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– MARINA WARNER – feeling, and develops the idea that the feeling arises when a figure or an image stirs a memory of something familiar that has been mislaid, or lost – hence the shivery or uncanny feel of déjà vu, or the prickly sensation excited by feeling that someone is in the room when there turns out to be nobody there. Dissatisfied with Jentsch’s emphasis on ambiguous animation, Freud turned to E. T. A, Hoffmann’s tale of ‘The Sand-Man’, and produced one of his greatest imaginative tours de force in literary criticism, as he explores the story’s bizarre and complex array of metaphors dramatizing the sinister Dr Coppelius who creates lifesize dolls, the lovely singing automaton Olympia, and the doomed student Nathaniel. The essay is central to Freud’s insistence on the castration complex, and has been hugely influential, admired and torn to shreds in equal measure; but it has certainly instituted ‘the uncanny’ alongside the sublime or the absurd as the generic effect of a certain kind of art in any medium. The undoubted frisson provoked by waxworks, robots, dolls, animatronics and digital imaging connects at the deepest level to the enigma of individual life itself, itself necessarily bound up with sexuality. But the analysis of magic and illusion carefully wrought by Christian thinkers, especially in the Renaissance and early modern period, can still help most effectively to illuminate this response, which is both emotional and intellectual. For the devil’s power lay in conjuring phenomena that were delusions: Mephistopheles 122
page 147
– On the Threshold – in Doctor Faustus summons the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, and then the beguiling phantom Helen of Troy. According to theological principles, these seemingly natural, living, moving figures are spectral, mere images, uncanny because illusory. The uncanny is an effect of doubling, as Jentsch indicated, when the subject represented does not exist. Such images or effigies consequently appear to supplant reality or take over from it when no prior referent remains in existence (the Seven Deadly Sins are allegories, Helen is long gone). The uncanny is an effect of reflection without referent, or of creation ex nihilo. In other words, it rises from a false impression that soul, in all its imprecision and mystery, is breathing in something; but these intimations of soul presence begin to stir only to be withheld. Living likenesses strive to guarantee and perpetuate presence, but ultimately underline the vanished and absent subject; creepily, they resemble someone or something who is not there, as in a mirror reflection with no subject. Modern optical media have greatly elaborated the scope of illusion since the audience of Athanasius Kircher’s magic lantern shows in Rome in the mid-seventeenth century worried about the ‘enchantments of the reverend father.’ In an essay about playing with dolls, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke describes the way imagination stirs to fill a void, to stop the love for a doll expiring on the blank slate of its response. Rilke often throws an oblique light on Freud, as if engaged in a distant conversation with 123

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– MARINA WARNER –

feeling, and develops the idea that the feeling arises when a figure or an image stirs a memory of something familiar that has been mislaid, or lost – hence the shivery or uncanny feel of déjà vu, or the prickly sensation excited by feeling that someone is in the room when there turns out to be nobody there.

Dissatisfied with Jentsch’s emphasis on ambiguous animation, Freud turned to E. T. A, Hoffmann’s tale of ‘The Sand-Man’, and produced one of his greatest imaginative tours de force in literary criticism, as he explores the story’s bizarre and complex array of metaphors dramatizing the sinister Dr Coppelius who creates lifesize dolls, the lovely singing automaton Olympia, and the doomed student Nathaniel. The essay is central to Freud’s insistence on the castration complex, and has been hugely influential, admired and torn to shreds in equal measure; but it has certainly instituted ‘the uncanny’ alongside the sublime or the absurd as the generic effect of a certain kind of art in any medium.

The undoubted frisson provoked by waxworks, robots, dolls, animatronics and digital imaging connects at the deepest level to the enigma of individual life itself, itself necessarily bound up with sexuality. But the analysis of magic and illusion carefully wrought by Christian thinkers, especially in the Renaissance and early modern period, can still help most effectively to illuminate this response, which is both emotional and intellectual. For the devil’s power lay in conjuring phenomena that were delusions: Mephistopheles

122

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