Dickens, ‘The Signal-Man’ (1866)
Dickens’s most famous ghost-story remains A Christmas Carol (1843), I suppose. Indeed, following the success of that tale, he published a number of novellas for the Christmas market — four more, each with a supernatural or ghostly element: The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1847). We can be honest: Carol is brilliant, but diminishing returns swiftly characterise these books (there’s a reason why only the first has any currency today— though there are some interesting things, if rather cluttered and botched in the delivery, in the last one, I think.)
At the latter end of the 1840s Dickens stopped issuing Christmas stories, but the growing fame and continuing sales of Carol, together with him founding his weekly magazine Household Words in 1850, persuaded him to recommence the practice. Through the 50s and 60s a separate Christmas number of Household Words (and after the magazine was renamed and relaunched, of All The Year Round) was issued every yuletide. These were different to the 1840s Christmas novellas, not least in being team-written: Dickens would decide on a frame — a location, an idea — and write a short piece or two, and would then commission established HW and ATYR writers to write their own stories on or around that theme. The resulting multi-author novella-length collections are of, we can be frank, variable quality, from Christmas to Christmas but also within themselves, but they were enormously successful in terms of sales. And the 1866 iteration of this annual practice, Mugby Junction, contains one of Dickens’s very best ghost stories. That’s ‘The Signal-Man’ and that’s what I’m blogging about here.
It concerns, as you would expect from its title, a railway employee, the operator of the signals box beside a busy railway line, in a cutting near a tunnel. Pickwick travels England in a horse-drawn coach, but from Dombey and Son (1848) on, the railways were increasingly a part of Dickens’s fiction, as of his life. In Dombey and Son London is being remade by the railways, and Carker is knocked down and killed by a train. Hard Times includes this grimly hilarious account of a House of Commons debate concerning a railway accident:
In the House of Commons on the occasion of his entertaining it with his (and the Board of Directors) view of a railway accident, in which the most careful officers ever known, employed by the most liberal managers ever heard of, assisted by the finest mechanical contrivances ever devised, the whole in action on the best line ever constructed, had killed five people and wounded thirty-two, by a casualty without which the excellence of the whole system would have been positively incomplete. Among the slain was a cow, and among the scattered articles unowned, a widow’s cap. And the honourable member had so tickled the House (which has a delicate sense of humour) by putting the cap on the cow, that it became impatient of any serious reference to the Coroner’s Inquest, and brought the railway off with Cheers and Laughter. [Hard Times, 2:2]
‘Mugby’ is CD’s fictional version of Rugby, a town whose railway station and intersections Dickens knew well from travelling up and down the country for his reading tours.
The 1866 Christmas ATYR special edition consisted of eight stories, cinched together under the general idea of Mugby Junction and the railways. The first four of these were written by Dickens himself, the rest by Andrew Halliday, Charles Collins, Hesba Stretton and Ameila B. Edwards — although in fact Dickens encouraged his contributors not to cleave too closely to the ‘railway’ theme: ‘in asking you to contribute to the Christmas Number as usual,’ Dickens’s sub-editor W H Wills wrote to prospective contributors, ‘it is again not necessary, Mr Dickens tells me, that I should put any restriction upon you as to plot, character or mode of narration. Perhaps some kind of connection with a great railway (as Travelling office or whatnot) might prove an acceptable feature of a Story — but Mr Dickens does not by any means think it necessary to impose this as a condition.’ His prospective contributors ignored this, naturally enough, and railway stories poured in. Indeed, in the new year Dickens scolded Wills (‘for the love of Heaven no more of those Xmas Railway stories!’) for printing submissions left-over after the Christmas edition in the regular weekly issues of AYTR.
Dickens didn’t usually write so many as four of the annual Christmas selection (usually it was one or two) but the idea clearly seized his imagination. The first two concern an individual called Mr Barbox, a man of independent means who decides, apparently on a whim, to break-off his journey at Mugby, to check into a hotel and explore the town. I’ll talk a little more about Barbox below. Then there is a comic short, ‘Main Line: The Boy at Mugby’ based on an experience of Dickens’s own, when, delayed at Rugby station, he had gone into the refreshment room and been treated rudely by the woman serving, who did not recognise the famous author. Finally we have ‘№1 Branch Line: The Signal-Man’, which opens after this fashion:
“Halloa! Below there!”
