AN UNCANNY DIGRESSION

In my review of Jack Zipes's THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, I left out one oddball detail that didn't seem pertinent to the main review. I mentioned that Zipes was trying to co-opt the tropes of fantasy for his own concerns:

Much in the same vein as a similar Marxist work, Rosemary Jackson's FANTASY: THE LITERATURE OF SUBVERSION, Zipes' survey celebrates fantasy for purely utilitarian purposes, in line with the Marxist project of restructuring corrupt society. 

But the strange thing is that Zipes tries to enlist Sigmund Freud's category, "the uncanny," to validate his end-- yet only uses the term on three pages in the whole book. Freud himself only gets cited on four pages, so Zipes certainly wasn't trying to bring ENCHANTED SCREEN into line with Freudian concepts. If anything, it's the opposite. Freud came up with his term "the uncanny" in order to distinguish the questionable nature of a story like Hoffman's "The Sandman" from, say, the world of fairy tales, in which Freud says that "the world of reality is left behind" by a constant stream of marvelous things and beings.

I suspect that the only reason Zipes "comes to bury Freud, not to praise him," is that he Zipes wants above all to convince his readers that the marvelous fantasies of fairy tales are not irrelevant to "the world of reality." In this, of course, his principal references are the usual Marxist suspects, and so Zipes doesn't really attempt to grapple with what Freud was trying to say to his contemporaries, least of all with Freud's belief that the marvelous content of the fairy tales could be traced to "animistic" societies.

Rather than trying to reclaim "the uncanny" for his explicitly Marxist uses, Zipes would have done better to follow the example of Rosemary Jackson, who at least was clear on the point that fantasy could be used equally well for a conservative ethos (Tolkien) or some more liberating one (Carroll).

However, Zipes's bad usage of the term "uncanny" did move me to research the genesis of Freud's concept a bit more, and will probably give rise to an essay on the topic here in near future.