Collins, Jo, and John Jervis, eds.: Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties.

Wilson, D. Harlan

Collins, Jo, and John Jervis, eds. Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 234 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0230517714. $75.00.

Contemporary theories of the uncanny can be traced back to Ernst Jentsch's "Uber die Psychologie des Unheimlichen" (1906), but they are more commonly associated with Sigmund Freud's legendary "Das Unheimliche" (1919), which extends and problematizes Jentsch's essay. Freud cites the essay as the only example in "medico-psychological literature" to address the uncanny (930). But he critiques Jentsch for "not get[ting] beyond this relation of the uncanny to the novel and unfamiliar" and develops a more intricate theory that considers the uncanny in light of its etymological and symbolic resonance (931). Much of Freud's oeuvre is better read as fiction than nonfiction, but "Das Unheimliche" has for the most part been taken seriously, despite how the essay's anomalous, meandering structure produces in readers the very subject matter it aspires to quantify. Since its publication, an abundance of writers (including theoretical bigwigs Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, Jacques Lacan, C. J. Jung, and Julia Kristeva, among others) have used "Das Unheimliche" as an interpretive mechanism or facilitator. Few book-length projects have used it, however, either as a means of addressing other topics or refining/redefining the uncanny itself. In Uncanny Modernity, editors John Jervis and Jo Collins aspire to expand uncanny studies and read beyond the parameters set by Freud, situating the uncanny within the rubric of modern experience. It is a significant contribution to multiple fields and discourses.

Uncanny Modernity features ten chapters written mainly by European scholars of cultural, literary, and film studies. The eleventh and final chapter is a 1995 translation of Jentsch's aforementioned essay. In Jervis and Collins's introduction, they begin with a broad definition of the uncanny as "an experience of disorientation, where the world in which we live suddenly seems strange, alienating or threatening" (1). Thereafter, they narrow and flesh out this definition while underscoring the text's focal media and primary sources of inquiry. This is their general argument: "Our study proposes to examine and interrogate the qualities that characterise uncanny experiences and the cultural contexts which permit ostensibly rational people to encounter such unnerving feelings, exploring how these experiences have been portrayed in literature and film, and how they can be theorised" and identified as "distinctively modem" (1). A preoccupation with modernity sets this project apart from its forerunners--not only do the authors look awry at the uncanny from unique perspectives, they examine its emergence and evolution within the mechanized framework of Western civilization. Most of the introduction discusses modernity vis-a-vis the uncanny, explaining how, for instance, the uncanny is a symptom of the anxiety produced by "a loss of continuity with the past and the natural environment" (4). Ultimately, Jervis and Collins want to use the uncanny as a tool to decipher some of "the uncertainties, tensions and obscurities of modernity itself" (5).

Most of the subsequent chapters in Uncanny Modernity cite Freud's "Das Unheimliche" within the first few paragraphs as a point of reference. This is somewhat tedious, albeit understandable and necessary in that the authors use some aspect of "Das Unheimliche" as a seed for their own ideas and commentary. For example, in chapter 2, "Night and the Uncanny," Elizabeth Bronfen notes how Freud "touch[es] upon gothic motives usually connected with the night" for her analysis, which centers on the nocturnal urban landscape and the role of the flaneur, "who penetrates into the night so as to resolve psychic issues that not only bother him during the day, but can also not be resolved there" (53). In chapter 4, "As It Happened ... Borderline, the Uncanny and the Cosmopolitan," James Donald invokes Freud as a kind of counterpoint. He argues that Freud's study of the uncanny is a "temporal dislocation--a recurrence from the past--that disrupts the spatial metaphor of the home," whereas Donald's essay foregrounds the spatial metaphor of "the borderline [that] has the air of a place where the uncanny belongs: an intermediate and uneasy zone between different states, a no-man's-land both politically and existentially" (91). Still another chapter, co-editor Collins's "'Neurotic Men' and a Spectral Woman: Freud, Jung and Sabina Spielrein," opens with a discussion about the etymological implications of the uncanny according to Freud, who was led "to consider how das Unheimliche (the unhomely) is inextricable from its antonym Heimlich (the homely)" (146). Collins uses the codedness of the term as a way to talk about Freud's biography; that is, she sees a similar code in "Das Unheimliche" engendered by the increasingly strained relationship between Freud and his underling/disciple Jung following the confession of an affair Jung had with his patient Sabina Spielrein. "[T]he constellation of concealed secrets, theories of the occult, and the disruptive potential of the libido surrounding the Freud/Jung/Spielrein triad reappears in figurative form in Freud's essay" (147).

