Uncanny Drift by Nicholas Royle

One thing juxtaposed with another. Superimposed or submerged. 

‘Uncanny’ is an adjective but people also talk of the uncanny. It’s been a thing – at least since 1919 when Sigmund Freud used the ‘the’ (Das) in one of his most intriguing and revelatory essay, ‘The Uncanny’ (‘Das Unheimliche’). 

Drift is a noun but also a verb. ‘Uncanny drift’ might refer to a kind of drift felt to be uncanny, or to a drift in the uncanny, a drift in how we perceive or think about the uncanny, up to and including a thought of uncanniness as having something first of all to do with drift.

Drifting, drifted, adrift. 

Near the end of his essay, Freud sums it up: ‘We have drifted into this field of research half involuntarily [Wir sind auf dieses Gebiet der Forschung ohne rechte Absicht geführt worden].’ The English translator’s phrasing seems apt. Drift is what has happened to him, it’s how he characterizes the composition of his text and what led him to write. He’s been led into this field without any real intention.

Freud uses the first-person plural, as he does elsewhere in his writing, to promote a sense of something shared, susceptible to generality, not peculiar to himself. It is a rhetorical device in the service of appearing detached, objective, scientific. If he had phrased it more candidly (‘I have drifted into this field of research’), the reader would have a quite different impression of what is going on. But it is a wonderful moment of revelation anyhow, this concession that he has been drifting: he doesn’t really know why he has been conducting this research or writing the essay. 

There’s a hint of having lost or relinquished control, of being led on by some force that is not oneself. ‘Half involuntarily’, without any real intention [ohne rechte Absicht], suggests both intention and absence of intention. Such uncertainty or ambiguity is at the heart of the uncanny. Freud speaks of it in German of course: ‘unheimlich’ originally goes back to ‘heimlich’ (meaning ‘belonging to the house’, ‘tame’, ‘intimate’, ‘friendly’, from the noun Heim, meaning ‘home’). ‘Uncanny’, on the other hand, goes back to ‘canny’ (‘knowing’, ‘skilful’, ‘shrewd’, from the older sense of the English ‘can’, meaning ‘to know’, ‘know how’). 

These German and English words have quite different backgrounds and connotations, then, but they also have a curious sameness. Freud observes: ‘heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’. This conception of double or antithetical meaning works for the English ‘uncanny’ too. When someone is described as canny (in their financial dealings, in their ability to negotiate a difficulty and so on), this can carry, at least on occasion, a flicker of mystery, something beyond the ordinary, unnatural, as if a bit magical. 

‘Drift’, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, means ‘natural or unconscious course, progress, process (of action, argument, time, etc)’ (OED, 1.3.a); but also ‘the conscious direction of action or speech towards some end; the end itself; what one is “driving at”; purpose, intention, object, aim’ (1.4.a). ‘Unconscious course’ and ‘conscious direction’: drift is an oddly duplicitous word, like uncanny.

Recall Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Romeo is beating about the bush, annoying Friar Laurence by being circumlocutory and not getting to the point (namely that he’s fallen in love with Juliet, a Capulet). The Friar upbraids him: 

                        Be plain, good son, and homely in thy drift; 

                        Riddling confession finds but riddling shrift. 

The term ‘uncanny’ post-dates Shakespeare: its meaning as ‘suggestive of the supernatural’ emerges only in the late eighteenth century. Still, his writing produces uncanny effects. We might pick this up in the workings of ‘drift’.

The Friar uses ‘homely’ in the sense of plain, unadorned, simple (‘characteristic or suggestive of a home’: OED, ‘homely’, sense 2a). His ‘plain and homely’ is an example of hendiadys (literally, in Greek, a ‘one-through-two’). More familiar examples of hendiadys would include ‘house and home’ and ‘fits and starts’. It is as if ‘plain’ were not plain enough, it needs ‘homely’ to make itself plain. Yet ‘plain’ is not the same as ‘homely’, nor ‘homely’ the equivalent of ‘plain’. Hendiadys is itself a curious drifter, a juxtaposition of two separate images that are at the same time combined, with one superimposed on or submerged in the other.  

