The weird, uncanny and new fantastic

How do you define “the uncanny” and how does this hold up now compared to the definition popularised by Sigmund Freud in 1919?

We want to define things, but it is the nature of the uncanny to be elusive, to unsettle limits and boundaries. So, it’s a peculiar concept. This is what led Anneleen Masschelein to call it, in her excellent study of the uncanny, The Unconcept (2012).

We can say that the uncanny is concerned with the uncomfortably strange, weird and mysterious; that it suggests a sense of the supernatural; or that it entails an unexpected moment in which something familiar becomes unfamiliar, or vice versa.

All of these definitions are helpful, but they aren’t much use in isolation as they need context. In the end, we have to reckon with the idea that uncanniness is a feeling that seems to involve a sense of surprise, something creeping over us. And then what I find uncanny, another person might not – and I myself might not on another occasion either. It is a fleeting, uncertain, even ghostly thing.

Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) is one of his most extraordinary pieces of writing. It is just as illuminating and thought-provoking today as it was a century ago. It’s remarkable in part because it’s such a rich mixture of theory and autobiography: he feigns objectivity and detachment but keeps slipping into anecdotes and apparently inadvertent personal revelations. The essay is full of fascinating observations, speculations and insights, but it’s also curiously contradictory as he gets so uncharacteristically tied up in knots.

Hélène Cixous also wrote extensively about the uncanny. What does her work add to Freud’s ideas?

Cixous’s essay ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’ first appeared in English in 1976 and is still, I think, the finest response to Freud’s essay. It offers a superb close reading of the essay in addition to being very inventive and funny in its own right. Cixous sees Freud as a brilliant thinker and writer on the subject of language, desire and dreams (she calls him the “Shakespeare of the night” elsewhere), but she is never just drily respectful: ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’ makes particular fun of Freud’s insensitivity to aspects of gender and sexual difference. Her essay remains an invaluable introduction to feminist and queer readings of the uncanny.

She also does a great job of illuminating the idea of the uncanny as a reading effect. Uncanniness is not some kind of object or attribute that is already there in the text but is to do with something it stirs within. It’s about how we respond, interpret or make sense of something – whether it’s a movie or an incident in the street, a novel or a person we encounter at the pub.

How do you distinguish between the concepts of weird, uncanny and fantastic?

Everything I write is about the uncanny. It’s always there, even (and sometimes especially) if it doesn’t appear by name. At the same time, I’ve been struck by how much more prominent “weird” has become as a cultural reference over the past twenty years or so. Of course, the weird goes back a long way – as far as the sisters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and beyond. And then there’s a rich tradition of weird literature in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Sheridan Le Fanu and Fitz-James O’Brien to Algernon Blackwood and H.P. Lovecraft. But in the twenty-first century, “weird” has experienced something of a rebirth or a significantly different configuration, as seen in fiction from Jeff VanderMeer, China Miéville and M. John Harrison.

All of this is part of a new emphasis on the weird that goes beyond the domain of literary or media studies. Weird has become a way of thinking about politics and philosophy, the environment, climate, sexuality, race, AI and new technology, and so on. I think the coronavirus pandemic has played an additional role in encouraging people to feel that we are living in weird times.

This has led me to feel that it might be interesting and productive to write a book that looks at “the weird” as well as “the uncanny”. My upcoming book, The Weird, the Uncanny and the New Fantastic, is deeply preoccupied with literature, but also with what is happening in the world. Broadly speaking, uncanny as a cultural reference seemed to have become rather worn out by the end of the twentieth century. The intellectual historian Martin Jay saw it as “the master trope” of the 1990s, with the implication that its primacy was at an end, and I’m sure my book could be viewed as a late arrival to the party in that respect. Unless, perhaps, it is arriving early for the next party...

The popularity of the weird as a go-to phrase lies in part, I suspect, in encouraging or allowing for looser forms of thinking. This is fine by me: I think we are all weird. But I would be inclined to say that uncanniness is a more critically nuanced and demanding idea: it arises in the present but seems to call back to the past (personal memory and history often seem to be at stake). To say you have had an “uncanny” experience is self-exposing in a way that “weird” isn’t.

The Weird, the Uncanny and the New Fantastic seeks to reflect on the uncanny and the weird, but also to elaborate something new. This is what I have in mind with the “new fantastic”. I woke up one morning with this phrase in my mind. I am quite influenced by my dreams, or by images or ideas that occur to me in the middle of the night. The idea of the new fantastic is a way of talking about something creative and inspiring, but inevitably also risky and perhaps uncomfortable.

