The Uncanny In The North London Book Of The Dead

‘The North London Book of the Dead’ is a comic story about the vital and dead sides of London written by Will Self in 1991. The story begins with the death of the narrator’s mother, after that he experiences depression and hallucinations of her. Suddenly, he see his dead mother alive. The uncanniness of this story lies in the nature of the term ”uncanny”. There are great number of definitions exist that are used for explaining the word. The term came from German ‘Unheimlich’, the antonym to Heimlich “familiar… belonging to home” (Freud, 1919, p.2). One of the definitions that was given by Freud (1919, p.2) ‘’the uncanny would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were''. It is not lust a combination of familiar and
From the whole beginning of the story, seems ordinary till the moment of the mothers’ death, especially the rapid transformation of the body “Mother, was changing color from an old ivory to a luminous yellow” (p.2). For a while the corpse seemed unfamiliar to the narrator as an “alien” (p. 2). Thus, the combination of natural phenomena as death and the actions that happened to the mother’s body creates an conception of ”alienation” or strangeness, that impute in familiar context (Royle, 2003, p.1). The death seems to be natural ending of the life, when in story it appears as supernatural, as beginning of something
Crouch Hill is the absolutely mundane street in London and the appearance of the dead character definitely creates a cognitive dissonance, especially if the character seems to be natural. When the narrator meets his mother, who wore tweedish jacket, “carrying the … book bag“ and large plastic “Waitrose bag” (p.6) as she used to being alive. “Mother tended to wear Africa-style dresses, she always carried a miscellaneous collection of bags” (p.5). Self created am image of narrator’s mother in common days, that would appear each time when the mother will be mentioned. And the uncanny effect, which appeared with alive mother very strong because of combination of walking dead mother with familiar mother image. This effect created also with the common actions placed in unfamiliar context. For instance, afternoon tea with the dead Mother. In traditional understanding, the dead do not have physiological need as consuming the food, but that Mother