The New Uncanny (2 page)

Our sample size is too small to prove anything of course. But it’s interesting all the same to note the overwhelming emphasis here on two phenomena in particular: the double and the doll. In conversation with several authors, it transpired that another essay, by a contemporary of Freud’s, came to bear heavily on their story, this being Rilke’s exhibition-review-cum-thesis, ‘Dolls: On the Waxwork Dolls of Lotte Pritzel’ (1913). For Rilke, dolls weren’t so much a reminder of that time in childhood when we did ‘not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects,’ as Freud puts it, or when we might have fancied that the doll ‘would be certain to come to life [if looked at] in a particular, extremely concentrated way.’ For Rilke, it was more personal. To see an old, familiar doll, as an adult, provokes a layered reaction in us. Firstly, he claimed, we feel anger – at the doll’s betrayal and its ‘horrible dense forgetfulness’ of that ‘purest affection’ we once squandered on it. Secondly, it scares us, for it reminds us of the first time we had to assert our own identity, rather than let our identity be steered and lost under the overcoat of others’. We had to be ourselves, that is
invent
ourselves, when left alone for the first time with a doll.

Thirdly it saddens us, because it reminds of the time we first learnt of the non-responsiveness of the world, the first time our questions and demands were met only by silence – an answer we grew all too used to as adults – and of the wider hollowness of things (including ourselves). Finally, the sight of such a doll in adulthood fills us with a feeling of estrangement, Rilke claimed. We no longer recognise it as this protagonist of our imaginary world, nor do we recognise ‘the confidences we heaped over it and into it,’ nor the child that did the heaping.

There is nothing in Rilke’s rich and moving essay that speaks of repression or denial. His subject is the re-evaluation of objects with which we now have a different relationship; and the realisation that the identity of both parties has shifted, drastically. As a child, Rilke hardly seems to have believed his dolls would awaken and come to life, as Freud claims. His sense of betrayal is rather that the doll no longer awakens something
in him
: the passion, the engagement they once had. Rilke’s reaction is a projection of a disappointment in himself, for
his own
‘dense forgetfulness’, not a suppression of some old belief.

As for the double, Freud is again frustratingly cursory. Citing fellow psychoanalyst Otto Rank, he compares the double to that immortal twin-spirit of ancient mythologies, the ‘ka’ accompanying us through life and transporting our soul after death. Carl Jung – deferring to mythology, but one can’t help thinking buoyed up by Dostoevsky’s
The Double
and Stevenson’s
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
– constructed a more elaborate thesis for the double, calling it ‘The Shadow’. This he claimed was one of the first ‘archetypes’ to reveal itself in psychotherapy: a subconscious embodiment of a lesser, more imperfect version of oneself, a vessel for the shortcomings and baser instincts one hopes or pretends one does not have.

Looking at the stories collected here, though, there seems to be much more synergy between the dolls and doubles than can be found in the diametric opposition between what Rilke said about the former (lost friends) and what Jung said about the latter (concealed, darker selves). In these stories they almost overlap. Take Adam Marek’s beautiful ‘Tamagotchi’. At first glance this is a technological update of the doll story, deserving to sit on the same bedroom shelf as A. S. Byatt’s collectible antique, echoing its function. But told from the father’s point of view (not dissimilar from a psychanalyst’s), the toy also becomes a repository for a more dangerous, contagious version of the child’s malady, that is it becomes Jung’s Shadow. Come the end of the story, however, it switches back to a simple doll, that which only a child can release, only a child can betray. A similar synergy unfolds in the ‘imaginative play’ of Frank Cottrell Boyce’s story, where the ‘doll’ in question – the computer game The Sims – invites a doubling from the off. In some stories, like Nicholas Royle’s ‘The Dummy’, the double remains pure Jungian Shadow, but more often it is grafted on in childhood, beginning life with a doll-like speechlessness, such as the chilling companion in Sara Maitland’s ‘Seeing Double’.

