Footnote 14, Chapter 6, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
indicates a link to material not in the original print version. [GPL]. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in Collected Papers, ed. Joan Riviere, 5 vols. (London: International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1949), IV, 368-407. The most penetrating brief discussion of the Ruskinian grotesque I have seen is Sprinker, "Ruskin on the Imagination." Sprinker compares Ruskin's knot of associations to Freud's description of dreams as containing a "navel," the cluster of associations close to the unconscious origin of the dream. "Just as Freud's primal scene is always confronted in a dream, a phantasm a fiction, so Ruskin's conception of the grotesque as a representation of the truth (objective reality) locates representation in a fiction, a phantasm, a figural rendering of that which is always real but never experienced except as something phantasmagoric." Sprinker continues his analysis in semiotic terms: "The grotesque... represents what is not there, and yet is there at the same time.... To put this problem in contemporary terms we might say that Ruskin discerned in the grotesque a heterogeneity between the sign (the natural form from which the figure originates) and its referent (the spiritual truth that the grotesque figure represents). To be more precise, the signified (spiritual truth) is always in excess of the signifier (the natural form); it is this excess that the grotesque figures forth" (pp. 128-130).
Last modified December 2000