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Session 8b: Uncanny Monsters
Chair: J. Randall Groves

Monsters and Others: Mediating the Contemporary Uncanny Through Fictions
Fiona Peters
Department of Cultural Studies, Bath Spa University, United Kingdom

Freud argues in ‘The Uncanny’ that this elusive yet undeniable phenomenon emerges within the slippery spaces between the boundaries of the real and the imaginary as a result of repression; in other words: ‘…everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.’ He goes on to claim that we speak of a person as uncanny ‘when we ascribe evil intentions to him.’ These intentions are, clearly, projections of the uncanny feelings that we experience when that which should be most familiar to us is made strange. By projecting these feelings outwards, Freud believes, the other person must becomes monstrous to us, we feel that ‘his intentions to harm us are going to be carried out with the help of special powers.’ In this text Freud mentions epilepsy and madness as being cast into this category, along with the female genitals; the most everyday and natural phenomena becoming, according to Freud, the most potent fixations for uncanny feelings.
Freud believed that dead bodies and their various monstrous manifestations as ghosts, spirits and so on, have a particular place within the phenomenon of the uncanny, placing the origins of the uncanny within a primitive yet pervasive fear of death, mediated by projecting that visceral fear out as an impotent yet inescapable terror of the evil other: ‘…most likely our fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to catty him off to share his new life with him.’
Freud himself suggests ways in which the uncanny is mediated through ‘fictions’, not just literary texts but fairy tales and fantastic stories and legends, which work to mediate and channel the fear both of the uncanny and also the monstrous and undefined but threatening ‘other’. The anxiety suffered by the uncanny feeling can, it may be argued, be reduced by the ways in which artifice works, by itself blurring the boundaries between what is real and what is imaginary, thus ‘allowing the repressed to return without fear or threat.’
This paper will investigate the ways in which the uncanny is worked through today, in other words ask what ‘fictions’ do we deploy in order to stave off an unbearable and overwhelming surfeit of the anxiety that the uncanny brings with it? The concept of the ‘stranger’ as monstrous, something not developed within Freud, may have particular resonance in our contemporary political world, in which state boundaries are being torn down at the same time as the concept of the stranger as ‘other’ and thus ‘monstrous’ is seemingly becoming ever more acceptable, especially within contemporary British political discourse.

When Charisma Breeds a Monster: Dangerous Liasons in Carmel Bird’s Novels
Gerardo Rodriguez Salas and Margarita Carretero-Gonzalez Departamento de Filologías Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Campus Universitario de Cartuja, Granada, Spain

While charisma may be considered one of the greatest possible gifts bestowed onto a person, it is also true that it can very likely be misused by its beneficiaries; the personal magnetism exerted by the charismatic endows him/her with an unusual power that is very often directed to control his/her enthusiasts. The recipient of the “divine gift” – the etymological meaning of “charisma” – is not infrequently turned into a monster who causes the destruction of an entire community. The cases of David Koresh, Luc Jouret or Joseph Di Mambro may serve as examples of incredibly charismatic leaders that died, together with their unconditional followers, in collective suicides. Anyone external to the sects where they put their doctrines into practice finds it difficult to believe how any intelligent person could fall for their statements of belief. Their charisma may offer part of the key to the answer.
In this paper, we aim precisely at studying personalities of this type as they are displayed in Australian novelist Carmel Bird’s narratives The White Garden (1995), Red Shoes (1998) and Cape Grimm (2004). The protagonists of this trilogy are examples of monstrous personalities. They become charismatic leaders and exert their magnetism even on the reader, who remains divided between the monster s/he wants to hate, and a certain fondness for them, a fondness that impels him/her to find any possible explanation that may excuse their terrible deeds. Carmel Bird fictionalises an unfortunately frequent reality, since, like Ambrose Goddard, Petra Penfold-Knight and Caleb Mean – the protagonists of the three novels we aim to analyse – charismatic leaders keep proving to be quite a powerful weapon of mass destruction.

Response to the Uncanny
Christopher Auld

Chris will be responding genrally to the issues raised int he two papers above.

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