To muddy death

QUEEN GERTRUDE

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;

There with fantastic garlands did she come

Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:

There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;

And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:

Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element: but long it could not be

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.

Thanatos and Eros are the two forces battling within us to drive our lives. As all animals do we keep ourselves out of danger and have a healthy aversion to death, ergo Eros. However just Eros didn’t explain to Freud the complex behaviour and psychology of the human mind. Thanatos explained why we act in certain way which wasn’t in accordance with Eros. When this occurs, deep within the psyche we aim to die, as a return to the womb, we wish to go back to the peaceful place that came before.

But I want to talk about how death is uncanny and I will use Ophelia’s death to exemplify. Gertrude describes Ophelia’s death and as she dies things come alive around her, personification breathes animation into elements. We read (or hear if played) the voice of the dead, we listen to Ophelia sing though she has already died, therefore the speech is haunted by prosopopeia. Death is aestheticized through the passage and Ophelia’s dying body is romanticised; these are why her death has an uncanny quality. This passage, far from conjuring images of horror or trepidation, as death may often do, draws us in to the sweet singing symphony of the elegiac imagery where death is strange and beautiful.

In Ophelia’s death the water seems to seduce her, calling her to her death. The description of her drowning has a strangely beautiful and alluring quality, in an act which would be, in reality, terrifying. The whole passage is gentle, graceful and slow compared to the actuality of drowning. The beauty of the anthropomorphised brook is in the image of it ‘weeping’ as Ophelia falls. The fact that her clothes ‘bore her up’ is discordant with the fundamental aspect of drowning. To drown is to sink, to go down not up. Because drown is a portmanteau of down, to descend is inherent in its syntax. But she floats like a seraphic being as she drowns. The halcyon river is weeping; this soft emotional way to describe crying, gives the stream, not just human qualities but caring, empathic characteristics.

In the ‘death by water’ section of The Waste Land, Brookes JR notes what is ’also readily apparent is its force as a symbol of surrender and relief through surrender.’ This idea of surrendering to water and gaining relief by this is visible in the way Ophelia drowns. She comes willingly down to the river and falls without a struggle into the water, surrendering to it, to death. The indication of her being ‘native’ reflects her unification with the river and the sense of her belonging to the water. She merges with the open, inviting river that will end her life. The drowning is a sensual experience, an unfurling into water. The delicate flowers she carries to her death are symbolic of her fragility, or her virginity. The bloomed flowers, her nascent sexuality, are drowned when she falls. She merges her body with the body of the river, seeming to be, in a flickering moment, amphibious. The most overtly sexual symbol in the speech can’t be skimmed over. The long purples, dead men’s fingers or when talking to shepherds a grosser appellation, are axiomatically phallic.

Ophelia is or was in love but is being driven mad. Instead of a natural progression in events, i.e. the reciprocity of feeling from Hamlet, there is death. Death replaces or impedes upon the climax of the love story. Or perhaps not, maybe death is the acme of the text or her role; the narrative has achieved its aim and can end.

The old lauds sung in Ophelia’s dying moments are generally recognised as a sign of her madness and inability to ascertain the danger she is in.  Alternatively I believe the singing intensifies the sexual undercurrents and magical qualities of the speech. The snatches of hymns are almost a serenade to the water, a ‘honeyed sound‘ that can be read in the flowing rhythm of the speech. Perhaps, her voice like a siren, charms her as she dies. She gives in to the pull of the water and is lulled by death.

The Sandman and the automaton

Mark Gatiss talks about The Sandman and the uncanny creeps into the BBC. 

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00vdxt5

More automatons. This one is beautiful and deeply disturbing, especially when she looks at you at the end.

The double in The Butt

The double in The Butt

After reading Will Self’s novel The Butt there were certain elements of the text I wanted to write about, in regards, of course, to the uncanny.

Let’s begin at the end. The ending is a prophetic vision realised. In the first few pages of the book Tom sees a homeless man picking up butt ends. Tom actually foresees himself, in the future, he is the homeless man.

This future Tom haunts the beginning, we immediately ask who is this man? A phantom of repetition we see throughout the narrative. Tom’s fate is already decided in the initial pages of the novel. The beginning has already begun, and the end is really the beginning. This inability to define a point of time or a start creates an uncanny tension within the text. The ending is a déjà vu for the reader, we have already read this scene. This creates the surroundings in which the playful use of doubling gives the text a macabre and uncanny twist.

