The Modern Monster: The Uncanny Disabled in Modernist Fiction

Abstract

The Uncanny, according to Freud, belongs to the realm of an upsetting, and horror that humans were previously familiar with but, due to constant repressing, has now turned into ‘unheimlich’ (unhomely). This horror is often located on the ‘other’ human being as impairments mark their bodies. The uncanny aspect of disability is experienced when the abled body, whose subjecthood and identity is emphasised in Modernist literature, is challenged by its confrontation with a ‘disabled’ human body. This confrontation with the unfamiliar body, away from the perceived ‘normal,’ leads to the uncanny experience of horror or fear in the ‘abled’ person. However, this fear has always been present instinctively in all individuals. When they confront that fear being concretized in a physical form in a person with disability, they tend to repress it further or distance themselves by simply converting a disabled body into a non-human entity that is itself problematic (as will be discussed in the paper). In Modernist literature, the presence of a ‘disabled’ person in the narrative presents an ‘absent-otherness’ of modern ideas and aesthetics that one attempts to avoid consciously but that nevertheless exists. In such a scheme of things, this paper focuses on analysing this aspect of disability as the uncanny other of the modernist ideas and objectives, through H.P Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu. It proposes to do so by comparing the figure of the ‘damaged’ embodiment as opposed to the socially and culturally accepted ‘abled’ body.