The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

in part as a rebuttal to Ernst Jentsch’s definition of the concept. Jentsch, Freud admitted, was right to say insecurity triggers that feeling of uncanniness; for instance, when looking at a body that we’re not sure is alive or dead, or when we encounter madness in another human being, or witness an epileptic fit. But not every new and strange thing is unpleasant. It takes something else, Freud claimed; another element has to be added to make the situation uncanny. What was needed was the familiar. More specifically, the uncanny is the unique unease we experience when something we think we know or understand turns out to be something else. The familiar that suddenly becomes unfamiliar. An object, a creature, a person, who is not what we first thought. A well-crafted wax figure. A stuffed animal. A rosy-cheeked corpse.

Freud turned to language to explain his thinking. “The German word unheimlich,” he wrote, “is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning ‘familiar,’ ‘native,’ ‘belonging to the home’; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.” But heimlich is also an ambiguous word, he claimed, since it can denote that which is secret and private, that which is hidden from the world. The word contains its own opposite. And the same is, of course, true of that which is unheimlich; it is at once both familiar and unfamiliar.

That is how, Freud states, we should understand the unique sense of unease called unheimlich. It overcomes us when what we recognize contains an element of strangeness and we become unsure of what we’re really looking at and what it means.

With his essay “Das Unheimliche,” Sigmund Freud gave fear a psychoanalytical foundation that authors and artists have used ever since. And I would like to think the eel played at least a small part in it.

Because, after establishing the linguistic ambiguity of the concept, Freud turns to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” to demonstrate how this unique feeling of uncanniness is expressed. “The Sandman” tells the story of a young man named Nathanael, who while visiting a strange city for his studies is forced to encounter his repressed past and by extension his madness. As a child, Nathanael was told that a terrifying creature called the Sandman appears at children’s bedsides in the night and steals their eyes. As a grown-up, he believes he encounters a reincarnation of the Sandman in the form of a man who sells barometers and optical instruments. And when he falls in love with a mysterious woman by the name of Olimpia, it turns out she is in fact a robot created by the barometer salesman and a professor called Spalanzani. When Nathanael eventually realizes the truth, and beholds Olimpia’s lifeless body at the professor’s house, her eyes lying next to her on the floor, he is overcome with madness and tries to kill Spalanzani.

The entire short story teeters on the brink of uncertainty. The narrative perspective shifts continually, nothing is truly known, things may be happening in the material world, or possibly only in Nathanael’s tormented mind. To Freud, the woman who turns out to be a robot and the theft of the eyes are also central symbols at the core of the uncanny; here is an example of the uncertainty about whether a creature is alive or dead, but also the fear of being robbed of one’s sight, of losing one’s ability to observe and experience the world as it truly is.

But perhaps other elements of Hoffmann’s story also resonated with Freud. The story is about a young German-speaking man who travels to a strange city to study. The city is never named, but both Professor Spalanzani and the barometer salesman are said to speak Italian. Furthermore, the barometer salesman doesn’t just sell barometers but all kinds of optical instruments, including microscopes, the tool that is supposed to reveal the truth to the scientifically minded. Also, and this may be a coincidence, but an entertaining one, the mysterious Professor Spalanzani in “The Sandman” happens to share his name with the famous scientist Spallanzani, who in the eighteenth century traveled to Comacchio to seek the truth of the eel, in vain.

To top it off, Freud at the end of “Das Unheimliche” recounts one of his own uncanny experiences. He describes a walk in a “provincial town in Italy”; it is a hot afternoon and without quite knowing how, he ends up on a narrow street where everywhere he looks, painted women stare out of windows. He walks away, only to find himself a while later in the same place. He leaves again, but soon discovers he has circled back to the same street for a third time. Three times he has unconsciously been brought to exactly the same place, like being forced to relive the same experience again and again in a dream.

He finds it uncanny. The involuntary repetition, experiencing the exact same unwelcome scenario over and over again, kind of like standing in a dark laboratory week after week, dissecting fish after fish only to find something other than you expected. “I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while before.”

He is, in all likeliness, writing about Trieste. He described similar, dreamlike walks in his letters to Eduard Silberstein during his 1876 visit, when he unsuccessfully tried to find the eel’s testicles. The same narrow alleys and painted women watching him from the windows. It appears, then, that what came to mind when Freud himself tried to capture the unique feeling of unease and intellectual uncertainty was his frustrating and enigmatic weeks in Trieste. And surely it’s not too far-fetched to think the eel played on his mind, because what has it been throughout history—in literature and art, as well as in its hidden existence just beneath the surface—if not uncanny? If not unheimlich?

12To Kill an Animal

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