Unheimlich Penguins

I’m in a book club.

This book club consists of 10 wonderful people.

We are reading “The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.”

H.P. Lovecraft was a short fiction horror writer in the early 1900s. He created and inspired what is now called “Lovecraftian horror.”

It’s not so much a book club as it is a books club.

We read two short stories a week and talk about the stories every Sunday.

It’s a lot of fun.

Last week’s stories were called “Rats in the Walls” and “At the Mountains of Madness.”

I want to talk about a certain word that was referenced during our discussion yesterday.

The word is “uncanny.”

“At the Mountains of Madness” has penguins. The story isn’t about penguins, but there is a brief mention of penguins. These penguins are not normal penguins. They’re 6-foot-tall, albino penguins. I had an uncomfortable reaction to these giant albino penguins. I found them creepy and haunting; more haunting than any other Lovecraftian monster that came later.

Others in the book club found them cute and questioned why I thought they were hostile.

I didn’t think they were hostile. I used the word uncanny.

This led to a discussion on the meaning of the word uncanny.

Does the word simply mean something strange or out of the ordinary? Or is fear involved?

Uncanny: strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way.

Google definition

This definition is good.

Not great though.

It’s missing something.

Edgar Allan Poe is an expert in the world of the uncanny. His psychological horror stories defined what it means to be unsettling.

The uncanny can take many forms, but one of the best representations is in Poe’s short story “William Wilson.”

This story uses the “uncanny doppelganger.”

Doppelganger: an apparition or double of a living person.

google definition

When William Wilson was a young boy in grade school, he met another boy with the same name and roughly the same appearance. This boy was mysterious and only spoke in whispers. Throughout the story, William Wilson is haunted by this whispering doppelganger.

In this sense, the uncanny is not simply strange, mysterious, or out of the ordinary. It’s more subtle than that.

If the sky suddenly turned green, that would be strange. But if the sky suddenly grew a face, a face always watching, staring, inexplicably grinning whenever you met its eyes, that would be uncanny.

A doll with a broken voice box is a strange sound to hear. A doll with a voice box that speaks your name in the middle of the night is an uncanny sound to hear.

The difference between strange and uncanny is familiarity.

Unexpected familiarity. Unwanted familiarity.

When something is uncanny, it’s oddly familiar but also out of place. It’s known but unknown. It’s paradoxical and our brains have a hard time comprehending. This becomes unsettling.

If you met yourself, someone who looked and acted exactly like you, it would be strange, but not altogether strange because it’s inherently familiar.

It’s you.

But you’re you.

So, who’s this?

Who are you?

Who am I?

Now imagine you met this doppelganger in a place more unsettling.

Not in broad daylight like I assume you imagined it.

No. That’s not fun.

Maybe in the back of a movie theater.

Or a dark alley way.

Or out the window at a family dinner.

And they’re whispering.

And you can barely read their lips.

They’re whispering your name.

That’s uncanny.

In his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny), Sigmund Freud attempts to explain the creepiness of dolls and wax works. He later confirms that, “everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”

This later led to a theory called “The Uncanny Valley.” Japanese robotics professor, Masahiro Mori, coined the term in his “Uncanny Valley” hypothesis:

“As the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers’ emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it reaches a point, beyond which the response quickly becomes strong revulsion.”

Uncanny valley wikipedia page

This “barely human” robot becomes uncanny. When the robot is made more fully human, however, empathetic levels increase once again in the observer’s response. This repulsive response between the “barely human” and “fully human” robot is called the uncanny valley. This references the valley created in the graph made to map out the emotional response to these robots.

Freud would call these “barely human” robots unheimlich.  

The German word “unheimlich” translates to uncanny.

But unheimlich sounds like a maneuver where you shove food down someone’s throat until they start choking.

Would that be uncanny?

I guess not.

Just strange and mean spirited.

I’d love to unheimlich those unheimlich penguins, though.