The Uncanny In Fiction

The uncanny “undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror ...” 

—Sigmund Freud

Have you ever had the feeling, upon waking, that your dream had followed you? Perhaps you woke, but a small panicked voice deep within you screamed you hadn’t, that it was still a dream, that ‘they’ were still out there, still coming to get you. That deep confused uneasiness, that sense of unreality, is one of the aspects of the uncanny; a feeling, a presentiment, that straddles the line between reality and unreality. [1]

In what follows I want to examine the various aspects of the uncanny as well as how the feeling might be elicited in readers.

The Uncanny: A Definition

Our word, “uncanny” comes from the German word, “unheimlich,” which means, more or less, “the opposite of what is familiar.” Or, rather, “a mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar that is experienced as being peculiar.” (The Uncanny, Wikipedia)

I prefer Sigmund Freud’s definition. In “The Uncanny” he wrote, “[...] the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” [2] To put it another way, it is the familiar which is, for whatever reason, kept out of sight. Hidden.

The Circumstances Of The Uncanny

Freud asks: Why is the uncanny frightening? Is it because it is the opposite of what is known and familiar? He didn’t think so and pointed out that just because something is new or unfamiliar does not automatically mean it is frightening. Something in addition to this is at play.

The Uncanny And The Familiar

The uncanny depends upon something, in Freud’s words, “strangely familiar,” something “which defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it.”

The Familiar Evil

Another way of looking at the uncanny, another aspect of the feeling, is of something that ought to have remained hidden and secret but has, for whatever reason, become visible.

In this sense, the uncanny is the familiar evil. Freud writes: “on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight.” It is that which “ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.” [1]

Tsvetan Todorov: The Circumstances of the Uncanny

Todorov writes,

“The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work--in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations....” [3]

Let’s go through these conditions.

1. “the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described.”

So ...

- The story world needs to be immersive.

- The story and story world must allow for two separate and opposite explanations, explanations which are equally plausible.

2. “this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work--in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character.”

- The story needs to be told from the perspective of one of the characters in the story. This would seem to indicate either a close third person or first person point of view.

- The viewpoint character must not know whether what they experience is a dream or reality, whether they are mad or sane. In general, they must not know whether their experiences have a natural, or supernatural, explanation.

3. “the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations....”

- I’m not one hundred percent sure what Todorov means here, but I think this is another reference to the fact that the reader must be led to suspend disbelief. The story itself must have a sense of reality, of consistency. It must have its own logic, even though that logic might be extremely strange and twisted.

⁃ When I read (3) I was reminded of the third movie in John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy, “In the Mouth of Madness.” In this movie, an homage to H.P. Lovecraft, humans are driven insane when they either finish reading a book called, you guessed it, “In the Mouth of Madness” or watch the movie of the same name. The idea is to convince the audience that by watching the movie or reading the book that they, too, will go insane. Through the use of a twisted kind of self-reference, the story reaches out to the reader and attempts to draw him or her into the horrific dreamworld of the story.

This isn’t a new idea, Robert W. Chambers employed it when he wrote, “The King in Yellow,” first published in 1895 (it can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg here). This book is a collection of short stories, many of which include mention of a book called “The King in Yellow.” Reading this book (the book within the book) was guaranteed to drive a person mad. Of course, the implication—the way the story reached out beyond itself and involved the reader—is that the reader, due to her having read the volume, will be condemned to madness just as the characters were.

Really, this is an amazing and special kind of story—one which warns the reader not to finish the story! 

Examples Of The Uncanny

Alive?

Doubt about whether a certain animate being is truly alive. (see: Uncanny Valley) Also, doubt about whether a certain inanimate being is truly not living.

Examples: Wax work figures, automatons, puppets, clowns.

The following passage has been often quoted in the literature. Freud writes:

“Jentsch says: ‘In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton; and to do it in such a way that his attention is not directly focused upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be urged to go into the matter and clear it up immediately, since that, as we have said, would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotional effect of the thing. [...]’”

Is this a dream? 

Doubt about whether one is dreaming or perhaps delirious, even insane, a doubt often brought on by a recurrence of “the same situations, things and events.”

Freud wrote:

“That factor which consists in a recurrence of the same situations, things and events, will perhaps not appeal to everyone as a source of uncanny feeling. From what I have observed, this phenomenon does undoubtedly [...] awaken an uncanny feeling, which recalls that sense of helplessness sometimes experienced in dreams. Once, as I was walking through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was strange to me, on a hot summer afternoon, I found myself in a quarter the character of which could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a while without being directed, I suddenly found myself  back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in the same place. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while before.” [2]

The double

Freud wrote:

“These themes are all concerned with the idea of a “double” in every shape and degree, with persons, therefore, who are to be considered identical by reason of looking alike; Hoffmann accentuates this relation by transferring mental processes from the one person to the other—what we should call telepathy—so that the one possesses knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other, identifies himself with another person, so that his self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own—in other words, by doubling, dividing and interchanging the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of similar situations, a same face, or character-trait, or twist of fortune, or a same crime, or even a same name recurring throughout several consecutive generations.” [2]

When I read this I thought of the book, The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin. Also the movie Pi, or The Number 23. 

Other instances of ‘the double’ are reflections in mirrors, shadows, guardian spirits and, arguably, the belief in the soul. [2]

That is a rather broad list, but it makes sense to me. Think of the many stories about staring into a mirror and repeating a name three times to summon an entity or of the myth that mirrors can be used as gateways. For example, Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”). 

Notes:

1. The Uncanny and the Fantastic.

2. “The Uncanny” by Sigmund Freud. 

3. Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975), via web page: The Uncanny and the Fantastic.

Terror vs Horror In Gothic Fiction

I’ve been reading and writing Gothic stories all my life, though I didn’t always know that’s what they were.

As a girl I tore through Mary Stewart’s Gothic Romances and most recently I’ve been ensnared by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s marvelous Pendergast series, an example of Southern Gothic.

I’m not going to lie, Gothic fiction is a big topic and perhaps I should start off with definitions and talk about how Gothic fiction differs from other sorts of fiction, and so on, but I’m not going to. Today I’m just going to dip my toe in the water and discuss what I think is an important and fruitful distinction in ANY kind of literature: terror vs horror.

Terror vs Horror: The Anticipated vs The Actual

In what follows I’m drawing from material I found on the university of Virginia’s servers. It came up in a Google search on “psychological overlay.” Here’s the link: Individual and Social Psychologies of the Gothic: Introduction.

Although terror and horror might appear superficially similar (terror is extreme fear and horror is defined as “an intense feeling of fear, shock or disgust”) one could argue—as Ann Radcliffe did in an 1826 essay—that ...

“[...] terror is characterized by ‘obscurity’ or indeterminacy in its treatment of potentially horrible events; it is this indeterminacy that leads the reader toward the sublime. Horror, in contrast, ‘nearly annihilates’ the reader's responsive capacity with its unambiguous displays of atrocity.” [1]

One gets the feeling Radcliffe would NOT have appreciated the 2004 movie Saw.

Echoing Radcliffe, Devendra Varma characterized the difference between “terror and horror as the difference between ‘awful apprehension and sickening realization,’ [...]”. Of terror she writes: “Sounds unexplained, sights indistinctly caught, dim shadows endowed with motion by the flicker of the firelight or the shimmer of the moonbeam invoke superstitious fear.” [2]

Horror, on the other hand, depends upon seeing the physical objects our fertile imaginations cast in a thousand shades of darkness. As Radcliffe put it, "the forms which float half-veiled in darkness afford a higher delight than the most distinct scenery the Sun can show." [3]

Summing up, Devendra P. Varma writes: 

“The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse. [...] Terror thus creates an intangible atmosphere of spiritual psychic dread, a certain superstitious shudder at the other world. Horror resorts to a cruder presentation of the macabre: by an exact portrayal of the physically horrible and revolting, against a far more terrible background of spiritual gloom and despair. Horror appeals to sheer dread and repulsion, by brooding upon the gloomy and the sinister, and lacerates the nerves by establishing actual cutaneous contact with the supernatural...” [2]

Another Perspective: Physical Ambiguity vs Moral And Psychological Ambiguity

While I’m personally convinced by the arguments put forward by Radcliffe and her modern ally, Varma, there is another way of looking at the distinction between the terrifying and the horrible. 

