ABSTRACT
Literature is uncanny. What does this mean? To try to define the uncanny is immediately to encounter one of its decisive paradoxes, namely that it has to do with a troubling of definitions, with a fundamental disturbance of what we think and feel. The uncanny has to do with a sense of strangeness, mystery or eeriness. More particularly it concerns a sense of unfamiliarity that appears at the very heart of the familiar, or else a sense of familiarity that appears at the very heart of the unfamiliar. The uncanny is not just a matter of the weird or spooky, but has to do more specifically with a disturbance of the familiar. Such a disturbance might be hinted at by way of the word ‘familiar’ itself. ‘Familiar’ goes back to the Latin familia, a family: we all have some sense of how odd families can seem (whether or not one is ‘part of the family’). The idea of ‘keeping things in the family’ or of something that ‘runs in the family’, for instance, is at once familiar and potentially secretive or strange. As an adjective ‘familiar’ means ‘well acquainted or intimate’, ‘having a thorough knowledge’, etc., but as a noun it carries the more unsettling, supernatural sense of ‘a spirit or demon supposed to come to a person esp a witch, etc, at his or her call’ (Chambers Dictionary). We might think here, for example, of the demonic ‘familiar’ that is said to haunt Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) or, more comically, of the 12-year-old Maud’s ‘supernatural companion’ in Elizabeth Bowen’s superb novel A World of Love (1955).
