The Architecture of the Uncanny: The Unhomely Houses of the Romantic Sublime
Author(s): Anthony Vidler
Source: Assemblage , Jul., 1987, No. 3 (Jul., 1987), pp. 6-29
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3171062
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Assemblage
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Anthony Vidler is Professor of Architecture
and Director of the Program in
European Cultural Studies at Princeton
University. His book The Writing of the
Walls is published by Princeton Architectural
Press; his monograph on ClaudeNicolas
Ledoux is forthcoming from
MIT Press.
1 (frontispiece). Victor Hugo,
Vieux Saint-Malo, June 1866
Anthony Vidler
The Architecture of the
Uncanny: The Unhomely
Houses of the Romantic
Sublime
1. Haunted Houses
With the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable
gloom pervaded my spirit. ... The feeling was unrelieved by any
of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the
mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate
or terrible. .... There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening
of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no
goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sub-
lime.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher'
The haunted house has been a pervasive leitmotiv of literary
fantasy and architectural revival alike since the early
nineteenth century. Its depiction in fairy tales, in horror
stories, in Gothic novels gave rise to a genre of writing
unique in itself, one that was preoccupied with the "uncanny,"
and that, by the end of the century, stood for romanticism
itself. The house provided an especially favored
locus for uncanny disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its
residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last
and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by
contrast the terror of invasion by alien spirits.
In Poe's description, the House of Usher, while evoking
premonitions of "shadowy fancies," exhibited nothing untoward
in its outer appearance. Its "bleak walls" and "vacant
eye-like windows" were stark, but any sentiments of
doom were more easily attributed to the fantasies of the
narrator than to any striking detail in the house itself. Indeed,
when looked at objectively, its ancient stones, carvings,
tapestries, and trophies were all familiar enough. The
7
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assemblage 3
"atmosphere" that surrounded the house, its smell of the
grave that "had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the
grey wall and the silent tarn," was difficult to account for:
"vague sentiments," seemingly the products of a dream.
The slow realization that these were properties of the
house, embedded in the very stones, which possessed a fatality
in themselves, that the house was itself an uncanny
power, fame unwillingly, against all reason, and was the
more disquieting for the absolute normality of the setting,
its absence of overt terror. The effect was one of the disturbing
unfamiliarity of the evidently familiar:
While the objects around me . . . were but matters to which, or
to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy while
I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this I
still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which
ordinary images were stirring up.2
But in Poe's paradigmatic haunted house, all the telltale
signs of haunting were present, systematically culled from
their romantic predecessors. The site was desolate; the
walls were blank and almost literally "faceless," the windows,
"eye-like" but without life - "vacant." The house
was, besides, a repository of centuries of memory and tradition,
embodied in its walls and objects: the walls were
marked by crumbling stones and the "discoloration of
ages"; the furnishings were dark, the rooms vaulted and
gloomy; it was, in fact, already a museum, a collection
such as that assembled by Albert de Sommerard in the
H6tel de Cluny, here preserved in memory of a family.
Finally, the family itself was almost extinct, doomed by a
history that lent the air of the tomb, the family vault, to
this once living abode; its fabric was reminiscent of "old
wood-work which has rotted for some years in some neglected
vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the
external air."' The house, then, was a crypt, predestined to
be buried in its turn, an event prefigured in the "barely
perceptible fissure" that ran vertically from roof to founda-
tions.
Abandoned houses, real or imaginary, had a similar effect
on the viewer. Those on the islands of Jersey or Guernsey
described by Victor Hugo, veritable figures of his own unhomely
exile, shared characteristics with the House of
Usher; they were "haunted," however, not by some imaginary
family spirit, but by virtue of the superstitions of the
islanders.
It sometimes happens, in Jersey or Guernsey, that in the countryside,
or even in the town, when passing through some deserted
spot or a street filled with people, you will see a house with a
barricaded entrance; holly obstructs the door; one knows not what
hideous layers of nailed planks fill the windows of the ground
floor; the windows of the upper floors are at once closed and
open, all the casements are barred but all the window-panes are
broken.4
Such a house, killed by its very emptiness, and by the
superstitions that have built up in the region, "is a haunted
house [une maison visionnee]. The devil comes there in
the night."'
Among these "dead houses" one in particular fascinated
Hugo, an empty house in the Guernsey village of Pleinmont.
He returned three times in seven years to sketch it
from various angles, and used it as a central motif in Les
travailleurs de la mer, the maison visionn&e of "Plainmont."
Drawn in brown ink and wash, this small, twostory
stone cottage seemed to have little out of the ordinary
about it. With its four windows, walled up on the ground
floor, its single door, pitched roof, and chimney, it seems
no more than the archetypical "child's house," a commonplace
compilation of the fundamental elements of dwelling.
As Hugo himself noted, "the site is fine, the house is
good."
This house, built in granite and two stories high, is surrounded
by grass. It is in no way ruined. It is perfectly habitable. The
walls are thick and the roof solid. Not a stone is lacking in the
walls, not a tile from the roof.6
Nevertheless, it had the reputation of being haunted, and
despite its simplicity, "its aspect was strange." First, the
deserted site, almost entirely surrounded by the sea, was
perhaps too beautiful: "the site is magnificent, and consequently
sinister." Then the contrast between the walled-up
windows on the ground floor and the empty windows on
the upper floor, "opening onto the shadows of the interior,"
gave a quasi-anthropomorphic air to the structure:
"One would say that the empty holes were two gouged out
eyes. "' An enigmatic inscription over the closed-up door
added to the mystery and told of a building and abandon-
8
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Vidler
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2. Victor Hugo, La maison
visionnee, June 1866
9
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assemblage 3
ment before the Revolution: "ELM-PBILG 1780." Finally,
the silence and emptiness contributed the aura of a tomb;
"one thought one saw a sepulcher with windows allowing
the specters to look out." It is by such mysteries, adding to
local lore, that Hugo explains the haunting. Who were the
original inhabitants? Why the abandonment? Why no
present owner? Why no one to cultivate the field? These
questions, all inexplicable without some unknown and
metaphysical cause, added to the atmosphere:
This house is uncanny at mid-day; what is it at midnight? Looking
at it one looks at a secret. . . . Enigmas. Sacred horror is in
these stones. This shadow inhabiting these walled up rooms is
more than a shadow; it is the unknown.8
Thus guarded by terror, the house, as Hugo develops the
narrative, becomes paradoxically secure for those unaffected
by the haunting; it is the secure home of smugglers
and renegades, exiles and fugitives. Only those on the
margin would feel at home in so disquieting an abode.
The legend of a crime committed in the house, an indelible
act from which it had never recovered, thus rejoined
the present it sheltered, and the circle of a home killed by
memories was completed in this image of a tomb inhabited
by its robbers.
The Margins of the Sublime
The genre of the uncanny, appropriately enough for its
position in romantic aesthetics, was, as Edgar Allen Poe
noted, intimately bound up with, but strangely different
from the grander and apparently more serious "sublime,"
the master category of aspiration, nostalgia, and the unattainable.
Together with other subgenres of the sublime the
grotesque, the caricature, the fairy story, and the melodrama
- the ghostly romance and the horror story were
essentially subversive of its overarching premises and its
transcendent ambitions.
From the middle of the eighteenth century, the domain of
the sublime had been forced to protect its high-flown
forms from erosion at its margins. While Edmund Burke
returned all sublime emotions to their sources in terror,
not everything that induced terror was, as he readily admitted,
sublime.9 By the same token, Kant's description of a
sublimity residing entirely in the mind as it was drawn to
"think the unattainability of nature" did not mean that all
ideas of things unattainable were necessarily sublime.
Indeed, lurking behind all attempts to achieve sublime
expression were a host of pitfalls that ranged from the
bathetic to the nonsensical; rhetoricians from Longinus to
Jean Paul had understood this tendency of the sublime to
fall into the ridiculous, an opposite that, however, shared
many characteristics with its more serious antecedent. Out
of this and other slippages were born the side, or sub,
genres of the sublime that were explored with such eagerness
by a romanticism critical of the static categories of
neoclassic appreciation. All were based, in differing degrees,
on exaggeration, fear, and terror, but not all aspired
to the absolute dimension consonant with the high sublime.
"Ugliness," stated Burke, "I imagine to be consistent
enough with an idea of the sublime. But I would by no
means insinuate that ugliness of itself is a sublime idea
unless united with such qualities that excite a strong
terror. "10
Most subversive of all, not only because it was easily trivialized,
but also because it seemed at times indistinguishable
from the sublime, was the realm variously called "the
uncanny" or das unheimliche. Burke himself had included
this ill-defined but increasingly popular sensation among
those associated with the obscurity that provoked terror,
along with the night and absolute darkness: "how greatly
the night adds to our dread in all cases of danger," he
observed, "and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins,
of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds.""
