'I will say at once that
both courses lead to the same result: the “uncanny” is that
class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar' p1
'Jentsch believes
that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny
sensations is created when there is intellectual uncertainty
whether an object is alive or not, and when an in-animate object becomes too much like an animate one.'
'when this stage has been left
behind the double takes on a different aspect. From having
been an assurance of immortality, he becomes the ghastly
harbinger of death.' p9
'As, for instance, when one is lost in
a forest in high altitudes, caught, we will suppose, by the
mountain mist, and when every endeavor to find the
marked or familiar path ends again and again in a return to
one and the same spot, recognizable by some particular
landmark. Or when one wanders about in a dark, strange
room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and collides
for the hundredth time with the same piece of furniture—a
situation which, indeed, has been made irresistibly
comic by Mark Twain, through the wild extravagance of
his narration' p10
'For instance, we of
course attach no importance to the event when we give up
a coat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, say, 62;
or when we find that our cabin on board ship is numbered
62. But the impression is altered if two such events, each
in itself indifferent, happen close together, if we come
across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we
begin to notice that everything which has a number—
addresses, hotel-rooms, compartments in railway-trains—
always has the same one, or one which at least contains the
same figures. We do feel this to be “uncanny,” and unless
a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition
he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to
this obstinate recurrence of a number, taking it, perhaps, as
an indication of the span of life allotted to him.'
'. In our great
14
cities, placards announce lectures which will tell us how to
get into touch with the souls of the departed; and it cannot
be denied that many of the most able and penetrating
minds among our scientific men have come to the conclusion,
especially towards the close of their lives, that a contact
of this kind is not utterly impossible. Since practically
all of us still think as savages do on this topic, it is no matter
for surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so
strong within us and always ready to come to the surface at
any opportunity.' p14
'The uncanny effect of epilepsy and of madness has the
same origin. The ordinary person sees in them the workings
of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellow-man but
which at the same time he is dimly aware of in a remote
corner of his own being.' p14
'Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at
the wrist,
21 feet which dance by themselves22
—all these
have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially
when, as in the last instance, they prove able to move of
themselves in addition.' p14
'To many people the idea of being buried
alive while appearing to be dead is the most uncanny thing
of all.' p14
Play on the Double and how can I make my machine drawings uncanny through doubling up on human activity and machine copies?
'The somewhat paradoxical result is
that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in
fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the
second place that there are many more means of creating
uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.' p18
'The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to
move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts
all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings
in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny
effect in reality has it in his story. But in this case,
too, he can increase his effect and multiply it far beyond
what could happen in reality, by bringing about events
which never or very rarely happen in fact. He takes advantage,
as it were, of our supposedly surmounted superstitiousness;
he deceives us into thinking that he is giving us
the sober truth, and then after all oversteps the bounds of
possibility. We react to his inventions as we should have
reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen
through his trick it is already too late and the author has
19
achieved his object; but it must be added that his success is
not unalloyed. We retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind
of grudge against the attempted deceit...' p18-19
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