“Strangeness” is one of the central terms of “weird fiction.” 1 Its range of meanings includes the unusual, the indescribable, the odd or eerie, alienation from the world as well as from oneself, the weird, the uncanny to the outright bizarre-terms that pretty much describe both what the protagonists of “weird tales” experience and a central layer of the emotional and experiential space that “weird” literature opens up for its readers. This is the reason why Jackson’s literature is able to convey (self-)alienation and related phenomena such as dreams and hallucinations so vividly.
The actual subject of the narrative is told by shaping it subliminally: instead of discursively treating the depths of the human psyche, the narrative evokes them directly in its readers.
Jackson’s narrative techniques here, as in her later works, are based on a poetics of transgression. Against this background, the paper undertakes a close reading of Jackson’s story “The Tooth” (1948). A reading of Freud’s short text “A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis” (1936), which has so far gone unnoticed in this context, makes it possible to introduce the concepts of “depersonalization” and “derealization” into the conceptual constellation of the uncanny. In the debate on the uncanny dominated by Freud’s essay of the same name, these phenomena, situated at the edges of the uncanny, are usually left out. This paper attributes her mastery to the depiction and evocation of extreme mental states, especially alienation and estrangement from oneself. Forgotten after her death in 1965, she is currently being rediscovered. Shirley Jackson is one of the most important authors of the uncanny of the twentieth century.
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