Robert Hume begins his critique by pointing out that Radcliffe’s technique, how she generates terror, is by using “dramatic suspension.” Which is another way of saying that Radcliffe “raises vague but unsettling possibilities and leaves them dangling for hundreds of pages.” (Where have I heard that technique used before? Lee Child.) Hume remarks that “Mrs. Radcliffe's easy manipulation of drawn-out suspense holds the reader's attention through long books with slight plots.” [4]

But, Hume says, terror isn’t the only game in town. Other writers hold the readers attention just as well and without aid of either suspense or dread, instead “they attack him frontally with events that shock or disturb him.” [4]

Rather than enumerating a labyrinth of possibilities that never materialize “they heap a succession of horrors upon the reader.” These sort of books gain much of their effect “from murder, torture, and rape.” [4]

Hume sums up his position: 

“The difference from terror-Gothic is considerable; Mrs. Radcliffe merely threatens these things, and Walpole uses violent death only at the beginning and end of his book. The reader is prepared for neither of these deaths, which serve only to catch the attention and to produce a climax, respectively.”

“[...] with the villain-heroes of horror-Gothic we enter the realm of the morally ambiguous. Ambrosio, Victor Frankenstein, and Melmoth are men of extraordinary capacity whom circumstance turns increasingly to evil purposes. They are not merely monsters [...]”

“To put the change from terror-Gothic to horror-Gothic in its simplest terms, the suspense of external circumstance is de- emphasized in favor of increasing psychological concern with moral ambiguity. The horror-Gothic writers [...] wrote for a reader who could say with Goethe that he had never heard of a crime which he could not imagine himself committing. The terror novel prepared the way for a fiction which though more overtly horrible is at the same time more serious and more profound.” [4]

The Appeal of Moral Ambiguity

Think of “The Silence of the Lambs,” either the book or the movie. That story was one in which the protagonist’s mentor, Hannibal Lecter (aka Hannibal the Cannibal) was a brutal serial killer. And, strangely, he was kinda, sorta, a good guy. Why? Because he helped stop another serial killer, Buffalo Bill, and because Hannibal only killed jerks. Buffalo Bill, on the other hand, killed without regard to the intrinsic characteristics of the victim; what they were like as people. Buffalo Bill’s victims were simply a means to an end. He was only interested in their exterior, their skin. 

For myself, one of the fascinating things about the universe Thomas Harris created was that he not only crafted a complex character like Hannibal Lecter but that he made me genuinely care about him, even root for him.

To Sum Up

Although a particular story could eschew horror and rely only upon suspense in order to create narrative drive, or vice versa, they (of course) work best together. That said, I thought it was interesting and possibly instructive to try an conceptually tease the two apart so as to meditate upon what is unique to each as well as how such feelings might be generated in readers.

That’s it for today! Thanks for reading.

Photo credit: Sketch by Edward Gorey.

Notes:

(All references are from “Terror and Horror.”)

1. Ann Radcliffe, "On the Supernatural in Poetry," The New Monthly Magazine (1826): 145-52.

2. Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966).

3. Ann Radcliffe, “The Mysteries of Udolpho.”

4. Robert Hume, "Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel," PMLA 84 (1969): pp. 282-290.

What Makes A Story Terrifying?

I love Halloween. Always have. Perhaps that’s why I love a good horror story.

The first horror story I heard was a spine-tingling tale of betrayal and dismemberment told around a dying fire. I remember it like it was yesterday. The flames flickered lazily over black husks of logs and faintly illuminated the shadowed faces of my nearest and dearest. But then as I looked at them something happened. In the space between two heartbeats they appeared transformed, hollow, their darker halves exposed.

Then someone laughed uneasily and the spell was broken. The monsters—or at least my recognition of them—melted away, sinking into my unconscious were it remains, the fuel of nightmares. 

Mm-wha-ha-ha. ;-)

What Makes A Scary Story A Horror Story?

What are the essential bits of a scary story, one that makes us imagine horrors under the bed so vividly we dare not dangle our toes over the edge?

I’ve accepted a challenge to write a scary story (ideally under 1,000 words, but in my case that’s SO not happening) and post it this Saturday as part of a special #SaturdayScenes challenge. 

