H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” is rife with similar modernist themes to those which we have discussed throughout the term, such as the pursuit of knowledge and the exploration of the unknown. The latter is especially important since Freudian psychoanalysis runs throughout the story. I’d argue that Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter”—in particular the end in which Harley is proclaimed dead—is a direct response to Freud’s ideas, particularly his idea of the “uncanny.” At the turn of the twentieth-century, the new science of psychoanalysis raised eyebrows and suspicions as it attempted to survey the previously unmapped terrain of the human mind. While the sciences had been hitherto concerned predominately with explaining the outside world, Freud shifted the focus inward to a strange new world—the unconscious. His idea of the uncanny followed suit, itself a response to Ernst Jentsch’s definition of the peculiar state. According to Jentsch, the uncanny is a state linked to a feeling of intellectual uncertainty. Jentsch gives the example of the uncomfortably strange feeling of seeing a life-like robot. There is a cognitive dissonance which stems from witnessing an animated inanimate object. In other words, the uncanny for Jentsch is a struggle between discerning imagination from reality. Freud revised this definition of the uncanny, focusing on what he saw as an underlying repression of infantile desires. Freud believed that as children we hold certain beliefs, which later in life are debunked with age and experience (ie. the belief that dead people can return from the grave). If this repression is ever challenged—let’s say by some medical miracle wherein a patient on their deathbed is nursed back to perfect health—there results a sense of the Freudian uncanny in real life. The situation changes when discussing the uncanny in literature, since the realm of fiction allows for greater creative freedom (thus the uncanny cannot exist in fairy tales, for instance). According to Freud, the existence of the uncanny in literature is dependent upon a certain literary realism to oppose it.
So what ever happened to Harley Warren? What do we make of his mysterious death at the hands of an unknown killer? The answer seems to be linked, at least partially, with the idea of the uncanny. His literal descent to the “center of the earth” is prefaced by a figurative descent into madness. As we can discern from Randolph Carter’s statement, Warren seems to have crossed the threshold separating reality from repressed infantile belief—his theory that “certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years” is irrefutable proof of his madness. Even before his literal descent, Warren seems to have come face-to-face with the possibility of the uncanny. Once under the surface, Warren is confronted with the exact uncanny which he surmised he might find—something so “terrible” and “monstrous” that it renders itself “utterly beyond thought.” Poor Carter faces a similar confrontation with the uncanny, stemming from his realization that “Warren is DEAD”! His own horror comes from the uncanniness of Warren losing his life to the unknown. By the end of “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” Lovecraft has the uncanny fold back on itself and consume everything.
Aaron Guggenmoos
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