed by an unshakable sense of deliberate menace. Our bodies go uncanny to us as we discover, with Felisberto Hernández's lonely young theater usher, a disturbing physical power over which we have no control. Robert Aickman's northern train station—a place we hope will provide a moment's rest and haven from the chaos without—is only waiting until the deep solitude of a winter's night, and a solitary, undefended guest, to bring a warm hearth glow and a forgotten horror back to life.

*   *   *

By Virginia Woolf's time we were no longer afraid of “ruins, or moonlight, or ghosts,” and her question “But what is it we are afraid of?” is one that shifts with every hour in the twenty-first century. Let's just say that the uncanny-in-literature has the power to reflect—and allow us to reflect on—our increasingly unstable sense of home. How do we cope with the contradiction of technologies designed to improve our communications, but which seem to isolate and alienate us further, technologies that proliferate beyond our control? Are we fracking ourselves to pieces, turning our planet
unheimlich
?

The late-twentieth-century stories included here speak to our new anxieties in a variety of forms and in a variety of voices. Dwelling places continue to seduce us with their promises of safety, then begin to show how fragile they are, how haunted by the histories repressed by their inhabitants—by us, with our unrelenting drive to contain, improve, and control. The foundations of apartment buildings whisper of state-sanctioned horrors more vast and more thoroughly concealed than those beneath Aickman's waiting room, and we must strain all the harder to catch the past trapped in the groomed and genteel borderlands between twin suburban mansions. And strain we do: we listen to our town's phantoms until they are more alive than we are. Grief and loss send us back to old childhood places—to islands and underwater caves and the edges of legendary mountains—but what we find there speaks more to the present and the future than the past. And sometimes, the terrain in which we grope and search to find ourselves is a place purely of the mind: no less real—and no less labyrinthine—than the passages of a ship's hold or the lost streets of Paris.

Train compartments reveal us to ourselves, as do streets slated for demolition. The uncanny takes us into the tightest of spots, both metaphorically and physically; thus you may find yourself negotiating the terrifying darkness of a death camp chimney. Travel to postcolonial Zambia, where a child witnesses the ghostliness of race and class in her own family.

And if earthly places go unfamiliar here, so do voices. Think of “The Sand-man” as a Pandora's box of voices, out from which has emerged a mad host of urgent storytellers, from the voice of a whole town gradually revealing its secret self to a handful of desperate letter writers, one of whom is a little marionette. Obsessed narrators abound: Some confess; some bear witness. Some are secret puppeteers themselves, concealing their subversive intent in playful satire, in acts of ventriloquism, and by hiding inside the very language of institutions.

We go uncanny to each other, breathtakingly so, in adolescence and adulthood; public spaces go unnervingly intimate, and our bodies cry out when they should have remained silent. Keep a wary eye on fathers—and the friends of fathers. Beware the aged advocate, the optician with too many coat pockets. Beware uncommonly beautiful women who seem eager to know you; beware their daughters. The odd policeman, the stranger who looks oddly familiar. The spectacular antique automaton placed just so on a couch. Beware the carrot shaped like a hand; beware the stone rabbits by the front door. Worry about the mysterious self-destructive behavior of tigers in the forest. Come home again and ask yourself, Am I trying too hard to create a perfect body, a perfect home? A perfect world?

We turn to stories to slow ourselves down, to experience the thrill and dislocation of our world transformed. To experience, if only for an instant, what Bruno Schulz meant when he described his work as an expression of rebellion “against the kingdom of the quotidian, that fixing and delimiting of all possibilities, the guarantee of secure borders.”

Therefore, dear reader, get out your flashlight and read in the dark. Read and, for a little time, let those borders dissolve.

