Uncanny

Radio 4 had a programme today on  the uncanny in which the familiar becomes unfamiliar.

It's that sense of unease or disquiet at the heart of ghost fiction and horror writing, the stuff of bad dreams when the familiar is suddenly strange, a feeling of a place being unsettlingly out of place. The uncanny is everywhere.

So why is it that the familiar, or that which is closest to home, can be so much more frightening to us than the truly exotic or unknown? Freud's extraordinary essay The Uncanny, from 1919, is like nothing else he wrote. It's a translation of the German 'un-heimlich' meaning 'not homely' or 'a feeling of not being at home'. But the term itself is strange. In German its meaning can shift so 'uncanny/un-heimlich' can be read, eerily, as 'homely but not at home' - a disquieting ambiguity.

Freud tries to unravel that sense of the 'uncanny' that he sees everywhere in popular art and culture: in the fiction of Poe and E.T.A. Hoffman, in life-like puppets and mannequins which for a second we think are real, in doppelgangers and doubles, in the strange feeling of getting lost in a familiar place.

He was arguably onto something. The uncanny really is discernible everywhere in fiction, film and art - fromMary Shelly to Asimov, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the Chapman Brothers. This atmospheric programme explores the power of the Uncanny in our culture - in all its strange, unsettling manifestations.

Spooky entertaining stuff.

Book 37 - Tennessee Williams "A Streetcar Named Desire"

Tennessee Williams "A Streetcar Named Desire" (Penguin Modern Classics)




The story of a Southern belle who finds herself down on her luck and forced to live with her sister and her sister's working class husband. Blanche is a classic character, a troubled woman with a secret past who tries to make a new life for herself, but finds that she can't leave her old self behind.

There's no escaping a reputation, especially when those you must rely on are scoundrels. This script manages to capture the sense of futility in life, and also provides a grim picture of the cost of pride, lust, anger, and prudery, especially when they meet heat on. It's difficult to find a truly sympathetic character among this lot, and Williams paints a clear picture of people who continue to destroy each other and themselves, and jump back into self-destruction with a relish. This script retains its power even all these decades after the fact because the characters and the situations are recognizable, perhaps even universal.