Notes on Photography: The Uncanny Double and Photography

We should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope, or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind. On that basis, psychical locality will correspond to a place inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. 

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams 

Freud compares consciousness to photography several times. And in his essay on the uncanny, he famously analyses ‘The Sandman’, a tale by E. T. A. Hoffman named after a mythical figure who steals children’s eyes. In the story, the character who represents the Sandman has two identities: Coppola and Coppelius. In the former guise, he’s an optician, who also makes eyes for automata; in the latter, an alchemist. In Italian, coppo means ‘eye-socket’, while coppella means ‘assay-crucible’: a white-hot orifice, overflowing with molten light.

Self-knowledge is a prize I pursue through a labyrinth, towards its centre, where I wait for myself. I’m both Oedipus and the sphinx; Theseus and the minotaur. But who lays out the labyrinth? Who carries out the act of repression that banishes an idea to its underworld? In other words, who maps the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious? He’s a censor who controls access to consciousness. He’s an invisible homunculus who watches a screen inside my head at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. He’s my double, who, in the essay on the uncanny, troubles Freud in the form of mannequins and automata, and is initially identified as an avatar of the id: primordial narcissism, which seeks, in duplication, a defence against annihilation.

As is often the way with Freudian concepts, and the effect is especially appropriate here, the double also stands for its opposite (just as unheimlich may also mean heimlich): having once been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. In this guise, it doesn’t affirm my existence; it usurps my place. And is thereby revealed as an avatar of the superego, which performs the function of self-observation and self-criticism, and which In the pathological case of delusions of observation ... becomes isolated, split off from the ego, and discernible to the clinician.

The double is the child of both Coppelius and Coppola: alchemy and optics. He’s my shadow, and my reflection. That is to say, the double is the child of photography, which uses alchemy and optics to combine shadows and reflections. Photography is an attempt to conjure and bind this hidden double, the ghost in the machine. I force him to manifest inside the frame, like a genie released from a bottle. He escapes: not out of the image, but into the image. 

Literary Fiction or Horror?

What kind of story is The Angels of L19? It’s published by a press whose mission statement emphasises literary fiction. I also submitted the manuscript to several publishers of speculative fiction, but when I met with an editor at one of these presses, she insisted she wasn’t the right home for my book: that it needed to be published by a ‘literary’ press. So there did seem to be a consensus on that point.

If we’re talking about the shape of my book’s plot, its structure, then it’s a redeemed tragedy (I have a guest essay upcoming on Lithub that will talk about this in relation to Tolkien’s idea of the eucatastrophe). But it can also be described as a horror novel.

There are four specific strands within the horror tradition that seem important here:

1) The Gothic. All horror novels are the children or grandchildren of Gothic novels, but in this case the genealogy is particularly clear. Haunted houses, doubles, labyrinths, supernatural beings, demonic pacts, the decaying corpse as the ultimate challenge to human reason: my book features all these Gothic motifs. But I’d particularly like to emphasise the idea of the Gothic as being about the return of the repressed, and the uncovering of secrets, including but not limited to the awful secret of what happens to our bodies after we die.

2) The Uncanny. There’s a prolific literature on this concept, often drawing on Freud’s seminal essay on the subject, but I’ll go with Mark Fisher’s definition: uncanny fiction is 'set in “our” world – only that world is no longer “ours” any more, it no longer coincides with itself, it has been estranged.’ The clearest example of this in my book is the semi-detached house: that is, a house accompanied by its own mirrored double, its own conjoined twin, to which it is sutured by a common wall that both joins and separates its two halves. A couple of key episodes in my story try to draw out the strangeness of this, with my doubled, mirrored house standing for the complex relations between my two protagonists, Robert and Tracey, who live on either side of its common wall.

3) The Weird. Again I’ll go with Fisher’s definition: ‘The Weird … depends upon the difference between two (or more) worlds - with “world” here having an ontological sense. It is not a question of an empirical difference – the aliens are not from another planet, they are invaders from another reality system.’ I talk about the applicability of the weird to my representation of angels and demons in an essay at Ginger Nuts of Horror.

4) Folk Horror. This is a more recent variation, which is generally about the hidden presence of atavistic forces within our degraded modern landscapes, which then reassert themselves and erupt into our disenchanted present. But while most versions of this focus on pre-Christian paganism, and often on forces associated with nature, I’m more interested in Christianity and medieval Catholicism as atavistic forces underlying modern secular life. This links back to the Gothic: in early Gothic novels, one of the repressed secrets that reasserts itself against Protestant rationality is precisely the medieval, which is associated with the irrational and superstition – the ruined abbeys and monasteries that were the preferred sites of Gothic encounters were ruined because of Henry VIII and the English Reformation. The Gothic is therefore haunted by the ghost of Catholicism – and so is my book.

None of these interests are antithetical to literary fiction, but their presence definitely suggests I’ve written a horror novel. 

To sum up:

Do you like literary fiction? Then you might like my novel.

Do you like speculative fiction, especially horror? Then you might also like my novel.

'The Uncanny' by Sigmund Freud

Eyes in The Terminator and Blade Runner: