Return of the repressed: The Fall of the House of Usher

Images: Boston Lyric Opera

". . .the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it. . ." —Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny'" [1]

The word for "uncanny" in German is unheimlich. Heimlich means "belonging to the home, familiar, intimate, comfortable," so the uncanny is the opposite: disturbing and (apparently) strange, "eerie, weird, arousing gruesome fear." [2] In this formulation one of the most terrifying of phenomena is the house, which should be a place of refuge and comfort, that is instead a source of the unheimlich. "Many people experience the feeling [of the uncanny] in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. . .some languages in use today can only render the German expression 'an unheimlich house' by 'a haunted house.'" [3]

A house haunted by the spectres of degeneration, derangement and death is the first image in Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Fall of the House of Usher":

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. [4]

The nameless narrator has been summoned to the house by a letter from a boyhood friend whom he has not seen for many years, Roderick Usher, who is seeking company to alleviate an "acute bodily illness" and "a mental disorder which oppressed him." Roderick lives with his twin sister, Madeline, who is suffering from "a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character" ("affections" in the 19th century having the dual meaning of "a mental state," "disposition," or "inclination," and also "a bodily state, especially a malady or disease." [5])

Catalepsy, neurasthenia, and all-pervading melancholy would not seem to be promising material on which to base an opera. While Poe's story effectively develops an atmosphere of mounting dread ending in a moment of terror, there is no dramatic conflict and almost no direct speech. Nonetheless by my count eight composers have attempted to write operas based on it, including, most famously, Philip Glass. [6]

Boston Lyric Opera has responded to the current moment by producing a film version of Glass's opera using puppets and stop-motion animation. [7] The filmed opera is intercut with and paralleled by a hand-drawn animated story about Luna, a young Guatemalan girl who together with her mother flees the violence of her homeland and tries to make it to the United States.

These parallel sequences are accompanied by television footage described in a framing introduction by a host (actress Sheila Vand in a non-singing role) as "a window into our collective consciousness, programming what we fear, what we long for, and that which we dare not speak of." The footage includes images of Cold War nuclear drills, Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, electroshock treatments, and police attacks on civil rights marchers. This footage and Luna's story bring home, as it were, our continuing history of racism, exclusion, environmental destruction, fear, exploitation and injustice: the Return of the American Repressed, the sinister twin of the American Dream.

"To many people the idea of being buried alive while appearing to be dead is the most uncanny thing of all."—Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny'"

Part of the horror of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is that both Roderick and Madeline are already buried alive in their tomb-like mansion (it is even made of gray stone, like a headstone). Those of you who have not read Poe's story may want to skip the rest of this paragraph to avoid spoilers: when Madeline (whose wordless vocalise is sung by soprano Chelsea Basler) dies and is sealed in her coffin in the family crypt, the narrator notes that "a faint blush [remained] upon the bosom and the face." Over the following days the narrator finds Roderick, with an "unceasingly agitated mind. . .gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound." But is it imaginary? Glass's opera seems to imply that it's all in his head; Poe's story is much more unsettling. In the film while Roderick (sung by tenor Jesse Darden), in a moment of dawning horror, tells his visitor (named "William" in the opera, sung by baritone Daniel Belcher), "We have put her living in the tomb," we see images of immigrant children, separated from their parents and fenced in behind barbed wire—put living in the tomb of an ICE concentration camp.

The film is brilliantly conceived and executed by director James Darrah, production designer Yuki Izumihara, director of photography Pablo Santiago, and screenwriter Raúl Santos. The use of puppets (costumes and dolls designed by Camille Assaf) and the multiple through-lines improve Glass's opera and its rather clunky Arthur Yorinks libretto by giving it far-reaching resonances. Luna's moving contemporary story (designed by Yee Eun Nam and animated by Will Kim, Rodrigo Muñoz, and Jian Lee) and Poe's gothic 19th-century one come together in the film's astonishing final images, which poetically evoke destruction and freedom, terror and awe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgC-aS_u8m0

The Fall of the House of Usher is available to view through June 30 for US$10 for a seven-day rental from Boston Lyric Opera.

---

1. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny." Translated by Alix Strachey. First published in Imago, Band V, 1919. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf
2. Daniel Sanders, Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (1860), 1:729. Quoted in Anthony Vidler, "The Architecture of the Uncanny: The Unhomely Houses of the Romantic Sublime." Assemblage, No. 3, 1987, pp. 6-29. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3171062
3. Freud, "The Uncanny."
4. This and subsequent quotes from Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher," taken from Project Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/932/pg932.txt
5. Definitions from Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed., Oxford University Press, 2007.
6. For the record, in addition to Glass they are Claude Debussy (La Chute de la maison Usher, unfinished), Alan Claflin (1920), Clarence Loomis (1941), Larry Sitsky (1965), Russell Currie (1984), Hendrik Hofmeyr (1988), and Gordon Getty (Usher House, 2013). Information from Oxford Music Online.
7. Puppets, dolls, and twins are also uncanny, of course, and all feature in the film.