When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but, instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about and looked down the Line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said, for my life, what. But, I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.
“Halloa! Below!”
From looking down the Line, he turned himself about again, and, raising his eyes, saw my figure high above him.
“Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?”
He looked up at me without replying, and I looked down at him without pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle question. Just then, there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down. When such vapour as rose to my height from this rapid train, had passed me and was skimming away over the landscape, I looked down again and saw him re-furling the flag he had shown while the train went by.
I repeated my inquiry. After a pause, during which he seemed to regard me with fixed attention, he motioned with his rolled-up flag towards a point on my level, some two or three hundred yards distant. I called down to him, “All right!” and made for that point. There, by dint of looking closely about me, I found a rough zig-zag descending path notched out: which I followed. [‘The Signal-Man’]
The narrator isn’t named, but we can take it that it’s Barbox.
Stepping out upon the level of the railroad and drawing nearer to him, I saw that he was a dark sallow man, with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows. His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way, only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction, terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.
Before he stirred, I was near enough to him to have touched him. Not even then removing his eyes from mine, he stepped back one step, and lifted his hand.
This was a lonesome post to occupy (I said), and it had riveted my attention when I looked down from up yonder. A visitor was a rarity, I should suppose; not an unwelcome rarity, I hoped? In me, he merely saw a man who had been shut up within narrow limits all his life, and who, being at last set free, had a newly-awakened interest in these great works. To such purpose I spoke to him; but I am far from sure of the terms I used, for, besides that I am not happy in opening any conversation, there was something in the man that daunted me.
The signalman appears afraid of his visitor, and believes he has met him before, but the narrator assures him that this is impossible. Reassured, the signal-man welcomes Barbox into his signal-hut. His work is monotonous, he says, but of course vital: controlling the signals as trains enter the tunnel and ensuring there are no accidents or collisions. An approaching train causes a signal bell to ring, but it transpires the signal-man sometimes hears ghostly rings — he does so when Barbox is visiting, and the latter hears nothing.
The signalman has seen a ghost, and more than once: a spectre who appears at the mouth of the tunnel and waves at him. The visitor asks what the apparition looks like. ‘“I never saw the face,”’ the Signal-man replies. ‘“The left arm is across the face, and the right arm is waved. Violently waved. This way.” I followed his action with my eyes, and it was the action of an arm gesticulating with the utmost passion and vehemence: “For God’s sake clear the way!”’
“One moonlight night,” said the man, “I was sitting here, when I heard a voice cry ‘Halloa! Below there!’ I started up, looked from that door, and saw this Some one else standing by the red light near the tunnel, waving as I just now showed you. The voice seemed hoarse with shouting, and it cried, ‘Look out! Look out!’ And then again ‘Halloa! Below there! Look out!’ I caught up my lamp, turned it on red, and ran towards the figure, calling, ‘What’s wrong? What has happened? Where?’ It stood just outside the blackness of the tunnel. I advanced so close upon it that I wondered at its keeping the sleeve across its eyes. I ran right up at it, and had my hand stretched out to pull the sleeve away, when it was gone.”
“Into the tunnel,” said I.
“No. I ran on, into the tunnel, five hundred yards. I stopped and held my lamp above my head, and saw the figures of the measured distance, and saw the wet stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the arch. I ran out again, faster than I had run in (for I had a mortal abhorrence of the place upon me), and I looked all round the red light with my own red light, and I went up the iron ladder to the gallery atop of it, and I came down again, and ran back here. I telegraphed both ways: ‘An alarm has been given. Is anything wrong?’ The answer came back, both ways: ‘All well.’”
The narrator (feeling the sensation as of a cold finger tracing up his spine) suggests that this may have been nothing more than a hallucination. But the signal-man is certain it was not. A few hours later, he reports, there was a catastrophic train crash inside the tunnel, with many killed and wounded. It seems as though this is what the ghost was trying to warn the signal-man about.
