The Interruption of Writing: Uncanny Intertextuality in under Western Eyes

Abstract

If there is a dark power, which with such enmity and treachery lays a thread within us, by which it holds us fast, and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I say, there is such a power, it must form itself within us or from ourselves, indeed; become identical with ourselves, for it is only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room which it requires to accomplish its secret work.E. T. A. Hoffman, "The Sandman" (147)Under WESTERN Eyes is a novel of uncanny returns; spectres, words and compulsively repeated scenes all conspire to unhinge its protagonist. Not only Razumov's guilty conscience, however, inspires this hauntological matrix.1 Haldin's unforeseeable intrusion at the outset inaugurates a story of betrayal, a fictional case study of the tyrannical fate dealt out in Tsarist Russia. This essay will show that the fateful intrusion may also be read as the formative start to an altogether different plot, one that self-reflexively and obsessively tells a story of writing. Viewed in this light, the spring of action is not a moral test but a dramatization of writer's block. The prize-winning essay that Razumov intends to write as he mounts the steps to his room before encountering Haldin is never written. The unfolding crisis of writing harbours the premise that the writerly instinct is inexorably linked to an experience of interruption, an acute and paralyzing sense of a lack of privacy. Haldin's spectral presence in the novel is thus to be read not only as a manifestation of guilt but also as an expression of writerly anxiety.The curious coincidence of writing and haunting explored in the novel makes for an interesting case study of the conceptual link between intertextuality and the uncanny. Although coined by Jentsch, "the uncanny" remains tied to Freud's seminal essay of 1919 in which it is used as an interpretative framework for the teasing out of GEdipal desire and the study of eerie repetition. The intertextual, in turn, offers a space of canny repetition, a convention of citation and duplication that in many ways defines what is literary. And yet, intertextuality also marks a space of difference where outside permeates inside and the familiar is uncannily inscribed into the new. Rather than define the transition between the accepted and the unaccepted, between the obsessive interruption of a return of the repressed and the poetic convention of a return to the already mitten, this essay will trace the way in which writing marks a conflation of the two, a space of permeable borders where the subject must confront the sham of its impervious cohesion.Writing, InterruptedHaldin's infiltration of Razumov's life occurs as a form of rupture or trauma that stands in the way of normality, a normality, moreover, that is perceived as the liberty to write: '"I shall put in four hours of good work,' he [Razumov] thought. But no sooner had he closed the door than he was horribly startled. All black against the usual tall stove of white tiles gleaming in the dusk, stood a strange figure" (14).The interruption of writing is a familiar scene in literature, evocative, as it is, of Coleridge's Person from Porlock, a symbol of the loathsome yet inevitable intruder who stands between the writer and artistic inspiration. Conrad, too, paints a vivid reminiscence of unnerving interruption in A Personal Record, where he narrates the story of the startling appearance of the general's daughter, who, paying a visit to his wife, accidently stumbles upon him one afternoon as he is engrossed in the writing of the concluding chapters of Nostromo.2 He writes:I had heard nothing - no rustle, no footsteps. I had felt only a moment before a sort of premonition of evil; I had the sense of an inauspicious presence - just that much warning and no more; and then came the sound of the voice and the jar as of a terrible fall from a great height - a fall, let us say, from the highest of the clouds floating in gentle procession over the fields in the faint westerly air of that July afternoon. …