It Walks: The Ambulatory Uncanny

Abstract

Das Unheimliche-the uncanny-has been with us for some time. Freud's famous essay began to attract critical attention in the early seventies as psychoanalysis became important in literary studies. Samuel Weber's essay, Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment, first published in MLN in 1973 and reprinted in the expanded edition of The Legend ofFreud in 2000, is now a classic in the literature of the uncanny. Reading Freud's essay Das Unheimliche along with Hoffmann's Sandman and Villier de l'Isle-Adam's novel lEve future, Weber makes an important intervention in arguing against the many prior approaches to this topic which had tended to understand it solely as an emotive phenomenon identified with feelings of fear, anxiety, weirdness, etc. Such a position, he writes, misconstrues the peculiar structure of the uncanny, or more precisely, ignores the fact that the uncanny has a particular structure, which, however intimately bound up with subjective feelings-above all anxiety-is nonetheless determined by a series of 'objective' factors that in turn stand in a certain relation to literary discourse (208).1 He thus joins in the discussion that begins to understand Freud's text as itself a case of the uncanny,2 and indeed of the literary uncanny. Weber points to Freud's failure to define the uncanny in a final or complete way, suggesting that this is not an error on Freud's part, but rather tells us something about the uncanny itself. At the same time, Weber steers clear of defining the uncanny as an object. Rather, what characterizes the uncanny is precisely the impossibility of looking it straight in the eyes, as it were . . . peeling and paring