2 - Symptomatic readings

Summary

As the doctor boards the derelict ship early in Hodgson's story, he remarks on the “peculiar smell” it emits: “I felt that in some way, it was vaguely familiar; yet I could give it no name” (“The Derelict,” pp. 35–6). His inability to place the smell disturbs him so much that he recurs to it: “there was again a vague odour of something half familiar, that somehow brought to me a sense of half-known fright” (p. 39). It is not the odor itself that frightens him so much, perhaps, as its incomplete familiarity: it stirs in him a memory of something he cannot quite bring to mind.

Similarly, upon Prendick's first meeting with M'Ling, one of Moreau's beast people, he comments on the haunting sense of déjà vu with which M'Ling inspires him. “I had never beheld such an extraordinary and repulsive face before, and yet – if the contradiction is credible – I experienced at the same time an odd feeling that in some way I had encountered exactly the features and gestures that now amazed me” (The Island of Dr. Moreau, p. 11; emphasis in text). The boy Pibby in Hodgson's “The Adventure of the Headland,” hunted by strange dogs somewhere on the African coast, hears the baying of the pack that pursues him, “and for the second time the vague yet frightening familiarity of it stirred the boy's memory oddly” (p. 184).

The uncanny

Sigmund Freud attempts to account for precisely such a sensation in his essay “The ‘Uncanny’.”