Environmental Humanities and the Uncanny

Ecoculture, Literature and Religion

Rod Giblett

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429576652
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Littérature
• Categoría: Critique littéraire

Sigmund Freud's essay 'The Uncanny' is celebrating a century since publication. It is arguably his greatest and most fruitful contribution to the study of culture and the environment. Environmental Humanities and the Uncanny brings into the open neglected aspects of the uncanny in this famous essay in its centenary year and in the work of those before and after him, such as Friedrich Schelling, Walter Benjamin, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Bram Stoker.

This book does so by focussing on religion, especially at a time and for a world in which some sectors of the monotheisms are in aggressive, and sometimes violent, contention against those of other monotheisms, and even against other sectors within their own monotheism. The chapter on Schelling's uncanny argues that monotheisms come out of polytheism and makes the plea for polytheism central to the whole book. It enables rethinking the relationships between mythology and monotheistic and polytheistic religions in a culturally and politically liberatory and progressive way. Succeeding chapters consider the uncanny cyborg, the uncanny and the fictional, and the uncanny and the Commonwealth, concluding with a chapter on Taoism as a polytheistic religion.

Building on the author's previous work in Environmental Humanities and Theologies in bringing together theories of religion and the environment, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, ecocultural studies and religion.

1
The uncanniness of Freud’s uncanny

The concept/metaphor of the uncanny is arguably the greatest and most fruitful contribution of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) to the study of culture, nature and the environment. Freud developed the uncanny in his essay of this title first published in 1919 in the psychoanalytic journal Imago. It was translated into English by Alix Strachey in 1925 for Freud’s Collected Papers. This translation was then ‘considerably modified’ for her husband James’ Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Freud, 1955) and republished by Penguin in their ‘Penguin Freud Library’ 30 years later and so 60 years after the original publication in English (Freud, 1985). A new translation was commissioned and published by Penguin early this century (Freud, 2003).

While a whole swag of Freud’s concepts and ideas (such as the Oedipus complex, penis envy and so on) are critiqued and problematized, or pooh-poohed and dismissed as the years go on, the uncanny endures for a century as a useful tool in the toolbox of cultural criticism, literary theory and political and philosophical critique. Freud (1955, p. 219, cf. 2003, p. 124) defines the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’ ‘What is known of old and long familiar’ is specifically, though Freud does not mention it, what Randolph (2001b, p. 97) calls ‘the mother-infant embrace,’ both in-utero and ex-utero. For Freud (1955, p. 244, 2003, p. 151) the uncanny is literally unheimlich, unhomely, but also homely, contradictory feelings which he found associated in the minds of adult males with female genitalia and in his own mind with the first home of individual human life in the mother’s womb. The uncanny entails a return of the repressed.

The return of the repressed occurs here and elsewhere for Freud as he does not refer to the mother – his or anybody else’s – or to her body, or specifically her womb. The maternal body is repressed in and by Freud in his essay on the uncanny as Randolph (2001a, p. 184, 2001b, p. 97) points out. Freud’s uncanny is uncanny in which the repressed maternal body returns. Freud (2003, p. 151) relates that ‘it often happens that neurotic men state that to them there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. But what they find uncanny [“unhomely”] is actually the entrance to man’s old “home,” the place where everyone once lived.’ Freud is, of course, referring to the womb, but seems a bit squeamish about doing so explicitly. ‘Man’s’ old home is the womb, whereas the old men’s home is (the entrance to) the tomb. The womb is more than a place (where action occurs, or a site where action takes place; it is not a passive receptacle). It is where the processes of life begin and are nurtured. It is also where the first bond occurs in-utero, and the mother’s body is where the first bond occurs ex-utero.

Life in-utero is a time and space when, as Freud (1955, p. 235, cf. 2003, p. 143) describes it euphemistically, ‘the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people.’ Freud (1955, p. 235) goes on to remark that ‘these factors are partly responsible for the impression of uncanniness.’ Both Freud’s euphemisms of ‘the external world’ and ‘other people’ for the mother’s body are factors partly responsible for the impression of uncanniness in Freud’s essay on the uncanny. Life in-utero and ex-utero is a time and space when the ego had not set itself against anything, including the external world, and from other people, such as the mother. The mother herself, as Randolph (2001b, p. 98) puts it following Melanie Klein, is ‘the infant’s “external world”’ and the ‘other people’ Freud vaguely refers to is the mother. The ego was a part and parcel of the inside world in-utero and the uncanny other, the mother, and of the outside world ex-utero. In 1919 in ‘The Uncanny’ Freud misses ‘the whole point about mothering’ as Randolph (2001a, p. 186) puts it. Twenty years later in his London notes of 1938 Freud (1975, p. 299) gets closer to the point about mothering by mimicking the child: ‘The breast is a part of me, I am the breast.’ All objects are initially conflated with one another and equated with the mother, or parts of her, especially her breasts, as she/they are the primary object for the young infant. Melanie Klein, as Randolph (2001b, p. 98) puts it, ‘gave the mother her due,’ as Margaret Mahler did too in her work on psycho-symbiosis and Jessica Benjamin in her work on ‘the bonds of love.’¹