The spectre then appeared a second time, this time silent, with both hands before the face in an attitude of grief. Afterwards a beautiful young woman died on a train, whilst passing through the tunnel: again, this must have been what the spectral warning concerned. The signal-man then confesses he has seen the spectre several times during the past week — it manifested whilst Barbox was present, the signal-man tells him, although Barbox saw nothing. Convinced a third tragic event is soon to happen, the signal-man is sick with fear and frustration.
“When it first stood under the Danger-light,” he went on, putting his dark hair back from his head, and drawing his hands outward across and across his temples in an extremity of feverish distress, “why not tell me where that accident was to happen — if it must happen? Why not tell me how it could be averted — if it could have been averted? When on its second coming it hid its face, why not tell me instead: ‘She is going to die. Let them keep her at home’? If it came, on those two occasions, only to show me that its warnings were true, and so to prepare me for the third, why not warn me plainly now? And I, Lord help me! A mere poor signal-man on this solitary station! Why not go to somebody with credit to be believed, and power to act!”
You can see where the story is going. The next day, the narrator returns and finds that the signal-man has been run down and killed by a train. He had, the distraught driver says, been standing on the line looking intently at something, and had failed to get out of the way, for all that the driver waved and called out to him, ‘Below there! Look out! For God’s sake, clear the way!’ Just before the moment of impact, the driver, unable to bear the sight of the man being struck, covered his face.
It’s a wonderfully effective little story this, or at least I have always found it so — trailing its tendrils of dread over the sensitive membrane of my imagination, uncanny and haunting. Julia Briggs praises its ‘mastery’ of form, ‘tightly and economically constructed so that every element contributes to the final effect’ [Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (Faber, 1977), 42]. David Seed thinks its success a function of Dickens repudiation of older, staler (even by the 1860s) modes of ghost-story construction:
The skill which Dickens demonstrates in this can partly be explained in terms of his preference for one of three notional kinds of supernaturalism which were available to him — conventional gothic, spiritualism and mystery evoked by day-to-day materials. The first of these would draw on traditional settings like a country house and would revolve around equally traditional themes like aristocratic dishonour or guilt. Dickens recognized how old-fashioned this kind of story was at least as early as 1850 in a sketch entitled ‘A Christmas Tree’ … The second and more modern notional possibility for supernaturalism in his fiction would have been for Dickens to draw on contemporary accounts of spiritualist experiences — whether talking in tongues, communicating with a dead spirit, or table-rapping. [David Seed, ‘Mystery in Everyday Things: Charles Dickens’ “Signalman” Criticism 23:1 (1981), 44]
Seed discusses how Dickens tended to treat that sort of spiritualism with comic mockery: his 1858 Household Words piece ‘Well-Authenticated Rappings’ inhabits the form of a table-rapping spiritualist report to describe a hangover, headaches and stomach rumblings (‘Dickens’ impatience and indignation with the fraudulence commonly practised under the name of spiritualism meant that it could only really appear in his stories in a satirical perspective’, Seed suggests). By avoiding these two possible paths, the hackneyed on the one hand and the ridiculous on the other, Seed argues that Dickens cannily utilises the trappings of everyday modernity to focus and intensify precisely the uncanny affect of the ghostliness. In this, Seed thinks, the story stands out sharply from those submitted by Dickens’s collaborators in the project.
Dickens’ concentration of the ghosts’ mystery into their function rather than appearance suggests a radical departure from the more usual story of the supernatural. In this and other respects ‘The Signalman’ makes a strong contrast with the other two ghost-stories included in Mugby Junction. ‘№3 Branch Line. The Compensation House,’ by Charles Collins (brother of Wilkie), revolves around an unfortunate Mr. Strange (sic) who has a morbid hatred of mirrors in his house. The main part of the story is told by his physician Dr. Garden who finds his friend rigid with horror one night in front of a looking-glass. He tells the doctor that the face he sees is not his own, and then collapses into a nervous illness which gradually consumes his life away. At this point the good doctor moralizes that ‘it was not likely that an affliction, lifelong and terrible, such as this he had endured, would come upon him unless some misdeed had provoked the punishment.’ And such proves to be the case. On his deathbed Strange confesses that he had in fact shot an Italian drawing-master who was seducing his wife. Amelia B. Edwards’ contribution is only slightly less contrived. Her story, ‘№5 Branch Line. The Engineer,’ describes two friends who go out to Italy to work on the new Turin-Genoa railway line. Once again an Italian sows the seeds of conflict — this time an attractive young girl. The two friends fight, the narrator stabs the other to death. But the climax of the story comes at the end when the dead friend materializes beside the narrator on his footplate. He shrieks with horror and swoons. Both stories moralize the ghosts into rather predictable agents of retribution, and both make extensive use of melodrama to heighten key moments of horror. Doctor Garden describes Strange’s cataleptic seizure in considerable detail; in the other tale the reappearance of the murdered friend is so positioned as to give it maximum intensity. Dickens’ signalman, however, has done nothing whatsoever to deserve the ghosts and the deaths which take place are in no way attributable to negligence on his part. At every point in the story Dickens is careful to understate the fantastic or possible supernatural elements in the signalman’s experience. [Seed, 54–55]
I think that’s right, but I think we can say more. CD’s approach here, by construing the ghostly out of the mundane rather than in contrast to it says something profound, and therefore unsettling, about mundanity as such — about our everyday life. It folds the natural and supernatural into one another because what haunts the signal-man is himself, his own mortality. This is what gives his pathetic complaint of ordinariness (‘a mere poor signal-man on this solitary station!’) its edge: because that we must die is simultaneously the most exceptional and absolutely the most commonplace and ordinary thing.
In Christmas Carol, Scrooge is at the centre of the story, visited by three ghosts: one representing the past, one the present and one the future. In ‘The Signal-Man’ the Scrooge-like Barbox is only a spectator, standing on the sidelines — what we can deduce from the first Mugby story, ‘Barbox Brothers’, is that he is stepping away from a lucrative but ‘discord[ant], solitary and unhappy existence’ (‘the firm of Barbox Brothers … [an] offshoot or irregular branch of the Public Notary and bill-broking tree’) to live more fully. So, a Scrooge trying to distance himself from his Scroogeishness. Having been taken on by ‘Young Jackson’ (who appears in ‘Barbox Brothers’ as a ghost, like a gloomier, more tenuous Marley, to haunt him as he waits at Mugby) Barbox rose through the firm to become Jackson’s partner and, after his death, the sole director. From here, since monetarily he had ‘enough to live on (though after all with not too much)’, he decided to ‘obliterate the firm of Barbox Brothers from the pages of the Post-office Directory and the face of the earth’, leaving nothing of it ‘but its name on two portmanteaus’ he carries with him.
The signal-man is also visited by three ghosts, but these represent not past, present and future as they did for Scrooge, but something else, something rather less intuitively obvious. The first ghost (‘holloa!’) presages the death of many people in the tunnel crash — Dickens is probably thinking of the dreadful Clayton Tunnel crash of 1861 in which 23 people died and 176 were injured, and which disaster was still fresh in people’s minds five years later.
The second ghost portends the death of one person, a woman, aboard a moving train as it comes hurtling out of the tunnel. The third, of course, looks forward to the signal-man’s own death, standing on the line, blind to the gigantic engine bearing down upon him — blind despite his professional expertise, despite the sheer materiality of that which is impending, and despite having been warned in advance by a spectre whose warning is repeated, in the fatal moment, by the train driver. How can he not see it? But of course that’s the point. We don’t, Dickens is saying, we can’t truly see our deaths, not despite the fact that our mortality is so huge and pressing but because it is. All we can do is live with the spectral haunting sense of it coming ever closer. The train figures life: onward rushing, hurtling along and bearing us with it. ‘Barbox Brothers’ makes this plain, as Barbox stalks the lonely platform of Mugby station in the small hours:
Now, all quiet, all rusty, wind and rain in possession, lamps extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with its robe drawn over its head, like Cæsar. Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing upon him and passing away into obscurity. [‘Barbox Brothers’]
‘The train of a life’ is also, Dickens understands, the train of death:
Mysterious goods trains, covered with palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying themselves guiltily away from the presence of the few lighted lamps, as if their freight had come to a secret and unlawful end. Half miles of coal pursuing in a Detective manner, following when they lead, stopping when they stop, backing when they back. Red hot embers showering out upon the ground, down this dark avenue, and down the other, as if torturing fires were being raked clear; concurrently, shrieks and groans and grinds invading the ear, as if the tortured were at the height of their suffering. Iron-barred cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the drooping beasts with horns entangled, eyes frozen with terror, and mouths too: at least they have long icicles (or what seem so) hanging from their lips. Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white characters. An earthquake accompanied with thunder and lightning, going up express to London.
This hellish landscape is at once hot and cold — the drool dangling from the terrified cattle’s mouths becoming icicles — at once busy and empty. ‘Unknown languages in the air’ is an especially apropos phrase. Dickens, of course, is a trader in language. Words are signals. As the signal-man is haunted by himself — by his own death — so Dickens is haunted by a version of himself, his public self dogging his private self, or perhaps the other way around. The other great fictional tessellation of Dickens’s 1860s — aside from his major novels — is ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’, in which a fictionalised version of Dickens travels with a similar scope and range as a commercial traveller, but in a way that negates the commerce. Although there is a paradox here, isn’t there: for these short pieces, published in All The Year Round, were part of and contributed to the magazines prodigious commercial success, and the volume in which they were collected sold well. But it’s not the commerce as such, but more specifically the mutuality implicit in that co-, that is negated by the un-. For a man so famously convivial, so engaged in the world, a writer adored and feted wherever he went, uncommercial Dickens is un-Dickens, a lone figure who haunts a variety of places and peoples only to observe, not to take his place in them. Here he is, in the volume’s frontispiece, stepping out of a morgue, of all places:
There is an emptiness at the p.o.v. heart of these pieces, for all their wit and closely observed material precision. They go nowhere even as Dickens, through them, goes everywhere — go nowhere in the sense that they don’t develop a coherent narrative in the way one of Dickens’s novels would, but also in the sense that they move with a kind of studied aimlessness that goes nowhere in particular. Commerce — con- “together, with” + merces “pay” — is the debt we all share, the pay due to the ferryman. The road Dickens treads is the Talking Heads’ road to nowhere (Barbox at Mugby: ‘Thus, with a steady step, the traveller went up and down, up and down, up and down, seeking nothing, and finding it’).
My sense is that Dickens is haunted by his sense of himself: by the chasm between his public face and his private life, the latter (with Ellen Ternan secreted away in her house in Slough) defined by the absences and gaps in his outward facing public self. Which haunts which? Trains, the vehicle (in more than one sense!) by which he delivers, in ‘The Signal-Man’, his ghostly uncanny shocks, are an element of the public Dickens, the mode by which he travelled the country, a part of his professional life. But they are also, somehow, private spaces, enclosed cabins, first-class compartments. And they are often literally death-dealing machines, these trains. On the 9th June 1865, Dickens himself (and his secret mistress, Ellen) were in a train that crashed at Staplehurst: he came close to dying on that occasion — to dying, and to having his secret spectral life revealed for public gaze. He was on the train from Folkestone to London, having returned (we can intuit) from the Continent, with Ellen T. (and her mother, as it happens). What were they all doing on the Continent? Nobody knows for sure: perhaps they were putting Charles and Ellen’s illegitimate child up for adoption, somewhere out of the way of gaze of the British media. Their journey back from this (perhaps) new life very nearly terminated abruptly in death. It was a life-event that manifestly fed into ‘The Signal-Man’, a year and a half later.
Something is going-on in this story to do with hollowness. That, I’d argue, is what the story’s opening line is about, called down by Barbox to the Signal-man at the mouth of his tunnel: ‘holloa’ is, on the one hand, an everyday greeting, a hello — but it is also a homophone for hollower, for more hollow. The tunnel is a hollowness beneath the earth, and the site of many deaths — it is, we could say, a grave. With the name ‘Barbox’ we might ask: what kind of box? Not an open one, at any rate: one barred, locked, closed: a coffin.
What goes into the underground (‘hollower — below, there’) are the dead, and once they go easily down it is, in Vergil’s famous phrase, very hard for them to come back: facilis descensus averno. Hard but not impossible, for revenants do return in a ghost story, such as this. Still: the structure of the story includes a puzzling element: it goes — many people die — one woman dies — you die. The first and last elements here make existential sense: the outnumbering dead precede us, but they also show us where we, each of us individually, must go, to death. What about the middle term, though? The second death is of a beautiful young woman. She dies not in a crash, but aboard the train of life, which passes rapidly along. More precisely, she dies as she leaves the signalman’s tunnel:
“That very day, as a train came out of the tunnel, I noticed, at a carriage window on my side, what looked like a confusion of hands and heads, and something waved. I saw it, just in time to signal the driver, Stop! He shut off, and put his brake on, but the train drifted past here a hundred and fifty yards or more. I ran after it, and, as I went along, heard terrible screams and cries. A beautiful young lady had died instantaneously in one of the compartments, and was brought in here, and laid down on this floor between us.”
This is the strangest of the three deaths: we’re not told of what the young woman died, or why her dead body is removed from the train into the signalman’s hut of all places (presumably it’s so the train and its otherwise living occupants can continue their journey without having to share conveyance with a corpse).
What’s going on here? I understand that many people have died, in the past. But then we are born — of woman — and come out of the darkness and into the light. What is this, but a kind of death, or velocity towards death? Pretty girls make graves, as Morrissey laconically put it, and the symbolic logic of this story combines female youthful beauty (which is to say, fecundity, fertility, birth) with instantaneous death. We leave the ‘hollow’ space, down below, of the vagina (‘Hollower! Below there!’) and come into the light of life, but this beautiful young lady straddles the grave (the light flickers for an instant and then is gone, as cheery Samuel B. puts it).
This may strike you as a fanciful reading of ‘The Signal-Man’s opening line, and indeed its whole story. But Freud has some, I think, brilliant and perceptive things to say about ghostly hauntings, and also, as it happens, about trains. In his immensely influential essay, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), Freud gives us the following story:
I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a travelling cap came in. I assumed that in leaving the washing-cabinet, which lay between the two compartments, he had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. [Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919): Standard Edition 17:248]
This is striking, and of peculiar relevance to a story like ‘The Signal-Man’. What haunts us is the self made strange, the uncanny double, the misrecognition of self as other. What is reflected in the existential looking-glass is uncanny us, a version of us we don’t like the look of, not popular commercial Dickens but the uncommercial, solitary, wandering mirror-image. I thoroughly disliked his appearance, says Freud; and the spectre in Dickens’s ghost story covers its eyes, as if it can’t bear to look at us, as if the mirror-image thoroughly dislikes our appearance.
What’s the significance of this occurring on a train, do you think? It has, surely, to do with onward momentum, with Dickens’s sense of life as en train (in, again, several senses). The other famous anecdote in Freud’s ‘Uncanny’ essay is him wandering inadvertently into a red-light district and being unable to find his way out again. Stephen Frosh comments:
One does not have to be a Freudian to know that this is not just a story about being lost. Something intrudes, through the looking glass or in the red light. In the latter case it is a repressed wish; in the former an unpleasant encounter with one’s own deathly visage. Both these things have the feeling of being seen before, already known, which is what makes them uncanny. And both give the impression of coming from somewhere else, not quite owned by the subject, even if that subject is Freud himself. We know this is the unconscious, of course, but what is the unconscious here? Is it the past, back to haunt us, or the future, threatening us with what we might become? Fear is, after all, usually directed towards what may happen, not what has already come to pass — that is more likely to be a matter for regret. Though the fear that one may discover something about the past that will put the future in jeopardy is, surely enough, a haunting fear. In the future I might become what I have always been, but have never been able to see. [Stephen Frosh, ‘Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmission’, American Imago 69:2 (2012), 244]
And this is where we are. Say hello, then, to the chthonic. Holloa! Below there!