Such was the fascination of the uncanny throughout the
romantic period that Hegel, in his vain effort to preserve
the memory of an authentic sublime in the Hebrew texts,
tried to close the door on this province of "magic, magnetism,
demons, the superior apparitions of clairvoyance, the
disease of somnambulism," banishing these dark powers
from the clear and transparent sphere of art; but he was
nevertheless forced to admit the general preoccupation of
his contemporaries with those "unknown forces" wherein
"there is supposed to lie an indecipherable truth of dreadfulness
which cannot be grasped or understood."'2 Among
the foremost practitioners of this genre of "visionary notions,"
where "nothing is expressed except a sickness of the
spirit," where "poetry runs over into nebulousness, insub-
10
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Vidler
stantiality and emptiness," Hegel cited E. T. A. Hoffmann,
who had indeed made the uncanny a genre of his
own.
More than eighty years later, in an essay dedicated to clarifying
the roots and pathological nature of this "sickness" of
the uncanny, Freud himself took the stories of Hoffmann
as his major example, observing that the subject of the
uncanny lay directly within the boundaries of "all that is
terrible," that is, within the sublime. " He set himself the
task of identifying "what this peculiar quality is which
allows us to distinguish as 'uncanny' certain things within
the boundaries of what is 'fearful,"' of exploring, against
those "elaborate treatises on aesthetics which . . . prefer to
concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and
sublime," feelings of an apparently opposite kind, those of
unpleasantness and repulsion:14 of exploring, that is, the
margins of the sublime against its acknowledged center, determining
the specificity of the uncanny within the terrible
sublime.
Heimlich / Unheimlich
Some languages in use today can only render the German expression
'an unheimlich house' by 'a haunted house."'
Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," 1919
The common denominator between the early-nineteenthcentury
romantic and the early-twentieth-century analyst,
between Hoffmann and Freud, was, at root, etymological.
Both were struck by the strange coincidence of two German
words, heimlich and unheimlich, that is, roughly
translated, "homely" and "unhomely." The string of definitions
cited by Freud in his search for the meaning of the
sensation colloquially known as "uncanny," and taken from
the two standard dictionaries of the mid-nineteenth century,
made the point. 16 The brothers Grimm, indefatigable
collectors of folklore and myth, defining the word heimlich
in their Deutsches Worterbuch, traced the idea of the
homely, that which belongs to house and home, a sentiment
of security and freedom from fear, as it gradually
took on the ominous dimensions of its apparent opposite,
the unhomely:
4. From the idea of'homelike,' belonging to the house, the further
idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers,
something concealed, secret. . . . 'Heimlich' is used in conjunction
with a verb expressing the act of concealing. ...
Officials who give important advice which has to be kept secret
in matters of state are called heimlich councillors; the adjective,
according to modern usage, has been replaced by geheim
[secret] .
Heimlich, as used of knowledge - mystic, allegorical: a heimlich
meaning, mysticus, divinus, occultus, figuratus.
Heimlich in a different sense, as withdrawn from knowledge,
unconscious. . . . Heimlich also has the meaning of that which
is obscure, inaccessible to knowledge.
The notion of something hidden and dangerous . . is still further
developed, so that 'heimlich' comes to have the meaning usually
ascribed to 'unheimlich.' Thus: 'At times I feel like a man who
walks in the night and believes in ghosts; every corner is heimlich
and full of terrors for him.'17
The ambivalent relations between heimlich and unheimlich
were similarly explored in Daniel Sanders's Worterbuch.
The feeling of the "friendly, intimate, homelike; the sense
of peaceful pleasure as in one within the four walls of his
house," as in the example "the cottage where he had once
sat so often among his own people, so heimelig, so happy,"
was joined immediately to the sense of the secret, the
"concealed, kept from sight," as in "to do something heimlich,
i.e., behind someone's back" and "heimlich places
(which good manners oblige us to conceal)."" The notion
of heimlich was then elided with "buried":
'To throw into pits or Heimlichkeiten.' . . . 'I have roots that are
most heimlich, I am grown in the deep earth.'"
From there to the "negative" of heimlich - unheimlich was
a short passage:
Note especially the negative 'un': eerie, weird, arousing gruesome
fear: 'Seeming quite unheimlich and ghostly.' ... 'Feels like an
unheimlich horror.' 'Unheimlich and motionless like a stone image.'
'The unheimlich mist called hill-fog. '2
Directly joining these two opposites was the notion of
something once buried and then reappearing, as Sanders
pointed out in a quotation from the dramatist Karl Ferdinand
Gutzkow:21
'The Zecks are all heimlich.' . . . 'Heimlich? . . .What do you
understand by heimlich?' 'Well . . ., they are like a buried spring
11
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assemblage 3
or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having
the feeling that the water might come up there again.' 'Oh,
we call it unheimlich; you call it heimlich.'22
To conclude this set of citations, Sanders introduced a
sentence from the philosopher Schelling that seemed to
summarize the strange bond between the homely and the
unhomely, a fragment that was immediately to strike
Freud's attention:
Unheimlich is the name for everything that ought to have remained
. . secret and hidden but has come to light.23
This enigmatic definition came from Schelling's late attempt
to synthesize the history of religion with the anthropology
of cults, his Philosophie der Mythologie of 1835.
Schelling's definition of the "uncanny" proposed an origin
for the feeling that was itself joined to the origins of religion,
philosophy, and poetry. Indeed, his formulation, anticipating
Nietzsche, asserted the necessary existence of the
uncanny as a force to be overcome, a first step toward the
birth of poetry. Speaking of the Homeric songs, for him
among the purest examples of the sublime, Schelling
proposed that they were precisely the result of an initial
suppression, the civilized subjugation of mystery, myth,
and the occult. Like the birth of the Apollonian out of
the Dionysian, and with similar interdependencies, the
Homeric sublime was founded on the repression of the
uncanny:
Greece had a Homer precisely because it had mysteries, that is,
because it succeeded in completely subduing that principle of the
past, which was still dominant and outwardly manifest in the
Oriental systems, and in pushing it back into the interior, that is,
into secrecy, into the Mystery (out of which it had, after all,
originally emerged). That clear sky which hovers above the Homeric
poems, that ether which arches over Homer's world, could
not have spread itself over Greece until the dark and obscure
power of that uncanny principle which dominated earlier religions
had been reduced to the Mysteries (all things are called
uncanny which should have remained secret, hidden, latent, but
which have come to light); the Homeric age could not contemplate
fashioning that purely poetic mythology until the genuine
religious principle had been secured in the interior, thereby
granting the mind complete outward freedom.24
This account of the "uncanny principle," besides providing
a convenient starting point for Freud - as based on a
primal repression, a slaying of the father ("Homer," stated
Schelling, "is not the father of mythology, mythology is
the father of Homer")25 - summarized the idea of unheimlich
as evoked by the romantics. At once a psychological
and an aesthetic phenomenon, it simultaneously
established and destabilized. Its effects were guaranteed by
an original authenticity, a first burial, and made all the
more potent by virtue of a return that, in civilization, was
in a real sense out of place. Something was not, then,
merely haunted, but rather revisited by a power that was
thought long dead. To such a force the romantic psyche
and the romantic aesthetic sensibility were profoundly
open; at any moment what seemed on the surface homely
and comforting, secure and clear of superstition, might be
reappropriated by something that should have remained secret
but that nevertheless, through some chink in the shutters
of progress, had crept back into the house, of all topoi
in literature and art, the locus suspectus of the uncanny.26
As Freud was to note, the systematic nature of what
Schelling referred to as "the uncanny principle" was explored
in all its variations by E. T. A. Hoffmann, himself
an amateur of architecture and an aesthetic theorist. In the
tale of "Councillor Krespel," initially published in 1818
and included the following year in the first volume of his
Serapion Brethren (Die Serapionsbriider), the relationship
between the uncanny in general and the house in particular
was drawn with analytical clarity.27 The story opened
with an apparently incidental description of the building of
a house, on the surface, indeed, as the narrator notes, no
more than an illustration of one of "the craziest schemes"
of this Councillor, himself "one of the most eccentric of
men." This house, described as having been the gift of a
local lord in payment for legal services, was built at the
bottom of the Councillor's garden according to his own,
somewhat peculiar, specifications. Having bought and assembled
all the building materials, stacked and cut the
stones, mixed the lime and sifted the sand, the Councillor
had proceeded to amaze the neighbors by refusing all architectural
help, directly employing a master mason, journeymen,
and apprentices on the work. What was more
extraordinary, he had neither commissioned nor drawn up
a plan for the house, but had simply excavated a perfectly
square foundation for the four walls. These, following his
instructions, were built up by the masons, without win-
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Vidler
dows or doors, just as high as the Councillor indicated.