The home place and processes, or perhaps more precisely the ‘unhome,’ of the uncanny is not only the mother’s womb, but also the wetland, the first home of life on the planet in the earth’s womb and tomb from both of which new life springs and is nurtured (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 2, 2018b, chapter 1). The wetland is the uncanny place and process par excellence. It is also the home, or unhome, of alligators and crocodiles, the ‘king’ of the tropical wetland, the obverse of the temperate dryland, and the archetypal swamp monsters par excellence. In some cultures, the alligator and crocodile are not only monstrous, but also divine. In Judeo-Christian theology, the monstrous and divine are divided, and the monstrous demonized; in the uncanny, the divine and monstrous are re-united.

Chapter 2 traces how monstrous alligators and crocodiles are vehicles and vectors for the uncanny for a variety of writers from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. The artefacts of colonization, such as the table with the carved alligators (or crocodiles) in the story by L. G. Moberly that Freud recounts in his essay on the uncanny, are one means by which not only the repressed returns, but also the means by which one returns to the repressed. Rather them seeing alligators and crocodiles as monsters to demonize and destroy, chapter two argues for a more environmentally and animal friendly view of them as monstrous figures to fear and respect living in their separate habitats to humans and as companion species on the home planet earth.

The uncanny is applicable not only to the b(l)ack waters of the swamp, but also to the dark underworld of the city which for Freud and Walter Benjamin were an object, or more precisely abject, of horror and fascination, whereas for some nineteenth-century writers on the city its underside was exclusively an object of horror and for some twenty-first century writers the slum is an object of fascination. The dark underside of the city is often figured in terms of colonial places and spaces, such as the jungle and the swamp. Chapter 3 argues that these writers are ‘placist’ in that they ascribe characteristics to a (human-made) place in the city, such as the slums, that were previously ascribed to a place not made with human hands, or made with ancient human hands (jungle, abyss, nether-land, swamps, etc.), such as darkness, decomposition and disease. As monsters are demonized, so are monstrous places. These places are theologized and moralized as places of evil, the monstrous and the demonic. They need to be detheologized and remythified in much more environmentally friendly terms of, for example, thinking both the city and the swamp as the body.

Other thinkers and writers before and after Freud contributed to the growing body of thinking and writing about the uncanny. In developing his understanding of the uncanny Freud was reliant on those who had gone before, not least the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who makes a cameo appearance in Freud’s essay. Chapter 4 brings into the open the uncanniness of Schelling’s uncanny in Freud’s essay, including some aspects of the uncanny ignored by Freud (as a lapsed or secular Jew), such as its birth in mythology and polytheism, and its association with the divine and monstrous (ignored by both Freud and Schelling). It also explores the uncanniness of Schelling’s uncanny in the work of some Anglophone Schellingians and some writers on Freud, psychoanalysis, the uncanny and the unconscious, such as Vidler’s (1992) work on ‘the architectural uncanny’ of ‘the modern unhomely.’

Chapter 4 makes the plea central to Environmental Humanities and the Uncanny for valuing polytheism over the monotheisms, and over those monotheistic sectors, contending against each other, often aggressively and violently, in the world today with often disastrous and devastating consequences for people and places with loss of life and ruination of cities and countrysides. It argues for the detheologization and remythification of thinking religion through mythology and for polytheistic poetics as a way of bringing being and living with the earth into closer affinity with nature. It follows in the footsteps and develops the thinking along these lines of Mules (2014). Environmental Humanities and the Uncanny prefers polytheology, the dialogic study of multiple, multifarious and polysemic religions, gods and goddesses with a multivocal play of voices traced in performances, to monotheology, the study of one monologic religion and the capital ‘G’ God with a monopoly on a single, univocal truth inscribed in a written scripture. It also considers monsters and the monstrous (neglected by Schelling and Freud) as and at the intersection of the divine and the human that became separated and the monstrous demonized in the development of the monotheisms, and later rationalism.