The doll and double are two faces of the same coin, these stories seem to suggest. The former reminds us of the person we no longer are, and of that first identity we asserted in a doll’s presence. The latter, or rather that tingle of unease we get from a double (receiving a spam email from ourselves, for example) makes us shiver for a moment and ask, Who is this? Who am I? In both cases, identity slips, becomes fallible. To take my house dream: the older version of the house, the original, feels more sturdy in the dream than the flimsy present-day duplicate, no matter how inaccessible the former has become. The house we grew up in, or the dolls we played with as children, though lost to us, are still more real. As are, perhaps, the people we were growing up with them. There are two versions of the doll, or the house, and two of us.

Crucially, Freud is right when he talks of the division of the self, as necessary for the development of a conscience – that agency able to ‘stand over the rest of the ego,’ observe, criticise and censor the self. The fallacy of a split-self is something that must also accompany the acquisition of language and its progression into thought. Here, we see the double as much the same thing as the doll: an older, disembodied inheritor of the doll’s role in our mental universe; that is to say the addressee of our thoughts. Whereas once the doll enabled us to play the language game to ourselves, and create worded, spoken thought, now the double sits speechless in the fallacious dialogue of adult consciousness, the audience of our internal speech. To see a doll is to be reminded of the fallacy’s beginning, to see a look-a-like of oneself is to be jolted into the fallacy itself.

But it’s fun, this fallacy, with its various triggers – doll or double, eyeball or living machine. As the stories commissioned here will attest, it quickens the heart, raises the neck hair, makes us squirm, writhe, or even feel physically sick. In a good way. It puts us on edge – that place we really should be from time to time – and reminds us: it’s us that’s alive.

Ra Page

Oct, 2008

‘YOU AREN'T WITH us, are you?’

‘I’d like to be.’

‘What’s your name?’ the other girl said, looking impudently quizzical. ‘You’ve seen ours.’

He was glad if they assumed he’d been squinting in the dimness of the hotel bar only at the badges pinned above their long slim thighs. Each badge bore the image of a winged young woman dressed in a chain-mail bikini and a virtually transparent robe, an outfit both girls had copied apart from the wings. The sword in her hand indicated their names, Primmy and Barbaria. ‘Edwin Ferguson,’ he said.

‘That’s an old name,’ Primmy commented.

‘You need to be old to know all the tricks.’

‘I like a good trick, don’t you, Primmy? Are you going to show us yours, Edwin?’

However guilty he couldn’t help feeling, he thought he might feel worse if he let the opportunity pass. ‘I only give private performances,’ he said.

‘Is it going to be all for us?’ Primmy cried.

Barbaria bent her head and an eyebrow towards her, prompting Ferguson to assure the girls ‘It’s all right, I didn’t think you were angels.’

‘Why not?’ Primmy demanded.

He pointed at her badge – at least, he hoped it was clear that was where he was pointing. ‘No wings.’

‘Sometimes we are,’ Barbaria said. ‘We can be all kinds.’

‘Depends who we’re with.’

‘I’m looking forward to finding out. What roles you like playing, I mean.’

He made the sudden silence the occasion for a sip of Scotch followed by a larger one. ‘You’re looking at them,’ Barbaria said.

‘And they’re all you’ll be seeing,’ Primmy said.

He was able to mistake this for a promise until they turned away as a man strolled into the bar. He was at least as old as Ferguson and even stouter, with greying hair that Ferguson thought far too long for his age. Nevertheless the girls stood up eagerly, although Primmy lingered to say ‘Thanks for the fun.’

‘Is that all?’ When she tried to appear prim instead of primitive Ferguson was provoked to add ‘Maybe you shouldn’t come out in public dressed like that. You might give some people the wrong idea.’

‘We were at the masquerade.’

‘You’ve been doing some of that all right.’ Loud enough for her to catch he said, ‘And what do you get up to the rest of the time?’

Barbaria turned long enough to inform him ‘We’re social workers.’

‘Is that what they call it these days?’ he might have retorted except for feeling obsolete. As the girls each took the newcomer by an arm Ferguson saw that the man’s badge depicted a bronzed bruiser in sandals and loincloth and crown, who was brandishing a blade at a lengthy name Ferguson felt expected to recognise. He drained his Scotch and murmured to the barman ‘Who’s he?’

‘One of their writers.’

