Narrating (against) the Uncanny: Goethe's "Ballade" versus Hoffmann's Der Sandmann

Narrating (against) the Uncanny:Goethe's "Ballade" versus Hoffmann's Der Sandmann Christian P. Weber The Aesthetic Uncanny, or: Why Children Need Stories Sigmund Freud opened his famous essay "Das Unheimliche" ("The Uncanny") with the gesture of acknowledging his unease about the quasi-uncanny intrusion he was about to commit by venturing into a domain outside the field of his psychoanalytical expertise: "the subject of aesthetics."1 He committed this transgression nonetheless and featured E. T. A. Hoffmann's story of Der Sandmann (The Sandman) as his primary case study to examine a series of motifs that have been labeled as "uncanny" in literature. However, at the end of his excursion into what was foreign territory to him, Freud redrew the strict line of demarcation between a psychoanalytic and aesthetic inquiry of the uncanny: We might say that these preliminary results have satisfied psycho-analytic interest in the problem of the uncanny, and that what remains probably calls for an aesthetic enquiry. But that would be to open the door to doubts about what exactly is the value of our general contention that the uncanny proceeds from something familiar which has been repressed. (246) This is a surprising, if not self-contradictory conclusion of the essay, because Freud took both the examples that supported as well as those that contradicted his theory from the realm of literature. By admitting to suppressing his rising doubts about the value of his results and closing the door to an aesthetic inquiry, he intentionally exposed his essay to the possibility of a haunting return—that of his repressed doubts in the form of future criticism. This article aims to reopen the door that Freud closed and to challenge, or at least complement, his psychoanalytical approach with an aesthetic inquiry. What kind of "doubts" Freud had in mind becomes evident when we consult the rivaling theory of Ernst Jentsch from 1906, who defined the uncanny as "intellectual" or "psychical uncertain[ty]" for distinguishing between the real and imagined, and as "doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate."2 To promote his thesis of the "return of the repressed," Freud at first vehemently argued against Jentsch's cognitive and aesthetic approach, but later acknowledged that "an uncanny effect is often and easily produced [End Page 79] when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on" (243)—only to withdraw again this concession to Jentsch later (as noted above). Taking all this into account, the uncanny unsettles no less than three binary distinctions: alive vs. dead, conscious vs. unconscious, and, finally, imaginary/symbolic vs. real. Of these three dichotomies, only the latter belongs to an aesthetic inquiry of the uncanny. Navigating and negotiating between the imaginary, symbolic, and the real belongs to the realm of fiction,3 and it is therefore no coincidence that Jentsch and Freud relied heavily on literary representations in order to conceptualize the uncanny. Freud suggested, however, differentiating "between the uncanny that we actually experience and the uncanny that we merely picture or read about" (246), whereas Jentsch deemed the distancing effect of literary fiction necessary for coping with the uncanny and turning it into a pleasurable aesthetic experience: Not the least pleasure of a literary work (or of a play, and so on) lies in the empathy of the reader or audience with all emotional excitement to which the characters of the play, novel, or ballad, and so forth, are subject. In life we do not like to expose ourselves to severe emotional blows, but in the theatre or while reading we gladly let ourselves be influenced in this way: we hereby experience certain powerful excitements which awake in us a strong feeling for life, without having to accept the consequences of the causes of the unpleasant moods if they were to have the opportunity to appear in corresponding form on their own account, so to speak.4 Literature thus...