The normative modern relationship between monsters and reason is depicted by Francisco Goya in his 1799 etching, ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.’² It depicts a sleeping figure dreaming of monstrous owls, bats and a cat larger than a domesticated one, perhaps a feral cat or a wild feline, such as a leopard. The title and etching imply that monsters are produced in the nightmare of reason when it is sleeping. Monsters do indeed lurk in the sleep of reason. They return to haunt dreams from the monstrous repressed of reason, not because dreams produce the monstrous, but because the sleep of monsters produces reason. Reason tried to put monsters to sleep. Monsters precede reason (as mythology shows). The birth of monsters precedes the birth of reason (as the Bible and Beowulf show (see Giblett, 2018b, chapter 2)). The (putting to) sleep of monsters made reason possible. The Christian-induced sleep and repression of monsters produced the bad dream of rationalism and the Enlightenment, in which the repressed monstrous returns (as Castle (1995) shows for that movement and period).³ The uncanny both returns to the repressed monstrous in the past, and returns the repressed monstrous to presence in the present.

Religion

The uncanny is religion without the boundaries of mere reason. It is contrary to Kant’s ‘religion within the boundaries of mere reason’ of the 1790s (Kant, 1998). This is not to imply that the uncanny is irrational; it is pre-rational and post-rational, before and after reason historically and chronologically, and ex-rational, outside and after reason conceptually and experientially. In the 1940s Georges Bataille invoked Kant for the title of the second part of Theory of Religion by entitling it ‘Religion within the Limits of Reason’ without acknowledging, referencing or discussing Kant (Bataille, 1992, pp. 7 and 63–104). For Bataille as an erstwhile associate of the French surrealists who were aficionados of that which is outside the limits of reason, such as dreams, this seems bizarre.

In the conclusion to Theory of Religion Bataille repeated as a throwaway provocation the title of Goya’s etching without attribution, comment or elaboration (see Bataille, 1992, p. 113). In the body of this book, Bataille (1992, p. 57) defined religion in Proustian terms as ‘the search for lost intimacy.’ One wonders, intimacy with what? With God, time, place, nature, animals, plants, people, bodies, gods, goddesses? Or all of them? Intimacy, as Bataille implies, does not necessarily have a fixed object or a stable subject, but is, in Julia Kristeva’s (1982) terms, abject (between and prior to subject and object). Religion is not the search for a lost object. Religion is the search for lost intimacy of and between time, place, nature, animals, plants, people, bodies, gods, goddesses and God. The uncanny is the vehicle and vector that enacts this intimacy – whether it is searched for or not. The uncanny can come searching for the dreamer – awake or asleep.

A century before Bataille, Henry David Thoreau (1958, p. 52, 2013, p. 89) defined religion more affirmatively than Bataille when he wrote in a letter dated 8th September 1841 that ‘our religion is where our love is.’ God is not love (contra the New Testament Epistle of 1 John 4: 8 in which ‘God is love’), but religion is love, or more precisely where our love is. When one finds love, one finds religion. When one loses (a) love, as Thoreau did when his beloved older brother died from lockjaw (tetanus) and his sweetheart rejected him on her father’s orders, one can become lost, as Thoreau did for a while. The uncanny is the search for lost love, or lost love searching one out, often horrifically, as it did for Thoreau who developed sympathetic symptoms of his brother’s lockjaw and who never married. The uncanny is not the search for a lost object of love (as that has gone and is lost), but the search for (lost) love. Thoreau found love (and so religion) in and for the swamps which he loved to walk in and write about, which he entered as the ‘Holy of Holies’ and where he found ‘the strength, the marrow’ of the body of the earth (Thoreau, 1982, p. 613, see also Giblett, 1996, pp. 229–239).

Thoreau’s swamp religion, however, is not where love is to be found for some. In Western culture swamps and other wetlands, such as marshes, mires, morasses, bogs, lagoons, sloughs, shallow lakes and estuaries, etc., have been seen traditionally, or at least in patriarchal times, as places of darkness, disease and death, horror and the uncanny, melancholy and the monstrous – in short, as black waters. They have often been regarded as home to some sort of horrifying marsh monster or swamp serpent lurking in their murky waters. Up until the 1890s it was thought that the miasmatic vapours that rose from stagnant pools caused malaria (which means literally ‘bad air’). The perception persisted from ancient times that miasma also cause melancholia or depression. Wetlands have been filled or drained in order not only to prevent malaria and melancholia, but also because they pose an obstacle to agricultural and urban development.⁴ Swamps are where hate and horror are for some, and where melancholy and depression were not for Thoreau (as we will see shortly). The uncanny is the name for this ambivalent love/hate religious relationship with monstrous places, such as swamps or slums (as we will see in ch...