The Friar’s ‘drift’ is evidently to be understood as ‘statement of purpose or intention’, but what is ‘homely’ here is already shadowed or hollowed out by the unhomely. What Romeo is not saying – the reason he is not getting to the point – is ‘homely’ (to do with his home and the House of Montagu) in a strangely uncomfortable, even deadly sense. Shakespeare’s language suggests an affinity here with Heidegger: the homely does not come first, but rather the other way round. The unhomely, ‘the “not-at-home” must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon’ (Being and Time).

Shakespeare seems to ‘load every rift with ore’ (in Keats’s phrase), and yet as if half involuntarily, without real intention. There is what Jacques Derrida, in the essay ‘Signature, Event, Context’, calls an ‘essential drift’ or dérive. Writing, he argues, is ‘cut off from all absolute responsibility, from consciousness as the ultimate authority’. Shakespeare seems happy to set his writing adrift, to go with the drift, to go and let go like no one else. This is perhaps also a way of understanding Keats’s idea of negative capability.   

The word ‘drift’ occurs only twice in the play. On both occasions Shakespeare puts it into Friar Laurence’s mouth. When the word comes back it is strangely charged, strangely changed. The second occurrence marks a crucial turn in the tragedy. It’s still a matter of the strange drift of words (spoken or written), but now with a more deadly accent.

Letters can always not arrive at their destination. The fate of the Friar’s missive bears witness to the drift that Derrida calls destinerrance. Drift is about chance, the Friar’s failure to put his drift in action. His aim (his ‘drift’) is to unite the lovers and enable them to elope. He tells Juliet how she must take a sleeping potion (to feign death) and lie in the family vault, so that Romeo can come and wake her up: 

                        Thou shalt be borne to that same ancient vault

                        Where all the kindred of the Capulets lie.

                        In the meantime, against thou shalt awake,

                        Shall Romeo by my letters know our drift, 

                        And hither shall he come. 

Friar Laurence’s letter gets held up by fear of the plague. As Friar John tells him: ‘l could not send it – here it is again – / Nor get a messenger to bring it thee, / So fearful were they of infection.’ Romeo never gets to ‘know our drift’.  It is the death of him.

‘Drift’ has a softness, quite different from the hardness of ‘drive’. In its entry for ‘drift’ Chambers Dictionary of Etymology offers: ‘Probably before 1325, movement as of falling rain or snow, snowdrift; later, movement as of running, beating of wings, etc. (before 1350), and driving cattle to pasture (1426).’ 

There is a sort of slowing, a dilatoriness or stilling in ‘drift’.  An older sense of the word was ‘to put off, delay, defer’: the OED cites the phrase ‘to drift time awhile’ from 1584 (OED, ‘drive’, v., 4). At least since 1893, to drift cattle is ‘to drive [them] slowly, letting them feed as they go’ (OED, ‘drive’, v., 2c).

The great unhomely or unspoken aspect of Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ is the death drive (Todestriebe). It bobs up to the surface in the context of his reflections on the ‘compulsion to repeat’. This is, he says, ‘a question I can only lightly touch on in these pages; and I must refer the reader instead to another work, already completed…’ He is referring to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which was not published until 1920. 

Do you get Freud’s drift? He’s telling you that you need to read something you can’t read because it hasn’t yet been published. But he is also saying (half involuntarily, perhaps) that if he weren’t insisting on the light touch here, his entire essay might be engulfed in talking about this death drive. About this fundamental uncanniness, he suggests, he must remain stumm. 

What does all of this have to do with Daniel Rapley’s Drift? When am I going to say something about the pictures? In truth I have been talking about them all along. It is about trying to elucidate what Rapley calls the ‘uncanny dimension’ of his work, including a meditation on what, in his words again, ‘destabilises authorial and temporal certainty’. 

‘Drift’ is a beautiful word.  A rift appears in it, then an if, as though the word itself were slowly coming to pieces under one’s eyes. 

It is a word I have always loved, but Daniel Rapley’s work prompts me to experience it afresh, as if for the first time, likethe first time. His pictures are haunted by the strangeness of this figure, the like, like the first time. He wants to show ‘the condition [in which] the slides are found’, the ‘accumulated veneer of dust, hair, scratches and age-related deterioration’. He wants to insist on and affirm the vulnerability, the randomness and lack of stability in drift. 

