The metaphor of the Uncanny as a psychic and literary experience

Abstract

The discussion below proposes a study of the space shared by the disciplines of literature and psychoanalysis via a dialogue between definitive cultural texts, and through examination of their transforming influence. At the centre of the discussion is Freud's 1919 essay, The Uncanny, which serves as the source of inspiration for a metaphorical reading and experiential collaboration. Understanding Freud's unique linguistic phrasings as metaphorical expression facilitates its use in shaping both a concrete and a symbolic world of content that impacts creative meaning of a revealing and enabling nature. This essay examines metaphor's modes of interpretive operation through a reading of the texts of the poet Yona Wallach (1944–1985), recognized for her profound awareness of language and its power and for her meta-poetic preoccupation with speech and language. The unique aesthetic object selected for discussion here is an example of the movement that occurs during the reading process, and the creative potential of interaction between texts which are the subject of interpretation and which, at the same time, participate in the interpretive process and influence it.

Keywords:

• Freud
• metaphor
• oxymoron
• psychoanalysis
• The Uncanny
• and Yona Wallach

Notes

1. Aspects of my earlier article (LevAri, 2011) are relevant here regarding interdisciplinary study. The article addresses the encounter between the texts of Freud and Bialik. An initial and intuitive clue to the study of literary texts via Freud's linguistic conception, discussed in the present article, can also be found in my article about Orit Gross's book, Sand Floor (2012), HaKibbutz HaMeuchad (Hebrew). And, see LevAri (2012) (Hebrew).

2. According to Bruner, the narrative is a mental model or a basic metaphor that constitutes a universal template for understanding the human psyche. Our life stories are not a natural reconstruction of some objective item of data, but an active reconstruction based on memory and on an interpretive component. The narrative metaphor domesticates the unexpected and enables acceptance of the strange or its comprehension, even if only partially. See Bruner (2002, 17, 34, 89–93) and Bruner (1991).

3. An expansive discussion of the process of choosing a metaphor and how it is used to understand texts and relations is included in my previous article that addresses Bion's metaphors, Attacks on Linking. See also LevAri (2013). Another inspiration for metaphorical reading is found in Amir's book (2013), Language Chasm, particularly in the chapter on interpretation and commentary. For more on metaphorical thinking, metaphor's definitions and understanding it as having a revealing and enabling nature, see Doron and Yaffe (2007).

4. For a comprehensive bibliography concerning the uncanny, see Royle (2003, pp. 329–333).

5. Ernst Jentsch's text, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” published in 1906, is appended to the uncanny translation (in Hebrew), and E.T.A. Hoffmann's (1776–1882) story, “The Sandman” is included. This is due to its centrality to Freud's text, which relies on that of Jentsch as the scientific source and he uses Hoffmann's story as an example of the “uncanny” principle. It should be noted that the limited space of this article and its focus do not permit a systematic and exhaustive discussion of Freud's text.

6. See Kristeva (2009, 196):

The disturbing foreignness Nathaniel experiences (in Hoffmann's story, “The Sand Man”) when confronted with the character of the father and its substitutes, and when confronted with allusions to eyes, relates to the castration anxiety the boy experienced, anxiety etched into his unconscious, repressed, and reappears under conditions of falling in love.

It is possible that Freud himself, through the text, illustrates the work of the unconscious, in that he represses realistic material that is difficult for him and chooses to address the aesthetic and literary. We can see the ironic paradox of the text, how Freud evades discussion of the linguistic concept's biographical, historic and concrete contexts. In this text, specifically, which revolves around the motif of vision and eyes, Freud carries on blindly in light of the difficult and uncanny European reality. Without seeming to notice, he has difficulty assimilating these events and under the guise of aesthetic concern, he turns from the real present of the beginning of the century to imaginary and literary times.

7. Doron and Yaffe (2007) make distinctions between private metaphors laden with meaning related to the feelings of man, to shared metaphors that carry universal significance. In a space rich with metaphor-creating transferences, they see a bridge between the past and the future, between the private and the universal, between the conscious and the unconscious, and between objects and their relations. In this context, see also Azikri (2004), who brings to his discussion on metaphor and its contexts, the applications from the distinctions made by Langer, Ricoeur, Bruner, Johnson and Lakoff, Spence, White, and others.

8. See Shen (2005) on the poetic oxymoron, and see Renan (1976) on possibilities of feeling.

9. On a linguistic and philosophical view of the language of poetry and the limits of meaning, see Sovran's (2005) article, especially her reference to Yona Wallach, pp. 90–93. The points raised and the problems that arose in the context of her poetics were intended to highlight and demonstrate the difficulties of deciphering and the necessity of a metaphorical reading.

10. See Benari (2005) for a description of understanding metaphorical reading that makes use of personal creativity by different processes of emanation through a reciprocal process between the reader and the text. He also expands on the theory of fusion, which describes mapping characteristics and textual elements from the source that serve as the source for these characteristics to the target area which is the semantic area in which the broad poetic context is discussed.

11. A critical comprehensive review of the research on the work of Yona Wallach and the directions of thought held by the critique can be found in the first chapter of Lidovsky's book (2003). In the psychoanalytic context, she relates to Lacan, to the name of the father and the symbolic order that will be discussed here; see esp. pp. 44–45, 65, 127, 144. In addition, she stresses the views of Jung, see esp pp. 84, 90–92, 126. In this context, see also the third chapter of Raz Barkin's book (2011) that details important emphases for diverse methods of interpreting her poetry. Distinct from the classical interpretive methods mentioned in the critique, Raz Barkin highlights the poetic motif of discomfort and finds Lacan's concepts suitable to addressing the incomprehensible dimension of her poems.

