Uncanny Narration in Moby-Dick

Abstract

THE word strange appears in nearly every chapter of MobyDick. Why? To what effects? Is repetition of strange itself strange? Three arguments developed from Freud's essay, Uncanny, will orient following discussion. (i) The structure of uncanny is structure of repression. Phenomenologically, uncanny is experienced as a certain frightful feeling: it belongs all that is terrible, Freud says, to all that arouses dread and . . . creeping horror.' This uncanny emotionality, however, functions within an economy of knowledge. On one hand, the 'uncanny' is that class of terrifying which leads back long known us, once very familiar but now forgotten. On other hand, everything is uncanny that ought have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes light.2 The uncanny signals a return of repressed. This is Freud's interest: not affective topography of uncanny but its signifying character, that was known and will be known again. (2) Freud identifies this something as the dread of and, in his analysis of Hoffman's Sand Man, locates it in child's castration complex. However, if one were understand cutting off of a part of body in castration as a particular instance of a larger category of severings, and if one were understand certain of infant's early experiences of separations from mother as experiences of being cut off, then one would be able conceptualize uncanny in preoedipal as well as oedipal terms.