Subjects Not-at-home: Forms of the Uncanny in the Contemporary French Novel. Emmanuel Carrère, Marie NDiaye, Eugène Savitzkaya by Daisy Connon (review)

In his earliest writings Jean-Paul Sartre likened the home (oikos) to a mausoleum, arguing that only physical and intellectual displacement can liberate the mind from stultification. In this monograph, which explores the creative potential of discomfort, unhoming, and the spectral disruption of the chez soi, Daisy Connon offers a detailed analysis of nine novels by three contemporary authors through the lens of post-Freudian treatments of the uncanny. Underpinned by rigorous and wide-ranging research, Subjects Not-at-home does an impressive job of setting the chosen texts in a broader framework of literary-historical understanding, addressing thematic intersections with the nouveau roman and the current ‘return of the real’ (or ‘new realism’) in contemporary French fiction. Using the theoretical expositions of Julia Kristeva and H&lène Cixous and observing how, in recent literary and theoretical treatments, the uncanny has come to point less to any external alterity than to the strangeness that haunts and fissures the quotidian and banal, Connon sets out to make a case for the critical potential of the uncanny to enable alternative and ethical reinterpretations of the ordinary world. As such, the novels that constitute her primary corpus focus on the irreducible strangeness of the everyday and on the liminal, productive space between the familiar and the unfamiliar, rather than on the grotesque or fantastic per se. In the first of four chapters Connon works through the already much-commented semantic and conceptual slipperiness of the unheimlich, but also goes on to tease out etymological blind spots and occluded or secondary connotations of the uncanny, including intellectual uncertainty and ontological disorientation. This opens a rich seam of interpretation, which Connon exploits in the following three chapters as she interrogates (the disruption of) the chez soi in its various manifestations as home, family, sense of self, and authorial position. The insightful and detailed analysis draws out the tension evident in the selected texts between the desire for home, secure selfhood and stability, and the creative potential unlocked by their very impossibility. Throughout this study, and in the final chapter in particular, much is made of the performative latency of the uncanny to disrupt writing and its domesticating impulses as it brings together in the same textual space the real and unreal, the familiar and unfamiliar, the strange and banal. In these respects, and in her decidedly compelling treatment of the work of three of France’s most interesting contemporary authors, Connon undoubtedly brings fresh insights to contemporary literary scholarship. While she is clear, however, that Subjects Not-at-home focuses primarily on the uncanny in the domestic and personal spheres, there is a sense of missed opportunity as the political and social potential of the uncanny, highlighted by Kristeva in the works that Connon addresses in her first chapter, remains unexplored. It is to be hoped that the author will follow up this excellent study with further commentary in this regard.