No Direction Home: The Uncanny In Literature

The purpose of this book will be to attempt to show, at great length, that the literature that falls under the category Freud and Jentsch describe as unheimlich is a kind of literature that at first makes us feel at home, feel comforted, feel safe and reassured and then, surreptitiously, stealthily, silently, leads us astray, takes us off the beaten track and into a place we do not quite recognise, into an unhome. Like the thief in the night, like the Pied Piper, like the Big Bad Wolf, the uncanny story steals us away from the reassurance, the safety, the cosiness, of our very familiar, very homelike home and quietly, almost unnoticed, delivers us to our not-home, our unhome, a place which is both familiar and strange, a place where we ought to feel comforted, where we ought to, and where we used to, feel ourselves, feel at home. But instead, we find that the rug – metaphorically the rug in front of our cosy hearth – has been pulled from under us. We are suddenly in a place where we are not reassured, not ourselves anymore. Not, in other words, at home. We may have arrived in this familiar yet strange place unknowingly, only slowly realising that we have got lost somewhere along the road, that we missed a turning some way back. Or perhaps we may have been plonked by the writer directly in medias res, dropped right into the middle of this strange new world and left to fend for ourselves with no direction seeming to be home.