As a textual-biographical analysis, Collins's chapter stands out from the others; rather than extrapolating ideas from "Das Unheimliche," she presents a new and compelling reading of Freud's essay. The first chapter, however, Jervis's "Uncanny Presences," is the most important piece in Uncanny Modernity. At forty pages, it is also the lengthiest, twice as long as any other chapter. Here Jervis elaborates on many of the themes broached in the introduction. Topics of note include metaphysics of presence, selfhood, the body, the home, modern experience and representation, production and reproduction, perception and cognition, and reality and the image, all of which he explores with respect to the uncanny via texts like Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" (1842), Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936) and E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann" (1816). In the end, Jervis makes a case for a Derridean hauntology of the uncanny distinguished by a chronic slippage of meaning. This slippage is facilitated by (and contingent upon) efforts towards meaning-making. "The uncanny shakes fundamental categories of knowledge and experience, while yet depending on them [...]. We cannot, therefore, 'locate' the uncanny; we cannot ask where it 'belongs.' [As Nicholas Royle says in The Uncanny]: 'If it belongs, it is no longer a question of the uncanny'" (11). Jervis's chapter culminates in a theory of figuration that rethinks the nature of the enlightenment and modernity. The scope of his chapter is wide, thorough, and theoretically dynamic; to varying degrees, all subsequent chapters inform or are informed by Jervis's ideas.

Other authors in this collection (re)read the uncanny by way of diverse topics, including ghosts, trauma, gnosis, quantum theory, surrealism, and terrorism. There is a diversity of studied texts, too, ranging from the films Cat People (1982), Borderline (1930), and The Others (2001) to the works of Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, and H. D. All this is reinforced with theoretical grout (e.g., Benjamin, Balzac, Marx, Derrida, Nietzsche, Baudrillard). Among the most important topics are ghosts, with two chapters devoted to them: Scott Brewster's "Access Denied: Memory and Resistance in the Contemporary Ghost Film" and Julian Wolfrey's "The Urban Uncanny: The City, the Subject, and Ghostly Modernity." This is understandable enough if we consider that the act of haunting, whatever form it takes, is always uncanny, and it is a ghost's business to haunt. At the same time, a ghost is not necessary for the act of haunting to occur, as Jervis explains: "The uncanny is the zone of intersection between the known and the felt, and the familiar and the strange--the place of 'haunting,' whether or not a ghost is involved" (44). Nonetheless, given that "haunting indicates the potential manifestation of figure in more determinate form," Jervis suggests that "[t]he ghost is a most appropriate figure, the most appropriate figure perhaps, for figure itself" (44). The notion of figuration lies at the center not only of Jervis's thought but of Uncanny Modernity as a whole. The uncanny gestures towards a figural form that cannot be articulated or directly experienced, but it still exerts considerable power and has the capacity to produce trauma, and it does so within a variable historical and cultural matrix that hinges on the vagaries of perception and subjectivity. In simpler terms, how do we look over our shoulders and see the unseeable beast? The authors of Uncanny Modernity address this question in provocative and illuminating ways. The book is not written for a general audience, but it will prove invaluable to scholars and theoreticians of the uncanny.

A final note: given the indebtedness of this collection to Freud, one thing I found it lacking was a translation of "Das Unheimliche." As I mentioned earlier, there is a translation of Jentsch's formative essay at the end, and it seems that Uncanny Modernity could only benefit from the inclusion of Freud's piece so that readers can study the two side by side. This is a minor concern, however, as "Das Unheimliche" is widely available on- and offline, whereas "Uber die Psychologie des Unheimlichen" is less accessible.