Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity by John Zilcosky (review)

In the opening pages of Uncanny Encounters, John Zilcosky's study of the preconditions that led to the birth of the uncanny, the elements that shaped it, and its current life, there is a story about maps: the author's fascination with them as a young boy, his preference for the "wondrous" kind, before modernity's insistence on a great divide between fiction and reality, maps like that of Odysseus's travels, Babylonian maps, medieval maps that depicted the Garden of Eden far to the East, past the Ganges delta. This ongoing fascination is what led him to discover later, as a teenager, that he did not have to go too far back in history to find the inviting incompletion that so drew him; that even in the nineteenth century there were "white spots in maps" all the more to encourage new scientific expeditions and intrepid travellers (p. 6). What he also discovered at this time, however, was that in a period of twenty years in the late nineteenth century all these spaces were "filled in" as "abruptly and irrevocably, the earth came into relief" (p. 8). "This unique historical moment," he writes, linking a childhood fascination with his academic work, "led to the pressing question of my book: How did this apparently final mapping of the earth affect the European imagination? How did Europeans' fantasies about themselves and their world change when these apparently virgin territories disappeared?" (p. 9).

Zilcosky's answer to these questions becomes the premise which informs all his readings in the book: "As I discovered while reading travel writing from around 1900, Europeans experienced this new global world as a shocking series of 'uncanny encounters.'" "At the ends of the earth," he explains, "they found not primitive savages but 'civilized' natives or, even worse, European dopplegängers…as a frightening surprise" (p. 9). "[F]in de siècle European, especially German, travelers," he continues, also specifying his book's area of study, "were…always discovering Europe everywhere, resulting in a new kind of fear, not of difference but of similarity, and also a new way of talking about this fear—years before Freud published his The Uncanny in 1919" (p. 12). With this realization, Zilcosky proceeds to delineate the subject matter, and uniqueness, of his book. By examining "popular texts [such as travel narratives] as well as so-called high literature and Freud's psychoanalytic works," he writes, "I aim to show how these three types of writing expressed a related anxiety and how, in the age of the apparent end of alterity, they pointed toward a new source of modern violence: not in the oft-cited fear of difference, but in the dread of uncanny recognition" (pp. 12–13). This is a dread that the last lines of the book attempt to exorcize from our collective unconscious by naming it as the thing that haunts us still. After citing a series of contemporary examples of modern violence in the figure of the "terrorist" whose similarity, not difference, to "us" "demonstrates how today's uncanny moment resembles the one around 1900, except with an even tighter concentric circle," Zilcosky concludes: "when we are not undone by it, we are reminded of the continued imperative to grapple with it" (p. 182).

Understanding this move at the end of the book as the actual occasion of its beginning, that is, as the cause of its interrogation into the end of alterity and not, as narrative convention of the ends of books would have it, as the effect of its interrogation of that end documented in the body of the book, is important to its argument that alterity is always already within. This pre-posterous structure, in itself an example of uncanniness, as well as all of the examples of familiar unfamiliarity that make up the body of the book, are all part of the "imperative to grapple" with today's uncanny moment. Uncanny Encounters traces that interior other...