The tale of Diana and Actaeon, which quickly escalates into the domain of cinematically nightmarish horror, features perhaps the most unsettingly ‘uncanny’ moment in The Metamorphoses.* Actaeon, of house Cadmus, has finished hunting and wanders the woods alone. Diana, also “weary from hunting,” bathes in her sacred cave, which Nature itself has sculpted into its own piece of art. When Actaeon wanders from his familiar path and happens upon the cave, god and human realms converge; though her nymphs scream and rush to hide Diana’s naked body, they cannot hide her skin from him completely. She furiously sprinkles his head with water and piece-by-piece, limb-by-limb, she transforms him into a stag. Now terrified, still unaware of his own transformation, Actaeon runs from the cave and through the woods. He is surprised at his own swiftness—until he catches a glimpse of himself in the river. He sees the stag’s “face” instead of his own, and wants to say “Poor me!” but cannot find his voice. (A literal translation: “he was about to say ‘Wretch that I am!” no voice followed. He groaned; that was his voice; and tears flowed over features not his own; only his former mind remained.”) His own hunting dogs begin to chase him, and, trained well by his own hand, they advance on him, easily down him, and sink their teeth into him again and again. As they wound him—perhaps even as theyeat him alive—he groans, and “though the sounds/ he utters are not human, they are not/ the sounds a stag could voice.” The dogs “tear in pieces their lord” as he hears his hunting companions calling and calling his name.
Freud proposes that “dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet which dance by themselves—all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them. . .” However, while the image of Actaeon’s dismemberment is certainly gruesome and horrific, and while a reader might experience general panic or terror (or at least discomfort) as they process its unfolding, the umheimlich itself lies in the moment of his groan, which “has a sound, although not of a man, yet such as a stag is not able to utter.” Actaeon, much like one of the stags he had watched fall earlier that day, collapses, and groans in a pool of his own blood, and the sound he makes is inhuman—but not the “godly” inhuman of Achilles, nor the inhuman of the natural, animal world to which a “lowly” (but humble, innocent) stag belongs. Like Lycaon-as-wolf, Actaeon is not quite a stag, but he is not a human being either. He is, as he suggests himself to be, a “wretch” that exists outside of the natural order of animalia.
What is this sound he makes? It is an ‘uncanny’ one—simultaneously familiar and strange. Ovid does not liken the groan to anything else on earth; he leaves the sound mysterious and open to imaginative interpretations. All he reveals is the unnaturalness of the “voice,” its abnormality, that the sound is out-of-place.
Imagining the sound of Actaeon’s groan—only described as existing somewhere on the spectrum between the sound of a man and a stag—is not a passive activity for a reader. The moment asks the reader to situate his or her self in the world of the moment of the poem, to not only become more intimate with that horror but to help construct it. The reader mentally enters the literary space rather than merely “reads” it. This (terrifying) moment of intimacy helps to “[efface] the distinction between imagination and reality” (that’s Freud again!) typically absent from a fairy-tale narrative. For a second, however brief, reader and poem merge.
And so, too, reader and “character” merge, heightening their empathic relationship with the imagined figure and so unlocking access to his inner world, for throughout the scene Actaeon himself is stuck in the province of the uncanny or unheimlicht. His mind is out-of-body, and his body is out-of-place, all is strange, and yet all is simultaneously familiar, as if he is experiencing a version of déjà vu: “On those same slopes where he once gave—/ he now is given—chase: he has to race/ away from his own hounds,” and, later, as the hounds mangle him, “he would delight to see—not feel and fear—/ the sight of his hounds’ ferocity.” Unsurprisingly, Freud identifies a relationship between unheimlicht and déjà vu, writing that “something uncanny” arises during an “involuntary return to the same situation,” such as being lost in the forest, “when every endeavor to find the marked or familiar path ends again and again in a return to the one and the same spot, recognizable by some particular landmark.” Actaeon experiences an “involuntary return” (of a sort) to his earlier hunt, to its “same slopes” and paths, with one major difference: instead of watching the familiar spectacle from a privileged position of spectator or voyeur, as a reader does the poem, or as a viewer does a film or theatre, he becomes the spectacle itself.