“Impossible to Tell a Story Properly”: Uncanny Narrative in Milkman

Nearly 100 years after Freud’s “The Uncanny,” Anna Burns’ Milkman delivers a contemporary take on the subject to depict life in Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles in the late 1970s. Relying on classic uncanny motifs—doubling, unhomely spaces, disorientation, intellectual uncertainty a confusion of animate and inanimate, real and unreal, the return of the repressed, and a preoccupation with sight—Milkman reveals the dangers of straightforward language in a world rife with political tension. The novel’s protagonist, known only as “middle sister,” navigates harassment and estrangement in a space haunted by the ghosts of imperialism wherein language is unstable, often incomprehensible, and occasionally fatal. The novel’s desultory structure mirrors middle sister’s repeated attempts to understand herself and her world; the scales repeatedly drop from middle sister’s eyes, but those disclosures are temporary, creating a rollercoaster narrative of revelation and repression. The uncanny in Milkman serves as both a recognition that not all is as it seems and a terrifying summons to see beyond sanctioned knowledge; it is entry into the uncertain, the indeterminate, the gaps in language, and the fallibility of self knowledge.