Shadowhunters and Downworlders

There is the world you know, the world you have always known; and then you blink, and there is a place you never had any inkling of, and it spreads out across your eyescape. And then, most shockingly of all: There is the realization that these two places are one and the same. It turns out you never really knew the world around you at all. This is often the moment at which the adventure begins: Your street has gone feral and has carried your house and all of your neighbors’ homes to another part of your city; your child is a changeling; your wardrobe is a doorway to a pine forest where it is always winter but never Christmas. Or you witness something that could not have happened: a murder, perhaps, in which three kids your own age kill a fourth, none of whom anyone but you can see.

Much fantasy and science fiction is built on the idea of stumbling through a portal of some sort and discovering oneself lost in a place that is wholly other. I confess that I have developed a preference for tales in which the already-existing world itself is revealed to be wholly other; in which, perhaps, the experience of jamais vu, or derealization, reveals a whole new reality. Some of this preference has to do with the kind of fantasy I write; some of it has to do with my love of places, of cities and towns and the oddities that make each place unique. Some of it—maybe most of it—has to do with my own belief that the world is much stranger than most of us are brought up to believe. History is stranger. Mathematics is stranger. Science is stranger—but you’d never know any of this if you didn’t venture beyond the textbooks. Every place—small town, big city, you name it—is stranger. So I have a hard time passing up speculative fiction that begins with the premise that our own world is somehow not the place we’ve taken it for.

But the experience of suddenly finding that something familiar has become strange—or, possibly, has simply made known its strangeness for the first time—isn’t limited to books. I recall that as a kid I was certain for a long time that my parents and basically everyone in my family had been replaced by look-alikes, a fear—in extreme circumstances, a psychological disorder—that’s probably at least in part responsible for changeling lore and all those fairy tales in which loved ones are changed into animals or objects and can be brought back to their original shapes only if the hero or heroine can identify them. Heck, stare at a familiar word long enough, for instance, or write it over and over enough times and it will start to look strange too: misspelled, unfamiliar, even oddly devoid of meaning.

Really, though, “strange” isn’t the right word for the effect I’m talking about. The sense of the familiar suddenly becoming unfamiliar in an eerie and uncomfortable fashion belongs more properly to the world of the uncanny.

The uncanny is such a bizarre realm of human psychology and experience that Freud wrote three very involved (and very strange, and arguably very conflicted) essays on the subject, collected together in a collection titled (appropriately) The Uncanny. It’s been discussed at length by philosophers, psychologists, and theorists around the world. When you read about the uncanny, certain motifs repeat themselves, and certain experiences appear to be common triggers of this feeling of unease and unfamiliarity. Ernst Jentsch, one of the early writers on the subject, attributed the sense of the uncanny at least in part to an intellectual uncertainty—the idea that one can’t know precisely what one is seeing or experiencing, or can’t know whether one’s interpretation of the thing or experience is correct. In “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” written in 1906, Jentsch argued that the discomfort associated with the uncanny stems from a desire for certainty about one’s understanding of the world and that this desire itself stems from a human need to feel at home or at least capable of survival in a world that may otherwise seem essentially unknowable, even potentially hostile:

The human desire for the intellectual mastery of one’s environment is a strong one. Intellectual certainty provides psychical shelter in the struggle for existence. However it came to be, it signifies a defensive position against the assault of hostile forces, and the lack of such certainty is equivalent to lack of cover in the episodes of that never-ending war of the human and organic world for the sake of which the strongest and most impregnable bastions of science were erected.