In his sleeveless denim outfit the fellow didn’t look much like one, or his age. Was being a writer all it took to have girls hanging on your arms? Perhaps now Ferguson had time to write the book he imagined he contained, the rest would follow. The idea seemed so variously disloyal that he felt his face glow like the light of a brake he’d applied too belatedly to himself, and he hurried not much better than blindly out of the bar.

He hadn’t reached the lifts when the lobby grew loudly crowded with people emerging from the conference suite. While a few were fantastically costumed, most struck him as not much less anonymous and awkward than himself. The hotel notice-board identified their event as a Fantasy Weekend, but it didn’t mean the kind of fantasy he’d yielded to imagining. At least, it certainly didn’t for him.

He kept his back to the mirror in the lift once he’d jabbed the button. On its way the lift opened to admit a view of the second-floor corridor, where badged individuals and their noise and drinks were spilling out of a room. For a moment he wished he were in there, but the room sounded too small for the revellers who were. That was one reason why the wish fell away before the corridor did.

The adjacent lift had just delivered someone to the third floor. Ferguson glimpsed their shadow vanishing around the corner ahead as he made for his room. From the corner, he saw the door next to his standing ajar. ‘Good night,’ he called as it shut, because the clinically pallid corridor with its equally colourless doors separated by timid abstract pastels made him lose all sense of himself. His last word was echoed in such a muffled voice that he couldn’t be sure of its gender.

Once the lock on his door had given his card the green light he left the card in a slot inside the stubby vestibule to drape the room with indirect lighting. The word flat might have been invented for the accommodation: the boxy wardrobe and dressing-table, the single angular nominally padded chair, the double bed tucking nothingness up tight. Perhaps the midget television might provide some company – distraction, at any rate.

A fat old man with a threadbare grizzly scalp met him in the bathroom. The sight fired up the taste of his Indian dinner, the taste of which rose in a volcanic belch. ‘Pardon,’ he said almost as inadvertently, rousing a muffled echo. He wasn’t apologising to his reflection; he didn’t even watch the old fool mouth the syllables. He lifted the toilet seat and its lid with the toe of his shoe, and the plastic ovals rapped the tiled wall. The small room seemed to have an echo for everything. He dragged his baggy zip down to fumble himself forth, and had hardly started pouring when the noise became a duet. The other performer was in the adjoining bathroom.

Urinating in company always made Ferguson feel like a shy child, and he faltered to a dribble that trailed off to a drip. Was his neighbour suffering from the identical problem? Straining never helped, and the silence aggravated his inhibition just as much. He could only hum to lessen his awareness or pretend it wasn’t troubling him. ‘Let’s Do It’ always came into his head on these occasions, and he might have added words – one of his rhymes for bees, ‘People who have finished having pees’ or ‘Women who are down upon their knees’, that used to amuse Elizabeth whenever he sang them at random – if his neighbour hadn’t joined in.

He still couldn’t identify the gender from the voice. His own was shriller than it had any right or need to be. Perhaps his fellow guest was borrowing his solution to the urinary annoyance; they hummed louder once Ferguson did. He squeezed his eyes shut and then managed to relax them, and was rewarded with activity where it mattered. Something had worked for his neighbour as well. The streams dwindled and fell silent simultaneously, and he was shaking himself dry when he heard a clink through the wall.

His neighbour had put a glass down, but it was ridiculous to fancy they’d been using a glassful of water to imitate his sounds. He pulled a tissue out of the box by the sink to blow his nose. As he dropped the wad in the toilet he heard a nasal trumpeting in the adjacent bathroom.

If it sounded very much like his, did it have much leeway to sound different? Hooking the toilet seat with the side of his shoe, he let it drop along with its lid on the pedestal, and was unsurprised to hear an echo through the wall. Both toilets flushed while he turned back to the sink. He had barely started brushing his teeth when the sound was imitated in the other bathroom.

The old wreck in the mirror let his wrinkled mouth hang open, displaying all his front teeth and the gap one had left last month. How could such a tiny noise be audible through the wall? How could his? He decided he’d heard an echo until another bout of brushing was copied beyond the mockingly blank wall. His neighbour must be making the noise in some other way, unless they were attacking their teeth with a savagery that sounded demonic. ‘Hope they all drop out of your head,’ Ferguson spluttered and spat in the sink.