Despite the evident madness of this procedure, the builders
seemed happy enough, plentifully supplied with food and
drink. One day Krespel shouted "Stop!" and the walls were
finished. 28
Then the Councillor began a most strange activity, pacing
up and down the garden, moving toward the house in
every direction, until, by means of this complex triangulation,
he "found" the right place for the door and ordered it
cut in the stone; similarly, walking into the house, he performed
the same method to determine each window and
partition, deciding, seemingly spontaneously, their position
and size. The house was then complete. To celebrate the
completion of his new home, Krespel invited the builders
and their families, but no friends, to a feast at which he
played the violin. The result of his maneuvers was a home
"presenting a most unusual appearance from the outside no
two windows being alike and so on - but whose interior
arrangements aroused a very special feeling of ease.'"29
This short, anecdotal introduction serves in Hoffmann's
story to present the peculiar character of the musician,
lawyer, and violin-maker Krespel, whose beautiful but illfated
daughter Antonia, blessed with an uncannily harmonious
singing voice is trapped within the house, unable to
sing lest she die of the effort. The crazy house seems one
more nonsensical trait of its owner, a literary conceit, like
that of his clothes, also made to his own specifications.
But on another level, when understood in the light of the
ensuing narrative, which involves the gradual revelation of
goodness out of apparent evil, of real harmony out of surface
disorder, the house assumes the status of a model, an
architectural paradigm of the story as a whole. In the first
place, the house allows Hoffmann to develop the theme of
harmony, musical and architectural, of a kind of natural,
original, and unself-conscious architecture, based on geometry
and craft lore - a kind of literary illustration of
the "architecture as frozen music" analogy advanced by
Schelling. Secondly, the house is a direct replication in
stone of the character of the Councillor, decribed as a man
whose madness was on the surface, concealing a sanity
within. His "mad gestures" and "irrational leaps" were
thereby mirrored by a dwelling that seemed irrational from
the outside, yet contained a sense of order within. But this
interpretation leads to the final observation that as a house
"unusual" from the outside, and homely inside, it is a
structure that reverses the general drift, traced above, of
the uncanny movement from homely to unhomely.
In this context, it should be remembered that in fabricating
the house Krespel's activities were themselves decidedly
unheimlich:
'Make way!' cried Krespel, who then ran to one end of the garden
and paced slowly toward his square building. When he came
close to the wall, he shook his head in dissatisfaction, ran to the
other end of the garden and again paced toward the wall with the
same result. He repeated this tactic several times, until finally,
running his sharp nose hard against the wall, he cried, 'Come
here, come here men, make me a door right here.'3o
Like a blind man with only his cane and his nose to guide
him, Krespel did not, like normal men, see and then
point, but rather ran toward and touched. If he saw at all
it was with a very myopic vision, an impression confirmed
in a description of him the next day moving like a drunken
or blind man: "he looked as if he would bump into or
damage something at any moment," but by some uncanny
sense he avoided breaking the cups on the table and was
able to maneuver around a full-length mirror that he initially
thought was a void.
In this repression of the eye, a deliberate forcing of the self
into blindness, Krespel was no doubt privileging touch and
hearing, the primary sense of the musician. He was also,
in the context of a romantic mythology that endowed
sight with the sinister properties of destruction - the evil
eye - and dissimulation - masking - achieving a kind
of willed innocence through a childlike perception of the
world of objects. Only by so doing could he fabricate a
house that was not an evil "double," a willed projection of
his worst passions, but that, rather, contained his inner
self, whole and untroubled within. And this would be why
the outside of the house seemed unheimlich and the inside
heimlich: as a blind transcription, an automatic writing of
his undivided soul, it operated as a return route, a passage
back from the uncanny to the homely. In this respect, the
house was a therapeutic instrument: Krespel, who knew,
we are informed, "how to preserve the divine," found in
this mask of madness a way to rebuff the world and
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assemblage 3
achieve inner composure. This was, after all, a canny way
to follow what Hoffmann called his Serapions Prinzip,
which united the brotherhood of his tales. In this ideal,
the outer world was used as a lever to set the inner world
of the artist in motion by realizing a clear sense of the
boundaries between poetry and life. For this the artist had
to cultivate a special kind of composure, a besonnenheit, or
mental state that controlled the release of images and
translated stimuli from the outer world into the spiritual
domain. As Maria Tatar has concluded, "without this gift,
the painter's canvas remains empty, the writer's manuscript
consists of blank pages, the composer's score contains not a
single note and the artist in general is branded a madman
by society. "31 Krespel, before the age of analysis, had preserved
his poetic self by means of an artificial boundary, a
house that was, in a special sense, a mirror of his soul.
Pipe Dreams
The special relationships between exterior and interior
privileged in the uncanny were, of course, fully exploited
by authors throughout the nineteenth century. The typical
context for the telling of ghost stories, the apparently
homely interior that gradually turns into a vehicle of horror,
was described in numerous versions: a cheerful household,
generally following dinner, the men smoking pipes
before the blazing fire, the women sewing, the children
allowed to stay up late. This was the nostalgic evocation of
the veillie, a "cottage" vision of house and home especially
relished in the age of rural displacement and urban emigration.
In such a secure setting, stories of terror might be
tasted with delight; many writers insisted on the need for a
storm outside, to reinforce by contrast the snugness within.
This is the scene of Hoffmann's "Uncanny Guest," where
"the four ingedients, autumn, a stormy wind, a good fire
and a jorum of punch," engendered a strange sense of the
awesome, provoked a fear of the supernatural, that was
then deliciously prolonged by stories that reminded the listeners
of the spirit world surrounding them.32 Similarly,
Thomas de Quincey, an adept in the art of evoking dreams
of terror, sometimes with the artificial help of opium, was
equally convinced of the need for a secure vantage point
from which to start the interior journey. The site of his
reveries, stimulated by laudanum, was a simple white cottage,
formerly owned by Wordsworth, in the valley of
Grasmere. "Embowered by flowing shrubs," this was a
homely house in a sheltered valley, its simple rooms lined
with books and warmed by cheerful hearths." De Quincey,
too, insisted on the need for winter and a storm outside
for his adventures of the mind, as, almost innocently,
he sipped from the ordinary decanter containing the deceptive
liquid, an instrument of those fantasies of the architectural
sublime that he remembered being described by
Coleridge, himself inspired by faulty recollection of Piranesi's
Carceri etchings.
From the simple cottage to the abyssal terraces of the Carceri,
the passage from homely to unhomely, now operating
wholly in the mind, reinforced the ambiguity between real
world and dream, real world and spirit world, in such a
way as to undermine even the sense of security demanded
by professional dreamers. Following Kant's prescription for
the achievement of delight through terror through certain
knowledge of safety - "provided our own position is secure
[the aspect of terrifying natural phenomena] is all the
more attractive for its fearfulness" - the aesthete of terror
succeeded in barricading the walls against nature in order
to indulge a taste for fear. But the locus of the uncanny
was now in the mind, and the mind recognized no such
barriers, dissolving them into the fabric of the dream,
haunting the site of its own dread.
Thus the veille"e, or "stay-up-late-evening" as Michael Riffaterre
translates the title of Rimbaud's poem,34 becomes
itself uncanny, its security belied and clouded by its anticipated
end, from the nights when, as in Hoffmann's story,
Nathanael's father awaits the arrival of the Sandman, sitting
silently in his armchair "blowing out billows of smoke
till we all seemed to be swimming in clouds,""35 to that
evening described by Rimbaud when mantleshelf and wallpaper
merge with the dream of a voyage, only to return as
the sign of normalcy and thereby of death. 36 Indeed, in
many veilldes smoke is an agent of dissolution by which
the fabric of the house is turned into the depth of the
dream; in the same way, as an instrument of the sublime,
smoke has always made obscure what otherwise would
have seemed too clear.
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Vidler
On the surface, nothing seemed to be more settled, more
at home, than the life of the narrator of Melville's short
story "I and My Chimney," as he sat contentedly puffing
his pipe beside an equally puffing chimney stack."
Resisting modernization, and determined to maintain an
amicable pact between himself and his old, silent friend,
the chimney, this narrator has indeed captured the imagination
of those who have seen something pragmatic and
sturdily "American" in one who finds the center of the
home in the fireplace, a tradition of settler origins, rooted in
the anthropology of Semper and finding its architectural
expression in the Prairie homesteading of Frank Lloyd
Wright. 38
Certainly the narrator loved his chimney; it provided
warmth and stability for the entire house, as structure and
function; it did not, like his wife, "talk back" and it represented,
symbolically enough, a last bastion of the good past
against the intrusions of a bad present. And yet the chimney,
as he readily admitted, was something of a tyrant.
Twelve feet square at the base, four feet wide at the top, it
completely usurped the center of the house, permitting no
passage from one side to another, forcing the inhabitants
into continual peripheral movement. So strong was its
presence, indeed, that the narrator had become its slave.
The chimney was master of the house; its "owner" stood
behind it, deferring to it on every count, finally protecting
it from destruction by withdrawing from the outer world
and mounting a continuous vigil lest it be demolished
while his back was turned. Fear pervades this story: fear of
being deprived of a "backbone" with the removal of the
chimney; fear of losing the "one permanence" of the dwelling;
fear of confrontation with the wife; fear, given the
chimney's shape and vertical power, of loss of manhood.
