Robert Aickman – Master of the Uncanny
- plecomber
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
In the late 1980s I bought a copy of Robert Aickman’s novella The Model, purely based on its intriguing cover: a Bruegelesque peasant on a fogbound heath, lamenting the death of a fabulous bird, overlooked by a large rocking horse; the overall effect being that of some kind of medieval fever-dream. Unpublished in his lifetime (the finished manuscript was found amongst his papers after his death in 1981), this mesmerising tale of a young girl’s dreamlike journey across Czarist Russia seduced me immediately and soon had me seeking out other works by the author. Which led me to his horror stories; or strange stories, as Aickman preferred. And what a revelation they were. For Robert Aickman was a master of the uncanny. Nearly all of his tales – there are a mere forty-eight in total – leave the reader with a creeping sense of unease. No body horror, very little violence or gore, no jump scares, just the exquisite conjuring of a sense of the uncanny.
Why is it that some works of fiction – or real-life experiences – produce this strange emotion? Both the psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud pondered this very question back at the start of the 20th century. The German word for uncanny is unheimlich, although, etymologically speaking, it more closely corresponds to ‘unhomely’ – in the sense that it is the opposite of heimlich: at home, cosy, at ease. Jentsch posited that one of the causes of this emotion is an intellectual uncertainty, specifically a doubt as to whether a seemingly lifeless object might actually be alive, or, conversely, something which we take to be a living being might actually be inanimate. This would explain why waxwork figures, Victorian dolls, automata, ventriloquists’ dummies and reanimated corpses are often principal players in the theatre of the uncanny. Jentsch also adds to this list the effect of witnessing someone in the grip of a seizure, or caught in the repetitive spasmodic actions of mental disease – the human body overtaken by a seemingly mechanical process.
But this feeling of unheimlich is not just restricted to experiences which might produce a creeping sense of dread. We often feel it when presented with surprising coincidences – talking about an old schoolfriend, say, only to have them contact us the next day out of the blue; or learning the definition of a new word and then seeing it appear multiple times in articles we read that week. Resorting to the tenets of psychoanalysis, Freud suggests these manifestations of unheimlich are caused by a repressed remnant in our psyches of a period of early human development – the old animistic view of the universe. This was a time when our ancestors believed the world to be peopled with spirits and attributed magical powers to strangers and inanimate objects. Freud postulates that we still have residual traces of these views, and that when something is uncanny, rather than, say, just frightening, it is because this repressed primitive remnant of the animistic attitude is stimulated and returns to our conscious mind. He says the same can be said of our attitude to death, dead bodies and ghosts, all of which held great superstitious relevance to our ancestors: '… secret harmful forces and the return of the dead … our primitive forebears once regarded such things as real possibilities … Today we no longer believe in them, having surmounted such modes of thought. Yet we do not feel entirely secure in these new convictions … Now, as soon as something happens in our lives that seems to confirm these old, discarded beliefs, we experience a sense of the uncanny – because something familiar that has been repressed has reappeared.'
But there is a difference between the things we find uncanny in real life and that which we find uncanny in imaginative fiction. After all, in fiction, the author has many more opportunities to produce the effect. There are certain required conditions, though. If the writer has invented a universe where spells, ghosts, demons and wish-fulfilment are everyday occurrences then the manifestation of these things will not be uncanny – frightening and compelling, perhaps, but never uncanny. However, if they create a world which, for all intents and purposes, appears like our everyday version of reality, and then they introduce something supernatural into it, they have far better scope for manifesting the required effect. Such is the realm of Mr Aickman. The settings for his stories are the most mundane of surroundings: dreary bed and breakfast establishments, failing coastal inns with alcoholic proprietors, modest suburban households. His protagonists are often lonely individuals, awkward in the company of others, fastidious in their habits, unclubbable, not always likeable. And against this backdrop of grey, British banality, Aickman spins his webs of unease, slowly undermining the agency of his protagonist, gradually building the unheimlich sense of dread. One can never second-guess where his strange tales might lead to and quite often they have no real satisfactory conclusion; the reader is left with the feeling they might have actually just recalled a partially remembered nightmare.
There are other authors, of course, who excel in the genre of the uncanny. One of my favourites of the species is a short story by Daphne du Maurier called The Doll. Written by the author when she was only twenty, but not published until 2011, it is a disturbing story about a man who becomes infatuated with a mysterious, alluring violinist named Rebecca. However, he is driven to a neurotic breakdown when he discovers that Rebecca harbours a disturbing secret – hidden in her flat she has a life-sized mechanical doll, whom she has taken as her lover. The tale is one of obsession, but also of repressed sexual feelings – an underlying theme of many of Robert Aickman’s stories as well (for all of his uptight British propriety, the author’s work often has a strong erotic charge). It also conforms to Jentsch’s theory of the uncanny. Here’s the point where the protagonist discovers the doll for the first time:
Something was sitting in the chair. I felt an eerie cold feeling in my heart, as if the room were haunted. ‘What is it?’ I whispered.
