Possum by Matthew Holness: A Critique of Uncanny Literature

I think that Matthew Holness takes a very disturbing spin on the subjectivity regarding several of Freud’s causes of fear that are displayed within literature: the concept of being buried alive, mistaking inanimate objects as animate, and confusions between reality and imagination.  These three sections of the Freudian Uncanny are interwoven within the story in a modern setting as the narrator struggles with his ventriloquist dummy, the Possum. In regards to the author “updating” his work to Freud’s theories, I think he does an admirable job relating present obstacles to past problems.  It is obvious that our narrator, no matter how reliable he is, is dealing with a reoccurring ghost from his childhood that he sees and continues to experience through his puppet.  He treats it as if it were alive, and one has to question whether he literally believes that it is - now keep in mind the whiskey that he continually drinks throughout the story may or may not have something to do with the fact that he is confusing reality with his imagination.  Because he views the Possum as an enemy of his past, he feels that by burning the puppet, and or burying it alive in his case or drowning in outside in the shed, that this will vanquish the terrors that he went through as a child, which appear to me to be some sort of physical or sexual abuse.

I found myself constantly comparing the narrator to Norman Bates in the sense that he drank a lot, and spoke about Christie in an uneasy way, as if he both loved him and held at grudge against him at the same time.  I definitely felt an oedipal triangle starting to form between them and what the puppet represented to our narrator, and I’m not sure if Christie was really alive, or was just a infatuation like Norman had with his mother.

Overall, I think the story succeeds as a work of uncanny literature because it not only touches on Freud’s ideology regarding fear in several instances, but it brings in other aspects of uneasiness that add to the piece as a whole.  For instance, the setting itself was very disturbing to me because it exhumed an atmosphere that was taken over by filth and disease.  I know at one point, the narrator says that he licked the dead flies off of the Possum, and there was another instance where his bloodied, Eczema hands were wading through the puppets ashes as a reassurance that it was destroyed.   Take this setting and couple it with some suppressed childhood anger/anxiety and you have yourself an uncomfortable winner if you ask me.

I think that uncanny literature today expresses hidden fears that adults don’t want to acknowledge because they think they have conquered them throughout the years.  A lot of issues that we tend to block out in our childhood ultimately end up reoccurring throughout our lives, and by reading pieces that confront those issues head on, can be quite dramatic to some readers.  I think the part in Holness’s story that really stood out to me was when he actually got into a fight with the Possum, and ended up beating it to ‘death’ and severing its head from its body.  Clearly, there was some suppressed emotional/violent turmoil going throughout our narrator’s head that caused him such pain and anxiety that he felt the need to literally destroy this representation of his fear(s).