The chimney provided another kind of support also. It was
the central object of the narrator's fantasy-life, a reminder
at once of the distant pyramids of Egypt and of the dark
Druidical ritual standing stones, it stood for the entire
romantic history of origins, an ur-monument, both lifegiving
and life-taking, harbinger of the eternal fire and
tomb of kings. It was further an instrument of knowledge,
an observatory pointed toward the heavens. In its bulk almost
incommensurable, irreducible to the mathematical calculations
of the architect, contemptuously called "Scribe,"
it could not be cut down to size. Its inner recesses hiding
unknown mysteries and its external walls impermeable and
silent, it was, as Hegel would have characterized it, the
perfect type of Symbolic architecture, an object not yet separated
from the magical world of demons or the projected
fantasies of men. Around this pyramid-tomb, the house
deployed itself, depending on the chimney for sustenance
and support; it was, because of its position, a kind of labyrinth
protecting the inner center from profane intrusion.
The resulting confusion of rooms, each forced to act as a
passage to the next, one with as many as nine doors, generated
a complex network of relations: "almost every room,
like a philosophical system, was in itself an entry, or passageway
to other rooms and systems of rooms, a whole
suite of entries in fact."'9 And, like the daydreamer whose
mental map these rooms seemed to emulate, "going
through the house you seem to be forever going somewhere
and getting no where." Indeed, one might entirely
lose one's way:
It is like losing oneself in the woods; round and round the chimney
you go, and if you arrive at all it is just where you started
and so you begin again and get nowhere.4"
Here, we are reminded of a similar pattern of uncanny
repetition in Freud's description of his strange experience
of a particular quarter in a provincial town, "the character
of which could not long remain in doubt," as painted
women filled the windows of the small houses. Freud recounts
that, hastening to leave this threatening place, unintentionally
and by devious paths he was forced to return
twice more, provoking a feeling he could only call "uncanny.'"41
Like Freud, Melville's narrator had a sense of
helplessness before the uncanny might of his chimney; and
he seemed as unwilling as Freud to track down the causes
of his involuntary acts.
This need to veil the source of dependency was mirrored
in the narrator's resistance to deciphering or interpreting
his hermetic chimney. It was as if his own body were
threatened with extinction. He preferred the pyramid to
remain a primal force, before writing, resisting all explanation,
like the hieroglyphs before Champollion. Even
when, as a last resort to persuade the owner to demolish
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assemblage 3
3. Exhibiting the skeleton,
Pompeii
his mainstay, the architect, modern scriptor, invented the
fiction of a "reserved space hermetically closed . . . a secret
chamber . . . hid in darkness," the narrator refused to
search. Not because he disbelieved in its existence, but
rather the opposite: he believed too much in mysteries.
What the chimney concealed, its and his nether world,
should remain concealed. "Infinite and sad mischief," he
held, "has resulted from the profane bursting open of secret
recesses," thus precisely locating the principle of the
uncanny previously identified by Schelling. By this means,
a kind of tacit treaty was reached between the subversive
and comforting powers of the house, allowing it, during
the life of its owner, to remain a home.
2. Buried Alive
Rome is only a vast museum; Pompeii is living antiquity.42
The pleasures of Pompeii in comparison to those of Rome
were, all visitors agreed, dependent on its domestic nature.
Its streets, shops, and houses seemed to the traveller from
the north at once intimate and private. Chateaubriand,
who passed through in 1802, was struck by the contrast
between "the public monuments, built at great cost in
granite and marble," typical of Rome, and the "domestic
dwellings," built with "the resources of simple individuals,"
of Pompeii. He even dreamed of a new form of nonmonumental
museum, which would leave in place the tools,
furniture, statues, and manuscripts found among the ruins,
and normally displaced to the museum at Portici, with the
roofs and walls of the houses rebuilt as a mise-en-scene of
everyday life in ancient Rome. "One would learn more
about the domestic history of the Roman people, the state
of Roman civilization in a few restored promenades of
Pompeii, than by the reading of all the works of antiquity,"
he observed, proposing in this way an anticipation of the
folk museums of the twentieth century:
It would only need a little brick, tile, plaster, stone, wood, carpentry
and joinery . . . a talented architect would follow the local
style for the- restorations, models for which he would find in the
landscapes painted on the very walls of the houses of Pompeii.43
Thus at little cost might be created "the most marvellous
museum in the world," "a Roman town conserved in its
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Vidler
4. Burnt remains of a man,
woman, and child, Pompeii, as
exhibited in the Naples
Museum
entirety, as if its inhabitants had just left a quarter of an
hour before."44
Other writers, from Winckelmann to Le Corbusier, have
attested to this humble, workaday quality of the ruins: th
so-called Villa of Diomedes, the House of the Faun, the
House of Championnet, the House of the Baker were only
a few of those dwellings painstakingly described and "restored"
by generations of architectural students. The sens
of having intruded on a domestic scene not long abandoned
was increased by the plethora of household goods
uncovered by the excavations, some of which were carefully
left in place for the benefit of visitors, but also by t
intimate glimpses into the customs, mores, and even sex
ual life afforded by the wall paintings. What had been
shrouded for reasons of prudery in museums was displaye
as part of a complete panorama, a veritable ethnographic
study, on the walls. Pierre-Adrien Paris lovingly drew the
priapic bas-relief on the wall of a small shop, while the
young Flaubert found it the only memorable ornament o
the town.45
And yet, despite the evident domesticity of the ruins, the
were not by any account homely. For behind the quotidian
semblance there lurked a horror, equally present to
view: skeletons abounded. In the soldiers' quarter, as
Crueze de Lesser noted, "the judges perished with the accused,"
and the remains of the prisoners were still chain
to the walls.46 As opposed to the death of Herculaneum,
which according to popular mythology was slow - "the
lava filled up Herculaneum, as the molten lead fills up th
cavities of a mold," wrote Chateaubriand - that of Pompeii
was sudden.47 GGrard de Nerval recreated the terrifyi
vision of the fiery rain of ashes, suffocating and burning
those in flight; hidden until the mid-eighteenth century,
this hideous destruction was revealed side by side with its
less disturbing and apparently more normal context. The
archaeological gaze was pitiless:
In the middle of the last century the scholars began to excavate
this enormous ruin. Oh! incredible surprise; they found a city in
the volcano, houses under the ash, skeletons in the houses, fur
ture and pictures next to the skeletons.48
The town was evidently no common archaeological site, it
ruins bleached by the sun and exorcised of social memo-
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assemblage 3
ries: history here seemed to be suspended in the gruesome
juxtaposition of these grisly remains and their apparently
homely surroundings. Chateaubriand's folksy museum was,
in fact, still inhabited.
It was, of course, this dramatic confrontation of the
homely and the unhomely that made of Pompeii a locus
of the literary and artistic uncanny for much of the nineteenth
century; whether in the mystical formulations of
Nerval, the popular melodramas of Bulwer Lytton, the
full-blown romanticism of Theophile Gautier, or the
dream narratives of Jensen. L'Utrange, l'inquidtant, das unheimliche,
all found their natural place in stories that centered
on the idea of history suspended, the dream come to
life, the past restored in the present. Pompeii, in contrast
to the conventional settings of haunting and horror, possessed
a level of archaeological verisimilitude matched by
historical drama that made of it the perfect vehicle, in a
century obsessed by the fugitive relations between past and
future, of what Gautier variously called "l'idIal retrospectif,"
"la chimere retrospectif," "le desir retrospectif," or, in
relation to Pompeii, "l'amour retrospectif."49 The special
characteristic of this retrospctive vision was its unsettling
merging of past and present, its insistence on the rights of
the unburied dead, its pervasive force over the fates of its
subjects. In Pompeii, it seemed, history, that solid realm of
explanation and material fact, was taking a kind of revenge
on its inventors.
In these terms, Pompeii evidently qualified as a textbook
example of the uncanny on every level, from the implicit
horror of the domestic to the revelations of mysteries, religious
and otherwise, which, in Schelling's view, might
better have remained unrevealed. Gautier's tale Arria Marcella
insistently contrasted the banal and the extraordinary,
the trivial and the momentous, the sublime and the grotesque
aspects of the town: the brilliance of the light and
the transparency of the air were opposed to the sombre tint
of the black volcanic sand, the clouds of black dust underfoot,
and the omnipresent ashes. Vesuvius itself was depicted
as benign as Montmartre, an old fellow like
Melville's chimney owner, quietly "smoking his pipe" in
defiance of its terrifying reputation. The juxtaposition of
the modern railway station and antique city; the happiness
of the tourists in the street of tombs; the "banal phrases" of
the guide as he recited the terrible deaths of the citizens in
front of their remains: all testified to the power of the place
to reproduce, quite systematically, the structures of the uncanny.
50
On a purely aesthetic level too, Pompeii seemed to reflect
precisely the struggle identified by Schelling between the
dark mysteries of the first religions and the sublime transparency
of the Homeric hymns, but as if reenacting the
battle in order to retrieve the uncanny, in reverse. For, of
course, what the first excavations of Pompeii had revealed
was a version of antiquity entirely at odds with the sublime
vision of Winckelmann and his followers. The paintings,
sculptures, and religious artifacts in this city of Greek
foundation were far from the Neoplatonic form of neoclassical
imagination. Fauns, cupids, satyrs, priapi, centaurs,
and prostitutes of every sex replaced the Apollonian
grace and La6coonian strength of Winckelmann's aesthetics.