But to understand how the uncanny works within the double we should refer to Freud’s comment on the matter. The notion of doubling in The Uncanny is set up from the start when Freud gives the reader a choice of two directions. He then proceeds to explain how the uncanny and canny are both opposites and the same; highlighting the strange shifting relationship between both concepts. Uncanny, or unheimlich (the German version of the word) means unfamiliar, unhomely and canny means homely or familiar. It is uncanny when we find something familiar suddenly unfamiliar and when we find something unfamiliar familiar. This is the idea I want to use to explain the effect of the characters Gloria and Martha (Tom‘s wife).

Both women look very alike and at times this becomes overwhelmingly apparent. Gloria is uncomfortably similar to Martha but at the same time nothing like her at all.
In a dream of Tom’s, one hot sticky night, he sees Gloria running her hands over her body but although it is Gloria’s body it is also Martha’s. There is an oddness in the idea that both women inhabit the same body but yet are also entirely different, separate people. Martha’s body is at once the familiar baby-bearing body and a foreign unknown figure. Tom is perturb by Gloria’s presence in lieu of his wife. The closeness of Gloria to Martha in appearance and her instant company makes him feel further and further from his wife. In fact Gloria, the strange double of his wife, the other, begins to replace Martha in Tom’s mind. He starts to doubt the materiality of his wife and that actually she is Gloria.

The other use of a kind of double in the text is Prentice as Tom shadow self. At various points they mirror each other physically and linguistically. The men become intertwined during their journey. Their fates are bound, and this is reflected in the changing states of Astande and Swift One between the men. Prentice is the ugly, morally disfigured side of Tom, that Tom wishes to repress or is simply scared lurks beneath in him. Tom becomes particularly pedantic and concern when Atalaya accuses him of looking at her breasts. Perhaps he is either terrified that he embodies Prentice’s characteristics or does and is desperate to submerge them. Whatever the case this strange partnership, the tie between both men which extends across the barren desert landscape, is a changing, reversing bond.

Through the book the dynamic of a shifting or blending of characters is disarming but also so subtly executed that it plants an odd sensation of both understanding and confusion.  The doubling breaks down any stark definitions between the characters and therefore doesn’t let us settle into the text but keeps moving with a dream like quality. What the uncanny does here is enables us to stand in the position of Tom and consider the incomprehensible land he finds himself in.

These are just some uncanny parts I pick out which unnerved but drew me further in. The novel is a wonderful tale of adventure in the strange planes of another land and reveals the inability not only to not understand others but also ourselves. Of course many aspects of this book are not uncanny and delve into the psyche; our disconnection to each other in a modern world, the seemingly normal rituals that give rhythm to our lives, (smoking for one) and the barrier language can put in front of understanding.

Uncanny moments

Uncanny moments.

In no particular order.

Déjà vu. I’ve done this before. I’ve seen this before. Maybe once before, or perhaps it is a feeling of continued repetition. One of the best examples to describe the uncanny.

Seeing your reflection when you don’t realise it is you, you are looking at. Catching sight of a person in a mirror or shop window but then before you look away, realising it is yourself. I have done this a few times and it is always an odd experience. Your face you know so well is suddenly unknown.

Did I dream that? At one point I often got little parts of my dreams mixed up into my real life. Small things like something I have said or done. It is weird when you realise that what you thought you did was actually just in a dream. When real and imaginary collide the uncanny is produced.

Shadows of objects making strange shapes in the dark. In a half lit room, lamps and ornaments make human or animal shapes that dance across the walls. For a child this is scary but for an adult it can be very creepy. 

Mistaking a stranger for someone you know well. From the side or back or far away the stranger looks just like a friend or family member. And you imagine it is them. And then at the last moment as you see the stranger properly they aren’t that person you imagined they were. It is so obviously not them. The clash between the stranger seeming familiar but then so completely unfamiliar is jarring.

Robots. I saw a documentary on the pioneering research and development of robots. It was unnervingly uncanny when the robots spoke and mimicked human speech and movements. The more human the robots were the creepier and stranger they became.

This video is one of many, take a look at some others too.

An uncanny rime

(The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel T Coleridge)

I wanted to write a little about how boundaries and thresholds of language in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are uncanny. In this text anything definite is lost, sureties are indistinguishable.

An uncanny feeling arises when the equator transports the sailors into another realm. As the sun rises and dips into the sea, so a change occurs.

The storm is both beautiful and terrifying, the ‘wonderous cold’ is a submissive fear to the elements. The sublime is uncanny. At once terrifying and beautiful, fear and desire work against and with each other to draw you in and push you away.

The ship is suspended in a state of limbo, in a liminal space, at an in-between time of day (sun and moon are the same size) when nothing can be for certain.

The enigma of repetition creates a pace and rhythm but it also creates a stasis in the action.

The tautology used throughout the poem ‘day is day’ and ‘words words words’ does something to these words to make them peculiar. The effect of repetition just makes the words seem odd, or not right in some way, especially when read aloud.

