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Writing the Uncanny
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Fairy Tale as Uncanny Scaffold

Writing the Uncanny Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst (eds.)

Key Principle

Freud claimed fairy tales cannot be uncanny because their content exists at a safe "literary" distance from real life. Claire Dean's counter-method removes that distance through four targeted moves: rooting the tale in a specific real place, giving characters psychological interiority, acquiring the fairy tale's symbolic grammar deeply enough to invent within it, and refusing to release the reader through definitive resolution. Each move strips away one of the conventional fairy tale's protective layers and leaves the reader exposed to what was always inside the form.

Why This Matters

The conventional fairy tale insulates. Geographic rootlessness ("a kingdom far away"), psychological flatness (characters who desire but do not doubt), and definitive resolution ("happily ever after" or its gruesome inverse) all signal to the reader: this is contained, you are safe, you may set it down. Uncanny fiction requires the opposite condition — an uncontained story that the reader cannot set down because it has not finished.

The fairy tale form itself, understood correctly, is already an uncanny object. It simultaneously occupies contradictory states: alive and dead as a text, real and unreal in its contents, familiar (remembered from childhood) and unfamiliar (the grammar is stranger than nostalgia admits). Walter Ong's formulation explains the paradox: "the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts." A writer who understands this is not borrowing fairy tale decoration; they are working with a form that is ontologically allied to the uncanny before a single word is written.

Good Examples

Rooting in a specific domestic interior: Dean took the Grimm tale 'The Raven' (a queen wishes her baby would transform and fly away) and set it in a Chorley living room where the transformed baby could not get out of the window. The specific, bounded domestic location made the impossible event more disturbing — not less — because "suddenly made it feel much more real." The trapped baby is more horrifying than the fairy tale version because the real place removes the protective distance. (Section 20: In the Forest, Stories Grow)

Zoe Gilbert's invented motifs in Folk: Gilbert acquired fairy tale grammar thoroughly enough to invent new elements that feel ancestrally authentic. Some readers claimed to recognise these invented details "as if they have read about them elsewhere" — an accidental confirmation that the grammar was genuinely internalised. The reader's sense of "I should remember this" is itself the uncanny moment. (Section 20: In the Forest, Stories Grow)

Slenderman as proof of memetic force: Slenderman originated in an online forum in 2009 and had propagated to school playgrounds as authentic folklore within a few years. The folk tradition did not end; it migrated to digital media. Jack Zipes's formulation — "a vibrant fairy tale can attract listeners and readers and latch onto their brains and become a living memetic force in cultural evolution" — is not historical description but a live observation. The tale's apparent animation (an inanimate text behaving as animate) is itself uncanny. (Section 20: In the Forest, Stories Grow)

Counterpoints

Geographic rootlessness: Setting a retelling in "a forest" or "a village" rather than a named, specific location preserves the protective literary distance Freud identified. The reader's sense of the possible never activates. Chorley is more disturbing than "a kingdom."

Psychological flatness: Fairy tale characters traditionally desire without doubting, act without reflecting. A queen who simply wishes is flat; a queen whose wish erupts from something specific in her interior life — desperation, depression, the specific texture of her confinement — becomes a character the reader cannot safely observe. Without interiority, the fairy tale remains at the distance of spectacle.

Definitive resolution: The expected ending (happy or gruesome) is a containment mechanism — it signals that the story is closed and the reader may leave. E.T.A. Hoffmann's character in 'Automata' captures the alternative: "many a fragment of a clever story sinks deep into my soul, and the continuance of the play of my imagination, as it goes along on its own swing, gives me an enduring pleasure." An ambiguous ending activates the reader, making the story continue into daily reality. But this only works if the structure preceding it has built enough that the reader wants resolution that is then withheld. (Section 20: In the Forest, Stories Grow)

Key Quotes

"Rooting the fairy tale in a Chorley living room where the transformed baby couldn't get out of the window suddenly made it feel much more disturbing." — Claire Dean (Section 20: In the Forest, Stories Grow)

"It is fairy tales' endless appetite for metamorphosis that means they can be used to create stories both familiar and unfamiliar, leading to a sense of the Uncanny." — Claire Dean (Section 20: In the Forest, Stories Grow)

"The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers." — Walter Ong (quoted in Section 20: In the Forest, Stories Grow)

Rules of Thumb

  • Name the place. Not "a village" but a specific town the writer can describe from knowledge. The reader's recognition activates their sense of proximity.
  • Add one thing the fairy tale character cannot do in the original: cannot leave the room, cannot stop thinking, cannot be certain of what they saw. Constraint plus interiority is the formula.
  • Read fairy tales widely and indiscriminately before writing one — not to borrow specific tales but to internalise the grammar until new elements feel ancestrally authentic.
  • Refuse the expected ending. The story should trail into the reader's week, not close within the final paragraph.
  • Research the folklore already layered into the chosen place: tourist boards, local newspaper archives, local history libraries, archaeological finds. "Traditions and local legends accrete in place to form crusts of story." (Section 20: In the Forest, Stories Grow)
  • The distinction to hold: fairy tale presents wonder without ambiguity; uncanny fiction "holds a space open for different possibilities — creating work in a liminal space between the real and the fantastic." (Section 20: In the Forest, Stories Grow)

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