The mysteries of Isis and a host of Egyptian cults took
the place of high philosophy and Acropolitan rituals. Archaeology,
by revealing what should have remained invisible,
had irredeemably confirmed the existence of a "dark
side" of classicism, thus betraying not only the high sublime,
but a slowly and carefully constructed world of modern
mythology. Schelling, with Goethe and Schiller, a true
believer in the "congealed music" of classical architecture,
had consciously resisted this undermining archaeology in
his ambiguous assessment of the temple sculptures of
Aegina, "perfected" as much as possible by Thorvaldsen,
but betraying all the distortions characteristic of a presublime
art. Their masklike features, he proposed, embodied
a "certain character of the uncanny," the product of
an older mysterious religion showing through."5
Perhaps the least forgivable aspect of this archaeological
treason was its blatant display of classical eroticism, a
world hitherto circumlocuted and circumscribed, but now
open to the view of tourists and the interpretation of historians.
Not only did such a scandalous unmasking support a
literature of dubious quality, from d'Hancarville to de
Sade, it also, as a next generation of romantics demonstrated,
dangerously unsettled the apparatus of classical aesthetics.
For of all the disturbing fragments found in the
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Vidler
city, it was the erotic traces that most exercised the imaginations
of those who, from Chateaubriand to Gautier,
were concerned themselves to undermine the high sublime.
Galatea Rediviva
Death, like a sculptor, has molded its victim.52
One of the more fascinating remains of Pompeii, described
in detail by many early visitors, and with relish by every
guide, was a fragment of scorched earth found beneath a
portico of the House of Diomedes, and kept in the museum
at Portici. Chateaubriand noted:
The portico that surrounds the garden of this house is made up of
square pillars, grouped in threes. Under this first portico, there is
a second: there it was that the young woman whose breast is
impressed in the piece of earth I saw at Portici was suffocated.53
This simple but lugubrious "impression" became the focus
of a series of meditations, each a reflection on its predecessor,
the burden of which was the strange way in which
nature, in its own death throes, had, so to speak, become
its own artist: "death, like a sculptor, has molded its victim."
The coincidence with the story of Pygmalion and
Galatea was too close to avoid, and it was somehow satisfying,
if depressing, to find the classical theory of imitation
thus trumped by fate. The sculptor whose creation was so
lifelike that she seemed to blush at his embrace, who fell
in love with and "married" his ivory statuette, was now
replaced by nature, or even better, history, who had
molded its own work of art from the life, turning, in a
reversal that caught the romantic imagination, living
beauty into dead trace. And, following the hardly subdued
erotic subtext of the buried city, this trace was not simply a
mumified body or skeleton, but the ghost of a breast, a
fragment, which, in an age preoccupied with the restoration
and completion of broken statues, demanded to be
reconstituted, in imagination at least.
As a fragment, this negative petrified sign of nature morte
easily took its place among other similar fragments in literature
and art that at once signalled an irretrievable past
and evoked an unbearable desire for future plenitude: the
Belvedere Torso, the Elgin Marbles, the Venus de Milo.
But unlike these the Pompeiian terre cuite in its isolated
anatomical specificity represented a far more brutal cutting
of the body, and thus imposed a greater interpretative effort.
Its status was more that of the lost arm of the Venus
de Milo than of the statue itself. Its archaeological equivalent
would perhaps be the posthole of a hut or the pattern
of woven cloth retained in dried mud.
The cutting of the body into significant parts, each representative
of the perfect beauty of the whole was, of course,
a commonplace of classical aesthetics. Zeuxis after all had
assembled the type of beauty by the selection and combination
of the best parts of his models. It was precisely
against this kind of mechanical imitation that Winckelmann
and his students had fought, proposing a kind of
pre-romantic Neoplatonism, an enthusiatic idealism in its
place. But the romantics themselves, while agreeing with
Winckelmann's dislike of the copy, nevertheless invested
the fragment with more than fragmentary significance.
Forced to reconcile the material existence of fragments the
increasing quantity of bits and pieces from the past
piled up in the basements of the new museums - with
their organicist metaphysics, they preferred to take the fragment
as it was and to cultivate it as an object of meditation.
In Schlegel's celebrated formulation, the fragment
"like a small work of art, should be totally detached from
the surrounding world and closed in on itself like a hedgehog."54
This closure, turning the fragment in on itself like
an aphorism, on the one level, monumentalized it and
allowed it to be framed and stabilized in the context of its
historical origins. On another level, however, it released a
kind of metahistorical potentiality by virtue of its incompletion,
forming part of an imaginary dialogue, "a chain or
a crown of fragments."55 In this way the fragment might
become a "project," the "subjective germ of an object in
becoming," a "fragment of the future." As Schlegel concluded,
"numerous works of the Ancients have become
fragments. Numerous works by Moderns are fragments
from their birth."56
If in these terms the status of Chateaubriand's "piece of
earth" was enhanced, it was even more so by its role as an
object of impossible love, a theme given full play in Gautier's
Arria Marcella. In this story of the buried city as
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assemblage 3
uncanny habitat, the "hero," Octavien, loses himself in a
"profound contemplation":
What he looked at with so much attention was a piece of coagulated
black ash bearing a hollowed imprint: one might have said
that it was a fragment of a mold for a statue, broken in the casting;
the trained eye of the artist had easily recognised the curve of
a beautiful breast and a thigh as pure in style as that of a Greek
statue. It was well known, and the least of guide-books pointed it
out, that this lava, cooled around the body of a woman, had
retained its charming contour.57
Out of such contemplation was engendered the uncanny
dream of Arria Marcella's feast, where Octavien, long an
admirer of statues, who had been known to cry out to the
Venus de Milo, soliciting an embrance from "her marble
breast," was finally brought face to face with the original of
the molded copy. She, true to his desires, "surrounded his
body with her beautiful statue-like arms, cold, hard and
rigid as marble." The reversal is clear and pointed directly
by Gautier: the living body, impressed in its mold of earth,
when revived took on the attributes of the artistic imitation.
Classical aesthetics was thereby rendered dead, in favor
of the life of "natural" fragments, themselves destined
to be completed only by the powerless form of dreamed
desire.
According to this analogy, we might also interpret the
dreamlike "restoration" of the fragmented buildings of
Pompeii that, in Gautier's tale, preceded Octavien's meeting
with his Galatea. In this already strange night, a "nocturnal
day" where the bright moonlight seemed to disguise
the fragmentation of the buildings, repairing "the fossil city
for some representation of a fantasy life," Octavien noted a
"strange restoration," which must have been undertaken
since the afternoon at great speed by an unknown archi-
tect:
This strange restoration, made between the afternoon and the
evening by an unknown architect, was very troubling to Octavien,
certain of having seen the house on the same day in a sorry
state of ruin. The mysterious reconstructor had worked quickly
enough, because the neighboring dwellings had the same recent
and new aspects."
Such a dream of the past restored, like some exact copy of
an architectural student's renvoi for the Ecole des BeauxArts,
acted, like the vision of Arria Marcella, to return history,
not to life, but to death: "All the historians had been
tricked; the eruption had not taken place." Archaeology
with its precise materialism had overcome temporality at
least for a moment. It would be tempting to read into
Gautier's narrative an implicit attack on restorers, BeauxArts
and medievalist alike, as they searched desperately to
make contemporary historical monuments out of the remains
of the past.
But where, in the too-complete visions of a literal architect,
whether restorer or conserver, the aesthetic effect
verged on a touristic sublime, all too often a response to
something that through endless re-representation and reproduction
had become a copy of itself - Carcassonne,
the Acropolis, and of course Pompeii itself would be examples
- the effect of the uncanny in Gautier's treatment
was less predictable. As a feeling of inadequacy in the face
of superior powers, the sublime, defined in this way by
Kant, joined all such metaphysical sentiments, and with
them was equally subject to banalization. As a mental
state, tied to the death or frustration of desire, the uncanny
remained a threat to the high sublime, and, in its literary
portrayal at least, was a harbinger of a living death in the
face of which the historical fate of Pompeii's inhabitants
seemed almost preferable. Thus Octavien, returning to the
site of his dream, finding the remains of Arria "resting obstinately
in the dust," despaired, suspended in the same
state of coldness, distance, banality as the statue he desired.
In the same manner, d'Aspremont, in another tale
by Gautier, Jettatura, having courted death in a duel only
to slay his opponent in the ruins of Pompeii, leaves the
city like "a walking statue," finally to die by his own hand,
his body never to be found.59 Those who courted the remains
of the buried alive, evidently risked sharing the
same fate.
Antique Burials
To many people the idea of being buried alive while appearing to
be dead is the most uncanny thing of all.
Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny"
In an apparently strange reversal, the tombs in Pompeii,
city of the dead, were, unlike the catacombs of Naples and
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Vidler
Rome, rarely the subjects of necropolitan meditations. To
Octavien's companions, indeed, they were positively pleas-
ant:
This road lined with sepulchres which, according to our modern
feelings would be a lugubrious avenue in a town . .. inspired
none of that cold repulsion, none of those fantastic terrors that
our own lugubrious tombs made us feel.60
Rather they experienced "a light curiosity and a joyous fulness
in existence," in this pagan cemetery. Like shepherds
in Arcadia, they frolicked conscious of the fact that in
these tombs "in place of a- horrible cadaver" were only
ashes, "the abstract idea of death" and not the object itself.
61
Such pleasure in the face of a ritualized death contrasted
with the terror felt at the untimely death of the inhabitants
under the eruption; it seemed to exorcise, in some way,
the uncanny effect of the guide's recital of the death of
Arria Marcella. "'It was here,' said the Cicerone in his
nonchalant voice, the tone of which hardly matched the
sense of his words, 'that they found, among seventeen skeletons,
that of the woman whose imprint can be seen in the
Museum at Naples."' The fear stimulated by "l'amour
retrospectif" was countered by the security, almost heimlich,
to be found in tombs "embellished by art," as Goethe
had it. Ritually placed ashes were part of a human plan,
naturally created they were a terrifying catastrophe.62
In his essay on the uncanny, Freud commented on this
fear of being buried alive, which he linked to other uncanny
tropes common in nineteenth-century literature,
such as the forces of animism, witchcraft, magic, the evil
eye, and especially the "Gettatore, that uncanny figure of
Roman superstition," that had, fifty years before, also inspired
Gautier.63 His long analysis of Hoffmann's tale "The
Sandman" persuaded him that, on one level, Schelling
had been correct in ascribing the feeling of the uncanny to
the return of "a hidden familiar thing that has undergone
repression and emerged from it." In this way, the fragment
- "dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at
the wrist"64 - might be related to the castration complex,
and superstition itself might be traced to the return of a
primitive fear, long buried but always ready to be awakened
in the psyche. In this sense, Freud reinterpreted
Schelling's definition in terms of a recurrence of the repressed,
the uncanny as a class of morbid anxiety that
comes from something "repressed which recurs." Similarly
the use of the word heimlich in such a way that it extended
to its seeming opposite, unheimlich, might be explained by
the fact that "this uncanny is in reality nothing new or
foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the
mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.""65
Thus the phenomena of haunting:
Many people experience the feeling [of the uncanny] in the highest
degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of
the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. As we have seen some languages
in use today can only render the German expression 'an
unheimlich house' by 'a haunted house.' ... There is scarcely
any other matter . . upon which our thoughts and feelings have
changed so little since the very earliest times, and in which discarded
forms have been so completely preserved under a thin
disguise, as of our relation to death.66
Freud, himself an amateur archaeologist, was well aware
of the uncanny effects of Pompeii: he had devoted a long
essay to the analysis of Wilhelm Jensen's fantasy Gradiva,
in which a young archaeologist found the original of his
model - a bas-relief of a young girl "splendid in walking"
- amidst the ruins of the city. Jensen's Pompeiian fantasy
was indeed a reworking of Gautier, with the addition of the
archaeologist's dream content.67 But Freud, in this analysis,
strangely refused any direct reference to the uncanny,
or even to the buried discoveries of archaeology, preferring
to enunciate the principles of the interpretation of dreams
as represented in fiction. Perhaps this, in turn, was his
own repression, for in The Interpretation of Dreams itself,
he had fully explored the question of the unheimlich with
reference to one of his own dreams: one that incorporated
both the fear of being buried alive and the desire for a
fully restorative archaeology. It was also, as he noted,
"strangely enough" an account of a dream that "related to
a dissection of the lower part of his own body," a kind of
self-fragmentation.68
In this dream, which he attributed to the reading of a popular
melodramatic novel by Rider Haggard, She, Freud
found himself, following the self-dissection scene, driving
in a cab through the entrance of his own apartment house,
thence to make his way over an Alpine landscape, and
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assemblage 3
5. Etruscan tomb called La
Grotta Campana at Veii
finally to arrive at a primitive "wooden house" within
which were men lying on benches along the walls. His
interpretation, refusing the more obvious allusion to She
a dramatization of the return of the repressed, a figure o
woman triumphant over history on the model of Arria
Marcella, turned instead to his archaeological fantasies:
The wooden house was also, no doubt a coffin, that is to say, t
grave. . . . I had already been in a grave once but it was an
excavated Etruscan grave near Orvieto, a narrow chamber with
two stone benches along its walls, on which the skeletons of two
grown men were lying. . . . The dream seems to be saying: 'If
you must rest in a grave let it be an Etruscan one.' And, by
making this replacement, it transformed the gloomiest of expec
tions into one that was highly desirable.69
Much later, in The Future of an Illusion, Freud was more
explicit on this desire for archaeological fulfillment: "The
sleeper may be seized with a presentiment of death, whic
threatens to place him in the grave. But the dream-work
knows how to select a condition that will turn even that
dreaded event into a wish fulfillment: the dreamer sees
himself in an ancient Etruscan grave which he has
climbed down into, happy to find his archaeological inter
ests satisfied."70 Freud's self-satisfying explanation of his
visit to the haunted house of his desire does nothing to
dispel the truth of his own perception that "psychoanalys
which is concerned with laying bare these hidden forces,
has itself become uncanny to many people for that very
reason." Perhaps it was out of homage to the power of an
archaeology that refused to hide what it had laid bare, an
that should have remained repressed, that Freud hung on
the walls of his consulting room, just above the famous
couch, a large photograph of the rock temple of Ramses
at Abu Simbel, and beside this a bas-relief in plaster copied
from the Museo Ciaramonti in the Vatican, portrayin
one of the Horae, goddesses of vegetation, otherwise
known as the "Gradiva" relief that inspired Jensen.
3. Homesickness
The perpetual exchange between the homely and the unhomely,
the imperceptible sliding of cosiness into dread,
was, in Hoffmann and de Quincey, a carefully arranged
affair, where architecture operated as a machine for defin-
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Vidler
ing boundaries that in the end were to be overcome. In
Melville, the divisions, while still essentially embodied in
physical spaces and objects, are less clear: between literal
concealment and projected fantasy, settled comfort and
lurking dread, the smoke raised an ill-defined wall. We are
even left in some doubt whether the house and its chimney
are not in fact some elaborate symbol for the mind of
the narrator, at home in its unhomely thoughts. In Walter
Pater's fragment "The Child in the House" there is no
longer any question: memory of the house and the house
itself have become subsumed in the dream.7
At first the dream of Florian seems homely enough; it parades
as the very essence of remembered homeliness: for,
as we are told, "in Florian the sense of home was singularly
intense," as "the special character of his home was so
essentially homelike" - a repetition that, like the repetition
of the term "behind" by the narrator in Melville's
story, tends to undermine itself by positive assertiveness.
The remembered attributes of Florian's childhood house,
however, confirm this picture: its garden, trees, walls,
doors, hearths, windows, furnishings, even its scent, contributing
to make it the very type of home, a typicality
reinforced by its position in the English Home Counties
and their homely landscapes. So secure was this house to
the child Florian that even the fog and smoke that occasionally
drifted in from the nearby town held no ominous
air. It was in every way a "place 'inclosed' and 'sealed."'72
But, of course, this house was only a remembered house,
and this itself recalled in a dream. Its aspect was clear but,
"as sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above
itself," heightened, half-spiritual, and merged with the
knowledge, later acquired, of its essential impermanence.
In retrospect, watching the growth of his soul in the house
from a distance, Florian would give significance to things
that, when a child, held only a vague portent. The dream
rapidly became a history of the growth of fear, a tracing of
the sources of what were, to the child, uncanny sensations,
and remained, with the adult, the permanent springs of
unease. Windows were, so to speak, left half-open inadvertantly;
a "cry in the stair, sounding bitterly through the
house," heralded the news of Florian's father's death; a
visit to the churchyard provoked questions as to the nature
of a final resting place.
Finally, Florian's house became haunted: a "certain sort of
figure that he hoped not to see," a shadow of the father,
remained each night by his bed, and did not entirely leave
in the morning. The move from this childhood home simply
confirmed this foreknowledge of death, the death of the
child of course, but also of security and of homeliness.
Returning for an instant to the already abandoned rooms,
"lying so pale, denuded and meek," the "aspect of the
place touched him like the face of one dead." Henceforth
the soul would have no rest but in nostalgia, in that malady
provoked by all apparently secure enclosures, homesickness.
The childhood home was transformed into no
more than a locus for dreams, for what Pater called "that
clinging back towards it" that lasts for a long time and
eventually spoils all anticipated pleasure.
