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Notes
Nicholas Royle Department of English University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QN UK E‐mail: [email protected]
The Interpretation of Dreams, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 4, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) 262.
Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) 48.
“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1978) 471.
For more on the notion of phantom text, permit me to refer to my book The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), esp. 277–88, and “This is Not a Book‐Review,” Angelaki 2.1 (1995), “Home and Family” special issue, ed. Sarah Wood 31–35.
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996) 64.
For a fuller discussion, see The Uncanny 307–28.
Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996) 181.
Ibid.
Especially with the appearance of the “new Penguin” Freud, under the general editorship of Adam Phillips, other forms of accommodation become available. In the present essay I shall occasionally have recourse to the new Penguin, in particular to The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, with an Introduction by Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 2003), but in the main rely on the “old Penguin” under the general editorship of James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin). “PFL,” followed by volume and page number, thus designates reference to this older edition. References to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho‐Analysis, 1953–73) will carry the abbreviation “SE.” References to Freud's essay “Das Unheimliche” (“The ‘Uncanny’”) are to the text given in PFL 14 (“Art and Literature”), trans. Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) 335–76, abbreviated “U” where appropriate. References to the German text of this Freud essay are taken from Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12 (London: Imago, 1947) 229–68.
In the manner of a rough guide, I would suggest the following list of hotels in the realm of The Interpretation of Dreams: 192, 294–97, 325–28, 392, 446–47, 526, 531.
This is an example of a dream about the structuring effects of the double meaning or encrypted “literal” sense of a word. Here it is the “superfluous” as “overflowing,” “flowing over.” Freud writes: “The dream referred to an excursion to the Hilmteich near Graz. The weather outside was fearful. There was a wretched hotel, water was dripping from the walls of the room, the bed‐clothes were damp … The meaning of the dream was ‘superfluous’” (531).
On the room as woman, cf. also Freud's remarks in the Introductory Lecture on “Symbolism in Dreams,” PFL 1: 189, 192, 197.
Perhaps the nearest Freud otherwise comes to providing personal testimony is in the succeeding paragraph when he remarks, now in the royal “we” form, on when “we begin to notice that everything which has a number – addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains – invariably has the same [number] … We do feel this to be uncanny” (U 360). Even this instance of a generalised “we,” it may be noted, is more or less explicitly a question of encountering a text, reading by numbers.
There is perhaps a cross‐reference to be made here to the analysis of the “Laughing with the hotel ‘boots’” or “Riding on a horse (Boil)” dream mentioned earlier. While he does not apparently attend to any thought of the hotel itself, Freud stresses that there are “sexual dream‐thoughts” connecting the dream to Italy: in particular he remarks on the identification between going to Italy (“gen Italien [to Italy]” and genitalia (“Genitalien [genitals]” (PFL 4: 328).
See, inter alia, Robert Young, “Psychoanalytic Criticism: Has it Got Beyond a Joke?,” Paragraph 4 (1984): 96; Jane Marie Todd, “The Veiled Woman in Freud's Das Unheimliche,” Signs 2.3 (1986): 526; and Robin Lydenberg, “Freud's Uncanny Narratives,” PMLA 112 (1997): 1075–77.
At the back of the new Penguin, instead of an index we are presented with ten blank pages – calling to mind the little notepads one sometimes finds, generally unused, in hotel rooms.
Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (London: Chatto, 1918). Further page references will be to this edition and incorporated in the main body of the text, with the accompanying abbreviation “TA” where appropriate.
Letter to Binswanger, 16 December 1912, cited by Max Schur in “Fainting Spells and Their Meaning” in his Freud: Living and Dying (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho‐Analysis, 1972) 271–72.
Freud alludes to Twain again with the phrase “greatly exaggerated,” in a letter to Ferenczi, 30 December 1912: “I hope the news about your recovery will not turn out to be ‘greatly exaggerated’ this time.” See The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, vol. 1, 1908–14, eds. Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder and Patrizia Giampieri‐Deutsch, trans. Peter T. Hoffer (London: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1993) 457.
See SE 19: 273; 25: 248.
In a perhaps not entirely frivolous parallel here, we might recall Freud's “dream of the dumplings” or “Three Fates” dream (as Strachey's more dignified and classical translation has it), in The Interpretation of Dreams (PFL 4: 294–97; 820). The dream centres on an inn rather than a hotel, but the inn‐keeper is nevertheless a figure of such grandeur as would perhaps not be unbecoming for a hotel: “the hostess of the inn,” Freud tells us, in an intriguing prefiguration of “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913; PFL 14: 235–47), is one of the three Fates, “the mother who gives life” (PFL 4: 295).
See Freud's letter of 9 February 1898, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1985) 299. Ernest Jones erroneously dates Twain's reading as September 1898: see Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, vol. 1 (London: Hogarth, 1953) 362. Many years later Freud recalls his experience of attending this public reading, in Civilization and its Discontents (PFL 12: 318–19 n.).
For all the critical attention that has been given to Freud's reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann's “The Sand Man” in terms of the links made between blindness and the fear of castration, it is perhaps worth noting the less obvious but still persistent association – in Hoffmann's story and in Freud's summary of it – with the precipice, the perilous position and precipitous fall, in particular the experience of being on “the high tower of the town hall” which “throws its huge shadow” over the city marketplace and the final moment in which Nathaniel “flings himself over the parapet” (see U 350–51).
See (so as not to see) A Tramp Abroad 260. Get lost, dear reader.
Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche,” New Literary History 7 (1976): 545.
See Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work 1: 348.
Mark Twain, New York Journal 2 June 1897.
The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock 144.
The new Penguin notably drops the exaggeratory gesture of the scare quotes around the word “uncanny” in Strachey's version of the essay title (“The ‘Uncanny’”). As I have argued elsewhere (see The Uncanny 28, n. 20), it would be just as much the “the” that calls for double quotation marks.
For more on psychoanalysis and facetiousness, see “Explanations, Applications and Orientations,” Oxford Literary Review 23 (2001): 5–27.
“Humorous displacement” is Freud's term: see PFL 6: 298–301.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998) 167.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, compiled from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees and James Taylor, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966) 24–25.
“Fiction and its Phantoms” 542.