Day after day, day after day
We stuck, nor breath nor motion
As idled as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean

This is my favourite line. And in it shows in perfection the uncanny.

The beauty of the imagery clashes with the reality of the sailors dangerous situation in a barren ocean. And the repetition of painted has the effect of making the reader imagine a painting within a painting within a painting. The language drags the narrative into repetition, beauty and stasis conflicting with the fear of the sailors.

Though these blacken lipped men are dehydrated to madness, surround by an oily witching sea and sucking their own blood; Coleridge makes the scene a glittering, wavering, chimerical painting, an uncanny picture.

Throughout the narrative there is always a linguistic wavering, an uncertainty to commit to one solid idea or image. For example, the transsegmental shifts across the boundaries of words, refuse to commit. The line ‘a sail, a sail’ is an example of this shifting. When read, the line sounds like it can mean either a ship sail or an attack (an assail). Notably either is applicable to the line and meaning. But what does he mean?

This is a circular prose where the end meets the beginning. Coleridge depicts a nightmarish world, a real dream, characterised by the disharmony between action and emotion.

In a savage sea where vivid images of burnt men drinking there own blood pervade the text, there is a strange beauty in the rhythm of lines and an odd wonderment at the scenes described. This conflict reaching sublime heights generates a powerful sense of the uncanny and a fearfully beautiful tale.

Dreams of Here

Art Review: Dreams of Here at Brighton Museum

Work by Julian Bell, Tom Hammick and Andrzej Jackowski

I recently went to an art exhibition in Brighton and here I saw the everyday create the uncanny before my eyes.

As you walk through the three joining rooms, separating each artist's work, you pass through different levels of consciousness, where reality slides into dreams.

The exhibition begins in the explosively colourful and bright white space which belongs to the work of Julian Bell. His pieces are large, evoking seemingly mundane scenes but the oil painted canvases jump out at you. The everyday objects range from the soft, subdued warm pinks and blues of 'Rain': colours reflecting the peaceful, romantic fall of rain against a bedroom window. To 'Darvaza' which captures in vivid detail an erupting volcano, the brightness giving movement and life to the whole room.

The second room contains the artwork of Tom Hammick. After leaving the solid reality, bold colours and physicality of Bell's work; this tentatively lit, all encompassing dark blue space, invites an insight into Hammick's dreaming mind. The subject is real objects; people, trees or nature but these everyday depictions are morphed by the mind. There is an unearthly, uncanny serenity that binds these pieces: you feel you are seeing the world through dreaming eyes. Speaking of his work Hammick said: 'painting distils time;' sentiments which are palpable in his work. You feel you are catching snippets of memories, fragments of time frozen but in a random order: much like a dream.

Lastly you enter a light pink room, exhibiting Andrzej Jackowski's collection: 'The voyage, a still film.' These pieces are more surreal and unnerving than the previous; we have moved away from the real or the dream and are now deeper into the mind. This room grabs me the most but in a creeping, inconspicuous way. In Jackowski's words: 'this is a place of memory, of thinking.' The collection of 60 drawings are linked by the ‘Baltic brown‘, bloody red and common recurring objects: such as the heron’s head, ladders, and hanging figures. The heron’s head is a menacing, watchful figure, unknown and voyeuristic. Themes of violence and sex course though the drawings, suspending you (like many of the figures) in this haunted world. The uncanny is a haunting of the everyday, a fissure in our seemingly substantial reality.

I left the exhibition in a pensive daze, knocked out by the stunning vivacity of Bell's work, hypnotised by the beautiful blue dreams Hammick paints and unnerved but engrossed from Jackowski's creations.

Through the Looking Glass: another Alice

I have posted twice about Alice simply to slice apart the twinned Alice books.

Alice enters the Looking Glass world by climbing through her living room mirror. This world is a reflection or double of the world Alice leaves. Therefore everything is backwards; objects, people and places are at once similar and opposing. The initial recognition or familiarity of the Looking Glass world becomes unfamiliar when we take a closer look. It is this strange combining of the familiar and unfamiliar which makes the Looking Glass world unnerving and uncanny. By entering this world Alice becomes her own reflection. She can now move autonomously without being watched or copied by the mirror reflection. There are two Alices but which are we dealing with?

Freud describes in The Uncanny that ‘what is Heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich.’ By entering the mirror Alice is situated in her home but also not her home, as it is a reflection of or the opposite of her home. Home is both home and not home. Comparable to the way the word Heimlich can mean the same as and also the opposite of unheimlich. This inversion and double meaning, or things meaning both the same and the opposite is bound into the fabric of the Looking Glass world and also the feeling and concept of the uncanny. The uncanny is different and the same, it is a happening but also an un-happening of things, disturbing our sense of what has or hasn’t happened: a questioning.

