SHADOWHUNTERS AND DOWNWORLDERS

KATE MILFORD

When I moved to New York City, I realized I had to write about the place. Between the hustle and bustle, I saw the possibility of another world opening up, just beyond our vision. Once I could see it, the Shadowhunter world appeared everywhere I looked. Whether it was vampires loitering outside nightclubs or fey peering from the foliage in the park, the city grabbed my imagination and ran with it.

It’s hard to say something clever about Kate Milford’s love letter, addressed to New York City and to the uncanny ability of place to open up mysteries we never imagined we’d find. So I’ll just say this: Right on, Kate.





UNHOMELY PLACES


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.

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!”

New York may have taken time to acclimate to, but Brooklyn I loved from the first minute. Brooklyn does that to you. It makes you possessive of it. It makes you love it. Clary’s fierce declaration was only the first of many points when I thought to myself, This book gets my city right.

There are plenty of other little details in the books that are spot-on if you’ve lived here. There is the constant and interesting problem of getting from point A to point B. Subway? Cab? Walk? Borrow a car? Where will you park? Is time of the essence? That’s a problem, because you can’t get anywhere outside of a ten-block radius in less than half an hour, and anyone who says otherwise—such as, for instance, the real estate agent from whom my roommate and I rented our first apartment—is lying to you. You always tell the cabbie you’re going to Brooklyn after you’re already inside with the door shut because no cabbie wants to drive you to Brooklyn, where chances of catching a fare back into Manhattan are so slim. Also, just like the windowless, slump-roofed Taki’s, the best restaurants in the city will always look like dives, as if they have glamours hiding them from tourists. And people really do think coffee ought to come by default with three sugars.

But the most meaningful true-to-New York thing of all is the way the city is such a compelling, uncanny beast and forces Clary to adapt. This is why, despite the titles, Clary Fray’s story isn’t about the hidden cities of bones, of ashes, of glass. Her story is about New York, and about a girl finding her place in it and learning to love and trust it again even though it has kept so much hidden from her. At least that’s how it seems to me, someone who loves cities and towns and who, when she first moved to New York City, wanted so desperately to love it but had to learn its true character, find its hidden charms, and accept its all-too-visible flaws before she could walk comfortably through it, to say nothing of finding its hidden beauty and mystery.

Clary’s New York is both the one she grew up in and the one she didn’t know existed and yet can’t unsee or deny. Mundane New York or Shadowhunter New York, it’s always her New York, and not simply because, by birth, she has a key part to play in the intrigues of the Nephilim. It’s her New York because Clary identifies strongly with it. It’s where she grew up and where she lives. Even if escaping its newfound strangeness were as simple as moving away—and it isn’t, nor is it generally that simple in real life—that isn’t an option, because Clary loves her home and goes on loving it even as it reveals itself to be something different from what she had always assumed it to be. Places, like people, are complex, and loving them isn’t simple.

Of course, it isn’t just New York that she must adjust to as she begins to see through the glamours that have been hiding reality from her for her entire life. As the proverbial scales begin to fall from her eyes, she realizes she has been blind to certain details about her own mother, and not just the past Jocelyn Fray hid from her. Even her mother’s skin bears the scars of her early life, a detail that Clary has never noticed due to the elaborate spells that kept her from seeing the stranger world around her.

Then again, I suppose I always assume people are hiding parts of themselves from each other. People do that. Perhaps, then, it isn’t particularly odd that all the family drama in the books never seems as big a deal to me as the shifting nature of the city, the things it hides and the things it chooses to reveal.