12. Rattok (1997) attests to Wallach's special music characterized as many heartbeats in one body. Many poems have the personal body belonging to the “I” as it splits into many and to images that are almost reflections. Splitting of one's body and its awareness empowers it and expands its limits (Rattok, 1997, 78), but does not facilitate its association with the “home”. With Jung as inspiration, Lidovsky (2003) expands on the topic of personas which are behavior patterns the person adopts, those masks that conceal the depths of the soul and lead to relinquishing the authentic self. These masks shape the individual with opposing templates (Lidovsky, 2003, 190–191) that also illustrate the oxymoron impression of the uncanny.

13. Lidovsky (2003) examines Wallach's poetry using many methods including the mystical, the Jungian, and the post-structuralist and within that, the “I's” disorientation in the concrete space which, as argued here, is one of the signs of the uncanny. Wallach herself relates to the idea that a person's life is not limited to the known, the seen, the rational or the realistic (Lidovsky, 2003, p. 206).

14. The third chapter of Raz Barkin's book (2011) examines a selected corpus of Wallach's and Avidan's poems using Lacan's interpretation technique and its central concepts. She argues that Lacan's psychoanalysis enables observation of the incomprehensible dimension in their poetry, in a way that differs from traditional psychoanalysis that wishes to provide the text with meaning and comprehension.

15. On reciprocal relationships between the text and the reader that grow out of emotional thirst and textual dedication, see Schoenberger (2000), “Devotion, thirst, rhythm and harmony in poetry and the therapeutic encounter,” Conversations, 15 (1), 58–64 (Hebrew).

16. The metaphorical reading's direction of observation is not intended to identify images and metaphors scattered among Wallach's poems and to clarify their meaning. The metaphorical uniqueness is pronounced from her very first book volume of poems Devarim (1966), in the way she forms strange situational stories and fully illustrates them as metaphorical alternatives. In these images in her poems, broad semantic fields possessing metaphorical attributes are created, and they become crystallized, I believe, in metaphorical areas of activity.

17. In this context, see Raz Barkin (2011, 144).

18. An example of this can be found in the image of God in the poem “Never Will I Hear the Sweet Voice of God”, and see Shira (1976, 133). The intimate space of the home can be a metaphorical illustration for the uncanny repressed in memory and echoes the opportunity that is no longer available for resurrecting it from the dead which can only be done by a revived remembering of it. Another image could be the Sand Man in Hoffmann's story, who appears as an image and an actual figure.

19. See the poem, “Sebastian”, in Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach, 1997, translated by Linda Zisquit, Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale on Hudson, New York, p. 31.

20. On “Absalom” as a confessional poem, see Lidovsky (2003). For another view of the poem, see Lachman (1994) who emphasizes Wallach's dialogue with the other within her, or the spiritual-erotic encounter with the other which she externalizes as a part of her body. The mystery of the huge distance between the “I” and the object of its love is revealed in the three questions upon which the appeal to him is structured: “With what, about what, to where?” The poet strives to convey precise feeling, but without noticing, or perhaps, of necessity, she phrases it using questions, and we are thus left with a sense of confusion. See, Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach, 1997, translated by Linda Zisquit, Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale on Hudson, New York, p. 4.

21. See Efrati and Yisraeli (2007) for the foundation of Lacan's philosophy and psychoanalysis, and Lacan (1991) and Fink (1995).

Post-structuralist thinkers believed that external influences on the individual's consciousness are built into language and culture and therefore, a person is fated, in one way or another, to recycle ideas that have reached him from the mind of the “absolute other”. See Lidovsky (2003) on Derrida as well as on the ideas of Lacan in light of his “symbolic order”, meaning that we do not act directly in response to reality, but are driven and mediated by linguistic codes that interpret and organize reality for us, to an extent. In this context, see (Lidovsky, 2003, 127), Bannet (1989, 12–48).

22. On the “little other” as a projection of the “I” and at the same time, its reflection as an external image that consolidates the “I” with a sense of completeness and unity, see Raz Barkin (2011, 25–41).

On this topic, we can add that in every significant encounter with reference of artistic text, we experience basic tension between identification, imagination and assimilation and the recognition of otherness. It is an encounter with the otherness of fellow-man that is unknown to us, which is not under our control, an encounter with the “I—not I” that can upend and threaten, but can also enable new give and take with parts of the self that are cut off or denied. One of “the other's” facets is the cultural other, or the cultural unconscious, that is, the hidden and uninvited guest, active in the existential spaces of literature and psychology.

23. In this context, it should be added that the “other room” can also be viewed through psychoanalytic imagery that aims toward the regular and continuing place of the analytic encounter, a place where the “I” is maintained and created anew each time. This room leads to the sense that there is always something there that eludes definition; it creates a degree of defamiliarization and at the same time, feelings of deep familiarity, self and interpersonal knowledge. See Levi (2012), The Home and the Path, Resling, Tel Aviv (Hebrew), and especially his image of the pulsating room, 145–168.

24. On this topic, see Freud (2003). The inspiration for this topic derives from the image of the uncanny, as quoted by Ettinger (2011, 14). Although Ettinger does not write about Yona Wallach, she accompanies her article on the uncanny with excerpts from the poetry of Yona Wallach and Paul Celan and with her own drawings and artworks. Into this unusual combination, she incorporates psychoanalytic study of art and literature and shows how the Freudian fear of the uncanny awakens, first and foremost, on the aesthetic plain.

25. On the topic of representing the absent, see Raz Barkin (2011, 146), and Lachman (1994).