The Uncanny by Nicholas Royle
PART TWO OF MY REVIEW CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/the-uncanny-by-nicholas-royle/
MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS (2003)
My previous review of this author’s novel QUILT: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/novel-doodlings/
…and his THIS THING CALLED LITERATURE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/this-thing-called-literature-andrew-bennett-nicholas-royle/
….and his AN ENGLISH GUIDE TO BIRD-WATCHING: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/an-english-guide-to-birdwatching-a-novel-by-nicholas-royle/
…and his THE TRANCE OF READING and ELIZABETH BOWEN AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE NOVEL: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/12/the-trance-of-reading/
DAVID BOWIE, ENID BLYTON AND THE SUN MACHINE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/11/29/david-bowie-enid-blyton-and-the-sun-machine-nicholas-royle/
When I continue to read this book, I intend to comment on it in the comment stream below…
9. Inexplicable
“: the uncanny undoes any certainty about what is real and what is not, about where literature ends and real life or science or psychoanalysis or philosophy or literary criticism begins.”
Indeed!
My next job, as result of this book, is somehow to read the story INEXPLICABLE by L.G. Moberly from the Strand Magazine 1917 (importantly factored in by Freud to his essay entitled ‘The Uncanny’). I shall then add a review of it to my reviews of other Uncanny stories listed HERE and then return to this review of the Royle book to further discuss.
I have now managed to read and review it in ironically double-quick time:
10. Buried Alive
The first few pages of this chapter bring back to what I said about Ligotti, the exhumation from burial-in-utero forced out by Mummy, then life and pain via light against darkness towards a different Mummification of nothingness, making the whole thing worth nemonisimg ab initio as never happening in the first place? And, now, Ligotti’s leitmotif of ‘soft black stars’ is here in the Royle re-arranged from the Freud Uncanny essay as section breaks!
Before continuing reading this chapter further, I shall re-read and review Poe’s ‘The Premature Burial’ to be set alongside all my previous reviews of Poe. (A po is what I remember my mother and grandmother using when caught short at night or because they did not want to visit the cold outside loo. Me, too.)
And so it has been:
This chapter by Royle is deep and detailed, and I sense it is a temporary sleep or sloop, before the ‘magic pinions and wizard wheels’ start turning again 20 years after THE UNCANNY was first published, not Freud’s but Royle’s: a ‘Premature Burial’ within this topic of study. Still buried by the casket of his name but flirting with the freedom of anonymity via voluntary severance or even sharing a relatively celebrated name with another person in a different but similar field of fiction writing or non-fiction study – and I see from the contents list, this book has a chapter later entitled THE DOUBLE.
Anyway, after dealing, in this current chapter, with Dostoevsky and Harold Bloom as well as with Poe, I relished that many other literary figures with celebrated name-traps have also been given textual Premature Burial references on these pages within diagrammatic caskets or coffins!
11. Déjà Vu
“Excluded, déjà vu is more uncannily active in Freud’s essay than if it were included.”
Both a Freudian slip, as explicitly mentioned here, and not a Freudian slip. As this expression when defined in dictionaries, seems to be its own version of the ‘double’, but a double of opposite meanings, a fact of which I was unaware until now. Another deep and detailed chapter, one about this expression vis à vis the nature of returns in the uncanny and the Uncanny, and all the nuances and paradoxes of false and real memories including their preternatural sense that one might find, I guess, in ghost stories etc.
My own very recently written fiction miniature, ‘The Gruesome Guestroom’, that features this expression from outset: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/08/14/the-gruesome-guestroom/
Having put out feelers to the hive mind of Facebook friends regarding any well-known ghost stories that deal with the ‘déjà vu’, I was offered, among others, two stories I have reviewed, viz. THE SIGNALMAN by Charles Dickens and the THE BUS CONDUCTOR by E.F. Benson, and although I do not mention this expression in these reviews (just re-read), déjà vu as an expression is the elephant in their proverbial rooms, I guess, just as Freud meaningfully omitted the expression. in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’. I leave you to make your minds up and perhaps counter-comment below in due course.
EF Benson: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/35138-2/#comment-24735
Charles Dickens: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/17/the-signal-man-charles-dickens/
12. The Double / 13. Chance Encounter
You can fool me some of the time, but you can’t fool me all of the time.
Depends on which of me you attempt to fool at any point of pointless rhyme.
Two writers rhyming: a Nicholas of the ‘Royle we’. I always thought they were two people, and I am now leaning in the opposite direction, because of the perceived MUP connection and a story called ‘Chance Encounter’, published as if by one Nicholas reprinted here by the other Nicholas, does not seem to exist other than here. The photograph published here of both of them together is a mock-up I claim, as the film star image of the one Nicholas I have not met does not match up with the prior image of him in my mind’s eye.
I guess I need face to face advice as to whether to blend together these two separate pages below of my reviews of Royle’s work:-
The death of the heart surely doesn’t matter
If another can host the next ‘knit and natter’.
***
I note that the next as yet unread chapter deals with ‘cannibalism’ and I thought I might pre-empt it with this link to my old controversial article on ‘Cannibalism in Robert Aickman’ (small echoes of which theme I later publicly identified in Elizabeth Bowen): https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/robert-aickman-and-cannibalism/