Exposure or double-exposure to chance.  

Rapley’s pictures let me see how much my own work has been interested in drift. It’s there in my first book, Telepathy and Literature (1990), in the concern to think about how a literary text (Virginia Woolf’s magnificent ‘Kew Gardens’, for example) ‘drifts at various speeds, in different rhythms’. Telepathy and Literature is about the sense that ‘something gets carried away, every time’. Telepathy is a theory of drift, and theory adrift. 

Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011) is also a book about drifting: no veer without drift. 

But other, more specific instances come back to me, as if for the first time. These examples feel as if they had been submerged, in the depths of a kind of palimpsest. This is one of the most striking things that Rapley’s images do: they seem to mime or act out the process of retrieving memories or composing an impression of one’s own past. They are likethat. 

Two further brief instances then. 

(1) In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud contends that there are really just two fundamental forces within us, Eros and Thanatos, and he comes to the view that, while we are basically preoccupied in our daily lives with how our desire for pleasure (the ‘pleasure principle’) has to deal with the facts and constraints of the real world (the ‘reality principle’), there is something else – something he feels has to be acknowledged, in other words a death drive (Todestriebe). He encapsulates this in the disquieting formula: ‘The aim of all life is death.’ We are not necessarily conscious of it – this aim or drift of all life. 

Life drift, death drift. 

Like a stranger to my own words, I see that ‘drift’ appears in my book The Uncanny (2003) apropos the translation of Freud’s Todestriebe: ‘Todestriebe is sometimes translated as “death instinct” or “death instincts”, though we might also think of it in terms of a current or flow, in other words as a “death drift”.’

(2) More recently, in David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine (2023), regarding Natsume Sōseki’s beautiful novel Sanshirō (1908), I focus on a brief passage which describes the young man Sanshirō’s early experience of university lectures:

He found it strangely pleasant that he could not understand the lecture. As he listened, cheek in hand, his senses became dulled, and he began to drift off. This was the very thing, he felt, that made lectures worthwhile.  

To drift off can be to fall asleep, but it can also mean to pass into a state of reverie. Sōseki’s novel led me to reflect on drifting off as a way of thinking about art and song. Music or the visual image and reverie. Reading and daydreaming. Creative writing and drifting off…     

In the vibrancy of its colours, the vigour of its invention and the vitality of its figures, Rapley’s work speaks of a drift that is hardly acknowledged in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is what Christopher Bollas and Paul Conti have in their different ways talked about as a generative principle or drive. In addition to the pleasure and reality principles and in addition to the death drive, there is a drive to generate, to create, to make.  

Like the first time. There is a ‘new image’, Rapley says, that comes from combining two: ‘Time, place and memory are compressed into a single hybrid-image. The two original photos become entangled…’ It is a kind of visual hendiadys. 

Consider ‘Drift 654’, a female figure holding onto railings looking out, evidently, at an urban landscape. It is also double. The woman (if this is a woman) is standing beside another, perhaps herself, a double. The world is upside down and also double. You should be standing on the ceiling of the gallery to observe what appear to be gates or railings, open at the bottom, above steep wooded slopes. 

Rapley’s picture seems full of blue and white mountainous light. It recalls Wordsworth’s poem about being ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees’, but also Adorno’s image of ‘the open-air prison that the world is becoming’. It is in motion, like the wind in the woman’s hair, the railings or fencing unsustainably hanging and leaning, unfixed.  

In engaging with the ‘found’, in exposing itself to chance, to drift, Daniel Rapley’s work encourages us to consider that the uncanny is a theory not of identity but rather of resemblance. It is less about unity and fixity, more about the uncertain and generative. These images solicit a thinking and a feeling of the like. 

It reminds me of… 

I was never there. You were never there. We don’t know this place or these people. We are strangers to these pictures, but the pictures are also strangers to themselves. Through the driftwork of its doubling, the aleatory effects of juxtaposition, superimposition and submergence, palimpsest and hendiadys, Rapley solicits us to sense likenesses, to remember as if for the first time. 

His work invites us to imagine, to daydream resemblances to things that are not there, in the picture, but are rather the effects of what I have been calling uncanny drift.