Shadowhunters and Downworlders

Among the most potent of things that may evoke this perilous uncertainty, Jentsch asserts, “there is one in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.” This, he says, is what lies behind the human horror of automata, cadavers, death’s-heads, and the like.

In his 1918 essay on the subject, however, Freud tried hard to kick this idea—that intellectual uncertainty is behind the sense of the uncanny—around the block, arguing that the skin-crawling response generated by uncanny triggers can be explained through psychoanalysis and attributed to basic human neuroses (or, rather, what one might consider to be basic human neuroses if one were, for instance, Freud) like the infantile castration complex and fears and fantasies related to the womb. He opens the first section of the essay by announcing that both of his courses of investigation into the uncanny (semantic and impressionistic) “lead to the same conclusion—that the uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.” By the end of the third section, however, Freud rather meekly suggested that perhaps the sources of the intellectual and emotional responses elicited by the uncanny are not as easy to analyze as he’d hoped—or at least that the uncanny in fiction might be a different sort of beast altogether:

The uncanny we find in fiction—in creative writing, imaginative literature—actually deserves to be considered separately. It is above all much richer than what we know from experience; it embraces the whole of this and something else besides, something that is wanting in real life. The distinction between what is repressed and what is surmounted cannot be transferred to the uncanny in literature without substantial modification, because the realm of the imagination depends for its validity on its contents being exempt from the reality test…Fiction affords possibilities for a sense of the uncanny that would not be available in real life.

(I think that he’s wrong there, by the way. I think real life affords plenty of possibilities for a sense of the uncanny, even of the varieties that Freud claims are only available in fiction. I think that attempting to explain them all away with complexes and repression is a bit shortsighted. But then I am not a psychoanalyst. Grain of salt.)

For both Jentsch and Freud, the uncanny is thick with the presence of the occult—meaning the “hidden”—made visible, and an unclear division between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate. It is populated by things that should be hidden but are not, things that have been carefully hidden that have come to light, and things that exist in the hidden margins, briefly glimpsed. It’s a realm of things that are not what they seem to be, of hidden desires and hidden knowledge and hidden pasts, of mistaken identities and darkness made visible, of madness and inner worlds projected outward, a world where the simple answer is highly suspect and the irrational and otherworldly answer, while perhaps never provable, can never be completely ruled out. It is a place of ultimate uncertainty. The bizarre things you feel might be just your imagination acting up, or your imagination might be the only thing that sees you safely through the perils you sense moving sound-lessly around you in the dark of your room. The uncanny is a grim and ghostly entity, inching toward you in the shadows that cut across a bright afternoon when your skin prick-les and there is no breeze to blame.

There are endless linguistic discussions about the etymology of the word “uncanny,” its opposites, and the myriad ways of translating them. For my purposes, it’s the German that’s most relevant. In German, “uncanny” becomes unheimlich, which translates more literally to unhomely. Not like home.

Dorothy murmurs it like a prayer: There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home. But if home suddenly becomes not like home, what then?




I can’t actually remember what made me pick up City of Bones for the first time. I do know it was long after I had begun to call New York City home, and I can tell you exactly where I became a fan of Clary Fray. That was on page sixty-eight, when, accused of being from New Jersey, she retorts indignantly, “I’m from Brooklyn!”