In Pater's palely sublime dream, the return of a sense of
primary narcissism gave an uncanny aura to the memory
of the house, a repetition of something half suppressed in
the mind, of the once intimate relationship between ideas
and things. It was at least significant for literary history and
the establishment of the Proustian mode that Florian's
dream was stimulated, not by actually revisiting the site of
childhood, nor by hearing a description of it that awakened
memories, but by the simple conjuring of the "name of
the place." Henceforth the uncanny will manifest itself no
longer in the prolonged and artistically delivered ghost
story, but in the fragmentary, chance occurrence of a
word, a phrase that, suspended as it were in ordinary discourse,
demanded, as one of a series of such linguistic
fragments of a once whole past, to be interpreted.
Nostalgia
If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in
regard to the house, . . . we shall arrive at the 'House-Machine,'
the mass-production house, healthy (and morally so too) and
beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments
which accompany our existence are beautiful.
Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 1920
The house, like man, can become a skeleton. A superstition is
enough to kill it. Then it is terrible.
Victor Hugo, Les travailleurs de la mer, 186673
The therapeutic programs of the Modern Movement, dedicated
to the erasure of nineteenth-century squalor in all its
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assemblage 3
forms, proposed an alliance between the hygienists and the
architects that would be reinforced on every level by design.
The destruction of the street, last trace of that "Balzacian
mentality" so despised by Le Corbusier, and its
replacement by expanses of verdure; the zoning of industry
away from the centers of habitation; the endless biological
analogies applied to functionalist mechanics were only a
few results of this polemical equation between art and
health to be legislated by the Athens Charter. On the level
of the house, too - its roof removed and replaced by a
garden, its cellars filled in and its first floor open to the
park, its horizontal windows and terraces encouraging the
ceaseless flow of light and air - modernism proposed to
consign the cluttered interiors and insalubrious living conditions
of centuries to oblivion. By these means it was
thought that disease, individual and social, might be eradicated
once and for all and the inhabitants of the twentieth
century rendered fit for the marathon of modern life.
And if the doctors were thus served by the Ville Verte and
the Maison Dom-ino, then, by implication, so were the
psychoanalysts. An open, fresh-air existence would finally
address the causes of those pathologies so painstakingly
treated on post-Freudian couches, purging society of its totems,
taboos, and discontents. If houses were no longer
haunted by the weight of tradition and the imbrications of
generations of family drama, if no cranny was left for the
storage of the bric-a-brac once deposited in damp cellars
and musty attics, then the prison house of memory would
be released from its unhealthy preoccupations to live in the
present. Side by side with the ubiquitous image of the
modern bureaucrat as athlete, measuring his strength
against a punching bag while contemplating a Leger painting,
was the vision of biological functions cleanly subsuming
psychological traumas: to picnic on the grass was not
to recline on the couch, which, in any case, had been
stripped of its layers of oriental rugs to be redesigned according
to the curves of the body and sprung like a tram-
poline.
Yet, inevitably, this house-cleaning operation produced its
own ghosts, the nostalgic shadows of all the "houses" now
condemned to history or to the demolition site. Once reduced
to its bony skeleton, transformed out of recognition
into the cellular fabric of the unite and the seidlung, the
house was itself an object of memory, not now of a particular
individual for a once-inhabited dwelling, but of a collective
population for a never-experienced space: the house
had become an instrument, that is, of generalized nostalgia.
In 1947, two years after the end of the war, and with Europe
poised for full reconstruction, the philosopher Gaston
Bachelard completed a book entitled, significantly enough
in the context of this exhaused battlefield, La terre et les
reveries du repos, the second volume in his study of what
he called "material imagination.'74 In this work he was
concerned to examine what he called the "countermateriality"
to be found in dreams of rest, of intimacy, of
interiority, of involution.
We will examine - he wrote - images of rest, of refuge, of
rootedness. . . . The house, the stomach, the cave, for example,
carry the same overall theme of the return to the mother. In this
realm the unconscious commands, the unconscious directs.
Oneiric values are more and more stable, more and more regular.
They are entirely concerned with nocturnal forces, and subterranean
powers.75
In this plumbing of the depths of a terrestial unconscious,
of la vie souterraine, Bachelard found the topos of the
house and home, la maison natale, to stand at the center
of his nostalgic vision.
This house is far away, it is lost, we inhabit it no more; we are,
alas, certain of inhabiting it never again. It is, however, more
than a memory. It is a house of dreams, our oneiric house.76
But such a house of dreams, a mental construct that included
all houses yet inhabited and to inhabit, a true
"birthplace" or site of origins, was not to be found in the
present, and certainly not in the present provided by modern
life and modern apartments. Bachelard was clear in his
rejection of urban contemporaneity:
I do not dream in Paris, in this geometric cube, in this cement
cell, in this room with iron shutters so hostile to nocturnal
subjects. When I dream well, I go yonder, to a house in
Champagne, or to a few houses within which the mysteries of
happiness are distilled.7
Bachelard's resistance to dreaming in his "geometric cube"
might of course simply be interpreted as the anti-urban
stance of a reveur in the long tradition established by
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Vidler
~7--"~~10
46 raas,
IN It I. 14
I r
1.- 46, no
6. Freud's couch and study,
Berggasse 19, 1938
7. Le Corbusier and Charlotte
Perriand, chaise longue, 1929
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assemblage 3
Rousseau. But in the aftermath of the war, it might more
properly be seen in the context of the antimodern discourse
that, since the early 1930s, had been gaining
ground with critics skeptical of "progress" and its supposed
benefits. Philosophers on both the right and left of the
political spectrum, from Theodore Adorno to Martin Heidegger,
Max Horkheimer to Hans Sedlmayr, contributed to
this sensibility, which amounted to no less than a concerted
attack on the founding premises of modernism, or at
least those that seemed to blame for the form of the "modern"
house, its "geometric cubes" stacked up or laid out in
"cement honeycombs."
Against the prismatic model of the Maison Dom-ino, a
modernist primitive hut in the line of many such structural
and rationalist types since the Enlightenment, these critics
advanced the complaint of uninhabitability. As Adorno
wrote in 1944, "In truth, it has become entirely impossible
to inhabit," a sentiment that was echoed by Heidegger
seven years later in his celebrated "to build, to inhabit, to
think." Adorno despaired of retrieving the house of yesterday
in the city of tomorrow, castigating that
functional architecture, which has made a tabula rasa of all superfluity,
producing only boxes for Boetians constructed by experts
. . . which have not the least relationship to those who
inhabit them; such dwellings are a slap in the face to any nostalgia
for an independent existence, which in any case exists no
more. 78
Reduced to "sleeping next to the ground like an animal,"
modern man would soon be forced into a new nomadic
primitivism, living in the bidonvilles, bungalows, and no
doubt the garden-huts, caravans, or even cars of the near
future. Heidegger was to blame the triumph of technique,
Sedlmayr the "loss of center," but the refrain was similar.
Paul Claudel summed up the feeling in characterizing his
Parisian apartment as a mere number, "a kind of geometrical
place, a conventional hole, between its four walls."
Even a detached house was no longer rooted, but "fixed
with asphalt on the ground so as not to be dug into the
earth."'" The house was no longer a home, ran the refrain,
a burden that has since emerged as a principle leitmotiv of
postmodernism.
The ensuing attempt to rebuild the home on more stable
foundations, according to the specifications of countermodernists
and nostalgic dreamers, complete with its cellar and
its attic, its aged walls and comforting fireplace, has, however,
inevitably fallen victim to a complaint inseparable
from all nostalgic enterprises: that of the triumph of image
over substance. In its aspiration to recover the past, postmodernism
has generally substituted the signs of its absence,
perhaps, in the process, engendering a house more
truly haunted than that of modernism, but for all this,
hardly a more comforting or stable entity. Certainly it remains
to be seen whether the mere image of "houseness"
provides a sufficient substitute for what has been lost, or
even an effective site for oneiric play. For, like its predecessors,
nostalgia for a fixed abode inevitably falls into the
paradox of all nostalgia, that self-consciousness that, despite
a yearning for a concrete place and time, the object
of desire is neither here nor there, present nor absent, now
nor then. It is, as the philosopher Vladimir Jankkl1vitch
put it, caught in the irreversibility of time, and thus fundamentally
unsettled.80
Perhaps it was prescient of Poe that, in describing one of
Usher's painted fantasies, he envisioned a scene that in its
character seemed to his narrator the most uncanny of all,
in its "abstraction," a frightening foresight of modernism's
own dreams:
One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking
not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth,
although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior
of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low
walls, smooth white, and without interruption or device. Certain
accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that
this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the
earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent,
and no torch or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet
a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole
in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.81
In this vision of the modernist crypt, buried and without
exit, Poe assayed the counterimage to his rich, deepcolored,
red and brocaded description of "philosophical
furniture." The tomb that was finally no longer a house,
destined to become the modern house itself, was perhaps
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Vidler
8. Max Klinger, Ein Handschuh:
Die Entf0hrung (A Glove: The
Abduction), 1881
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assemblage 3
the most telling image of the uncanny environment: one
that despite its evident associations to horror, melodrama,
and psychic disturbance, nevertheless envinced only a negative,
a blank, an absence, before a gaze perhaps too eager
to discover presence.