I’ve thought of a story, but I wondered: is this story scary? Or, to put it another way, even though this story of mine has scary bits, is it really a horror story. So I took my question to Google and came up with an answer courtesy of Stephen King:

“The three types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there …” [1]

The Gross-Out, The Horror, The Terror

Although I’m sure it’s not as simple as this, let’s say that as long as a story has at least one of these three in it—the gross-out, the horror or the terror—that the story can, without undue fear of contradiction, be called a horror story.

Of course a horror story is, above all, a story and so (all things being equal, which they never are) should have a protagonist who wants something desperately. There should also be a force—a person or monster or supernatural entity—that opposes her achieving her goal. And there should be stakes. For more on this see:

- 17 Ways To Write A Terrifyingly Good Horror Story

- How To Write A Horror Story

- Writing Horror: What Makes A Story Scary?

- Eight Tips: How To Tell A Scary Story

What is horror? Terror? What gives rise to those emotions?

Let’s return to discussing the horror story. I’ve been reading Stephen King lately to pick up a few pointers, mostly his tome on terror: Danse Macabre. He writes:

“I believe that we are all ultimately alone and that any deep and lasting human contact is nothing more or less than a necessary illusion [...] the feelings which we think of as “positive” and “constructive” are a reaching-out, an effort to make contact and establish some sort of communication.”

“Horror, terror, fear, panic: these are the emotions which drive wedges between us, split us off from the crowd, and make us alone.”

“The melodies of the horror tale are simple and repetitive, and they are melodies of disestablishment and disintegration... but another paradox is that the ritual outletting of these emotions seems to bring things back to a more stable and constructive state again.”

“The closest I want to come to definition or rationalization is to suggest that the genre exists on three more or less separate levels, each one a little less fine than the one before it. The finest emotion is terror, that emotion which is called up in the tale of [...] “The Monkey’s Paw.” We actually see nothing outright nasty [...] there is the paw, which, dried and mummified, can surely be no worse than those plastic dogturds on sale at any novelty shop. It’s what the mind sees that makes these stories such quintessential tales of terror.”

Terror is psychological. Mental. I’m reminded of a piece of flash fiction posted over at Creepypasta (that site is NOT safe to browse at work). Here’s the story, entitled "Bad Dreams":

‘Daddy, I had a bad dream.’

You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness — it’s 3:23. ‘Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?’

‘No, Daddy.’

The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter’s pale form in the darkness of your room. ‘Why not, sweetie?’

‘Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy’s skin sat up.’

For a moment, you feel paralyzed; you can’t take your eyes off of your daughter. The covers behind you begin to shift. [2]

We don’t see anything horrific, there is no gore. The terror is that someone who we thought we knew well, someone who is intimately entwined with our life, isn’t who we thought they were. We have invited the dangerous outsider into our lives and now nothing is to stop them from doing their worst. 

Or, as in “The Monkey’s Paw,” the terror could be that someone we know and love has been, through no fault of their own, transformed into a dangerous outsider.

King concludes that, at its heart, terror is about “secrets best left untold and things best left unsaid.” And what does the writer of horror do? They “promise to tell us the secret.”

That’s it! I was going to say something about horror and ‘the gross out,’ but I think we’ve probably got a handle on both of those. Remember, good horror, like all good fiction, is about the truth inside the lie.

Notes:

1. This quotation is attributed to Stephen King and it does read like something he would write. The Writer’s Digest article (The Horror Genre) doesn’t attribute the quotation to a specific work, but elsewhere it is said to come from King’s book “Danse Macabre,” which I can believe. After all, that book is King’s take on Horror, what it is, what it means, and so on. BUT I’ve searched my digital copy of the book and haven’t found it. I thought perhaps the quotation came from an updated version of the book but this morning I read the new forward to the 2010 edition in it’s entirety (courtesy of Google Books since I don’t want to buy the newer version) and didn’t find the quotation. Perhaps I simply missed it, but I thought I would note this minor mystery. If anyone comes upon the quotation in King’s work, I would appreciate it if you would tell me where it’s found. Thanks!

2. Creepypasta, over at Aeon.com.

Photo credit: "Evil Min-ja" by JD Hancock under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.