#nicholas royle

[uncannyarchive]

“The uncanny entails another thinking of beginning: the beginning is already haunted. The uncanny is ghostly. It is concerned with the strange, weird and mysterious, with a flickering sense…of something supernatural. The uncanny involves feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of who one is and what is being experienced. Suddenly one’s sense of oneself…seems strangely questionable.”

— Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny

[cyberspace-saga]

“The uncanny can be a matter of something gruesome or terrible, above all death and corpses, cannibalism, live burial, the return of the dead. But it can also be a matter of something strangely beautiful, bordering on ecstasy, or eerily reminding us of something, like déjà vu. It can involve a feeling of something beautiful but at the same time frightening, as in the figure of the double or telepathy. It comes above all, perhaps, in the uncertainties of silence, solitude, and darkness. The uncanny has to do with the sense of a secret encounter: it is perhaps inseparable from an apprehension, however fleeting, of something that should have remained secret and hidden but has come to life.”

— Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny

[zippocreed501]

Art by Les Edwards

[helenvaughans]

“She rises when the sun sets and goes immediately to her table where she plays her game of patience until she grows hungry, until she becomes ravenous. She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.”

–Angela Carter, “The Lady of the House of Love”

Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

“Her figure is regular, certainly, and so is her face. She would be beautiful, but her eyes seem to have no ray of life; they almost seem to lack the power of sight. Her gait is curiously measured, as though her every movement were produced by some mechanism like clockwork. She plays and sings with the disagreeably perfect, soulless timing of a machine, and she dances similarly. Olimpia gave us a very weird feeling; we wanted nothing to do with her; we felt that she was only pretending to be a living being, and that there was something very strange about her.”

–E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman” (Trans. Ritchie Robertson)

Moira Shearer as Olympia in The Tales of Hoffmann (1954)

“The uncanny can be a matter of something gruesome or terrible, above all death and corpses, cannibalism, live burial, the return of the dead. But it can also be a matter of something strangely beautiful, bordering on ecstasy, or eerily reminding us of something, like déjà vu. It can involve a feeling of something beautiful but at the same time frightening, as in the figure of the double or telepathy. It comes above all, perhaps, in the uncertainties of silence, solitude, and darkness. The uncanny has to do with the sense of a secret encounter: it is perhaps inseparable from an apprehension, however fleeting, of something that should have remained secret and hidden but has come to life.”

–Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny

From The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death, and the Ecstatic by Joanna Ebenstein

“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”

–Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition

Sonoya Mizuno as Kyoko in Ex Machina (2014)

[funeral]

The uncanny can be a matter of something gruesome or terrible, above all death and corpses, cannibalism, live burial, the return of the dead. But it can also be a matter of something strangely beautiful, bordering on ecstasy, or eerily reminding us of something, like déjà vu. It can involve a feeling of something beautiful but at the same time frightening, as in the figure of the double or telepathy. It comes above all, perhaps, in the uncertainties of silence, solitude, and darkness. The uncanny has to do with the sense of a secret encounter: it is perhaps inseparable from an apprehension, however fleeting, of something that should have remained secret and hidden but has come to life.

Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny

[cyberspace-saga]

"The uncanny entails another thinking of beginning: the beginning is already haunted. The uncanny is ghostly. It is concerned with the strange, weird and mysterious, with a flickering sense…of something supernatural. The uncanny involves feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of who one is and what is being experienced. Suddenly one’s sense of oneself…seems strangely questionable."

— Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny

[funeral]

At some level the feeling of the uncanny may be bound up with the most extreme nostalgia or 'homesickness', in other words a compulsion to return to an inorganic state, a desire (perhaps unconscious) to die, a death drive ... And it is different (yet strangely the same) every time: its happening is always a kind of un-happening. Its 'un' unsettles time and space, order and sense.

Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny

[funeral]

The uncanny has to do with a strangeness of framing and borders, an experience of liminality. It may be that the uncanny is a feeling that happens only to oneself, within oneself, but it is never one's 'own': its meaning or significance may have to do, most of all, with what is not oneself, with others, with the world 'itself'. It may thus be construed as a foreign body within oneself, even the experience of oneself as a foreign body, the very estrangement of inner silence and solitude. It would appear to be indissociably bound up with a sense of repetition or 'coming back' — the return of the repressed, the constant or eternal recurrence of the same thing, a compulsion to repeat.

Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny