Adventures With The Wife and Blake, Volume 2: The Avon Years by Neil Perryman, Sue Perryman

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Even with the restoration of representational religious arts by the Empress Theodora and her son Michael, abstraction powerfully inflected the visual arts. And though the Western church persisted in representing Jesus, Mary, and the saints, such depictions grew increasingly divorced from naturalism. ⁴⁰ Not surprisingly, themes or legends suggestive of classical mimesis fell from popular consciousness, although among the particularly learned, the legend of Zeuxis Selecting Models may have been known via manuscript copies of Valerius Maximus’s Memorable Deeds and Sayings.

Her significance therefore shifts continuously, producing a disorienting rather than stabilizing mythic sign. ”⁴⁸ The sensation of encountering one’s double is discussed by Freud as a prevalent manifestation of the uncanny. In his account Freud defers to Otto Rank’s analysis of the doppelgänger:⁴⁹ [Rank] has gone into the connections which the “double” has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death. . This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol.

In this way, a provincial setting seems to enhance the uncanny sensation. But what sort of repression manifests itself through the uncanny? Freud argues that there are two classes of repressed material that can produce the uncanny. ” Among these is the castration complex. Freud associates the uncanny sensation reported when individuals confront “dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist” as a response to repressed castration anxiety. Most often, though, an experience of the uncanny coincides with a reminder of one’s own mortality via the sight of dead bodies or some encounter with death.