The impression that this odd appeal to and simultaneous dismissal of
foreign languages is motivated (in the Freudian sense) is strengthened by
Strachey’s modest note that in fact, English has the same couple in a rare
OED-only sense of ‘canny’. Of course, Freud could not have been
expected to know this, but, proud of his schoolboy Greek, he might have
pricked up his ears at one of the other examples Reik supplied, for the
GreekxenoBhas a very similar paradox, meaning at once stranger, guest
and host. What Freud or Reik did, in fact, was to look up the word
unheimlichin Rost and Schenkl’s German–Greek lexicons, find it trans-
lated asxenoB, and leave it at that. Had Freud looked upxenBin Rost or
Schenkl, he would have found it translated asFremdeandGastfreundin
both: the uncanny essay treats Greek as if it were structured by a German
original, whereas a paradox of translation is that because no word trans-
lates back perfectly, a faithful translation is slightly foreign to its own
language too.^40 Although the concept Freud wants is in fact already there,
instead, Freud is determined to surmise that the dictionaries tell him
nothing new, for the mysterious reason that ‘we ourselves speak a lan-
guage that is foreign’. But foreign to whom? Again, the uncanny strange/
familiar couple is at work in the logic here: the foreign dictionaries are all
too familiar (‘tell us nothing new’) because Freud’s own mother tongue is
‘foreign’. Freud’s investigations, it seems, are already being structured by
what they are about to discover.
This damages Freud’s point in one way and confirms it another. So
much for scientific objectivity, since the conclusion of his investigation
can be seen to be structuring the method. But this itself is exactly the
modus operandiof the uncanny, which is where we sense a hidden force to
have been at work all along – as Coppelius in ‘The Sandman’ turns out to
have been lurking there all through Nathaniel’s life, as the double or
telepathic twin turns out to be as much yourself from birth as you ever
have been, as Freud feels that the Italian town’s red-light district is always
awaiting him no matter where he turns, and so on. To experience the
uncanny is to be secondary to its machinations: we might say that
the uncanny is not so much ‘whatever reminds us of this inner “compul-
sion to repeat”’ as the realisation that one isalreadyrepeating, even in
being reminded.^41 Unlike horror or fear, the uncanny never comes as a
complete surprise: to experience it is to be always already entangled with
some strangely intimate network of forces. To use Freud’s examples, the
dead return because they know you’ll recognise them, or the number 62
turns up again and again because you’ve seen it before. The one thing that
is fatal to the uncanny is objectivity, as Freud observes about fairy stories,
124 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism