The uncanny mask and the fiction writer

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the connection between the mask and fiction writing. Freud has theorised the identifications of writers and readers with the masks of literary personae, but my interest in this essay is with how the mask of a narrator or character can function uncannily to impede identification. I am also interested in research emerging from neuroscience, socobiology and robotics, the last of which has drawn attention to the ‘uncanny valley’, an affect generated by cybernetic beings that deny – by virtue of their mask-like faces – the neuronal mirror activity fundamental to human identity. Both Freudian and emerging scientific research provide the context for the question I ask here: how might we understand the affect generated by a fiction writer who uses the uncanny mask of a narrator or character to refuse opportunities for identification and to elicit, instead, an uncanny crisis in subjectivity within the reader? To answer this question, I employ a hybrid autoethnographic methodology that recognises the primacy of feeling when it comes to the experience of the uncanny and that acknowledges my own compromised position as a writer invested in such unfriendly or sadistic affects.

KEYWORDS:

• Fiction writing
• masks
• the uncanny
• neuroscience
• robotics
• autoethnography

Acknowledgements

This paper was first written for a keynote at the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. I would like to thank Professor Jennifer Rutherford and other members of the research centre for their generosity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I am referring here to Marieke Hardy, the artistic director of the 2018 Melbourne Writers’ Festival, who wanted to provide ‘a place where people can hug each other’ (Dore 2018).

2 To briefly engage with one of the key controversies in our present literary culture – cultural appropriation – a commitment to the truth, rather than institutional regulation, should be sufficient to discourage writers from pretending to imagine the lives of people unknown by them.

3 Mothers remain the primary caregivers of infants around the world. Fathers who are sensitive about the gendered noun might find it useful to view ‘mother’ as a synecdoche for caregiver in the way that ‘man’ has been historically employed as a synecdoche for the human.

4 What this means is that our ‘nature’ is not only intrinsically social but also ‘cultural’. As Susan Oyama argues – against Francis Crick’s ‘Central Dogma’ privileging genetic transmission – ‘there is no “biological” character that does not have a developmental history’ (2000, 95).

5 Keyser also explains, however, that as language develops ‘the motor system is not always necessary for recognizing what other people say’ because, through repetition, we also come to ‘rely on representation of the word in our auditory [or visual] memory’ (2011, 81). This process allows for greater abstraction.

6 The upper regions of the face and our eyebrows play a particularly important role in affective communication because our mouths are often busy undertaking speech.

7 Other scholars, such as Jon Sletvold (2017), have done so.

8 The renowned sociobiologist Edward O Wilson has called for ‘consilience’ – ‘the common goal of turning as much philosophy as possible into science’ (1999, 12) – and some researchers within the humanities are responding. The literary-studies scholar Brian Boyd, for example, has praised science’s ‘research program’ against cultural theory’s ‘bodies of doctrine’ (2009, 388). Of course, there is plenty of ‘doctrine’ in science, as evident precisely in the work of some of those humanities scholars who have embraced a scientific program, such as Jonathan Gottschall (2008), whose neo-Darwinian readings of classic texts provide little more than sorties in the culture wars.

9 Royle’s study of the uncanny – a key inspiration for this essay – also uses autoethnographic and experimental methodologies to explore his subject. For Royle, ‘it is impossible to think about the uncanny without this involving a sense of what is autobiographical, self-centred, based in one’s own experience. But it is also impossible to conceive of the uncanny without a sense of ghostliness, a sense of strangeness given to dissolving all assurances about the identity of a self’ (2003, 16).

10 As ‘The Seventh Voyage’ in Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries (1957) shows, the echo-chamber of our uncanny double lives can be the stuff of comedy as much as horror. The ‘comic’ potential of the uncanny is something Royle also notes (2003, 2).

 

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Takolander

Maria Takolander is a prize-winning fiction writer and the author of The Double (and Other Stories) (Text 2013). Her fourth book of poems, Trigger Warning, is in press with UQP. Maria is also a widely-published scholar, with numerous essays and book chapters focusing on magical realism and theories of creativity. She is the author of Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground (Peter Lang 2007) and co-editor of The Limits of Life Writing (Routledge 2019). She is an Associate Professor in Writing and Literature at Deakin University in Australia. Her website is mariatakolander.com.