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.