A feeling of strangeness comes from the Tweedles insistence that Alice is only a part of the Red Kings dream and so she is not real. In Wonderland her size changes and she questions and forgets who she is. This strange questioning of the self is pushed further in the Looking Glass, when her materiality is made uncertain. Is she real? The Tweedles’ answer is no, and that if the Red King woke she would ’go out-bang-like a candle.’ This image draws on her already questionable materiality. She fears ’going out altogether, like a candle,’ her physical presence is no more solid than an exposed, flickering flame. Alice’s effect on the Looking Glass world is challenged, as the Tweedles assert she couldn’t wake the King as she is in his dream. What an odd feeling to be consciously aware of yourself in another’s dreaming mind. She is unable to justify her realness, she cant make herself real either through action (crying) or language (stating ‘I am real‘)

The Tweedles continually talk in negatives, no-one nobody nowhere nothing. These express the absence of something. Negative speech here goes around defining. Speaking in negatives is a circumlocution that evades meaning, this is the effect of the Tweedles’ speech on Alice. This creates confusion, if everything is expressed or described by what it isn’t. Alice would apparently be ‘nowhere’ if the Red King woke up but can you actually be nowhere? And where is this nowhere if this is where she will be?

Language and meaning in the Looking Glass are both powerful and effective or circular and fail definition. Language can initiate action in the book, making things happen. For example the Queen turns into a sheep through the augmentation of the word better into a bleat. Language is at once active and passive; Alice feels, most palpably, the uncanny failure of language to affirm the absence of the presence of something (her). Freud states that the double has become a vision of terror, a terror Alice becomes acutely aware of as it defines the absence of herself. The slipperiness of meaning makes Through the Looking Glass a strangely resounding text. The text is haunted by the parallel world which is the other side of the mirror and the questions suspended in uncertainty.

Alice in Wonderland: my own private rabbit hole

What makes Alice in Wonderland uncanny?

I first read Alice in Wonderland as a child, I then re-read it years later. The book I knew as a child and the one I was reading as an adult were vastly different in feeling and meaning. It created two versions of the book in my mind that jostled with one another. This was the first thing I found uncanny about Alice. Second was the first chapter: The Pool of Tears.

After falling down the rabbit hole Alice finds herself in a long hallway. The hall has every appearance of normalcy, however in this seemingly mundane hall, strange things start to occur. It is precisely the ordinariness of the hall which makes the events to follow peculiar. A table materialises with a key on top of it which doesn’t fit any of the door locks. It is exactly this conglomeration of familiar and unfamiliar things which leaves Alice, and so the reader, unnerved and curious as to what to expect next. Alice’s uncertainty of her situation and disorientation due to the dislocation in time and space, causes her to weep a pool of tears.



The complete effacement of a spatial and temporal anchor is distressing. The focus on tears in this chapter points to use of the word as more than one meaning. Namely, to tear something or to tear, e.g move at speed.

Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole creates a tear in time. The space she is located in is in-between reality and fantasy, a world in which the two collide. The physical world of wonderland is apt to morph, objects or creatures which appear to be substantial can in a moment disintegrate; such as the Cheshire cat. Comparably she chases logical avenues of thought but they result in nonsensical answers. It can be uncanny when the demarcation between reality and fantasy slides, and each spills over into the next.



The dislodgment of a time reference is noticeable in the cycle or a temporal glitch Alice seems to be stuck in. Firstly her thoughts circumnavigate from questioning her identity to reciting her lessons. The uncertainty of her surroundings causes her to doubt the solidity of her identity. This circular cognitive pattern is reflected in her speech. She repeats certain words; ‘curiouser and curiouser’ or ‘dear dear.’ This repetition is Alice’s way of consoling herself, as she attempts to hold onto a sense of reality. However through the reiteration of a word or thought its meaning unravels; becoming, especially if said or read aloud, just a sequence of nonsensical noises. What she believes will anchor her, in fact, further destabilises her world. The sense of time in wonderland is endless, circular or static. There is no beginning or end; such as in the caucus race everyone ’left off when they liked’ and so it was ‘not easy to tell when the race was over.’ Or it is stuck in a loop, it’s always teatime for the mad hatter.

Time does move in wonderland, as the tea party moves around the table but the direction isn’t necessarily linear. The introduction to wonderland creates an uncanny effect through the interplay of words, images and ideas that repeat, reflect and negate each other. The reader and Alice are unsettled in every sense and at every turn. When we feel we have finally made sense of wonderland; Carroll shakes and flips the ground and we find ourselves back at the beginning of the adventure, or quite possibly at the end.