Rebecca took the lamp and held it over the chair. ‘This is Julio,’ she said softly, I stepped closer, and saw what I took to be a boy of about sixteen, dressed in a dinner jacket, shirt and waistcoat, and long Spanish trousers.
A boy of about sixteen; for some reason, I find that detail particularly unnerving. The inanimate object, then, mistaken as a living being. But is Rebecca’s mechanical lover truly inanimate? There’s our intellectual uncertainty. I use a similar uncanny reveal in my novel MIDNIGHT STREETS – about a series of grisly murders in 1920s London – when a young mother, thinking she may have been burgled, discovers the tips of a pair of child’s patent leather shoes protruding from under the living room curtains. Momentarily relieved at thinking it’s just her young son playing hide-and-seek, she whips back the curtain to reveal … well, something that certainly isn’t alive any more.
According to du Maurier’s protagonist, Julio’s face was ‘… the most evil thing I have ever seen. It was ashen pale in colour, and the mouth was a crimson gash, sensual and depraved … and the eyes were cruel, gleaming and narrow … They seemed to stare right through one.’ Compare this to the description of another uncanny doll – the ventriloquist’s prop from Gerald Kersh’s The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy:
There was something disgustingly avid in the stare of its bulging blue eyes, the lids of which clicked as it winked; and an extraordinarily horrible ghoulishness in the smacking of its great, grinning, red wooden lips.
Published in 1944, Kersh’s tale is a perfectly-crafted vignette of that popular uncanny trope: the haunted ventriloquist’s dummy, probably most successfully represented by the Michael Redgrave section of the classic British supernatural anthology movie, Dead of Night. That version was attributed to the writer John Baines, but as the film was released in 1945, it begs the question as to which story came first. Perhaps it’s just another of those uncanny coincidences?
But let’s get back to du Maurier’s doll, Julio, the one with the sensual and depraved mouth. The overwhelming sense we get from this tale is one of carnal danger. At one point Julio’s face is described as that of a ‘grinning hateful satyr’ – surely the most lustful of mythological creatues. A similar, decadent erotic charge runs through one of my favourite Aickman tales: The Swords. Wanting to escape his digs for a while, a young, inexperienced travelling salesman stumbles across a shabby circus tent set up on a dreary piece of wasteland in Wolverhampton. Inside he finds a show going on, the seats half-filled with a collection of seedy men. It has all the appearances of some tawdry striptease, but the female performer on stage sits sprawled, catatonic on a chair, her face made up with strange green powder. The circus barker – whom our protagonist suspects of being her pimp – then proceeds to cajole members of the audience into piercing the young woman with swords, a collection of which are piled up before him. We are as unnerved as the young salesman to discover that, rather than injuring the beguiling performer, these woundings seem to enliven and arouse her. The young man escapes through the tent flaps, terrified he will be next to be called up to perform the transgressional act. The whole thing has the eerie detachment of some horrid dream. With our inexperienced protagonist now besotted with the strange young woman, things become even more surreal when the barker pimps her out to him. Typical of Aickman, the ending is both disturbing and puzzling in equal measures.
And so to one of the most accomplished of Aickman’s stories, Ringing the Changes, a kind of folk horror tale which takes us back to Freud’s theory of repressed primitive superstition. The story centres around two newlyweds, Gerald and Phrynne, who have chosen to spend their honeymoon in a remote seaside town. Immediately upon their arrival, the bell in a nearby church begins to peal ominously. Soon it’s joined by the bells from other churches, and what at first was a curious oddity, now becomes a monotonous nuisance which threatens to ruin their honeymoon. Things are made worse when they discover they’ve booked themselves into a ramshackle hotel, run by a pair of shoddy dipsomaniacs. One of the fellow guests admonishes Gerald for bringing his young wife to the town on such a night, and urges him to leave immediately. It soon becomes clear the clanging bells herald some terrifying ancient ritual and before long the couple find themselves cowering in their room, as the dead are resurrected to the riotous thrill of the marauding locals. But this is an Aickman story – not The Walking Dead; we never actually see the reanimated corpses, we only smell them, in the claustrophobic dark, as they invade the hotel room. And they’re not there to kill, only to dance; dance with the locals … and with Phrynne, who gets carried away into the nightmarish throng. In the morning things appear to have returned to normal; but Gerald notices his new wife will no longer meet his eye; he knows then, of course, things will never be the same. As they leave town they pass the cemetery, where the locals are toiling hard with their spades, returning the dead to their graves, repressing those primitive urges once again. And at the sight of this, Phrynne’s mouth ‘… became fleetingly more voluptuous still.’ Aickman’s tale is over, and we are left, once again, with an overwhelming sense of the uncanny.
This article first appeared as a guest post on The Ginger Nuts of Horror website: https://gnofhorror.com/robert-aickman-master-of-the-uncanny/
I thought this was going to be about Robert Heinlein at first (Strangers in a strange land, etc).
I'm glad it wasn't.