We are living, I believe, in what M. John Harrison calls a new “age of fantasy”. I see the new fantastic as a force for good and truth – a way of responding (in writing, art, activism and daily life) to the deadliness of so many forms of programming and oppression, from the lifeless, insidious effects of AI and misinformation to the destructive effects of nationalistic or religious movements and right-wing politics. The new fantastic is in the spirit of “hope not hate”; it’s a creative force of resistance, difference and inventiveness at odds with the cruel and inhuman.

When I started to work on this topic, preparing to give a lecture at the University of Amsterdam in 2024, I went back to something I hadn’t read in many years, Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (first published in French in 1970). I discovered that, very near the end of the book, Todorov himself refers to the idea of a “new fantastic”. I had evidently forgotten this, but then I found an even earlier use of the phrase in a book review in Le Monde written by Cixous. Cixous’s strangely fantastical autobiographical writings are indeed also notable points of reference in The Weird, the Uncanny and the New Fantastic. Texts such as The Day I Wasn’t There and Mother Homer is Dead… are remarkable in their uncanny blending of what is real and what is fantastic, in their insistence at once on the dreamlike and on everyday actuality.

The Freudian uncanny is oriented towards the internal (as a feeling within, something merely psychological and private to oneself), whereas the weird is about what’s out there, in the external world. I’m arguing in the book that the new fantastic is a means of putting these two perspectives together. It’s about thinking of writing itself not as some sort of escape from the world but as an experience of being in it, swallowed up in the fantastic effects of reading.

Your work often moves between philosophy, psychoanalysis and literary criticism. Do you see these as separate disciplines or different ways of asking the same questions?

My first book, Telepathy and Literature (1990), was rather weird, whimsical and offbeat. Of course, that wasn’t how I thought about it myself, but I think the publisher, Basil Blackwell, saw it as a chancy venture. The book moves between philosophy, psychoanalysis and literary criticism, but it also contains a chapter in the form of fragments of love letters, written as if under hypnosis, as well as a full-length piece of short fiction called ‘Telephoning Home’ that, for many readers, would have been simply a baffling inclusion.

David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine (2023) is a strange book too. I worried for a while as to whether anyone would take it on but in the end it was published by Manchester University Press, who have been very supportive of my work over many years. In some respects, it is an academic book: it contains a series of lectures about the music of David Bowie and the storytelling of Enid Blyton, especially the Famous Five books. In other respects, it is a mix of autobiography and speculative fiction: the final section is about an imaginary encounter between Blyton and my grandmother Lola Onslow. (Lola and Enid indeed knew one another as my grandmother provided illustrations for a number of her books in the 1920s.)

The person who reviewed it for The Spectator described the book as a “one-of-a-kind fantasia” – a phrase that I found at first perplexing, but then rather edifying. My work on the new fantastic was in part triggered by this idea of fantasia. In bookshops these days, one often encounters a table featuring books that don’t readily fit into the conventional categories, which testifies to a compelling conundrum: what kind of text should one write today?

The Weird, the Uncanny and the New Fantastic is recognisably an academic study. It is intended to have pedagogical value – to be informative, enjoyable and thought-provoking to students and scholars interested in the topics in question. So, some of the chapters are written in the form of the ghostly or phantom lecture. Then there is a chapter about trees, that just grew. And then in keeping with a longstanding fascination with non-human animals, especially for thinking about the uncanny and the new fantastic, there is a chapter written in part from the perspective of a mole.

I usually work on more than one project at the same time. Right now, I’m also completing a book about re-reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse for the first time in forty years, and a novel with the working-title When Nettie Yahoo Comes to Tea. They’re like fantastical offspring I can’t stop thinking about and fretting over; but at the same time, they don’t need me, they play together, talk and listen to one another and are constantly giving each other ideas.

When you wonder about whether it’s a matter of “different ways of asking the same questions”, I’d like to say no. I don’t approach writing in terms of having a question. I recognise that that is a conventional and even required aspect of the methodology of academic writing (where we ask: “what is the research question?”), but I have never thought of writing in this way. I write without being tied to some definite goal, I enjoy writing when I have no idea what I am doing or where I am going. That’s why my preference is to write very early in the morning, when I am not really conscious. It’s about encountering the unforeseeable and unknown. It’s about dreaming – the new fantastic.