Notes
This article is based on a paper
originally delivered at the Humanities
Center, Johns Hopkins University,
in the Spring'of 1984; it has
been revised and much expanded
under the auspices of a Fellowship
from the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation for the academic year
1985-86. A version of the section
"Buried Alive" was published in
Quaderns d'arquitectura i urbanisme
166 (1985): 124-35. This is a
condensed version of a chapter in
my book in preparation, The Architecture
of Romanticism (Cambridge:
MIT Press, forthcoming).
1. Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete
Tales and Poems (New York: The
Modern Library, 1938), p. 231.
2. Ibid., p. 233.
3. Ibid.
4. Victor Hugo, Les travailleurs de
la mer (1866), in Oeuvres completes:
Roman III (Paris: Robert Laffont,
1985), p. 50.
5. Ibid., p. 51.
6. Ibid., p. 119.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 120.
9. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas
of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757), edited with an introduction
and notes by James T. Boulton
(Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1958), pp. 39-40.
10. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry,
p. 119.
11. Ibid., p. 59.
12. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics:
Lectures on Fine Art (1835), 2
vols., translated by T. M. Knox
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1975), 1:243.
13. Sigmund Freud, "Das Unheimliche"
(The Uncanny), translated in
Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature
(Penguin Books: Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, 1985), p. 339. This essay
first appeared in Imago 5 (1919):
297-324, and was translated in The
Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works, ed. James
Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth
Press, 1953-74), 17: 217-52.
All references to Freud's essay in
this piece will be taken from the
Penguin edition.
14. Ibid., pp. 339-40.
15. Ibid., p. 364.
16. The English word "uncanny,"
although not a direct translation of
unheimlich, reveals similar relationships
with "house and home." Thus
"canny," from the root "can"
(knowledge and skill), led to the
frugal and the careful - the household
virtues - and then to comfort
and cosiness by the fireside household
qualities - and thence
to the idea of the supernaturally
wise; "uncanny" while not precisely
the opposite of canny, nevertheless
retained connections with both the
haunting of houses and the strange,
unfamiliar, mysterious presence of
the supernatural. The earliest use in
English cited in the Oxford English
Dictionary is significantly enough
connected to architecture: a remark
by Emerson visiting Stonehenge,
"We walked in and out, and took
again a fresh look at the uncanny
stones. "
17. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm,
Deutsches Worterbuch (Leipzig,
1877), vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 874.
18. Daniel Sanders, Worterbuch
der deutschen Sprache (1860),
1:729.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow
(1811-78), novelist and playwright,
whose early romances were in the
fantastic genre but who joined with
the Young Germans in Frankfurt
against the romantic current; later
he succeeded Tieck at the court
theater Dresden.
22. Sanders. W6rterbuch, 1:729.
23. Ibid.
24. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie,
vol. 2 of Ausgewiihlte Werke
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgeselleschaft, 1966), p. 649. I
am grateful to E. R. Miller for providing
a finished translation of this
passage.
25. Ibid.
26. Locus suspectus, the nearest
Latin equivalent for the uncanny.
27. E. T. A. Hoffmann, "Rat Krespel,"
in Die Serapionsbriider, vol. 5
of Poetische Werke (Berlin: W. de
Gruyter, 1957), pp. 32-56. Cited in
"Councillor Krespel," trans. L. J.
Kent and E. C. Knight, in Tales,
ed. Victor Lange (New York: Continuum,
1982), pp. 80-100.
28. Ibid., pp. 80-81.
29. Ibid., p. 82.
30. Ibid., p. 81, emphasis added.
31. Maria Tatar, Spellbound: Studies
on Mesmerism and Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1978), p. 126.
32. Hoffmann, "Der Unheimliche
Gast," in Die Serapionsbriider, vol.
7 of Poetische Werke, pp. 103-53.
33. Thomas de Quincey, Confessions
of an Opium Eater, in Selected
Writings of Thomas de
Quincey, ed. Philip van Doren
Stern (New York: Modern Library,
1937), pp. 814ff.
34. Michael Riffaterre, "Hermeneutic
Models," Poetics Today 4,
no. 1 (1983): 7-16.
35. Hoffman, Tales, p. 278.
36. J. N. A. Rimbaud, "Veill6es,"
in Illuminations, Complete Works,
Selected Letters, trans. with an introduction
and notes by Wallace
Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966), p. 248.
37. Herman Melville, "I and My
Chimney," in Pierre, Israel Potter,
The Confidence-Man, Tales, and
Billy Budd (New York: The Library
of America, 1984), pp. 1298-327.
38. See, for example, V. H.
Litman, "The Cottage and the
Temple: Melville's Symbolic Use of
Architecture," American Quarterly
2 (1969): 638ff.
39. Melville, "I and My Chimney,"
p. 1311.
40. Ibid.
41. Freud, "The Uncanny," p. 359.
42. Baron Taylor, letter to Charles
Nodier, "Sur les villes de Pomp6i et
d'Herculanum," in Frangois-Rene
de Chateaubriand, Oeuvres romanesques
et voyages (Paris: Gallimard,
Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1969),
2:1505.
43. Ibid., p. 1475.
44. Ibid.
45. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondence,
I, 1830-1851 (Paris: Gallimard,
Bibliotheque de la Pleiade,
1973), p. 773; Letter to Louis
Bouilhet, "Ah! poor chap, how I
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Vidler
missed you in Pompeii! I send you
flowers that I picked from a brothel
over the door of which is set an
erect phallus. There were in this
house more flowers than in any
other. The sperm of ancient penises,
fallen to the earth, have perhaps
fertilized the earth."
46. Chateaubriand, Oeuvres, p.
1783.
47. Ibid., p. 1472.
48. G6rard de Nerval, Oeuvres,
(Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de
la Pl6iade, 1952), 1:1175.
49. Th6ophile Gautier, Rcits fantastiques
(Paris: Flammarion, 1981),
p. 246.
50. Ibid., pp. 240ff.
51. Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie,
p. 653.
52. Chateaubriand, Oeuvres, p.
1474.
53. Ibid.
54. Freidrich Schlegel, Athenaeum,
Fragment 206, quoted in
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and JeanLuc
Nancy, L'absolu litte'raire:
Theorie de la litterature du romantisme
allemand (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1978), p. 126.
55. Ibid., p. 101.
56. Ibid.
57. Gautier, RMcits fantastiques,
pp. 237-38.
58. Ibid., p. 253.
59. Ibid., p. 379.
60. Ibid., p. 243.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Freud, "The Uncanny," pp.
365-66.
64. Ibid., p. 366.
65. Ibid., pp. 363-64.
66. Ibid., p. 364.
67. Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva: A
Pompeiian Fantasy (1903), translated
in Sigmund Freud, Delusion
and Dream and other Essays, ed.
Philip Rieff (Boston: Beacon Press,
1956), pp. 147-235.
68. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation
of Dreams, trans. and ed.
James Strachey (New York: Basic
Books, 1955), p. 491.
69. Ibid.
70. Sigmund Freud, The Future of
an Illusion, trans. James Strachey
(New York: Doubleday, 1964), p.
23.
71. Walter Pater, "The Child in
the House" [1878], in Harold
Bloom, ed., Selected Writings of
Walter Pater (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1974), pp. 1-16.
72. Ibid., p. 6.
73. Hugo, Les travailleurs de la
mer, bk. 1, pt. 2, p. 2, in Oeuvres
completes, Roman III, p. 51.
74. Gaston Bachelard, La terre et
les reveries de la volonte' (Paris: Librarie
Jos6 Corti, 1948).
75. Gaston Bachelard, La terre et
les reveries du repos (Paris: Librarie
Jose Corti, 1948), p. 6.
76. Ibid., pp. 95-96.
77. Ibid., p. 96.
78. Theodore Adorno, Minima
Moralia: Reflections from Damaged
Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (1951;
London: Verso Editions, 1974).
79. Paul Claudel, Oiseau noir dans
le soleil levant, p. 144, quoted in
Gaston Bachelard, La pogtique de
l'espace (Paris: Presses universitaires
de France, 1957), p. 42.
80. Vladimir Jank616vitch, L'irrdversible
et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion,
1983), pp. 346ff.
81. Poe, The Fall of the House of
Usher, p. 237.
Figure Credits
1, 2. Victor Hugo, Les travailleurs
de la mer (Paris: L'Impremerie Nationale,
1911), pp. 563, 561.
3, 4. Johannes Overbeck, Pompegi
(Leipzig, 1884), figs. 4-6.
5. George Dennis, The Cities and
Cemeteries of Etruria (London,
1883), vol. 1, p. 31.
6. Photograph by Edmund Engelman.
From Berggasse 19 (New
York: Basic Books, 1976).
7. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret,
Oeuvre complete de 1929-34
(Zurich: Verlag H. Girsberger,
1929).
8. Courtesy of Carus Gallery, New
York.
29
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