Our first regular session, with Professor Simone Marchesi of French and Italian. We read Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” and studied Francisco Goya’s nightmarish drawing, “El sueño de la razon produce monstruos” (the sleep of reason produces monsters).
5 replies on “The Sleep of Reason”
After Prof. Marchesi’s wonderful lecture, I found myself pondering the diversity of interpretations of the Goya piece. The ambivalence of the creatures surrounding the person, as well as their uncanniness, creates a scene that implies either refuge or torment in sleep. What, then, is there to say about the monsters that torment ourselves? Can we even interpret the creatures in the drawing as real? That which is unfamiliar, regardless of whether it exists or not, insists on encroaching upon what is meant to be a position of rest. I’m still intrigued (and a touch confused) by the meaning of the title, which is often the point. I want to think more about the tension between reason and the uncanny, and whether it’s true that the monstrously unfamiliar is automatically horrifying.
(Apologies for the lateness of this response–I completely forgot amidst the bustle of midterms).
Just a pendant to these great comments, especially Sam’s, pointing to jokes as an expression of the uncanny. At our first meeting, we observed that My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a funny book—even if we did not always feel comfortable laughing. Jokes often probe us where we are psychologically or ideologically vulnerable. Was there anything monstrous about Moshfegh’s narrator? Does Freud offer a clarifying framework in any way, monstrosity? See also Abigail above on borders, and Beatrix on the unconscious, two slightly different ways of thinking about monstrosity (as a hybrid, and as a survival or a return of something buried; and of course, they’re not mutually exclusive). I’m on the lookout for questions that recur over the year, and we are certainly at a moment when joking in public easily goes wrong, becomes/appears monstrous. We might keep this one in mind, the potential monstrosity of the joke.
Towards the end of our discussion with Professor Marchesi, Aliya reminded us that heimlich is contained within unheimlich and directed us back to Freud: “Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich” (4). Monsters, to me, exist within and occupy spaces of ambivalence. They dwell in borders: between life and death, nature and artifice, insides and outsides; of corporeality, sex, gender, technology. Are monsters (un)heimlich because we cannot (dis)place them? As embodiments of difference, do monsters threaten to do away with difference as we understand it?
I was particularly interested by Professor Marchesi’s explanation of the joke as one of the four ways the uncanny expresses itself. I’ve always wondered why it is that if a joke takes more than a second or two to register, even it’s a really good one, it falls flat. You might acknowledge that it was funny, but you won’t actually laugh; the moment has passed. Rather, the most effective jokes catch us off guard, wresting our instincts (Freud would no doubt call them repressed) from the clutches of our cultivated, measured worldviews. But that disconnect is only fleeting: soon we regain composure, and often we scold ourselves for finding humor in what we ought not to have. Seemingly, then, the uncanny thrives on the element of surprise.
Happy October, everyone! I’m writing just after our second meeting of the year, an appropriate start to Halloween month/spooky season: a session devoted to monsters and the uncanny. We began by looking at several monsters on campus (Blair Arch, the Cyclab, and a medusa-themed production poster); monsters are all around us! Then, we discussed Francisco Goya’s El sueño de la razon produce monstruos: Reason, sleep/dreaming, monsters, and production. We debated posture (is this person asleep?), setting (are we inside or outside?), and the monsters themselves (nocturnal animals, as Rachel pointed out). Goya’s etching, we can agree, operates through categorical uncertainties, as monsters do. These are hybrid creatures.
Professor Marchesi led us through a discussion surrounding how the Sleep of Reason produces monsters. Examples brought to the table included the Manhattan Project, the French Revolution, Frankenstein, the Salem Witch trials, Jurassic Park, the Nazi regime/extermination system, and Stalinism, all examples of technology surpassing reason to disastrous, gruesome, or monstrous effect. When we debated manifestations of the uncanny like automatons, AI, robots, and various animation, we agreed that genre greatly determines effect, as does form, intent, and principle (my insistence that the idea of toys coming to life is, in fact, uncanny, even if it isn’t scary or within the genre of horror). Working with Freud’s article on the uncanny, we discussed why we are drawn to it despite our uneasiness. Through the uncanny or the exploration of the proximate other, we can explore liminal zones. What does it mean to be human? Where does human end and other begin? Where does the self end and other begin? We can revisit stages of life, through the uncanny, that preceded Reason, and we can contemplate ways of thinking that we have surpassed. Whether we seek it our not, we concluded, the uncanny manifests in four main ways 1) unconscious symptoms that express supressed impulses or desires (e.g. brutally murdering your neighbor with a baseball bat), 2) jokes: controlled forms of taboo aggression 3) literature: space to entertain abandoned modes of thinking, and 4) dreams themselves, which, like the etymology of the heimlich/unheimlick are not paradoxical to reason but contain it.
I’m particularly interested in our discussion of how monsters recur and the idea that the uncanny is essentially the reappearance of a forgotten or buried experience/mode of thought. Before the stage of reasoning, children cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy, between the imagination and the external world, between an infant’s own hand and other objects that do not belong to the body. Once the human mind recognizes its own hand, it will never again seem foreign. The experience of the uncanny brings us back to forgotten stages, and I thought it was fascinating to consider the recurrence of forms of monsters. Our only recent examples of new monsters, related to industrialization in the modern world, were Dracula (reinvented vampire, Frankenstein (reinvented golem), and the zombie (reinvented undead). In a sense, since all of these are reinvented from pre-existing traditional monsters or sinister characters from folklore, they cannot even truly be considered “new.”
This summer, I had a fascinating conversation with a class about the idea of all monsters operating with a double, or even a team. Are monsters ever truly alone, and do they ever truly disappear? Consider it. Far more often than not, monsters have doubles, partners, inversions, or recurring manifestations. Three exceptions to the rule (though can these even be considered monsters?): 1) Frankenstein: solitary creature, loneliness is his demon 2) Shelob (from Lord of the Rings): lives in darkness on her own, serves nobody other than herself, immortal (does not recur) 3) Geryon: unique monster, operates as vehicle in Dante’s Inferno, truly lacks a companion or alternate form, although he is three-in-one (if you’d like more on this, ask Professor Marchesi, Priyanka, or me. Or visit the Princeton Dante project or read John Hollander’s version of the Inferno).
Monsters, like the uncanny, operate through recurring appearances, (often exaggerated) forms, and fears, acting on categorical uncertainties and in hybrid zones to merge the familiar with the unfamiliar. This is why we can’t look away, why we love them.