Stepping into the Void: A Look at the Uncanny

There’s a fragile space between the known and the unknown in which things that we expect are no longer what we know them to be. It’s that space that we term the uncanny. It’s hard to define and yet it holds such power to unsettle us as readers. Or to influence our readers if we’re writers. But how do we make sense of it? How do we recognize it? And how do we write it?

I asked myself these very questions sometime last year as I was reading an article that Freud wrote on the uncanny. Shortly afterwards, I picked up a copy of Sarah Waters’s book The Little Stranger, not realizing that it’s practically a study in that very subject.

The Uncanny: What is It?

But first, what do we mean when we talk about something being uncanny?

If you read Freud’s article that I referenced above, you will come away with two impressions. First, that any attempt to define the uncanny is woefully insufficient. But second, that we can use several examples to attempt to gain some level of understanding. At least at a surface level. That’s what I’ll do here, so keep in mind that we could go to much greater philosophical depths, but I doubt that they would help us in what we intend to achieve as readers/writers.

That said, let’s start here: the uncanny is something that leaves people feeling frightened and unsettled. That’s important – unsettled is different from just plain frightened. An intruder in your house at three in the morning is frightening; a grizzly wandering past your isolated tent while you’re sleeping (or attempting to) is frightening; a car accident near a steep precipice is frightening. None of these are unsettling, at least not in the way that the uncanny is.

Because something that is uncanny crosses over from what we know to be normal and everyday into what is supposed to be impossible. For example, déjà vu. Imagine that you go about your day, you leave the house, make a few errands, see a friend for lunch and then, as you’re leaving the restaurant, walking back to your car, you freeze. You suddenly have the sense that everything that you’ve experienced today has happened to you before. Not in some vague sense that you’ve eaten at that place before, with that person, but every single thing.

Every car you passed, every person on the street, every word that you spoke and that you overheard…you realize that every single thing about today is a repeat from some prior day.

That’s creepy. Very, very creepy. And it’s uncanny.

Or consider this: you take a vacation at your family’s cottage on a rocky coast with only a small village within an hour’s driving distance. It’s a stormy late autumn and you’re content to spend the time reading and working on creative projects. After a few days though, you notice something strange. When you make tea and come back to your chair, your book is moved. When you go up to bed in the evening, the lamp has fallen on the floor. When you come down to breakfast in the morning, a plate flies across the room and crashes into the wall beside your head.

The doors are still locked. The windows are secure. There are no wet footprints in the house, which there would be if someone had come in out of the storm. There’s nothing. No sign of anything natural to explain these incidents. [Assume that there’s NO explicable reason for these, such as some prankster who’s been hiding in the house since you arrived.]

Those are three escalating examples of the uncanny. Notice that each one involves something that should never happen in the natural world: inanimate objects becoming animate. In the first example something just seems different. You know you left the book somewhere else. In the second, you know that something has happened. Lamps don’t fall of their own accord. And in the third, you witness something beyond reason: a plate that chooses to violently attack you.

I think of the uncanny as a bridge between our world and another. An experience that can’t be explained by any natural means and which isn’t a mystery to be solved. When objects move on their own, or animals or plants do things that they shouldn’t or wouldn’t ever do, or we suddenly sense that our experience of reality is not what we know it to be, that’s the uncanny.

Note that these phenomena are also all intensely psychological. They cause us to question our own sanity. They suggest that our perception is coming unhinged. Even if it isn’t. Even if there’s some reason for these things – most likely a reason we’ll never understand in this world – and it’s not an issue of our mental acuity, the uncanny leaves our minds shaken. Unsettled.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Beware: Plot Spoilers Ahead

[In order to discuss the uncanny in this book, I have to lay out what the little stranger is along with some other elements behind the story. I don’t think this actually spoils the plot as the book isn’t really meant to be a mystery to be solved. For me it makes the story more interesting. I can dig deeper as I read now that I know where Waters is going with this.

However, if that would spoil the plot for you, you’ll want to read the book first and come back to this post!]

The book centers on a young woman, Caroline Ayres, who lives in her family’s estate in England with her brother and aging mother. When their family doctor is unavailable in the midst of a perceived crisis, they call in a new young doctor, Dr. Faraday, to aid them. This ushers in his presence for the duration of the story, a story that is told from his perspective.

Shortly afterwards, strange things begin to happen. Caroline’s dog, a mild mannered, lovable retriever, attacks a young girl without provocation. Caroline’s brother, Roderick, begins to sequester himself, claiming that there’s a curse on the house. Fires begin spontaneously, voices speak through tubes in the walls when no one is on the other end, clocks throw themselves across the room, objects are no longer where they once were.

For a time these incidents are explained away. The dog must have been startled when no one was looking. Roderick must be progressively losing his mind and either claiming things that are false, or doing them himself. But as the story goes on, the explanations fail. More and more incidents occur without Roderick and and when everyone else’s actions are accounted for. Eventually, readers are left stumped with the sense that there’s no natural explanation for anything. And yet this is clearly no ghost story.

At least not traditionally.

The key to the mystery is found later in the book (around the three-quarter point, of course!). At that point, Dr. Faraday is discussing the strange happenings at Hundreds Hall with a colleague of his, Dr. Seeley. Seeley is not as surprised as Faraday had expected and instead tells him,

The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a – a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop – to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr. Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden way: things like envy, and malice, and frustration…

p. 389

In other words, the little stranger is a manifestation of the character’s darkest impulses, his unconscious nature given an invisible form that can wreak havoc as a means of acting out against those who have frustrated his designs.

There’s only one character in this book who covets something very badly, who wants to finally have and be and do all of the things that his station in life have prevented him from having or being or doing. Dr. Faraday.

He covets Hundreds Hall, an aptly-named estate that represents the money and social standing to which his family isn’t privy.

Waters handles this brilliantly. I don’t remember her ever overtly stating such a thing and yet it lies just beneath the surface throughout the story. We know that Faraday is greedy and jealous even though we never see him act on it. We know that his intentions in seeking to marry Caroline – a marriage that would be unthinkable under normal circumstances – are self-serving and underhanded though he never shows his hand.

Even Dr. Faraday seems oblivious to his own character, a fact that’s revealed at this point in Dr. Seeley’s insight that Faraday doesn’t anticipate. It’s a little stranger – one whom even the character from whom it emanates doesn’t recognize.

Thus, it would be fair to say that Waters has given a psychological/ spiritual character to the uncanny in this story. This shadow version of Dr. Faraday is able to provoke the dog to bite and set fire to Roderick’s rooms and torment Caroline in the middle of the night. It prowls around acting out against the things that frustrate him and attempting to turn his circumstances to his advantage.

In that way, the uncanny has an explanation and yet it’s a reasoning that still leaves us deeply unsettled. It opens doors to all sorts of further implications with their own unsettling ends. In that way, Waters has handled the subject adeptly, leaving even her explanation…uncanny.

Writing the Uncanny

If you want to write the uncanny, it’s something of a tight-rope walk. Objects, animals, even events have to act in subtly abnormal ways, things that we can’t explain. But we can’t take it too far. Too far one way and there’s a ghost or paranormal explanation. Too far another way and we’re in a fantasy tale in which the world functions differently. Too far in a different direction and it’s psychological suspense with characters entrenched in mental illness. Any one of these makes for a great story, but none of them are uncanny.

To write the uncanny, you have to be comfortable with walking a fine line between events that fit together for a reason and events that have no logical explanation. It’s a tough task, but impressive when it’s well executed as it is in The Little Stranger.

If you know of other instances of the uncanny, or you’re interested in writing some of your own, let me know! I’d love to hear about it.

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