Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheit Uncanny") liche (The Sigmund Freud; James Strachey; Helene Cixous; Robert Dennome New Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 3, Thinking in the Arts, Sciences, and Literature (Spring, 1976), 525-548+619-645, Stable URL: hhtp//links,jstor-org/sici?sici=0028-6087%281971621%297%3A3%3C525%3AFAIPAR%3E2,0,CO%3B2-E, ‘New Literary History is currently published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hhup:/www.jstororg/about/terms.huml. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at butp:/svww jstor.org/journals/jhup html Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals, For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact jstor-info@ jstor.org, bhupswww jstor.org/ Fri Apr 9 16:56:58 2004Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “uncanny” ) ‘Héléne Cixous HESE PAGES ARE MEANT as a reading divided between literature and psychoanalysis, with special attention paid to what is pro- duced and what escapes in the unfolding of a text, sometimes, led by Freud and at other times by his double. Indeed, Freud's text? may strike us to be les a discourse than a strange theoretical novel. ‘There is something “savage” in the Unheimlicke, a breath or a pro- vocative air which at times catches the novelist himself off guard, over- taking him and restraining him. Freud and the object of his desi (icc, the truth about the Unkeimliche) are fired by reciprocal inspira- tion. As a commentary on uncertainty, with its tightly drawn net mended by its plots and their resolutions, this long text of Freud em- ploys a peculiarly disquieting method to track down the concept das Unheimliche, the Disquieting Strangeness the Uncanny. Nothing turns ‘out less reassuring for the reader than this niggling, cautious, yet wily and interminable pursuit (of “something”—be it a domain, an emo- tional movement, a concept, impossible to determine yet variable in its form, intensity, quality, and content). Nor does anything prove to bbe more fleeting than this search whose movement constitutes the labyrinth which instigates it; the sense of strangeness imposes its secret necessity everywhere. ‘The ensuing unfolding whose operation is con- tradictory is accomplished by the author's double: Hesitation. We are faced, then, with a text and its hesitating shadow, and their double escapade. As for plots, what is brought together here is quickly undone, ‘what asserts itself becomes suspect; each thread leads to its net or to some kind of disentanglement. In the labyrinthian space, many char- acters alluded to as witnesses and well-informed persons appear and are quickly relegated to the comer of some street or paragraph. What unfolds without fail before the reader's eyes is a kind of puppet theater in which real dolls or fake dolls, real and simulated life, are manipu- lated by a sovereign but capricious stage-setter. The net is tightly stretched, bowed, and tangled; the scenes are centered and dispersed narratives are begun and left in suspension. Just as the reader thinks526 [NEW LITERARY HISTORY he is following some demonstration, he senses that the surface is crack- ing: the text slides a few roots under the ground while it allows others to be lofted in the air. What in one instance appears a figure of science seems later to resemble some type of fiction. This text proceeds as its own metaphor, as Mallarmé recalls Hamlet, reading in a book about himself while noticing that memory, in retrospect, serves to prophesy. Oh, my prophetic soul! ‘A text dealing with the nature of incertitude is approached by the reader with a sense of distrust and fascination, for in the exchange which takes place between the text itself and its reading, in this enticing interplay where the text always emerges a step ahead, the doubtful ele- ments of the text necessarily engender doubt in its reader. This phe- nomenon may account for the reader's sense of pleasure and boldness. We shall examine the strange pleasure incurred in the reading of the Freudian text and of the inseparable and concomitant uneasiness which parallels Freud’s own, describes it, and which can hardly be distinguished from it. Freud leads his investigation of the frightening object which con- stitutes the nucleus of the Unheimliche in two different ways. We shall allow ourselves to be guided at times by and against Freud’s design, by what is certain and by what is hypothetical, by science and fiction, by the object that is “symbolized” and by that which “symbolizes.” We shall be guided by ambivalence and in conformity with the un- decidable nature of all that touches the Unkeimliche: life and fiction, life-as-fiction, the Oedipus myth, the castration complex, and literary creation. Undecided, the analyst, the psychologist, the reader, the writer, the multitude of named and anonymous subjects which are brought up and which disappear into the fabric of the text (they have, indeed, been thwarted by Freud himself) go along two routes which at least lead us back to our dissatisfaction. First of all, in allow- ing ourselves to be led, we are submissive to Freud’s entreaty, and thus we share in his disillusionment: because the complexity of the analysis and its suffocation go hand-in-hand with the uncertainty of the analyst. Is this a play or a replay with hesitation? Doesn't the analysis which brings up the whole question of repressions imprint them at once upon the one who undertakes the analysis? Everything takes place as if the Unheimliche went back to Freud himself in a vicious interchange be- tween pursued and pursuer; as if one of Freud’s repressions acted as the motor re-presenting at each moment the analysis of the repression which Freud was analyzing: the Unkeimliche is at the root of Freud’s analysis. Our role as readers caught in the Unheimliche is a curious double of the role of the other reader, that of the Sand-Man. Accord-