 

 

THE SAND-MAN

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann

Translated by J. T. Bealby

NATHANAEL TO LOTHAIR

I know you are all very uneasy because I have not written for such a long, long time. Mother, to be sure, is angry, and Clara, I dare say, believes I am living here in riot and revelry, and quite forgetting my sweet angel, whose image is so deeply engraved upon my heart and mind. But that is not so; daily and hourly do I think of you all, and my lovely Clara's form comes to gladden me in my dreams, and smiles upon me with her bright eyes, as graciously as she used to do in the days when I went in and out amongst you. Oh! How could I write to you in the distracted state of mind in which I have been, and which, until now, has quite bewildered me! A terrible thing has happened to me. Dark forebodings of some awful fate threatening me are spreading themselves out over my head like black clouds, impenetrable to every friendly ray of sunlight. I must now tell you what has taken place; I must, that I see well enough, but only to think upon it makes the wild laughter burst from my lips. Oh! My dear, dear Lothair, what shall I say to make you feel, if only in an inadequate way, that that which happened to me a few days ago could thus really exercise such a hostile and disturbing influence upon my life? Oh that you were here to see for yourself! But now you will, I suppose, take me for a superstitious ghost-seer. In a word, the terrible thing which I have experienced, the fatal effect of which I in vain exert every effort to shake off, is simply that some days ago, namely, on the 30
th
October, at twelve o'clock at noon, a dealer in weather-glasses came into my room and wanted to sell me one of his wares. I bought nothing, and threatened to kick him downstairs, whereupon he went away of his own accord.

You will conclude that it can only be very peculiar relations—relations intimately intertwined with my life—that can give significance to this event, and that it must be the person of this unfortunate hawker which has had such a very inimical effect upon me. And so it really is. I will summon up all my faculties in order to narrate to you calmly and patiently as much of the early days of my youth as will suffice to put matters before you in such a way that your keen sharp intellect may grasp everything clearly and distinctly, in bright and living pictures. Just as I am beginning, I hear you laugh and Clara say, “What's all this childish nonsense about!” Well, laugh at me, laugh heartily at me, pray do. But, good God! My hair is standing on end, and I seem to be entreating you to laugh at me in the same sort of frantic despair in which Franz Moor entreated Daniel to laugh him to scorn. But to my story.

Except at dinner we,
i.e
., I and my brothers and sisters, saw but little of our father all day long. His business no doubt took up most of his time. After our evening meal, which, in accordance with an old custom, was served at seven o'clock, we all went, mother with us, into father's room, and took our places around a round table. My father smoked his pipe, drinking a large glass of beer to it. Often he told us many wonderful stories, and got so excited over them that his pipe always went out; I used then to light it for him with a spill, and this formed my chief amusement. Often, again, he would give us picture-books to look at, whilst he sat silent and motionless in his easy-chair, puffing out such dense clouds of smoke that we were all as it were enveloped in mist. On such evenings mother was very sad; and directly it struck nine she said, “Come, children! Off to bed! Come! The ‘Sand-man' is come I see.” And I always did seem to hear something trampling upstairs with slow heavy steps; that must be the Sand-man. Once in particular I was very much frightened at this dull trampling and knocking; as mother was leading us out of the room I asked her, “O mamma! But who is this nasty Sand-man who always sends us away from papa? What does he look like?” “There is no Sand-man, my dear child,” mother answered; “when I say the Sand-man is come, I only mean that you are sleepy and can't keep your eyes open, as if somebody had put sand in them.” This answer of mother's did not satisfy me; nay, in my childish mind the thought clearly unfolded itself that mother denied there was a Sand-man only to prevent us being afraid,—why, I always heard him come upstairs. Full of curiosity to learn something more about this Sand-man and what he had to do with us children, I at length asked the old woman who acted as my youngest sister's attendant what sort of a man he was—the Sand-man? “Why, 'thanael, darling, don't you know?” she replied. “Oh! He's a wicked man, who comes to little children when they won't go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody; and he puts them into a bag and takes them to the half-moon as food for his little ones; and they sit there in the nest and have hooked beaks like owls, and they pick naughty little boys' and girls' eyes out with them.” After this I formed in my own mind a horrible picture of the cruel Sand-man. When anything came blundering upstairs at night I trembled with fear and dismay; and all that my mother could get out of me were the stammered words “The Sand-man! the Sand-man!” whilst the tears coursed down my cheeks. Then I ran into my bedroom, and the whole night through tormented myself with the terrible apparition of the Sand-man. I was quite old enough to perceive that the old woman's tale about the Sand-man and his little ones' nest in the half-moon couldn't be altogether true; nevertheless the Sand-man continued to be for me a fearful incubus, and I was always seized with terror—my blood always ran cold, not only when I heard anybody come up the stairs, but when I heard anybody noisily open my father's room door and go in. Often he stayed away for a long season altogether; then he would come several times in close succession.