Gripla - 20.12.2008, Page 103

101HEARING VOICES
2. Uncanny voices
The uncanny is ghostly. It is concerned with the strange, weird and
mysterious, with a flickering sense (but not conviction) of some -
thing supernatural. The uncanny involves feelings of uncertainty, in
particular regarding the reality of who one is and what is being
experienced...It can consist in a sense of homeliness uprooted, the
revelation of something unhomely at the heart of hearth and home...
It can come in the fear of losing one’s eyes or genitals, or in realizing
that someone has a missing or prosthetic body-part, in the strange
actuality of dismembered, supplementary or phantom limbs...The
uncanny can be a matter of something gruesome or terrible, above
all death and corpses, cannibalism, live burial, the return of the
dead...The uncanny has to do with a strangeness of framing and
borders, an experience of liminality...Above all, the uncanny is
intimately entwined in language, with how we conceive and re -
present what is happening within ourselves, to ourselves, to the
world, when uncanny strangeness is at issue. (Royle 2003, 2–3).
This ‘strange conceptual shopping-list’ (Royle 2003, 14) summarises
the main locales of the uncanny in Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay ‘Das
Unheimliche’. Tzvetan Todorov’s theory (1975), which has been rather
more influential than Freud’s in saga studies,12 reserves the term ‘uncanny’
for experiences which definitely involve the supernatural. The moment of
uncertainty, of hovering between explanations, which Freud places at the
heart of the uncanny, Todorov instead calls ‘the fantastic’. Todorov’s model
is problematic, not least because using it involves making assumptions
about what medieval people would have experienced as supernatural or
implausible; as the saga episodes which follow demonstrate, although the
supernatural plays a part, it is uncertainty, the state of hovering between,
which is key. As proposed above, the locus of this uncertainty can be
summed up in the question who is speaking?
12 Cf. the Proceedings of the 13th Saga Conference (McKinnell et al. 2006), where all refe-
rences to the concept of the uncanny are to Todorov’s work.