The Uncanny and the Nemonymous

“If the name has capacity for generating uncanny effects, so does its absence. We expect a work of literature to have an author, to be identifiable with an authorial name; and yet the link between a work and an authorial name is never absolutely certain… […] There is, perhaps, some quasi-essential link between anonymity and literature, between fiction and ‘the absolute proximity of a stranger whose power is singular and anonymous’. As E.M. Forster suggested, in a fascinating essay called ‘Anonymity: An Enquiry’…” — from THE UNCANNY (2003) by Nicholas Royle

As well as the aspects on the uncanny — in ‘literature(,) teaching(,) psychoanalysis’, and in what I have long felt about ghosts and haunted houses, and horror genre fiction works, as well as Derrida and Freud, as in Royle here — we have above in the passage in ‘The Uncanny’ that starts as above quote, arguably, by dint of an uncanny imagination, a seminal observation in this book published in 2003 about my first edition, in 2001, of a literary journal of anonymous slipstream stories entitled ‘Nemonymous’ (its Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemonymous) that broaches Nemonymity as another form of Anonymity in Literature, plus my interest in E.M. Forster’s ‘Only Connect’ dictum (viz. my later ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’) from ‘Howard (Lovecraft)’s End’, and his ‘The Machine Stops’ near the turn of the century 19th into the 20th century of what was to become the Internet, and all the Internet’s own varieties of Nemonymity and ghosts and haunted dark webs!

ABOVE IS FROM MY REVIEW OF ‘The Uncanny’ HERE:

THE UNCANNY by Nicholas Royle