R. L. Stevenson's Sense of the Uncanny: "The Face in the Cheval-Glass"

R. L. Stevenson's Sense of the Uncanny: "The Face in the Cheval-Glass" Shafquat Towheed Corpus Christi College, Cambridge IN HIS FAMOUS essay on the uncanny, "Das Unheimliche" (1919), Sigmund Freud resorted, rather unsurprisingly, to self-analysis in order to explain the importance of repetition in feelings of the uncanny : As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could no longer remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another détour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery.1 Freud's reminiscence of a rather Prufrockian adventure in a red-light district is, for him, the perfect example of the transformation of an unexceptional event into a memorably uncanny one through its repetition. On first arriving in the "narrow street" full of "painted women," he recognises the quarter for what it is, a red-light district. Returning to the same street, he re-cognises it, for want of a better word, an event that serves to "excite attention," not least one suspects in Freud himself. Returning to the street for the second time by "another détour" he is finally struck by a sense of the uncanny nature of his experience. What makes this experience uncanny is not just its repetition, but the fact that as one thing is repeated, another is changed; the second experience in the 23 ELT 42 :1 1999 street is not the same as the first, because it is a return to a scene which has become familiar. The familiar, the heimlich (homely), becomes indistinguishable from the unheimlich (unhomely); indeed, it is the recurring nature of the familiar that makes it uncanny: "This uncanny is in reality, nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and oldestablished in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression."2 The experience of the uncanny is never an adventure into the unknown, but really a return to something which has been lost. It is this "compulsion to repeat" that makes any specific experience uncanny, and its pathological repetition that is the hallmark of obsessive neurosis. Of course, Freud's self-analysis is really a self-diagnosis. Experiences of the uncanny, if we accept Freud's axiom of repression and exposure , are never "further voyages of discovery" but rather insistent attempts to return to the familiar, in this case, the piazza that is pushed to the very end of the anecdote. What we have here is perhaps a "compulsion to repeat," an obsessive urge that transforms an everyday occurrence into an uncanny one. Freud's anecdote is factual, and he suggests that the model of analysis used is unsuitable to the interpretation of fiction : "The uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative productions, merits in truth a separate discussion.... the contrast between what has been repressed and what has been surmounted cannot be transposed on to the uncanny in fiction without profound modification ."3 The uncanny in fiction, Freud argues, is both more common and more artificial than the uncanny in life; the suspension of disbelief central to the art of fiction makes this so. It occupies a grey area between fact and fiction, and this ambivalence of values is consistent throughout Freud's essay, for the uncanny is evidently both familiar and unfamiliar, both a voyage of discovery and a return to origin, both a recognition and a re-cognition. What is most surprising about "Das Unheimliche" in general...