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

The scholarly engagement of German Studies with the Orient, Africa, and other non-Western cultures is one of the longest-lasting and most productive traditions in the field, going back, at least, to the Enlightenment and the Classical-Romantic period. In fact, it can be argued that especially European modernism is largely a negotiation of collective identities and aesthetic media through the appropriation, critique, and transformation of contested images of territorial, ethnological, or cultural Otherness. Since the late 1970s, postcolonial theories, emphasizing negotiations of political hegemony and subversion, cultural hybridity and difference, ethnic stereotyping, recognition, and self-articulation, have had a major influence on German Studies, but scholars soon realized that the predominantly French and Anglo-American focus of postcolonial critique possessed rather limited applicability to the specifics of German colonialism, its ideologies, and discursive practices. Perhaps fearful or defiant of Anglo-American theory hegemony, German Studies therefore initiated a reconfiguration and conceptual translation of postcolonial terminology, and John Zilcosky’s new study clearly emerges from this disciplinary environment.

In some ways a continuation of his earlier book Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (2003), the present work investigates the intricate interactions between literary texts, psychoanalysis, and popular travel writings; it is a major contribution to our understanding of the textual particularities of the German-speaking encounters with cultural alterity. While the author shares with a postcolonial thinker like Homi Bhabha an interest in psychoanalytic categories for exploring the workings of the cultural/political unconscious, Zilcosky differs from Bhabha in arguing successfully that it is not the disavowal of alienating difference, but, on the contrary, the fear of an excessive and unsettling similarity that subverts the Western traveller’s desire for seemingly stable and manageable instances of ethnic, cultural, or sexual alterity around 1900. Arriving relatively late on the global map of colonial conquests, Hermann Hesse and many others searched for exotic wonders, pure natives, and erotic stimulation as forms of escape from Western capitalist-technological disillusionment, only to find other Europeans who had always already arrived before them, or indigenous peoples who had already begun to assimilate to Western customs in what appeared as startling performances of mimicry and parody. As the author notes, “At the ends of the earth,” the European travellers “found not primitive savages but ‘civilized’ natives or, even worse, European doppelgängers” (9).

Whereas Bhabha works with psychoanalytic categories like desire and fetishism, Zilcosky’s conceptual master trope for this complex situation is the “uncanny.” Theorized most prominently by Sigmund Freud, whose medical and psychological research was influenced by travel writings, the term’s highly ambivalent German original unheimlich collapses apparently stable opposites—homely/familiar/secretly, but also strange/horrifying—in ways that travellers encountering its various manifestations deemed disappointing, revoltingly unnatural, and illegitimate. Pervading in travelogues, ethnographic records, and fiction while undergoing many socio-politically specific variations, the trope, often signifying the shockingly unexpected return of the repressed or forgotten, testifies to the writers’ obsessive fear of an unavoidable end to alterity. Frequently flipping over into brute resentment and violence, this anxiety encompassed a sexual aversion against traditionally feminized Otherness threatening the masculinist hegemony.

Indeed, so powerful and ubiquitous is the uncanny that Zilcosky, intent on questioning scholarly delineations of high and popular art forms, succeeds in showing that it is not limited to capturing the confusions of Western travellers abroad. Rather, the uncanny also infuses high literary modernism’s quasi-ethnographic exploration of the subversive intrusion of the seemingly strange but frightfully recognizable Other within Europe itself. Here, the protagonist’s anthropological gaze toward the Other is frequently replicated by the meta-gaze cast by the narrator on the protagonist himself. Examples that Zilcosky analyzes at length include Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Andreas, and Robert Musil’s Grigia.

As the concluding chapters suggest, the uncanny is not confined to the historical situation...