"You Too Will Be Mis-spelled": The Environmental Uncanny in Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain

Abstract

This thesis explores how the environmental uncanny manifests in Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. Following Nicholas Royle’s examination of how the uncanny is felt through the senses, I discuss how different senses show different sides of the uncanny. The prose work shows that many natural phenomena have the potential to be strange, for instance, mist, water, clouds and the smells of plants. The reason for their strangeness often comes from the dilemma of simultaneous presence and absence. The uncanny indicates that the environment is not what it has traditionally been thought to be. Romanticim, lanscape painting and the aesthetic theories of the sublime and the picturesque have promoted an understanding of nature as strong and separate from human. John Wylie, Taylor A. Eggan and Rob Nixon explain in their theories how these beliefs lead to biased thinking. A different view of the environment is possible and needed. Supported by Timothy Morton’s theory, we can see how The Living Mountain shows that the boundaries between the environment, beings and bodies are permissible, and the individuality of beings is not as straightforward as it has been assumed to be.

The Living Mountain’s uncanniness has its origins in Scottish culture and history. Scottish literature has long engaged with the uncanny and allowed it to reveal painful stories that have been suppressed. What has been suppressed are the violence and traumas caused by colonialism and wars. Ghosts and skeletons remind us of the dead in the prose work. The presence of the supernatural is ambiguous, and it seems to connect to questions of identity, suggesting that Scotland and the Scots language cannot be separated from the belief that the Scottish landscape has a supernatural dimension.